The Kingdom of Light (15 page)

Dante caught the sharp scent of her breath. But at the same time he thought he noticed a hint of affection in the warning, as if for a moment the girl’s hostility had eased a little.

‘Pietra …’ he began. But she interrupted him with a brusque gesture and turned to leave. Her voice was harsh once more. ‘Beware,’ she repeated. ‘She is not as she seems.’

‘What do you mean?’

The prostitute cast a hostile glance at the mute, still lying motionless with her head abandoned against the back of the seat. Then unexpectedly she exploded into fits of bitter laughter, full of that vulgar sarcasm that the poet knew so well. ‘You’ll find out for yourself, my God, you’ll find out!’ she exclaimed, removing her hand from the edge of the cart and retreating towards the door of the brothel as if sorry she had come.

Dante was unsure as to the best course of action. Beside
him
, on the cart, his companion seemed to be slowly recovering, glancing at him from time to time from under the veil, beneath which she had hidden her face once more.

To take her back to the priory would have been impossible. He was almost tempted to turn round and go back to the brothel, to ask Monna Lagia to put her up for a while. But that would have amounted to making her existence public in the blink of an eye, when what he really wanted to understand was what lay concealed behind the trick, and how it was linked to the mysterious deaths.

He decided to return to the abbey. There the woman could remain in hiding, and he would have the chance of getting his hands on the monk as soon as Brandano showed his face again.

D
ANTE ENTERED
the church by the door that he had forced the first time, holding the woman by the hand. Her fingers had slowly warmed up between his. Now when they responded to his grip it was no longer with the fear of a prisoner, but almost with the sweet abandon of a lover.

He led her along the colonnade, towards the door behind the altar. But after a few steps he stopped, pushing her behind a pillar and then squatting down in its shadow. In front of them a man was wandering about the nave as if looking for something. Thinking that Brandano might
have
returned, the poet moved his hand to his dagger as the shadow came closer.

He was preparing to attack, his muscles quivering for action, but just a moment before he pounced a ray of moonlight from a window lit up the ungainly face of the stranger.

‘Cecco!’ cried Dante. ‘What are you doing here?’

The other man gave a little jump, and stopped. But he immediately recovered his composure, his embarrassment soon erased by a mocking little smile. He raised his head, glancing ostentatiously all round.

‘They say miracles happen here. I just wanted to see. You Florentines are really lucky, you know. God comes and writes straight on to your pages. I’m sure that if it rained shit from the heavens one day, in Florence it would smell of violets.’

A red veil fell over the poet’s eyes. He gripped the Sienese by the lapel of his jerkin and shook it violently. ‘Cecco, did you come here to hoodwink my city along with that rogue Brandano? When there’s cheating going on, you’re never far away!’

Cecco delicately took Dante’s fingers and gracefully loosened their grip. ‘I swear I’m here to breathe in the air of the miracle and prepare my soul for the baptistery in St Peter’s.’

‘What are you doing here?’ the poet repeated, trembling.

Cecco’s cheerful mask was beginning to crack. His eyes
ran
from Dante to the woman, as if uncertain what attitude to assume. ‘Nothing … I was looking for something …’ he stammered, embarrassed. He kept his eyes lowered. Then he raised them to the mute woman. ‘So you’ve discovered everything,’ he murmured, drawing his head back defiantly. An icy silence fell between them for a few moments. ‘Well?’ Cecco continued. ‘You can’t tell me you want to help the populace of this despicable city just to sit on some miserable throne and represent the clique of merchants and cutpurses! Besides, I’ve used up all my funds and my faction in Siena is doing battle with its enemies. And they will do badly if our only protection is Milady Poverty. I’m not one of those idiots who jump up and down singing the praises of that fool from Assisi,’ he concluded, with a hint of his usual mirth.

‘Cecco, tonight you will sleep at the Stinche.’

Cecco blanched, just for a moment, then immediately grew cocky again. ‘Come on, Dante, you wouldn’t do that to an old comrade-at-arms? Don’t you remember how I protected your back, at the battle of Campaldino?’

‘At the battle of Campaldino all I saw was
your
back, running away ahead of all the others!’

‘Which means you can’t have been far behind!’

Dante shook his head. ‘Who else is involved with you in all this?’

‘There’s no shortage of them in Italy, people ready to play at being priests,’ Cecco smiled. ‘And even more if
there’s
the prospect of gain. Join us, my friend. I know your finances aren’t exactly flourishing at the moment. We can make a small fortune from the gullibility of these yokels.’

There was a moment’s silence. Cecco took advantage of it to nudge the poet.

‘Those Florentines can go to hell! What have you got in common with all those pygmies that surround you, apart from the fact that you were born in the midst of them? And wouldn’t a few florins in your pocket come in handy? I know your name’s in the records of the usurers, as well as on the parchments of the poets.’

The prior’s face was darkening by the minute. Beside him Amara had lifted her veil. Once again those enigmatic features pierced him to the core. For a moment he had a sense that she was about to say something, and that even her muteness was a trick. Instead she merely took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘they can go to hell. Yet I want to know everything, holding nothing back. Who’s responsible for this mess? And who are the people I must join, Cecco?’

The other man gestured vaguely. ‘The Fedeli are about to carry out a colossal enterprise that will change the face of the earth.’

‘Who’s Brandano? And where’s he got to? He’s the brains behind the illusion, isn’t he?’

‘He’s merely a showman, the kind of wandering player
who
charms the peasants at fairs. But he’s pretty good, don’t you think? He’s believable, in those monk’s rags. I thought I’d find him here.’

‘Who gave Brandano the mirrors for the trick? And who’s pulling the strings here in Florence?’

Cecco shook his head. His expression was sincere now. ‘I don’t know who’s running this. I found out about this in Toulouse, when we went there for a change of air.’

‘To Toulouse?’ Dante said. ‘And why Florence after that?’

Cecco exploded with laughter. ‘Perhaps they want to pay tribute to the greatness of your city! Or more likely they think there are more priests, more money and more idiots here than anywhere else. Certainly I’d rather have cheated my own Siena, but apparently everything has to be
sub flore
…’

The poet gave a start. Where did the old prophecy about the death of Frederick the Second come into it? ‘Where did you get the reliquary that you’re using for the trick?’ he asked.

‘Bigarelli gave it to us.’

Dante nodded. His suspicions were confirmed; there really was a connection between the sculptor and that business about the fake crusade. And between that and the crime. The tense expression on Cecco’s face suggested that the slashed throat of the victim in the tower was still in his mind.

Dante looked around. ‘The reliquary. Where is it hidden?’

Cecco hesitated for a moment, before moving towards a corner of the church not far from the feet of the scaffolding on which the prior had pursued the monk. He bent down and moved something on the edge of what looked like a tombstone. There was the sound of a click, and then Cecco moved the stone aside with remarkable force, revealing the beginning of a staircase that led under the floor. ‘It’s the old crypt. It’s here that …’

He broke off. Then, having overcome his final hesitation, he went down first, followed by the poet. The silent woman had also walked behind them, as if she feared being abandoned in the church.

A spacious basement opened up beneath the abbey. Gravestones lay scattered on the tiled marble floor, and Roman sarcophagi were lined up against the walls. It must once have been the cemetery of the little monastic community, but the ravages of time and abandonment were everywhere in evidence.

‘This is the secret of the magic,’ Cecco murmured, pointing to an object wrapped in a heavy red cloth.

Dante walked over and resolutely uncovered it. The face of the statue, horrible yet fascinating, was lit by the glare of the oil-lamp. The enamel eyes seemed to stare at him with a light of their own, as if they were about to spring into life. He turned around for a minute to look at the woman. There really was a resemblance between the two faces – the same anxious expression – as if some
mysterious
correspondence existed between the bronze and the flesh.

He carefully worked the locks on the chest, opening the two panels. There was something written inside, invisible to the eye of anyone looking at it from the front. Bigarelli had engraved two words:
Sacellum Federici
.

Frederick’s tomb. Or his shrine. Once again Dante raised the lamp towards that bronze face, studying it intensely. The soft features, the long hair, had led him to think it was the statue of a woman. But might he not, in fact, have been gazing upon the lineaments of the Emperor, captured in bronze to carry his image into the afterlife? Might the reliquary have been designed to protect the Swabian Emperor’s body on his journey into eternity?

But if that was the case, what was the connection between the sovereign’s death and the deeds that stained Florence with blood half a century later?

He went on looking round in that cave of wonders. Next to one of the sarcophagi a crack opened up in the floor, leading to yet another room below. Dante stretched down, lowering the lamp into the passageway. Under the crypt there ran a wide brick corridor that seemed to disappear in the direction of the Arno. The bottom was covered with water.

‘It’s an old Roman cloaca. It leads towards the old well, in the Forum. Brandano comes along here whenever he doesn’t want to be seen,’ Cecco explained.

Dante nodded. Brandano really was the king of disappearance. Not just on the roof, then, but here too.

‘Now you know everything, my friend. Join us,’ Cecco whispered insinuatingly into his ear.

‘I can’t let you do it. It isn’t for this that Florence has trusted in my deeds … and in my virtue,’ the poet replied with a shake of his head.

Cecco spread his arms in a gesture of comic desperation. By now the woman had joined them. ‘Don’t lose us. Don’t lose her. Isn’t she too lovely to end up in the hands of the
bargellini
?’

Dante covered his eyes with his hands. He was about to refuse again, but then a possibility entered his mind. ‘What was the Emperor’s last dream? What was he building in the lands of the Cavalcanti? What was it that came from beyond the seas, on that broken ship?’

‘I don’t know. It’s something spoken of among the Fedeli d’Amore. Perhaps it’s his hidden treasure, as safe as it would be in a felt cradle.’

Dante opened his eyes wide. Between felt and felt: Fabio dal Pozzo had used similar words. He gripped his friend by the shoulders and shook him. ‘What is the meaning of the phrase, “between felt and felt”?’

Cecco had turned pale. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he stammered. ‘It was something the Fedeli used to say …’

He seemed sincere, Dante thought, disoriented. And
yet
the false crusade must somehow be linked to the deaths of all those men. Perhaps, if he had revealed his discoveries to the world straight away, the feeble thread that linked those events might have broken, and he would never know the whole truth.

‘For now, the secret remains hidden in the abbey, with that woman,’ the prior said at last. ‘I shall say nothing. For the time being at least.’

5

Dawn of 10th August

D
ANTE CAME
outside at dawn, after a brief sleep filled with restless images. The faces of the living and the dead had merged into a macabre comedy in which Cecco’s mocking expression was superimposed over Bigarelli’s horrendous injury and the death-ship, weighing anchor again, now sailed with its cargo of corpses towards the lands of the Orient.

He himself must have ploughed through a salty sea, which he thought he could still taste on his lips. The Virgin, too, a prisoner in her gem-encrusted reliquary, had pursued him for a long time, trying to communicate something to him. In the dream, her delicate features had become the horrible face of a monster, as if the wax of her flesh had finally yielded to the glare of the sun.

He had woken up all of a sudden, his forehead gripped in a ring of iron. His old enemy was back, tormenting him by plunging its nails into his brain; although without injuring him too much this time. A light touch, as if to
remind
the poet of its presence.

So, in Florence he had to find his way to a treasure. He performed a swift mental calculation, but without reaching any definite conclusion. Without having any final idea of the construction, it was difficult to imagine how long it would take to complete it. The ‘treasure’ – whatever it might have been – might still be in transit, or it might already have arrived in Florence. If that were so, it could not be hidden in the casket designed to receive it. It had to be somewhere else.

Between felt and felt.

An allegory, or an expression to be taken literally?

That might be the explanation. The wool warehouses were all concentrated around the fields of Santa Maria Novella, on the other side of the city.

He hoped the cool morning air might do him good. But the sun was already shining relentlessly, like a ball of fire. He had only been walking for a minute or so, and already he was drenched in sweat, like the humour exuded by the skin in a fever. The burning feeling that had tormented him during the night had flamed up once more.