The Kingdom of Light (19 page)

‘On your own? Don’t you know that the root of vice and sin lies in solitude?’ the newcomer insisted. ‘It plants in the soul the seeds of
melancholia obscura
, and puts our humours out of balance, predisposing the body to illnesses and miserable decadence, as Aristotle asserts in
De anima
. Perhaps you want to grow old before your time, shut up behind your armour of pride?’

Dante studied him with surprise.

‘You didn’t think I was a man of logic!’ the fair-haired man exclaimed, clearly satisfied at having attracted his attention. ‘I immediately saw from your manners and your clothes that you’re a man of letters like myself.’

‘Aristotle says nothing of the sort. And certainly not in
De anima
,’ the poet declared, trying once more to catch what the four men were saying. He thought he heard a reference to the temple …

‘Oh, then it must be someone else,’ the man snorted, touching Dante’s neck with his hand again.

Dante instinctively recoiled, furiously pulling the man’s
hand
away. He must have hit him hard, because the man shrieked, turning to his companions asking for help, his small eyes filled with sudden hatred. Attracted by the noise, people started looking in the poet’s direction. Some of the customers at the back of the hall had risen to their feet and were advancing menacingly.

Dante struck the fair-haired man violently with his free hand and hurled him against the tripod in the middle of the room. The big copper brazier toppled over and crashed noisily to the floor, throwing sparks all around. A chorus of cries of pain rose up from the group of customers closest to it, the ones who had caught the full force of the fire.

The men seemed to perform some infernal dance, as they desperately tried to shake the fragments of burning embers from their hair and clothes. Cursing and swearing, they waved their limbs around, ignoring Dante. But the rest, having got over their bewilderment, still approached, and other customers were joining them.

Dante felt he was lost. A colossus with a cuirass was now only a few feet away, and hurled himself at the poet, trying to grab him by the throat, but lost his balance and crashed to the floor. Dante had the feeling that he had tripped over the foot of one of the men whose conversation he had been listening in on – the foot having been deliberately stretched out between the giant’s legs.

The prior took advantage of this to reach the door. He
stopped
for a moment in the doorway, looking behind him. He brought his thumbs and index fingers together above his head. ‘You cursed sons of whores, unnatural wretches! This is the fire that awaits you, the fire you will know sooner or later.’

The whole tavern had become an infernal madhouse. Only the four strangers had remained motionless in their seats, watching the scene like spectators in a theatre.

As soon as he was outside he began running, afraid that someone might come after him. But the door of the tavern stayed shut, as if it were a kind of inviolable boundary for those who had found refuge inside. As a precautionary measure, however, he flattened himself against the wall of a nearby hut, hiding in the shadow of a doorway.

It was at that moment that he saw two silhouettes emerging from a side-alley and approaching the door of the tavern, after checking with a furtive glance that no one had noticed them. From his hiding place Dante could clearly see their faces outlined in the bright light.

Cecco Angiolieri and young Colonna.

Cecco was the kind of man to frequent such a place. By now his descent along the slope of vice could easily have taken him beyond the bounds of nature. He suppressed a smile at the thought: the hero of Campaldino, with his purple leggings! He really seemed made to pass through that door. But Franceschino didn’t seem the kind, it wasn’t the image the poet had of him. No, they must
be
there for some other reason, one that had something to do with the four men perhaps.

He stayed close by the door, unsure what to do. There was no question of going back. Waiting for the strangers to leave and confronting them might mean losing precious time, with no guarantee of honest replies. The two men could have a thousand possible explanations for being in that place, and he had no proof against them.

Perhaps it was better to exploit the little that remained of the day and go back to Maestro Alberto, in the hope that he might have managed to understand something more about the contraption taken from the ship.

T
HE
MECHANICUS
welcomed him with an expression of disappointment that told him more than a thousand words could have done.

‘Still nothing, Maestro Alberto?’

The man shook his head. ‘Not really. I think I’ve worked out some of the connections. And I’ve rebuilt one of the damaged gear-wheels. Look.’

He held out a gleaming circle of gilded metal, the teeth of which still smelled of the file.

Dante tested the quality of the design, with a quick observation in the light from the window. ‘It doesn’t look as if your work is in any way inferior to the work of the pagans. But behind the perfection of the form you must
now
be able to grasp the soul of what you have in front of you. And soon, because the time that this machine is supposed to measure has already been set in motion.’

The
maestro
stared at him, struck by his anxious tone. ‘But nothing whatsoever is unknown about its nature …’ he murmured.

Dante’s face lit up with interest. ‘And its purpose?’

‘A chain of whirling rotations. Gradually accelerated by the reduced diameter of the wheels.’

The two men stared each other in the eye, sure that the same idea was passing through their minds.

The poet was the first to break the silence. ‘Just as in the universe the moon’s heaven orbits more quickly than that of Saturn, the most remote before one reaches the realm of God. But why?’

‘That’s what I don’t understand. If its purpose were sure-footedly to measure the passing of time, if it were put in motion it would keep a non-human time, closer to a fly’s wing-beat than to the beat of a human heart. As if someone had wished to construct a time-keeper to mark the day of people who were not of this earth …’

‘Perhaps al-Jazari built a clock for the angels?’

‘Or for the demons. And besides, there’s this detail, here – it’s the sign of a genius … If I have understood correctly, here the maker’s mind really has penetrated the mind of God,’ the old man went on, his eyes burning with admiration.

‘What’s so extraordinary about it?’ Dante asked, perplexed. He had seen that hungry, shady expression before. Men who had gone to the pyre because of their hankering to overcome the limits that God has imposed upon reason not illuminated by grace.

‘You see this lever and the two lead spheres on the ends of the two little moving arches?’

Dante narrowed his eyes to peer at the tiny detail, then looked quizzically back at the
maestro
.

‘It regulates the speed of rotation – so simple, but really the offspring of the illumination that only God can give. The solution to an enormous problem. Don’t you understand? Our science too is capable of building a spinning mechanism, driven by the energy accumulated in a curved arc of steel, or supplied by a descending weight. But no one has ever found a way of rendering constant the motion that derives from it, as this machine has done.’

The
mechanicus
went on studying the device admiringly. ‘And look here,’ he continued, pointing at the hole in a strip of bronze on the side of the contraption. A skilful hand had carved around the aperture the stylised design of a human eye. He glanced quizzically at the poet, as if waiting for an explanation from him.

Dante approached to see better. The circular hole corresponded precisely to the pupil of the carved figure. ‘An invitation to look through the hole?’ he guessed uncertainly.

On the other side of the aperture there was a bronze frame, pivoted in such a way as to be set at a variable angle. He assessed its dimensions, as a bizarre idea came into his mind. It could hold one of the mirrors in the Virgin trick. He leaned the other way: in front of the other hole there was an identical frame. Confused, he bit his lower lip.

Meanwhile the
mechanicus
had started talking again. ‘I thought so too. It could be an unusual model of an astrolabe, and this would be the hole to look at the stars through. But it doesn’t make sense. There is in fact a symmetrical hole, on the other side of the machine. But if you look through it, your vision is obstructed by the rotating blades. It makes no sense,’ he repeated, shaking his head once more.

‘Unless its purpose is to invite people to observe its parts in motion,’ the prior remarked.

Alberto bent over the table with his head in his hands. ‘Al-Jazari had gone mad. Perhaps the purpose of the machine is merely to celebrate his mastery. A monument to blind pride.’

‘An admirable game, but one without purpose. Do you think so many men would have died for that?’ The old man looked up at him, disturbed, but before he could comment Dante interrupted him. ‘Try to penetrate his secret, Maestro Alberto. You have no idea how important it is.’

‘Give me some more time, Prior.’

‘Time is the material least available to us,’ Dante murmured. The
mechanicus
had leaned over his bench again, with his hands inside the device. Dante looked round.

Hamid stood silently in a corner. He was sunk in prayer, bent over on his little rug. The poet sat down on a chest beside the workbench and watched carefully, his hands twined together under his chin.

He knew it was the custom of Moors to pray towards Mecca, but seeing Hamid prostrate against a wall, immersed in an incomprehensible litany, inspired hilarity in him rather than religious piety.

The slave must have heard his laughter, because he broke off and stared angrily at him.

‘Tell me of your paradise, pagan. What is written in the book?’ Dante asked him. ‘And forgive me for interrupting your conversation with your god.’

He knew he had offended Hamid. But why? he wondered, shaking off that sentiment. The conversation he had interrupted was, after all, merely a dialogue with the void.

‘Across the seven skies, the Prophet reached the house of God the powerful and merciful on the wings of Buraq, the magic flying horse. Up there He revealed the secrets of all things.’

‘And what might those secrets be?’

‘God put a seal upon the Prophet’s lips so that nothing would be revealed.’

‘Of course! Because he saw nothing. Why should God receive a heretic and converse with him, explaining his intentions to him like the lord of a castle to his bailiff? Flight through the air one might concede, but only as an expiation and a warning to the whole of humanity.’

‘Mohammed is the noblest of men, the first and last of the prophets. Who is more worthy than he to visit the higher realms and bear witness to them?’

‘God could summon to himself the worst of sinners, just because he had granted him the gift of a higher faculty of the rational mind. A man whose fabric was illuminated by a spark of the supernal light.’

‘A man like you, Messer Alighieri?’

Dante shrugged impatiently. ‘So your paradise extends beyond the crystal vaults of the heavens. And what is it like?’

‘By the stairs that appeared to him, the Prophet – may God’s glory be upon him – first ascended through the seven heavens of the seven planets. In the precise order in which the wise astronomers of Baghdad arranged them, with their marvellous vision. Crossing deserts of darkness and light. And the fiery lake of sin.’

Dante shook his head. ‘In the order in which the wise men of Greece arranged them, you mean. Aristotle and the great Ptolemy. Those lakes of fire and darkness of which
you
speak are not the pillars of the world, but something that our eyes might see even if our mind were crushed by the sight of them. God is far from us, and not even your Avicenna could count the paces that separate us from Him.’

The Arab did not reply. Dante’s thoughts had slipped once more to the series of crimes. He thought once again of the face of Fabio dal Pozzo, the mathematician. Not even a mathematician could have counted out those paces. So why did it take one to bring that obscure project to its conclusion?

A sudden anxiety had taken hold of him. He hurried out of the door.

He strode down the long street to the inn, as quickly as his strength permitted. As he did so he cursed himself for his short-sightedness. Seized by emotion over what he had seen at the Stinche, he had ordered the man to be freed. It had been a decision that had been dictated not by reason, but only by his sense of guilt at having been the indirect cause of the man’s torture. By freeing him Dante had obeyed the desire to erase from his memory that bloody face, those dislocated joints.

But perhaps he still had time to stop him. The mathematician would probably wait until he had recovered a minimum of strength before heading north.

He went on walking until he reached his goal. The ground-floor hall was empty, and he didn’t meet anyone on the stairs, either. He climbed to the first floor, where
Fabio
dal Pozzo had his cell. Without knocking he lifted the latch and walked in.

It took him only a quick glance to ascertain that the room was completely empty. There were papers on the desk, with geometrical figures and numbers traced on them. He touched his fingertips to the traces of ink, which were still damp. The mathematician must have left the room only a few moments before.

He quickly read the pages that seemed to have been written last: they contained scattered observations, notes on the declination of Venus. In one corner he saw a reddish smudge, as if the paper had been touched with blood-drenched hands. Dante instinctively looked up towards the ceiling. Vespers had just rung, the best time to study the evening star in all its splendour. Perhaps Fabio had gone out on to the roof of the tower to complete his observations. Deep inside he felt an admiration for a man who could not ignore his mind’s passions even in a state of terrible pain.