The Kingdom of Light (24 page)

‘Perhaps a celestial spirit will help me, then,’ Dante murmured, leaping up again and setting off on his way.

When they were near the old Forum, about a hundred yards from his destination, the prior stopped, sending Hamid away with a coin. The boy set the chest down, looking round in puzzlement, but said nothing. It was not by chance that Dante had chosen that spot by the market. He was confident that no one would have paid them any attention, even in this gossipy city, if they had seen him in the company of a porter with an anonymous burden.

He waited until the slave had disappeared, then hoisted the chest on to his shoulder and set off towards the abbey.

He had encountered some familiar faces on the way, but he had carried on walking, staring straight ahead, and avoided returning anyone’s greetings. He arrived at the church just as the abbey bell was ringing out for vespers. Having reached the second door, and having checked that no one was observing his movements, he entered with his load.

Inside it was deserted. He took advantage of the fact and
quickly
opened the trapdoor that gave access to the crypt, and climbed down. Remembering where the oil-lamp had been left, he lit it and set off in search of a hiding place.

There were no hiding places in the room. For a moment he thought of stowing the machine in the underground cleft, but was deterred by fear that the water in the well might somehow rise up all that way.

The image of the Virgin came into his mind. In a corner, deposited on an old Roman sarcophagus, was Bigarelli’s reliquary, which seemed to stare at him with its terrible
pietra dura
glare. He walked over to it, seized by the desire to observe from close up the fruits of the sculptor’s madness.

Then his attention was drawn by the lid of the sarcophagus. The stone seemed to have been moved, and recently, judging by the traces on the floor. With a huge effort, he managed to open it a crack.

Dante was expecting to glimpse ancient, bony remains. Instead the quivering light reflected on a large number of gleaming steel points.

Someone had hidden a bundle of swords in there. He looked round. There were two other sarcophagi in the crypt. He quickly moved their lids, too, discovering other weapons. There was enough in there to equip a small army. New blades, without the slightest trace of rust.

Dante stopped to think for a moment. Then, moving the weapons a little, he made enough room on the bottom to put the machine inside.

He was about to put the cover back in its place when he noticed a movement on the stairs of the crypt. In the faint light of the lamp he saw Cecco. He was clutching a short sword in his hand.

Seeing Dante, he lowered the weapon. ‘I heard noises. So you came back, eh? I was about to …’

‘Why did you lie to me?’ the poet interrupted, finishing his work.

A comically pained expression appeared on the man’s face. ‘What do you mean?’ he stammered, scratching his prominent belly.

‘The crypt is full of weapons. What are you planning to do with them, if your purpose is only to extort a few florins from the yokels?’

‘I knew about those weapons. But I didn’t know why they were hidden here, I swear!’ He walked over to Dante, throwing his sword aside. ‘The Fedeli organised everything, but I don’t know the overall plan. None of us has been informed. But if Boniface’s men discover it …’ Cecco looked like a corpse. A violent tremor had taken hold of his limbs. His knees bent and he fell to the floor. ‘Then we are finished …’

‘What does the Pope have to do with it?’ Dante replied, immediately alarmed. At that moment the last thing he wanted to face was a clash with Caetani.

The other man bit his lips anxiously and didn’t reply. Then he finally seemed to make up his mind. ‘The Fedeli have something big in mind.’

‘Here in Florence? What?’

Cecco had assumed a circumspect attitude, as if afraid that someone was listening to them. He seemed to have recovered from his initial fear, assuming his usual arrogant expression once more. ‘Money, my friend, money. I’m sure of it. That’s why they got involved in the illusion, what else? A pile of money, something dating back to the days of Frederick, may God’s glory preserve him! So I’ll be able to send my father to hell at last …’

‘What has the Emperor got to do with it, damn your soul?’ Dante cried, exasperated. ‘You all talk about him as if his shadow had returned to walk the earth. But rather than doing so with the reverence due to the dead, you drag him from his sleep to use him as a screen for your intrigues. What is the purpose of all this?’

Cecco shook his head. ‘There are many different parts, like the branches of a great tree. Each of us knows his own task … but only the First one knows everything. I, though, have worked out: the imperial treasure … the friends are on its trail. And then you can safely bet that much of that metal will end up in my pockets, which have great need of it. And in yours, if you will help me. As you did that time at Campaldino …’ he concluded, slapping the poet hard on the shoulder.

Dante irritably removed his hand. ‘Who is the head of the Fedeli now? Is he the First of whom you speak?’

Cecco shook his head. ‘The leader of the Fedeli was for a
long
time our friend, Guido Cavalcanti. And perhaps he still would be, if he hadn’t been struck by the banishment order to which you put your seal,’ he replied bitterly. ‘But now the leader is someone far higher up. That is all I know for certain.’

Dante put his head in his hands. All the elements of this enigma were spinning around in his mind like crazed moths round a flame.

‘I know they want to avenge the Emperor, I’ve heard that, too. His death,’ Cecco said.

‘His death?’ the prior echoed.

Bernardo’s words had come back to him. ‘Cecco, do the Fedeli think the Emperor was murdered as well?’

‘That’s what we say to each other. Poison, and possibly by his own physician.’

‘And how might he have done it?’

‘No one knows,’ the other man replied with a shrug. Dante felt a twinge of anger. Once again someone had brought him to the threshold of a revelation and then closed the door in his face.

Late morning

D
ANTE CROSSED
the open space that lay behind San Piero, still lined with the ruins of the Ghibelline houses destroyed in the fury that followed their defeat in 1266. There, incorporating large tracts of the old walls, the future Palazzo
della
Prioria, with its vast tower, was going up. But for now the offices of the Commune were scattered among the little surrounding buildings, which had been let for the purpose.

The clerk of the Commune was based in one of these, at the beginning of the road to the market, on the first floor. On the floor below, and in the basements, lay the city archives, where deeds, depositions and minutes of the meetings of countless assemblies were bound between ornate boards.

‘Greetings, Messer Duccio,’ said the poet.

The bald man, who had greeted him solicitously, quickly replied with a bow, setting aside the big dossier he was compiling. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘You know everything about this city. The debits and credits. And above all the activities that go on there, who performs them and where.’

The other man half-closed his eyes with a barely perceptible twinge of pleasure, which he then disguised with a little smile. ‘You are too generous in listing my humble qualities. In fact it is the Guilds, with their local registries, that keep precise account of the activities pursued by the affiliates of the various camps. Although it is true that in my office we take general note of everything … to give the tax-man a hand,’ he added with a wink. ‘Those merchants will stop at nothing to avoid paying tolls and taxes.’

Dante looked round. The clerk’s room was decorated very simply, with a few items of furniture that had been rescued
from
God knows where. Even his desk looked like an adapted church pew, and the two mismatched benches were no better. And yet, beneath their shabby exterior, those rooms concealed a detailed collective consciousness of the city.

‘Messer Duccio, what do you know about a certain
literatus
, Arrigo da Jesi, who has been staying in Florence for some time?’

The man raised his chin as if his attention had suddenly been drawn by something on the ceiling. He closed his eyes and pursed his lips, repeating the name under his breath. Dante had the impression that he was running through the open pages of a mysterious mental archive, concealed in the folds of his memory.

‘Arrigo … da Jesi. Of course. The philosopher,’ he said after a few moments. ‘He arrived from France not long ago. Not much luggage, and in fact he didn’t pay any duties, except a small amount for the books and writing paper that he had with him. He asked for lodgings at the hostel in Santa Maria Novella, from the Dominicans. In return he sometimes gives lessons at their school.’

‘Are you sure he had nothing else with him? Nothing valuable?’

Duccio half-closed his eyes again. ‘No. But he was transporting something unusual, now that you remind me of it. The customs men couldn’t work out the sum that needed to be paid, so they turned to my office. A chest with a wheel in it. And some small glass objects.’

‘What?’ exclaimed Dante.

‘Yes, a wooden wheel. Or at least that’s how the customs man described it to me, when he delivered his report. More than a wheel, in fact … wait!’ the man cried, striking his forehead with a hand.

A tall stack of papers had accumulated on his desk. He flicked through them quickly, until he settled on one in particular.

‘Here it is, you see?’ he said emphatically. ‘Nothing gets lost in here! There’s the report, with the description of the object,’ he added, holding the sheet out to the poet.

Before his eyes, roughly sketched in ink, was the drawing of two concentric octagons.

‘You see? A kind of wheel, as I told you.’

‘And what did Arrigo tell the customs officer?’

‘Nothing. That it was just an instrument he used for his studies.’

Dante had immersed himself in his thoughts, and went on staring at the drawing.

‘It’s certainly strange,’ he suddenly heard Duccio say.

‘What?’ he murmured, stirring slightly.

‘That Arrigo should have been a guest of the Dominicans.’

‘What’s strange about it?’

‘Lots of things, given the way the brothers think. As a young man, Arrigo had been a Franciscan novice, in the days of Brother Elias, Francis’s successor. And since there’s
so
little love lost between those two orders – I wonder why he didn’t go to Santa Croce …’

‘Indeed. I wonder why not?’

Midday

T
HE CLOISTER
of the convent adjacent to Santa Maria Novella was full of monks busy with a great variety of tasks. Dante quickly reached the northernmost corner, where a door led to the little classrooms.

He too had been there as a young man, and he clearly remembered the firmness with which the teachers had instilled in them the certain truth of faith.

Of
their
faith. The black and white of the cloaks wandering around was a reflection of the clarity with which the order distinguished truth from falsehood. Even then he had never managed to enter those spaces without a faint shiver of anxiety, when he became aware of one of the monks standing behind him. And that old insecurity seemed to be returning today, he thought with some irritation, as he tried to shake off the disagreeable sensation with a shrug of his shoulders.

Now he was no longer the nervous student getting to grips with God’s mysteries; he was the prior of the city, the keeper of the keys – those that closed and those that opened. He raised his eyes, which he had kept lowered
until
that point, instinctively adapting to the manners of the people he noticed around him, and reached the last cell, from which he heard a familiar voice.

Two benches, on which half a dozen men were seated, most of them tonsured novices, faced a simple desk set upon a three-step dais. Sitting on the chair, Arrigo was busy declaiming from a large illuminated manuscript set on a lectern. In a loud voice, the philosopher uttered the words of the text, slowly, articulating them one by one as though the meaning he sought lay in each one, rather than in the sentence that they formed.

Dante immediately recognised the text to which the lesson was devoted: the Book of Genesis, the narration of the first phases of Creation. He sat down on the end of the closest bench. It was then that he noticed in the audience the thin figure of Bernardo the historian, leaning over his wax tablets and making rapid notes. He glanced up and met the poet’s eye. He immediately snapped his tablets shut, nodding Dante a quick greeting.

Meanwhile Arrigo seemed to have reached his conclusion. He quoted the work of some of the Church fathers, lingering particularly over an observation by Lactantius. Then he assigned his pupils the task of preparing a controversy on the subject, to be expounded in the following lesson. As his audience was rising to its feet to pay him tribute, he spoke again, making one final request.

‘I would also like you to try and explain how it was
that
God created light on the first day, and the stars and the other givers of light only on the fourth,’ he said calmly.

Dante walked to the foot of the desk, past the pupils who were proceeding towards the exit.

Arrigo had closed the manuscript. He looked up and recognised the poet immediately. ‘Messer Alighieri! And you, Bernardo … I am glad you have found the time to listen to my humble dissertation. But come, let us leave this suffocating space. Outside, in the cool shade of the cloister, we will be able to pursue our conversation with greater ease.’

He led them outside. The portico of thin double columns surrounded a luxuriant garden divided into ordered sections, in which the monks cultivated medical herbs for the monastery pharmacy. In one corner a big lemon tree extended its branches towards the shade of the portico, next to a little gurgling fountain.

Arrigo bent down and took a long, greedy sip.