The Kingdom of Light (28 page)

After curfew

‘
W
HY SO
much interest in the statue of Janus?’

The rooms at the Angel Inn looked deserted. Dante asked Manetto for news of the Frenchman, Monerre. He had spent the whole afternoon mulling over what he had heard on the bridge. Something had sparked a doubt in his mind. And now he was cursing himself for not having gone into the matter, rather than irritably walking away from the challenge like a stupid peasant.

‘He isn’t here any more,’ the innkeeper replied. ‘He seems to have moved to another inn,’ he added in an offended tone.

Dante pinched his lip with his fingers, as he always did. ‘He didn’t leave a message of any kind?’

‘No. Perhaps my humble lodgings aren’t fit for sophisticated foreigners, and I’m not worthy of their trust. He left in the company of two strangers.’

‘Foreigners?’

‘They didn’t speak. But I would swear to it.’

Dante took his leave of the innkeeper. What was he going to do now? He was worried. He instinctively sensed that Monerre was the one most deeply involved in the plot, with his mysterious ways and the affected politeness of a transalpine gentleman. If he really had disappeared, his crimes too would remain swathed in darkness for ever.

Walking slowly, he had turned into an alleyway behind Santa Maria Maggiore, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground. His attention was attracted by a double shadow in front of him. A little way off, two men were walking side by side.

They were foreigners, judging by their clothes, but there was something familiar about them. His curiosity fired, Dante began to follow them. Meanwhile he desperately scoured his memory for an explanation of that sense of familiarity.

Suddenly he remembered. They were two of the men who had sat apart from everyone else in Ceccherino’s tavern, apparently uninvolved in the climate of perversion that prevailed there.

He quickened his pace, coming up behind them as they drew near the ancient Roman well.

‘Greetings, gentlemen,’ he said, blocking their way.

The two men stopped with a look of surprise. ‘Do we know each other?’ the taller man asked after a moment of embarrassment.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before,’ said the other, glancing quickly around as if to check that the poet was alone.

‘Don’t worry, there’s no one else with me. But I have a request to ask of you.’

The foreigners stared at him in silence, maintaining a cautious attitude.

‘We have a friend in common, I’m sure of it. And perhaps more than one. I’m referring to Messer Monerre.’

The two men remained silent, impassive, as if that name meant nothing to them.

‘I’m sure you know who I’m talking about. Tell him I need to meet him and that I will wait for him behind the Baptistery choir tomorrow night an hour after compline.’

The two men did not reply. Still staring impassively at him, they nodded curtly and went on their way, disappearing at a turn in the road.

The prior watched them until the last moment. He was thinking about how easy it would be to disappear from sight in his city, as if the walls of the houses had been built in tribute to some diabolical design and the streets were really filled with those jinns that Monerre said he had met in the East.

At the priory, night of 12th August

H
E WAS
in a terrible state of anxiety. A sense of moral derangement, of torpid sensuality, stirred within him. He
was
being pursued by Amara’s elusive face, almost featureless, like the surface of a far-off moon.

He paced up and down in his cell, mentally caressing the body of the woman whose splendid figure he had glimpsed on the cart, feeling a tension that refused to assume the form of words, even though he had tried several times to turn it into poetry. He thumped his desk. The violent pain in his fingers brought him back to reality for a moment, driving away those erotic fantasies.

He was ashamed of that instinct. But why? The feeling of love is a proof of noble sentiments, and only a heart rendered superior by learning and virtue is capable of feeling its pangs, of turning a vile sickness of the body into a state of ecstasy … and he had to leave her in the hands of that rogue Cecco Angiolieri, with his filthy innuendos.

Perhaps at that very moment Cecco’s hands were running over her body, taking advantage of the darkness and the fact that they were alone. Did he have to consent to a girl in his city being exposed even to rape, perhaps, with no one to apply the rules of common courtesy on her behalf?

All of a sudden he closed the wax tablets and jumped to his feet.

T
HE CITY
streets were deserted. Dante was very familiar with the route of the night patrol, which was mapped out
with
the sole purpose of protecting the houses of important families. He had no difficulty in avoiding their measured pace when he spotted them in the distance.

Having drawn close to the abbey, he peered into the street ahead of him for the last time to make sure no one was there. Approaching the corner of the building, he thought he heard a metallic sound, followed by the quick, rustling footsteps of someone leaving in a hurry. He waited a few moments, but complete silence had fallen once more.

Only then did he open the little door. Inside, the nave was in total darkness, apart from a faint beam of moonlight that caught the tops of the windows. He reached the door of the sacristy and walked in.

The first room was empty. He quickly climbed the stairs to the corridor with the old cells along it. Here, too, contrary to what he expected, he didn’t encounter a living soul. Cecco and the woman seemed to have disappeared. They might even have fled.

A confused emotion took hold of him. He was reassured by the idea that they might be far away. It meant that the plan to defraud Florence had now been abandoned. The burden that weighed upon his conscience over his failure to reveal the plot grew lighter. But his hopes of exposing the murderer were fading, too. Now that Brandano was dead and his accomplice had vanished, another thread in that mesh of clues and shadows had been severed.

But beneath the surface of his rational reflections he
felt
a twinge of disappointment: never again would he see that woman, who had escaped him for ever.

Then he spotted a glimmer of light coming from a little passageway leading to the stairs of the abbey tower. His heart leaped in his throat as he started running again, charging up the narrow stairway towards the top. When he reached the final flight, he stopped, panting, beneath the rough arch leading to the bell-tower, which was lit by a candle in a niche in the wall. The wheels of the old bells still hung from the roof-beams, and beneath them someone had arranged some cushions. In the total silence of the night he could hear the breathing of the figure that lay on that improvised bed under a thin organza veil. The shape of it … At that moment the woman, taking a deeper breath, stirred in her sleep, turning on to one side and revealing her back.

The gentle curve of her hips appeared in all its splendour. She seemed to be dreaming. Her hands, joined in her lap, brushed her private parts with a tender and barely perceptible gesture. As if she were trying to protect herself.

‘Psyche waiting for the hand of Eros,’ Dante thought excitedly, as Amara began stirring in her sleep once more, stretching her legs voluptuously. For the first time he could see, right before his eyes, all the splendour of a body that he had only guessed at before, when it had been hidden by her clothes.

He approached slowly until he could touch the bed.
The
flickering light of the little flame seemed to bring the thin fabric to life. Trembling, he stretched out a hand, slowly revealing the body. Amara appeared before him as clearly as an ivory statue.

He felt a flame blazing up inside him, and his breath quickened. The woman, moving again, had turned round, revealing her lap, still veiled. Her quivering eyelids revealed that her sleep was coming to an end. Her eyes, which looked as if they were made of clear glass, flashed a few times; then, after a shy gesture of fear at the sight of the man leaning over her, a mysterious, distant smile appeared on her mouth, the like of which Dante had only ever seen on the statues of ancient goddesses.

She stared at him for a few moments, then slowly spread her arms. The prior fell to his knees before her. He felt her hands brushing the back of his neck and drawing him gently towards her half-opened lips.

Her mouth tasted of sleep and honey. Dante abandoned himself voluptuously to the kiss, trying to wipe away the smile that still hovered before his eyes. Breathing in the woman’s breath, he began to peel back the thin cloth that covered her breasts. Freed from their constraints, her erect, excited nipples stretched towards him.

When he began to loosen the sheets around her belly, Amara gripped his hand with unexpected strength and stopped it from going any further. Then she rose slowly to her feet, still keeping him at a distance with her fingertips.
He
took a step further, trying to grab hold of the creature who went on eluding him, but once again she escaped his grip, taking refuge in a corner of the cell, beside the candle-flame.

At last, with a slow movement, as if she was dancing, she herself shook away the last of the cloths that still covered her belly, displaying herself to his gaze. Dante brought his hand to his mouth, his lips half-open with surprise.

Before him was a being of god-like form, the monster described by Ovid, male and female at the same time, a living hermaphrodite sprung in all its albino glory from a page of the
Metamorphoses
.

A strange sensation had taken hold of the poet, a mixture of horror and desire. He took a step back towards the door, but stopped on the threshold. The creature had spread its arms, revealing all the pallor of its body. A big featherless bird. That must be what the angels look like, he thought, the ones that form a crown of praise at the summit of the sky.

The creature moved again, beckoning him, approached him in all its dazzling nakedness, and began once again to stroke his face with its hand, as cold and white as snow. Attraction and repulsion alternated within him. The gentleness of the gesture and the sweetness of the facial expression were those of a woman in love. But as Amara began to approach him again, he saw with horror that the creature’s male member was also in a state of excitement.

Unable to react, Dante discovered that he was torn between two desires, like the monster that was stretching its hands towards him. Then, with an effort of will, he gripped the organza veil that lay abandoned on the bed and wrapped it delicately around the ivory body, conquering the desire to press it to him and possess it. Now that it was no longer naked, its duality too had vanished and Amara had become female once again, by the same magic that had made a male of her a moment before.

Still bewildered, Dante dashed from the cell and ran away without a backward glance. On the stairs he encountered Cecco, standing on the bottom steps with his arms folded. The poet raced past him without saying a word, avoiding the sarcastic glance that the other man darted at him.

He was sure that Cecco knew everything, and that he would make a fool of the prior. But he would have time to settle his accounts, he said to himself, choking back the insults that had risen to his lips.

Different considerations now flooded his mind. His confusion and his impotent rage diluted his arousal, and the voice of reason returned to speak in his ear. Amara was a man … was also a man. And what if in her masculine condition she was really the one who was due to come – Frederick’s heir, the one to restore his throne? Bernardo hadn’t known, or hadn’t wanted to be more precise about
the
sex of the heir. Perhaps because he didn’t know whether Bianca Lancia had given the Emperor a boy or a girl? Or because it was in a single descendant that the two sexes were united, and the new Emperor would put his dual natures on the throne?

He shook his head to rid it of such an insane idea. Amara didn’t look more than twenty, and she would have had to be at least fifty to have been born of the Emperor’s seed. But Dante didn’t seem certain even of that. Had his own teachers, the great writers of antiquity, not told of fabulous creatures with the gift of immortality?

He ran away, into the street, like a wounded animal in search of its lair.

At the priory

D
ANTE NERVOUSLY
crumpled the sheet on which he had written only a few lines. He looked at the thin ream of pages that lay on the desk: soon it would be finished, and he didn’t know whether he would be able to get hold of another one. He would have to go back to working in his mind alone, exploiting the book of memory.

A violent spasm struck him behind the eyes, with its fiery finger. He closed his eyes tightly, waiting for the cloud of flaming sparks to fade away.

As he held his fists tight against his eyelids, he thought
he
was aware of a movement behind the door and of a hand touching the latch. But he didn’t have the strength to turn round. When he finally did manage to do so, he saw the visitor who had come in and was waiting motionlessly, leaning against the door-post.

‘Pietra … is it you?’ he murmured, recognising the woman’s slender outline. In the light from the little candle on the desk she barely stood out against the darkness. ‘How did you get in?’

‘Lagia’s women always find open doors. I also have friends among your guards,’ she replied with her vulgar chuckle.

Dante struggled to his feet and walked over to the girl. He stretched out a hand to touch her cheek, but she recoiled, turning her head away.

‘Don’t touch me. You haven’t paid.’

The poet lowered his hand. The girl stared at him with her deep-green eyes. The mass of dark curls, loose on her shoulders, framed her face. He thought there was a slight luminescence to her eyes, which were caught by the flickering light from the candle. For a moment the sweet phantasm of Amara was superimposed over those hard features, hiding them from view.