CHAPTER 21
Beyond the shore they entered a dark valley and wandered through a forest of human forms. The shades were pale and insubstantial. Marco saw men and women holding hands. Children gathered at their feet. Some of the figures shied from the lancelight, raising a hand to shield their eyes, but the light passed through their phantom flesh and left no shadows on their faces. They turned away and moved away and parted as he approached. They moaned and whispered and looked afraid. When Marco tried going right, the shades refused to yield. He brushed against one and felt a chill. To avoid contact he drifted to the left, following the path of least resistance.
They’re guiding me.
Nadja spoke in a tremulous voice. “What is this place?”
“Limbo,” Giovanni said. “These are the virtuous pagans.”
“And the unbaptized children,” William added.
Marco noticed that the shades were not watching him, but Nadja. Children pointed at the girl and muttered. In the moans and sighs he heard her name repeated: “Nadja.” He saw fear in Nadja’s face. They were calling to her. Guiding her.
Where?
Nadja clutched Marco’s arm. Together they walked through the whispers of the damned.
Looking over the heads of the children, Nadja saw a fire in the distance, a beacon on a hill.
“The citadel,” said Giovanni. “Virgil is up there.”
“Would he help us?” Marco asked.
“He helped Dante.”
The friar nodded his consent, and the pilgrims changed course for the hill. They passed a verdant field where Nadja saw more infants than adults. Some of the babies had a parent beside them to hold their hands or tickle their tummies, but most lay unattended. Infants wept in the grass, on their backs, with hands and feet reaching through murky air for a mother or father who would never come.
In that confluence of cries, Nadja heard the soft cooing of a single child. Her body trembled. Baby. She let go of Marco’s arm and stepped into the grassy field.
Giovanni heard the purl of a stream that circled the citadel, and with every step his vision of the walled enclosure became more clear. Up there, he knew, were the great poets of antiquity, Homer and Horace and Ovid and Lucan. Yes, and Virgil most of all. His heart warmed with a lyric fire. He picked up the pace, walking ahead of the lancelight, leading the way to the citadel and chanting as he went, “Ultima regna canam, fluvido contermina mundo, spiritibus quae lata patent, quae premia solvunt pro meritis cuicunque suis...”
They crossed over the little stream and when they came to the gate it opened for them.
Giovanni saw two shades arguing by a marble column. He asked the first one, “Where is Virgil?”
“Coming,” said the man, who wore a Greek toga. “He knows you’re here.”
“Who are you?”
“Plato.” He indicated the second shade, who paced back and forth with his hands behind him. “This is one of my students—”
“I’ve read your Timeaus,” said William, catching up with the group. “In translation.”
“Not my best work,” Plato conceded.
“Your other works are lost.”
“No. They’re all here. Our library is complete.”
Giovanni asked, “How is it you speak Italian?”
“I am speaking my native tongue,” Plato said.
Listening, Giovanni realized it was true, yet it baffled him all the more. “I don’t know Greek. Only a few words. Yet I understand you perfectly.”
He recalled that Dante, who spoke no Greek, had understood the speech of Ulysses in Malebolge. Was Hell, then, an inverse Tower of Babel where languages merged instead of sundered?
“Every language,” said Plato, “is a corruption of the ideal language. I speak the corruption I knew in life. What you hear is the eternal form.”
“Nonsense,” said the student.
His master continued, “Imagine we’re in a cave—”
“We are in a cave,” the other shot back.
“—and we see shadows on the wall—”
“We are the shadows. The formal and final cause.”
Plato said, “There is much we cannot perceive directly.”
“We may be dead, but we’re not insensate.”
“We cannot trust our senses. For example, what are those screams we hear from below? If we were to step out of the cave and into the light—”
Giovanni felt a pull at his arm. He turned and saw Marco.
“Nadja’s missing,” said the knight.
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know. Out there somewhere. We must go back.”
Giovanni nodded.
William, however, was already walking off with the two shades, moving deeper into the citadel. Giovanni called after him, “William!” but the friar did not respond. The poet chased the old man down the hall and tugged at his sleeve.
Startled: “What?”
Giovanni said, “We have to find Nadja.”
“Yes, yes. Very good. I’ll be in the library.”
“No, we must stay together.”
“She knows where we are.”
“We can’t stay, Father. We have to go. Now. She could be lost out there.”
William glanced back at the philosophers who were walking away, deep in discussion. For a moment the friar stood indecisive, like Buridan’s ass between two equidistant and equally tempting haystacks.
Then, like a man, he chose.
Nadja wandered over the green sward, lost in the orphanage of the damned, listening to the tearful tumult. Again she caught the soft cooing of a single child. She turned to the sound but could not find the source.
“Where?” she cried. “Where are you?”
Wading through the multitude, she searched left and right, then leaned down to roll one child over and turn another around, looking for a face that had her features. The children all gazed up at her with expectant eyes.
Not you, not you.
Her heart raced. Her hands shook. Her cheeks were wet and her throat was dry.
“Where are you?”
And then she saw him. He lay on his back, his tiny hands and feet clenched in anticipation. He had not aged. He looked three hours old. And alive. So very alive. He smiled, and Nadja saw her own eyes staring back at her. She picked him up and dandled him in her arms. He felt light as a whisper. She kissed him and pressed her cheek to his. He was cold, so cold. His breath had a faint odor of wetted ashes.
The children who had been passed over now bellowed at the insult, but in Nadja’s mind the voices fell away till only one remained, giggling and cooing, one little boy, her one perfect little boy.
Someone touched her on the shoulder but she shrugged the hand away.
William’s voice behind her: “There is nothing you can do for him.”
“He’s hungry,” she said.
She pulled down the front of her shift, exposing a breast, and moved her baby to the nipple. His lips were cold as the heart of winter. She had no milk for him, but her dead child took what she had to give, her warmth, her life. As she suckled him, a chill spread through her body from her breast to her heart, then along her spine. Her arms and legs grew numb. The air froze in her chest. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t speak. Her vision blurred and the world began to slip away. Her child, still nursing, looked hazy in her arms. She felt herself plunge slowly into darkness.
No!
She ripped the dead thing from her breast. It came away with blood in its mouth, smiling.
I’m sorry.
She set the monster on the ground. Her body warmed slowly, her heart last of all. Nadja covered her bleeding breast and lifted her gaze to William. “We should go,” she said.
As they searched for a way down, the pilgrims were followed and questioned by a crowd of shades. Marco brandished the Lance, clearing a path through the mob. News of visitors had spread through Limbo.
The poet heard the siren call of his own name. “Giovanni, Giovanni
Boccaccio, Boccaccio, Giovanni...”
Keep moving, he thought, trying not to look at the dolorous faces but unable to ignore them completely.
“My father was Daedalus,” said a boy of about fourteen, who fell in beside Giovanni and kept pace with the pilgrims.
The poet studied him. “Icarus?”
“Yes,” he said, then sadly, “Yes.”
“Your father, is he here?”
“He fell too far. I saw him fall. A dark wind froze his wings. I fear he’s gone to the ice, to the ice at the bottom of the world.”
“Can you help us get out of here?”
Icarus shook his head.
“If you help us,” Giovanni said, “we can take a message to your father.”
“There’s no way out.”
“There must be.”
To this the shade said nothing.
Giovanni said, “If I see your father, what should I tell him?”
“Tell him I’m okay.”
“I will.”
“Tell him it’s not his fault.”
Later, William saw a woman approach. She wore a flowing phantom gown and flowers in her hair.
She said, “Where are you going?”
“Down,” William answered.
“Will you please deliver a message?”
“To whom?”
“My love, who lies below.”
“How will we know him?”
“By his harp. By his voice. He has the most beautiful voice. He sang for me in the meadow. His name is Orpheus.”
Giovanni stepped forward. “Eurydice?”
“Yes,” she said. “That is what they called me.”
The poet looked confused. “Dante saw Orpheus in Limbo.”
She nodded. “Nine times he escaped the pit. Nine times he came to see me, but they always throw him back.”
Nadja asked, “Back where?”
The shade of Eurydice shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“What was his sin?” asked William.
“He wouldn’t say.”
“If we see him, what message?”
“Love. That is the only message. Tell him I love him. That I wait for his return.”
“Then love survives,” said Nadja, “even in Hell.”
Eurydice nodded and wept.
Giovanni said to Nadja, “Of course love survives. Hell is the realm of torments.”
Another shade found them and said, “You asked for me. I waited in the library, but you did not come.”
Giovanni saw the man’s laurel crown. “Are you Virgil?”
“I am.”
“We’re here because of you.”
“For that I’m sorry.”
“I’ve read your work.”
“And I’ve read yours, Giovanni.”
This surprised him. “Which books?”
“All of them. Even the ones you have yet to write.”
William said to Virgil, “We must leave. Can you help us?”
“Perhaps.”
“How do we get to the bottom of the abyss?”
“By dying.”
Giovanni said, “We need to get down alive.”
“That is not so easy.”
“And back again,” said Marco.
“Harder yet.”
“You could guide us down,” Giovanni said.
Virgil answered, “I cannot leave this realm.”
“You showed Dante the way.”
“A special dispensation. But you were not invited. I know your purpose. You come as thieves in the night to steal from the Devil, the greatest thief that ever was. How do you hope to survive this folly?”
“With your help,” Giovanni said.
“I have no power to help you.”
“With your advice, then,” said William.
“Go back the way you came. It is your only hope.”
“The passage behind us is blocked,” said Marco.
Nadja said, “We must go down.”
Giovanni tried another tack. “Is it true that shades in Hell can see the future.”
“Sometimes,” Virgil answered.
“What will happen to us?”
Virgil shook his head. “We see the future on Earth. In Hell there is no future. Not for us. Not for you.”
Giovanni recalled a scene from the Inferno. “Take us to Minos,” he insisted. “That far, at least.”
“You cannot go down that way.”
“Is there another?”
Virgil turned and departed. He glanced back over his shoulder. “Follow me.”
“Thank you,” Giovanni said.
“Don’t thank me. You will not find what you’re looking for.”
“What will we find?”
“Despair.”
CHAPTER 22
Virgil led the pilgrims to where Limbo dropped away. They circled to the left. Looking back, Giovanni saw the light of the citadel grow dimmer, as if a black mist were rising from the depths to cloud the path behind them. For awhile they joined a herd of damned souls shambling along the top of the cliff, until Virgil led the pilgrims out of the crowd and up a short rise.
“They go to Minos,” he said. “We go another way.”
They crested a ridge. Giovanni saw King Minos, a beastly half-man with a long tail who stood at the brink of the chasm hearing the confession of a weeping woman. The infernal judge was flanked by black cherubim. Giovanni saw no portal, only the drop itself.
Minos shook an urn in anger, spilling ashes. “Silence!” He wrapped his long tail around himself eight times. “Save your sweet words. Flattery will get you nowhere but Malebolge!”
The tip of his long tail lashed out, seized the woman in a caudal clench, and lifted her into the air. As the tail unwound from Minos’s trunk, the woman spun around him eight times, then was tossed shrieking into the pit.
“We cannot linger.” Virgil led them to another place. “Orpheus climbed up this way. You might climb down.”
Marco stuck the tip of the Holy Lance into the well of blackness and said, “I can see the bottom.”
“Not the bottom. The second circle.”
“We’ll need the rope.”
They tied the rope to an outcrop of rock. Marco climbed down first, then Giovanni. The rough stone wall was warmed by the anabatic air. The wind blasted Giovanni, tugging at his clothes. One gust nearly knocked him from the cliff. He lost his footing and rolled to the left, twisting, twirling, bouncing off the rock, swinging perilous and pendulous until he could regain his footing and finish his descent. Nadja followed, untroubled by the wind. William came last and said he felt no breeze at all.
When the pilgrims stood together on the second circle, Giovanni signaled Virgil with a tug on the rope. The rest of it fell down to them. The shade of the old poet raised a hand in farewell, then stepped back from the bluff and was gone.
The wind rose as the pilgrims tried to cross to the next cliff. Swirling dust needled Giovanni. He shielded his face in the crook of his arm, but could not keep the grit from his eyes, nor the tears that followed. The tempest knocked Giovanni to the ground as the others struggled to stay afoot. Marco and Nadja shouted words Giovanni could not hear. The knight pointed back to the cliff. The poet nodded. Defeated, the pilgrims returned to where they had climbed down. They circled to the left, along a dark ledge carved out by the whirlwind. Clinging to the stone wall, they made slow progress.
Giovanni saw shades whirling in the storm like sailors drowning in Charybdis. He covered his ears against the shrieking of the damned and the skirling of the squall.
Farther on, the wind quelled a bit, though Nadja had to scream to be heard. “What is this wind?”
“Lex talionis,” William shouted.
“What?”
Giovanni leaned close to her and said, “Law of retaliation. Eye for an eye. In life these sinners were blown about by their passions. The punishment fits the crime.”
Here the cliff wall was studded with yellow crystals. William broke some
off and placed them in his pouch.
“What’s that?” Giovanni asked.
“Brimstone,” the friar said. “We may need it later.”
“What for?”
“Thunder and lightning.”
A knight, arrayed in ghostly white armor, descended out of the swirling air. He wore no helm. His hair blustered. His eyes sparkled in the lancelight. He stared at the weapon in wonder. “The Holy Lance?”
“Who are you?” Marco asked.
“I am Lancelot.”
Giovanni said, “You quested for the Holy Grail.”
“For my sins, I could not find it.”
“For our sins, we might.”
Nadja asked, “Is it true you sinned with Guinevere?”
“She is my weakness. And my strength.”
“What happened?”
“I saw her and I fell. I heard her voice and wept. My eyes and ears condemned my heart. To shield my thoughts, I veiled my face behind a visor, but there is no armor for amor. Like a stag pierced by the arrows of a huntress, I fled. I carried my wound into the wood, begged for death and did not die. I absented myself in errantry, defeating many evils for my lady, though I could not slay the evil in my heart.”
“Can love ever be evil?” Nadja asked.
“There is no evil like a love mislaid.”
“Then it’s true you lay with her?”
“There is no greater truth.”
“But if you stayed away...?”
“Galehot, my friend and my betrayer, arranged for my love and I to meet in a garden. I found my lady but lost my voice. Words failed me, so she asked me to read aloud to her.”
“What did you read?” Giovanni asked.
“Virgil’s Aeneid. The hunting scene, where Dido and Aeneas ride together in the forest. I read how Juno sent a storm to chase the lovers into a cave. Fearing the passions on the page, Guinevere stopped my story before the lovers could unite. She said that next time I should read to her from the Holy Book.”
Another shade descended out of the whirlwind: a diaphanous sylph in a luminous gown. On her head she wore a golden diadem bejeweled in amethyst.
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