‘Let’s see if your secret is worth your daughter’s suffering,’ he said.
The young one, who by the look of him could almost have been a good man, stood in front of the brazier, saying, ‘Commander, the child’s got nothing to do with it! We can’t have that on our consciences!’
The other, who spoke Latin with a French accent, said, ‘It’s too late to change your mind, Angelo. He must talk. If the pain from his own flesh is not enough, perhaps the sight of his daughter’s will convince him.’
I hoped that the young man would contradict him and defend me. I wasn’t guilty of anything! But he just lowered his head and moved away. Then the older Templar, the one the others called Wilhelm, took a red-hot iron from the brazier and brought it close to my face. My father yelled to them not to harm me and he would tell them all they wanted to know. The old man took his hand away and my father began to speak. He said that the secret of the elixir was too important to be kept at home so he had hidden it in a cave in the hills. In the house he only kept a map indicating where the cave was. He nodded with his head at the larger bookshelf. The three men pushed it over without hesitation. It came crashing down and there in the wall behind was a niche with the map in it.
At that point the leader made a sign to the old man to come back over to me.
‘But Hugues,’ he said. ‘He has already confessed.’
‘We haven’t got much time,’ the leader insisted. ‘He must understand that it is not worth his while to try anything and send us who knows where to find the elixir. Brand her face. If he doesn’t tell us everything immediately, we will blind her, first one eye, and then the other.’
‘No! I beg you!’ shouted my father. ‘I’ve told you the truth!’
But this time the old man didn’t hold back. I saw the burning iron coming towards me, I cried out, I felt a hot wind on my face just like when you open the oven door to check the baking, then a pain that was so strong that it went beyond all my imaginings. Then there was a smell of burned meat. I let out a terrible scream just as everything became muddled.
It is from that moment on that I can’t remember very well what happened. Suddenly I opened my eyes, and the house was in flames.
Gerardo looked up, he was breathing heavily. It couldn’t be true. Knights templar, people who had sworn to rescue the Holy land from the infidels and to keep Christ’s true faith at any cost. They couldn’t besmirch themselves with such infamy. Torture, murder, violence to a child ... And yet the diary was evidence of the opposite. The scar on Fiamma’s cheek had been produced in that brutal manner.
And the names of the three templars who were responsible for the abomination were all too familiar to him. He looked back down at the page and read on.
6 February AD 1305
I’ve killed a man, and all for nothing.
He was a goatherd who had five goats. I attracted his attention by calling for help and then smashed his head with a stone. I killed a goat as well, to eat, and I’ve kept another alive. I let the rest of the flock go.
Then I cut the goatherd’s sternum as my father taught me and took out his heart by carefully cutting the veins and arteries. Then, step by step, I followed the instructions that I found in the cave, putting the ingredients to macerate together under a bed of manure made from my own excrement.
After only three days I went to check the compost and saw that it had turned into a grey and uniform matter, instead of red as it said in the instructions. I followed the next steps, adding the other ingredients and grinding it all until I had a very fine powder. Then, with a prayer for God’s forgiveness for what I had done, I wet a piece of cloth and applied some of the powder to my scar. Nothing happened.
Consumed by an indescribable anxiety, I tried to make the live goat drink the elixir dissolved in water, to see what happened before taking the risk of drinking it myself.
Nothing happened.
Distraught, I decided to kill myself. I had done all this in the hope of being able to heal the wound that had ruined my face by making one cheek swollen like a piece of cord soaked in water. But my father must have made a mistake when he copied down the secret he’d extorted from the Turkish alchemist. Or else the secret was false from the beginning. When I found the little book with the secret instructions, I understood why the man who had turned up at our house had been found at the gates of Gharnata without his heart. My father had killed him to make the elixir. But he can’t have succeeded either. Otherwise he would no doubt have told the three Templars who had tortured him. Above all when they turned their wickedness on me.
I cannot believe that he would have wanted to protect the secret at the cost of his life. And mine.
When I realised that I had killed a human being for nothing, I knew I was no better than the three men who had killed my father. And I decided to kill myself.
But before cutting my own throat with the knife, I wanted to practise. I didn’t want my hand to tremble so that I would suffer for hours before dying. I dragged the goat into the cave and butchered it with one strike, but in the process it struggled and managed to bite my hand. As it bit me I made an involuntary movement, knocking over the bowl that contained the fake elixir, and some of the powder fell on to the goat’s throat, as it lay there juddering in the spasms of death. Then something happened that is beyond comprehension: before my eyes the goat’s blood began to turn into a metal similar to iron. I saw its veins swell and break the skin, as they became filaments of metal. The transmutation went on until the poor animal was dead and then it stopped because the blood was no longer carrying the granules of grey powder around the organism.
It was in that precise moment that the bittersweet idea of revenge began to germinate inside me. I did not yet know how or when, but I realised that I could never kill myself without relieving the world of my father’s murderers and the architects of my ugliness.
Sitting on the floor of his prison cell, Gerardo’s mind was somewhere else entirely. It seemed to him that he could almost see the little girl’s horror. She had just escaped from a house in flames, wounded and pained in body and soul, and then, more by instinct than conscious decision, she got herself to her father’s secret hiding place in the mountains above the city of Granada. It must have been the place shown on the map that Mondino had taken off the German’s corpse. But how was it that the three templars who had taken the map from her father under torture hadn’t found her?
Perhaps the answer was in the following pages, but there was no time left to read on. It was clear that Fiamma was the murderer they were looking for, and something should be done to stop her as soon as possible. She would definitely have killed Hugues de Narbonne by now. And despite the Frenchman’s guilt, Gerardo felt his heart contract at the thought that it was he who had delivered Hugues tied and gagged into the girl’s hands.
Suddenly the words of Fiamma’s letter came back to him: I will soon be lying in my grave. Without thinking, Gerardo began to pummel his fists on the door of the cell, shouting to the guard as loud as he could.
Mondino awoke with a jump and a muffled shout. Only when his breathing had calmed down did he realise that he was in fact back in his own bed, and not snared in a muddy swamp, being chased by thugs armed with sharp-ended pikes.
He sat up and the contact of his bare feet with the cold floor woke him properly. He had got home when everybody was in bed, had checked that his father was asleep and gone upstairs to his own room. He had just had time to take off his shoes before he collapsed on to his bed and fell asleep fully dressed.
From the light coming through the window, he realised that it was already late morning. Another long day awaited him. He would have to go and find Gerardo to tell him to leave. Mondino would give him the whole day to get out of the city and that very evening would go to the monastery at San Domenico to speak to the Inquisitor. It was pointless hoping that he would succee
d in catching Angelo da Piczano and Wilhelm von Trier’s killer. He was certain that Gerardo wouldn’t have discovered anything useful either. Mondino didn’t regret what he had done, from the evening when he had helped Gerardo to get rid of Angelo’s body to his skirmish with Guido Arlotti – a fight that might have cost him his life, if it hadn’t been for Adia’s mastiffs. His dream of mapping the complete human vascular system was worth the risks he’d run. But that road had led to a dead end.
He pulled out the chamber pot from under his bed, went to empty it out of the window over the garden and then put it back. It was Lorenza’s job, but the woman had already got far too much to do looking after his father.
He went to the chest of drawers, filled the tin basin from the jug and washed, savouring the pleasure of the fresh water on his face. Then he picked up a razor, soaped his face carefully and began to shave, looking at his reflection in the silver mirror on the wall: bloodshot eyes, stubbly chin, dirty hair. The face looking back at him certainly wasn’t the portrait of a great anatomist, famous throughout Italy and France. It was more that of a petty thief of the stamp of Guido Arlotti and his thugs.
But everything would be different from the next day on.
Mondino’s life would go back to being an ordered sequence of study, lessons and daily tasks, with no more running away, being chased and coming to blows. With no more scrapes between life and death. He would apologise to Liuzzo and ask him to go back on the decision to break up their collaboration and throw him out of the school of medicine. And he would try not to think about Gerardo, obliged to start a new life from scratch in some foreign land.
When he had finished shaving, he put on a clean shirt and breeches and a flame-red tunic that he kept for special occasions. He didn’t want to meet the Inquisitor tired and defeated. It was important at least to keep up a sense of decorum. So before he went downstairs he put his fur-trimmed cloak on over the tunic.
Dressed in full pomp, he went into his father’s room. Rainerio was awake and seemed slightly better, but instead of giving him the usual tired smile, as soon as he saw Mondino, his face took on a look of alarm, almost terror.
‘Mondino! Where have you been?’
‘I got in at dawn, father. No one saw me.’
‘Thank heavens. You must leave immediately.’
Mondino felt his breath fail him. ‘Leave? Why?’
‘Last night a judge from the comune came round. He’s a tuscan who’s been a friend of mine for years and he wanted to warn me that the city guards are coming to arrest you today.’
‘On what basis?’
Rainerio lifted his chest, trying to raise himself up on his elbows. Mondino ran to the bedside and helped him sit up. When the old man was settled again, with a great big feather cushion behind his back, he looked at Mondino long and hard. ‘Mondino, you must be honest with me,’ he said. ‘A father understands everything. But I must know the truth.’ He paused and added, in a whisper, ‘Have you killed someone?’ Mondino’s first thought was that Guido Arlotti had died after their fight. But it wasn’t possible. Arlotti was in a bad state, but not more so than himself. So it must be the old woman. But it was impossible that it had got back to his father. He didn’t want to lie to Rainerio, but he wasn’t quite ready to admit to himself that he had killed Philomena.
‘Have I been accused of killing someone?’ he asked, cautiously.
Rainerio nodded. ‘A Frenchman, Hugues de something, I don’t remember what. He was found tied to the bed in his house, with his head sawn in half and full of worms. And the heart ...’ ‘Turned into a block of iron,’ murmured Mondino, almost to himself.
He couldn’t believe his ears. When his father had mentioned Hugues, he thought that the man must have died as a result of the operation and the accusation of murder referred to that. Whereas in fact the murderer had found and killed Hugues and now they were accusing him of it.
‘So you know,’ said Rainerio, looking at him closely. ‘Was it you?’
‘No, I swear it wasn’t,’ replied Mondino, happy to be able to tell the truth at least about that. ‘But I did go into that house and someone must have seen me.’ ‘Can you prove your innocence?’
Mondino shook his head, dismayed. Only Gerardo would have been able to testify in his favour, if the templar hadn’t been a wanted man too.
‘Then you must leave,’ said his father. ‘I will ask Liuzzo to engage one of his lawyer friends, and we will do all we can to stop them convicting you. If we manage, you can come back.’ ‘I am sure it will all be resolved,’ lied Mondino, without managing to look his father in the eye. ‘When you see Liuzzo, please tell him that as soon as I can, I will ask his forgiveness for my unspeakable behaviour towards him.’
Saying that made Mondino feel better. To think that he might have the chance to apologise to his uncle helped him convince himself that he really did have a future.
‘I will. Now go,’ Rainerio said. ‘The guards will be here any moment.’
Mondino said goodbye to his father with a kiss on the forehead, left the room and hurried towards the kitchen. He almost fell over Lorenza, who, as soon as she saw him, childishly tried to hide something behind her back. It was a wooden cup of milk.
‘Not again!’ exclaimed Mondino, furiously.
‘Forgive me,’ said Lorenza, shaking nervously and looking at the floor. ‘I beg you ...’
In an outburst of rage, Mondino put his hand out towards the cup, which fell to the ground spilling its contents all over the floor.
‘I’ll clean up straight away,’ murmured the woman, turning to go back into the kitchen.
The smell coming from the floor reminded Mondino of something. On an impulse, he bent down and dipped a finger into what was left of the spilt milk and tasted it. The unmistakable pungent flavour awakened confused feelings and memories that he didn’t know he had.
He suddenly understood what Lorenza was trying to do and when he saw her come back with a cloth in her hand, he exploded: ‘You are giving my father your mother’s milk instead of cow’s milk.’
The woman tried to deny it by shaking her head. She was so terrified that she could hardly speak. ‘No, it’s not true ...’
‘Don’t lie, Lorenza. Not to me.’
Lorenza was giving Rainerio her mother’s milk in the conviction, widespread among the populace, that women’s milk possessed miracle-working properties, capable of healing every ill.
‘Please,’ she said, dissolving into sobs. ‘Don’t send us away ... We’ve nowhere to go ...’
She was trembling with fear. Hers was only a superstition and yet she had denied her own daughter the milk in order to give it to Rainerio. She deserved respect for her action, certainly not rebukes. To calm her, Mondino did something that he would never have thought himself capable of. He hugged her to him, holding her tight to his chest.
‘Forgive me, Lorenza,’ he said, softly. ‘Do whatever you think is right for my father. It will be fine.’
Then leaving her stupefied and still sobbing with the cloth in her hand, he quickly crossed the kitchen and a few seconds later opened the street door.
Just at that moment a squad of the Podestà’s guards was coming around the corner, led by a section leader. Mondino took a step backwards so as not to be seen, closed the door and stood motionless, not knowing what to do. There was no time to get away now. The only possible place to hide was inside. He turned and ran back across the courtyard and through the kitchen.
Lorenza was on her knees in the corridor cleaning up the milk. Mondino bent down to touch her shoulder. ‘The guards are coming to arrest me,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t betray me.’
He ran upstairs, while the guards entered the house asking for him in loud voices and walked into his study to look around for a place where someone might hide. For a second Mondino thought he could get out of the
window and escape over the rooftops as Gerardo had done on the night that the whole ordeal had started. But the wall was too high and he would be in danger of finding himself hanging there like a haunch of Parma ham, without being able to hoist himself up on to the roof. And the courtyard below was too far down to jump without breaking a leg. Just then he heard steps and voices on the stairs. Without stopping to think, he climbed on to the window ledge and huddled on the narrow cornice that ran round the house.
He was only just in time. A second later the door was thrown open and a voice said, ‘You two look in the bedroom. I’ll search in here.’
It was a voice that Mondino thought he knew. He waited motionless in his spur-of-the-moment hiding place, hardly daring to breathe and hoping that he wouldn’t be seen from the neighbouring houses. He tried not to think about what would happen if he were caught. Defamatory accusations, a trial in which it would be impossible for him to prove that he was innocent, almost certainly the death sentence. While the guard walked round the room rummaging in everything, Mondino thought of his notes for the anatomy treatise. The man might open the bundle, see it contained sheets with notes and drawings on them, and decide to sequester it as proof against him. Who knows what would happen to it then.
But his thoughts froze when he heard the steps come towards the window.
The man stopped and Mondino prayed that he wouldn’t look out. The physician was squatting on the cornice, crouching with his head down to keep his balance. From below he must have looked like one of those gargoyles that can be seen on the façades of churches. He could hear the man breathing and even smell him; a blend of sweat and onions, strong but not unpleasant. Suddenly Mondino realised that the smell was getting stronger, and he understood. He slowly lifted his head and looked the man in the face.
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