“Let’s forge a sculpture with the iron hammers,” I joked.
The captain stood right in front of them, totally focused. Then he crouched down. At that point, I lost sight of him because he was hidden behind the anvil. Farag sat up to watch him, then he finally stood up and walked toward him.
“Find anything, Kaspar?” he asked. The Rock got to his feet and I could see the upper half of his body again. He had a hammer in his hand.
“Nothing special. They’re just regular hammers,” he said, hefting the tool. “Some have been used and others haven’t. There are big ones, little ones, and medium-size ones. But there doesn’t seem to be anything extraordinary about them.”
Farag jumped up immediately, carrying one of those iron mallets. He raised it in the air, flipped it, threw it up, and caught it with ease.
“Nothing extraordinary, indeed,” he lamented. Then he stepped up to the anvil and struck it. The sound boomed like a huge bell in the forest. We froze, but the birds didn’t. Flocks of them flew away, squawking from the highest treetops. Seconds later, when the clamor stopped, none of us dared move, still alarmed by what had happened, frozen like statues.
“Lord…,” I babbled, blinking nervously and swallowing hard.
The Rock let out a huge laugh. “Well, that was extraordinary, Professor.”
But Farag wasn’t laughing. He was serious and expressionless. Without saying a word, he turned around and snatched the hammer out of the captain’s hands. Before we could stop him, he struck the anvil again with all his might. I covered my ears, but it didn’t help. The blow of iron against iron drilled into my brain through the bones of my skull. I jumped to my feet and marched over to him. I preferred an argument a thousand times over to suffering that abominable sound again.
“What on earth are you doing?” I snapped, confronting him over the anvil. He didn’t answer. He went back to the pile of hammers, about to grab another one. “Don’t even think about it!” I shouted. “Are you crazy?”
He looked at me as if he’d never seen me before. Then he ran around the anvil, planted himself in front of me, and grabbed me by the shoulders.
“Basileia, Basileia! Think, Basileia! Pythagoras!”
“Pythagoras?…”
“Pythagoras, Pythagoras! Isn’t it wonderful?”
My brain replayed what had happened since we climbed out of the helicopter. Then I quickly ran through all I knew about Pythagoras: the labyrinth of straight lines, the famous theorem (the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the square of the other angles, or something like that). The seven planetary circles, the Harmony of the Spheres, the Brotherhood of the Staurofilakes, the secret sect of the Pythagoreans… The Harmony of the Spheres and the anvil and the hammers… I smiled.
“Do you get it?” Farag smiled, not taking his eyes off me. “Now you see!”
I nodded. Pythagoras of Samos, one of the most preeminent Greek philosophers of antiquity, born in the sixth century B.C., established a theory in which numbers were the fundamental principle of all things and the only possible way to decipher the enigma of the universe. He founded a type of scientific-religious community that considered the study of mathematics a way to spiritual perfection. He put all his effort into teaching deductive reasoning. His school had a number of followers; from it originated a line of wise men that continued through Plato and Virgil—Virgil!—up until the Middle Ages. In fact, today he is considered to be the father of medieval numerology; in the Divine Comedy, Dante followed him with mathematical precision. It was Pythagoras who first classified the different types of mathematics according to a system that has lasted for over two thousand years in the quadrivium of the sciences—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and… music. Yes, music. Pythagoras was obsessed with explaining the musical scale mathematically. It was a great mystery for people back then. He was convinced that the intervals between the notes of an octave could be represented through numbers. He focused on this theme for the greater part of his life, until one day, legend has it that—
“Would one of you please explain it to me,” Glauser-Röist grumbled.
Farag turned, like someone waking out of a trance, with a guilty look on his face. “The Pythagoreans were the first to define the cosmos as a series of spheres that functioned as circular orbits. The theory of the nine spheres and the seven planets is the basis for the labyrinth we just came through, Captain. It was Pythagoras who exposed it for the first time…” He grew pensive for a moment. “Why didn’t I realize that before? You see, Pythagoras maintained that as the seven planets followed their orbits, they emitted a series of sounds, the musical notes that created what he called the Harmony of the Spheres. That sound, that harmonious music, cannot be heard by us humans because we are inured to it from birth. According to this theory, each one of the seven planets emitted one of the seven musical notes, from do to ti.”
“And what does that have to do with the hammers?”
“Can you please explain it to him, Ottavia?”
I felt a knot in my throat. I was looking at Farag, and all I wanted was for him to keep talking. So I gently turned down his offer by shaking my head. The old Ottavia had died, I said to myself in shock. Where had my taste for intellectual boasting gone?
“One day,” continued Farag, “as Pythagoras was walking down the street, he heard some rhythmic blows that grabbed his attention. The noise was coming from a nearby blacksmith. Wise Pythagoras was attracted by the musicality of the blows on the anvil. He stood there for a long time, observing how the blacksmiths worked and how they used their tools. He realized that the sound varied according to the size of the hammers.”
“It’s a well-known story,” I said, making a superhuman effort to seem normal, “that appears to be true, because Pythagoras did discover the numerical relationship between the musical notes, the same musical notes emitted by the seven planets as they rotated around the earth.”
The bright sun appeared from behind the hedge, casting sheets of light on that earthly circle we were trying to escape. Glauser-Röist was impressed.
“We’re on that earth,” Farag happily concluded, “the center of the Pythagorean cosmology. That’s where the planetary symbols in the previous circles came from.”
“I suppose you’ve already surmised that your beloved Dante derived his numerology directly from Pythagoras,” I said with irony.
The Rock looked at me. He had reverence in his steely eyes. “You don’t understand, Doctor. All this deepens my conviction that we have lost so much beautiful, profound wisdom throughout history.”
“Pythagoras was wrong, Captain. To begin with, the moon isn’t a planet; it’s the earth’s satellite. No star emits musical notes as it orbits. And the orbits aren’t round, but elliptical.”
“Are you sure, Doctor?”
Farag listened to us very attentively.
“What do you mean am I sure? For the love of God! Don’t you remember what you learned in high school?”
“From so many possible paths,” the captain reflected, “it seems like humanity chose the saddest of all. Wouldn’t you like to believe there’s music in the universe?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, it’s all the same to me.”
“Not to me,” he declared, turning his back on me, silently facing the hammers. It never ceases to amaze me how such a tough guy could harbor such a tender nature.
“Remember,” Farag whispered, “romanticism was born in Germany.”
“And what does that have to do with it?” I was getting annoyed.
“Sometimes one’s reputation or public side doesn’t necessarily jibe with the truth. I told you Glauser-Röist is a good person.”
“I never said he wasn’t!”
Just then a frightening hammer blow boomed. The captain had struck the anvil with all his might. “We have to find the Harmony of the Spheres!” he shouted at the top of his lungs as the ringing subsided. “You’re wasting time!”
“Non
e of us will have our head on right when all this ends,” I lamented, observing the Rock.
“I hope you do, at least, Basileia. Yours is the most valuable.”
As I turned around, I collided with the glare of his smiling blue eyes. Dear God, how wrong Farag was! My head was already lost.
“Please!” the captain insisted. “Can you please explain what Pythagoras did with these damned hammers?”
Farag turned to him and smiled. “He had the blacksmiths bring him a pile just like ours. He hit them on an anvil until he found the ones that played the notes on the musical scale. Actually the Greeks divided the notes in tetrachords. Our do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti actually came from the first syllable of the verses of a medieval hymn dedicated to Saint John, but in the end, they’re exactly the same thing.”
“I used to know that hymn,” I said. “But right this minute, I can’t recall it.”
“And what else did Pythagoras do with all those hammers?” the captain snorted.
“He found the numerical relationship between the weight of the ones he had and then deduced the weight of those he was missing. He had them made, and the seven sounded as if they had just been tuned.”
“Okay, so what is that numerical relationship?”
Farag and I looked at each other, and then looked at the captain.
“Not a clue,” I said.
“I suppose mathematicians and musicians would surely know it,” Farag said. “But we’re neither.”
“Maybe we need to figure them out.”
“Maybe we do. I just recall one thing, but I’m not sure it’s right. The weight of the hammer that makes the do sound was exactly twice that of one that made the do sound an octave lower.
“In other words,” I continued, “the hammer that produced the highest do weighs half what the hammer that produced the lowest do weighs. Yes, that sounds right to me too.”
“It’s one of those historical oddities you always remember.”
“You half remember,” I quickly objected. “If we weren’t standing here, I would never have dredged it out of my memory.”
“Well, the fact is, we’ve been in this place for three days. We have to use the Harmony of the Spheres if we ever want to see the world again.”
Just the thought of having to strike all those hammers over and over again until we found the seven we were looking for made me completely ill. How I loved silence.
I proposed we group the hammers according to their weight. That task took longer than we thought. In most cases, the difference between a kilo hammer and a kilo-and-a-half hammer, for example, was imperceptible. At least we enjoyed the daylight as the sun rose to its highest point. What we didn’t have was food or water. I was braced for a hypoglycemic attack at any moment.
After a couple of hours, we discovered it was easier to line the hammers up, from largest to smallest. By the time we finally did that, we were sweating and as parched as the desert sands. But after that it got much simpler. We softly struck the largest hammer on the anvil. Then we chose the eighth hammer from it and struck that one. Since we weren’t quite sure if the notes were exact, we tried the seventh and the ninth, too, but that just added to our confusion. After plenty of debate and hefting the hammers back and forth, we decided to switch the eighth for the ninth. After that simple adjustment, the notes sounded much better.
Unfortunately, the hammer that was supposed to be the re note, the second in line, didn’t sound like re at all. However, in the second octave, the one we had obtained by exchanging the do hammer, the second hammer did sound like the correct re. We were making progress, just like the day was passing without our realizing. But in the second scale the mi didn’t fit—or so we thought after trying them all. So we had to locate a third do and find its corresponding re and mi—which, of course, were out of order.
The situation was absolutely insane. We had no way of assembling a complete octave. Either the hammers were in the wrong place or the hammers we needed just weren’t there. Because of our desperation, the blows on the anvil, the hunger and thirst, I was starting to get one of my headaches, which steadily got worse and worse. Finally, by midafternoon, we thought we had completed the scale. Almost all the notes sounded fine, but I wasn’t sure they were absolutely right. Some hammers seemed to be missing a few grams of iron; some seemed to have had too much. Farag and the captain, however, were convinced we had completed the task.
“Fine, so why hasn’t anything happened?” I asked.
“What’s supposed to happen?” Glauser-Röist argued.
“We’re supposed to get out of here, Captain, remember?”
“Well, let’s sit down and wait. They’ll come and get us out.”
“Why can’t I convince you two that this musical scale isn’t totally correct?”
“It’s correct, Basileia. You’re the one who’s insisting it’s not.”
Upset on account of the pain in my head and their pigheadedness, I flopped down on the ground, leaned against the anvil, and closed myself off in a stormy silence they ignored. Minutes turned into a half hour. They started to look chagrined, thinking I might be right after all. With my eyes closed, and taking slow, measured breaths, I thought back and realized that taking some rest was doing us good. When you listen to noises all day, noises that were supposed to sound like musical notes, there comes a time when you simply can’t hear a thing. After silence had refreshed their ears, maybe Farag and the Rock would change their minds if they listened to their precious musical scale one more time.
“Try again,” I encouraged them, without getting up.
Farag didn’t move a muscle, but the captain, irreducible, tried again. He played the seven notes, and a slight error was clearly detectable in the fa tone.
“The doctor is right, Professor,” the Rock admitted grudgingly.
“I heard it,” Farag replied, shrugging his shoulders and smiling.
The captain went down the line until he found the hammers immediately before and after the defective fa. Once again, there was an error, and once again, he tried and tried until he came up with the right tool, the one that sounded right.
“Play them all again, Kaspar.”
Glauser-Röist struck the anvil with the seven definitive hammers. Night was falling. The sky was dimming with warm, golden light. All was harmony and quiet in the forest when the silence returned. I felt sleepy. I realized it wasn’t my normal way of falling asleep; something seemed to be off. An immense lassitude was taking over my body, carrying me slowly into a dark well of lethargy. I opened my eyes and saw Farag, glassy-eyed, and the captain who was leaning against the anvil, his arms as taut as ropes, trying to stay on his feet. There was a soft aroma of resin in the air. My eyelids fluttered closed again, against their will. I began to dream. I dreamt about my great-grandfather Giuseppe directing the construction of Villa Salina, which surprised me. The part of me that was conscious warned me that the dream wasn’t real. I struggled to open my eyes, and a delicate cloud of white smoke filtered into the circle from under the wall, rising off the ground. I watched Glauser-Röist fall to his knees, murmuring a soliloquy I couldn’t make out. He clutched the anvil, trying not to lose his balance, and shook his head to stay awake.
“Ottavia…,” Farag called out. I roused myself enough to stretch my hand toward him, although I couldn’t answer. My fingertips brushed his arm, and immediately his hand found mine. United again, our joined hands were the last clear memory I had.
I awoke to an intense cold and a strong white light shining in my eyes. I felt as if my essence were all that existed, and that I had no past, no memories, not even a name. I returned to life slowly, floating like a bubble rising in a sea of oil. I wrinkled my forehead and noticed how rigid my facial muscles were. My mouth was so dry that I couldn’t unglue my tongue from the roof of my mouth or separate my jaws.
The noise of a nearby car and an intense cold helped make me lucid. I opened my eyes wide, and still with no identity or conscience, I saw before
me the facade of a church, a street lit up by lampposts, and a paltry bit of green under my feet. The white light shining on me in fact came from one of those tall lampposts. I could have been in New York or Melbourne. Instead of being Ottavia Salina, I could just as well have been Marie Antoinette. And then I remembered. I took a deep breath, filling my lungs, and it all came back to me—the labyrinth, the spheres, the hammers, and Farag!
I quickly sat up and searched around me. There he was, to my left, fast asleep between me and the captain, who was also still asleep. Another car came down the street. The driver didn’t shine his light on us. If he had, he probably would have thought we were three bums sleeping on a park bench. The grass was wet with dew. I told myself I had to wake the sleeping beauties next to me so we could figure out where we were and what had happened. I shook Farag’s shoulder gently, but was hit by a pain on the inside of my left forearm, like the one I felt when I woke up in the Cloaca Maxima. I pulled up my sleeve and found another bandage covering a new, cross-shaped tattoo. In their strange way, the Staurofilakes had certified that we had passed the second test. We had conquered envy.
Farag opened his eyes. He looked at me and smiled. “Ottavia…,” he murmured and ran his dry tongue over his lips.
“Wake up, Farag. We’re out.”
“Out of what? I don’t remember. Oh, yeah! The anvil and the hammers.”
He glanced around him. Still groggy, he brushed his palms over his shaggy cheeks. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my hand still on his shoulder. “In a park, I think. We have to wake the captain.”
Farag tried to stand up, but couldn’t. His face registered surprise. “Did they hit us very hard?”
“No, Farag, they didn’t hit us this time—they put us to sleep. I remember some white smoke.”
“White smoke?…”
“They drugged us with something that smelled like resin.”
“Resin? I swear, Ottavia, I don’t remember a thing after Kaspar struck the anvil with the seven hammers.”
He was puzzled for a moment and then started to laugh, raising his hand to his left forearm. “They marked us, right?” He seemed delighted.
The Last Cato Page 27