The Kingdom of Light

by Giulio Leoni

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Giulio Leoni

  Cast of Characters

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Palermo, summer 1240

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Author’s Note

  Translator’s Note

  Glossary

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Italy, August 1300. A mysterious ship is discovered at the mouth of the Arno River. The crew has been poisoned and the only clues are a mysterious mechanical device and a page containing the words ‘The Kingdom of Light’. Dante suspects that the damaged instrument is an astrolabe and is the work of al-Jazari, the legendary Persian inventor. But others are also after the astrolabe and will stop at nothing to lay their hands on it…

  When Dante returns to Florence to work on his magnum opus, The Divine Comedy, he discovers that the renegade monk, Brinando, is stirring up trouble and recruiting Florentines for a new crusade to liberate the Holy Land. Is this disturbing new development somehow linked to the deaths of the galley crew?

  About the Author

  Giulio Leoni is a professor of Italian literature and history. He lives in Rome with his family.

  Shaun Whiteside’s most recent translations from Italian include Venice is a Fish by Tiziano Scarpa and The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano.

  ALSO BY GIULIO LEONI

  The Third Heaven Conspiracy

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  DANTE ALIGHIERI (c.1265–1321) – prior of Florence, poet and author of The Divine Comedy; often referred to in the book as Messer Durante, because his full name was Durante degli Alighieri

  Some real persons are described in greater detail in the Glossary at the back of the book (see here).

  CARDINAL D’ACQUASPARTA – the Pope’s representative in the city of Florence

  MAESTRO ALBERTO – a Lombard mechanicus who keeps an inn at Santa Maria

  ARRIGO DA JESI – formerly held the chair of natural philosophy at the Faculty of Arts and Theology in Paris, where he taught Dante; known in the novel as ‘the philosopher’

  THE BARGELLO – chief of the guards for the Commune

  BONIFACE VIII – Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 1294 until 1303; sometimes referred to in the novel as Caetani, because he was born Benedetto Caetani

  BRANDANO – a monk and preacher of miracles; the leader of a group of pilgrims seeking to free the Holy Land from the pagans

  CECCHERINO – the owner of a disreputable tavern

  CECCO ANGIOLIERI – a poet and acquaintance of Dante

  NOFFO DEI – the head of the inquisitors in Florence

  MESSER Duccio – town clerk and secretary of the Council

  FREDERICK II – Holy Roman Emperor 1220–50 and monarch of Italy from 1215

  HAMID – a young Saracen slave captured off the coast of Egypt and now working for Maestro Alberto

  MONNA LAGIA – a local brothel-keeper

  PIETRA – one of Monna Lagia’s whores and Dante’s lover

  AT THE ANGEL INN

  BRUNETTO DA PALERMO – a painter

  FRANCESCHINO COLONNA – a student from Rome

  FABIO DAL POZZO – a cloth merchant from the North

  MANETTO DEL MOLINO – keeper of the Angel Inn, on behalf of the Cavalcanti

  MESSER MARCELLO – a scholar and doctor from the North; known in the novel as ‘the doctor’

  JACQUES MONERRE – a scholar and astronomer from Toulouse

  RIGO DI COLA – a wool merchant

  BERNARDO RINUCCIO – a writer and scholar; known in the novel as ‘the historian’

  For Riccarda

  Si probitas, sensus, virtutum gratia, census, nobilitas orti possint resistere morti, non foret extinctus Federicus, qui iacet intus.

  If probity, reason, abundance of virtue, nobility of birth, could prevent death, Frederick, who lies here, would not have died.

  Inscription on Frederick’s tomb.

  Palermo, summer 1240

  THE GLARE OF sunset pierced the foliage, inflaming the gilded surface of the fruits on the lemon tree.

  In the garden, closed off by a marble colonnade, an intense scent of flowers floated through the air, carried on the sea breeze.

  Reclining on purple cushions, the Emperor was distractedly tracing geometrical drawings on the ground. He stretched his hand towards a citrus fruit lying on the ground and showed it to the younger man who stood beside him.

  ‘So what shape is the earth?’ he asked after a moment’s reflection.

  ‘A solid sphere, curved at every point,’ confirmed Guido Bonatti, the court astrologer.

  Frederick meditated upon these words. Then he suddenly opened his fingers, dropping the fruit. ‘So what holds it up, then?’ he went on, turning towards his other companion in thought, who sat slightly apart from the others. A pale man, freckled face and red hair.

  ‘The hand of God,’ replied the foremost scientist of Christendom, the pride of his court. Michael Scotus. Slender as one of the reeds that held up the pergola of the vines.

  ‘And how high are the skies where God dwells? Can you tell me that, Guido?’

  ‘As far as their light reaches, Majesty,’ replied the astrologer, picking up the fruit with his left hand. ‘Which is the light of God.’

  ‘And what lies beyond that light?’

  ‘Beyond it lies only darkness. As the Scriptures tell us, what remained after light was called into being,’ replied Michael Scotus, pointing a finger up into the air.

  An enigmatic smile lit up Frederick’s face. A little way off, a man dressed in the rough habit of the Minorites had witnessed the scene in silence.

  The Emperor turned towards him. ‘Tell me your measurement, Brother Elias. The measurement of the height of God.’

  1

  Morning of 5th August, 1300, in the marshes west of Florence

  THEY HAD turned away from the houses beside a cottage on the road to Pisa, when the sun was already high in the sky. From there they had headed towards the river, which flowed a few leagues away, invisible among the cane thickets and the patches of marshy vegetation.

  For over two hours the little column trudged across the waterlogged terrain, weighed down by their heavy armour, seeking a path among the swamps. At their head Dante Alighieri, wearing the banner of the priory, stayed about twenty yards ahead of the group.

  ‘Prior, please wait, slow down. Why such a hurry?’ wheezed the Bargello, a squat man covered with armour that made him even clumsier than he would otherwise have been. The Bargello, chief of the guards, slipped as he attempted to catch up with the prior.

  A little waterway blocked their path. Dante turned round, wiping the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. Then with a resolute gesture he pulled the hem of his robe up above his knees and waded through the stream, followed by the others. Further ahead the horizon was hidden by a scrubby hillock.

  ‘That’s the tower of Santa Croce … we should be there by now,’ panted the chief of the guards, pointing at a far-off building.

  The prior had stopped a little further off, halfway up the slope, and was pulling his shoes out of the mud and water.

  With a grimace of disgust he pulled a leech from his calf and threw it far away. At the point where the sucker had bitten his flesh, a thin stream of blood stained his skin. He washed the wound with a little water, then stared impatiently at the awkward movements of the Bargello, who was brea
thlessly trying to catch up with him.

  ‘So where is it?’

  In front of them, in an opening among the reed-thickets, the bank of the Arno could be seen, folding into a loop hidden by a bump in the ground.

  ‘It should be here … behind this clump.’

  Dante looked in the direction indicated. The muddy dune seemed to be trying to drag them down. For the last few steps he had to use his hands, clutching the spiny tufts that covered its summit; then finally he was able to take a look from the other side.

  About three hundred yards away a dark outline lay beached on the pebbly shore, partly hidden by the vegetation.

  ‘So it was true … there it is,’ stammered the Bargello.

  Dante was also having difficulty believing his own eyes. Leaning slightly to one side, a war galley lay against the river bank, its whole array of oars outstretched as though about to take to the open sea.

  ‘The devil must have brought it here,’ the Bargello murmured with a shudder. Dante couldn’t suppress a smile. He knew the legends that were told about this place. But if the devil really did exist, at least he would catch a glimpse of him.

  ‘I can’t see anyone on board. It looks abandoned,’ remarked one of the guards.

  ‘Yes, not a trace of life,’ the poet confirmed, studying the deserted fo’c’sle. On the narrow central corridor not a soul could be seen, and there was no one at the helm. The nave looked in perfect condition, as if the ship had only recently docked, its big triangular sail neatly furled on the boom. Dante felt a shiver running down his spine. Such large vessels couldn’t possibly sail on the Arno. Its presence here was … yes, it was impossible. He sought a sign that might reveal where the ship had come from, but there was nothing but a black flag dangling slackly from the yard.

  ‘Let’s go over. I have to see … and I have to know,’ he said, and slipped quickly down on his back, plunging into the canal, followed reluctantly by the others.

  He had grabbed a sword from one of the men, and opened up a path for himself by impetuously scything the plants, wading through water up to his knees. Streams of sweat trickled down his body, but the excitement of the discovery seemed to have swept all exhaustion away.

  He couldn’t see where he was going. Then he dealt one final blow and stopped with a jerk, as the horrified cries of the bargellini rose up behind him.

  A bearded giant had appeared in front of him, more than six ells in height. On the creature’s monstrous, crowned head two hideous faces looking in opposite directions took in the whole of the horizon with their twofold malevolent gaze. The giant sat on a massive carved tree-trunk that ended in a bronze tip half-hidden in the mud of the river bank.

  An insistent hum echoed in the air. The insects that had been tormenting the men all the way along their march now seemed even more numerous and aggressive. They clustered around the figurehead in a repellent throng.

  ‘Beelzebub, the lord of the flies,’ said Dante, disgustedly waving away a cloud of them. A gust of wind pierced the air, bringing with it a terrible stench of decomposition. ‘We’ve got to get on board,’ said the prior, after a moment’s hesitation.

  A rope ladder hung from the anchor mouth at the prow. Dante wrapped his mouth and nose with the veil of his biretta, then hoisted himself up on the remains of the truncated ram and from there began struggling up the ship’s rail. Halfway up he turned round, urging on the Bargello, who was still staring dazedly at the figurehead. Dante waited for the other man to begin climbing, and with one last effort hoisted himself on to the fo’c’sle.

  The chief of the guards had also reached the deck, puffing. He came and stood next to him so that he could see too, then brought his hand to his mouth with a sob. ‘But they’re …’

  ‘They’re dead. As your men said they were.’

  Dozens of oarsmen, lined up on their benches, seemed intently engaged in some kind of macabre parody, bent over their oars as if in the convulsive effort of rowing. Other figures lay supine towards the stern and around the helm. The corpses were swollen and covered with an oily liquid, as if they had been exposed to the boiling sun for many days.

  Disoriented, Dante looked around. A breath of hot wind swept the deck, raising a foul breath of putrefaction. ‘There’s plague on board!’ whispered the Bargello, putting his hand over his face in an attempt to stem the stench that rose up from below.

  Dante shook his head. The ship must have been manoeuvred with extreme skill to rise all the way up the river. How could it have done that if the crew was ill? No, there must be some other cause for this massacre. Death must have come on board like a silent guest, gliding its limbs along for a while before finally striking. He looked up, drawn by the rattle of the flag against the yard. Before the banner sank down again he just had time to see the image of a skull, above two bones in the shape of a cross.

  Halfway along the deck there was a hatch leading to the hold. Perhaps the cargo of the ship would reveal its mystery? Picking up a wooden peg, he quickly wrapped it in a strip of tarred cloth that lay on the ground. With a few blows of his flint he lit the makeshift torch, then leaned into the cavity and cast a light inside.

  He saw no tools, yardarms or spare sails, or any kind of foodstuffs, or stores of water or wine. No kind of lodging for the crew, no galley or weapons. Even the ballast stones had been removed, turning the ship into a big, empty husk.

  It seemed as if its commander’s sole concern had been to reduce the load as far as possible so as to come upriver. He turned to look towards the wardroom, below the quarterdeck. The door to the captain’s quarters swung slightly, as if someone inside were beckoning him in.

  The cabin was plunged in shadow. In the middle of the wardroom, beneath a torch-holder that hung above their heads, three men sat motionless around a small table, slumped on their carved benches, as if they had just interrupted a conversation over beakers of wine, when sleep had suddenly come upon them. At their feet a mass lay in the middle of a pool of light.

  Curious, Dante leaned over and brought the torch close to it. It was a kind of crude device of levers and toothed wheels, whose surfaces of gleaming wood and brass flickered in the flame in a thousand reflections. The thing was two feet high, perhaps as wide and deep, but it was hard to get a clear idea of its original shape, because someone seemed to have attacked it with considerable force, smashing it to pieces. The axe that had inflicted the damage still lay on the ground.

  Dante picked up one of the gear-wheels, testing the bite of the thin teeth on his fingers. On the edge there were tiny letters that he couldn’t decipher.

  At that moment the galley swayed with a groan, as if the river had begun to eddy.

  The Bargello had approached, and now looked around in puzzlement. ‘But … they’re Saracens! All dead,’ he exclaimed, ignoring the shattered machine.

  Dante looked up at the corpses. Two of them wore the insignia of marine officers: they must have been the commander and his second-in-command. The third was dressed in sumptuous clothes that seemed to float around him like outspread wings. Clothes of an unfamiliar shape, like the big turban wrapped around his head. His face bore the marks of advanced old age.

  ‘All … all dead,’ the Bargello said, stunned.

  ‘Shh,’ hissed Dante irritably. ‘Let me listen.’

  ‘What to?’

  ‘To what the dead are saying. This man wasn’t part of the crew. He certainly wasn’t a sailor. Have you seen his hands? And his clothes? He was a passenger. And they were all dead by the time the ship was beached. With one exception.’ He pointed to an empty chair and one of the cups on the table, still full. ‘There were four of them. But one of them didn’t drink. And look over there,’ he added, pointing towards the far side of the cabin. ‘There are four hammocks, all slept in. The man who didn’t drink is still alive.’

  Dante turned the old man’s head towards the light and loosened the tightened jaws. Through the half-open mouth he glimpsed a cloister of irregular teeth, coated with a reddi
sh foam. There were deep cuts on the purple lips, as if the unfortunate man had bitten them to the quick during the last moments of his life. Then he sniffed the remains of the liquid in the cup.

  ‘How did they die?’

  The poet indicated the corpse to the Bargello, bringing the torch close to his face. ‘You see the swollen lips and tongue? As if he had drowned in coagulated air,’ he explained, moving the flame away from the face of the dead man, whose beard had begun to curl in the heat of the flame. ‘Poison. Not an insult to the innards; a substance that extinguished the force of the breath.’

  As he let the dead man’s head fall back, something slipped from the corpse’s neck, twisting like a snake. It looked like a gilded medallion, covered with tiny signs and Arabic characters, held by a leather lace.

  An astrolabe, he noted, and one of very refined manufacture. The alidade, the moving pointer, had been damaged by a blow that had bent one of its two fins. But the rete, a filigree bundle precisely cut like a precious jewel, was intact, with its incredible profusion of spines and flames to mark the fixed stars. Making a rapid calculation, Dante worked out that there were at least a hundred of them. He had never seen an astrolabe with more than thirty. If an angel had needed to determine the route between the stars, he could have found nothing better.

  An angel … or a demon.

  Dante quickly examined the other two corpses. On those, too, death had left the same cruel mark.

  ‘The fourth man killed his companions by poisoning the wine supply. It’s customary for drink to be distributed to the men when they have reached their destination. So the crew followed them into the same abyss,’ murmured Dante. ‘Let’s try and find out something about the ship.’

  He looked around. At the end of the cabin, fixed to the wall, there was a cabinet reinforced with strips of iron. Forcing in the tip of his dagger, he pulled out the hinges of the door. Inside there was a leather-bound book. It must have been the ship’s log. After taking a quick look, he put that in his bag as well.