The Kingdom of Light

by Giulio Leoni

  Cecco seemed about to add something. He stood there rubbing his neck, trying to get his breath back. But all of a sudden he turned round and made off in the direction indicated by Dante, who saw him vanish in swirls of acrid smoke.

  After a moment the poet stirred. With one final effort he hoisted the chest on to his shoulders and headed for his destination. There, in Arrigo’s cell, he would find all his answers.

  He looked around: the whole area was swarming with armed men, but no one noticed him. Pressing his face against the chest, he headed onwards, hoping that no one would recognise him. In all likelihood he would be mistaken for one of the looting assailants.

  At that moment, in the distance, the roof of the flaming tower bent beneath its own weight and fell in on itself, taking with it the floors in between. Dante instinctively looked round, just in time to see a mass of incandescent beams collapsing, sending intermittent flashes of light through the loopholes in the wall, as if a crowd armed with torches was dashing down the stairs. All that remained at the top was the circle of charred crenellations, an enormous fireplace belching smoke and red flashes, like the jaws of a dragon trying to bite the sky.

  Sensing the impending collapse, the besieging forces had already retreated, leaving their victims’ bodies scattered in the courtyard to await the devastation of the fire and raining masonry. There were no enemies left to kill now, and the fire put a stop to any opportunities for looting. Without waiting for an order, the regular units were assembling, while the volunteers had already dispersed.

  Some groups of soldiers passed by, ignoring him. They were making excited comments about what had happened, like a hunting party returning from the chase. Dante had gloomily sat down on an old Roman stone to get his breath back, and meanwhile he listened to the horrible boasts and jokes of the mob, still delighted with their slaughter. All that remained all around was the agitated motion of the local vigiles, who had come with pumps and buckets to keep the flames from spreading to the neighbouring houses.

  After getting his breath back, Dante set off quickly on his way. When he reached Santa Maria Novella the main portal to the church was barred. Only a little torch beside the arch had been lit against the coming night. But one of the side-doors was still open, and the prior slipped inside, walking quickly down the deserted nave.

  From the church he passed into the cloister, and from there to the corridor with the cells along it. Arrigo’s cell was barred from inside. He knocked without receiving a reply. He put the chest on the ground and tried to shake the door, hoping it would open. From the other side he heard the metallic sound of the latch, refusing to budge.

  He was gripped by fear that Arrigo might have escaped. Perhaps he sensed that he had been discovered. Or, having learned of the destruction of the Maddalena, perhaps he had decided to make his getaway to save any aspects of his plan that could still be rescued. Or perhaps he was in search of some other victims, to finish his plot once and for all, Dante thought with a shiver.

  But where could Arrigo be? He leaned against the door again, pushing harder at it. As he crashed into it for the second time he felt the latch yielding and entered.

  The cell was plunged in darkness, barely attenuated by the faint gloom that filtered through the closed shutter over the loophole. He paused for a moment on the threshold, waiting for his eyes to accustom themselves.

  ‘Arrigo, I come with the authority of Florence to make you account for your crimes,’ he announced, his hand raised like the statue of a classical figure of justice.

  After a while he was able to see more clearly. He made out the profile of the philosopher sitting on the little stool by his desk and could just make out the whiteness of the paper. The man seemed to be busy writing something, in spite of the lack of light.

  ‘Arrigo, justify yourself,’ he added, walking towards him. His resolute tone was crumbling. The absolute certainty of Arrigo’s guilt that had held him in its sway and brought him here was wavering in the face of the enormity of what he was about to do.

  Perhaps he had been wrong to have blind faith in Mainardino’s writings.

  If Arrigo really was the natural son of Frederick, then his veins flowed with the most noble blood that the world had known since Charlemagne. Was it right to apply, to a being privileged by God’s design, rules created to hold together a clutch of merchants and peasants? Was it right to consign to the noose a man within whom dwelt the hopes of the restoration of the empire, the supreme construction of the human spirit, an earthly mirror of the divine order?

  And what if the Chronicle had been right and Arrigo really was an impostor? Might he not have derived a dream of peace and grandeur from that very imposture? Might he not have been a great emperor in any case? The long-awaited greyhound coming down to administer justice to the wolves?

  His hand fell limply back against his side. The vulgar faces of the Council of Priors, the haughtiness of Cardinal d’Acquasparta, the ferocity of the Inquisition, the decline of the morals of his fellow-citizens – all of this could have been righted by this man, whose work he was now preparing to bring to an end. Perhaps his bid had failed. Manfred and Conrad had already lost their part of the game, but hope was young. It was still possible to try.

  To stop him at the peak of his venture – would that not have been the real crime?

  Should he not instead throw himself at Arrigo’s feet, put all his ingenuity, his will, his knowledge at the service of this great work? Be the counsel, the voice of the new Frederick, the one who holds and discloses his heart with the keys of wisdom and virtue. Correct his errors, rectify his imprudence, pick up where the plan of the Fedeli had failed …

  And then to sing all this in his work and give it the form of a journey of the spirit, from the darkness of despair to the light of order regained, order’s bridegroom. And to be crowned poet in San Giovanni!

  He stepped forward again until he could just touch the man’s shoulder. Arrigo sat with his head on one side as if sleeping, his hand abandoned on the paper in front of him. Dante ran to the window and pulled open the shutter to let in what little brightness remained outside. The last of the evening light poured into the small room, slightly softening the shadows.

  Arrigo was dead. In front of him, set down on the paper on which his hand had written a few lines, lay a cup still moist with wine. Dante noticed a sharp smell, the scent of the grape mixed with something metallic. A thin trickle of reddish spittle fell from the corner of the philosopher’s mouth, an unmistakeable sign of the poison that he had swallowed.

  Dante delicately slipped from beneath the lifeless hand the sheet of paper on which, in an unsteady hand, Arrigo had written a few words: ‘Omnia tempus corrumpit, non bis in idem datur hominibus.’

  Time corrupts all, men are not granted a second chance.

  The poet’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Why didn’t he wait for me?’ he cried, waving his fists at the dead man. In Arrigo’s half-closed eyes the light of dusk reawakened an unexpected appearance of life. He seemed to be staring with detachment at the goblet from which he had drunk his death. Only now did Dante notice how magnificent it was, something that had escaped him in the agitation of the moment.

  The darkness was deepening. He drew his tinderbox from his bag and lit a candle on the table, then brought the goblet to the flame to take a better look. It was gold, the size of a Eucharistic cup.

  ‘It really is …’ he said to himself with disbelief. A lump in his throat stifled the cry that had risen to his lips. He ran his fingers along the delicate pattern of the goblet, a garland of roses and laurel leaves along the rim, above four imperial eagles with their wings outspread. A precious piece of work, truly worthy of the lips of an emperor. The eight faces of the goblet recalled the perfect shape of the temple in Jerusalem. But also Frederick’s old unfinished fortress and the building burned in the land of the Cavalcanti.

  There were Greek characters carved around the eagles. So it had been engraved in the East, perhaps in Constantinopl
e. But someone had disfigured it, roughly carving three Latin characters with a sharp piece of iron: ‘F R I’.

  The gift from the Emperor of Byzantium, renewing his allegiance and protection. The cup from which he had drunk on his last day on earth. Federicus Rex Imperator …

  A shiver ran down Dante’s spine. He quickly set the object down on the desk with great reverence. The gold seemed to have become incandescent, and burned his fingers. A cup not of life, but of death. The one used to kill Frederick. By a coward, an ‘incomplete man’.

  Once again emotion took hold of him, and his eyes filled with tears. A great roar like that of a waterfall filled his mind, as his consciousness seeped away.

  HE CAME to his senses disorientated, with no idea how much time had passed. He was lying on the floor, all his limbs aching from his fall. A few hours hence his mandate would come to an end: he had to get back to San Piero and arrange the transfer of duties to the new priors. But before he did that he wanted to restore order to the blood-drenched ruins. Starting with Arrigo’s body, lest it be abandoned to the fate reserved for the remains of suicides.

  He would spread the rumour that the philosopher had succumbed to an incurable illness, on his way to an impossible salvation in Rome. Anyway, that idiot the pontifical doctor wouldn’t be able to tell a drowning from a death by fire.

  The tension of the most recent events was easing, leaving him with a sense of emptiness. That vista of ruins was the end result of all his efforts, he thought with despair. The force of his reason had been able to do nothing to resolve the enigma. Like an idiot standing open-mouthed watching the performance of an acrobat, he had observed the fatal events unfolding without knowing how to intervene in any way.

  Perhaps Marcello had been right about the total, blind predestination of human life. By some inscrutable irony of fate, two men had drunk death from the same precious object. The second by his own will, the first the victim of the perverse desires of others. Both now dust in the eternal cycle that hangs over us all.

  Dante leaped to his feet, bumping his head against the desk. He wanted to cover Arrigo’s face before calling anyone. His feet struck something on the ground that he had not seen. Mechanically he stretched out his hands and picked up a big notebook. He brought the manuscript to the candle flame.

  It was a folio manuscript, more than a hundred parchment pages sewn together: Decem continens tractatus astronomiae.

  The great work of Guido Bonatti. The most important astrological book of modern times. And Bonatti had been Frederick’s astrologer. Another ghost from the past returning, as if from the realm of the dead the Emperor had ordered his court to assemble for one last time in Florence, the city that had always escaped his complete dominion.

  The touch of his hands had instinctively become more delicate. The poet flicked admiringly through the first few pages. Arrigo, then, had been so deeply attached to the science of the stars as to possess this most precious of works. And what was more, he was capable of making notes on it, as borne out by the many observations written in the margins in a narrow, nervous hand, quite unlike the regular Caroline script of the anonymous copyist who had transcribed the text.

  Unusually similar to his own, he noticed as he read the observations jotted here and there. There was something about the author of those notes that made him seem close to Dante in a completely unexpected way, as two pilgrims in a foreign land reveal themselves to be fellow-countrymen even before they have exchanged a greeting or revealed their names. That harmony of the soul that binds all the citizens of Plato’s Republic.

  He went on flicking through the manuscript until he reached the final pages. Two whole bundles of paper had been added to the binding, partly covered with jottings and observations in the same hand that had written the notes. A new chapter, Liber undecimus de amplitudine rei universalis.

  The width of the universe. The author of the notes had not merely noted the text then, but had sought to complement it with an organic treatise. Dante’s admiration grew as he read on. Had Arrigo himself been responsible for these jottings?

  He stared again at the dead man’s profile: the nobility of his features could easily trace him back to the ancient Swabian race. Perhaps he too had been deceived by his own image, when he had found himself looking at it reflected in the mirror, and had desperately wanted to believe in an unfathomable fate, when he measured the tracks of the stars – a fate that seemed to summon him to be next on the throne of an imagined father.

  The throne of Frederick.

  Dead. Murdered.

  A new possibility took hold of the poet’s mind; what if Arrigo had killed himself not because of the failure of his plans, but out of remorse for some long-distant crime, a shadow that had dogged his steps for fifty years? Could he have been the Emperor’s assassin, the ‘incomplete man’?

  Reading Mainardino’s pages he had thought the metaphor referred to a physical imperfection, or perhaps to a moral defect. But what if the bishop had, with the words ‘an incomplete man’, meant someone who had been only a boy at the time? And what if that boy had acted as a blind instrument of other people’s wickedness, out of hatred for a father who had inexplicably denied and insulted him in the person of his beloved mother?

  That ancient pain might have paved the way for a tragedy that had exterminated a clan and devastated the empire. Until the final act, which had happened before his eyes, when men had come to Florence from the four corners of the earth only to meet the frozen mask of death.

  And that city, Dante’s city, which he felt pulsating beyond the walls of the convent, was the stage for all this. Through the walls that hung above him, gripping the dead Arrigo and the living Dante in a strange stone embrace, he seemed to see the streets and the walls, the houses, the locked doors, the great sack of wickedness and evil always on the point of overflowing. And he heard no footsteps. For this was the city of Dis, its gates guarded by demons.

  With that same goblet, Arrigo had killed the man he believed was his father. But how had he done it? After the barons’ conspiracy Frederick had become extremely suspicious, and had his food tasted by loyal Saracens. And even if the poison had been diluted, to act only after a certain delay, others would have died with him. Had that been so, the rumour would have circulated straight away, while there was nothing to suggest that anyone had accompanied the Emperor to the realm of the shadows.

  Perhaps Frederick had fallen into the trap as a result of some distraction, a little flaw in his otherwise perfect circumspection, perhaps trusting the bastard son he had grown used to seeing around him since his childhood, the boy he now ignored …

  The poison aconite acts through contact, he recalled. During his studies he had seen the spasms of a rabbit after aconite was poured into its ear. Could there have been some sort of spike hidden in the stem of the cup, which pierced the sovereign’s finger?

  The gold’s brilliance filled the little cell. Dante very carefully picked up the object again, raising it to eye level as though in a mute act of offertory. Again he ran his fingers along the engraving, seeking the point that the Emperor’s lips would have touched as he took his final sip. But he discovered nothing that confirmed his hypothesis.

  He closed his eyes, his thoughts still focused upon the Emperor. Now his body lay embalmed in Palermo. But where was his heart, once torn from his body? Did not an echo of his mind still resound there in the cell, even more powerfully than it hovered around his decomposed tissues, the rags of his royal garments locked up in his sarcophagus?

  Perhaps that was the deeper meaning of Michael Scotus’ prophecy: ‘Sub flore morieris.’ You will end your days in Florence.

  Like his great architect. The man who wanted to build his tomb. In all likelihood the building that had gone up in flames on the Cavalcanti lands had been designed as a cenotaph for the Emperor, a great monument apparently built to celebrate – but in reality to hide – the crime.

  Had that been Arrigo’s plan? To have himself crowned in that rep
lica of the Castel del Monte, decorated with the magic mirrors that would endlessly have replicated his glory, granting it eternal life in an extreme repetition of the same image, over and over again.

  With a shiver Dante glimpsed the madness within the plan: Nero had had a throne built for him, which followed the movement of the sun. Arrigo wanted to be that sun himself, at the still centre of a dazzling planetarium.

  He had opened his eyes again, and the splendour of the goblet, still gripped in his hand, filled his mind once again.

  He thought of his own work, still unfinished. Clear proof of his limitations as a poet, he reflected bitterly. Might that have been the solution he had sought so hard for his vision of Paradise? A vast golden goblet, the same one used in the sacrifice of Frederick, but wide as a thousand skies, where the souls of the blessed swam in a bath of eternal purification?

  Horrified by his own blasphemy, he slammed the goblet down on the table. It was then that the silence was broken by a metallic click. He looked carefully at the goblet. The candle-light clearly emphasised its outline. The symmetrical flow of the handles and the curves of the grip formed a pair of human faces. The shade of the two-headed man that Marcello had spoken of. The ninth shade …

  What did it mean? Dante picked up the goblet and set it back down on the table, listening attentively. Once again he thought he heard the same faint metallic sound. He repeated the gesture: the little carved column actually seemed to give a little. So this jewel had not been cast as a single piece, but was made in at least two parts. He performed the same action again, pressing the bottom with increasing strength, then slumped on his stool in disappointment. Nothing had changed in the appearance of that deadly chalice. There was no secret spike to wound the drinker’s finger.