by Aidan Harte
‘—obviously don’t apply to me.’ Geta pulled back his hood. He had no way of knowing whether he’d been proscribed yet. He’d have to risk it.
The guard noticed Geta’s second horse, breathing hard. ‘What’s in them bags?’
‘Nothing to do with you; my business in the north is urgent.’
When the guard still hesitated, he snapped, ‘Madonna! Check with Spinther if you must – and explain to him why the Eighth Legion was lost while you’re at it.’
CHAPTER 60
‘Idiota!’ Leto slapped the guard with his glove and walked back over the bridge in a black mood. He’d been rather looking forward to putting Geta on the rack.
‘Cadet Fifty-Eight!’
Leto pulled up short. ‘Who said that?’
‘Up here, General!’
On either side of the barbican’s archway were gibbets. The gibbet on the left was older, and the wicker had worn away, leaving a rusted outer frame and a tattered skeleton; the prisoner had outlasted his prison, but freedom no longer interested him. The gibbet on the right was still functional, and the prisoner within likewise, although the unnatural tilt of his shoulders revealed he had been treated to the attentions of the strappado, and what was left of his strength had been broken on the wheel. Leto scowled – he disapproved of prisoners keeping their tongues. ‘How do you know my number?’
‘I gave it to you.’
‘Grand Selector Flaccus? Well, I never. You’ve moved up in the world.’
‘And you, General! Congratulations on your promotion.’
‘How did you end up there?’ Leto said politely, but without much interest.
‘Your talented friend saw to that – but I’ll be out soon. There’s some justice in this world. Sixty is languishing in a dungeon now, if Corvis hasn’t had him killed.’
‘Ah. No, sorry. He’s First Apprentice again.’
‘Oh …’
‘Well, I must be going. So nice to see you again.’
‘Tarry a while and I’ll tell you what really happened to Agrippina. I don’t suppose Sixty ever told you the truth.’
Leto looked puzzled. ‘I expect he killed her. You really thought I’d give a damn? Dear me. No wonder you stayed a selector all your life.’
Geta raced through the Wastes and did not look back. He’d always boasted that he knew when to leave the table. The one stop he’d made before leaving was the treasury, making full use of his authority to take what he wanted without explanations – another gamble, but necessary. Whatever city he stopped in couldn’t be an ally of Concord’s and he’d need to make friends quickly. He should perhaps have squirrelled away a cache outside the capital, but he did not regret it: a true gambler never hedges. To win Fortune’s favour one must be faithful – but because of his fidelity he was destitute, with only as much gold as two horses could carry and a question: Where to?
There was nothing in the north but legions loyal to Spinther, so south then.
Geta didn’t begrudge the First Apprentice’s success – he only wished he had seen it coming. The boy had played a bad hand brilliantly. He and Spinther had obviously prearranged the assassination campaign to discredit Corvis with the Collegio; they’d decapitated Norcino’s mob, and, since Spinther had been dissimulating all along, the army was his too, and Concord was his again. He deserved it. Geta’s motley militia was the last loose end, and he expected they’d all be dead before nightfall. Shame really: nice lads. Obviously the First Apprentice had expected their leader to nobly stand by them, hence the appeal to Geta’s patriotism. That had been his one miscalculation.
The gruesome spectacle of ex-Consul Corvis’ public flaying was a timely lesson that served to forestall any more Collegio conspiracies and cool Norcino’s followers. Geta’s bravos, abandoned by their champion and offered the choice of joining Corvis or reinstatement in the army, all chose reinstatement. Though Old Town was not yet fully pacified, the First Apprentice promptly returned to the isolation of the Drawing Hall. Throughout Corvis’ power grab, Torbidda had been directing Leto’s movements, while the rest of his brain chipped away at the other conundrum. It was challenging, but no more than the simultaneous chess games they used to play in the Guild Halls. Corvis was dealt with, but Torbidda’s confidence that the other problem’s solution would dawn on him, given time, had not been borne out.
He needed to return to first principles.
For the first few revolutions, prisoners in the beast were fed a recycled mush, the origin of which was best not speculated upon. The beast was like a mine-shaft, and the fuel it mined was agony, so prisoners must be capable of producing it for as long as possible. Once cells reached a certain depth, feeding stopped; Torbidda had seen the relevant formula in Bernoulli’s notebook. It was bad luck if all the upper-row cells were full; a lower cell whose occupant had died prematurely would have to be found.
For the last week, along with food, Torbidda had been punctiliously administering the excruciating blue light, until the preacher was ready to talk. ‘Whatever you are, you’re no mendicant. Who is your master?’
Words spilled from his drooling maw. ‘The king of the world. Ages ago my brothers and I conquered the Worm, that we might serve Him for ever.’
‘Who are you?’
‘… Melcior? Or was it Balthazar? I’ve forgotten.’
Torbidda reached for the lever. ‘Don’t lie. No one forgets his name.’
‘Was that not the method by which you won the red?’
‘That’s different.’
‘Is it? Perhaps it is. I get so confused.’ He crept closer to the door. ‘Go easy on me, child. You’re still so young. You don’t know about the years. There’s no end to them! They bury you unless you keep moving. After the Bethlehem … incident, my brothers and I did what we always did and parted ways to wander the world’s dark paths, listening to rumour, watching the stars, following the winds where they led us, to the courts of strange kings, majestic huts built on jungle canopies, caves fretted with rubies and blue ice, hide-skin tents that rumble over the steppes like ships, and always we asked the same questions: is the new Emmanuel born? Are you the new Herod? It was an endless search, but I took comfort that I was not the only one searching. Back in Babylon, we three had not your wonderful lenses, so we learned to walk amongst the Stars in our minds. It proved a useful skill in the wandering times. No matter which of the world’s deserts we were lost in, my brothers and I could confer.’
‘These are a madman’s fantasies,’ said Torbidda.
‘They may be, for surely I am mad, the years have seen to that.’ The blind man’s face trembled with painful grief remembered. ‘Then, a few hundred years ago, I lost contact. In my dreams I no longer heard their whispers; I could not sense their passing in the world. They were gone! I pondered to myself: was the work done, the war won? Had the Old One surrendered, finally resigned his claim on this world? If so, the Magi were no longer needed. My brothers had perhaps heard the good news sooner than I and taken their sweet reward.’
‘What’s that?’
‘… sleep …’ He savoured the word as if describing the sum of the world’s treasure. ‘I took me to a desert I knew well and found there an old pillar, strong and tall, and all that stood of a temple of a god whose name I have forgotten. My plan was to let the sun and wind and rain consume me together – each had as good a claim on my bones. I sat there for – oh, a century at least, getting thinner, retreating from the world. Whenever a stranger happened by, once a decade or so, I’d ask, more out of habit than curiosity, to what king was he subject? Finally there came a day when a man – he was an engineer like you, child – told me a thing I had never heard in all my wanderings: he said he had no king!’
The blind man shook his head with dissatisfaction. ‘I insisted that all men have a king, but he insisted that he was subject to Reason alone. So I pried a little, asking who taught him this novel dogma. With a reverent manner he spoke of an artful man of war who’d enslaved the Water even as
Solomon enslaved the Wind.’
Torbidda looked down at the dark pool at the bottom of the pit, felt the hunger biding there. ‘Bernoulli.’
Inside the cell, the blind man leapt with such excitement that he nearly tipped over his slop bucket. ‘I knew! Herod was amongst us once more, and where Herod is, near about is Emmanuel. O, I was frantic! I’d weathered millennia, but now time was short. I searched between the stars for my brothers, in deep time; I sailed on the burning winds between suns until at last I saw a pair of shifting shadows on the bloody skin of a dying star: two wrestlers. I raced to intervene – O, but the vacuum is vast. When I reached the star, the hurly-burly was done and only a smouldering husk was left of what had been my youngest brother.’
For a time Fra Norcino said nothing, just sat humming and cooing to himself.
Torbidda leaned in to examine the shivering sobbing wreck.
‘My elder brother has fallen into apostasy,’ Norcino confessed quietly. ‘He is Magi no more.’ Suddenly he reached out, and Torbidda flinched instinctively, but he was too slow. Norcino pulled him to the bars, babbling in his ear, ‘You are the last Apprentice as I am the last Magi! When I returned to my body, my skin was raw and blistered and a buzzard was feeding on my eyes. I did not blame the creature; all things need sustenance. I sucked it dry and threw myself from the pillar, and after my bones healed, I limped towards Etruria. On the way, I fell in with some pilgrims—’
‘Yes, I remember,’ Torbidda said, struggling to free himself.
‘—but when I came to Concord and learned that Girolamo Bernoulli was long dead, I feared that I was too late. I launched my spirit once more into the stars, to search out my King. I did not look long. It’s close, Torbidda, closer than ever before. The Darkness waits behind the rising sun to swallow the world at last. It told me to tarry in the desert until the temple burned; it told me the vessel would soon be ready. Then you found me.’
‘I told you before, I’m no lamb.’ Torbidda’s hand blindly searched for the switch.
The blind man’s breath was the rabid panting of a predator about to pounce. ‘Seek your heart: you know you have a great destiny, if only you will stop running from it. Torbidda, you were born to slay God’s son!’
Torbidda’s fingers found the switch and the cell was flooded with crackling blue light. The current passed to his body from Norcino’s and when his grip fell away, they collapsed as one on either side of the bars: prisoner and jailer; courtier and king.
CHAPTER 61
Volume II: the Land across the Water CRUSADE
Before broaching this perennially thorny subject, a brief review is necessary of the Holy Land from the expulsion of the Etruscans to the eve of the Western invasion.
The desert has been always incontinent with prophets, but in the first century a flood of holy fools doused the land. Each heralded a new kingdom; each had a vision that bloomed as briefly as desert flowers, beautiful and inconsequential. The Prophetess’ message was different, and not merely in the sense that she preached with a dagger. In the great fire that consumed Jerusalem, she reforged Judaism into a proselytising creed. She turned an inchoate resentment of Etruscans into nationalism. In a remarkable few decades, waves of fanatical armies erupted from the desert to envelop the Middle East and beyond.22
After the Prophetess’ death, and under the guidance of her apostles,23 power migrated to the more refined coastal cities; the capital shifted north to Tyre, then south to Alexandria before meeting halfway in Akka. The nomadic fighting spirit of the desert was lauded ever louder as the Radinate became more cosmopolitan. The Melics’ belief that this savage hinterland would always save them in time of peril was about to be tested.24
CHAPTER 62
As the fogbank on the Tarentine coast thinned under the morning sun, a small skiff emerged, drawing on silent oars. Only when the Tancred and her escort were out of sight did Sofia dare speak. ‘What now?’
‘Now we run,’ said Ezra. He set the jib opposite the mainsail and goosewinged it, to put some distance between them and the watchful shores of Etruria. The streamlined little boat’s cutwater sank like a dagger into the waves and released an arterial spray that misted them. After a few hours, they cleared the strait and felt the welcome chill of the northern tradewind that would carry them south.
The course Ezra plotted would take them by Crete, then they would hug the Anatolian coast until they reached Cyprus and then finally to Akka. The first crossing was the longest, but they were lucky: Ezra didn’t share the traditional sailor’s dread of the open sea. It was imperative they escape the sea-lanes where all the traffic was Ariminumese. The Bora had brought them swiftly down the Adriatic; now the hardworking Greagale was hauling them across the Ionican. ‘Once we get beyond Tessolonika, we’ll be in the Meltrimi’s delicate hands. I hope she’s in a good mood this time of month.’
‘’course she’ll be,’ said Levi, ‘winter’s passed.’
‘Spring brings forth more than turtle-doves, lambs and blossoms. The dark gods wake from slumber; war banners and pestilence stalk the land. The eastern Tyrrhenian can be cruel this time of year.’ He glanced at Sofia. ‘But we’ve been lucky so far.’
Sofia felt the wind against her skin and an instant later heard a fierce crack as the sail caught it. ‘That’s the style of it!’ said Ezra.
Levi had proved a surprisingly adept fisherman, so Sofia, feeling useless, asked Ezra to teach her how to trim the sails. It was harder than it looked, but she got the knack eventually. Now she felt the tension and the creaking strain of the running rigging striving against the wind. In flag-fighting, one created these snaps – the Doc insisted they were the mark of a real bandieratoro. Now she felt the canvas, billowing slow and regal, pulling the ship with it.
‘You’ve become a serviceable sailor, and just in time,’ said Ezra, ‘for tomorrow comes the bride at the end of week. Time to rest, and ponder and dream …’
The city had been elevated above all other things in the land, and its pride had drawn the wind’s wrath. What hands had carved and gilded and mortised and encased, the winds worked ceaselessly to undo, rounding away all memory of Men’s busy fingers, and now the heavy stones lay everywhere, a sea of caved-in houses, characterless pebbles on a forgotten beach, so featureless that the returning families – if ever the prophets’ promises of resurrection came true – would never be able to pick out the homes they had once lived in. The sand moved of its own violation, pouring with tireless curiosity into doorways that led nowhere now and creeping up walls, only to tumble back on itself again and again and again. It moved on and settled and moved on. The cobblestones of old paths appeared for a moment before the grains rushed between them and buried them again. The winds charged through the city’s forgotten quarters and drove each other to new peaks of outrage.
On the southern hill that faced the city the wind shredded hollowed olive trees into chips. Gravestones trembled like leaves; the carved names were blasted illegible. Sometimes, in the shifting dirt, Sofia glimpsed white smooth things: elongated, thinning shells of some extinct creature. The winds harried them into fragile meshes connected by calcium bridges and the desert’s jagged teeth did the rest until the last trace of Man was swallowed. The tombstones were finally ripped up and thrown with gay carelessness into the maelstrom, exploding against each other. Their owners, who had thought to be first, would find themselves nameless and forgotten come Judgement. And, if this was Judgement, the wind was a pitiless judge.
And everywhere, in the midst of the dull, incessant rage, floated pages crammed with dense scribbles. Even if she could translate the language the prayers were written in, they disappeared faster than her eye could read them. The lower quarters on the city’s periphery suffered least; whole hours would go by before the sands would barge through the streets and make them impassable again. But at the city’s heart, the howl of the storm was constant and overwhelming. A defiant section of a great wall circled the mount, the source of the prayers, which bled o
ut between the wounded stones. On the plateau, lightning cracked between burly clouds. Storms condensed into tumbling balls of yellow air against a rumble like great stones being hauled up. The storm was made of grains of sand and scraps of paper. Most of the prayers begged for life, for love, for money, for power, but only prayers begging for annihilation had been answered.
Sofia opened her eyes and quickly closed them. Ezra was already up. Through half-closed lids she studied him. It was odd that she had never seen him sleep. This morning his eyes were not on the sails but buried in the old volume he carried always. He read it aloud with a melancholy melody, half song, half speech, and as if on command, a strong wind sent the skiff skipping over the water.
Without looking up, he said, ‘The joy of the Sabbath to you, Contessa. It’s bad luck to wake a sleeper, but I was tempted. You had a bad dream, I think?’
‘I slept fine.’ Sofia yawned to cover her embarrassment at being caught spying. ‘Shouldn’t you be checking our course?’
‘The wind will look after us. It knows I must read.’
‘You must know it by heart now.’
‘Even God must continuously study. Study alone keeps back the Darkness.’ He slapped the wood in front of him and the ship creaked in complaint. ‘It is a difficult art, requiring nerve and skill. You must wait for the letters to form words and the words to gestate without prematurely imposing meaning. If you can do that, truth springs upon you.’
‘Sure, sure: be detached, go with the flow, nothing’s real,’ Sofia said. ‘I’ve heard it before.’
Ezra sat up. ‘Oh no! You must be attached to the world. Constant awareness is necessary. God is in everyone, everything, every letter. Every word in this book spells His name.’
‘Sure,’ Sofia said.
He held up two pages then a third against the morning sun and shifted them until the first letters on each page lined up. ‘What’s it say?’