Act of Faith (11 page)

There was even more food the next morning: fruit and soft cheese, eggs, bread rolls and the warm drink they called
caffè
— everyone drank it here, not just men in coffee houses. We ate in the courtyard, right outside in the sun, which was a custom in those parts, until Master de Aquila roused us.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘There is something here I have wanted to see for many years.’

He pulled a soft red cap out of his satchel.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Willem. ‘You’ll look ridiculous.’

‘Have you not noticed? All our new friends here wear the red cap, and so must I while I am on Venetian soil. It is like the yellow wheel I wore in the German cities, if a little more dramatic.’

‘I’m not wearing one.’

‘No, Willem, and I would not ask you to do so. You would look even more ridiculous than I.’

It was true that everyone in the Ghetto wore a red cap or scarf of some kind, but once we were outside its gates, the red caps became fewer. It was market day, and the roads and paths were crowded. Willem pushed his way through. He seemed so very pale against the throng of dark-haired people, and had grown so tall in recent months, it was like watching a Viking cut swathes through an army of tiny Celts.

‘Hurry up,’ he called to us.

Master de Aquila hesitated. ‘Open your eyes, boy. Do you not see that those of us in red caps must stand aside to let the others pass?’

Willem glanced around, then walked off, staying a few paces ahead of us.

‘Take my arm, Master,’ I said.

‘I don’t know which is worse,’ he said. ‘Willem pretending he doesn’t know me, or you pretending you don’t care.’

‘He needs time to get used to new ideas.’

He grunted.

We made our way through the crowds to the basilica. The doors were open. Master de Aquila and Willem paused to study the enormous lions carved in stone on the portico, but I walked on, into the church. It was dark inside, and a few moments passed before I could see clearly. The cool marble floor seemed to stretch a mile ahead of me to the altar, where streams of blue and red light
soared through the coloured-glass windows and melted into the darkness. All along the walls, groups of candles flickered in front of statues or gilt-framed paintings, where people kneeled: silently, hopefully. The only noise was from a young priest gently sweeping the centre aisle.

I felt Master de Aquila at my side.

‘Are we allowed in here?’ I whispered.

‘Are you scared God will strike us down?’ He smiled, but his eyes darted towards the priest, who had stopped his work and was staring at us.

‘We should go,’ said Willem.

‘Nonsense. Everyone is welcome in a house of prayer.’

‘I don’t think it works like that,’ I said.

‘This is not my kind of prayer house,’ said Willem. ‘I’ll wait outside.’

Master de Aquila took my hand. ‘Come. This is the home of one of the greatest paintings on earth — Clement has described it to me in great detail. Surely even heathens like us are permitted to look upon the beauty of grace, or he would not have told me of it.’

‘Well …’ I still hesitated. ‘If Fra Clement said it would be all right.’

He didn’t answer, but led me down the northern aisle to a gloomy side chapel where a group of pilgrims huddled on the floor, kneeling, murmuring prayers and turning their faces like flowers towards the most astonishing painting I had ever seen. It sat on the altar, in three gilded panels, and at its centre, surrounded by angels, were the Holy Mother and Infant. Her gown was painted in the most extraordinary blue: as brilliant as a miniature in a Book of Hours.

‘Is it all lapis?’ I whispered.

Master de Aquila nodded, his eyes wide with wonder. That quantity of lapis lazuli, all the way from the wild lands of the Afghans, would cost a king’s ransom.

I gazed a moment longer at her face, her halo, and the eternally tranquil and pure blue. ‘So serene.’

Someone pulled at my arm — the priest. He put his face close to mine and muttered something. I didn’t catch the words, but the meaning was unmistakable. He pointed to Master de Aquila’s red cap and shouted.

‘There’s no need for that,’ said Master de Aquila gently.

We left without another glance at the painting.

Willem was waiting in the forecourt. ‘I thought you’d be ages.’

‘You were right: we were not welcome.’

‘Papists!’

‘Keep your voice down,’ Master de Aquila hissed.

‘It was very beautiful, though,’ I said.

Master de Aquila gazed around him. ‘This is an ancient city. We will be safer looking at the monuments and buildings left here by the Romans. They, at least, are not here to stop us.’

Willem laughed.

‘I have read that there is a stadium here somewhere.’ Master de Aquila pointed. ‘And that arch over there looks to me as if it might be a Roman triumphal arch.’

It did look a lot like one of the engravings I had seen in
The Sum of All Knowledge
. As we walked towards it, Willem laughed again, even louder.

‘What on earth is so funny?’ I asked.

‘Romans,’ he said.

Master de Aquila and I exchanged glances. ‘I’ve never thought of Roman arches as amusing,’ he said.

Willem’s smile vanished. ‘You mean, you aren’t joking?’

‘Why would I be?’

‘Romans aren’t real,’ said Willem.

Master de Aquila stopped in his tracks. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘All those old people — Egyptians and Romans and Babylonians. Israelites. They’re just stories.’

‘Stories?’

‘We don’t know for certain that they ever existed,’ said Willem.

‘But here is the proof, boy, right here in front of your eyes. The Romans built structures that are still with us today.’

‘So you say. They might have been built last year for all we know.’

‘Willem,’ I said, ‘those ancient countries and peoples were described by many authors. They are in the Bible. Herodotus, thousands of years ago, told us of the Egyptians. Pliny wrote of life in Rome. Aristotle —’

‘Just books.’

‘Do you think Herodotus invented Africa? Do you think he dreamed the Pyramids?’

‘But that world is lost — the ancient world is gone.’

‘My goodness, Willem,’ said Master de Aquila. ‘I never thought to hear you say such a thing.’

‘Why? The Old Testament, the ancient worlds, they don’t matter any more. Everyone knows that.’

‘Then everyone is wrong.’

Willem chuckled. ‘Master, you don’t really believe in pyramids. Next you’ll be telling me that tigers and elephants are real.’

‘I have seen a tiger, when I was a boy. It was in a cage in the park in Córdoba. And my father told me of the Pyramids. Those lands exist, Willem. It is true they may have changed, and some peoples have passed from the earth, just as the pharaohs did. But
the mountains and the seas are still there, the elephants and the tigers roam wild, the great stones do rise from the desert — it is just that the memory of them has vanished from our minds.’

Master and apprentice spent the rest of the day taking it in turns to laugh quietly at the other’s naïvety.

Later that evening, when he and I were alone together, Master de Aquila took up his argument again.

‘Now do you see, Isabella, why this work is so important? To many people, the ancients are like elves, rather than men and women like us, who sculpted and wrote and built the most amazing creations. Such things will be remembered in
The Sum of All Knowledge
.’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Can you capture something that is lost?’

‘In this case, the loss is felt only in Christendom. People outside Europe have not forgotten. Their maps still show us the coasts of Africa and the true paths of the stars. That is why we have a Saracen hidden in our attic, making maps.’

‘Is it only in Europe that such things are heretical?’

‘It seems so. I cannot say why. Perhaps the bishops want only their own world to be known.’

‘But Homer, and all the ancients, knew there were lands and peoples outside Europe.’

‘Yet, somehow, until very recently, our maps told us otherwise,’ said Master de Aquila. ‘There are two types of maps in the world: those that seek to tell the truth, and those that do not.’

‘What is the point of a map that lies?’

‘Popes and kings seem to prefer them.’

‘But others must know the truth.’

‘Perhaps people forgot. It is as if human knowledge expands and contracts, and now it is expanding once again.’

‘If everyone once knew something, how can it be forgotten?’

‘Maybe the truth doesn’t suit them.’ He smiled. ‘It may be as simple as an argument between two brothers. They fight one day over a trifle, an insult. They cannot forgive. They meet each market day and pretend they do not see each other. They forbid their wives to meet or speak. Over the years, they forget why the feud began but it cannot be stopped. Their children do not know what caused it. Their grandchildren do not know. Over the decades, the brothers forget each other’s faces. So it might have been between two churches, or two continents, between Rome and Constantinople and Damascus. Who can say?’

‘Then the sooner we get to Venice and print
The Sum of All Knowledge
, the better.’

‘Very well,’ said Master de Aquila. ‘Let us hurry.’

A few days later, we arrived in Padua and found much the same welcome in the Ghetto as had greeted us in Verona.

‘You are sirens,’ Master de Aquila teased the women who fed us each day. ‘You will make us so fat and happy we can never leave.’

Still, we headed for Venice the next morning. It was a leisurely ride through marshes and fields and, as we drew near to the city, Master de Aquila couldn’t hide his smile.

‘At last,’ he said. ‘
La Serenissima
.’

He turned to Willem. ‘We have no need of horses in the city. We can sell them at the market. In Venice, we move about by boat or on foot.’

‘No more boats,’ I pleaded.

‘Canal boats only, I promise, Isabella.’

‘I am sick of living in these ghettoes,’ said Willem.

‘It is hard, I know, being fussed over and fed. But while you are with me, you have little choice in the matter.’

Willem stuck out his chin. ‘I can stay where I want.’

‘How will you achieve that, my young genius?’

‘I will tell them the truth.’

‘Let me understand you,’ said Master de Aquila. ‘You wish to walk up to a city guard and insist on telling him you are not Jewish — nor Catholic, for that matter — so that he will not be under a mistaken impression and therefore not let you into the only area of the city in which I am allowed to sleep?’

‘No. Well, yes, I suppose, but if you put it that way it sounds stupid.’

‘Indeed. Then go ahead, my boy. Let’s see how you fare.’ He turned to face me. ‘
E tu
, Isabella?’

‘I go with you, sir.’

I’m not sure which of them was the most surly as we led the donkey through the city. A guard showed us the way, which was just as well or we would have been hopelessly lost within minutes. We walked along narrow canals where the buildings were so close they almost touched, through piazzas where a weak sun illuminated pink and blue and gold houses adorned with fabrics and gilded windows, past shops and coffee houses and rows of shiny black boats. The whole city smelled of the sea and warm fruit and wine and freshly laundered bed linen. And, occasionally, rotting fish.

At last, the guard stopped, pointed the way, and we continued alone along a lonely pathway, across a wooden drawbridge and up to the gates of the Ghetto. It was an island, like so much of the
city, but this island was surrounded by a high stone wall, like a fortress.

The guards checked Master de Aquila’s papers and waved us through. The laneway opened onto a petite square, paved with flagstones and edged all around by towering buildings, some of them seven storeys high. These weren’t fancy buildings, like in the rest of the city. There was no bright paintwork here — just unadorned brickwork and low doorways and square windows with shutters. But even Willem gazed up, counting the many windows in each building and wondering aloud how many stairs a person would climb to reach the attic.

Master de Aquila had written ahead to a tailor he’d known in his youth, now living in the Ghetto, who found us a suite of tiny rooms in one of the towering tenements. For once, my master didn’t waste a moment unpacking his books.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘Venice awaits us.’

Back outside in the city, we wandered through endless winding alleyways and alongside canals in which greenish sea water sloshed and gurgled. It seemed a universe away from the mountains and rivers of Germany, the dark clouds of Amsterdam. We had left those behind; here, we were on the edge of the rest of the world.

At home in Cambridge, the map in my father’s library had shown Europe ending here. Beyond Venice was a wilderness of wolves, heathens, giants and dragons. Now I knew the city was only a threshold. No matter what Willem believed, across the sea lay Constantinople, the roads to India, the glories of Persia, all the wonders described by Herodotus and in
The Sum of All Knowledge.

We walked along the Grand Canal, gazing out at the cathedrals across the water. I had thought the sea would be azure here, but it was a sullen grey — a dull background for a city of jewels — with
cold winds that swept across the lagoon and fogs so opaque it felt as if the city were underwater.

Master de Aquila exclaimed over every detail. ‘See! At the end of the lane there — the tip of the famous
campanile
! I think, then, just along here will be …’ He took my hand and led me around a corner into a colonnaded porch.

He stopped. We all stopped. Before us stretched a great piazza, as wide as a lake, and at its end was a golden crown of a cathedral. It glistened, even on this dull afternoon.

Master de Aquila gasped aloud. ‘San Marco!’

‘Is it gold?’ Willem whispered.

‘It can’t be,’ I said.

But as we drew closer, we saw that it was.

‘Surely,’ I said, ‘this is the greatest building in the world.’