The Kingdom of Light (2 page)

‘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 reddish 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.

The stench of decomposition had become unbearable. Dante was seized with a violent attack of retching, as the feeling of nausea become more intense. He managed only
to
ascertain that their clothes contained no other objects worthy of interest, before he was forced to leave the cabin.

A
S SOON
as he was outside he stopped for a moment to catch his breath. His mind ran to the terrible deaths of the oarsmen. Now he understood the awful contraction of their limbs. Anyone who had escaped the poison was left in chains to die of thirst beneath the roasting sun, and the murderer hadn’t bothered to unlock their fetters. They had tried to free themselves until the very last, and their desperate cries must have filled the swamp for days. But their incomprehensible language, rather than bringing anyone running over, would have frightened the few inhabitants, terrified as they were by a fear of ghosts.

Dante thought he could still hear the cries rising up from the benches. He turned to the Bargello: ‘Order your men to bring back very carefully every fragment of the machine in the wardroom, and have it brought to Florence with the utmost care. Strip off one of the sails and turn it into a bag.’

‘And … these people?’

The poet looked hesitantly around. He could do nothing more for those wretches. But he wouldn’t leave them there to rot among their chains. ‘Set fire to the ship. Let it turn into a funeral pyre, and let their God receive them along with their souls,’ he commanded. ‘And let people know
as
little as possible about this story for the time being.’

‘But the galley was empty. No precious cargo, nothing but rubbish. Why such secrecy?’ the chief of the guards objected suspiciously. ‘Apart from those corpses.’

‘Yes. Apart from those corpses,’ the prior interrupted, starting to climb down.

The men hurried to accomplish their task, impatient to get away from that accursed place.

‘Let’s get back to our horses,’ Dante said when he saw the flames beginning to attack the ship. As they moved away, he darted one final glance at the top of the dune. Red tongues rose higher and higher as the fire took hold of the carcase. They looked like fingers rising from the funeral pyre in a plea for justice.

Or revenge.

T
HEY REACHED
Florence early the following day, after a forced night-march that had exhausted both men and horses, while the constellations of the Zodiac waned above their heads. The tops of the walls gleamed in the rays of the early-morning sun, as if they were made of copper rather than brick and stone.

During the night a sandy rain had fallen, with intervals of clarity. While the starry vault had been visible, Dante had looked up to work out how much time had passed. At that moment Gemini, his birth-constellation,
was
shining in the sky. The twofold splendour of Castor and Pollux seemed to guide him, giving him the strength to conquer the unease that had lately taken hold of him. Several times the Bargello had suggested a rest, encouraged by the protests of his men. But each time Dante had rejected the idea, determined as he was to keep going.

The pyre of the ship had erased the visible traces of the slaughter, but not the right of those souls to be avenged. He had to find the man responsible, the man who had fled after committing that savage crime.

In front of him swayed the bag containing the fragments of the mechanism. The horse swerved nervously each time its cargo groaned with its metallic voice, as if sensing that it was carrying shards of hell.

‘Open the door in the name of the city of Florence!’ Dante called with the last of his strength at the sentinel on the tower, who peered down, poking his torch through a gap in the crenellations. In the semi-darkness the line of exhausted men and horses was a muddled collection of dark silhouettes. ‘And jump to it when I give you an order,’ the poet shouted.

‘Bugger off!’ shouted the man high above them, cupping his hands around his mouth, the better to be heard. ‘It isn’t market day today, and you can’t get in before the third hour. You and your rabble go and camp far from the walls, or I’ll come out with the guard and stroke your bones.’

‘You whore-son!’ yelled Dante, bouncing furiously up
and
down on his saddle. The unexpected noise and movement terrified his mount, which shifted sideways and made his foot slip from his stirrup. He landed heavily, sending up splashes of mud, only just managing to stay on his feet. Behind him the malevolent laughter of the
bargellini
exploded in sympathy with their fellow-guard. Even the Bargello had been unable to suppress a barely stifled chuckle.

Meanwhile, drawn by the hubbub, the other soldiers of the guard corps were crowding round, amidst sounds of yawning and the rattle of armour. Purple faces, still filled with sleep, appeared between the merlons, hurling down insults and making obscene gestures at the people below.

‘Open this door, you rogues!’ the Bargello finally decided to shout, letting them know who he was. From above, the yelling suddenly stopped, replaced a few moments later by the sound of the chain being removed. Dante, drawing his horse by the bridle, moved slowly beneath the low arch. He tried to look in the guards’ faces to memorise each one of them, cursing them under his breath.

At that very moment, a distant chant rose up behind him, a kind of psalmody of indistinguishable words. For a moment he thought he was hallucinating and turned round. Beyond the bend in the road he saw a curious line of people slowly approaching. It was from them that the chant was coming.

The group seemed to be made up of the survivors of a
shipwreck
. At their head came a tall man, wearing a rough, dark habit, his bearded face half-concealed by its hood. He came forward leaning on a long stick topped with a cross placed in a circle. Behind him a little crowd of men and women were dressed as if their guide had assembled them while they were still going about their daily business. Peasants and merchants, nobles and fishermen, warriors and prostitutes, doctors and usurers, a kind of confused and sorrowful representation of humanity.

In the middle of the crowd of dusty wayfarers were a number of mules loaded up improbably with luggage and parcels. One in particular was constantly shifting sideways, under the weight of a big chest, in spite of the firm hand of the military-looking man who was leading it by the reins. Its load was covered by a white linen sheet emblazoned with a red cross.

After a brief interruption the psalmody had resumed, led by the monk at the head. The procession moved slowly beneath the gate unimpeded by any of the guards.

‘Who are they?’ asked the poet.

‘Pilgrims on their way back from Rome, I should imagine,’ replied the Bargello.

‘All in search of salvation at the court of Boniface?’