The Warring States (The Wave Trilogy) (47 page)

Levi had caught enough fish the previous day, and Sofia found she hardly had to touch the sails, so with nothing better to do they partook of the peace of the Sabbath. The wind carried them onwards as Ezra read. Sofia half-listened, thinking of the wind-racked city and the startling idea that one might gainsay God. Next morning, Ezra was back at the tiller, and his tireless adjustments to the sail were justified in the speed and distance travelled that day. It was evening when Sofia noticed something amiss.

Ezra was standing still, though the sail was flapping, bleeding wind. Levi was merrily murdering a condottieri song – something about stealing a dead comrade’s boots – when suddenly Ezra turned about. The look on his face made Levi fall silent.

Ezra mumbled something as he took in the sail and the wind abruptly ceased, then he turned back to the water.

Sofia said quietly, ‘What is it?’

He put his fingers to his lips and whispered, ‘We’re hunted.’

Sofia and Levi looked behind them – if the Moor was following, then surely they should sail for the nearest shore, and quickly? But Ezra was looking down, into the cold depths of the wine-dark sea. Abruptly he pointed, his finger travelling slowly over the surface.

‘I don’t see anything,’ said Levi, but Sofia felt her skin crawl as the foul shadow of
something
, a great fish or worm, crossed their path below, followed by a wafting stench of dead, sodden
flesh, worse even than the burning sheep mound near Gubbio. A minute passed before the wind took up again.

Ezra quietly raised the sail. ‘It’s gone, but we must be on guard.’

Levi announced that in his considered opinion, Ezra and Sofia were sun-touched, and he was going to take a nap.

Sofia found Ezra looking at her. ‘You’ve tangled with that old fellow before?’ he asked.

‘Only in dreams. This is the real world—’

‘There are places where they are one. We’re in the sea’s hands now. The dark place that fellow came from wants to keep you from your destination.’

‘Those tales you read us yesterday – you believe them? That Mary’s son could have made everything better for ever?’

‘Oh, not so long as that,’ Ezra said. ‘Even Messiah is not once and for all. Messiah is the spring that must come when the earth has grown old. For hundreds of thousands of years the seasons of Man have rotated: after summer comes winter, the heat retreats from the land, rivers dry up, the deserts grow, the earth shrinks. Good deeds become rare, charity a myth, cynicism prevails. And then, at the darkest hour, a new voice cries out and all who hear it remember there were once such things as honour and love, and all the wickedness of the world loses courage and retreats into the Darkness.’

‘But God let Herod kill him.’

‘Who told you God is master of this world? The disaster that befell the Madonna was His disaster as much as ours. Her grief is everyone’s. We see its results all round us – corruption and deceit, revolution and civil war spreading like plague until all hope is gone.’

Pedro escaped Ariminum before the alarm went up. On the way back to Rasenna he halted briefly near Gubbio. Where the
burning sheep mound had been was a black patch of grassless earth that stank like a wound. The men were gone, the tree empty. Hereabouts Giovanni had died, and hereabouts a second Giovanni had been born. The carrion was too decayed even for scavengers, and the rot in the air made it hard to think clearly. He hurried home.

His first stop in Rasenna was the baptistery. He remembered visiting Giovanni here after he’d almost drowned – had Giovanni himself begun to suspect then? In the light of Sofia’s revelation, Pedro felt duty-bound to re-examine all his assumptions. His initial reaction had been doubt. Engineers were sceptical of theory and faithful to experience, but Giovanni hadn’t been an ordinary engineer; and his grandfather certainly wasn’t. The Concordians had pulled the mechanical arts to a frontier where it was not measurable phenomena like Gravity or Friction that mattered but the unquantifiable: Faith and Love. Pedro had helped to create the transmission that had stopped the Wave during the siege, so he knew the mathematics it was based on, backwards and forwards. It was as solid as a gear-shank.

As he tied up his horse, the unfinished orphanage next to the baptistery seemed to reproach him. Inside, he circled the cool interior looking up at the stages of the Madonna’s life. The fanciful story was familiar, of course, but its meaning had always been remote. He had never even considered that it might be taken seriously, let alone literally.

‘Do you believe in Her?’

Pedro turned and found Isabella standing at the doorway.

‘I believe in things I see.’

‘You saw the Wave.’

‘That’s no more miracle than a flag is. It’s a weapon made by men.’

‘Understand a thing and it ceases to be miraculous?’

‘I suppose. The Wave was created by amplifying a particular harmonic sequence. We stopped the Wave by creating a signal that was its counterpoint.’

Isabella glanced at the aged Madonna of Rasenna in a corner niche. ‘Like throwing a cloak over Rasenna.’

Pedro said nothing; the image from the old Rasenneisi prayer was eerily apt. Perhaps his failure was one of language – call it ‘Love’ and an engineer is suspicious but call it ‘Harmony‘ and it can be measured and amplified, dissected and destroyed.

‘Sofia told me everything. She told me that Giovanni was one of them – a buio …’

Isabella didn’t even pretend to be surprised. ‘Is she safe?’

‘More than she ever could be in Etruria. She’s on the way to Oltremare.’

‘Grazie Madonna!’
Isabella sighed in relief, then looked at him. ‘That wasn’t all she told you, was it?’

Pedro looked around in embarrassment. ‘I don’t know what to believe. Nothing generates spontaneously, especially life. There must be a cause—’

‘There is, and someday you’ll understand that miracle too. Right now all that matters is that you helped her escape.’

The tiered circles ground against each other pitilessly and the echo of the tortured metal was amplified by the pit. The beast carried on its excruciating revolutions, though now it was a prison with only one prisoner.

Fra Norcino scrambled to the compartment before it closed and grabbed the bowl. He threw the food in the corner impatiently and placed the bowl under a drip. His shit-bucket was under another drip, and it was getting fuller. He listened merrily to the tapping, and when the bowl was filled he poured it into the bucket. The water was still below the brim.

‘Nuh!’ he grunted, unsatisfied.

He stood astride the bucket and made up the missing inch with a steaming stream of greenish-amber piss. He fell to his knees like a worshipper and inhaled the textured vapours of the noxious brew with delectation. ‘Perfect,’ he said, blowing upon the surface.

After Pedro left, Isabella stood on tip-toe, looking down into the cool water of the font.

‘Come out, Carmella.’

The older novice appeared from the dark corner of the baptistery where she’d been hiding. ‘I’m sorry, Reverend Mother. I was cleaning when the young engineer came in …’ She stopped, seeing that Isabella didn’t believe the lie. Carefully, she said, ‘What he said about the Contessa – is she really—?’

‘—I expect your discretion.’

‘How long have you been hiding her sins?’

‘You
heard
nothing, and you will
repeat
nothing, Carmella. I would be alone now.’

‘I— Yes, Reverend Mother.’

The novice left hurriedly. Isabella waited for her composure to return and studied the still cold water below. Her mind drifted, and she let it, leaving behind her frail body – it was too heavy for where she needed to be. She was a bird, travelling through the soft froth of clouds, seeing the white feathers of her outstretched wings, making minute adjustments, the better to catch the wind. She felt the bird’s hunger, and sensed the change in temperature as it travelled beyond the land, where the air chilled still further. In the calm sea below her she
saw
a tiny skiff. A tremor passed on the distant surface below; electrical tension in the air; drops of unseen rain danced on the water of the font.

Sofia watched Ezra warily. The old man had been surveying the sky for an hour now, though she could see nothing of interest
but a single seagull. Ezra sniffed suspiciously as the sails filled with wind, and the breeze, gentle till now, suddenly grew stronger.

Levi woke with a start, like Sofia, gagging at the foul stench that suddenly surrounded them.

‘Damn you, not here!’ Ezra cried as the skiff suddenly lurched to the side.

Mumbling through his cracked lips, Fra Norcino stirred the foulness clockwise, and it kept spinning when he removed his finger. Far below his cell, in the lake at the bottom of the pit, the water’s surface was alive with changing forms, cubes and cylinders and disproportionate disembodied limbs that clawed the air and fell apart.

A sudden wind blew the dust through Rasenna’s streets and burst the baptistery doors open. ‘You have
no right
!’ Isabella screamed, seeing –
feeling
– the maelstrom growing in the Holy Water.

‘We’re being tugged from below!’ Levi shouted. ‘Ezra, what is it?’