The Warring States (The Wave Trilogy) (64 page)

It emerged a second later, searing the darkness of the pit like a razor, shooting past Norcino’s cell to the lake into which the coffin had just sunk.

The buio leapt and clawed and climbed over one another, each particle of the filthy water striving to separate itself from the rest to escape the writhing agony that churned the depths until the ascending coffin parted the surface, wreathed in fronds of black-green scum, and rose.

The exhausted water went still.

The
thing
inside it was no longer crying. A talented, terrified boy had descended moments before; what stepped out was something else; Fra Norcino’s blind eyes could see that plainly.

‘Welcome back, my king.’

‘Come, astrologer. The hour is late and we have work.’

The story concludes in

Spira Mirabilis

Book III of The Wave Trilogy

They say that Labor Vincit Omnia, but it’s nice to have help:

Seth Grodofsky assisted my research by showing me Israel, not quite from Dan to Beersheba but near enough, while Merav and the girls showed me great hospitality. Michael Harte lent me a critical pair of eyes on the first draft (he can have them back now – they’ve gone dry). Jo Fletcher deftly nipped and tucked a somewhat baggy version of
The Warring States
into something presentable. Throughout this my agent Ian Drury has been a constant support.

My thanks to all.

Thanks too to Nicola Budd, Lucy Ramsey, Georgina Difford, and everyone at Jo Fletcher Books and Quercus who are working hard to spread the word.

Lastly, most especially, my wife Bronagh deserves a bathtub of diamonds. Since I can’t afford one yet, I give her my love.

AH

¹
Saint Eco, a follower of Saint Francis, travelled from Gubbio to Concord to minister to those unlucky Crusaders who returned from Oltremare with the venereal affliction known as
Roland’s Horn
. The miracles ascribed to Eco are too numerous and repetitious to relate, but his popularity was such that the Curia named their cherished cathedral for him.

²
The Author demolishes this jejune theory in Volume II, showing how the Curia’s inertia could not have been overcome without a force as dynamic as Bernoulli.

³
Today the giant skeletons of these cathedrals litter the continent. To many engineers the real tragedy of the Europan wars is they will never be rebuilt; walls expected to be bombarded cannot soar.

⁴
In the cities, their marble had been long cannibalised.

⁵
Since the fall of the Etruscan Empire, the dome had presented an insurmountable logistical challenge.

⁶
The centuries-old plans had been elevated to holy relics at this stage.

⁷
In our era of rampant egoism, it seems natural, predictable even, for an architect to disparage his predecessors. Students should be wary of projecting contemporary values onto an age when slavish ancestor-worship was the norm. It was then a given that those who wished to succeed had to adorn the dead with laurels and spew bile on innovators; this complacent ethos sat well with an institution like the Curia.

⁸
Revealing also the influence of Bernoulli’s ill-fated patron, Senator Postumus Tremellius Felix.

⁹
‘I hate every line that is not vertical. I hate every colour that is not black. History’s chains will not bind me.’

¹⁰
Shrill but ineffective protests. Some were erudite dialogues; more popular were the lampoons that exploited traditional Concordian xenophobia: the slander that Bernoulli’s ancestors were fur-wearing northerners originated here. Ciuto Brandini’s judgement that ‘Bernoulli expresses in stone the iron in his blood‘ was much duplicated in the Piazzetta Bocca della Verità.

¹¹
The first reliable reports of the settlement appear in the fifth century. We must not imagine the exquisite beauty of the contemporary city but a motley cluster of huts wobbling on stilts like insects.

¹²
Fortis Iusta Trona Furias Maris Sub Pede Pono
– Enthroned, Just and Strong, I defeat the Fury of the Sea. How then to explain her recent expansion onto Terra Firma and acquisition of the accoutrements of war? Ariminumese diplomats maintain that these are precautionary measures prompted by Concordian expansion. Less biased commentators call it a betrayal of Terra da Mar, the source of her greatness.

¹³
Typically, former Doges.

¹⁴
One can buy one’s way into anything in Ariminum, with the exception of the Maggior Consiglio. According to tradition the Golden Book was closed forever in AD 1001 on October 1st at 10.01 AM.

¹⁵
This mundane truth is deeply unsatisfying for conspiratorial Etrurians, and where reality fails, imagination takes flight. The rumour goes that The Ten are subject to another ministry of state, the so-called
Consilium Sapientium
, a three-man body that spends men’s lives like days, that has not slept since the city’s foundation. The identity of these mythical wise men is a favourite speculation amongst the cognoscenti.

¹⁶
If you can ignore its plodding prose,
The Bifurcated Goddess
by Duke Spurius Lartius Cocles competently demonstrates that the Madonna’s iconography and supernatural powers are almost identical to the Etruscan fertility goddess, Thalna (virgin consort of the Sky God, Tins). Likewise, the Madonna’s short-lived child, Jesus, was equated with the wonder child, Tages (son of Thalna). Etruscan shrines to the fertility goddess were converted into Marian baptisteries throughout the peninsula.

¹⁷
By ‘we’, the Author means Post Re-Formation Concord; Etruria’s other cities have retained their primitive idols with a grip as tenacious as it inexplicable.

¹⁸
The worst of these values find their fullest expression the Curia of the last Century, the best, in the empire of reason founded by their successors.

¹⁹
The only pillar to survive the cataclysm was the school of cardinals based in the northern city of Concord. The vigorous new faith was a light the Curia shielded against the gathering gloom.

²⁰
Ignore chauvinistic propaganda of ’Manifest Destiny’; Ariminum’s early start was but the accidental consequence of taking refuge in a singularly defensible lagoon. The interested reader can track Ariminum’s evolution more precisely in
The Southern Principalities
, an earlier chapter in this volume. It would be remiss not to mention
The Stones of Ariminum
, a highly regarded cultural study, also by the present Author.

²¹
As the post-imperial Etruscans become known. The interested reader may consult Appendix XXIII for a detailed survey into the predictably chaotic etymology of this period.

²²
Inevitably, this success was seen as proof of God’s favour, but as detailed in Volume I, the late Etruscan Empire was beset with internal and external problems. Specifically, the attempt to use devalued currency to pay the legions, already exhausted and demoralised after the prolonged Sassanid war, prompted several mutinies at exactly the worst time. Absent this chaos, the Radinate could not have won so much so quickly.

²³
Barabbas was the first ‘Rightly Guided’ Melic. Following the Schism, Saul derisively described Barabbas’ followers as ‘the Poor Ones’. Barabbas responded that, before God, all were poor. Thereafter
Ebionite
became an honourable appellation amongst the Jews.

²⁴
The nomads’ contribution to the Radinate is similar to that of the Romans to the Etruscans. Also analogous is their equivocal attitude to the sybaritic excess of their respective capitals – the Radinate’s decadence prior to the Crusades had attained new depths.

²⁵
This was not altogether selfless. Larger urban incomes meant larger tithes could be collected.

²⁶
That is, he increased the tolls on roads and bridges along the pilgrim trail.

²⁷
There were some tragic exceptions – in the VIII Century, an ambitious but naïve Frankish king initiated a correspondence with the renowned Ebionite melic Haroun al Raschid. Since Charles the Great was illiterate, al Raschid replied with a wonderful clockwork toy. The delighted king played with the musical menagerie until the birds fell suddenly silent. When he wound the clock it exploded. Later preachers cited this as clear evidence that all Ebionites were duplicitous and intent on killing Marians.

²⁸
The
Reconquista
myth dies hard, but the collapse of the Ebionite occupation of southern Etruria in the IX Century was a result of rivalries back in Akka more than any effort by the occupied. See Chapters III to V.

²⁹
Whether part of the Radinate or Oltremare, this famous city bestrides East and West. While the Bosperous prevents encroachment from the East, the Dalmatian March prevents encroachment from the West.

³⁰
The ancient martial art the Curia had preserved since Etruscan times.

³¹
The Old Man of the Mountain is credited with reviving the Wind-based martial art of the Sicarii.

³²
This Europan interloper rudely bisected the Radinate. Alexandria became the capital of the southern Radinate and Byzant, the northern capital.

³³
This was but one front on which the insatiable race advanced. Ariminum had long sought access to the trade routes that ran though Byzant and, when they solicited the now-isolated city with fresh entreaties, the previously haughty Byzantines proved receptive. In Etruria, this scandalous alliance with an Ebionite power drew down a long-threatened Curial interdiction on the Serenissima. The Ariminumese attributed this excommunication more to Concordian jealously than piety. It was, in any case, a small price to pay for Byzant’s friendship and the wealth it brought.

³⁴
The sensual peoples of the East will pay ridiculous sums for spices unknown to them.

³⁵
Account-books breathlessly list ‘jacinths, chrysoltes, emerauds, and pearls as large as peeled onions’.

³⁶
The scandalous history of Oltremare’s first century suggests it was the latter.

³⁷
The Khazarian
Reconquista
is outside the scope of this work but the northeast quarter recovered sooner.

³⁸
The Author is no theologian but the Curia’s doctrine, that the Ebionites were schismatics who had corrupted the one true faith, is obviously simplistic. In many ways, the Rabbis retain a purer version of Mary’s message. Few Concordian scholars would dispute the Ebionite characterisation of Etrurian Madonna-worship as idolatry.

³⁹
Met by a remilitarised Radinate, the Second Crusade failed. This was to become a wearingly repetitious pattern.

⁴⁰
The innovative mood extended to religion. Intermingling flavours of heresy made Oltremare’s Faith a strange stew. The cult of death, epitomised in the grim
Madonna Muerta
, outrages both Ebionite and Etrurian sensibilities.

⁴¹
The Fraticelli had by now been domesticated and enfolded (smothered, some would say) within the cloak of Mother Church. The movement had given the declining Curia some much-needed creditability, but perhaps the cardinals believed that Gubbio’s holy fool had reached the end of his usefulness and that a suitably pathetic martyrdom would restore faith in the discredited cause of Crusade.

⁴²
This prodigy may owe more to Alexandria’s long-standing rivalry with Byzant than to the Saint’s powers of persuasion. Whatever the truth, possession of the Egyptian bread-basket saved Oltremare from extinction.

⁴³
Ebionite for ‘the Spring of Goliath’ – an appropriate venue for giant-slaying.

⁴⁴
Oltremarines still use clappers and cymbals in memory of this victory. The custom originates in the second Ebionite occupation of Jerusalem: Marians were allowed to pray on the Mount, but they were forbidden to ring bells.

⁴⁵
When Oltremare conquered Byzant, the Ariminumese merchants in the city assumed the existing arrangement would continue. They were shocked to be expelled along with the Ebionites.

⁴⁶
Those who chose the safety of Oltremarine cities paid the price in the degrading trades allowed to them: servants, tanners and blacksmiths, horse traders, executioners and accountants.

⁴⁷
Meanwhile, far from Akka’s influence, Byzant persued its own destiny. Though Marian now, Byzant’s traditional cycle of war and trade with her neighbours went on exactly as before. As time passed, and Byzant’s spheres of influence drifted westwards, Akka’s seniority became but a legal fiction.

⁴⁸
The other contender is how a scheme designed to bolster the Curia finally destroyed it. The legal innovation of selling Atonement, concocted to finance the Crusades, opened the floodgates for a wave of corruption. When the flood of opprobrium subsided, the cardinals had been replaced by engineers and the world upended.