Meanwhile the dervish – he, too, covering his ears to defend himself from the deafening chorus, awkwardly jerking his elbows and pointlessly yelling – signalled to his men to come to his aid and protect him in his terror-struck flight from the Place with No Name.
My ears were still hurting, but it was time to act. While the dance between Ciezeber and his henchmen continued, I went back to the Flying Ship. Shocked as I was by Simonis’s end, I had almost forgotten Abbot Melani. Although hampered by having to press my hands to my ears, I managed to pull myself aboard the aircraft just in time to feel its wooden frame vibrate and shake rhythmically. It was what I hoped: the only way to escape. Atto was also clamping his hands to his ears, but he removed his hands when he felt this phenomenon, almost a familiar one by now: we were rising.
But the ship, for the first time, was struggling. It lifted just enough to fly over the walls of the ball stadium and to take us out of the Place with No Name. However, its journey was not an easy one. It proceeded in jerks, tossed by powerful gusts, which swelled the sails and lifted it, and undertows, which dragged it downwards again. The amber stones, instead of chiming in their usual harmony, oscillated confusedly and buzzed in acrid concert, producing a metallic din, as in a battle from an earlier age. The light they emitted was grey and livid this time, like the face of someone confronted by horrific visions. Maybe it came down to that, I thought; too much horror had unfolded itself around the ship: Simonis’s end, the wickedness of Palatine and the new age . . . Death weighed down its keel like ballast. It swayed awkwardly for a while and finally sank down, as if exhausted, in the dark countryside of Simmering. Atto and I stayed sitting in the ship, overwhelmed by the cries of the forty thousand.
But suddenly, just as it had started, the yelling of the martyrs of Kasim ceased. In those long minutes in which I had left him alone, Atto had realised what it was, and on his lean face I could see his amazement at this overpowering phenomenon. So what Dànilo Danilovitsch and Dragomir Populescu had recounted was not nonsense: the Turkish legend of the forty thousand was true – or at least it had become so that night, and so perhaps the legend of the Golden Apple was not wholly invented either. But Abbot Melani was constrained by the pride of one who has always thought he held the key that unlocks the labyrinth of existence.
Trying to gather my ideas and to recover lucidity, I told him what had happened to Simonis. I hoped that the excessive emotions the Abbot was once again exposed to would not endanger his life; I had not yet realised that it was my spirit that had been wounded most cruelly.
“It is not a coincidence that I arrived in Vienna just a day after the Turks arrived and after the Emperor fell ill,” he suddenly said.
“What are you saying?” I said, turning pale.
Atto gave a faint smile.
“I knew nothing of it, have no fear. The truth is that we are at a crossroads in history, and at such moments the strangest things happen.”
“Yes, it’s a crucial turning point.”
“I thought I was the one who could bring about this turning point, but I have been brushed away like a fly.”
“The new forces . . .”
“New? They are ancient, they have just changed their strategy, and this pays better. Shall we name some names from the past? The Fuggers, for example, who financed the ascent to the throne of Charles V and then of Maximilian through their henchman Ilsung. But it is not important. What counts is their method. Their code of behaviour is not what we were accustomed to – the code of kings, their ministers, of diplomacy, of the old conventions – but another one, unknown to anyone but them. No general will do as Melac did during the siege of Landau and offer not to fire on the tent of the enemy’s emperor. Those days are forever gone. Checkmate is abolished. From now on the enemy king will be killed as well – the dervish explained it clearly to your Simonis.”
On hearing my assistant’s name I saw his eyes again, gazing at me in his last instants of life. I felt myself shaking.
“He died torn to pieces by the wild beasts, like a Christian martyr,” murmured Atto suddenly to himself.
“What?”
“Simonis. You’re thinking of him, aren’t you? So am I. His courageous end confirms it: he was part of the resistance against the new order that is about to emerge victorious from this war. Your assistant was, to use Penicek’s words, on the side of Christ. And like an ancient Christian he was torn to pieces. But by now you too have understood that he was working as part of a network of which you knew and will always know nothing. Simonis, too, like the new faceless lords, is a sign of the approaching times. Do we know who he really was? No. Penicek? Again no. And Ciezeber-Palatine-Ammon? Even less. And yet they, and other equally anonymous beings, are playing dice with the world. The future is in the hands of shadowy networks of individuals with no names, no identities and no faces. Fortunately I am at the end of my career, boy: there is no room for people like me. I was the King’s advisor, and His Majesty listened to me and then made his decisions, exposing himself to the judgement of his subjects, of the entire world and of history. The world was made of men. But soon it will be led by governments that function like this ship: if necessary, even without human beings on board. I didn’t understand until now, do you realise? The shadow-man I was seeking everywhere does not exist. The new Abbot Melani does not exist. We were fighting against the void. There is just a group, up there, a collective intelligence, like an anthill. They are not individuals with independent mentalities. Taken singly they are puny beings, pipsqueaks. Only in a pack, like hyenas, are they to be feared.”
“The Age of Man is over, the agony of the world has begun: the Last Days of Mankind,” I said, repeating what I had thought when we found Opalinski’s corpse.
“They have succeeded in setting fire to the world, these devils incarnate,” Atto went on in a voice now quivering with rage. “And to think that I ingenuously came to Vienna on a peace mission. Peace, indeed! This war is just a lucrative affair of blood to quench the thirst of Beelzebub. And it will not end in the rebirth they have promised us, no, but in the greatest bankruptcy the world has ever seen.”
His words dismayed me. I needed to hope, I desperately needed to hope. Otherwise I could not cope. It was all too much for me.
“But once there’s peace –” I began.
“Then the war will begin,” Atto interrupted me with a snarl of repressed fury.
“But all wars have ended with a peace!” I protested, clutching with all my strength at the banal optimism of my words.
“This one will not!” the Abbot snapped back with all the breath in his body. “This war did not take place on the surface of life. No! It raged within life itself: the world perishes and no one will know! Everything was yesterday, it will have been forgotten. Today will not be seen, and tomorrow will not be feared. It will be forgotten that the war has been lost, forgotten that it was begun, forgotten that it was fought. That is why this war WILL NE-VER END!”
“But once there is peace?”
“People will never have enough of war.”
“But the people, through error –”
“They unlearn. Indeed: they UNLIVE!” the old castrato ended with a shrill cry, finally giving way to tears and sobs, hunched over in a corner of the ship, striking his breast like a soul in Purgatory.
Atto himself had made a decisive contribution to the outbreak of this war, this endless war, eleven years earlier. He, who had always believed he held the reins of the world in his hands, had been no more than a pawn in the hands of those like Ciezeber. He had only fully realised this now, and it had plunged him into despair.
The empty basin of the sky was illuminated only by a weak moon, almost entirely covered by clouds. The cold gnawed at us from head to toes. I curled up trembling at the bottom of the ship next to Atto. I should have taken the Abbot and left the ship where it had come to ground, but I felt broken inside, lost in a black night of the spirit that robbed me of all my strength.
I f
elt I had gone back to the days of our first adventure in Rome, where aboard a frail boat, in company with Ugonio, we had sailed the subterranean rivers beneath the Holy City, armed with just a paddle and our intuition. But this, as I had seen, was just one of many parallels between our present situation and the vicissitudes I had shared with Abbot Melani in the past. Now, just like twenty-eight years earlier in the little inn where I had been working when I first met Atto Melani, there was a case of a sick man who had perhaps been poisoned – and on that occasion too there had been an attempted murder by means of a deliberately produced contagion. Once again, I was pervaded by the sense of a cycle coming to completion; as similar events repeated themselves, I felt as if the real meaning of what I had lived through was about to be revealed.
Abbot Melani, meanwhile, passed from weeping to a dark dreamless sleep, as I could tell from the expression on his face. I held him in an embrace, so as to warm him with my body and prevent any risk of death by exposure.
Lying like this on the hard planks of the ship, my eyes gazing at the stars, I recalled Simonis’s last words, and the daring action that he had clearly signalled to me with them. The task I yearned for was almost impossible, but I felt that I owed it to Simonis, poor Simonis, mysterious Simonis, to make an attempt. I stared straight ahead, trying to forget those instants in which I had seen him smile feebly to me and then drop among the beasts, to his death. If we were to tell the palace staff about the plot that was afoot to assassinate Joseph, they would take us for dangerous madmen. We would have to try some other method. Oh, if only the ship would take flight again! I could put into action what I had haphazardly attempted during the previous flight. I could fiddle with the ropes holding the amber stones and so manoeuvre it. I dreamed of guiding the Flying Ship towards the imperial palace, where I would carry out my desperate plan. Using my skills as a chimney-sweep, I would drop down into one of the great chimneys with the iron ladders typical of the imperial residences and make my way to the apartments of His Majesty Joseph the Victorious. There, on the sofa of some sitting room, in plain view, I would leave an account of the plot hatched against His Caesarean Majesty, imploring them not to subject him to the inoculations prescribed by Ciezeber; or I would try to get one of Joseph’s butlers to listen to me, if I should meet one; or . . . well, I didn’t really know what, but something had to be done.
At that moment the ship, with a final effort (or so at least it seemed to my confused spirit) took off again. I jumped to my feet and with renewed vigour prepared to handle the ropes in order to guide it towards the Caesarean Palace, but at once I felt the ropes jangle weirdly beneath my fingers, and the ship judder uncontrollably. A sudden unsettling jerk forced me to drop the reins (if they could be called such) of my winged steed, and so I left it free, as on the first flight, to guide itself. At once it appeared to me that the solidity and stability of the vehicle improved, and I felt relief. But it did not last long, alas. The Flying Ship was aiming – or so it seemed to me amid the purple nocturnal mist – for the spire of St Stephen’s. And indeed it was. As the roofs and squares of the city glided beneath us, I saw the top of the cathedral tower getting closer and closer. I prayed that none of the city’s fire-watchers, who always keep an eye on the cathedral, would spot the outline of our ship and raise the alarm.
“Not here, you wretched thing!” I shouted, beside myself. “You know where you have to go!”
As our craft got closer and closer to the spire, Simonis’s death suddenly came rushing back to me. The roaring of the lions and the panther had been drowned out by the yelling of the forty thousand martyrs, and the beasts’ jaws, hidden by the darkness of the night, had had seized hold not only of Simonis’s helpless limbs but also of my spirit. The Last Days of Mankind, which had announced themselves with Opalinski’s death, had swallowed Simonis and were now breathing down my neck. For a moment I stood there full of anguish. It was then that I saw it.
At first I thought it was a hallucinatory effect of my sad lucubrations. Although it seemed alien in substance to the world of humans, the object was such that it was also visible to Abbot Melani, who had re-awoken and risen in the meantime, and who now stood gaping by my side.
It was a golden globe, suspended in the air, the size of an apple. No description could ever fully convey its appearance; a reminiscence of it has stuck with me, albeit blurred and impenetrable. Certain dreams are difficult to remember, not because one’s memory is weak, but because they can only live in the distorted state of mind of the oneiric world; like jellyfish dragged onto the shore, as soon they are transported to a state of wakened awareness they dissolve. In the same way, owing to my desperate and tormented state of mind at that time, I was granted an experience that I cannot now fully repeat and describe. All I can say is that the substance of the golden globe, suspended at a short distance from the prow of the Flying Ship, seemed midway between vapour and metal, as if the magic breath of an alchemist had transformed a sphere of gas into gold, and this latter once again into an aeriform substance.
It was then, enraptured by this arcane and fantastic vision, that I remembered: among the many prophecies about the Golden Apple that we had heard during the last few days, there was the one Ugonio had recounted. The War of the Spanish Succession, which was raging throughout Europe, would be won by the Empire only if the original Golden Apple of Justinian, which assures supremacy over the Christian West, were to be placed on the highest spire of the most sacred church in Vienna: the Cathedral of St Stephen, where one day the Archangel Michael had appeared, he who, according to tradition, holds the Imperial Orb in his hand as he drives out Lucifer with his sword in the form of the holy cross.
The ship gave a start. The wind had risen, and the swaying craft had knocked against the tip of the spire of St Stephen’s. Out of the corner of my eye, even though enraptured by the vision of the golden globe, I glimpsed the coils and spirals that adorn the highest point of the glorious cathedral.
“What’s happening? First that shout . . . now the Apple . . .” stammered Abbot Melani in a trembling voice, clinging onto my arm: he too had realised what the golden globe was.
But I was no longer listening. I now remembered that, according to Ugonio, on the pinnacle of St Stephen’s were the seven mysterious words carved by the Archangel Michael.
It is from this point that my memories are overpowered by the shades of oblivion, and everything merges in a blurred magma: my attempt to lean out to try and see, despite the darkness, the inscription engraved by Archangel Michael’s sword, the ship swaying with a new gust of wind, my body losing its balance, Abbot Melani tottering by my side and collapsing onto the floor of the ship, and I, with the help of my elbow, just managing not to fall out of the ship into the void. And then those long seconds half-hanging head downwards, with the unreal vision of the bell tower of St Stephen’s, an immense humpback whale of stone, looming beneath the imposing roof of the cathedral. And again, the Golden Apple suddenly increasing in luminosity, and then, as I save myself from falling and manage to pull myself back into the ship, the Apple disappearing in a wispy trail of refulgent powder.
The epiphany was over and the Golden Apple had not returned to St Stephen’s: Spain was destined to fall into French hands. The night in which the fate of the world was sealed had completed its parabola. The outcome of the war was already decided – that was what the Flying Ship wished to tell us – and with it the events of the years to come.
Then it was time to abandon ourselves to the pitching of the ship, and to its dumb and elusive will: to surrender, yield and turn away, while distant thunder announced a short morning downpour. Like an outburst of universal weeping, the rain would act as prelude to the new age: the Last Days of Mankind.
Almost as if it wanted to give us a final helping hand, the Flying Ship once again landed amid the vineyards of Simmering, just a few yards from the convent’s buttery. As soon as we had disembarked, the winged ship rose into the air again and departed, but not in the direction of the
Place with No Name but to the west. I saw it sailing off ethereally and silently until it merged into the horizon and the clouds of the ashen dawn, towards the west, the Kingdom of Portugal, whence it had arrived two years earlier.
With my remaining strength, I dragged the Abbot to the nearby buttery of the convent. I do not know how my poor, short homunculus’s limbs managed to support the weight of the old castrato. I leaned against the door in exhaustion and realised it was ajar. At that moment it was thrown open.
“My love!” I heard a cry.
I just managed to see Cloridia, and Camilla de’ Rossi who was with her. While the Chormaisterin offered ready support to Atto, Cloridia smiled at me and held me tight, her face streaked with tears. What was my wife doing there? Why was Camilla de’ Rossi there too? Were they looking for us? And how did they know that we would arrive at that very spot? These thoughts whirled round my head like bothersome flies. After Penicek and Palatine, I certainly did not have the strength to face the ambiguities and mysteries of the Chormaisterin! I frowned, but Cloridia held my hands gently and shook her head:
“I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry. Camilla has cleared everything up.”
I had no time to hear any more. Overwhelmed by it all, I fainted in my wife’s arms.
Veritas (Atto Melani) Page 70
