Aurelia kicked at it gently, sending gemlike droplets sparkling up into the sun, splashing her face with the cooling fluid. She wished she could shed all her clothes and baptize herself with the rejuvenating liquid. She settled for cleansing her face and hands and the back of her neck, shivering as a bead of water dribbled down the hollow of her spine.
Battista reached the outcropping first, tying the reins of his horse to a smaller but similar projectile beside it. Peering around one side, and then the other, Battista turned to them in displeasure.
“There is no more than a crack between,” he said dejectedly.
Aurelia secured her horse and stepped to the stone monolith. It rose over her head at least ten men high and half as many wide. She squinted to see less distinctly but far more clearly.
“It is a robed man,” she said, head tipped almost straight up on her long, thin neck.
Battista came to stand on one side of her, Frado on the other, each tipping his head back in a comparable posture.
“I see him,” Battista said, voice strangled by the awkward position.
The craggy lines upon the rock face drew an abstract but interpretive form of a bearded man, a long nose and deep-set eyes, his head tucked into the mantle of his robe falling in folds to the ground.
Battista lowered his head. “ ‘I threw myself devotedly at his holy feet, asking him to open out of mercy; but first I beat three times upon my breast.’ ”
Aurelia recognized the opening stanza of the Commedia’s second canticle, the beginning of Purgatorio. She held her breath as Battista knelt and, with a fisted right hand, beat upon his breast three times.
A black bird cawed overhead as a gust of wind swooshed around them, but the rock cropping did not move.
“Wait,” Aurelia demanded. Lifting her skirts, she fell to her knees, and then to her stomach.
“What in Heaven are you doing?” Battista demanded.
“Dear lady, you’ll hurt yourself,” Frado insisted, then threw up his hands with a laugh, as if the absurdity of the situation suddenly dawned on him.
“ ‘From beneath the robe, he drew two keys.’ ” The words came out in muffled grunts, spoken into the moist stone beneath, one hand stretched out in front. With a happy yelp, her digits moved beyond the edge of the outcropping, disappearing into the tiniest crack between rock and ground. She squirmed forward, hand completely engulfed by the gap of stone.
She yanked her hand—now fisted—out and jumped to her feet with one swift, graceful move. Holding out her limb, she unfurled her fingers, quoting Dante once more, “ ‘The one was made of gold, the other of silver.’ ”
The men bombarded her, jostling her as they squeezed closer. On her scratched, gritty skin lay two strange pieces, one whitish and one yellow. Though clearly keys, they were more akin to dowels of metal, not carved nor bright, straight cylindrical shafts with unique indentations, the metal tarnished and worn.
“Do you think they are truly made of silver and gold?” Frado’s hushed murmur spoke of value, not discovery, and Battista bumped the man’s shoulder with his own, knocking Frado’s attention back to the matter at hand.
“Well done, Aurelia,” Battista praised, though grudgingly. “But where are the keyholes?”
They separated, each heading for a different part of the mammoth boulder, each searching—with eyes and hands—for indentations to accommodate the unique keys.
“Here, here. I’ve found it!” Frado cried, his thrill to be an active part of the quest ringing in his high-pitched squeal. With a squelch of shallow water beneath his boots, he ran to Aurelia, swiped the keys from her hands, and returned to the left side of the boulder. Patting the stone surface, finding the two small barrel holes, one sitting atop the other, he pinched the small yellow dowel between thumb and forefinger and raised it up.
“Stop!” Aurelia and Battista cried together, rushing toward him, Battista passing her with his long-legged stride.
Frado froze, hand poised in the air, face awash with fright.
“You must put the other in first.” Battista reached him, placing a calming hand on his startled friend’s shoulder.
“ ‘First with the white, then with the yellow, he plied the gate so as to satisfy me,’ ” Aurelia quoted the instructions.
Frado heaved a cleansing breath, switched the devices in his hand, and raised them once more. He gently pushed one in and then the other, turning first to the right without yield and then to the left, where the small pins slipped and then receded, as if pulled by someone, or something, on the opposite side.
“They c—”
With a thunderlike boom and a grinding of stone, the monstrous boulder shuddered and fell to the right, creating a gap no more than a foot wide, broad enough for Battista to slip through sideways.
The stone dust fell upon them, fluffy as snow, the motes dancing in the sun’s bright glare.
With wide-eyed eagerness and the hint of a grin, Battista leaned toward the opening, slipping one foot and one shoulder into the space.
“No, not yet!” Frado pulled him back, grabbing and tugging his friend’s arm. “You have not eaten a thing since early morning and only God knows how long you may be in ... there. I insist you eat, rest, and drink before embarking on this journey.” He stood with arms akimbo, mouth set tight and firm.
Aurelia lowered her head, hiding the smile born of the endearing man’s attempt at fierceness.
“You make fine sense,” Battista replied, and slithered back out of the crevice.
As they each took a place atop some flat, moss-covered rocks, passing the wine-filled goatskins and strips of dried meat, Aurelia leaned her back against the chasm wall, eyes raised heavenward as if in prayer, feeling at the same time small in the face of such splendor and large as a part of such a creation.
“I think you may safely give us more than the usual two hours.” Battista chuckled around a cheekful of food. “But I would give it no more than a rise and a set of the sun.”
“Oh no.” Frado shook his head, bald pate uncovered and shiny in the sun. “No, no, no. I will not leave you. This is not the same. This is not someone’s home. I wi—”
“Frado, you—,” Battista tried to argue, to no avail.
Frado sliced at Battista’s words with a pointed finger and a narrow-eyed glare. “I will come looking for you, should you not return.”
Battista sighed, tipped his head to the side, and smiled. “You are correct, amico mio, this is not a palazzo I am set to plunder... .”
Aurelia lifted her head, raising a cynical brow.
“Poor choice of words.” Battista shrugged, having the grace to look sheepish. “This is not a guarded palace that may find me captured, but a cavern of unknown depths. Nor am I alone. Surely you have a care for Aurelia’s well-being?”
Frado curled a lip at him, at the unfairness of using a woman—one for whom he felt a fondness—as a bargaining chip.
“If we do not return by this time tomorrow,” Battista continued unashamed, “you must make your way to Rome. Find Vispasiano di Polisena. He will have the tools and the men ... should you need them.”
Battista’s gaze found hers and all manner of animosity seemed set aside. They had seen Hell together, true, but as too much knowledge did at times, it brought only more fear. She watched as his dark gaze rose from the narrow opening in the cliff side to the mountain of rock towering above it; no one could survive the weight of it, no matter how many men and how many tools tried to lift it away.
She lifted a shoulder a smidgen, one side of her mouth curling, a gesture of cautionary acceptance. He cast her doubts aside with his smile, slapped his hands upon his thighs, pushing himself up, and offered her a hand.
“Are you ready, Aurelia?”
She gave no answer—who could be ready for such an expedition? —but took his hand and stood. Packing a few extra pieces of food in his pack and slinging a skin of watered wine around his shoulders, Battista led her away.
With Frado h
ard on their heels, they approached the portal. Turning sideways, pulling in his breath, Battista slipped through. With her small frame, Aurelia turned only slightly askew to fit through the space.
They stopped but a few feet into the cave, each taking a bearing on the mammoth structure in which they found themselves.
The late day’s light streaming through the crevice shifted and Aurelia turned back, almost laughing as Frado stuck only his head in to see them away. Any hint of laughter died in her throat at the man’s confused gaze; something bothered him, but his befuddled expression put no name to it. She looked down at herself, where his gaze led hers, finding a blaze of light suffusing her whole body with its brilliance.
Aurelia sprinted forward, jumping into Battista’s shadow.
“This way, Battista.” Tugging on the sleeve of his jerkin, she led his gaze in the opposite direction.
The entrance hall of the cave was as large and vast as a great cathedral, one filled with boulders and fist-sized stones gathered in haphazard piles, their composition of mostly pale gray and watered red. A large and fast-flowing stream rushed through the center, its trickle echoing in the emptiness. More like a chamber than a cave, there was a complete absence of any of the concretions normally found in a grotto.
No more than a few steps inward and the path diverged, trails formed by nature itself. One branch followed the rushing water, veered to the left and down into darkness. The other headed up, toward a golden glow.
“Sì, upward to the light, as all those passing through Purgatory desire,” Battista agreed.
The path rose round the circumference of the cave at a constant angle, the gradient never increasing or decreasing. And yet its tedium—igniting fear of endemic infinity—fatigued them. Here and there a recessed opening revealed a graying sky; on the opposite side the golden light of dusk set the cave aglow, so close to the outside of the mountain did they travel.
As they passed one such opening, high upon the wall, Battista stopped beneath it.
“Look, Aurelia, the Pyxis.” Battista pointed at the cluster of stars hovering over the mountain, just as the painting had shown. “It hangs in the northeast sky. If we see it again, we may keep our bearings.”
Aurelia agreed with a halfhearted nod, turning back to the path before them. The pale drawings upon the walls had started just a few paces back, and she ran her hand along the bumpy stone surface, gently rubbing off dirt to see them better. Seeing her motion and the glyphs uncovered, Battista pulled a small handled brush from the pouch at his back, sweeping the dirt of untold years away from the crude sketches.
If they feared that—as in Hell—the tortured souls depicted would appear to spring to life and give chase with the illusion, the fear subsided as their stories became clear. Death came calling in each of the three scenes, the harbinger of the hereafter brought forth by a different means. In one a soldier died upon the battlefield, in another an old man died upon his bed, and in the last a young man fell to a scarring illness. In every instance, the recently deceased reached upward, for the Paradise awaiting him, if he was worthy, in the heavens above.
“Will death come for us now?”
Aurelia spun round; Battista’s angular face, ever more beautiful in the shadows cast by the eerie light, creased with worry.
“We can never know when our ultimate moment may come. We can only hope to be worthy of it,” she replied.
Battista frowned at her as if her words meant to insult, not encourage as intended, but an explanation faltered on her tongue.
Just ahead of them, the passage narrowed, not only in width but also in height. From a wide barrel-vaulted passage, it shrunk to a single-file lane and finally to an almost-complete blockade. Her reflection at the ease of the ascension had come too soon, as she had known it would the moment the idea slipped through her mind. Aurelia regarded Battista’s tall, lean physique with a sidelong study; neither of them would make it through the small opening, not even if she scurried on her belly.
“Ah, our first challenge,” Battista said as if reading her thoughts.
“Not a challenge,” Aurelia grumbled. “An impasse.”
They reached the barricade just as the path tried to turn once more to the left. It was not a pile of stone, but a wall; the opening was not a hole, but a fissure, no more than a missing tooth in the mouth of the wall.
Aurelia stepped to it, hands running along the sharp, hard surface, fingers searching for some sort of latch or perhaps another keyhole. Finding nothing, she banged on the stone, a desultory attempt; her physical strength could not overcome such a surface.
“Are we stymied?” She turned to Battista, surprised to find him standing quite still, face contorted in deep thought.
“No.” His head waggled slowly, changing direction, becoming an enthusiastic nod. “No, we are not done yet, donna mia, not at all. We must bow.”
“Bow?”
“Yes, bow. Did you not see the rendering of Satan falling from Heaven?” he asked, referring to the last drawing they had passed. “What brought his fall?”
Aurelia tilted her head. “Pride?”
He gave her that smile then, the one so striking, so intimate, and she lost thought for a moment, swimming in the sight of him.
“Our humility must bend us to the sin of pride.” He stepped forward, voice full of more than just explanation, but of genuine repentance. Looking down and around, he pointed to the floor.
Aurelia saw it, too, an outline of a basic rectangular shape, carved shallowly into the stone floor directly in front of the fissure.
Stepping to the rim of the stone square, they clasped hands, kneeling upon the slab as they bowed.
The instant their weight shifted from their feet to their knees—shifting to the carved-out shape—it lurched beneath them.
Aurelia yelped in surprise; Battista reached out, hand flapping in the air, finding nothing to grab onto to keep them from plummeting downward.
With a rasp upon their knees, the slab struck bottom, having fallen no more than a few feet. No longer did an impassable wall tower in front of them; what had been little more than a fissure had become a triangular crawl space, its existence revealed by their plunge upon the stone.
Battista bent low, staring through the opening. “There is another chamber but a few paces away,” he told her, inching forward. “Our next stop, though it seems far too easy.”
“We are only just beginning,” she reminded him as she watched him fall to his hands and knees and inch forward, as she did, following his waggling posterior.
It took a few short minutes to traverse the crawl space; Battista stood on the other side, reaching out a hand to help her to her feet.
Brushing off the dirt from her skirts, she raised her gaze, breath snatched from her lungs. Sparing a furtive look at Battista, she found him in an equal state of awe.
The enormous cavern opening out from the point of entry defied imagination.
“It is a sculpture,” Battista breathed. “As fine as any by the hand of Michelangelo or Rustici.”
With the wonder of an ant looking up to a flower, Aurelia stared enthralled at the formation above their heads. “It looks like a willow tree.”
Battista laughed with unabashed delight. “It does, doesn’t it?”
Long, lean projectiles of a pale clay-colored stone hung from the unbearably high ceiling, as if the protrusions were fluid and swayed from the stone overhead, some of the trickles so thin as to look feathery, fuzzy, like the fronds of a weeping willow.
“As if you could picnic beneath its branches,” Aurelia envisaged fancifully.
“Where is that light coming from?” Battista pointed to the far left corner of the chamber and the circle of golden light illuminating it to near brilliance.
Aurelia followed the crepuscular stream of light upward, but that portion of the ceiling lay hidden behind the largest froth of protrusions. “There must be an ocular above.”
Battista shook his head. “But it is da
rk out. The sun set some time ago.”
With a shared grimace, they set out across the hall, the tinkling of tiny streams following along, the air whistling and moaning through the projectiles. They followed the course of the streams as they would the narrow streets of Florence, the light at least three lanes away. As they drew closer to its brilliance, they spied a huge form rising out of the ground, the rounded top no more than inches from the roof.
There was nothing illusory about the shape. The mammoth wings, the heavy robes, the halo carved above its head. The gigantic statue was an angel; in its two crossed hands, it held two swords, both aflame.
They circled around the base of the angel, the faithful at the feet of the deity. Just beyond the sphere of light, the ceiling lowered and curved, forming a plainly discernible but closed archway. In silent negation they agreed, neither perceived how to open it.
“Is that a lever?” Aurelia stepped behind the giant seraph, pointing straight up.
Battista came beside her; the stone pin sticking out from the angel’s back looked like nothing if not a lever, for the trough it sat in ran down the figure for several feet, the opening and the dowel at a height just above Battista’s reach, the bottom end of the furrow level with his knees.
“Let’s give it a try, shall we?” With a gentle tug on her arm, he pulled her back, out of harm’s way. Eyeing the lever, he spat on his hands, rubbed them together, bent his knees, and jumped.
He grabbed onto the stone bar, hung, all his weight upon it, and for a moment it moved not an inch. With a sudden grinding of stone, it plunged, taking Battista with it. At the same time, the angel’s mammoth wings flapped, the breeze a brutal gust, buffeting and pushing Aurelia backward with its force.
The light grew dim, the whoosh of air threatening to douse the swords’ flames.
Battista’s feet touched ground once more, the lever not reaching the bottom of its gully. The wings stilled, and the flames grew full and bold again, the stench of burning oil thick in the air.
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