Irenicon

by Aidan Harte

  “Stay back, Lucia,” the nun said. “Let’s see what she really knows.”

  “I’ll show you!” Sofia focused as they traded punches. The nun was still superior, but she wasn’t toying with Sofia anymore.

  “If you saw this coming, why did you teach me?”

  “You’ll have to understand that yourself.”

  “Have I hurt your feelings?”

  “No. I’m just not going to be around much longer.”

  The nun suddenly stepped around Sofia’s arms and planted two fists into her torso. Sofia flew back and landed just outside the square.

  The nun did not press her advantage.

  “The sooner, the better,” Sofia spit. She pushed Lucia out of her way. “Both of you, stay out of Bardini territory. Stay away from me.”

  Sofia watched the deal done from an abandoned tower. So many torches were assembled on the bridge that it looked like a great shining hourglass.

  While their masters stood face to face, discussing terms and making a great display of their amity, Morello and Bardini bandieratori waited on the banks for a war cry that never came.

  In the shadows, Sofia’s face burned with shame. Every man in Rasenna could hear them trading her like livestock, haggling over the price. The deal was done; only the exchange of goods remained. The Doctor spit on his hand. Morello overcame his fastidiousness and shook it. War asks only blood; peace demands sacrifices more brutal.

  “What were those lights on the bridge last night, another shipment?”

  Fabbro and Vettori looked at each other. After they told him, Giovanni went straight to the Baptistery. His foremen seemed to think the deal was the best thing for Rasenna: even if the Small People north and south were content to live and work together, they’d have no choice but to follow if the Families went to war.

  “Signorina Scaligeri understands the choice she’s making. And it’s about time,” Fabbro said vehemently. “Why should the Small People make every sacrifice?”

  The nun was in the enclosed garden with a younger novice, performing a kind of slow-moving dance together.

  “Sister, they’re making Sofia marry! I think she’s doing it to protect me. It’s wrong. I thought you could—” Giovanni stopped as the Reverend Mother turned around. “How did you get that black eye? Oh—”

  “This is nothing,” she mumbled. “I had a brother once.”

  “You asked me once before if I would fight for her. Well, I’m ready to do whatever it takes.”

  “You’ll get your chance. She will not marry.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do you know your bridge will bear an army marching over it? Because you have studied such things. I too have studied. It’s hard to describe things that are shifting, but Sofia’s destiny is even stranger than yours.”

  “I need more than that!”

  She glanced at the girl. “Go into the chapel, Isabella. I’ll follow shortly. Captain, imagine a line, curved like a wave. It could be a man’s life, or a town’s, or a nation’s. Now imagine a second line, rising when the first falls, a reflection—the intervals can be minutes or centuries. When they intersect, wonderful or dreadful things happen. One thousand three hundred years ago, Christ was born, and His birth intersected with the reign of a wicked and jealous king. If the currents had met a year earlier or a year later, the child might have escaped the sword. What kind of man would He have become? His Mother spread the Word, but She could never do what He was meant to, and so we remain unredeemed. Bernoulli ensnared the buio with a song of absolute power. Their first sin, like Man’s, was murder.”

  “But the first sin was—”

  “A lie to justify the Curia’s ignorance. Engineers have committed many sins, but seeking knowledge was never one. God wants us to understand His creation. All sins are forgivable but for murder; after Cain slew his brother, paradise was lost. Now we have tainted the water. Murdered, murderer, and Messiah, the same person. Man and buio, fallen together, together we must be redeemed.”

  “But the Christ did die—”

  “At the wrong time! The choice must be understood! That is what makes a sacrifice.”

  “Sister, what has this to do with me or Sofia?”

  Her head hung heavy with age. “Time has a direction, just like a river. In the flood of centuries, there are moments when History can change course.”

  He looked down. “What if you’re wrong? If one of us is not—”

  “We are none of us what we seem. Our nature is hidden to us until the hour comes.”

  “How will I know when that is?”

  “You’ll know. The earth itself will shake.”

  As the hot season ended, a storm rose up in northern Etruria. With the indifferent hunger of locusts, the Twelfth Legion crossed down the peninsula. Towns paid tribute, and in return Concord brought not Justice but Law, a thing like Nature’s violence: containing no hate, no love, and no mercy. Feuding factions made peace and prayed together till the storm passed.

  All sought shelter, the good and the wicked together. Some were passed over, some perished. And the storm moved on, on toward Rasenna.

  CHAPTER 35

  Though we are more concerned with the Wave itself than the Philosophy that created it, it would distort our subject to ignore his sublime calculation.15 In an age disfigured by War, its beauty is too seldom mentioned.

  Bernoulli’s maps were a boon for Concord’s soldiers, but that was accidental; Bernoulli had surveyed Etruria’s plentiful rivers to learn their secrets. And learn he did, discovering that apparently random undulations were no such thing: as rivers travel from source to sea, friction causes erosion, which causes winding, even as land tilt, gravity, and momentum carry them forward. This contest between order and disorder was governed by a certain ratio.16

  From the hour of this discovery, Bernoulli’s study changed course too, to focus on all things governed by Chance.17 The Curia’s inconsistent mathematicians thought and taught that Perfect Numbers occurred as randomly as the stars fret Heaven, but Bernoulli soon proved that they were governed by the same ratio that governed his rivers. He appears to have found religious significance in the fact that every Perfect Number has a negative twin, “a fallen angel” forever seeking its reflection’s annihilation.18

  So by happenstance foundations were laid. Likewise, Bernoulli’s earlier work on Harmonics, Number-theory, and Time proved a vital springboard for the leap from Wave Theory to Wave Technology, a happy confluence that no one, the unworldly young boy least of all, predicted.19

  Unleashing the Wave would be simple enough now that he had a unifying system. The remaining problem, he told the Senate, was how not to destroy Concord along with Rasenna, and after seven years’ toil this last minor inconvenience was surmounted.

  The Wave struck Rasenna, dividing her forever, and the example of that great city brought low was sufficient to shatter the Southern League.20 Yet for Senator Tremellius and his party there would be no laurels; while the Engineers succeeded in controlling most of the Wave’s physical effects, the Senators took the brunt of the political storm unleashed in Concord.

  CHAPTER 36

  For good or ill, the week promised to be eventful. Tomorrow there would be celebrations as the bridge opened. The day after, the Concordians would interrupt their march south to collect Rasenna’s tribute. On the third day, Sofia would turn seventeen, come into her inheritance, and marry to share that inheritance with a new husband.

  Many pitied the Contessa, but few doubted the union was necessary to prevent war in the imminently-to-be-united town. For Sofia, it was simply a sentence of death and a uniquely cruel sentence, for not only could she see the scaffold being assembled from the tower, she must participate in its assembly.

  Fabbro’s wife, the imposing Donna Bombelli, led the invasion of Tower Bardini. Her army of giggling matrons, who’d come to prepare Sofia’s bridal clothes and trousseau, repeatedly said the dress, one of her late mother’s, hardly worn, became her splend
idly. The overdress was of deep burgundy velvet and sewn with pearls and lavish gold trimmings; the underslip was a bright poppy-red, the same color as the impractically long sleeves dangling almost to the ground that obliged her to clasp her hands as though praying.

  The high waist, just below her bosom, accentuated the womanly shape she had made such efforts to conceal in recent years, as did the neckline, cut low and wide, the type of coy bait an ordinary girl would display for a husband. Sofia wore her Herod’s Sword to distract from the expanse of skin. The high collar, which accentuated the gracious tower of her neck, was set with jewels. She would get used to the discomfort, the matrons insisted, as they washed and powdered every inch of her exposed skin till she resembled a porcelain Madonna: Our Lady of Dynastic Marriage.

  Her hair—they’d insisted she let it grow for the last month—was pulled tight to flaunt her unlined brow and then wrapped laboriously in a crépine that would keep its shape “no matter how vigorously you dance!”

  She endured the tittering matrons’ innuendos with growing impatience. She was, of course, forbidden a glimpse of the other dress. Her wedding gown promised to be an even more elaborate prison. Her new, coddled life was a reduction in every sense. She had misunderstood the terms of the Contract: she was merely Rasenna’s proxy: the town itself was being married.

  Her mood was foul when Donna Bombelli finally let her see herself in the long mirror. “Aren’t you pretty, amore?”

  She couldn’t speak. The woman staring back was noble and beautiful and strong, the ideal Contessa she had carried in her heart as a motherless girl. It was immaterial how—or if—Giovanni remembered her after this, but somehow it blunted her grief to think this was how he would see her last.

  The opening fell on the Feast of the Assumption, so it was only correct that Our Lady of Rasenna, garlanded in roses, was the first to cross. The Sisterhood, much reduced, like every Rasenneisi institution, carried the old statue from the Baptistery and chanted the Virgin’s Hymn, followed by excited northsiders pressing around to pin notes on the Madonna, who was bearing the hopes of every Rasenneisi that day.

  She saw him in the throng of southsiders crammed into Piazza Luna waiting for the procession. There was no point weeping or fighting, so she blushed and played the docile Madonna they’d made her. To be Contessa was to be first, first to suffer; you carry the town, it carries you. When a sacrifice is needed, you are the well-fed lamb ready for the occasion. Your life is not your own.

  When the hymn ended, the Reverend Mother untied the flags and cried, “In the name of the Virgin, I declare Rasenna Bridge open!”

  The crowd cheered as the procession took on a carnival pace, pouring into the piazza.

  Giovanni was caught in the crush as the Madonna approached. After fighting his way out, he found himself next to—

  “Sofia?”

  Now he saw her as Rasenneisi had always seen her: a Scaligeri, something more than a person.

  “You look like a Contessa,” he said, smiling calmly, though he wanted to grab her and steal her away. “Shouldn’t you be with the Doctor?”

  “Probably, but I’m still your bodyguard, remember?” Her smile didn’t reach her glistening eyes.

  “I know why you’re doing this,” he whispered. “You don’t—”

  “But I do! And who knows, some good may come of it.”

  There was nothing he could do. He pointed at the Madonna. “What did you wish for?”

  “Don’t heathens know how wishes work? That’s between us girls.” She joked to distract him from the truth that all this joy came at the price of hers.

  The procession slowed in front of the Palazzo della Signoria, and as Quintus Morello called for attention, she had to admit he wore the full regalia of gonfaloniere with patrician dignity. Beside Quintus stood the Doctor, and between them was a small chest filled with dull silver coins.

  “Many of Rasenna, and I am one,” Quintus started, “predicted this bridge would bring only discord, but I look around today and see before me no northsiders, no southsiders, but Rasenneisi all. Today I see citizens in congress, friends united, families made whole: a town ready to know itself once more! Concord’s army will pass through and have this tribute tomorrow only because Rasenna is united today. Tomorrow we may disagree, but we feud no longer; that is yesterday. Today I extend another bridge, the hand of friendship, to my friend Doctor Bardini.”

  They shook hands and then together dropped a final soldi into the tribute chest to the sound of applause and cheers.

  Once the Madonna was installed in the loggia, the carnival proper began. Rasenneisi mingled: cousins who had never before met embraced; bandieratori who’d only interacted in street battles bought drinks and toasted each other’s health. Thanks to the bridge, foreigners were not the rarity they had been; there were even novelty acts, juggling and tumbling to triple-time galliards to entertain the boisterous throng.

  Sofia pushed into the crowd surrounding the puppet show, and when the engineer was accosted by crew members offering congratulations, she kept a tight grip on his hand; they would not be separated today.

  “Congratulations, Captain,” said the Doctor over the hoots and laughter.

  Sofia stiffened, but she did not release Giovanni’s hand. The tension between her and the Doctor, renewed since the Reverend Mother’s allegation, was more fraught for being unexplained. Sofia told herself the old woman was nothing but a lying troublemaker, but her accusation remained horribly plausible, and it was hard to meet the Doctor’s eye with the burning memory of Isabella’s family tower as a great chimney. Was he truly capable of such deeds?

  Giovanni examined the miniature stage before them. “What is this?”

  “Don’t you have the Marionette Theater in Concord?” Sofia shouted in his ear. “Poor thing! They take a story everybody knows, from history. This is, let me see—”

  Draped in a shabby gown, a bulky puppet bounded on stage, precariously balanced on the edge of a narrow bridge and cried, “None shall pass!” to the mass of soldiers on the other side.

  “Horatius on the bridge?” Giovanni ventured. “In our version, he betrayed Rome to the Etruscans.”

  “Ours too—but in these shows the roles are played by locals.”

  “Ah, I see,” said Giovanni, “and Horatius is—the Doctor?”

  On the other side of the audience, Sofia noticed Quintus Morello and his sons. They’d chosen a spot where they could keep an eye on the show and the Doctor.

  Much to the crowd’s amusement, the “Etruscans” wore Concordian uniforms. A tall, slender one pranced up to Horatius and cried,

  “Good knight, wouldst thou make way

  Please. Tell me what I have to pay.”

  The ambassador puppet did a double take as he noticed his stump. “Aahhh!”

  “I swear, by Jove, that Rome will last,

  Eternally for none shall pass!”

  Horatius waved his black banner bombastically.

  “But nothing lasts so well as Gold,

  So best be rich before you’re old!”

  Horatius caught the oversized soldi and stood aside as the ambassador and troops hopped across the bridge.

  “Some shall pass I meant to say.

  Welcome to Rome, enjoy your stay!”

  Sofia watched the Doctor smile and raise a glass to Quintus. “Most generous, Gonfaloniere!” he shouted over the hoots.

  The children in the crowd laughed, all but one; Sofia’s former sparring partner was holding a little girl’s hand. Isabella had grown as pale as Lucia during her stay in the convent, and she had lost her freckles. Sofia wasn’t surprised at Lucia’s stony demeanor—the novice never smiled—but it was odd behavior for a little girl. She followed Isabella’s gaze to the Morello; Valentino was laughing, delighted with his caricature.

  The Doctor leaned over to Sofia. “Why have you stopped going to the Baptistery?”

  “You’ve been spying on me?”

  “The information came un
solicited. Don’t trust that woman.”

  “I don’t. Answer my question. Who told you?”

  He pretended to watch the show.

  “Valerius,” she said.

  He laughed loudly, then whispered, “He’s taken an interest in Bardini fortunes. You seem to have lost yours. I’m not angry. After tonight, it won’t matter anyway.”

  Horatius laughed villainously:

  “Would it turn new friendship sour

  If I asked for just a little more?”

  The ambassador threw an oversized treasure chest.

  “Traitors are insatiable, that I know

  If you want more money, here you go!”

  Horatius wailed as the bridge began to collapse.

  “Lend me a hand! It weighs a ton!”

  “Alas, Horatius, I have but one.”

  Horatius sank under a wave of coins, and the ambassador addressed the audience with mock solemnity.

  “Alas, the Roman could not swim.

  Betraying traitors is no sin!”

  The curtain dropped with a cymbal crash. The Doctor and the gonfaloniere applauded with the crowd, toasting each other. He suddenly turned to Sofia and embraced her.

  “Sofia, obey me—this once,” he whispered urgently. “Slip away quietly, get to the tower. It’s not safe out tonight.”

  She pushed him away. “Doc, you promised! What have you done?”

  The Doctor’s eyes glazed over as he transformed into a smiling reveler. “Speak up! I can’t hear you.”

  “What’s wrong?” said Giovanni.

  “Nothing, nothing,” she said quickly, backing off and forcing a smile.

  This was serious; normally, the Doctor wouldn’t say anything until afterward. If the target was Giovanni, she was there to protect him.