Irenicon

by Aidan Harte

  EPILOGUE

  To walk the streets on summer days listening to the towers babble was sweet. Returning from a Signoria meeting, Sofia reflected on the year that had passed since the Wave. The bridges between the towers were permanent now, and neighbors spent hours on them, gossiping and arguing and watching the world go by for the pleasure of criticizing it. The pale flecks of cotton, blown in on a temperate breeze from the Rasenna contato, floated indolently through the streets, and the sun poured down until the cobblestones rippled like water. She often imagined that she walked in the heart of old Rasenna with her grandfather and father proudly watching over her.

  Nobody guessed it at the time, but the siege inaugurated the third contest between Rasenna and Concord: the final and most terrible war. There was more than a year’s respite before Concord regrouped, time enough for Rasenna to rebuild broken walls and grow still stronger.

  Rasenna had withstood the most powerful weapon Concord had. It was predictable that the cities of Etruria would believe that it had engineers equal to Concord’s; they neither understood Natural Philosophy nor believed that anything could be stronger. Still, it was true that a miracle had come to pass, and the cities of Etruria lost no time forming a new Southern League for collective security, the chance of revenge, and, most of all, a stake in the Empire’s assets when it collapsed.

  This was premature.

  Though the First and Second Apprentices had perished, leaving a mere boy in charge of an Empire that would never again be seen as invincible, much remained unchanged. The Guild still ruled Concord, and Concord still ruled northern Etruria. The Twelfth Legion was lost, but eleven other legions continued to fight and win the war in Europa. At best, Rasenna had been given an opportunity; whether it used that opportunity wisely or squandered it as before depended on the men and women who led it.

  Under Pedro Vanzetti, Rasenna’s Engineers’ Guild expanded as rapidly as Concord’s had more than three decades ago—but there was no question of Rasenneisi engineers abandoning their names.

  Family banners hung proudly from family towers, no longer cause for contention or rivalry; the only banner that would be carried into future battles was the city’s, as both a weapon for her bandieratori and a Standard for her knights.

  The men of the Hawk’s Company, tired of scratching a living in a country that could no longer afford condottieri, petitioned to stay in Rasenna, and Colonel Levi was nominated podesta. Vowing never to become too respectable, he accepted the honor.

  Sofia crossed the bridge and stopped at the gap to watch the river. Though she had thrown off her rank, she was still conspicuous among the crowds. Stall owners whispered to civilians that this was the Contessa Scaligeri—the noblewoman who had returned to Rasenna with an army; she might have seized power, but in giving up her birthright, she had instead slain the serpent of faction forever.

  There were certain bandieratori and certain towers that urged her to reconsider, but the Contessa—Sofia—insisted there would be no return to aristocracy in Rasenna; the chain was broken. Her only ambition was to sit in the Signoria as one respected voice among many and to support Gonfaloniere Bombelli.

  She turned away from the river and walked back to the workshop. In the months after the second Wave she’d struggled to come to terms with a grief that existed without death, though she knew that Isabella was right: Giovanni was not really gone. He was with her forever, as the Irenicon was one with Rasenna.

  The Scaligeri banner had found a new home on what once had been called Tower Bardini. The Doc had been faithful to her, so she in turn kept his workshop alive, and it was as thronged with students as ever. Now she briefly conferred with Uggeri before climbing up to the tower roof.

  Up here, she felt as if she could call upon the Doctor’s ghost for counsel. She peeled an orange as she looked down on the bridge and pondered the questions still unanswered since that terrible, wonderful day: the Reverend Mother and her own visions had spoken of a choice she would have to make, yet it was Giovanni who had sacrificed everything.

  Why had the Apprentices been so intent on destroying Rasenna instead of simply reconquering it?

  What were they so afraid of?

  She still felt that a terrible ghost was loose in the world and a wonderful promise. Her recurring nightmare always started the same way:

  At night, with wind and rain howling through the ruin of the Molè’s great hall. Indifferent to Nature’s agony, the charred angel looked down at the circle of torch-bearing engineers standing around the repaired glass column. In the center, the Third Apprentice, now First, now wearing the red, looked balefully up at the statue.

  “This is a great honor,” the boy said nervously. “We are but vessels.”

  “We are vessels,” came the engineers’ response.

  “Although changed I shall arise the same,” he intoned as he approached the waiting coffin with faltering steps.

  When the door hissed closed and there was no one to hear, he whispered, “Madonna, preserve me. I am afraid.”

  The star dropped into darkness. A storm that had been incubating for centuries attacked the dark white city, with bolt after bolt striking the lantern at the Molè’s summit. The charges shot through the triple dome and lit up the great hall as they hit the angel’s upraised sword. The engineers fell back in fear as their torches were snuffed out.

  In the underworld, a moment later, the charge shot from the second angel’s sword through the void of the pit and into the lake.

  The water’s surface boiled with buio in agony.

  When the coffin rose from the filthy black water, the boy inside was no longer crying.

  The thunder that followed was the sound of Heaven cracking open.

  Sofia awoke. It was just before dawn, and she realized she was not alone. The air was humid, as if an imperceptible mist hung in the air, and on her skin were droplets like morning dew.

  The buio stood at the window, waiting for the morning light.

  “Is it you?” she asked.

  The sun came up over Rasenna and swept into the room. The light swam over Sofia, and she understood the responsibility offered.

  “Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” she said, and felt at once the quickening.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my readers: Ernesto Brosa, Matt Whelan, Ciaran Lawless, Sheena Murphy, Fergal Haran, Michael, and Norah Harte for advice on various drafts.

  Thanks to Nicola Budd and the Quercus staff, who got us to the church on time. A big to Lavie Tidhar for assistance with Hebrew incantations.

  Thanks to my intrepid agent Ian Drury for seeing the potential of Irenicon and to my wise and wonderful editor, Jo Fletcher, for helping me realize it.

  Aidan Harte, 2011

  FOOTNOTES

  1 One example will suffice: “All that is required to discover a new world is to sail until one runs out of water. Bernoulli did something immeasurably harder: he illuminated that sphere we stumbled over since Time began, before we had even seen the darkness.” Sycophantic drivel like this may keep Duke Spurius Lartius Cocles in print, but it is not History.

  2 In one charming version the babe floats down the Irenicon in a basket, rejected by mother and river both. Others have it that he had no human master; an Angel taught him the Divine Masonry. Predictably, many southern versions replace this Angelic instructor with an erudite Demon.

  3 As elaborated in Volume II, from a trivial theological disagreement came schism. A reforming branch of the Curia proposed that the Original Sin was not Seeking Forbidden Knowledge but Murder. In the heat of the controversy, the Empiricists (as they became known) went further: no knowledge was forbidden. After the Heresy trials the surviving Empiricists resigned themselves to the study of Nature. Within a single generation the Engineers’ ecclesial origins were forgotten.

  4 That generation’s fate is a question for another History. Most of his first champions denounced him eventually: Plagiarist, Heretic, Tyrant, and so on. In turn the Inquisition d
enounced many of them, while others were simply discredited. After the Re-Formation there was small appetite for Theology.

  5 The Author’s father.

  6 He consumed facts “like a pig, eating all that was put before him,” according to contemporary diarist and wit Ciuto Brandini (Born 1304–Executed 1348).

  7 “Pace Pythagoras, material proof of Perfection, X3 + Y3 = Z3, possible?” Since it was found scribbled in a proof margin, most scholars consider it a whimsy rather than a question proper.

  8 Two decades were to pass before the Most Holy Inquisition made their jaundiced interpretation of this passage the centerpiece of Bernoulli’s trial for heresy.

  9 He was, however, already universally lauded as a second Daedalus and had just been made Chief Architect of St. Eco’s Cathedral. A decade would pass before it acquired its current title.

  10 The morphological changes occurring postmortem make corpses inefficient for anatomical study but ever practical; when subjects expired, he used them for “harmonic” experiments. It is unlikely, however, that these attempts to find “Divine Music” to animate the inanimate produced anything but ghastly smells from his student quarters.

  11 A set of reforms pushed through the Senate by Bernoulli’s obliging Patron, Senator Tremellius.

  12 Drawn from Bernoulli’s inner circle, the brilliant young men known as the Apprentices.

  13 By unhappy coincidence, eight Generals died in the last decade of the war. The four remaining were purged in Forty-Eight. Our current Generals’ limited tactical authority makes them pale beside these predecessors.

  14 Unpopular in the Senate; this voicing of intellectual independence changed the way the Guild saw itself and becomes, in hindsight, one of the early intimations of the reforming spirit of Forty-Six. Afterward Bernoulli decided never again to bow to intellectual inferiors. As ever, he planned patiently.

  15 As less conscientious commentators have seen fit to do. Conscious that he is a relic of an obsolete pedagogy, the present Author proceeds with gratitude for his Masters’ patient explanation and the needless caution that any errors are his own.

  16 A ratio of extreme and mean, i.e., the Golden Section of the Etruscans. Before this discovery, Bernoulli dismissed Clerical reverence of Classical authority as “ancestor worship.” He soon began studying the Disciplina Etrusca.

  17 Luca Pacioli, our first First Apprentice (served 1353–1357), commented on “this drive to unify in Bernoulli’s thought, strategy and administration. His method was to find in separate truths, one larger.”

  18 This research prompted private misgivings, with Bernoulli noting in the margins of his Disciplina Etrusca, “I have plucked the Tree of Knowledge bare; the great Spiral is now visible and, with it, the great Secret: the War between Order and Chaos is itself the cause of Beauty. I have built a Tower tall enough to spy on His design, and for that am damned.”

  19 Did the Wave will itself into being, he wondered in later life. Did it cast a shadow on the Past as well as Future? The question, variously phrased, appears often in his last notebooks.

  20 We live with the unexplained side effects to this day. After two decades of research, the pseudonaiades, colloquially known as waterfolk, or buio, remain a mystery, a subject where even the use of the word creation is contentious. Were they created, or were they freed? Whatever the truth, after the more dreadful example of Gubbio, a dread of unweaving other hidden bonds of reality prompted the moratorium enforced to this day.

  21 With such hypocrisy was the revolution nourished. Consider: the same Curia that commanded Bernoulli to make the Wave subsequently characterized it as a usurpation of God. The same Curia employed Natural Philosophy when it suited them. The same Curia’s theologians were pleased to use Pythagoras’s description of the flawed third dimension as a mathematical explanation of Man’s fall, a practice that Bernoulli gently reproves in the Discourse as “unsound.”

  22 Choice examples of the Scholastic category mistakes that impeded philosophical progress for centuries.

  23 When the first proscription list began with Senator Tremellius’s name, speculation began that he was manipulated from the start. Right or wrong, the truth is the Re-Formation consumed its Author.

  24 Which makes the current generation of Historians’ willingness to repeat old myths and Imperial propaganda doubly disappointing. Our vocation is to doubt, to fearlessly probe and dig, however unsettling what we unearth may be to earthly power. Our first duty is to truth.

  25 Concord had been locked in a mortal struggle with Rasenna, so while Rasennennesi bewailed their fate in 1347, they understood it had been earned. Gubbio, an unimportant backwater, had maintained neutrality throughtout the conflict; however, it was deemed to be a perfect site for the second test of the Wave. Without any formal declaration of war, Concord sent a Wave substantially more destructive than that which divided Rasenna thirteen years before. It incurred universal censure and, more seriously, created the Frank-Anglo pact that has so protracted our current Europan war. Filippo Argenti, the second First Apprentice, criticized it as “a callous failure, technically and politically.” The drain of resources halted Imperial expansion at a crucial period, and though Gubbio was extensively studied, the aftereffects remain mysterious.

  26 Taken from Bernoulli’s address on the Re-Formation’s fifth anniversary. This subtle revision of the meaning of Re-Formation, the expansion of Concordian society rather than its perfection, became more pronounced over the decade. By Fifty-nine it had transmuted into the bellicosity that made the second test possible. That is not to give credence to the theory that Gubbio’s purpose was Gubbio; personally, the present Author finds trite the fashion of describing the test as a demonstration. That Concord has not since employed the Wave proves nothing.

  27 Is one of these secrets the answer to the Dialogue’s last question? I inquired of my Masters what such a proof would prove. Pythagoras describes two-dimensional perfection as X2 + Y2 = Z2. The rumored proof proving that X3 + Y3 = Z3 is mathematically absurd. Perfection and reality are incompatible.

  28 It was Concord’s awed citizenry who dubbed it the Molè, usually translated as Miracle, although I find the secular Wonder renders it more accurately. Bernoulli himself gave it its less reverent handle.

  29 Though it must be obvious to the Reader that such thorough research has as seldom been tempered with such rare insight as it has been so eloquently expressed.

  30 Too rigidly defined now, some argue. The Empiricist school and the more generous vision of the Naturalists continue to find their adherents within the Guild. The second First Apprentice, himself an aggressive Empiricist, did much to foster the materialism of our contemporary Guild. Our current First Apprentice takes a more embracing view; like Bernoulli, Guglielmo Bonaccio is a bridge builder.

  31 Owing to the dearth of records. If Bernoulli was secretive in his public works, imagine, Reader, how much more jealously he concealed his researches alchemical.

  32 He investigated folktales of autoconception with credulity marvelous to our age of reason.

  The archives contain accounts of ewes producing lambs without rams, frogs changing sex, fish inseminating themselves, and reptiles dying to be reborn with new skin, new youth.

  33 Metamorphosis is a recurring theme. As the Virgin made water become wine, so he theorized that water and man were interchangeable states.

  34 The first two books of the Disciplina Etrusca concern Divination and Interpretation. But judging by dog ears and annotations, the last book, concerning Ritual, is the volume that most preoccupied Bernoulli.

  It too trisects: the first book concerns Lifespan, of everything from People to Empires. The second, those Worlds we visit in mediation and death. The last book, on Reading, purports to be a key to hidden truths in Scripture; imagine a lock that is key to itself!

  35 Why he assumed Concord’s end and the Second Coming would occur concurrently is unknown. The date, he speculated, corresponded to the relationship of the Golden number to its co
njugate, approximately –0.618. “The first describes all that is Perfect. Its Dark Twin (the absolute value of the length ratio in reverse order) must then describe all that is Wrong. The perfection of an anti-God.” An elegant hypothesis, but what the Devil he meant by it, we have no idea.

  36 What it says that we, who live surrounded by his monuments, have remained ignorant of this, his shadow, is a question for Philosophers more than Historians. If nothing else it reveals the slipshod scholarship of the present Author’s colleagues.