by Ian Whates
Diana Pinguicha is a Portuguese Young Adult fiction writer. She is known for helping authors improve their manuscripts and for giving advice on how to approach literary agents. She has given several writing workshops and taken part in panels at Portuguese SF&F events. In her story, “Heart of Stone”, she mixes science fiction and steampunk, creating a page-turner which once more asks the question: ‘What makes us human?’
Pedro Cipriano, founder of the publisher Editorial Divergência, contributed to the first Steampunk Almanac as author and co-organised the 2017 edition. He is a prolific author of short fiction, with works published in several anthologies. In 2017, his debut novel, As Nuvens de Hamburgo (The Clouds of Hamburg), won the Choice of the Year award at Fórum Fantástico, the annual Portuguese SF&F convention. In “The Desert Spider”, he wrote a Steampunk short story set in an alternative Porto at the beginning of the 20th century, where Portugal's Northern Monarchy Uprising succeed. It features Ana, a young spy, whose mission is to steal top secret military secrets for the Republic of Lisbon.
Pedro Cipriano
Sintra, Portugal
April 2018
Videri Quam Esse
Anton Stark
Translated by Anton Stark
The note came wrapped inside a fig in his supper.
Come soon. I have found a way to beat God.
By the time the paper burnt to ash, he was long gone.
From Albrecht Dürer’s Rhinocerus:
On the first of May in the year 1513 AD, the powerful King of Portugal brought such a living animal from India, called the rhinoceros. This is an accurate representation. It is the colour of a speckled tortoise, and is almost entirely covered with thick scales.
“It’s dead, Your Majesty.”
“What do you mean, it’s dead?”
The Indian bowed again and shook his head, a gesture which frankly bothered Garcia no end. His Royal Majesty, King Manuel the First, by the Grace of God, King of Portugal and the Algarves of Either Side of the Sea in Africa, Lord of Guinea and of Conquest, Navigation, and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India, sank into his chair, looking annoyed.
“It is just so, Your Majesty. It is dead,” the Indian repeated, and made the sign of the cross. He was still making it, with a fervour normally reserved for frenzied zealots, when the king shooed him away and a guard dragged him out. Garcia de Resende set down his pen, stared at the tapestry on the other side of the room, and waited. The king’s fury showed in every angry step he took towards the window, where he could glare at the walls of the menagerie below, and then back to the throne to sulk in silence. Garcia looked down at the work in front of him, a hefty stack of shipping reports. In the margins, he’d managed to scribble two fifths of a song before the Indian had burst in with the news. Not half bad work, if he did say so himself.
“I promised that beast to the Pope,” the monarch finally grumbled. “And now it’s dead.”
Garcia could empathise. Manuel was the richest prince in Christendom, Portugal the richest kingdom. Yet it would have been easier to gift the Pope a solid gold rhinoceros, made from the treasures of Africa by the best smiths of Rua do Ouro, than to bring a live one from one of the many faraway lands where the naus made port.
“Can we be sure, Your Majesty?”
Manuel scoffed. “You heard the man, didn’t you? Unless death means something else entirely where he comes from, the bloody thing’s gone. Even though I promised it. To the Pope.”
Garcia tidied the papers on the desk, knocking one side of the stack and then the other against the mahogany. He took care to remove the sheet containing his song from the pile. He had more need of it than the Chancery.
“Quite so, Your Majesty. And what Your Majesty has promised, Your Majesty must deliver.”
“I can hardly fetch another one in time, can I?”
Garcia shook his head.
“There is no need, Your Majesty. We must make do with what we have.”
Manuel raised a bushy eyebrow.
“Do you have an idea?”
“Aut viam inveniam aut faciam, Your Majesty. With Your permission, you shall have your rhinoceros ready to be sent to the Holy Father within the month.”
“Do you have any ideas?” asked Bernardo, pouring the last dregs of the wine into Garcia’s cup. The tavern overlooked the Tagus, bathed in dwindling sunlight.
“None whatsoever,” said the chamberlain, draining the wine in a single gulp. “I thought you could lend me a hand with that.”
Bernardo rapped his knuckles on the table. He was twenty years Garcia’s junior, but he had a mind as keen as any in Christendom. Keener, in fact, since it didn’t seem to be overly constrained by the Church’s teachings. This had enabled him to train under Zacuto’s tutelage, to read not only the Jewish genius’ mathematical tables, but also the texts of the Kabbalah and treatises from the old Orient. He’d learnt the secrets of locomotion and physics from a prodigy in Italy, metalworking from the Helmschmids in Augsburg. Even Erasmus sent a letter or two his way, on occasion. It was enough knowledge in a single person’s head to warrant Garcia’s constant protection as chamberlain to His Majesty. If anyone could produce a rhinoceros out of thin air, Bernardo de Salvaterra was that person.
“You’re asking me to make you a rhinoceros.”
“Am I?”
“I can’t breed one, I can’t fetch one. I could have it stuffed, but you wouldn’t need me for that.”
“Quite right. I need you to unmake the rhino’s death.”
“What if it was God’s will?”
Garcia shrugged.
“Remember the Bible. God is entitled to a little mistake every now and then.”
Bernardo looked at the empty jug as if hoping for assistance. None was forthcoming.
“I mean, without seeing the thing…”
“You can see it whenever you wish. The sooner the better,” Garcia said, and thought that the phrase would work marvellously into his song.
“But even if I could do something, it would be dangerous work. Blasphemous. Heretical.”
“Not to worry. I have the king’s ear…” Garcia said, mentally revising the second stanza. How did it go again?
“Not to mention the materials, of course, and the labour…”
“… and the king’s purse as well.”
Bernardo looked away towards the sunset. It was gold where he gazed, where the river met the sea.
“There’s no point arguing with you, is there?”
Garcia smiled. “For a genius, you took your time to work that one out.”
It is the size of an elephant but has shorter legs and is almost invulnerable. It has a strong pointed horn on the tip of its nose, which it sharpens on stones. It is the mortal enemy of the elephant. The elephant is afraid of the rhinoceros, for, when they meet, the rhinoceros charges with its head between its front legs and rips open the elephant's stomach, against which the elephant is unable to defend itself. The rhinoceros is so well-armed that the elephant cannot harm it. It is said that the rhinoceros is fast, impetuous and cunning.
It lay on its side, a mound of grey hide, grey flesh, grey bone, all stinking to the heavens above.
“It’s quite the beast,” Bernardo said.
“It was,” said the Indian, Ocem, wiping away a tear.
“It will be,” said Garcia, prodding the carcass distractedly with the tip of his boot. “Do you know what you need to do?”
Bernardo sat on his haunches. He ran a gentle hand on the rhino’s horn.
“I do. My Italian master taught me how to mimic natural movement in a suit of armour, and I believe the principle can be extrapolated to suit our purposes. But you’ll have to bring it to my workshop. In secret. I don’t want any onlookers.”
Ocem spoke quickly, beating Garcia to the punch.
“What are you going to do to him?” he demanded. “This is a sacred animal! It was a gift from my Sultan, Allah bless him. I will not allow you to defile it!”
Garcia cros
sed his arms in front of him.
“We are not going to defile it, you fool. We are going to bring your rhino back to life, so that it can be given to the Holy Father in Rome. Understand?”
This time, the Indian didn’t shake his head. His look was ice, sharp as the tip of the dead animal’s horn.
“I do not like this, Christian. That is unnatural. That is sorcery. What is dead must so remain. You will not lay a finger on this poor animal.”
“You’re forgetting yourself, Ocem.”
“I am not. It was a gift from my Sultan to your King, Christian. You cannot touch it.”
The chamberlain’s eyes grew hard.
“I speak with the king’s voice.”
“No king is greater than Allah, and only he can breathe life into the world.”
Garcia buried his face in his palm. This was getting them nowhere. With a nod, he had two guards drag the Indian away, kicking and screaming and cursing his name in foreign vowels. The chamberlain nodded, disappointed. This much shouting in the middle of the morning was making him forget his planned third stanza.
“I do believe that was uncalled for,” said Bernardo.
“Might have been. But at least now we can work in some degree of peace and quiet,” Garcia said, humming verses under his breath.
The ending to the song eluded him.
It eluded him because of Bernardo’s secret requests and reports. So far, he’d asked for copper and iron and coal, two smiths, a tanner, three jewellers and a shoemaker. He’d requested access to certain books in the royal library – translations of the Ancients, particularly the Greeks – and a few tomes Garcia had to smuggle in himself for fear of the Bishopric. He’d requested gold, enough to get more than a few curious looks from the chancery office.
It eluded him because of the screams that came from the palace dungeons, loud enough that the jailors had petitioned the head jailor to petition the major-domo to petition the king’s chamberlain to petition the king to have the prisoner muffled, moved, or put to death. Sometimes the cries woke him during the night. Sometimes when he woke up he noticed his wife sound asleep next to him, and he knew he wasn’t really hearing them; they were in his head, and he was clutching his crucifix so hard it hurt.
It eluded him because of the king’s impatience, exacerbated by the murmurings around court of the precious beast’s demise, and the deadline, his own idiotic deadline, drawing closer with every passing hour.
It eluded him because maybe, just maybe, the whole thing hadn’t been the best of ideas to begin with.
This rhinoceros is covered all around in plates of leather scale so thick as to be almost metal. It is said the Indian prizes its hide for armour and shield, for almost no weapon can dent or pierce the rhinoceros’ skin.
“We have a problem.”
Garcia could see that. He could see their problem scattered around the workshop in bits and pieces, being worked on by a motley crew of artisans under Bernardo’s direction.
They’d taken apart the animal. It had been scooped out like a mussel, and where once there had been organs there was now a skeletal copper structure propped up on a platform, to which several metal plates were affixed. Some of them had been covered with the beast’s hide, and looked every bit the real thing. Others were still bare, which spoilt the overall effect. All in all, little more than half of the beast had been reassembled, and the deadline was closing in fast. The tables were strewn with clockwork mechanisms, wheels and coils and things he didn’t know the names of. The head, hanging from a winch in the ceiling, lorded over the workshop like a thurible in cathedral mass.
“Do tell,” said Garcia as Bernardo guided him towards the back and then up, to a loft that housed the polymath’s study. The clanging from workmen around them was almost deafening. Bernardo sat the chamberlain down in a chair cleared of books and papers, before collapsing onto a stool in the corner.
“We can reproduce the bones and joints,” he said, pointing to diagrams lining the walls. “We can tack back skin, we can stuff the head, we can induce movement… but it has no animus. No soul. No creature can function autonomously without one.”
“I thought you said your Italian master…”
“Induced movement. A set range of motions, repeated. That is all we can do. I tried everything,” he pleaded, and Garcia believed him. “I scoured the old texts. I found this thing, by Hero of Alexandria, a ball of metal that generates movement when heated. It’s brilliant, it works just fine. But even that is hopeless without a soul to guide the machine. It would be like having a puppet on strings and no-one to pull them. It would fool the Pope for all of ten minutes, if that, if prepared beforehand. So much for the king’s ambitions then.”
“A soul. I dread to ask, but is there a way of giving it one?”
“Not that I know of, no. Unless…”
“Unless…?”
Bernardo eyed the bookshelf next to them. Then he shook his head.
“The Indian was not half wrong, you know? Only God should breathe life where there is none.”
Two days before the rhinoceros was due to be loaded onto a ship and sailed away to Rome, and still no news from Bernardo. Garcia’s song had been suffering as a result – sheets of paper tossed into the fire, one after the other, filled with inanities and minute, scared handwriting. For a man who prided himself on serenity and steadfastness, he was letting the situation get the better of him.
So they’d have to deliver a simulacrum. The king would be even more furious, of course, and would probably have him moved down to the chancery or removed from court altogether, sent packing to his holdings in Évora in disgrace. Still, he’d live. He’d keep to his songs, he’d have Bernardo make him drawings and plans for a palace, and maybe by then the blasted Indian would’ve shouted himself to death. No reason to be anxious.
The note came wrapped inside a fig in his supper.
Come soon. I have found a way to beat God.
By the time the paper burnt to ash, he was long gone.
The workshop was deserted. Only Bernardo waited for him, like a spirit, holding a dirty glass lamp. In the gloom, the disassembled rhinoceros looked like something out of hell. He wondered what curses the Indian would spout if he could see the animal now.
The polymath guided him back to his study, bid him wait as he set the lamp on the table, reached for a shelf and pulled out a roll of parchment. It was an old thing, scarred and creased and dirty. Bernardo laid it out near the light, and both men pored over it. Latin, and from before Constantine had been given his sign at the Milvian Bridge. Garcia’s breath frayed as he read on. When he reached the end, he could not resist but to make the sign of the cross – out of relief, more than anything.
“How much do you believe in God, after all?” Bernardo asked apprehensively.
Garcia folded the manuscript with care.
“Enough to know,” he handed Bernardo the document, and in his head he could see the final stanza in perfect form, and he smiled, “that He rarely cares, but always provides.”
The animal eats leaves and shoots and pieces of wood and coal for digestion, and its belly is warm like a great furnace. Smoke rises from its nostrils and it bellows like a bull. It has dark eyes, small and sullen, and intelligent as to be almost human. It is one of God’s prodigies on Earth.
Nuremberg, 1515.
He scanned the assembled populace for Bernardo, but then remembered his friend was indisposed. He’d probably be so for quite a while.
It was something to be seen. The crowd gathered around the beasts – forty-two of them, including caged leopards and panthers and parrots and fine Indian mounts, and all the necessary accoutrements and keepers and feed – around the soldiers, around the musicians decked out in Indian silks, around the carts laden with treasures beyond count. The canopies above the procession, the solemn looks of the clergy with their crosses held high. The elephant, with a little Indian fellow on its back, laughing as he guided the beast along and parted the throng
in fear.
By his suggestion, the embassy to the Eternal City would go by land, dazzling the peoples of Europe along the way. The rhinoceros, however, would travel by sea, with a cargo of silver treasure and spices, along the southern coast of Castile and then France and then Italy. The less the beast could be seen out in the open, the better.
The nau was docked in front of them, near where the new tower-fortress would be built to defend the entrance to the river. In the royal tribune, King Manuel, every bit the perfect prince, clad head to toe in gold and velvet, bade him approach with the wave of a hand.
“Well done, Resende.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty.”
“So the thing wasn’t dead then?”
“It was ill, Your Majesty. Our airs did not agree with it. The problem required… a delicate approach.”
Manuel laughed. It occurred to Garcia he’d rarely seen the monarch laugh. Perhaps it took what they’d done to please a king.
“I don’t know what you did or how you did it, but the beast seems even livelier than before. Certainly more belligerent. The Holy Father will be most pleased.”
“Indeed so, Your Majesty.”
“I would like you to convey my personal greetings to His Holiness when you meet him.” He’d managed to convince the king to appoint him secretary to the ambassador, Dom Tristão da Cunha. He had a mind to stay as far from Lisbon as possible, for a while. “You have done me a great service; it is you who should have that honour.”
“Thank you again, Your Majesty.”
“In a way, it’s a relief to see the beast go. It is a marvel of God, but not worth the trouble it causes. Speaking of which, what happened to that idiot, Ocem? You did get him released, did you not?”
“Oh, worry not, Your Majesty,” Garcia said. The beast was making its way up the planks. As it climbed onto the deck of the ship, it stared at the royal tribune, with a look Garcia could only describe as sad. Prodded by its handlers, it trudged unceremoniously forward – a slow, inevitable march. A fitting end to the song, he thought. “I think he’s around here somewhere.”
