by Giulio Leoni
He skipped to the last page. The bishop’s solemn prose sang out the end of the Emperor in the tones of a classical drama. The agony of illness, the false hopes of apparent recovery. The troubled tangle of passions and rivalries around his death-bed. Then he was startled to see a note that Mainardino recorded as if in passing: ‘… news was brought to Frederick of the death of a little son of his, a novice with the Franciscans. And Frederick wept over him.’
Shortly after this the bishop returned to the affairs of court. Dante stopped to reflect, biting his lip. Could this be the son of Bianca Lancia? But if he was dead, upon whom did the Ghibellines rest their hopes? The whole venture of Rome was based on the charisma of the imperial blood. And wasn’t it the return of the clan of the Antichrist that Cardinal d’Acquasparta was so afraid of?
Fascinated, he began reading again. Page after page of deeds, of pain, of glory, which his mind drank in as a thirsty man drinks water. At last, having finished the manuscript, Mainardino described the poisoning of the Emperor, ‘killed by the hand of the incomplete man, who was’ …
Dante turned the page, hoping that the text might continue on the other side. But the sheet was blank: and the last scrap of parchment had been carefully torn away, as if to remove the final lines that mentioned the murderer’s name.
If someone had been seeking to protect the man responsible for the crimes, why not get rid of the whole previous page, or indeed the whole book? Why hide only the name of the murderer, when it would have been possible to erase all traces of the crime itself?
Or had it been Bernardo himself, perhaps to remain the sole guardian of so terrible a secret? But if he was about to make his work public, why destroy the very text that could have backed up his claims?
He had to find the historian at all costs. He looked around, trying to find some answer to the doubts that haunted him. For a moment he had imagined himself close to the solution of the mystery. Or at least to the discovery of the guilty man and his shadowy accomplice.
But Bernardo’s disappearance dealt his theory a fatal blow. If the man was one of two murderers, he would surely be far away by now. The poet suddenly felt uneasy. Apart from the book, there were no objects of value in the room, nothing that a thief could not easily have abandoned without regret. If, on the other hand, his theory was incorrect, then at that moment Bernardo was close to the deadly blade, and with his death the last chance of solving the mystery would be lost for ever.
He turned towards the stairs, in the hope of seeing the shadowy figure of the historian, safe and sound.
Down below, someone was sitting at the communal table.
Dante climbed down the stairs and silently walked up behind him.
But somehow the man must have noticed his presence. ‘Welcome, Prior. Sit down,’ he heard the man whisper.
The prior threw caution to the winds. He walked past the table and stopped in front of Marcello. The doctor was sitting there with his eyes closed, motionless, with a big book in front of him. On the corner of the table there was an hour-glass: all of the sand had collected in the bottom half, as if the man had spent some time immersed in his work.
‘You seem to be able to see in the dark, as cats do,’ Dante exclaimed with surprise.
‘Your step is light, and yet it has an unmistakeable tone.’
The prior moved slowly along the edge of the table, trying to make out, by the faint candle-light, what Marcello had written.
The old man, still without opening his eyes, twitched with impatience. ‘Stop hovering around me and sit down at my table. Have you found the key to that tangle of clues that you talked of?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘And what about the intentions of Frederick the Great – have you reconstructed his plan? What dwelt in that mind of his before Death came for him?’
Dante cast his eyes down and bit his lip. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.
‘For God’s sake, Messer Durante, how difficult was it to say those three words?’ the old man exclaimed triumphantly, suddenly opening his eyes. ‘And yet they’re enough to moderate your pride, to bring you back within the realms of the human. “I don’t know”! Sculpt them in bronze above your front door!’
Dante clenched his fists, conquering the impulse to get up and leave. ‘It sounds as if you know much more than I do,’ he said.
The old man picked up the hour-glass and tipped it over. His face had softened, as if he wanted to apologise for his sarcasm a moment before. ‘The certainty of my knowledge comes from the passing of time and things that I have seen and measured,’ he added mildly.
Dante shrugged. ‘The certainty of knowledge!’ he repeated angrily. He was leaning on the table, head in his hands. He stared at the sand that had just begun to flow. ‘It is only an illusion, just as time is an illusion of our senses,’ he added bleakly. ‘Look at these little grains. Like these, the grains of our time run out in hours and days. And what do we know, lost in this dust?’
‘Are you losing your faith, Prior?’
‘No … but never more than in these last hours have I felt I was wandering amongst mirages. Even my star seems darkened, with its useless light,’ Dante replied through gritted teeth.
‘And it will happen as it is written in your stars. Triumph, if that is what awaits you. Or defeat, if that is what the heavens decree.’
‘I don’t believe in predestination. If I fail it is because of the weakness of my reason and my virtue, not because of some cold spark that gleams far away.’
Marcello contemplated his last words for a moment. Then he shook his head and with an angry gesture struck the papers in front of him, hurling them to the ground. ‘Not a cold light, Prior!’ he cried. ‘But a noble echo of the divine splendour. The light that calls all things into being and gives them names. Before Adam’s voice. Before Creation itself. Fiat lux, His first act!’
As it descended, the bundle of papers had fallen apart, revealing sheets covered with calculations and astronomical symbols. Dante’s attention immediately revived. ‘You should take greater care of your writings,’ he exclaimed, bending down to pick up the fallen pages. ‘Great works of ancient genius have been lost through careless gestures.’
‘Nothing will happen that must not happen. Nothing will happen that has not been written from the first day in the book of destiny,’ Marcello insisted, his voice breaking hoarsely. He held out his hands to regain possession of the notebook.
Dante, after rapidly realigning the pages, tried to read a little of what was written on them, but the other man snatched them from his hands, as if fearing contamination. He was surprised by the old man’s impetuosity. ‘Do you really believe that we are governed by an unknown force, even in our most ordinary acts, in contempt of the freedom conferred upon us by the Creator?’
‘The freedom granted to us is the same as that granted to the acorn to become an oak. It is only the limitation of our senses, deceiving us into seeing alteration where there is none, that forces us to see the whole of destiny only in fragments.’
‘But that would mean that the very movement of our bodies is an illusion,’ Dante objected. ‘And yet we are surrounded by the most obvious proof of the contrary, precisely in these heavenly bodies upon which your science is based. Does not the sun rise every day; does not the moon wane with perfect precision every month? And even if those bodies were fixed, does not their light at least move, carrying their image to us?’
‘No! Light is not the propagation of light, as the pagan al-Kindi proclaims! It is without motion, fixed like the stars on the First Day!’
‘Then in those stars man could have read of the pomp of Babylon, the pyre of Ilium and the furrow that first marked Rome, and the throne of Peter and the second Empire, and Frederick the Great and finally this very night, and our meeting …’
‘Who tells you that this is not the case? If …’
‘You are blaspheming, Marcello! Adam was created free to choose between good and evil. And if that were not s
o, God would have tempted our progenitor solely to witness a spectacle of degradation that already played out in His mind.’
‘Then look at this!’ cried the old man, beginning to draw a square on the parchment. ‘You will have the summary of your life, and all that awaits you in what remains of it. And you will have the pain you deserve!’ He went on scratching nervous lines, turning the original square into a complex grid. He delineated the series of Houses, then arranged within it the symbols of the planets. He worked from memory, without reference to calculations of any kind.
He must have had a prodigious mind to remember the angular positions of every heavenly body on the ecliptic, Dante reflected admiringly. Or else he must already have drawn that diagram in the past, and now was simply retranscribing what he had discovered in his secret studies.
But before the poet could express his doubt, Marcello had finished. ‘Here are the signs of your hour on earth, Messer Alighieri. The blazing sun in Gemini, in the final surge of inconstant spring, which governs your ambiguous, dual instincts, or couples with wavering Mercury, the lord of your thieving science of ancient knowledge, and vain as he. Your insatiable concupiscence, governed by the star of Venus in exaltation in Cancer; your ferocity, turned blood-red by leonine Mars. And then …’
‘I see you have spied well on my life so far,’ the poet broke in mockingly. ‘There are many in Florence who could give you a much more concise account!’
‘But no one else could show you what remains of it.’
Dante stretched out a hand to pick up the parchment, but the old man’s energetic hand clamped it to the table.
‘Nine is your ruling number. The same number that governed the destiny of Frederick, who died in the face of the ninth two-headed shade.’ The prior wasn’t sure that he had understood, but before he could say anything the other man continued. ‘At the age of nine you experienced your first illumination, at eighteen the ravenous bite of lust. At thirty-six you will know the despair of banishment. You will die far away in exile, a death without the comfort of hope. That is my prediction.’
Dante had listened to the last words with his lips tightly pursed, as rage and perplexity filled his mind. ‘And you, Marcello? Where is your death written?’ he replied with derision. ‘Or do you have certain knowledge only of the future of others?’
‘My end is written, as they all are. In the hour and the place set out by the stars, and which I know already. It will be a liquid death that carries me off, governed by the liquid sign of Pisces. From water I have come, like all human beings. To water I will return.’
Dante silently gripped the chart. Then he clenched his fingers as if to seize his fate in his fist.
Night
THE REAR corner of the Baptistery almost touched the old buildings that crowded around it, separated from them only by a narrow alleyway. At that point the mass of stone completely concealed the cathedral of Santa Reparata, and not so much as a faint glimmer from the torches in the square reached as far as that.
Dante had been waiting for an hour now. A cry rang out at regular intervals, perhaps an invalid wailing out his anguish. Or perhaps someone being tormented by demons. He slipped slowly down the wall of the building until he was sitting on his heels. A torpor born of heat and exhaustion held him in its grip. He felt his mind wavering, at the portal of dreams. And yet sleep, which lay in wait somewhere behind him, seemed to want to stay at a distance, as if his mind was as yet unwilling to free itself from his exhausted body, which was now on the point of complete collapse.
After drifting into unconsciousness for a moment he opened his eyes, watchful once more. He thought he had heard light footsteps approaching. Then a dark outline interposed itself between him and the exit to the alleyway. This new danger revived his strength. He rose to his feet, clinging against the wall, motionless and alert. He clutched his dagger and prepared to repel the intruder, if he was someone other than the person he was waiting for.
The figure that appeared in front of him was completely enveloped in a cloak of light linen that covered the lower part of his face. On the man’s head was a hat of woven straw like those worn by country people, pressed down over his forehead and leaving only the eyes visible.
And yet the prior had immediately recognised the unusual visitor, who stared at him heedless of the steel point brandished only a few inches away, even though a single torch barely pierced the darkness of the loggia.
Monerre came forward and stopped a few feet away.
‘I know you’ve been looking for me,’ he said.
Dante waited for him to continue. Then he leaned towards Monerre until his lips almost brushed the man’s cheek. ‘I know all about your machinations. Not a hoax for money, as your movements might have led us to believe. That was just your cover, in case anyone grew suspicious about you, or worse still, discovered the trick with the Virgin.’
He stopped, waiting for the Frenchman to reply. But Monerre remained silent and merely stared at him. The poet felt himself becoming increasingly irritated. ‘In fact, there’s something even more perfidious about your plan, I’m sure of it. Whoever came up with it wanted the trick to be discovered, to reinforce the conviction amongst your enemies that they were only up against a bunch of secondrate crooks. And I too fell into that trap, but only briefly.’
Monerre’s eyes glinted. ‘And what do you believe now?’ he said softly, finally breaking his silence.
‘Your plan was quite different: to repeat the pattern of the Fourth Crusade, when men, lances and horses were recruited for the Holy Land, but were instead unleashed against the Eastern Empire, with a view to loot and plunder. Your scheme was the same: to unite the faithful, stir them up for the task, fill their minds with dreams of salvation and booty. Conquer their simple minds with the glimmer of a miracle. And meanwhile fill key posts with trusted Ghibellines. And then, on the way to the Holy Land, this was your true objective: Rome! To take it by storm, as once Constantinople had been taken. After assembling your army in the squares of the great city, pretending to wait for the papal viaticum, it would have been an easy matter to cause utter chaos merely by revealing, through a half-closed door, the light of a gold chalice, a tabernacle encrusted with jewels …’
The Frenchman was staring at him in silence, his one eye flashing in the darkness like a cat’s.
‘There, the Colonnas and other big Roman families would be ready to provide their armies to back you up, just to escape Boniface’s claw-like clutches, helped by the money of the men of La Serenissima!’ the poet went on. ‘That was the plan of the Fedeli, wasn’t it? That’s the treasure you’re all inventing tales about: the coffers of St Peter’s.’
‘Come with us, Prior.’ Monerre’s voice had become calm and distant. But there was a hidden fervour in his words.
‘And not only theirs!’ Dante cut in.
‘Come with us,’ Monerre repeated. ‘We will avenge the last Emperor, the murdered eagle.’
‘With you? With the Order of the Templars?’ hissed the prior.
Monerre stiffened. Then he nodded slowly. ‘How did you find out?’ There was no disappointment in his voice, only surprise. The embarrassment of a little boy caught playing a forbidden game.
‘I was sure of it, listening to your words. The story of your travels and that practice you told me about, of sharing a single mount between two horsemen. That is the trick of the Templars: not to quicken the journey, but to have a horse that is always fresh when the moment comes to attack. That was how you disconcerted the pagans, the reason why you always won your battles with half the number of forces. The practice that you turned into a symbol on your seal.’
A pale smile lit up the Frenchman’s face. ‘Our seal – you are right. And so many poor fools believe that it symbolises the poverty of our order … Come with us,’ he repeated for the third time. In the faint light of the lantern his scar stood out like a mark of the devil on the shadowy face.
‘To bow down and worship the hideous Baphomet, the vi
le two-headed god? I clearly remember your praise of Janus, your other secret symbol. The double demon who dwells in your hearts, who is even made the figurehead of your ships, like the one lost in the marshes of the Arno. You heap nobility on what is merely a path of heresy and perdition.’
‘So the ship arrived!’ the Frenchman exclaimed, interrupting him. ‘And where …’
‘It arrived with its cargo of death. Is that what you were waiting for?’
‘You don’t understand, Messer Alighieri.’ Monerre shook his head. Then he looked up, as if to draw inspiration from the stars that filled the firmament. ‘How far your judgement is from the truth, and unworthy of a mind like yours. One of our most sacred symbols is the head with the double face. But it is no pagan idol …’
‘Then what is it? A symbol whose features pervert the precise harmony of Creation? What could be sacred about that?’
‘Peace, Messer Durante. The highest aspiration of righteous minds, which you yourself have celebrated in your writings. Those two faces, which together contemplate the whole of the horizon, symbolise a supreme accord made in the lands that witnessed the birth of Christ.’
‘The Pactio secreta … but that’s a legend,’ Dante said, caught by surprise.
‘No legend. In Jerusalem, in Frederick’s presence, amidst the fury of battle vainly being waged against the enemy armies, an accord really was reached between us and the Islamic sages. It isn’t written on the parchments, but the image that we have borne with us since then marks its intangible seal. The figure’s two faces represent the West and the East, different but united in a single idea of peace. Facing opposite directions so that nothing escapes their gaze.’
Dante listened attentively, as unease rose within him. ‘You have betrayed your mission, which was to redeem the Holy Land,’ he said frostily.
‘No, Messer Durante. We have only betrayed the vain ambitions of little men for something much higher. A truly universal empire.’
