The Warring States (The Wave Trilogy) (13 page)

‘The show of unity against the Small People proved to each side they had much in common. A deal was struck, money changed hands and the keep marched out, flags up, honour intact, between the skeletons of the beggars and beggars’ wives
and beggars’ children, and if that was not success, I don’t know what is.’

Torbidda felt the story’s moral was somehow dubious, but lately he’d found such distinctions impossibly difficult. ‘Are you a pilgrim too?’

‘I was, but now I wait in this wilderness to make ready for the king.’

‘Ours just died,’ Torbidda said wryly.

‘Permit me to contradict you, Child. The First Apprentice is merely a steward. He keeps the lamp burning and awaits his king’s return. See—?’ He pointed to the city.

‘I see nothing,’ Torbidda began, but just then the lantern atop the Molè lit up, its glow taking its place amongst the stars.

‘Behold! A star in the east. It burns for you.’

Torbidda watched it for a long time. ‘If I go back, I’ll have to do a wicked thing.’

‘You have no experience in this area?’

‘Nothing like this. I fear my penance for it will be to become a sacrificial lamb.’

‘Who told you so? We all have parts to play: handmaid, king, wise man, fool – but you’re no lamb. I see better than most – you’re a wolf! And a wolf must wolf. These pilgrims chose to run; you see how Fortune rewarded their cowardice. Choose life and fight, or stay here and fuel my fire.’

The fat-fuelled fire burned frantically, the Fraticelli’s voice was a drone like a sated fly and Torbidda felt sleep creeping up on him. ‘And how do you know my part?’

The blind man looked heavenwards. ‘I read it,’ he said, then laughed as if he saw Torbidda’s look of scepticism. ‘Oh, not there! The stars are one book, but I prefer another.’ He moved to the side. A little away from both fires lay an old man’s body, abdomen open, entrails exposed. Torbidda gagged, even though he was an experienced dissectionist – this looked like the work
of a ravening beast. The blind man reached over and held up some trailing guts. ‘Here’s the honest part of a man. That fellow was the pilgrims’ guide. He led them to me, and he
told
me’ – he shook the entrails like prayer beads – ‘to wait here for my king.’ The seared air between them warped and twisted tiresomely. Before his eyes shut, Torbidda heard him say, ‘Turn, Majesty! Turn and be a wolf.’

Torbidda awoke with his horse nuzzling him. He sat up and turned into a swollen, unblinking Cyclopean sun. It blinded him momentarily and robbed heat from his vision so that he saw the world in tones of blue. He did not recognise it. There was no sign of the Fraticelli, nor the charnel mound, only a few scattered bones the sun had been obviously been parching for years. The wind doused him with foul dust. He wrapped a scarf around his face and rode back to the city, to take whatever Fortune had in store for Cadet Number LX.

The Opera del Duomo wasted lifetimes in procrastination, wasted them as waves beating on the rocks are wasted, before it was dismissed in disgrace. In the Twenties, when a young Girolamo Bernoulli was making his name, the embarrassment of Concord’s unfinished cathedral was compounded by the triumphant completion of Rasenna’s. The subsequent appointment of an unconventional and relatively untested young man as capomaestro (St Eco’s youngest-ever) was either an inspired choice or a sign of how desperate the Curia had become
.

Far from letting this task overawe him, Bernoulli caused a minor scandal by scathingly dismissing the Curia’s unrealised designs.
⁶
He described St Eco’s walls as ‘squat, sober and thrifty, like a merchant’s wife, and just as ugly.’ The dome that had defeated generations of brilliant architects he pronounced ‘unambitious’.
⁷
Before he would place a single brick atop another, he insisted on knocking down the walls that had stood for decades. That he was allowed to do so is revealing of the Curia’s desperation
.
⁸

He had climbed for hours, and each hour the wind grew more outraged and assailed him more wildly. It screamed abuse as it whipped between the ragged peaks, so intent on hurtling him down that he had to hug the steps until his fingertips fused with the cold rock. He did not feel his skin coming away as he ripped them off the freezing stone.

He was numb: best to be numb when there is nothing left to feel but pain. He had not even bothered to justify the morning’s events to himself. His conscience must be numb too – perhaps it had atrophied. It was certainly superfluous at this altitude.
Take nothing that will slow you down
. Agrippina told him that before the ascent began. He remembered seeing emptiness rush into her eyes as the hate disappeared. He remembered the perfunctory applause as he limped out of the Conclave. He remembered Grand Selector Flaccus’ confusion as he shook his bloody hand and dazedly pointed to the steps.

Take nothing.

When he reached the summit of Monte Nero he found himself standing between two rows: men and women in long black gowns on the right, soldiers on the left, consuls and praetorians. The plain was utterly flat, as if some giant sword had cut the stone with a clean swipe. The cathedral occupied most of it but there would have been space enough for a legion to assemble if such a thing were legal: the only soldiers allowed up here were senior officers and praetorians. At the end of the path was the Molè. Steep steps led to the great Doors of History,
and there, flanked by Castrucco, the Prefect of the Praetorian Guard, stood a figure whose orange robes whipped about him like the last leaves of winter.

Torbidda paused to catch his breath. The consul on his right, a short, genial-looking fellow with a V-shaped smile and small twinkling eyes like a doll’s, leaned forward and said, ‘A little further, Cadet. Walk tall!’

He stumbled through the guard of honor, vaguely recognising a few Collegio members, and, thanks to Leto’s tuition, guessing the identity of others. He tried to keep his head high, but his body trembled and he feared his legs would not carry him. At the top of the steps, the Second Apprentice waited, wearing the orange and a triumphant smile. Torbidda stopped at the first step, waiting for instructions.

The new Second Apprentice was adolescent, but he still had a boyish quality. Torbidda knew his name, of course – Pulcher was something of a Guild Hall legend, a first-blood who’d actually lived up to his promise. The chief viper of a generation of vipers, he represented the logical end of Bernoulli’s revolution. Naturalism, Empiricism, questions of right or wrong, historic destiny; none of these abstractions troubled Pulcher. He was a kite in the wind, turning whatever way was expedient, with all his thought bent to one ambition: to wear the red. He had a weak chin and watery eyes, and his youthful face was dominated entirely by a cumbersome nose. Everything receded from the prominent tip, which he thrust forward aggressively with menacing curiosity. He clapped his hands once and the rows came alive. The consuls filed up the steps past Torbidda and disappeared into the darkness. When Torbidda took a step to follow, the Second Apprentice snapped, ‘Halt! No Cadet may enter here. Those are the clothes of a Cadet.’

Torbidda realised immediately what was intended: another
shearing. Again he saw beyond the game to its intention. He stripped and stood shivering in the snow.

‘Who are you?’ Pulcher asked imperiously. He at least was enjoying his part in the ritual.

‘I am the Third Apprentice!’ said Torbidda through chattering teeth.

Pulcher laughed, ‘I see a naked lamb.’ He nodded to the praetorian prefect. ‘There is no charity here.’

The door closed and the icy silence of the night surrounded Torbidda. He looked into the sky, trying to see beyond the falling snow to the stars. They fell together, impossible to tell apart. The world was crumbling, unequal to the stress it bore. The drifting snow was a constantly collapsing curtain in front of the colossal door, a masterpiece of an earlier era. The antique style suggested its creator was Curia-trained. If so, he had paid the Curia back with a parody of the traditional schematic of the hereafter. The Re-Formation infected everything. The cressets were so placed that the light only illuminated the bottom half. Heaven was dominated by a gentle figure of the Madonna. With surprise and shame Torbidda looked on the compassionate face he had spent so many hours contemplating when he ought to have been fighting.

‘You,
here?’
he whispered, tears trickled down his face. He wondered whom he was mourning, Agrippina or himself? For, truly, he was dead as she.

The Virgin looked on in rhapsody at the figures playing amongst the surrounding clouds. They carried trumpets and long horns and lyres and harps. Plump cherubs chased each another, and these She regarded with special tenderness.

Her gaze led Torbidda’s eyes to a particular angel soaring with arms stretched skywards in praise – or … was he screaming as he fell? The change was so subtle one could not say where it began. This winged creature was not a saint but a
carrion-feeding demon; that singer, a screaming soul. That babe shyly turning was a sly black imp. Cherubs rushed to impale themselves on the long pikes of Hell’s black-armoured infantry, and so it went, up and up, until one entered another space where soft clouds became jagged stone and twisted metal. The architecture of Hell was eye-cutting desolation. The inverted spires of the ruined temples were the first clue that the World’s orientation had changed. Soaring angels became falling souls, and those who survived the spikes and hooks fell into the gaping maw of the swinish creature with greedy, bulging eyes that squatted in the murksome darkness. The door was executed in high relief, but here the goldsmith had excelled himself. The black goddess was wreathed in shadows that nearly obscured her vile drooping teats, dripping snout, curled and broken tusks, her hairy grasping limbs, her sharp hoofs that crushed the damned underneath and her roving hungry eyes—

They fell on him.

Torbidda fell back with a yelp as the door opened. He was unsure whether hours or moments had passed. Behind the row of praetorians he glimpsed the consuls lining the circumference of the crossing under the dome. In the centre was a treelike pillar of glass and beside it was a colossal statue of an angel, thrusting a sword heavenwards. The praetorians parted and the Second Apprentice advanced until he stood in the same position and asked again, ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Sixty.’

‘A Cadet’s name. Yet you wear no uniform. Who are you truly?’

‘My name is …’ He tried to dredge it up, but it would not come. He had lost it somewhere in the darkness – that place where Agrippina’s dying eyes were staring, making him dumb.

‘Wait, I think I know you – are you not called Torbidda?’

This time he knew the response with certainty. ‘Torbidda is dead.’

‘I have not invited you in,’ Pulcher said as Torbidda began to climb the steps.

‘This house belongs not to you but to him we are Apprenticed to: Girolamo Bernoulli.’

‘Proto Magister, now and forever,’ said Pulcher, breaking into a smile. ‘Then welcome, Third Apprentice! Dress and follow me.’

A consul came forward, taking tiny steps – the same twinkling-eyed fellow who had whispered encouragement. As he handed Torbidda a yellow bundle, he leaned in. ‘Well done! Usually this routine goes on for an
age
. Took Pulcher half the night to figure out he didn’t need permission to enter.’

Torbidda said nothing as he dressed. It felt strange; he had expected some great revelation when he finally took the yellow, but the numbness remained.

The consul stood back appraisingly. ‘The colour suits you. I’m Corvis, by the way. We’ll be working together soon. Follow me.’

In the centre of the nave-crossing, the Second Apprentice stood, apparently suspended on air, in an opening in the glass column. Torbidda felt the consuls’ eyes upon him. It was like being back in the Halls. Did they envy him? Despise him? Most likely both – as below, so above, as the late Selector Varro used to say.

As Torbidda approached, the mighty bronze angel loomed clearer and he saw that the sculptor was a more advanced creature than the primitive responsible for the hellish door. All of this titan’s forms were noble. It occupied space with the same right any living thing did, and it represented a promise: here was the man of tomorrow, unfettered by defunct morality or doubt or guilt. For a moment Torbidda’s spirits lifted – then he read the motto carved in massive Etruscan characters at its base –
Although changed, I shall arise the same
– and found a mocking echo of his own thoughts. These consuls, the smug, smiling Pulcher, they imagined they had evolved beyond antique
notions like sin and punishment, and yet Torbidda knew a great abyss lay waiting below their feet.

‘Come on. The man in red is waiting,’ Pulcher whined with youthful impatience as Torbidda joined him in the confines of the capsule with trepidation. ‘Sorry about all
that
stuff. The First Apprentice takes matters of form very seriously’ – a sharp intake of breath – ‘as you shall presently see.’