The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,51

off our course.”

“It must be one of them.” Brother Guido spoke with certainty. “The fleet, my uncle, they’re connected. Something has been set in train, and we are to be carried along. I assure you in the name of Mary and all the saints that we will be going to Naples or Genoa, and as soon as we see some sunlight, I will know which.”

I was impressed but too tired to ask how he could possibly divine our direction from the sun. Everyone knows that the sun is a great fiery ball that moves around the earth—it is never still, so how could it be any kind of marker? Presently we began to move around, in the hope that food would come if the crew knew that we were awake. But after long hours of walking from one end to t’other of our pitchy prison, feeling wooded walls and naught else, we observed a gray dawnlight begin to seep through the iron grille above. We could now see our jail, ten feet square of space, with the grille set so high above that we could never escape without a rope or ladder. They knew we were safe down here, trapped like lobsters in a pot. We sat down again, regarding the hole we were in, considering our options, realizing we had none. We were at the mercy of the brigands that walked above us. Ignorant of our fate, we were too afraid to plan, and fell to bickering the morning away. At length we subsided into a sulky silence, and this was how we greeted a new phenomenon: bright sunlight suddenly flooded through the grille trapdoor of the hold, and a square of golden light began to crawl down the wooden wall of our prison, gradually, gradually sinking to the floor as the ship sailed its course. Brother Guido was up, swift as a fox, craning below the grille to see the sun’s position. I stood beside him but could see little—after a night in the dark the sky was too bright for me to behold. Brother Guido looked about him, frustrated.

“What do you need?” said I.

“I need a marker of sorts—a stylus, pen, charcoal. We are nearing the middle of the day and I must take a measurement.”

I raised a brow. “I don’t think you’re in luck.”

“Hmm.”

He lurched to the larboard side—the left—and began to prise a glob of tar from between the clinkered planks of the hold. The ship was new, so the tar was tacky and the monk rolled the mass into a long stylus and spat on the end. He gazed at the floor, and where the light hit the board at the extreme southern edge of the grille he made a neat cross with the black tar marker.

“What the fuck . . .?”

He held up one long palm in my face, to silence me, and held the other hand to his heart. He was counting. Long moments passed, then he suddenly made another mark, where the light from the same point now fell in a new position. He then connected the two points with a line, drew a third, seemingly random point, and connected the three to make a triangle. Then he drew a circle neatly within the fattest part of the triangle and began to write numbers against the adjoining points in his cramped and wiggly hand. I got bored and stared up, hoping for provisions to be sent down, but my daydreams of salt beef and ship’s rum were soon interrupted—Brother Guido sat back on his haunches, face flushed with his calculations in the light of the new day.

He had his answer.

3

Naples

Naples, June 1482

16

“It’s Naples.” He spoke with great confidence. “We’re going to Naples.”

I groaned inwardly. I’d hoped never to have to go to the savage south. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. We’re sailing at seven degrees of latitude, in a southerly direction, at twelve knots. A goodly rate. The wind is favorable.” He scribbled more numbers. “We’ll travel ninety leagues a day at the least. With a following breeze, we could reach up to one hundred seventy leagues.” He scribbled still, and muttered some calculations under his breath. “We should be there in three days.”

“What!” I could not countenance three days in this hole, but Brother Guido seemed fairly cheerful, damn him. “Take heart. They will not harm us. They spoke of taking us to some southern potentate—’Don Ferrente’ they named him. We must just hope he is a man of honor and will