The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,81

return to the church is death. ‘Twill have to be the sea. Can you swim?”

I nodded, breathless. “Can you?”

“No.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Now was not the time to question how a young nobleman could have been raised on the coast without learning to swim. How could I tell my companion I’d rather head into the blue sea that rose and flung itself at the mouth of the cave in an ecstasy of spray and crashing waves? That I’d rather carry him through the brine myself than have to return to that dark crypt and meet once more the silver eyes of the mysterious leper that had followed us here? “We will have to go seaward,” I said stubbornly. “We’ll have to steal a bark or something.” But the way was impossible. Angry cobalt waves at the cave’s mouth now swelled to tidal proportions to confound us. We would be dashed from the rocks and claimed by the sea, swimmers or not. We skirted the thousand ships and stood huddled together on the foamy shores of the lake as the spume licked at our boots. “We’re trapped,” I admitted gloomily.

“Not so,” said Brother Guido gently. “We must repair to the church and brave the fellow if he is indeed awaiting us. Time is short—we must return else we will miss the royal train north.”

I knew he was right—but my cold dread weighed me down like the seawater that had soaked my velvet skirts. I stumbled as I tried to turn, and fell to my knees in the surf. I shrugged off the monk’s helping hand; while I was down there I thought I may as well pray for a miracle to keep me from that church and the gaze of those silver eyes.

You will know, by now, that prayer is not a custom with me. In fact, if the Lord had a spare moment in his day I doubted he would heed a lost sheep such as myself. But, incredibly, a miracle came. The vicious elements that ruled this place now smiled upon us and offered a marvel. In a moment of eerie calm, and sudden silence, the sea began to retreat—sliding back and over the sands like the tide going out in the time it takes the heart to beat. In an instant, the waters were gone. We looked at each other, baffled.

“God has smoothed our path,” said Brother Guido, smiling. “He has taken the sea away from our feet, as he did for Moses.”

I had never thought myself a second Moses before today, but my companion spoke the truth; the water moved from our sight almost to the horizon, leaving nothing but a calm blue line between earth and sky.

“Never mind all that,” I interrupted his biblical musings. “Let’s go.”

Behind us the ships in the hidden lake sank down till they were almost graveled, their timbers and ropes whining and creaking in protest. They were saved from grounding only by the shallows of the natural reservoir, retained within the enormous cavern by a lip of rock at the mouth of the cave. We clambered over the retaining shingle and scrambled down to the sands—instantly dry and golden in the noonday sun.

‘Twas hard to countenance what we saw; it was not just low tide, but as if a sea had never existed on this shore. “What has happened to the ocean?” I breathed, unwilling to break the sudden quiet.

Brother Guido shook his head in wonder. “I know not. Perhaps it is a thing of custom here—a sudden riptide that takes the sea away. At the mud flats of Pisa, sometimes the seas withdraw at an ill moon. But I have never seen it occur with such rapidity, nor completeness.”

The sand was flat and gold as a wheatfield, and the sky as blue as Mary’s cloak. It was a peerless day, and at another moment to stroll along the sands thus with the man I loved would have been my dearest dream. But all was not right. The sun was too bright, the sky too blue. Everything seemed too—well, real. And furthermore there were no birds singing; even the seagulls—whose constant yakking and mewing I’d endured for three days now—were silent. There was not a creature on the beach despite the sudden retreat of the sea, not a worm’s cast, not a stranded herring. The air seemed strange, viscous, as if ‘twas an effort to walk through it. I tried to express somewhat of this to Brother Guido. “The air seems,