spy on me, did he not? Promised you things? It’s all right, you don’t have to answer. I remember when I took the yellow how I yearned to wear the orange and then the red. Ambition doesn’t merely blind Man, it deafens him. It took time to realise why Bernoulli wanted us segregated from the rest of the Guild, why he built so high. It’s so we can hear – the stars, they speak to us. I listened until I learned what my unfortunate predecessor could never understand: the Master’s return is at hand!’
Torbidda was hot and uncomfortable under Bonnacio’s hollow gaze. He said the test was over, but that might be another, more subtle test. Bonnacio was remote, but Torbidda knew that otherworldly manner concealed a mind worldly enough to manipulate Pulcher’s feral ambition. He attempted a more servile tack. ‘You are my master, First Apprentice.’
‘Child, we are but vessels. The vessel was once the man called Girolamo Bernoulli, and now it is his Molè. A time is coming when the Molè will be no more. It’s not accidental that you’re here and not some other Candidate; the hour calls forth the man, his steps ordained by necessity. My astronomy, Pulcher’s warcraft, your architecture: men believe they are free, but nothing’s free: everything’s written and History is a problem to be solved by exegesis. Its treasure belongs to the most penetrating reader. That’s why you must go to the library. You must solve the Molè.’
Torbidda was perplexed: a building wasn’t an equation. After a minute went by, the First Apprentice happened to glance around. He was obviously surprised to find Torbidda still standing there and dismissed him with a waved hand. ‘Attend to it.’
CHAPTER 19
On the Origins of Concordian Gothic
As the dust settled on the mount, Bernoulli drew his plans for the cathedral to be built on the grave of St Eco’s. He understood the Etruscans – their love of the circle, the triangle, the balance of the horizontal with the vertical – and his optical studies gave him a philosophical appreciation of the spectrum, but he rejected all Classical precedents. His vision for what became the Molè Bernoulliana was monochromatic and severe.9
With hindsight, it is clear to us that Bernoulli’s conception of the Cathedral was more Europan than Etrurian but, when the Curia realised just how iconoclastic the style we call Concordian Gothic was, traditionalist architects reacted with shrill protests.10
His critics fell silent as the frame of one dome was capped by another and still another. It was clear to all Concordians that the right man had arrived at the right moment to solve the problem that had bested so many. Bernoulli had made his name as a bridge builder, after all, and what is a bridge but an arch, and what is a dome but three hundred and eighty arches? The triple dome of the Molè was more than an answer to Duke Scaligeri’s Cathedral; it was proof, for all Etruria, of Concordian superiority – though utterly different to that envisaged by the Curia so many years ago.
PART II:
CITY OF TOWERS
Who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as
if it had issued out of the womb? …
Hath the rain a father? Or who hath begotten the drops of dew?
Job 38: 8, 28
CHAPTER 20
One year after the Siege of Rasenna, the Year of our Lady, 1371
The other students never mocked Uggeri’s elaborate preparations to his face; he was, after all, a hero of the siege which had ended with the destruction of the Twelfth Legion and the death of all but the youngest Apprentice. Uggeri made up for his late start in the Art Bandiera with practice and ability. He prepared like the bandieratori of old, and it was quite a thing to watch his prickly dissatisfaction as he picked a weapon from the rack – to hear him testing the flag’s snap and the wood’s spring, weighing it in his hand, tipping it, letting it roll over the top of his fist with the sceptical look of a man listening to a coin-changer. In any other student Sofia would have called it fetishism, but give Uggeri an enemy and all hesitancy disappeared like dew on sun-baked stones. The Doc used to say sincerity was as rare in a fighter as charity in Ariminum, but Uggeri did everything with sincerity.
He came at her roaring,
Tok
Tok
Tok.
Sofia gave ground coolly. ‘Pace yourself. Every strike doesn’t have to be a knock-out.’
In response Uggeri roared again and leapt for her,