Veritas

Day the Seventh

WEDNESDAY, 15^TH APRIL 1711

5.30 of the clock: first mass. From now on the bells will ring in succession throughout the day, announcing masses, processions, devotions. Eating houses and alehouses open.

“Tomorrow night, do you understand? They’re going to do it tomorrow night,” said Cloridia, her voice eager and anxious.

“And so? What’s the problem?”

Cloridia had once again been urgently summoned during the early hours of the day to the palace of the Prince of Savoy. The Agha would return that morning for a new audience, but not at midday as usual, but before dawn.

But just a short while later my dear wife returned from the palace. She had stolen a few minutes from her job to tell me the red-hot news she had heard.

As we already knew, the Most Serene Prince had been supposed to leave for the front the previous day, Tuesday. As His Caesarean Majesty’s condition still seemed to be improving, the condottiero had finally resolved to leave the day after tomorrow, Thursday 16th April. He had written a letter to the Emperor officially announcing his intention to leave Vienna. This last piece of news could be traced back to one of Eugene’s scribes, and so seemed more than certain. But this was not what was agitating Cloridia.

Before leaving, Eugene was to meet the Turkish Agha again. To talk about what (and at that hour, when the nobles were snoring), was a mystery, since they had seen each other just two days earlier. But nor was that the main reason for Cloridia’s anxiety.

She had had a good deal to do that morning. First, to accompany two soldiers in the Agha’s retinue to the kitchens to negotiate the unofficial purchase of liquors. Then to provide explanations for another pair of Turkish soldiers, who, beguiled by the sight of some couples behaving fairly freely during an Andacht, were asking for information about the habits of the local females (Cloridia had warned them against any harassment, which might provoke a diplomatic incident). Then she had had to obtain pen and paper for another Ottoman, a young man of a sad and contemplative temperament, who wanted to take home a sketch of Eugene’s palace. After that she had had to resolve a row over prices between the two soldiers she had earlier taken to the kitchen to buy alcoholic beverages and one of the Most Serene Prince’s cooks. Finally, Cloridia had been requested by the palace staff to remind some of the gentle guests (if the grim soldiery of the Orient could be so termed) at His Highness’s residence that it was forbidden to make souvenirs of such items as ornaments, curtains, candelabra, the precious damask upholstery of the armchairs or the stucco from the walls. Cloridia had seen to all this while the Agha made his arrival at the palace and engaged in conversation with Eugene, this time in private audience, accompanied only by the official interpreters and the closest, most trusted counsellors.

At this point my sweet little wife had heard, as she passed in the corridor, a conversation between a small group of Turks (it was impossible to tell exactly how many, perhaps three or four, including the dervish) and another, German-speaking, person. One of those present acted as interpreter: why had they not engaged Cloridia? The matter under discussion seemed to be highly confidential. And indeed it was.

Prudently putting her ear to the door, she learned that the German-speaking person was none other than the Caesarean Proto-Medicus: Doctor Mathias von Hertod.

“The Caesarean Proto-Medicus!” I exclaimed. “And what was he doing with the Turks, in Eugene’s palace, at such an antelucan hour?”

This was not the first parley between Ciezeber and the Proto-Medicus of Joseph I, Cloridia explained. The two of them, and the rest of the group, had referred to earlier conversations that they had had.

“Eavesdropping like that, of course, I couldn’t understand everything they said, but I heard the most important news almost immediately — and very clearly. Tomorrow evening the dervish will tend to Joseph.”

“Tend to him?”

“Yes, he’ll give him a treatment — that’s what I heard.”

“So he is responsible for the improvement in his condition!” I said in amazement.

“Tomorrow will be just a repetition of the treatment, and it should be decisive. Von Hertod reported that Joseph’s condition is improving continually, and so the treatment must be concluded tomorrow at all costs. If the people were to find out that the Infidels are collaborating on the Emperor’s treatment, it could give rise to a great scandal.”

As she had already said, the lion’s share of the treatment was to be carried out by Ciezeber. In the conversation at Eugene’s palace, they had talked about the dervish’s instruments, his knowledge of such procedures and of the most suitable hour to do the operation.

“Do you think the Caesarean Proto-Medicus has realised that someone is plotting the Emperor’s death?”

“I believe so, given the hour they met and the confidential nature of the meeting. The Proto-Medicus said that that at this point he could only trust Ciezeber.”

“So that was what those rituals were for, the ones the dervish carried out in the woods near the Place with No Name,” I said. “Ugonio told us they were for therapeutic purposes, but I would never have guessed who they were intended for! But,” I objected, in a more doubtful tone, “when you think about it, it’s an absurd story. We began by suspecting the Turks of wanting to poison the Emperor, and now we discover they’re actually curing him. .”

“It’s simple,” answered Cloridia, “if the Emperor died, his brother Charles would ascend the throne and the war would be over. It sounds paradoxical, but in fact the Sultan has every interest in Joseph remaining in good health. The conflict will continue, wearing out the Empire and the other Christian powers. Isn’t it an excellent deal for the Ottomans?”

“But Abbot Melani told me that Charles has a weak character and Prince Eugene will persuade him to continue the war, and also that Joseph I is thinking of coming to terms with France, leaving them with Spain and keeping just Catalonia for his brother Charles. If that’s really the case, it’s more likely that the war will finish under Joseph than under Charles.”

“Maybe the Turks don’t know this.”

“That seems unlikely, at least as far as the Emperor’s peaceful intentions are concerned.”

“Then perhaps they don’t believe that Joseph’s idea is likely to succeed. You know what the French are like: they want everything, or else it’s war,” said Cloridia, miming French intransigence with a wave of her hand.

“It’s possible,” I agreed. “But if that’s the way things are, what happens to all Atto’s theories about Prince Eugene conspiring against the Emperor to replace him with Charles, who is indecisive and would let him go on with the war? It would be very strange if the saviour of Joseph I were hiding in the Prince’s palace.”

“Quite. So Eugene might have nothing to do with it.”

Cloridia was right. I was used to the notion that Atto’s hypotheses and deductions were always correct, but this time he had clearly got hold of the wrong end of the stick! Besides, had not his conviction that the Turks were hired killers in the pay of Europe’s warring factions been proved miserably wrong by the facts?

While Cloridia left me to go to back to the palace, urging me over and over again to look after the Abbot, Simonis came and knocked at my door as agreed. Now that I knew for certain that the Emperor was about to recover completely, I devoted myself with renewed zeal to the most important job that His Caesarean Majesty had entrusted me with: the Place with No Name awaited us.

I went with my little boy and Simonis to the usual eating house for breakfast. Abbot Melani was with us. He was not used to waking up so early, and now he sprawled on his chair, listlessly nibbling at the abundant meal of sausages and mustard. In a coffee shop he would have found a breakfast more to his tastes. However, after what had happened to Dragomir Populescu and the things we had heard about the Armenians, the thought of setting foot in a coffee shop was a little unnerving.

I was about to tell the Abbot the devastating news reported by Cloridia but I held back. Atto had shown that he did not greatly trust Simonis. So I decided to say nothing. Instead I told him about the fruitless interrogation of Gaetano Orsini.

“Would you ask the host to bring me the latest gazette?” Atto asked my assistant as soon as I had finished my account.

“This is not a coffee shop, Signor Abbot: they don’t have gazettes. But I happen to have the Diary of Vienna, hot off the press,” answered Simonis, wondering at Melani’s timing: on arriving in the eating house the Greek had set down on the table the newspaper he had just bought at the little palace of the Red Porcupine. “It’s the issue covering the last three days.”

What could the blind old Abbot want with a gazette in German, I asked myself, while I asked the host for some water for my son.

“Good. I imagine it is a newspaper that contains an obituary page for the city,” said Melani.

“Certainly.”

“Could you read it to me?”

The Greek looked at me questioningly. I signalled to him to proceed.

He opened the gazette and read:

“List of all deaths within and without the walls,” he began in his slightly foolish voice, reading the title of the column. “On 11th April 1711 died the little daughter — ”

“No, no, please, just the male adults.”

“Let’s see. . here you are: Christof Lang and Matthias Koch, aged sixty-five and seventy-six, both at the poor people’s home; Franz Zintel, aged thirty-two, brewer at the Spittelberg; Georg Schraub, aged forty-eight, cloth-cutter at the Windmill; Adam Kugler, aged forty, soldier of the Neubau guard; Michael Wißhoffer, aged forty, stone mason at the Liechtenthal.”

“It’s clear that these Viennese stuff themselves like pigs,” broke in Atto, with a disgusted air. “Only those two at the old people’s home died at an advanced age. The others all died very young, and I bet it was from indigestion.”

“Shall I go on?” asked Simonis.

Atto nodded.

“On 12th April died Franz Johannes, aged seventy-four; Kaspar Wolff, aged forty; and Johann Graßberger, aged fifty-eight, both in hospital. On 13th April. .”

While Simonis dutifully read the list of deaths, I gazed wonderingly at Atto, who was listening attentively, his neck taut like a bloodhound’s.

“. . Carl Dement, aged thirty, student, at Landstrasse; Andre Treberitz, aged forty-five, soldier on leave at Wieden; Philipp Brixner, aged fifty-eight, fishmonger. .”

“Are you looking for someone in particular?” I asked.

“Shhh! Just a moment,” Atto hushed me.

“On 14th April,” Simonis went on, “died Melchior Plaschky, aged fifty-four, on the Leopoldine Island; Rietter Blasi, aged thirty-eight, tailor on the Munich ramparts; Leopold Löffler, guard on the Carinthian ramparts; Lorentz Kienast, aged thirty-six, dyer on the Leopoldine Island. .”

“Just as I thought. They’re not there,” commented Melani when Simonis had finished reading.

“Who?”

“Can’t you guess? Your murdered friends. And it’s not a mere oversight, or a decision not to include them: students are always dying like flies on account of their intemperate behaviour. .”

“It’s true,” Simonis confirmed, looking at the gazette again, “for example, there’s the death of this Carl Dement, a student.”

“Populescu’s body was disposed of by those colleagues of your cart driver, that what’s his name. . Penicek. All right. But Koloman and the first two?”

“It’s true, damn it,” I nodded, while my mouth gaped in amazement and Simonis furrowed his brows in thought. Koloman’s body at the Heuriger had been handed over to the guards directly by the host; Dànilo Danilovitsch had been stabbed on the night of 11th April: a corpse on the ramparts certainly could not have escaped the soldiers’ eyes. Hristo Hadji-Tanjov had died in the Prater on the 13th, two days earlier: the snow had certainly all melted by now and the guards must have found him.

“But how is it possible?” I asked.

“Simple. Someone made sure their deaths were not registered in the mortuary protocols.”

“I don’t see how: the guards will have called the city’s medical officer and — ”

“Exactly,” he anticipated me, making me understand that he did not wish to talk in front of my assistant. “Now I must go back to my rooms a moment, I have forgotten something.”

“Do you think that — ” I persisted.

“I think what you think,” he cut me off curtly. “So will you accompany me or do I have to go back by myself?”

Leaving my boy with Simonis to finish his breakfast, I noticed that my assistant was once again carrying the little bag that I had seen around his neck the previous day.

Atto and I set off towards Porta Coeli Street. He resumed the conversation:

“Whoever ordered this, shall we say, little cleansing operation is very powerful, and the person who carried it out is no mere pawn either. Do you know what this means?”

I shook my head.

“It means that behind those boys’ deaths there is something big — very big.”

“So why have you always laughed whenever I’ve tried to talk to you about these students’ deaths and my fears?” I asked, barely restraining my acrimony.

“I told you this before and I’ve even repeated it, but apparently that isn’t enough: I still do not believe they died because of their research into the Golden Apple, but I never said that their deaths were not linked to one another.”

“Don’t start shifting your position, Signor Atto. I remember clearly: you told me that Hristo was an Ottoman subject, as was Dragomir, and you let me believe that this was connected with their deaths.”

“I spoke a little loosely, I admit. Actually, since the Sublime Porte invaded them, the Bulgarians have lived as refugees in their impregnable mountains and have practically no contact with their conquerors. And Romania is not entirely under the Ottoman Empire.”

“What? And you’ve only just remembered this?”

“Shhh! Speak quietly, for goodness’ sake,” he hushed me, turning his head instinctively to left and right, as if his blind eyes could intercept any hidden spies. “I needed you to make contact with the Pálffy woman and I didn’t want you to be distracted, racking your brains over the deaths of those good-for-nothings,” answered the old castrato with brisk candour.

When we reached the convent, Atto struck the door of his room with the pummel of his stick.

The door was opened by Domenico, who was still weak from the fever of the last few days and the fluxion of the chest. He went straight back to cough in bed.

“I beg your pardon, boy,” concluded Atto in a suddenly grim tone, seizing my arm. “I thought that, whatever the matter was, it only concerned the Empire, whereas I am here to serve France. And then

I was confident that if my letter reached Joseph I, all would turn out for the best. I would be ahead of anyone else. Instead. .” And here he paused.

Oh yes, I reflected as he let me into his room, Abbot Melani would never believe that the interests of France and the Empire could be the same. In the theatre of war they seemed to be the two enemy captains. But the Emperor and the Grand Dauphin were at that moment on the same sacrificial altar, while the dagger raised over their hearts was in the grip of an unknown hand. . Their hearts?

“By the way, Signor Atto,” I said. “What were you doing the other evening in the alleyway behind the convent with that Armenian?”

Melani gave a start.

“What are you doing now, following me about?”

“I would never do such a thing. I overheard it by chance, on my way back from the eating house. The Armenian was talking about some people that had sold you, at a high price apparently, their master’s heart.”

“Did he say that? I don’t think — ” stammered Atto.

“Word for word, I remember perfectly. He gave you a little coffer and you gave him a little bag of money.”

“Oh it was nothing important, just a — ”

“No, Signor Atto. Let’s put aside the usual nonsense, if you want me to trust you. Otherwise I’ll turn around and leave you. And to the devil with you and the Grand Dauphin.”

“Very well, you are right,” he admitted after a few moments’ silence.

His hands groped the knob of the drawer closest to him. He opened it and took out the little coffer he had received from the Armenian.

“Here it is. I’ll give it to you, to show that your trust in me is not ill-founded,” he said, handing me the little container.

I tried to open it, but in vain. It was locked.

“I’ll give you the key before I leave. I swear it.”

“I’ve already had experience of your oaths,” I retorted in a sceptical tone.

“But you can open it whenever you want! You just have to force it. I only ask you not to do so now. I’ll trust you,” he added in a solemn tone, “if you’ll trust me.”

A great sophist, Abbot Melani, when it came down to trust. But I had to acknowledge that this time I had something concrete in my hands.

“All right,” I said. “What do you want in exchange for the coffer?”

“That until you open it you ask me no more questions about the Armenian.”

“When do you intend to leave again?” I asked after pocketing the coffer.

“As soon as I have understood who the shadow-man is.”

“The shadow-man?”

“The man who acts as intermediary between the killers of His Caesarean Majesty and the Grand Dauphin and the instigators.”

“A secret agent?”

“There is someone in Vienna who superintends and organises the moves of the perpetrators, whoever they are. It cannot be otherwise.”

The shadow-man: Atto Melani was all too familiar with this role! Wasn’t it the role I had always seen him play? Who, eleven years ago, had organised the conspiracy that had caused the war of succession to break out? Atto Melani was neither the instigator (France) nor the perpetrator (a simple scribe). But he had organised and guided the diabolical machine that had forged the will of a king, led three cardinals to betray the Pope in person and even obtained the election of one of the three traitors as the new pope.

Now for the first time I was seeing the Abbot wrong-footed by a new Atto Melani. Someone, who was of course much younger than him, and in the pay of other powers — Holland, England or who knows who — had taken the old castrato’s place and was setting a fatal and ingenious trap for the Emperor.

“Maybe this shadow-man,” I remarked, “is spying on our moves. He might be behind the murder of Dànilo, Hristo, Dragomir and, perhaps, Koloman.”

“If so, it would be good to unmask him before we find him behind our backs.”

For once we allowed ourselves a little comfort. Abbot Melani would certainly not be able to reach Neugebäu on foot, or in our miserable chimney-sweep’s cart. So Simonis engaged the Pennal, who transported us all much more commodiously and swiftly. Some obscure foreboding had induced me to leave our little boy at Porta Coeli, in the care of Camilla, who had generously agreed to look after him until either Cloridia or I returned.

As Penicek’s cart made its jolting way towards our destination, I found myself picturing the corpses of those poor lads: Dànilo’s agonised expression, Hristo’s swollen blue face, Dragomir’s mangled pudenda, and finally Koloman impaled on the pikes. I squeezed my eyelids tight and shook my head, trying to expel from my breast the wave of nausea and anguish surging within me. Death had reaped a rich harvest from the small group of students. Whose turn would it be next? Penicek? Or perhaps Simonis? Or Opalinski? I looked at my assistant sitting opposite me; his dull eyes were fixed inertly on the horizon, as if he had no worries. But it was just an act: I knew that, were he to be assailed by the most tremendous tempest, his gaze would remain the same. Penicek sat on the box seat. No one was questioning him and so he kept quiet, locked in his grim Pennal’s cage, condemned to serve the Barber for one year, six months, six weeks, six days and six minutes. Finally I thought of Opalinski again: he too had trembled at the appalling sight of his Hungarian friend. And to think that until a short while ago Jan Janitzki had shown no fear. Inexplicable behaviour, in the light of subsequent events. I asked Simonis about it.

“Well, Signor Master, it’s due to his occupation. Outside study hours, that is, of course.”

“And what is it?”

“It’s a little complicated, Signor Master. Do you know what the ‘right of quarters’ is here in Vienna?”

Since ancient times, Simonis explained, the Emperor had had the right to claim all rented property for himself and for the court. Ever since the ancient Caesars, travelling through their lands, had entrusted the Court Marshal with the task of requisitioning the lodgings needed for overnight stays. This custom, which takes the name of the right of quarters, had spread to Vienna as well, as the city became the seat of an increasingly large and important court, and of a growing number of functionaries, chancellors, musicians, copyists, dancers, soldiers, stewards, cantors, poets, servants, cooks, footmen, retainers, assistants, assistants’ assistants, and parasites of all sorts.

“Many think that having an imperial functionary as tenant is both elegant and desirable. Quite the contrary!”

This was how things went. One fine day an imperial functionary would knock at the door and, with a decree in his hand, announce that from that moment on the apartment was at his disposal. In the space of a few days the owner and his family either had to accept cohabitation or move out. If the owner refused, they would forcefully requisition the whole of his house, or his shop, or even the entire palace, if it belonged to him. After this, without any bargaining, a derisory rent would be set by the imperial chamber. The imperial functionary, not content with this result, instead of using the confiscated apartment, would sublet it.

“And is that allowed?” asked Abbot Melani.

“Of course not. But in the shadow of the Caesarean court anything can be done,” sneered Simonis.

The poor owner would thus find his apartment invaded by mysterious strangers who would carry off his furniture, rip out doors and windows, and often sublet in turn to the most disreputable types. The beautiful apartment would end up as a stinking den, a home to all sorts of shady business, including prostitution, sometimes even murders. There were even cases in which the occupiers, too slovenly to light the fire in the hearth, would make a big bonfire on the wooden floor, and the whole apartment would go up in flames. Meanwhile the imperial chamber, permanently in debt, would not even pay the rent. And if the owner protested the imperial functionary could actually follow the ancient custom of stoning him.

“This malpractice can become so bad,” my assistant went on, “that at times it is the emperors themselves who evict the occupiers. Ferdinand I had an entire palace next to the royal palace emptied, because the functionaries who had settled there were always drunk and made so much noise that they disturbed the imperial sessions, and they were so incompetent in handling the stoves and fireplaces that they risked setting alight both their own building and the royal palace.”

“And what does Opalinski have to do with all this?” I asked at the end of the explanation.

“It’s simple: he acts as intermediary for the subletting agreements.”

“Didn’t you say they were illegal?”

“Certainly. In fact, they can present real risks: for example, when the owner of the apartment has friends at court and decides to get his own back on the functionary who expropriated him, or on the intermediary himself. Opalinski is used to risks, familiar with fear. It must be acknowledged: Jan is truly a courageous Pole. It’s only now, after what happened to Koloman, that I’ve seen him get really nervous.”

Meanwhile we had arrived in Neugebäu, greeted by the dazzle of its white marble. As a good son does with his tired father, I would have liked to show Atto, had his eyeballs not been deprived of light, Maximilian II’s majestic building, its gardens, its generous fish ponds, its towers, the seraglio of the ferocious animals and the unconfined view that could be enjoyed from the northern terrace. Prior to entering the Place with No Name I had given him a brief description of its treasures and history, so that he did not arrive completely unprepared in this trove of memories, suspended between the tragic past of Maximilian and the present, no less sinisterly shaded, of the young Joseph. I had summarised Maximilian’s struggles with the Turks, the birth of Neugebäu as a parody of the tent of Suleiman the Magnificent, the tragic death of the Emperor and the plots woven against him. I had of course said nothing of the only detail which he would never have believed: the Flying Ship and the supernatural wonders that Simonis and I had witnessed.

Atto had listened to my whole account of the dark history of the Place with No Name with extreme interest, nodding at those parts he already knew, prudently remaining silent during those that were new to him.

I could not, with my feeble oratorical powers, render the greatness of the place denied to him by his blind eyes, and I knew — or at least I felt — that he was afflicted by it to the depths of his soul, because this was the definitive proof of his decline: twenty-eight years earlier I had known him to be thirsty for all aspects of learning, every curiosity, every secret, and intent even on writing a guide to Rome in his spare time, so as to satisfy his creative bent and his appetite for knowledge. Now that his body betrayed him, his inner faculties were all slaves to circumstances; curiosity had to yield to resignation, haste to patience, intelligence to ignorance. Atto would never see Neugebäu.

Once we had reached our destination, after bidding farewell to the Pennal (he would come by to pick us up later), we went first of all to introduce our bizarre party to Frosch. The keeper of the Place with No Name, who had been surprised to see us arriving in Penicek’s gig, cast a sceptical eye at Abbot Melani.

“Is he a new apprentice, replacing the little boy?” he laughed with coarse, bold humour, pointing at Atto.

Frosch asked us no questions about our previous day’s work at Neugebäu. If he was not a skilful dissimulator (and drunkards generally are not), this meant he had not seen us take off in the Flying Ship, nor indeed land in it. I heaved a surreptitious sigh of relief: I certainly did not want to share with the drunken Cerberus the incredible secret of the flight that Simonis and I had undertaken.

We passed in front of the ball stadium and I cast a silent glance at the Flying Ship. It was where we had left it, lying limp on the ground. Its birdlike features, as awkward as they were bizarre, gave no intimation that it was capable of soaring lightly and nimbly among the clouds. I looked sidelong at Simonis: at the sight of the ship his doltish eyeballs seemed to grow wide and cloud over with emotion. Even Abbot Melani, unconscious of everything and locked in the darkness of his blind eyes, as he passed in front of the ball stadium, turned his head imperceptibly towards the Flying Ship, as if it had sent out an invisible, magnetic summons. “The power of blindness!” I thought. Those unable to see perceive what is invisible to the rest of us.

In the ball stadium only one detail had changed from our previous visits: at the far end of the great rectangular space were stacked the birdcages, full of their vociferous occupants. Atto heard the chattering noise and asked me about it. I turned and asked Frosch.

“Martens. Last night they did away with half a dozen Indian pullets.”

The keeper explained that he had put the cages in the ball stadium because the stable door had been broken, and the predators had immediately taken advantage of the accident. Tonight the birds of the Place with No Name would sleep safely: the stadium, whose doors were in good condition, presented no such risks. As soon as the stable door had been mended, the cages would go back there. For the moment, since the weather was now quite warm, the birds could even sleep in the open.

Atto was greatly struck when he heard the racket made by the lions, panthers and other fierce beasts: it was their meal time, and the hungry animals let out slavering howls. I briefly described the appearance and attitude of each carnivore, depicting how they gripped and tore at the red meats distributed to them by their keeper. He asked me if there was any risk of them escaping. I then told him of my encounter with Mustafa, on my first visit to the Place with No Name.

“Being blind, I wouldn’t have a chance to escape from the lion. But then he’d find my bones getting stuck in his teeth, ha ha!” he joked.

During our first hour of work everything went smoothly. Abbot Melani remained at a prudent distance from us, sitting on a stool, taking great care not to get dusty: as soon as any dirty cloud reached his nose, amid sneezes and imprecations he would ask to be placed a little further off to spare his clothes, which were the usual green and black. It was surprising, I thought, how attentive the Abbot was to his outward appearance, even though he could not see himself in the mirror.

We took up our work at the point where we had left off the previous occasion. We entered the mansion by the main door and once again started with the large rooms on the ground floor. On the previous occasion we had finished the central entrance hall and the two side rooms. We went to the left, crossed the great terrace and reached the western keep, access to which was by a door. It was locked.

“We’ll have to get the keys from Frosch,” I remarked. “Meanwhile we’ll try on the opposite side.”

In the meantime I was trying to describe to Abbot Melani the wonders of the view that could be enjoyed from the terrace, the grandiose conception of the architect, the touching personal involvement of Maximilian, who must have followed the project from its outset to its realisation.

As we walked away, I thought I heard, from a direction that could not be identified, a noise — a long, shrill rumbling sound that I had heard before. But it was such a vague sensation that I did not dare to ask the others for confirmation, lest they should take me for a visionary or a coward. So we re-crossed the three entrance halls, and then came out into the open air again, onto the terrace in the opposite wing, finally reaching the eastern keep. Here the door was open.

Inside we found a broad space that resembled a large chapel.

“I think it was to be set aside for divine service,” Simonis confirmed, “if only Maximilian had been able to finish it.”

We set down to work. The job did not take long. As soon as it was over we went to the outside of the mansion and re-entered by the eastern keep. From here we visited the whole of the semi-basement floor. It was in the eastern keep, according to Frosch, that Rudolph the Mad had carried out his experiments in magic and alchemy. However, we found no obvious signs of ovens, alembics or other such devilries. If that had once been the place where Rudolph celebrated his follies, time must have mercifully cancelled all traces. The ghosts that the Viennese (but also the chimney-sweeps, my fellow countrymen) fantasised about had left no marks of their presence.

Proceeding towards the central point of the house, we found the next room was a long gallery with round vaults, lit by broad, low windows that opened on the north side.

“This was where Maximilian wanted to set up his antiquarium, his collection of marvels. On the walls he wanted to display triumphal monuments, statues, tapestries and trophies,” explained Simonis.

All we could see, however, was a bare stone corridor, made just a little more graceful by the fine curves of the ceiling. Every stone, I was saying to myself, seemed to express melancholy at its unfulfilled destiny, when Abbot Melani interrupted my thoughts.

“Did you catch that?”

“What?” said Simonis.

“Four times. It was repeated four times.”

“A strange sound, right?” I said, thinking of the curious noise, halfway between an acute trumpet and a percussion instrument, which I had heard from the terrace.

“Not a sound: a vibration. Like the firing of a cannon, but muffled.”

Simonis and I exchanged glances. It was no surprise that Atto should have heard a noise that was imperceptible to us: blind people are known for the acuteness of their tympani. But it could be something else: bizarre perceptions could also be attributed, alas, to the wandering mind of an old man.

Having completed our work of inspection and maintenance, we had come to the middle of the semi-basement. Just above our heads, on the ground-floor level, was the mansion’s main entrance. From the point where we stood a couple of ramps descended underground, leading to a door that gave onto the rear of Neugebäu. From there we had a view that took in the gardens and the large fish pond to the north, and which widened out gloriously to the fields and woods beyond.

When we had finished our short reconnaissance, we went back towards the ramp and then towards the centre of the semi-basement. We began to explore the west wing. We had just begun to examine the southern wall when the strange phenomenon re-occurred.

“Did you hear that?” asked Atto, perturbed again.

This time I had heard something too. A hollow and indistinct thud, as if above and around us a giant had gently set a Cyclopic bass drum vibrating. Simonis, however, had not noticed anything.

“We must finish the job,” said my assistant, vaguely vexed that his hearing was not sharp enough.

“You’re right,” I agreed, hoping that I had been mistaken, or that work might magically wipe from my mind all memories of the arcane signal.

Rummaging in a bag of tools for a broom, and groping among a thousand irons of all kinds, my fingertips touched a quadrangular-shaped object. It was Hristo Hadji-Tanjov’s chessboard, still wrapped in the little bag that its ill-fated owner had thrust it into.

In order not to risk losing it, I had put it among our tools, which I always put away securely. I pulled it out and dusted off the object that had saved my life three days earlier, but unfortunately not that of its owner. Simonis and I exchanged mournful glances.

“Poor friend,” whispered Simonis.

“He realised long before Penicek that the meaning of the Agha’s phrase all lay in soli soli soli,” I said.

“What did you say?” Atto said with a start.

I explained how the chessboard had come into my hands, and I told him what Hristo had said to Simonis: our chess-playing friend believed that the secret of the Agha’s phrase all lay in the repetition of those three mysterious words soli soli soli. When we had found Hristo’s corpse, I added, the poor lad was clutching a white chess king in his fist. Finally, in his chessboard I had found a note that referred to checkmate.

“Yes, Hristo on the very day of his death had mentioned that he thought the words soli soli soli — that is, ‘all alone’ — were connected with checkmate,” explained Simonis.

Abbot Melani quivered as if he had been stung by a wasp and stood up.

“Just a moment. Have I got this right? On the day of the audience the Agha said to Eugene that the Turks had arrived soli soli soli?”

“Certainly, what’s new about that?”

“Wha-a-a-t? And you never told me?”

“Told you what?”

“That the Agha’s phrase contained the words soli soli soli!”

Atto muttered a series of unrepeatable expletives to himself, as if to spare me a direct insult. Then he spoke aloud again:

“Just what were you thinking of? You realise what you’ve done?” he said vehemently.

I still did not understand. Simonis was listening in bewilderment too.

“To tell the truth, Signor Atto, I’m sure I did tell you. Didn’t I explain that the Agha said ‘We’ve come all alone to the Golden Apple’?”

“Just a moment: the phrase was in Latin, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Say it to me.”

“Soli soli soli ad pomum venimus aureum.”

“And you, you ass, you ignorant beast, you translate soli soli soli as ‘all alone’? The Agha’s phrase means something quite different, curse it.”

It had been a venial sin, but it had serious consequences all the same.

While we made our way back to the ball stadium for something to eat, now that the first part of the job was over, Atto began to explain.

Cloridia and I had believed that soli soli soli was just the repetition of a single term, which meant ‘alone’, and so we had given Atto the translation directly, ‘all alone’, or ‘truly alone’, not mentioning the original version.

Abbot Melani was raging. His legs trembled with anger, he muttered and mumbled swear words and curses, every so often addressing me with an accusing forefinger upraised.

“You young people. . you’re. . all irresponsible, that’s what you are! All you can do is get flustered and create disasters. Oh, if you only had a tenth of the brainpower and concentration needed for such things! And I brought you all the way here to Vienna so that you might help me!”

“Be careful, Signor Atto.” I suddenly pulled him back by his arm.

While the old castrato was getting so worked up, before we started down the spiral staircase that led to the ball stadium and the animal cages, we noticed something truly bizarre. In the large eastern courtyard lay a huge stinking pile of dung.

“Good heavens, it must have been Mustafa,” I said, holding my nose.

“I didn’t think lions did such big ones,” remarked Simonis with amusement.

Atto calmed down at last. We made him sit down on the stairs. With his hands quivering from the sudden surge of anger, he finally made up his mind to explain how things were.

“Soli soli soli is not just the stupid repetition of the word soli. On the contrary. It’s a very famous Latin motto.”

I listened in utter amazement.

“And if you had had the good manners to repeat to me literally the Agha’s Latin phrase,” Abbot Melani insisted, “instead of providing your own witless interpretation, we would have saved days and days of useless toil.”

“So what does soli soli soli mean then?” I asked.

“The first soli is the dative singular of the adjective solus, ‘alone’, and so it means ‘to the only one’. The second is the dative of the noun sol, ‘sun’. The third is the genitive of solum, ‘earth’, and so it means ‘of the earth’.”

“And so soli soli soli means. . ‘To the only sun of the earth’.”

“Exactly. Or ‘to the only sun of the soil’, if you prefer. In France it is a well-known saying, because His Majesty has had it engraved on his army’s cannons. The Sun King likes to remind everyone of his power. But he did not invent the phrase — it was used, for example, by Nostradamus, in some of his woolly wafflings. And Nostradamus must have stolen it in turn from the ancient Romans.”

“And why?”

“Soli soli soli is often found on sundials. It was probably an old Latin custom, which was handed down over the centuries. In any case its origin does not concern us. There are countless similar sayings, like sol solus solo salo, which means ‘only the sun commands the earth and the sea’, or ‘sol solus non soli, that is to say, ‘the sun is just one for all’, or again sol solus soles solari, ‘only the sun consoles without a pause’.”

As he spoke, Atto had got up again and started moving so we had now descended to the lower depths. We at once looked for Frosch to ask him if he had any water or wine to sell us, in particular because after his harangue Atto now felt thirsty, but the keeper was nowhere to be found. Near the entrance to the stable we found the tools and wooden planks with which he was mending the door. We heard a noise from far end of the ball stadium, where the birdcages were stacked. At once the birds became animated and the stadium was filled with their twittering.

“So the story of the Circassian has got nothing to do with it,” I reflected aloud. “But why would the Agha have chosen this saying?” I asked, as we all three headed towards the ball stadium.

“Maybe it was a way of paying homage to Eugene,” hazarded Simonis. “Perhaps the Agha just wanted to say, ‘We have come to the only sun of the earth’.”

“Unlikely,” replied Atto. “Eugene is not the sun of anything. He is the commander-in-chief of the imperial armies, and that’s all. Soli soli soli clearly refers to a sovereign.”

“And so to the Emperor,” I deduced. “But why use this saying in an audience with Eugene, instead of with the Emperor?”

Atto said nothing but looked thoughtful.

“Maybe the phrase has a double meaning,” observed Simonis.

“And what would that be?”

“Let’s see. . instead of ‘to the only sun of the earth’, it could be translated as ‘to the lonely sun of the earth’.”

“And isn’t that the same thing?”

“No. This second formulation would mean ‘to the solitary sun of the earth’, that is, to the Emperor,” explained Simonis.

“And why would he be lonely?” I asked in surprise.

But I could get no answer. We had entered the ball stadium. The great arena, surrounded by high walls stretching upwards to the sky, was alive with the shrill squawking of the birds. Parrots and parakeets strained their uvulas to the utmost, filling the bowl of the stadium with strident screeches.

“Why on earth are the birds making all this row, boy?” Abbot Melani asked me, having to raise his voice to be heard.

We heard two or three heavy blows, like a mallet striking wooden boards. I explained to Atto that Frosch, concealed among the cages, was probably hammering nails into planks for the new stable door (even though it was not clear why he should be doing it among the birdcages).

The din, already deafening, was made almost unbearable by the reverberation of a new series of hammer blows.

“Curse it, these wretched birds are unbearable,” said Atto again, trying to block his ears with his hands.

Protecting my own eardrums with my hands, I had almost reached the small birdcages when I noticed they were set right up against the wall, and so there could be no one behind them, certainly no Frosch, making those vexatious noises.

“Simonis!” I called my assistant, who had stayed behind with Atto.

“Look, Signor Master, look!” he echoed me, calling my attention in turn.

He was looking towards the opposite end of the great space, towards the doorway into the ball stadium, the one we had just entered by.

We were no longer alone. An enormous hairy biped, as tall and broad as two human beings, was baring its slavering canines and, even though I could not hear it on account of the racket made by the birds, was bestially snarling at us. Then it dropped on all fours and came bounding towards us, preparing to attack.

I knew nothing about ferocious animals, but instinct told me that it was enraged by hunger. Petrified, I observed the approaching beast, and with a last shred of awareness I heard the invisible blacksmith rekindle chaos among the birds with new hammer blows, and then I heard a final screech — and only then did I realise that there was at least one other door giving onto the stadium, diametrically opposite the one that the bear had entered by.

While the parrots’ squawking continued to assail my ears, I realised that the second door was hidden by the birdcages that Frosch had piled up on top of one another, and it was that door that some hidden carpenter was tormenting with his hammer blows.

Instinctively running away from the path of the bear, which was unmistakably heading for me, I had lost sight of Melani and Simonis, now hidden by the shape of the Flying Ship.

“Signor Master!” I heard Simonis call out one last time.

Then came the roar, and the tide vomited itself.

As in some crazed seer’s dream, all creation erupted at monstrous speed from the door beyond the cages, almost as if behind it a capricious god had compressed all animal life from every age and place. A chaotic mass of flesh, blood, muscles, claws, manes, skins and fangs smashed their deafening way into the stadium, instantaneously pervading every inch of it like chalk dust thrown into clear water. The earth trembled at the passage of an enormous grey, be-trunked being, followed by the rumble of stamping bulls, of panthers which like black stars of ferocity seemed to absorb the ambient light into their dark fur, of tigers that spread out fanwise like the tentacles of a single feline octopus, of lynxes that almost seemed to fly with the savage energy of the living detonation that had hurled them into the ball stadium.

The birdcages were wiped out by the explosion like reeds in a tempest. The poor winged creatures that had not been instantaneously annihilated by the impact, or crushed by the beasts that burst into the stadium after the boom, rose into the air, filling the entire space above us with a crazy multicoloured cloud. The enormous bear that had rushed us moments before was now a mere trifle.

Where had it come from, the elephant that had knocked down the door, leading the great army of beasts? Why were these wild animals all free? How had they reached the back door of the stadium? None of these questions mattered: while the mad bellowing of the animals assailed my head and ears, I saw an entire army of brutes rushing towards me, and my legs ran as if self-propelled towards the only mad hope of escape.

“Simonis!” I yelled without hearing my own voice, drowned by the powerful trumpeting of the elephant, which had begun to run in a semicircle around the Flying Ship, while swarms of birds flew over it and the lions began a quarrel with the bears, making the walls of the stadium shake with their hate-filled roaring.

I will never know how I made it, since panic is the enemy of memory. I think I must have yelled unceasingly from the incursion of the elephant and its bestial convoy right up to the moment when, clambering with ape-like rapidity, I found myself breathless and voiceless aboard the Flying Ship. I was in such a state of unconscious terror that it was only when I saw Simonis dragging Abbot Melani aboard that I came partially to my senses.

Not far off a bear was tearing to pieces a sort of large pheasant; at once a pair of lions pounced upon it, driving off the bear and taking possession of the prey.

“Here I am!” I shouted, running towards my assistant.

In his attempt to scramble onto the ship, Atto had fallen awkwardly to the ground, and Simonis was almost lifting him bodily, in an attempt to get him on board. Of course, a lion could very easily board the craft as well, but at the moment it was as good a place to be as any.

Meanwhile the smell of the birds killed by the bears and lions must have gone to the heads of the other beasts. An amorphous forest of heads, fangs, claws and snorting nostrils was devouring the belly and genitals of a poor ox, kneeling on its hind legs, its eyes raised to heaven as it emitted a last gasp of agony.

While Simonis and I, both purple with effort, heaved Abbot Melani slowly onto the ship, I saw Atto’s livid lips contract in a mute prayer. Just a few paces away a lioness, held at bay only by the crazy circling of the elephant, roared irately at him.

We had almost managed to drag ourselves and the Abbot aboard when I felt a sharp, cruel blow on my head, and a thousand stings tormenting the skin of my neck and my temples. A small flock of crazed birds had come swarming around us, and a young bird of prey was hammering at my skull. I had to let go of Atto to try and defend myself. Waving my arms around maniacally, my eyes half-closed for fear of being blinded, I thought I saw a kite, some parrots and other fowl of unknown breed.

The lioness meanwhile was getting closer, roaring threateningly and showing its fangs.

Suddenly the ship juddered, as if shaken by an invisible wave, and began to pitch. The elephant had stopped its mad circling and with its trunk had started to beat rhythmically on the opposite wing from the one we were on. By its side a panther, maybe the same one that had been making for me before I scrambled aboard the Flying Ship, was about to leap up, only halted by the continual oscillation of the vessel.

Finally the clamorous birds gave me some peace. I passed my hand over my head and then looked at my palm: it was bright red. Thousands of little wounds, caused by the birds’ attack, were bleeding all over my head, trickling down my chin and my forehead. We finally got Abbot Melani on board, trembling and as pale as a sheet, and he only just managed to keep his balance and not fall straight back down. The ship had shaken so violently that we nearly tumbled as we climbed over the parapet of the cockpit.

“The elephant. .” I gasped, pointing at the huge animal to explain to Simonis why the ship was shaking in that fashion.

But meanwhile the giant had been attacked in turn by the birds, and had let go of its prey and started to run wildly in a circle again, driving the birds away from its eyes with its swinging trunk and intimidating the lions, panthers and lynxes with its powerful trumpeting. The lioness that had seemed on the point of attacking us, confused by the pandemonium, had preferred to join the group of fellow creatures busily devouring the ox. But the ship now had a new occupier: the panther.

“God Almighty protect us,” murmured Abbot Melani tremulously.

The beast had leaped onto the wing opposite the one we had climbed onto and was now moving towards us in slow measured paces.

There was no time to weigh pros and cons. Simonis snatched up the only tool we had: a chimney-sweep’s broom.

“I left it here last time, Signor Master.”

In the meantime the organised group of animals had finished massacring the ox, which lay on the ground in a pool of blood and guts. Not far off, two bulls had victoriously engaged in battle with a lion, opening its belly with a blow of their horns. The feline now lay with its bowels ripped open, roaring with despair and feebly swiping its paws in the direction of its assassin. All around was ferocity, blood and folly. A few animals had found the two doors out of the stadium; most seemed prisoners inside that crazed arena.

The smell of blood meanwhile had excited the panther that had climbed onto the wing of the ship, and it was staring at us with ravenous fury. We were all three clustered in the cockpit, pressed close to one another. As soon as the animal was below us, my assistant gave it a great blow on the head. The panther’s amazement was obvious; clearly it had not expected any resistance. Meanwhile the ship swung a couple of times. All around, the mad festivity of the birds was dying down; the deafening screeches had ceased. Several birds had flown off, others were perched here and there, and yet others had ended up crushed or torn to pieces by the animals. It was now the deep bellowing of the larger beasts that prevailed. For want of other prey (the ox was now the preserve of the strongest and most domineering animals), they were now massing together around the ship. After the unleashed frenzy of their incursion, they had identified their next prey: us. Even the elephant, having finished his senseless circling, had come up to the ship and had started to threaten us with the buccin blast of his trunk. That was what it was, I thought — the silvery trumpet noise I had heard two days earlier at Neugebäu! And that was what had produced those thuds, like earthquake rumbles, that we had heard a few hours earlier in the mansion.

Meanwhile the panther, almost as if to get a foretaste of the assault, was amusing itself by attacking the wooden handle of the broom Simonis was stretching out to it, trying to bite it and seize it with its claws. My assistant managed to jerk it from its jaws and give it another resounding thwack on the head. The animal drew back angrily. Then it advanced again and Simonis, turning the broom around, shook its sharp bristles in its face. The panther jerked back, letting out a yelp of surprise, then it began to rub its right eye socket with its paw; one of the bristles must have got into the eye. It shook itself, throwing us a furious glance. We had played around too long; the animal was preparing to pounce. It would tear Simonis to pieces first, as he had irritated it, then me, as I stank of blood from the wounds on my head, and finally Atto.

The Flying Ship trembled. I turned round. A new and powerful weight now burdened the other wing: a large lion, far more fearsome than old Mustafa, was approaching with murderous intentions. We were caught between two fires: I prepared for the end.

The hull gave another judder. While the lion heaved itself onto the wing, on the opposite side the panther tensed its muscles, uncovered its canines, roared and leaped into the air. I did not even have time to utter a mute prayer to the Virgin, and with the animal almost upon us I yelled in fear and despair. Simonis held the broom, useless and ridiculous, out in front of himself.

It was the same benign gods as before that decided our fate. The ship was shaken by yet another powerful judder, it rose and at the same time revolved.

The centripetal motion of the ship threw us all into the bottom of the craft, while out of the corner of my eye I saw the dark silhouette of the panther leap forward and smash its face into the keel. The animal let out a raucous and angry wail, but the time for its rage had run out: the Flying Ship quivered again, shaking off the panther. And the lion too, as I discovered moments later, had been rudely removed, as a lazy heifer sweeps away the tiresome flies with a careless swish of its tail.

“What. . what’s happened?” I heard Abbot Melani murmur, almost dead from terror, crouching with his head down on the planking of the ship, while below the ship we felt (because I was sure that I was not the only one to sense it) a terrifying and primeval force surge from the bowels of nature and drive us powerfully upwards, just as the spring breeze, amid the vines of Nussdorf, wafts the light dandelion spores.

And then there came that sound, the sweet, solemn tinkling of the amber gems dangling from the ropes above our heads, a kind of primitive hymn with which the Flying Ship celebrated our ascent to heaven. It pervaded the craft, transforming the miserable, poky space into a sublime garden of harmonies. Everything became possible: it was the same sound as the first time but also different, it was everywhere and nowhere, I could hear it and not hear it. It was as sweet as a flute and as sharp as a jangling of cymbals; if I had been a poet I would have called it a “Hymn to Flight”, for it is a human weakness to impose colourful names on the ineffable, and to dip the fallacious brush of recollection into it, trying to create on canvas a landscape that never existed, like a dreamy drinker who raises an empty chalice to his lips, and savours in memory the ghost of wine that he never drank.

The celestial resonance of the amber stones found its counterpoint, as on the previous flight, in a subdued lowing: it was the air flowing through the tubes that constituted the keel, the real belly of the vessel. At the stern the banner with the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Portugal began to flap gaily in the lashing wind.

“Simonis!” I shouted, as I finally rose from the planks at the bottom, where I had cowered to escape the panther’s deadly pounce.

“Signor Master!” he answered, rising to his feet in turn, his face illuminated by a kind of delirious rapture.

“It’s flying again, Simonis, it’s flying again!” I exclaimed, embracing my assistant from relief at our escape, while beneath us we heard the beasts grunting, foiled by our flight.

I looked at the petrified figure of Atto: he no longer had his dark-lensed spectacles. He must have lost them amid the hubbub we had so miraculously escaped. He, too, had risen to his feet and was holding one hand to his left ear, as if to protect himself from that primeval sound, the Flying Ship’s special hymn. With his other hand he clung to the vertical poles that held up the strings with the amber fragments.

Abbot Melani’s face had a waxen and unreal pallor, except for a pair of livid rings round his eyes, from the glasses he had worn so long. It was as if a deranged painter had mocked him by coating his face with white lead, and had then spread ash around his eye sockets and hooked nose, turning him into a new version of Pulcinella. His goggling eyeballs were gazing outwards and downwards.

“But I. . we. . we’re flying,” he stammered in astonishment, and then fainted, collapsing like a withered grass snake on the floor of the ship.

And then I understood what I had, perhaps, suspected all along: Atto could see.

My assistant — who was, after all, a medical student — felt Atto’s pulse, examined his rolled up pupils, and finally, with a good few resounding slaps, brought him round.

Abbot Melani, his wig askew on his head, his four real hairs lashed by the impetuous wind, stared at me with goggling eyes and a tragic expression. He let out an “o-o-oh”, low and monotonous, half way between a cry and a gasp. First he approached the parapet, still supported by Simonis, then stepped back, then leaned out again, going back and forth two or three times, dismayed by the great height we had reached.

Lions, tigers and bears roared with impotent fury at us; the elephant stretched its pliant trunk upwards by way of anathema; the birds, still savouring their freedom, flapped around us, intrigued by our craft, which soared lithely although the wings remained as still as statues. It may have been imagination (indeed, there was no doubt it was), but sharpening my gaze I saw the panther that Simonis had staved off with the broom and I thought I discerned a mute vow of hatred in its distant, almost invisible eyes.

“Yes, Signor Atto, we’re flying,” I confirmed. “And you can see perfectly well, it seems.”

“My eyes see, yes,” he confessed, letting his pupils roam the firmament, without even noticing what he was saying, overwhelmed by the power of the vision opening up around us.

Atto Melani’s eyes and nose cleft the air, as fixed and immobile as the Flying Ship’s wooden eagle’s head, enigmatically outstretched towards infinity.

“But. . couldn’t we fly a little lower?” he implored.

Simonis and I looked at one another.

“Yes, Signor Atto, try and whisper into its ear!” I said with a sudden guffaw, venting the unbearable tension that was tearing me apart and gesturing towards the aquiline head at the ship’s prow. “Maybe it will obey you.”

Simonis joined in my liberating laughter, after which we confessed to Atto that this was not our first flight, and that two days earlier we had experienced the inexplicable power of the Flying Ship.

“You hid everything from me, boy. .”

“And you pretended to be blind,” I retorted.

“It’s not what you think. I did it to defend myself,” he corrected me laconically, and at last he looked out of the ship.

He gazed at the incredible landscape that stretched out before us: the Bald Mountain, the towers and spires of Vienna, the walls of the city and the clearing of the Glacis, the Danube with its tortuous curves, the plain on the other side of the river that stretched all the way to the kingdoms of Poland and the Czar; and then palaces, bridges, avenues, gardens, the hills with their vineyards, ploughed and cultivated fields, the roads radiating out of Vienna towards the countryside, lanes and streams, cliffs and gorges: everything was reduced to the size of an anthill, with us like haughty, all-powerful gods perched high above.

“Tell me: how do you manoeuvre this ship? How does it fly?”

“We don’t know, Signor Atto,” answered Simonis.

“What? It wasn’t you two who lifted it into the air?” he exclaimed, and I saw the panic and terror on his face.

The poor Abbot had thought that Simonis and I were the artificers of its aerial elevation and thus fully in charge. And so I tried to explain to Melani that on the previous occasion also the Flying Ship had risen into the air not because it had been spurred in any way by us, but just because — so it seemed to us — it had sensed and granted our wish: the first time, our desire to fathom the mystery of the Golden Apple; this second time, our desperate wish to escape the fangs of the lions of Neugebäu.

“A wish? Wishing by itself is not enough to move a fork, let alone a ship into the air. Tell me I’m dreaming,” retorted Melani.

At that very moment, with a slight shudder, the Flying Ship changed direction.

“What’s happening?” asked Atto in alarm. “Who is controlling the ship at this moment?”

“It’s hard to accept, Signor Atto, but it controls itself.”

“It controls itself. .” repeated Melani, bewildered, once again casting a dismayed glance downwards, and then staggering slightly.

Simonis darted forward to hold him up.

“My God,” said Atto, shivering, as the Greek rubbed his arms and chest, “it’s terribly cold, it’s worse than being at the top of a mountain. And what about the descent? Won’t we crash into the ground?”

“The other time the ship landed back in the ball stadium.”

“But we can’t go back into the stadium,” spluttered Atto, turning pale again. “Not with all those. . Help! My God! Holy Virgin!”

Suddenly, with a sharp creak, the ship had veered. With a gentle but definite swerve, the craft had turned left, and the centrifugal force almost projected Abbot Melani into the abyss. Luckily Simonis, who had remained by his side, grabbed him by a fold of his habit. I myself, to keep my balance, had had to snatch hold of one of the poles.

For a few minutes silence reigned between us, broken only by the whimpering of the octogenarian Abbot and the rustling of the amber stones, which filled the air with their ineffable harmony. Atto’s eyes were now lost in the abyss. As if reciting the rosary, his lips murmured tremulous and incredulous orations to the Most High, to the Blessed Virgin and to all the saints.

Meanwhile the ship continued to adjust its route at regular intervals, carrying out an aerial survey of the city, segment by segment. With Simonis supporting him at each new juddering shift of direction, Atto, amid muttered invocations, commented on our voyage with dismay:

“A life, a whole life. .” he mumbled, “a whole life has not been enough for me to understand the world. And now that I’m about to die this has to happen to me as well. .”

The ship had completed a full circle above Vienna. It was then that I heard it. The harmonious rustling of the amber stones swelled and embellished itself with bizarre and ineffable variations; it became a counterpoint of whispers and tinklings in a constant crescendo. Finally the shining gems, almost like graceful orchestra players, regaled us with a golden-azure chiming, and a sense of inexorable sweetness wafted over the ship. Indefinable melodious delights, like the outlandish symphonies that one savours in the initial torpor of sleep, resounded throughout the Flying Ship, and I knew that Simonis and Atto were sharing them with me, and were as enraptured with them as I was, so that I did not even have to ask: “Do you hear it as well?” because all of this was with us and within us.

“Soli soli soli. . Vae soli,” murmured Atto. “These amber stones. It’s. . a motif I know — a sonata for bass solo by Gregorio Strozzi. But how do they. .”

He hesitated. Then to our surprise, he stood up, almost arching like a bow, and before falling back, he shouted:

“Vae soli, quia cum ceciderit, non habet sublevantem se!” he pronounced with a stentorian voice to the amber stones, which cast polyhedric arabesques of light onto his face.

“Oh my God, he’s ill!” I shouted to my assistant, fearing the worst, while both of us ran to prevent him from collapsing on the floor of the ship.

“Ecclesiastes. He’s quoting from Ecclesiastes!” answered Simonis, also beside himself, but it seemed to me shaken more by Atto’s words than by his state of health.

We settled the Abbot on the planks. He had not fainted, but he seemed to have lost his senses. Before falling he had touched one of the amber stones with his wrinkled fingertips and the music had at once ceased, giving way to the original rustling noise. Simonis was now rubbing the old Abbot’s temples, chest and feet.

“How is he?” I asked anxiously.

“Don’t worry, Signor Master. He’s very shaken, but he’s getting over it.”

I heaved a sigh of relief. I cursed the Agha and that weed Domenico, who was always ill. It had been a mad idea, now that I thought of it, to take the Abbot to work with us. Certainly, if I had had any idea what was waiting for us at the Place with No Name. .

“We’re on our way back,” observed the Greek. “We’re losing height.”

The Flying Ship was descending. Staring into infinity with its empty wooden eyes, the aquiline head of the Flying Ship had finally pointed its beak towards the countryside of Ebersdorf and Simmering.

Would we land back in the ball stadium? In that case, would we survive? Atto meanwhile had come to his senses.

“We must change direction!” I yelled.

Our first attempts were wholly fruitless. We began to move carefully all three to one side of the ship, and then to the other, hoping to observe some change in the stability of the craft, but in vain.

“It’s going straight down like a stone,” remarked my assistant. “The only difference is that it’s slow.”

Massing together at the prow or stern seemed to have no effect on the progress of the vessel either. It was only then that the idea came to me. What had Penicek told us about the Jesuit Francesco Lana, and his experiments? To steer his ship he had conceived a system of guy ropes: even if unpredictable, it was worth trying.

I stretched up and pinched one of the ropes on which the pieces of amber hung. The yellowish fragments bounced around chaotically without ceasing to emit their indefinable and celestial humming, while the thread vibrated like a lute string. It was as if by disturbing the subdued and amorphous melody the natural course of events could be altered. In a flash of ineffable intuition it struck me that the Flying Ship and the music of the amber stones were the same thing, and it was as if it had always been so, and could not be otherwise. This dim perception, however bizarre, was no illusion: to my extreme astonishment, after a few instants the ship shifted to the left, then to the right and then to the left again.

“Jesus save us! What’s happening?” exclaimed Abbot Melani, clutching Simonis’s arm.

So it was true, I thought: the fragments of amber were in some way connected with the motion of the ship. In what fashion, it was not yet given to me to know (nor did I hope ever to find out), but for the moment I was happy to have found a way to influence the motion of the ship. I noticed that the sky, serene since the start of the day, had suddenly grown dark. In Vienna the sun and clouds alternate quite differently from the way they do in Rome: in the Papal City we have a kind of calm dialogue between two scholars; in Vienna it is like the squabbling of two suspicious lovers. Every three minutes the front lines are altered, it is impossible to say who or what is right or wrong.

“Hold tight,” I warned my two travelling companions, and I repeated the experiment, this time tugging the rope with the pieces of amber more vigorously.

I had overdone it. The airship trembled violently, then the prow began to oscillate horizontally, as if the bird’s head were seeking its direction: suddenly it became a challenge to stay upright.

“Aren’t we overdoing things, Signor Master?” Simonis protested in a worried voice, while Abbot Melani clung to him with his bony hands.

Giving my companions in misfortune the time to hold on to something, I made some more cautious attempts, trying to limit the danger of our all being hurled into the abyss by the pitching of the ship.

In the meantime our altitude decreased, as did the distance between us and the Place with No Name, which now stood out clearly in the broad expanse of the plain of Simmering. The first drops of rain fell.

“Signor Master, I think the ship is returning to base,” Simonis pointed out to me.

I looked: we were heading straight towards the ball stadium. I could not yet see if the animals were waiting for us within the great rectangle. It was highly probable that some of the animals would still be wandering around hungrily, if not in the stadium, then nearby. At least one of them was longing to see us again: the panther, whose eye Simonis had injured with the broom.

That was not the only development: at that moment great black drops began to pelt down. There was no time to lose, nor could I allow myself too many qualms.

“What on earth are you doing with those ropes now, boy?” Abbot Melani asked anxiously.

“Trying to stop us ending up in the jaws of some big cat.”

Neither Simonis nor Atto tried to answer this: it was clear that we had to solve the problem of our safe return. We were not very high now. With my hands I tugged at three or four ropes and released them like hunting bows.

The ship gave a violent start, so that if I had not held on with all my might I would certainly have fallen. Atto and Simonis had crouched down on the floor. We were still heading for the ball stadium. What a crude and unworthy helmsman, I thought, the Flying Ship had found in me! The sublime Ark of Truth, the noble vessel come from the West to grant the Empire victory in war, the vehicle whose purpose was to crown the tallest spire of St Stephen with the Golden Apple, was now the victim of my clumsy attempt at sabotage. What a cruel twist of fate for the ship: it saved us and now we were betraying it by trying to divert the natural course of its flight and force it to the ground. Soaked by the rain, I got to my feet and gave another and harder jerk at the ropes.

This time the oscillation was so violent that I myself fell to the floor and was afraid we would be immediately thrown out. Atto and Simonis both swore. I did not have the courage to check the direction, fearing that some new, unforeseen lurch of the ship would knock me overboard. Getting up again, I gripped the ropes and pulled again, even harder. Finally it happened.

The stones had stopped humming. I looked up: the fragments of yellowish matter were no longer vibrating spontaneously. It was as if they were dissipating some form of residual energy. The Flying Ship shook from top to bottom, like an enormous bird struck in a vital organ. It was a painful, convulsive shudder, a prelude to some catastrophe. If we had had gunpowder on board, I would have sworn that we were all about to be blown to pieces.

“Mamma mia, we’re all dead,” I heard Abbot Melani whisper, clinging to Simonis like a child.

I stood on tiptoes and, swaying as in the midst of an earthquake, I looked outside, towards the prow. At last we had changed direction. After momentarily regaining altitude, the Flying Ship had started descending again, now heading to the left. It was making for a corner of the plain of Simmering, a grassy expanse north-east of the Place with No Name. There, I thought, we would be thrown out.

As we braced ourselves for the impact, the simple rain became a violent storm. Perhaps it was better that way, if it meant no one would see our landing. A flash transformed our sail for an instant into a silver half moon, fallen from its niche in heaven and preparing to settle on the only strip of land willing to receive it. The rain came down in huge heavy drops.

“Hold tight!” I yelled as the belly of the Flying Ship grazed shrubs and tall plants, and I got ready for the crash. Then, as thunder burst nearby, I felt the first contact with the land and made the sign of the cross.

“What are those pieces of amber for? How do they make that noise? Can one of you explain it to me?”

We had landed soaked through and exhausted but alive. Surprisingly, we had come down with little more than an awkward jolt. The Flying Ship had made contact with the ground without either breaking up or overturning, and we had only needed to hold tight to avoid being thrown out of the vehicle.

As soon as we had disembarked, the winged ship rose into the air again and headed for the Place with No Name.

“Maybe it’s going back to the ball stadium,” surmised Simonis.

As it sailed away, humbly exposed to the rain, I gave it one last look: would I ever see it again?

We were not far from the buttery of Porta Coeli, and we made our way towards it, trudging laboriously through the muddy fields. We did not know what had happened in the Place with No Name after our skyward escape; were the lions and tigers still roaming free?

Now we were drying our clothes in the little basement room, near the fireplace. Fortunately, we had met no one on our short walk: what would two chimney-sweeps be doing in the open country, in the company of a decrepit, bald old man (the Abbot had lost his wig), with a face of patchy white lead and carmine? His expression still showing consternation at the recent events, his clothes dark and filthy, his back bent and his gait awkward, Atto resembled a battered old elf who had fled from some strange fantasy land.

We now sat half-naked by the fireside, with our clothes laid out to dry, clasping warm cups of mulled wine, and we took stock of the situation. Abbot Melani regained confidence and fired a number of questions at us.

What was the function of the tubes that constituted the hull, with the noisy flow of air rushing through them? Did they provide the the power necessary for flight? And why did the ship fly a Portuguese flag?

This barrage of questions merely rebounded off the wall of our ignorance, despite the best efforts of our imagination. The tubes did seem to act as a propellant, even if we had no proof of that. The flag of the Kingdom of Portugal, however, was connected with the provenance of the ship. The gazette from two years earlier that Frosch had shown us reported that the aerial vessel had arrived from Portugal. That tallied with the information from Ugonio: the Flying Ship had been sent to Vienna at the behest of the Queen of Portugal, sister of Emperor Joseph I. Its task was to place the Golden Apple, which had arrived in some mysterious fashion from the East, on the tallest spire of St Stephen’s. Only in this way could the Empire triumph in the great war against France and its king, Louis XIV.

But the question that most concerned Atto was the first: how the devil had those amber stones performed the sonata for bass solo by Gregorio Strozzi?

“But why does that interest you so much?” asked Simonis.

“And why should you care?” snapped Melani rudely, who was beginning to find the constant presence of my assistant rather irritating.

The Greek was not intimidated.

“Why are you no longer blind?” he retorted, with his most foolish air.

“Listen, boy,” said Atto to me, repressing his annoyance, “I advise you to send your workshop assistant to go and have a look, with due care, at that abandoned hovel — what’s it called, Neugebäu? We need to know if the situation has calmed down.”

The Abbot wanted to get rid of my assistant, whom he did not trust in the least, and especially to be spared his importunate questions.

“It’s pouring down, Signor Atto,” I objected. “And in any case I’d like to know myself how you miraculously recovered your sight on board the Flying Ship.”

Atto lowered his eyes.

I persisted with my questions. Why on earth had he worn those dark glasses all this time? Was it to cross the border more easily and get into the Caesarean city? On the ship he had mentioned very vaguely that he had done it to defend himself.

“Well, what am I supposed to do with those bloodsuckers, my relatives?”

“Your relatives?” I said in amazement.

“My nephews and nieces, yes — those profiteers. Don’t get the idea that my sight is good. Quite the opposite: I have advancing cataracts. That’s why my Parisian doctor advised me always to wear green and black, two colours, he says, that are good for the eyes. And for the same reason I sleep barefoot in winter too: apparently it is very good for your sight. As for the rest, by the grace of God, I don’t do badly.”

Apart from the piles and gravel sickness, explained Atto, at his venerable age he was still sound of mind and body. The only problem was his nephews and nieces in Pistoia: they did nothing but ask him for money.

“Money, money, always money! They would like me to buy two smallholdings they have their eyes on, and so they want me to withdraw the savings I have in the Monte del Sale: yes, with the Germans at the gates I would get three per cent at best! And they want me to put iron hoops on the barrels on the Castel Nuovo estate. Oh, such luxury — do they think I find money under stones?”

Amazingly, Atto seemed to have already forgotten the feats of the Flying Ship and was now inveighing against his relatives. His nephews and nieces seemed to have no appreciation of what their old uncle did for the family; each of them was out for what he or she could get.

“They even had the nerve to ask me for money to buy an entire library! To which I answered that I would soon be needing them to send me money! Result: they all vanished into thin air. Such gratitude. And to think that I paid an intermediary for four years to find a wife for Luigi, Domenico’s brother, one with the right dowry and lineage. Once I’d found the right girl, they got back in touch only to ask me, quite shamelessly, to send her a bridal gown from Paris — greedy skinflints! I answered that it wouldn’t be ready in time for the wedding, and I suggested they should hire the same dressmaker as the Most Serene Princess of Tuscany and her ladies. Then I gave them permission to remove the diamonds from a portrait in my gallery to make two pendants for her ears and a small cross to hang round her neck on a black silk cord. But that wasn’t enough, no!”

The Abbot was now in full spate. I had the impression that he actually had something else to tell me and was just waiting for Simonis to leave us.

“They insisted on the bridal gown,” Atto continued, “heedless of the fact that the corallines of Oneglia and the armed boats of Finale had raided the galley that brought the courier of Lyons to Genoa and that sending a Parisian dress to the bride would be throwing money away, as happened to a lady who sent two dresses to the Pope’s niece. I answered very brusquely, promising that if I could be sure of my income in the Kingdom of France, maybe they would see me in Pistoia before St John’s day, in which case I myself would bring the bride her gown.”

When the bride had resigned herself to getting married in a Tuscan gown and was pregnant, Atto went on, the nephews and nieces returned to the attack.

“The baby, according to the Connestabilessa who had seen him, was very beautiful. And so I rashly promised to send the mother strings of pearls and some other trinkets. I was waiting for a good opportunity to send them without any risk of theft, which never came; and I’m sorry that circumstances do not allow me to do all that I would like, but, as I have told you too, in Paris all we see are currency notes, and if you exchange them you lose half, and these notes have been and are the ruin of France.”

All they were good for, his dear nephews and nieces, was demanding money, Atto said heatedly, every so often casting a sidelong, impatient glance at Simonis. The violent memory of the beasts appeared to have faded in the thick smoke of his anger against his blood relations. But any good fortune, he said, and any riches that came to them, they took care to keep to themselves.

“They were very quiet, the cunning devils, when last year the Most Serene Grand Duke granted our family access to second-degree nobility, announcing that after five years genuine nobility would be granted. I only heard about it from other folk of the town.”

Abbot Melani went on to explain that his relatives in Pistoia were always complaining: first they insisted on sending Domenico to Paris, to keep an eye on his wealth, then they even got jealous and suspicious of one another.

“Domenico is a lawyer, and the Most Serene Grand Duke of Tuscany gave him a post as secretary of the Council of Siena. I didn’t want him to come to Paris, I don’t need anyone. I said that it was not a good time to travel, with all the widespread poverty and the countless murders, and the countryside rife with malign fevers and petechiae. There are so few of us left now that we have to be careful to look after ourselves, I wrote to the bloodsuckers, hoping they would leave me in peace. But it was no use: they turned to the Grand Duke, and His Royal Highness wrote to me that he considered it highly appropriate for Domenico, cadet of the family, to come to Paris: not being the eldest son he had no obligation to look after the interests of the house, and I need not worry about his position, they would keep it for him for as long as he needed to be away. Domenico was supposed to go back with me to Pistoia, or to set off by himself, but not before — just listen to this! — he had found out about all my interests! And I even had to reply to the Most Serene Grand Duke offering my humble thanks for the great kindness he had shown me et cetera et cetera. .”

Simonis looked at me. I realised that he would rather go out and get soaked in the storm than stay and listen to this senile prattle. But it was still like the Great Flood outside. I indicated he should wait a little longer.

A year ago — Melani went on — Domenico had settled in with his uncle. In vain had Atto urged that his nephew should bring just a few things “because the suit he had on and half a dozen shirts would be enough”; he stayed for months and months, and his old uncle had to buy him a complete wardrobe. That was not all: Melani had had to send him money for the journey, and since thirty doubloons had seemed very little to his relatives, they had sent Domenico to Paris without even a servant.

“And I had been hoping he would bring a servant who knew how to cook, so that at last I could eat some Italian dishes. Selfish and miserly, that’s all they are. And I know what I’m talking about, I know just how much money is coming into the family: when Domenico got his post as secretary of the Council of Siena the Grand Duke sent me a note listing all the emoluments and honours he enjoyed. One day or other I’ll come out with it and write to those skinflints and tell them it’s no good playing hide-and-seek with their old uncle, because the Grand Duke tells me everything.”

As the months went by, however, the old Abbot had grown fond of his nephew, and even had him naturalised as a Frenchman.

“And the trouble that caused! The other relatives all got jealous, afraid that I was favouring him over them.”

Simonis and I listened wearily to the endless harangue. Atto explained that the relatives should all have been grateful for this decision, because if he had died all his furniture and the income he received from his villa near Paris would have been given to anyone who asked for them.

“It is a right of the crown, which in France is called aubaine, and that is why most foreigners send for some relative of theirs and have him naturalised.”

He was not in fact the first nephew that Abbot Melani had taken in to live with him.

“Three years ago I lost my dear nephew Leopoldo. He was blond and very good-looking. It was a great grief to me: he was only thirty-four. He went to the Lord after over twenty days of continual fever, with headaches and delirium. In His goodness God allowed him time to receive all the sacraments and he died a saint, which is the only consolation left to me. He had become a very good young man, of angelic behaviour, and was loved and esteemed by all who knew him for his fine qualities. I too fell ill at the same time that he did, and God in His mercy preserved me, so that the fruit of all my labours should not be lost.”

Here Atto came to an emotional pause, but also listened carefully to see if it was still raining or not. It was. Casting a last disconsolate look at Simonis, who did not move a muscle, Melani started up again.

Thanks to family jealousies, he recounted, with the arrival of the first cold weather he had succeeded in sending Domenico back home. But then he returned, and so Atto took advantage of this to be accompanied to Vienna, instead of hiring a secretary whose wages he would have had to pay.

“I wanted to make up, at least in part, for what my vulture-relatives steal from me. But Domenico fell ill. When we leave Vienna, I’ll send him straight back to Pistoia, together with the mortadellas.”

“The mortadellas?” I said in surprise.

“Before embarking on the journey to Vienna, I asked my nephews and nieces to send me candied oranges and two of the best mortadellas that they make in Pistoia and to put them in the cases of wine that His Royal Highness the Grand Duke honours me with. I wanted to have these things for breakfast in the morning. After all, given that I couldn’t make the journey except in a litter, I wanted to bring some flasks of wine along with me. Well, the skinflints sent me inedible mortadellas, hard and very peppery, and there wasn’t a trace of a candied orange.”

All they can do is beg, these relatives! thundered Melani, completely transformed from the trembling old man we had seen on the Flying Ship. Had it not been for him, he stated, at this hour they would still be the humble grandchildren of a bell-ringer, and not the descendants of a gentleman of the Veneto, he said, thus emphasising that he had been ennobled by the Most Serene Republic.

“It was I who carried out heraldic research and discovered that Machiavelli talks of a Castle of Melano in his Istoria della Repubblica, or Istorie Fiorentine or whatever it’s called, and that its lord was a certain Biagio del Melano, from whom I am convinced we get the surname that these idlers are now so happy to boast of!”

Meanwhile the rain was letting up. Simonis felt his clothes and, although they were still damp, began to get dressed again, with Melani looking hopefully on.

“But you have to be able to carry out the offices of a lieutenant before doing those of a captain! I wrote to them in a letter. If only they would exert themselves as I had done, sweating for their daily bread,” he declared sententiously, forgetting that his fortune had in fact begun with something one could hardly wish on others: emasculation.

But in the end, concluded the Abbot, it was almost impossible to elude all the requests of these money-grubbers.

“And so to save myself from being bled white, I had to pretend to be blind, and thus unable to serve His Majesty, and for this reason in straitened circumstances. I have to say that I gradually acquired a taste for it: blindness saves me a lot of trouble, also with the Grand Duke.”

“With the Grand Duke?” I said wonderingly.

“Yes, in France he has some pupils with no talent either for soldiery or the court, and as unruly as they are foolish, and he wants me, as I’m on the spot, to advance their expenses. Yes, and who will guarantee that I’ll ever get back the money that I lend them? With the war raging throughout Europe and raids by brigands and pirates — oh, very likely! And in any case what are the Grand Duke’s pupils to me? The only possibility for such desperate cases is to become monks, so long as they never join the choir and remain either at table or in bed: which is to say, they go on with the same life they lead when they have no money to gamble with.”

From Atto’s words, it would seem that everyone wanted to take advantage of him.

“And finally, as you know, the expedient of my blindness enabled me to enter Vienna undisturbed.”

But I objected that Domenico seemed to believe in his old uncle’s blindness; or else he was a great actor, I thought to myself — like his aged relative, after all. And furthermore, the Abbot had confessed several things to me the previous day, even the fact that the letter in which Prince Eugene betrayed the imperial cause was a forgery that he himself had commissioned (but Atto did not allow me to say this in front of Simonis). So why had he not revealed to me that his blindness was all a sham?

“Domenico knows that I can see, but just a little, as is in fact the case, and since the others are now all so jealous of him, he has no interest in betraying me. As for your second question, I never reveal anything unless I am forced to.”

Exactly. After the bad news of the Grand Dauphin’s presumed smallpox, Atto had had no choice: he had been obliged to tell me that Eugene’s letter was false, otherwise how could he have got my help? But if he had revealed his sham blindness at the same time, he would have lost all credibility with me irremediably.

Simonis was now ready. Having placed the little bag from which he was never parted round his neck again, he pulled on an oilcloth he had found in the room and slipped out of the door and headed for the Place with No Name.

“We must find out how the devil that ship flies!” Atto brusquely changed the subject, happy that the Greek had finally left us alone. “It’s the greatest invention of all time! An army that possessed such a ship would win every war. You could drop bombs much more accurately than with a canon. You could spy on the layout of the enemy battalions, their consistency, the conditions of the land, everything, even know if a storm were arriving, if a river had dried up — everything you need to wage war.”

All that Abbot Melani had appreciated of the wonderful Flying Ship and its qualities were its possible military uses. Ah yes, I said to myself, Atto was the same old intriguer as ever. Indeed, the more he felt his innermost being threatened by outward things, like the mysterious flying contraption that challenged our very conception of the world, the more he took refuge in the hard, certain and practical kernel of his own profession as a spy.

“If only I could tell the Most Christian King about it. .” he sighed. “It would be my great return to favour! Everyone would say: Abbot Melani is advising His Majesty once again on military matters.”

“I have no idea, Signor Atto, how that ship manages to fly. .” I said, shaking my head.

“We’ll talk about it later,” the Abbot cut me short. “Now that your sham-fool of an assistant has gone, there’s something more urgent I must tell you.”

It was Gregorio Strozzi’s melody, which Atto had thought he had heard being repeated by the amber stones of the Flying Ship.

Melani explained that in the margin of the manuscript copies of Strozzi’s sonata which circulated at the time of its composition, about thirty years ago, a phrase from Ecclesiastes was jotted down: Vae soli, quia cum ceciderit, non habet sublevantem se. Which meant: “Woe to the Sun when it falleth, for it hath not another to help him up.” It was this phrase that Atto had suddenly remembered on hearing the amber stones perform (if that was the right word) Strozzi’s sonata.

“So Simonis was right,” I said.

“What do you mean?” asked Atto, immediately suspicious.

“You didn’t hear him because you had fainted, but he at once recognised that your words came from Ecclesiastes.”

“Well, well,” remarked Melani. “Erudition worthy of a biblical scholar! Isn’t that a little singular for an assistant chimney-sweep?”

“Simonis is a Bettelstudent, a poor student, Signor Atto, and poor students are often highly educated,” I protested.

“All right, all right,” he cut me off, annoyed. “But explain to me how and why the amber stones played Gregorio Strozzi’s sonata?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. I would say that the ship must have wanted to suggest to us the solution to soli soli soli.”

Atto was clearly exasperated. As I had seen him do in the past, he rejected the idea of having been a witness to arcane forces, and preferred to attribute inexplicable events to his own and to other people’s ignorance of natural phenomena.

Without responding to my observation, Melani went on: as with the Agha’s phrase, the quotation from Ecclesiastes could be translated, playing with Latin words that have the same sound, differently.

“Not ‘Woe to the Sun’, but ‘Woe to him that is alone’. Woe to him that is alone, like Joseph, because when he falls, he has not another to help him up,” concluded the Abbot.

“So the soli soli soli of the Agha’s phrase could have a double meaning,” I deduced. “Hristo was right!”

“Ah yes, the Bulgarian. Now explain carefully to me,” said Melani. “What did he write in that note, before dying?”

“On the piece of paper hidden in the chessboard? He wrote: ‘Shah matt, checkmate, the King is enclosed’. And when we found his corpse, he was clutching a white king in his hand.”

“Right,” he said with satisfaction; but his face immediately darkened: “Of course, if you had told me sooner. .”

Then he fell silent. He had probably realised that the reason why I had not recounted the circumstances of Hristo’s death was that at that time, before hearing that the Dauphin of France had also fallen ill and before his own confession, I had not trusted him. And, now that my suspicions had been allayed, I myself no longer had any desire to dredge up the matter. Meanwhile he began again:

“I told you the story of the two sieges that Joseph laid at Landau, you remember?”

“Certainly, Signor Atto.”

“And I told you about the French commander Melac, who chivalrously offered not to shoot at Joseph.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Good. Then you will also recall my explanation of his conduct: the good and ancient military rules resemble those of chess, where the enemy king can never be killed. ‘Checkmate’ in fact means ‘the King is enclosed’, ‘the King has no way out’, but not ‘the King is dead’.” Your Bulgarian friend must have been tormented by this thought, the thought of the King and his destiny, since you found a chess king in his hand after his death.”

“And so?”

“And so the relationship between your Bulgarian friend’s note and soli soli soli is that. . they are the same thing.”

“What does that mean?”

“Soli soli soli can be translated another way,” continued Atto, “if the first and the third soli remain as they are in the phrase engraved on the French king’s cannons, while the second is considered not as the dative singular of sol, ‘Sun’, but as identical to the first sol and is thus translated ‘solitary’, ‘man alone’.”

“And so that would mean. . ‘To the only man alone of the earth’.”

“Exactly.”

“ ‘To the only man alone of the earth’. . It sounds a little strange,” I remarked.

“But it works. If this explanation is correct, before he died your friend had understood the real sense of the Turks’ message: ‘We come to the Golden Apple, which is to say Vienna, to the only man alone of the earth’. A man alone, like the victim king of checkmate: the King is enclosed, the King is alone.”

“And why would Joseph be the victim of checkmate?”

“That too you should be able to work out from what I have told you over the last few days,” said Melani.

I was silent, gathering my thoughts.

“Yes, I understand what you mean,” I said at last, breaking the silence that had fallen between us. “Joseph is alone, and he knows it. It is no accident that he is seeking peace with all his old enemies: to the west, France, to the east, the Ottomans and the Hungarian rebels, to the south, in Italy, the Pope, against whom the Emperor had even sent an army three years ago. His Caesarean Majesty’s allies are the Dutch and English, who are actually his worst enemies: they are negotiating secretly with France and are afraid that Joseph, emerging victoriously from the war or making peace with the Sun King, might block their plans to replace the old European powers. And finally in Spain, his brother Charles is fighting the French, but he hates Joseph on account of the rivalry stirred up between the two of them by their father, the late Emperor Leopold. And Eugene, his military commander, has also hated him since the days of Landau, when Joseph overshadowed his glory. The Emperor is alone. Alone like no one else in the world.”

“And now, I would add, in mortal danger,” Atto completed.

“But why did the Turks choose to present themselves to Eugene with this sentence? What did they want to communicate?”

“It’s the only question I can’t answer. For the moment.”

We stayed like this, in silence, gazing meditatively at the fire that flared up every so often, taking care that some lapillus should not singe the Abbot’s clothes or mine, which were hanging there to dry. Soon Atto fell into a doze. The emotions of the last hour had been too much for the old man; it was only surprising that he had not lost his senses entirely the moment the animals burst into the ball stadium.

I thought back to his sham blindness and smiled. Abbot Melani in his old age had become the classic old skinflint from comedy, hounded by his relatives. Just a few days earlier I had been taken in myself and had believed Atto’s complaints about his poverty. As I cogitated thus I felt drowsiness stealing over my tired limbs. In this semi-comatose state I went on to think about Hristo, about the Agha’s phrase and the new meaning we had just discovered. And just as reason was yielding to dream, I had a flash of inspiration.

Now, at last, I knew why the Agha had said that phrase to Eugene.

It was just a question of putting two and two together, thinking of what Cloridia had heard that very morning from Ciezeber, who was looking after the Emperor.

The Ottoman embassy had arrived in great haste from Constantinople, bringing the dervish with them, in order to save the life of His Caesarean Majesty. They had come just in time, the very day Joseph I had been put to bed. Probably those who were on the Emperor’s side had learned that someone was making an attempt on his life and had asked for help — why not? — from the Sultan of the powerful empire, the land that possessed medical skills undreamt of in Europe. And the Sultan, who (as Cloridia had understood) had all to gain from Joseph’s good health, had sent Ciezeber.

Who had summoned the Turks? The answer was obvious: it could only have been Prince Eugene. It was certainly not a coincidence that it was in his palace that the embassy had been welcomed, and that it was there that the secret encounters took place between the dervish and the Caesarean Proto-Medicus.

Cloridia had hit the nail on the head here too: Eugene should not be counted among the Emperor’s enemies, as Atto believed, but among his few friends, perhaps even the only one.

I had not yet had time to say so to Melani only because he had made it very clear that he did not trust my assistant. At that moment the sound of footsteps outside awoke Atto from his torpor. Simonis had returned from his reconnaissance.

“Judging by the elephant’s trumpeting, I would say the situation has not improved at all,” announced the Greek.

And so we confronted the event that had triggered off all our recent misadventures: the terrifying wild animals of the Place with No Name.

The incursion of the elephant and the other beasts into the ball stadium had come about because the animals had been channelled into a narrow space behind the stadium: a sort of blind alley, bordered by the external wall of the stadium, by the eastern keep of the manor house and by another wall. The animals had made their way there by a subterranean passage, which I guessed must lead to their ditches.

But where had the elephant come from? How was it possible to hide such a giant? We had seen no trace of it in the ditches along with the other beasts!

“There is an opening in the eastern keep as well, Signor Master,” Simonis informed me.

I went over the events in my mind. On two occasions I had perceived the presence of the elephant: first on the great terrace on the upper floor of the manor house, when I had heard the trumpeting of its trunk, like that of a buccin. The second time was when we had been on the western side of the gallery on the building’s semi-basement level. Evidently the great beast had its den in the western keep, at the westernmost end of the terrace, just above the gallery where we had heard its footsteps: we had not been able to enter the keep because Frosch had not given us the key. From here it had passed onto the terrace, then into the entrance halls and finally it had escaped from the manorhouse, turning left to pass under the archway of the maior domus. Once it had reached the eastern courtyard, that of the main entrance, it had deposited an organic evacuation: that was the source of the extraordinarily abundant faeces we had almost run into!

Finding no other way out, the elephant had entered the eastern keep, whose entrance into the courtyard, as I had verified myself, was always open. Inside the keep it had turned immediately right, entering the passage towards the narrow space behind the ball stadium, where it had met the animals that were emerging from the underground gateway of the ditches. Here the great mass of beasts of every possible breed, especially of the aggressive and ferocious, mauling kind, must have created a situation of uncontrollable fury. Tigers, lions and bears had found themselves face to face with the elephant, all crammed tightly together, in a suffocating mêlée. Panic had confused their feral minds, preventing them from finding the only possible solution: to enter the eastern keep, from which the elephant had emerged, one at a time, and from there to spill out into the main courtyard. The elephant had then resolved the situation by smashing down the door that led into the ball stadium: hence the sudden explosion of beasts into the arena where the Flying Ship lay. The elephant and the rest of the bestial horde had shattered not only the door but also the birdcages, unleashing general chaos.

So far, all was clear, but who had let the animals out of their ditches, and the elephant from its hiding place in the western keep? Where had Frosch been? Why had he previously said nothing about the elephant’s existence? And how the devil had that colossus ended up in one of the keeps of Neugebäu?

17 of the clock, end of the working day: workshops and chancelleries close. Dinner hour for artisans, secretaries, language teachers, priests, servants of commerce, footmen and coach drivers (while in Rome people take but a light refection).

Half an hour later we were inside the Pennal’s cart, which we had intercepted on the road as it headed punctually towards the agreed meeting place: we wanted to avoid getting too close to the walls of the Place with No Name. A pleasant surprise awaited us: Penicek had stretched a robust tarpaulin over his cart to protect it from the rain. He appeared rather taken aback to meet us there, with the Abbot exhausted and wigless. After bidding us climb in, he set off again without asking too many questions; Simonis saw to that, mistreating him as usual, so he did not dare to open his mouth.

As the cart set off, I wondered what had happened to Frosch. He would certainly get into trouble if he could not justify his absence at the moment the animals were released from their cages.

“I will have to report to the imperial chamber what has happened here today,” I said to Simonis. “As always in such cases, they’ll come here for an inspection tomorrow and we’ll have to be here too. They’ll ask us a lot of questions, but as Master Chimney-sweep by court licence I can’t keep quiet about this affair.”

“I’ll come too,” Atto said swiftly.

I guessed why. The Abbot was not willing to leave Vienna without finding out more about the Flying Ship: if he could report something specific to the Most Christian King, his journey to the Caesarean city would be crowned by at least one success. I did not protest; it was useless to oppose the Abbot’s obstinacy. And in any case no one would suspect a blind, decrepit old man. Dressing him in shabby clothes, with no make-up or wig, I would present him as a relative I was looking after.

“All right, Signor Atto,” I replied simply.

While the Pennal’s trap rumbled along slowly on account of the mud, with a new storm raging furiously, we picked up a peasant on the road.

As soon as he got in, gesticulating and yelling in a thick and almost incomprehensible dialect, the yokel explained that he had just seen a lion rampaging around and that was why he had asked for a ride. We feigned utter incredulity: unbelievable, a lion in this area? The man then explained that one of the wild beasts from Neugebäu, which were part of the castle’s attractions for visitors, must have escaped from its keeper. We evinced further surprise at the news that Neugebäu contained not just one but numerous ferocious animals. The peasant, maybe to relieve the terror of his encounter with the lion, took pleasure in amazing us and said that, according to rumours in the countryside nearby, at Neugebäu there was even an elephant.

We opened our eyes wide in amazement and asked him to explain. He told us that Emperor Maximilian II, who had founded Neugebäu, had been presented with an elephant from Africa. Maximilian had arranged for it to travel overland from Spain to Vienna, thus giving the Germanic peoples their first opportunity to admire the breed of elephantine pachyderms. The beast had so impressed the Germans and Austrians that each of the numerous inns where it had halted had taken on the name of “Elephant Inn”. With rustic ingenuousness the peasant told us that when it came to Vienna, the pachyderm had not only surprised the onlookers but also moved them: among the admirers was a young mother, who in her amazement dropped her newborn baby; amid the yells of the crowd the elephant picked up the little child with its trunk and returned it to its mother’s arms. Maximilian had first placed the elephant in a purpose-built menagerie at Ebersdorf, near the Place with No Name. But then, in December 1553, the beast had died, and a chair, made from its left front leg, was all that remained of it. All? No, not quite all, the peasant corrected himself. Before dying the elephant had proved itself to be an elephantess, giving birth (a very rare event, apparently, among these pachydermic colossi) to a beautiful pair of “calves”. Now, the keeper of the elephantess — the great-grandfather of the present keeper at Neugebäu — believing that the elephantess’s death had been caused by the excessive strain of the Emperor’s court ceremonial, felt sorry for the two exotic orphans. Fearing that sooner or later someone would come and take them away from their comfortable quarters at Ebersdorf, and put their lives at risk, he said not a word about the birth and moved the two little elephants into a stable in the countryside nearby, where he raised them, with the help of relatives, in great secrecy. After Maximilian’s death the two little ones (in a manner of speaking) were transferred to the manor house of Neugebäu, which, after its creator’s death, had fallen into neglect and decay. Their fate seemed to be sealed: victims and protagonists of a secret scheme, the two little elephants were destined to die alone and in secret in the gloom of the Place with No Name. But since Mother Nature is boundless in her mercy, among animals even incestuous love is permitted and can be fruitful: the two elephants were brother and sister, and their first youthful effusions resulted in a fine little male offspring, now kept at Neugebäu, healthy, lively and vigorous of character. Now, of course it was getting on in years, but it still possessed a notable temper.

“So we noticed,” I was about to remark, thinking of the terrifying roar that had accompanied its incursion into the ball stadium, but I managed to keep my mouth shut.

“And the two parents? Did they die?” asked Simonis.

“They were stolen during the Thirty Years’ War. To be eaten. There was a famine,” the peasant answered laconically.

Atto, Simonis and I all started in surprise. Pater Abraham from Sancta Clara was right: the Viennese appetite being what it was, no animal could feel safe in this city.

“Talking about dead people,” the peasant said, “today they found one in the woods, up north.”

“Oh yes? Where?” I asked.

“At the Two Hanged Men.”

I gasped with surprise. The peasant noticed.

“Don’t you know the place? It’s near Salmannsdorf.”

Having left our passenger at a crossroads, we did not think twice. We had got him to explain, eventually, where and what the Two Hanged Men were: a clearing in the Viennese woods, to the north. It was called that, he explained, because they had once found the swinging corpses of two men executed on a gallows there, probably two brigands.

We arrived at our destination after a journey of almost two hours, first in a carriage and then on foot, in the neighbourhood of the charming village of Salmannsdorf. We reached our objective by following a steady stream of inquisitive onlookers through the woods. Our journey had been considerably lengthened by a detour: we had deposited Atto, too tired for any further activity, at the convent of Porta Coeli. On my return, free from Simonis’s company, I would tell him what Cloridia had discovered at Eugene’s palace.

Ugonio’s body was lying on the rain-soaked grass. His appearance was not (and could not have been) much worse than usual. While the four or five greyish hairs on his head were covered by his hood, his face still presented the same wrinkled grey skin, and from his filthy overcoat peeked his black collar and his hooked, stained hands. Invincible and nauseating, the same cowshed stench still enveloped him. His half-closed eyes, yellow and gummy, still glittered dully with the bloodshot sclera of his rotten corpisantaro blood. Only a trickle of greenish slaver daubed his chin and testified to what had happened. If we had not known, we might have thought he was sleeping.

Suddenly there came a break in the clouds and a ray of sunlight, penetrating the foliage, touched the basket that Ugonio had brought with him and which still lay beside him. From the basket protruded various objects which had probably emerged at the moment the corpisantaro fell to the ground: two glass ampullae and a small pannier. The ray of sunlight transformed the two ampullae, making their respective liquids gleam: one golden, the other a fine ruby red.

Simonis and I pushed our way through the crowd of onlookers casually discussing the discovery of the body. In no way are Rome and Vienna more different than in their attitudes towards death. In Rome everyone thinks that talking of death brings bad luck; in Vienna the Great Liberator and all that accompanies it (the causes and circumstances of death, funerals, division of the inheritance, the subsequent rich banquet) are the subject of casual and spontaneous conversations. The Romans make fun of the Viennese: how the devil can they converse cheerfully about bereavements and corpses? They forget that in the city of the popes, death, especially violent death, is less widely discussed but more commonly perpetrated.

Ugonio, in a life spent between Rome and Vienna, had blended Italian and Austrian customs: he had died in the Viennese woods at the hands of an Italian. I could put a name to the murderer. It was all too obvious: Al. Ursinum, as was written in Ugonio’s memorandum. Which is to say, Alessium Ursinum, the castrato Gaetano Orsini, who sang the role of Sant’ Alessio. Farewell Ugonio, farewell for ever my friend, may God be with you. You have taken to the tomb the secret that bound you to Orsini. And farewell to the words of the Archangel Michael: now that Atto and I had finally understood the meaning of the Agha’s phrase, it would not be much use to us. But I was still curious to know what message the Archangel had engraved with his sword at the top of the spire of St Stephen’s, on the pedestal that had once held the sacrilegious globe of Suleiman the Magnificent and which, according to the prophecy, was still awaiting the real Golden Apple.

I stole a look at Simonis’s face, wan with anguish. Another murder was rending our souls and further entangling the snarled thread of events. With my mind on the thousand homicides that steeped the Eternal City in blood every year, I looked at Ugonio’s lifeless face and pondered again on his strange destiny. “After running every sort of risk in Rome,” I repeated to myself, “you got yourself killed in Vienna.”

“Poor wretch!” a couple of old people commented at a short distance. “He got the wrong herb.”

“True. These things happen. .” echoed another.

Got the wrong herb? Defying the scandalised voices of the onlookers (mostly octogenarians with little to do but poke their noses into other people’s business), I approached the corpse. I picked up the ampulla with the golden liquid and held it against the light.

“It looks like oil,” said Simonis, who had joined me.

I pulled the cork out of the ampulla and spilled a drop onto my thumb and sucked it. He was right.

At once we checked the other ampulla, which, as one might have imagined, was vinegar. The pannier was full of herbs. A salad, that is to say, and freshly picked.

At this point our inspection was interrupted by three members of the city guard who had come to examine the corpse. They snatched the ampullae and salad from our hands. They examined them meticulously, shaking their heads as if deploring an accident that could have been avoided.

“Another one who’s made the old mistake,” said the tallest of the three, examining the leaves attentively. “Lily of the valley instead of ursine garlic.”

“Ursine garlic?” I asked the gendarmes.

The three looked at each other and then burst out laughing, as if there were no corpse at their feet.

“Italiano, be careful! Or salad turns into poison,’ one of the three answered mockingly.

Now everything was clear. After I had heard some explanations in dialect from the gendarmes (in Vienna the employees of the urban institutions almost always speak in the vernacular, unfortunately), it was Simonis who explained it all to me, as we made our way back to the cart.

Allium ursinum was the scientific Latin name of ursine, or wild, garlic: the long-leafed herb with its pungent taste which, in early spring every year, thickly carpets the soil of the Viennese woods with a brilliant shiny emerald green and spreads its spicy perfume everywhere. In Vienna it is normal to pick wild garlic to make salads with, or to cook with other dishes, a custom that has long died out in Rome. Ugonio evidently preferred it raw, and that was why he had brought a little oil and vinegar with him. That was what the annotation “Al. Ursinum” meant in Ugonio’s note: not Sant’ Alessio and Gaetano Orsini, but ursine garlic: an innocent harvest of fresh herbs. That therefore was the “urgentitious and appeteasing” affair that the corpisantaro had hinted at, not any plots with Orsini under the cover of the Chormaestrin’s music! The subsequent words in Ugonio’s note, the name of the Two Hanged Men, indicated the spot where the corpisantaro knew that he would find it in abundance. But instead, it was where he had found his death: wild garlic, as one of the gendarmes had explained to me, was almost identical to another plant, lily of the valley, whose leaves contain a swift and fatal poison. Even expert herb pickers had sometimes made mistakes and paid with their lives, just like Ugonio. Oh, how fragile a thing is a human being, if the life of a reckless relic hunter, hardened to all labours and all dangers, can be broken by a puny little wild plant!

That was why Gaetano Orsini, when Simonis and his companions had asked him, amid their pummelling, about the two hanged men, had said in bewilderment that he hardly ever left the city walls! He knew the name of the place and could not understand why they were talking to him about it.

It had all been pointless. The last tenuous thread that seemed to link us to a possible solution had frayed to nothing in our hands. If Ugonio had not been plotting with Gaetano Orsini, then our suspicions about Camilla de’ Rossi’s musicians remained no more than suspicions — or even fantasies, since they were based on nothing concrete. Ugonio’s only business had been to provide Ciezeber with a false head of Kara Mustafa, as part of his customary trade as a hunter of fake relics.

The disappearance of the corpisantaro was another painful rupture for me. I had run into Ugonio twenty-eight years ago, in Rome, at the very same time that I, an inexperienced servant boy in a modest Roman inn, had first met Atto Melani, and through him the great capricious world outside the walls of my little inn, and the mad wheel of fortune that governs it.

Even then I had stared death in the face. Now the death of Ugonio closed the circle that had begun in those distant Roman days. The sense of completeness (not of perfection) that the events of Vienna brushed over my distant memories, like painters silently coating frescoes with a fresher glaze, took on a new tonality. A harsher, sadder and more ruthless one.

At least I had the consolation that Ugonio had not died at anyone else’s hand: indeed, he had gone by gorging himself. I cast a last glance at his lifeless body. The shades and mephitic airs of the Roman sewers had bestowed on him the features of a burrowing mole. His passing now allowed him to be benignly caressed by the fresh Viennese breeze and by the April sunlight, which filtered tremulously through the foliage and rested maternally on his face, almost as if it wished to show me the divine breath that lies hidden in every man. More than a death, it was almost an elevation from the subhuman to the superhuman, this demise of the haggard old corpisantaro, I thought as I walked away. I made the sign of the cross and recited a short prayer for his twisted soul.

On our way back I called in at the imperial chamber to report the escape of the wild animals from the Place with No Name. The clerk took note without batting an eyelid.

When we got back to Porta Coeli there was no point in trying to confer with Atto: he lay almost lifeless on his bed, too worn out by the day’s adventures. Domenico, who had almost completely recovered at last, begged me not to insist: better to let him sleep through to the next day.

“Today we will tackle the Fourth Discussion: Of buying and selling,” Ollendorf greeted me, with the usual Teutonic smile that sends a shiver running down our Latin spines.

With my mind on quite other matters, I passively submitted to the German lesson. Our little boy and Cloridia, fortunately, proved much more attentive to the teachings of our good preceptor.

“Was für Wahren wollen die Herren haben? Sie gehen herein in den Laden, und schawen, was Ihnen beliebet,” which is to say “What merchandise would your lordships like to have? Pray enter the shop, and see what attracts you,” my little wife recited diligently.

A little later there came a knock at our door. It was Simonis. He had found a note from Opalinski in his room: he wanted to meet us the next day and fixed an appointment at seven a.m. in a palace near the southern ramparts.

I went back to the lesson with even less enthusiasm, and when Ollendorf had gone I was finally able to tell Cloridia all about the latest events, Ugonio’s death in primis.

She was saddened, although less than me, naturally. For her the corpisantaro had only constituted a threat, not someone towards whom she could feel any attachment, however wavering. In any case, we did not talk much about it, so as not to distress our boy.

I settled down to read the newspaper: the Corriere Ordinario, of course. I had to admit that since these troubles had started, I had felt less and less inclined to take up the customs of my adopted city, and the impenetrable Germanic idiom was one of the first victims.

Cloridia had meanwhile foraged in the convent’s kitchens for something to eat. I had not yet had any chance to eat and was starving.

“Mummy’s little boy,” she said to our son, with a tray in her hand. “Come and help me prepare Daddy’s dinner.”

“Ich gehorsambe”, which is to say, “I obey,” my little apprentice answered comically in German, and at once set out cutlery, a napkin and a glass in front of me.

The dinner was all based strictly on spelt. I knew who it came from, of course. How could I object? The Chormaisterin’s fixation on the curative powers of spelt was shared wholeheartedly by Clorida, who had inherited it from her mother. In all her years in Rome, my wife had actually made very little use of her mother’s recipes, but now, spurred by Camilla, she too had become a real fanatic. At first it had not bothered me, especially since the noble grain, a favourite food of the ancient Romans, had more than once cured our boy of his ailments, but as time went by I had tired of it. Chewing my way through this meal fit for ruminants, I settled down to read the Corriere Ordinario, which Cloridia had as usual obtained from van Ghelen’s printing house.

The dispatches from Madrid, which had left there on 9th March, reported the preparations in Portugal (where the Queen was Joseph’s sister) for the campaign against the Duke of Anjou. And so naturally I thought of the Golden Apple and the Flying Ship, which the Queen of Portugal had sent to Vienna. Then I read of the quarrels between the Duke of Vendôme and the Princess of the Orsini, “which are growing daily, the Duke saying loftily, that he cannot understand how the advice of a woman is followed in matters that should not even come to the ears of their Sex.” I could well believe that the Duke of Vendôme might grow irritated with the gentle sex, I thought: had not Atto included him in the list of women-men? The name of Orsini, on the other hand, the famous intriguer known to everyone, reminded me of the homonymous and far from noble castrato, whom I had for a moment mistaken for the killer of poor Ugonio. . How strange this evening’s perusal of the Corriere was proving, I said to myself in vexation: instead of distracting me, every item reminded me of what I had just lived through. If such coincidences meant anything, what were they trying to tell me? I went on to the dispatches from Rome, which were also far from fresh, from 28th March, but here too the first name my eyes fell on was that of Connestabile Colonna: he had participated with His Holiness, the Supreme Pontiff Clement XI, at the feast of the Most Holy Annunciation. The Connestabile was Maria Mancini’s son. In short, the gazette, wherever my eyes fell, was talking about me.

I threw it onto the ground impatiently and went on to read the pamphlet which accompanied the gazette. However, it only brought news from places that were distant and wholly unknown to me, like Mietavia, capital of a certain Duchy of Curlandia. Right at the end I found the latest news from Vienna:

The Most August Emperor having been ill with Smallpox since Wednesday, Prayers have been ordained and published since Sunday. .

Things I already knew. I read on:

These days have seen the departure for the Low Countries by Postal Diligence of the Caesarean General Sergeant Count Gundacchero of Althan.

So Count Althan had already set off: which made it all the stranger that Prince Eugene was still lingering here. Perhaps the next day he really would leave, as he had announced.

That was the end of the Viennese news. I looked at the page again: there was something odd, like a false or missing note. Missing? Of course! The news of the Augustinian monk arrested for murder and rape! The Italian newspaper said nothing about it.

“Cloridia! The Diary of Vienna! Where’s the Diary of Vienna?” I exclaimed, leaping from my chair.

“Here it is, here it is!” my consort said, pointing to the table by my side, where she always placed the paper that she bought at the Red Porcupine.

I could not find the news in the German-language gazette either.

Penicek had told me the previous day that it was on everyone’s lips and he was surprised we knew nothing about it. But there was not a word about it in the gazettes. I went over to Cloridia, who had started brushing my work clothes and asked if she had heard anything about it, but she shook her head and looked surprised: at the palace of the Most Serene Prince they were usually the first to hear every little item of gossip — and if a monk had been arrested. .! That was not the only thing. She had not heard a word about the serious crimes he was supposed to have committed either.

“Odd!” remarked my wife. “Who told you about it?”

“Penicek.”

“Ah.”

“Do you think he invented it, perhaps to. .?”

At that moment, from the pocket of the trousers Cloridia was holding, fell a small object. It was the little box Atto had given to me.

“What is it?” asked Cloridia, retrieving it.

I told her that, according to Abbot Melani, it contained the explanation of his meeting with the Armenian. However, he had made me promise not to open it before he left Vienna.

“And suppose it were empty?” she objected.

I felt myself turn pale. I shook it slightly. An object of some sort rattled within. I heaved a sigh of relief.

“All right, the Abbot has put something inside,” she admitted. “But are you really sure that it will explain his meeting with the Armenian? Maybe it’s just a pebble.”

I was on tenterhooks.

“I’m tempted to open it,” I said.

“You’d be breaking your word.”

“So what should I do?” I asked disconsolately.

“I’m almost sure your Abbot was sincere, this time. I’ve still got a few doubts, I’ll admit, but the moment you suspect anything you can always force it open.”

20 of the clock: eating houses and alehouses close their doors.

I was sitting in my usual place in the Caesarean chapel: it was time for the rehearsal of Sant’ Alessio. This evening the orchestra was playing with more intensity of purpose than usual, the performance of the oratorio being imminent.

After Ugonio’s tragicomic death — may he rest with God — the musicians had turned back into the innocent artists I had always really believed them to be. And yet I looked at Camilla de’ Rossi’s back as she waved her arm to coax a more intense vibrato from the violins, or a gentler muttering from the violas, and I asked myself some questions.

Why had she lied about Anton de’ Rossi? Rossis are not necessarily all related to one another, she had said. But the ex-chamberlain of Cardinal Collonitz was indeed related to her deceased husband Franz. Cardinal Collonitz was the same man who years ago had baptised the Turkish girl who had been rejected by the nuns of Porta Coeli; it was Camilla herself who had told us about it. Franz and Anton de’ Rossi, Franz and Camilla, Anton de’ Rossi and Collonitz, but also Collonitz and Porta Coeli, and finally Porta Coeli and Camilla. What logic, if any, lay concealed amid all this tangle?

And why on earth, as I had been told by Gaetano Orsini (whom I only now knew to be harmless and therefore trustworthy), had the Chormaisterin never let herself be paid for the work she did for the Emperor? People who do not work for money, I argued, receive some other kind of recompense. What was hers? When Joseph had asked her to give up her job as a healer with spelt, she was no longer able to support herself and, rather than get paid for her musical compositions, she had asked His Caesarean Majesty to be allowed to stay at the convent of Porta Coeli, which was more like a punishment than a recompense.

Years earlier, Camilla and her husband Franz had arrived in the distant capital of the Kingdom of France to meet. . Atto Melani. Was the journey undertaken for the purpose of meeting the pupil of Seigneur Luigi — or the spy of the Most Christian King? Could one really believe that Camilla had nothing to do with the shady dealings in which Atto had always been entangled? I noticed that Cloridia was looking at me gloomily: she knew my cogitations and shared them, but her heart wavered between them and her affection for the Chormaisterin.

From the mouth of the soprano, the plump Maria Landini whom I had believed just the previous day to be capable of the vilest crimes, Alessio’s spouse mellifluously sang the wonders of love:

Basta sol che casto sia

Che diletta sempre amor. .¹⁴

No, it was not possible. It was clear that behind Camilla’s fabrications something lay hidden. I observed the Chormaisterin as she conducted, and I pondered.

. .e fa’ poi che eterna sia

Fiamma ascosa entro del cor.¹⁵

As I heard the soprano’s words on the eternal flame of the passions, I told myself that doubt is just like love, a flame that torments and blazes incessantly. My perplexities about the Chormaisterin’s musicians had vanished. But my burning doubts about this woman grew more painful by the hour. Porta Coeli and Camilla had been the starting point of my stay in Vienna. Now, after a thousand bloody adventures, everything seemed to lead back to the convent and to the enigmatic composer.

With regard to the students’ deaths, we no longer had any clue to follow. But with regard to the Emperor’s mysterious illness there were still far too many questions left unanswered: what bound Camilla to Joseph the Victorious? What recompense did the Chormaisterin expect for the service she was rendering His Caesarean Majesty?

I could not say why, but I felt that the next day would bring a little light to my intellect, now befuddled by the bewildering labyrinth of events.