The Last Cato (33 page)

“We have to move around,” murmured Farag, still sleepy.

I wanted to turn and look at him. With an iron will, I lowered my head and resisted a foolish need to cry. I was starting to get sick of my childish emotions.

Glauser-Röist got to his feet and did some jumping jacks to get the blood flowing. I didn’t move an inch.

“Call room service and have them send up a big breakfast.”

“I want a steaming hot espresso and a chocolate biscotto,” I begged, my palms pressed together.

“What do you say we get to work?”The Rock cut us short, his arms behind his head. He looked like he was trying to pull his head out by the root.

“Let’s forge a sculpture with the iron hammers,” I joked.

The captain stood right in front of them, totally focused. Then he crouched down. At that point, I lost sight of him because he was hidden behind the anvil. Farag sat up to watch him, then he finally stood up and walked toward him.

“Find anything, Kaspar?” he asked. The Rock got to his feet and I could see the upper half of his body again. He had a hammer in his hand.

“Nothing special. They’re just regular hammers,” he said, hefting the tool. “Some have been used and others haven’t. There are big ones, little ones, and medium-size ones. But there doesn’t seem to be anything extraordinary about them.”

Farag jumped up immediately, carrying one of those iron mallets. He raised it in the air, flipped it, threw it up, and caught it with ease.

“Nothing extraordinary, indeed,” he lamented. Then he stepped up to the anvil and struck it. The sound boomed like a huge bell in the forest. We froze, but the birds didn’t. Flocks of them flew away, squawking from the highest treetops. Seconds later, when the clamor stopped, none of us dared move, still alarmed by what had happened, frozen like statues.

“Lord…,” I babbled, blinking nervously and swallowing hard.

The Rock let out a huge laugh. “Well,
that
was extraordinary, Professor.”

But Farag wasn’t laughing. He was serious and expressionless. Without saying a word, he turned around and snatched the hammer out of the captain’s hands. Before we could stop him, he struck the anvil again with all his might. I covered my ears, but it didn’t help. The blow of iron against iron drilled into my brain through the bones of my skull. I jumped to my feet and marched over to him. I preferred an argument a thousand times over to suffering that abominable sound again.

“What on earth are you doing?” I snapped, confronting him over the anvil. He didn’t answer. He went back to the pile of hammers, about to grab another one. “Don’t even think about it!” I shouted. “Are you crazy?”

He looked at me as if he’d never seen me before. Then he ran around the anvil, planted himself in front of me, and grabbed me by the shoulders.

“Basileia, Basileia!
Think,
Basileia!
Pythagoras!”

“Pythagoras?…”

“Pythagoras, Pythagoras! Isn’t it wonderful?”

My brain replayed what had happened since we climbed out of the helicopter. Then I quickly ran through all I knew about Pythagoras: the labyrinth of straight lines, the famous theorem (the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the square of the other angles, or something like that). The seven planetary circles, the Harmony of the Spheres, the Brotherhood of the Staurofilakes, the secret sect of the Pythagoreans… The Harmony of the Spheres and the anvil and the hammers… I smiled.

“Do you get it?” Farag smiled, not taking his eyes off me. “Now you see!”

I nodded. Pythagoras of Samos, one of the most preeminent Greek philosophers of antiquity, born in the sixth century B.C., established a theory in which numbers were the fundamental principle of all things and the only possible way to decipher the enigma of the universe. He founded a type of scientific-religious community that considered the study of mathematics a way to spiritual perfection. He put all his effort into teaching deductive reasoning. His school had a number of followers; from it originated a line of wise men that continued through Plato and Virgil—Virgil!—up until the Middle Ages. In fact, today he is considered to be the father of medieval numerology; in the
Divine Comedy,
Dante followed him with mathematical precision. It was Pythagoras who first classified the different types of mathematics according to a system that has lasted for over two thousand years in the quadrivium of the sciences—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and… music. Yes, music. Pythagoras was obsessed with explaining the musical scale mathematically. It was a great mystery for people back then. He was convinced that the intervals between the notes of an octave could be represented through numbers. He focused on this theme for the greater part of his life, until one day, legend has it that—

“Would one of you please explain it to
me,”
Glauser-Röist grumbled.

Farag turned, like someone waking out of a trance, with a guilty look on his face. “The Pythagoreans were the first to define the cosmos as a series of spheres that functioned as circular orbits. The theory of the nine spheres and the seven planets is the basis for the labyrinth we just came through, Captain. It was Pythagoras who exposed it for the first time…” He grew pensive for a moment. “Why didn’t I realize that before? You see, Pythagoras maintained that as the seven planets followed their orbits, they emitted a series of sounds, the musical notes that created what he called the Harmony of the Spheres. That sound, that harmonious music, cannot be heard by us humans because we are inured to it from birth. According to this theory, each one of the seven planets emitted one of the seven musical notes, from
do
to
ti.”

“And what does that have to do with the hammers?”

“Can you please explain it to him, Ottavia?”

I felt a knot in my throat. I was looking at Farag, and all I wanted was for him to keep talking. So I gently turned down his offer by shaking my head. The old Ottavia had died, I said to myself in shock. Where had my taste for intellectual boasting gone?

“One day,” continued Farag, “as Pythagoras was walking down the street, he heard some rhythmic blows that grabbed his attention. The noise was coming from a nearby blacksmith. Wise Pythagoras was attracted by the musicality of the blows on the anvil. He stood there for a long time, observing how the blacksmiths worked and how they used their tools. He realized that the sound varied according to the size of the hammers.”

“It’s a well-known story,” I said, making a superhuman effort to seem normal, “that appears to be true, because Pythagoras did discover the numerical relationship between the musical notes, the same musical notes emitted by the seven planets as they rotated around the earth.”

The bright sun appeared from behind the hedge, casting sheets of light on that earthly circle we were trying to escape. Glauser-Röist was impressed.

“We’re on that earth,” Farag happily concluded, “the center of the Pythagorean cosmology. That’s where the planetary symbols in the previous circles came from.”

“I suppose you’ve already surmised that your beloved Dante derived his numerology directly from Pythagoras,” I said with irony.

The Rock looked at me. He had reverence in his steely eyes. “You don’t understand, Doctor. All this deepens my conviction that we have lost so much beautiful, profound wisdom throughout history.”

“Pythagoras was wrong, Captain. To begin with, the moon isn’t a planet; it’s the earth’s satellite. No star emits musical notes as it orbits. And the orbits aren’t round, but elliptical.”

“Are you sure, Doctor?”

Farag listened to us very attentively.

“What do you mean
am I sure?
For the love of God! Don’t you remember what you learned in high school?”

“From so many possible paths,” the captain reflected, “it seems like humanity chose the saddest of all. Wouldn’t you like to believe there’s music in the universe?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, it’s all the same to me.”

“Not to me,” he declared, turning his back on me, silently facing the hammers. It never ceases to amaze me how such a tough guy could harbor such a tender nature.

“Remember,” Farag whispered, “romanticism was born in Germany.”

“And what does that have to do with it?” I was getting annoyed.

“Sometimes one’s reputation or public side doesn’t necessarily jibe with the truth. I told you Glauser-Röist is a good person.”

“I never said he wasn’t!”

Just then a frightening hammer blow boomed. The captain had struck the anvil with all his might. “We have to find the Harmony of the Spheres!” he shouted at the top of his lungs as the ringing subsided. “You’re wasting time!”

“None of us will have our head on right when all this ends,” I lamented, observing the Rock.

“I hope
you
do, at least,
Basileia.
Yours is the most valuable.”

As I turned around, I collided with the glare of his smiling blue eyes. Dear God, how wrong Farag was! My head was already lost.

“Please!” the captain insisted. “Can you please explain what Pythagoras did with these damned hammers?”

Farag turned to him and smiled. “He had the blacksmiths bring him a pile just like ours. He hit them on an anvil until he found the ones that played the notes on the musical scale. Actually the Greeks divided the notes in tetrachords. Our
do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti
actually came from the first syllable of the verses of a medieval hymn dedicated to Saint John, but in the end, they’re exactly the same thing.”

“I used to know that hymn,” I said. “But right this minute, I can’t recall it.”

“And what else did Pythagoras do with all those hammers?” the captain snorted.

“He found the numerical relationship between the weight of the ones he had and then deduced the weight of those he was missing. He had them made, and the seven sounded as if they had just been tuned.”

“Okay, so what is that numerical relationship?”

Farag and I looked at each other, and then looked at the captain.

“Not a clue,” I said.

“I suppose mathematicians and musicians would surely know it,” Farag said. “But we’re neither.”

“Maybe we need to figure them out.”

“Maybe we do. I just recall one thing, but I’m not sure it’s right. The weight of the hammer that makes the
do
sound was exactly twice that of one that made the
do
sound an octave lower.

“In other words,” I continued, “the hammer that produced the highest
do
weighs half what the hammer that produced the lowest
do
weighs. Yes, that sounds right to me too.”

“It’s one of those historical oddities you always remember.”

“You half remember,” I quickly objected. “If we weren’t standing here, I would never have dredged it out of my memory.”

“Well, the fact is, we’ve been in this place for three days. We have to use the Harmony of the Spheres if we ever want to see the world again.”

Just the thought of having to strike all those hammers over and over again until we found the seven we were looking for made me completely ill. How I loved silence.

I proposed we group the hammers according to their weight. That task took longer than we thought. In most cases, the difference between a kilo hammer and a kilo-and-a-half hammer, for example, was imperceptible. At least we enjoyed the daylight as the sun rose to its highest point. What we didn’t have was food or water. I was braced for a hypoglycemic attack at any moment.

After a couple of hours, we discovered it was easier to line the hammers up, from largest to smallest. By the time we finally did that, we were sweating and as parched as the desert sands. But after that it got much simpler. We softly struck the largest hammer on the anvil. Then we chose the eighth hammer from it and struck that one. Since we weren’t quite sure if the notes were exact, we tried the seventh and the ninth, too, but that just added to our confusion. After plenty of debate and hefting the hammers back and forth, we decided to switch the eighth for the ninth. After that simple adjustment, the notes sounded much better.

Unfortunately, the hammer that was supposed to be the
re
note, the second in line, didn’t sound like
re
at all. However, in the second octave, the one we had obtained by exchanging the
do
hammer, the second hammer did sound like the correct
re.
We were making progress, just like the day was passing without our realizing. But in the second scale the
mi
didn’t fit—or so we thought after trying them all. So we had to locate a third
do
and find its corresponding
re
and
mi
—which, of course, were out of order.

The situation was absolutely insane. We had no way of assembling a complete octave. Either the hammers were in the wrong place or the hammers we needed just weren’t there. Because of our desperation, the blows on the anvil, the hunger and thirst, I was starting to get one of my headaches, which steadily got worse and worse. Finally, by midafternoon, we thought we had completed the scale. Almost all the notes sounded fine, but I wasn’t sure they were absolutely right. Some hammers seemed to be missing a few grams of iron; some seemed to have had too much. Farag and the captain, however, were convinced we had completed the task.