The Stone Light (14 page)

A question shot through Serafin’s mind, even before the shock of grief. Had Talamar succeeded in getting into the workshop through a magic mirror? And had Arcimboldo destroyed the entrance with the hammer?

Dario crouched beside his master but didn’t dare to touch him, either out of respect or fear of the truth.

Eft pushed the boys aside and rolled Arcimboldo onto his back. Then they all looked into his dimmed eyes, half-covered with strands of the wild white hair lying around his head like wet wool.

With a gentle movement of her hand, Eft closed the old man’s eyes. Her fingers were shaking. She lifted Arcimboldo’s upper body, pressed it close to her, and laid the back of his head carefully in her lap. With trembling hands she pushed his hair back, stroked his cheeks.

Dario looked up for the first time. Looked into Eft’s face.

He uttered a gasp, and for a moment it looked as if he would draw away from her. But then he had himself under control again. He gave one quick look at Eft’s legs—no fishtail, Serafin could read in his thoughts—then took the hand of his former master and pressed it firmly.

Serafin felt out of place. He hadn’t known the magic mirror maker well, but he’d liked him. He would have paid his respects to the dead, but he feared that any gesture would seem shallow and false. The two had so much to be grateful to Arcimboldo for, their grief must be infinitely deeper. He bowed briefly, turned around, and went back to the workshop.

He didn’t have to wait long before Dario joined him.

“Eft wants to be alone with him.”

Serafin nodded. “Yes, of course.”

“She said we should wait for her.”

Dario perched on the edge of a table. His gaze was turned inward. It astonished Serafin that Dario wasn’t in more of a hurry to get back to the enclave, in spite of everything; the attack on the Pharaoh still had to take place tonight, and it did not lie in Dario’s power to change this plan.

“What is she going to do?” Serafin asked.

“I think she intends to go with us.”

“To the enclave?”

Dario nodded.

Perhaps that wasn’t such a bad idea. Eft was old, over a hundred, he guessed, perhaps even older, but her appearance was that of a woman in her thirties. She was slender and lithe, and it wouldn’t have surprised him if she knew how to handle a blade.

“You didn’t know it, did you?” Serafin asked.

“That she’s a mermaid?” Dario shook his head. “No. Of course we wondered why she always wore those masks. She never let anyone see her whole face, only from the nose up. A disease, we thought, or an accident.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows, maybe we also did suspect it a little. Tiziano made a joke about it one time, what if … but no, I didn’t know. Not really.”

They left the workshop and sat outside in the hall, on the floor, their backs against the wall, Serafin on one side and Dario on the other. Both had their knees drawn up and looked down the corridor. Dario’s saber lay at his feet.

The quiet was broken by the clicking of a door lock, as Eft locked the workshop from the inside. The last thing Serafin saw was Arcimboldo’s body, which Eft had laid out on a workbench, half-concealed behind the billowing clouds of mist.

“What’s she doing?”

Dario looked over at the double doors as if he could see through the wood. “No idea. We have to wait.”

Serafin nodded his agreement.

And so they waited.

One hour. Possibly even two or three.

They didn’t speak much, but when they talked, there was nothing of the old enmity between them, only respect and something that might someday become friendship.

But they’d paid a high price for it. Acimboldo was dead, Junipa abducted.

Much too high a price.

The thought of having still to invade the Doge’s Palace after all this and carry out an assassination of the Pharaoh was suddenly so unreal, so utterly and completely insane, that Serafin quickly repressed it.

The corrosive mist had slowly dissipated when the door lock clicked a second time. But now another smell took its place.

Something was burning. Fire in the workshop!

Serafin and Dario awakened from their trance and sprang up. Eft came toward them. Something gleamed in
her hands. At first Serafin thought it was a blade, but then he made out a mask of silvery mirror glass. Eft pressed it to her as if it were something unspeakably costly, more than only a keepsake that she had taken in remembrance.

Behind her the workbench was burning.

A column of black, greasy smoke billowed up, was trapped under the roof, and then crept along to the door like the advance front of a swarm of ants.

“Let’s go,” said Eft.

The two boys exchanged uncertain looks, then Serafin looked inside the workshop again. The flames dancing around Arcimboldo’s laid-out body concealed the destruction they were wreaking. Something about the profile of the dead man seemed strange to him, as if the face of the old man were now smooth as a ball.

His eyes traveled again to the silvery mask in Eft’s hand. The features were thin and haggard. The face of an old man.

“Let’s go,” said the mermaid once again, her free hand pulling the edge of a neckerchief over her mouth until she looked like a robber who was preparing for his last big holdup.

Dario nodded, and Serafin joined the two of them as they hurried quickly down the corridor. He looked back over his shoulder once more, but now he saw only smoke and flames billowing out into the passage in thick plumes.

Moments later the three were running along the Canal of the Expelled, away from Arcimboldo’s pyre.

Flames were now shooting from several windows, and dense smoke spread over the water.

7
T
HE
P
HARAOH

B
EHIND THE GOLDEN DOME OF THE
B
ASILICA OF
S
AN
Marco rose a falcon, larger than any animal on earth, higher than the highest tower, mightier than the statues of the pharaohs at home in Egypt.

He drew himself up to his full height of more than a hundred man-lengths, with round black eyes and a beak as large as the hull of a boat. His plumage was of pure gold and stood out against the night sky as if it were in flames.

Horus, the falcon god.

He unfolded his wings like golden sails and laid them on both sides of the façade of the basilica, around its rich
Byzantine carving and ornamentation, around its pediments and windows and reliefs. The tips of the wings met in front of the portals, slipped over one another, until the entire basilica was caught in its embrace, concealed as if behind a curtain of glowing, gleaming lava.

The falcon god laid claim to what was his.

He showed everyone who now possessed the power in Venice that the city was now only a part of Egypt, a part of the Empire, a fief of the old gods.

Standing on a roof opposite was Seth, highest of the high priests and the Pharaoh’s vizier. His head was slightly bent and his arms crossed over his upper body. Sweat stood in shining beads on his forehead, and his golden robe was soaked with it. At this moment he
was
the falcon, the absolute master of this illusion.

Seth held the illusion upright for a minute longer, then spread his arms apart with a quick movement and sharply expelled air through his mouth and nose.

The towering falcon dissolved in a fountain of glittering spangles that sank to the Piazza San Marco around the basilica as if the stars themselves were plunging from the sky.

Applause sounded from the rows of priests gathered in the piazza below him. Only the mummy soldiers, of whom several dozen were scattered all over the piazza, stood unmoved, staring straight ahead out of dead, sunken eyes, some even out of empty eye sockets.

But Seth required no rejoicing, no applause to know the extent of his talent. He was conscious of his power, of every tiny aspect of his godlike abilities. The golden falcon god was nothing more than a skillful illusion, a symbol of the victory of the Empire, like the others that time after time sent the Pharaoh into naive raptures. The toys of a child.

What a waste, Seth thought disapprovingly. Of power, respect, and credibility. He, the highest priest and second man of the Empire; he, the venerable Seth; was wasting his energy on Amenophis’s whimsies. And everyone in the priesthood, as well as his closest confidants, knew that he had no other choice. Not in times like these, when the sphinx commanders were winning more and more influence and power and pushing the priesthood out of the ruler’s favor. It was worth it to make the Pharaoh happy—at least until the power of the priests of Horus was no longer threatened by the accursed sphinxes.

Seth snorted. Here the Empire was, celebrating its greatest victory, the conquest of Venice after more than three decades of siege, and it was primarily Seth’s victory, his personal triumph over the Flowing Queen—and yet he could not rejoice in it. His satisfaction was only external, nothing more than a masquerade.

The sphinxes were to blame for that. And, of course, the Pharaoh himself.

Amenophis was a fool—a silly, narcissistic coxcomb
on a throne of gold and human lives. The priests of Horus had chosen him and made him into the figurehead of the Empire because they believed him weak, pliant, and easy to influence. Only a child, they’d said, and they exulted when they succeeded in waking him to new life in the stepped pyramid of Amun-Ka-Re.

He was their handiwork, their puppet, they’d believed. And in certain ways that applied today.

But only in
certain
ways.

Silently, Seth allowed a long cloak to be placed around his shoulders and accepted a cloth that one of his inferior priests handed to him. He used it to pat the perspiration from his bald head, from the spaces in between the golden wires that had been countersunk into his scalp as ornament, but also as a means for concentrating his spiritual power. The other priests had the network tattooed into their skin in color, but his own was of pure gold, worked by the smiths of Punt, deep in southern Africa.

Seth walked into the stairwell with measured steps, followed by his priests. Numerous mummy soldiers had been stationed around for his protection. Remarkably numerous. Seth wondered who had given the order for it. Certainly not he.

As he entered the piazza below, a priest adept came up to him, bowed three times, kissed his hands and feet, and begged permission to deliver a message from the Pharaoh:
Amenophis wished to see Seth, right now, in his new chambers in the Doge’s Palace.

Internally boiling with rage, Seth left the adept and his subordinates, crossed the piazza, and entered the palace. Amenophis summoned him like one of his body slaves. He, the highest among the priests of Horus, the spiritual head of the Empire. And that in front of the assembled priesthood. Through the mouth of a lowly adept!

Seth entered the palace through the richly decorated Porta della Carta, a masterpiece of gothic stonework. On the other side of the great interior courtyard, he mounted a splendid staircase in the shadow of two huge statues of gods. Mars and Neptune looked coldly down on him. Seth would have them pulled down as soon as possible and replaced with Horus and Re.

Through wide corridors and several anterooms he finally reached the door behind which some rooms had been arranged as the personal domicile of the Pharaoh. Appropriate to the status of a ruler, the rooms were on the top floor of the palace, just under the attic. Above them, in earlier times, prisoners had been locked into tiny cells under the lead roof. But today, so far as Seth knew, the dreaded rooms stood empty. He would inspect them later and decide whether it would be a suitable place to incarcerate the rebels among the city councillors.

Not all the city councillors had taken part in surrendering the Flowing Queen. Amenophis had ordered the
three instigators executed the evening before, publicly, in the Piazza San Marco. He was grateful to them for their help but suffered around him no one whose word could not be trusted. The other councillors had been confined somewhere in the palace since then, separated from their bodyguards. Most of the soldiers had been imprisoned at the same time. Later an attempt would be made to enlist them on the side of the Empire; Amenophis was fascinated by the powerful bond between the soldiers and their stone lions. And kindling the Pharaoh’s interest above all were the winged stone lions, who were only at the disposal of the Body Guard of the City Council.

Seth, on the contrary, thought that it would be better to kill all lions, right away, however difficult such an undertaking might be—even if it were necessary to sacrifice a few dozen mummy soldiers for each lion. It was a mistake to let them live. Amenophis might see in the lions only animals that would be suitable to tame and use for his own purposes; but Seth was of another mind. The lions were not dumb creatures who let themselves be trained at will. He could feel the divinity in them, their intelligence, their ancient knowledge. And he wondered if, in truth, the sphinx commanders were not behind the Pharaoh’s decision as well. They were half lion themselves, and it was obvious that they knew more about the Venetian lions than they were admitting.