Veritas (Atto Melani) (97 page)

“Now be silent,” the other man said. “The House of Habsburg will soon be extinct. Thanks to Joseph’s death, Italy will have its own king, as will Germany.”

“And that is why you had a poor child, just one year old, killed by your doctors – Leopold Joseph, the Emperor’s little son.”

“Italy has been broken up for centuries into a myriad of principalities,” continued the dervish without replying, “and Germany into electorates for just as long. And yet both
will become great nations, while the Habsburgs must come to an end once and for all, because we wish it, and history is in our hands.”

“Yes, and after killing the kings and their sons and grandsons, you’ll put the new heirs on the throne – all still children or mere youths – in the hands of tutors
faithful to you, who will turn them into imbeciles, cruel and ridiculous,” said Simonis, repeating what had just been said.

“Their subjects will rightly hate them, the crowned heads will fall under the axe of the people, which will therefore think it is controlling the revolution while all it is doing is
implementing our designs,” concluded the dervish. “A new order will replace the old world. For each new right we concede to the rabble, we will secretly abolish ten. Laws will get
better, life will get worse. We will rewrite history: we will make fun of the ancients and convince mankind it is now living in the best of all possible worlds, so as to remove any desire to return
to the past. We will spread artificial diseases to weaken the health of entire nations. Indeed, we are already doing so: you see how Joseph has ended up? The remedies we supply will be worse than
the disease: the doctors and the propaganda are almost entirely in our hands. We will snatch babies from their mothers’ breasts. The people will not even realise, and their weakness will be
handed down to their children, and to their children’s children. The tremendous wars which we will organise in the meantime will serve to destroy the documents of the past, to disperse its
memory and to turn the world into a grey prison, to make man sad and reduce him to a state of resignation.”

“Resignation? It’s hard sometimes,” said Simonis, jerking his head towards the beasts that roared angrily at him from the ditch.

The dervish did not grasp the irony, and went on as if nothing had happened, happy to humiliate Simonis with that grim and apparently inevitable vision of the future.

“Everyone will accept suffering as something normal, and those who are happy will be looked down upon. Oh, I ardently hope that envy will guide and illuminate the centuries to come! The
imbecilic masses will live in ignorance, but we will allow those like you, those who have understood, to rebel just a little. We won’t kill all of you: quite simply, we will see to it that
you are provided with false prophets under our guidance, who will keep you under surveillance and count you one by one, in case it is decided to eliminate you. But take comfort: we actually need
you. Your impotent suffering nourishes us, and gives a joyful meaning to our task. What glory would there be, otherwise, in triumphing over a herd of blind, deaf beasts? There is no greatness in
agreeing with the laws of nature. True power consists in making water flow against the current, making the mediocre triumph over the virtuous, rewarding injustice, praising ugliness. We will
separate man from nature. We will imprison everyone in large windowless hives, people will end up ignorant of how a hen’s egg is laid, what a haystack is, or a common little dandelion plant.
Our triumph will come when we can separate the people from God as well, and we will take His place. This is what destiny has in store, and we are destiny.”

“You may be destiny, but without money, weapons and lies you are nothing,” answered Simonis in a strangely calm tone, as if the dervish’s endless lecture were all too familiar
to him, and this last objection was dictated more by duty than from any sense of real utility, like a soldier who wearily fires his last shot against an overwhelming enemy.

“Money and weapons are useful,” admitted Palatine-Ciezeber, “but we are already very rich. Wealth bores us. Indeed, it no longer exists: we are replacing gold with paper money,
payment with promises. Wealth is an idea. And the most powerful weapon is the dominion of ideas. Lies are part of the game, they make it more amusing. Because we are –”

“. . . you are all mad,” Simonis interrupted him, packing into these few syllables all the paternal sarcasm that the pranks of little children, imbeciles and madmen merited.
“No human being agrees to sacrifice his own life just to inflict evil on his neighbour, and to pass on his mission to his descendants. But you do. And if the world succumbs to your vileness,
it is simply thanks to the only real weapon you have: madness.”

Caught by surprise, Ciezeber remained motionless for an instant. Then he nodded to the two henchmen. One of them headed towards the tunnel that led out of the cages. In the meantime the other
one, after a good deal of fumbling, had succeeded in reloading his pistol, and he aimed it at Simonis’s legs. It was clear what was about to happen: the first henchman would empty one of the
two lion cages, the other one would shoot Simonis in a non-vital spot, maybe his foot. Then my assistant would have to fall into one of the cages, and obviously he would choose the empty one. There
he would be at the mercy of the three enemies, who would drag him away by force. With torture they might be able to extort something interesting out of him.

“We will keep you just for a while,” said the dervish, “then you will be free. Obviously you will go out and recount what happened to you here, but no one will believe you, not
even your own people. We will slander you, and we will spread the word that we bribed you. Soon people will suspect that you can no longer be trusted. They will say: why was Simonis spared?
You’ll be alone, with no honour, no homeland. But alive.”

“You’re going too fast. You make it sound as if you’ve already succeeded. Because of you the world is getting worse and worse, it’s true, but according to your plans it
should have been ruined long ago. The truth is that you are desperate, because for centuries, for thousands of years, you have been struggling to eradicate Christ from the world, but the fruit of
your efforts is always inferior to your hopes. Your problem is always the same: ‘the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’, as the Psalm says. The game is never
really over, least of all yours. And so I ask you: are you really sure that it is you who direct the world? Have you never suspected that God leaves you alone – indeed, that He has even
elected you for His own inscrutable ends?”

These were the very ideas that we had heard from Atto before we arrived at the Place with No Name. I smiled bitterly. The Abbot and Simonis were really on the same side: that of the humans, not
of those who only appeared to be human.

“The world is the test bed of souls, Ciezeber,” continued the Greek, “and you are no more than unwitting tools of this divine plan: we are all a part of God’s plans, even
damned souls like yours.”

A shiver ran down the dervish’s spine, making him shudder. Perhaps it was the cold. Or perhaps Simonis’s words.

“And as for us,” my assistant went on, “are you really sure that things will really go just as you said? Don’t you think that at the last moment someone might spoil your
party?”

At that exact instant Simonis’s eyes sought out mine in the darkness, and he was certain that I was observing him. In the dark I could just make out a weak smile, perhaps a farewell. I
realised that he was about to act, and that he expected the same from me.

“So who’s going to prevent us?” Ciezeber said with a sneer. “Your two friends perhaps? Your little dwarf boss and that mummy Abbot Melani?”

The bow of possibilities had been stretched taut, the arrow of events was about to be launched. It was at that moment, enormous and deafening, that the noise began.

Day the Ninth
F
RIDAY
, 17
^TH
A
PRIL
1711

An immense fracas, a grandiose and oppressive dirge, a primeval abyss of male voices exploded in the moor of Simmering. It came from all around and was directed everywhere. It
set vibrating every clod, every plant, every stone, every one of the sharp-pointed stars that dotted the dark canopy of the sky. A piercing noise assaulted my ears, and I had to cover them with my
hands to prevent them from being shattered by this scorching gale of screeches. It was if the throat of the whole of creation were growing agitated, as if the earth itself, the heavens and the
waters had struck up a colossal counterpoint and were chanting in Turkish. Yes, this terrible and deafening litany was in Turkish, and as Ciezeber triumphed over Simonis, this faceless choir
invoked the name of Allah, almost as if a new titanic Mahomet were shouting his own wild joy before sweeping away Vienna and its lands. And then I remembered what the students had learned during
their investigations into the Golden Apple, and I understood; as Dragomir Populescu had told us, this was the chorus destined to repeat itself every Friday, and it recited “Woe to you, Allah,
Allah!” as on that night when the forty thousand martyrs of Kasim had died. That harvest of blood was now being repeated, and the forty thousand were invoking vendetta. As the whole universe
seemed to close in on itself above us, I learned that this was the night when the fate of the world would be sealed.

Then it was as if the horizon flared up, and the sound became so lacerating that it was not enough even to cover one’s ears. Staggering with the pain tormenting my ears and head, I tried
to stand up and I saw that at that very moment my assistant was dropping into the lions’ cage.

Just so as not to deliver himself up to Ciezeber, he had surrendered his life. Simonis the humble chimney-sweep, Simonis the student with the foolish air, Simonis the Greek, had decided to end
his life in heroic fashion. Better to be torn apart by lions than to confess his own secrets under torture. I gazed in terror at the darkness and with the eyes of imagination beheld the black
panther, grimly mindful of the blows that had offended it the previous day, sink its jaws into my assistant’s neck and chest, and inaugurate the orgiastic banquet in which he was torn to
pieces and flayed, his human blood drunk, his veins sucked, his joints shattered, his muscles frayed, as if nature were seeking to indulge in the caprice of reversed butchery, and the blood of the
forty thousand had to be avenged on Simonis alone. On his poor mangled body the wrath of two entire armies was being vented – one from the past, led by Kasim, and one from the present, led by
the grim panther of the Place with No Name.

Meanwhile the dervish – he, too, covering his ears to defend himself from the deafening chorus, awkwardly jerking his elbows and pointlessly yelling – signalled to his men to come to
his aid and protect him in his terror-struck flight from the Place with No Name.

My ears were still hurting, but it was time to act. While the dance between Ciezeber and his henchmen continued, I went back to the Flying Ship. Shocked as I was by Simonis’s end, I had
almost forgotten Abbot Melani. Although hampered by having to press my hands to my ears, I managed to pull myself aboard the aircraft just in time to feel its wooden frame vibrate and shake
rhythmically. It was what I hoped: the only way to escape. Atto was also clamping his hands to his ears, but he removed his hands when he felt this phenomenon, almost a familiar one by now: we were
rising.

But the ship, for the first time, was struggling. It lifted just enough to fly over the walls of the ball stadium and to take us out of the Place with No Name. However, its
journey was not an easy one. It proceeded in jerks, tossed by powerful gusts, which swelled the sails and lifted it, and undertows, which dragged it downwards again. The amber stones, instead of
chiming in their usual harmony, oscillated confusedly and buzzed in acrid concert, producing a metallic din, as in a battle from an earlier age. The light they emitted was grey and livid this time,
like the face of someone confronted by horrific visions. Maybe it came down to that, I thought; too much horror had unfolded itself around the ship: Simonis’s end, the wickedness of Palatine
and the new age . . . Death weighed down its keel like ballast. It swayed awkwardly for a while and finally sank down, as if exhausted, in the dark countryside of Simmering. Atto and I stayed
sitting in the ship, overwhelmed by the cries of the forty thousand.