Pasquale's Angel Page 24

  He barely had time to settle himself before he heard the two corpsemasters coming back, pursued by Mother Lucia’s vengeful voice. Pasquale lay still in the darkness, up against a cold heavy body. The rough planks were wet with something that was soaking into his hose. There was a creaking as the two men climbed on to the wagon’s bench, then a lurch as they started off. In the heavily perfumed darkness beneath the tarpaulin, a corpse’s cold hand fell across Pasquale’s face. He didn’t dare move it; suppose one of the corpse-masters chanced to be looking down at his load? Another corpse, swollen with gases, made liquid farting noises at every jolt. The smell was not as bad as that in the anatomy theatre in high summer, on the third day of dissection when nothing is left but a shell of spoiling muscle and fat over yellow bones, but Pasquale did not have a pouch of camphor to hold to his nostrils, and although the strong artificial scent of violets burned his throat and eyes, it did not mask the stench but only cut through it. He turned his head and was able to thrust his nose close to the cleated edge of the canvas sheet, and so draw in fresh cold air. He prayed that these corpses had all died violent or natural deaths, and that he would not catch the flux or the Spanish pox from their black air.

  The corpsemasters’ voices could be heard over the rumble of the wagon’s muffled wheels and the creaking of its wooden frame. One, slow and deep-voiced, was grumbling about the arrogance of artificers. ‘As if we weren’t busy enough, we’re bodyguards to the fools to the bargain.’

  The other said, ‘He’s a stubborn blockhead of an old man who thinks everyone is set on robbing him. No doubt some pimp asked too much for the favour of introducing him to a nice warm whore.’

  ‘Well, the pimp ran off too. Or never existed in the first place.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll make sure we get that coin he promised us, even if we didn’t find the pimp. Did you see the tits on the girl? I’d have liked to stay there for sloppy seconds.’

  The deep-voiced one laughed. ‘The way it’s going you’ll be able to afford her fresh and warm in a day or two.’

  ‘The way it’s going we’ll be out of business by then. War is good for medicine, bad for the likes of us. Any fool can turn his hand to the trade during war.’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ the first said. ‘Unless they find some way of preserving corpses we’ll always have a job. This lot won’t keep the theatres going past the New Year. Look at it like this—at least we don’t have to go on the hunt.’

  The second said, ‘We might have to, even so. Too many hot-blooded young men killing each other, and not enough women.’

  ‘Brains is all they want these days. They’re not too particular what kind. Brains are all the same.’

  ‘Brains are the seat of reason, which may be why you don’t find them interesting.’

  ‘Now hearts are a different matter. I always have had a soft spot for hearts.’

  ‘Hearts or lights, it’s all money in the end.’

  ‘You have no poetry, Agostino. The heart now, with its four chambers and its valves, is a miracle. Think of the way the blood must flow in the heart, because the valves are so cunningly designed that they open inward or outward according to need. You need an education in these matters, as I’ve always said.’

  The second corpsemaster, Agostino, said, ‘There’s still the medical students to think about. Maybe that young whore you were soft on, the one with the tits. I would look the other way if you wanted to enjoy her before we put her over to the cold side.’

  ‘My father was in this trade, and his father before him. They didn’t have to use the knife.’

  ‘I have heard enough about your father, thank you. You turn down here. We’ll make this last pick-up and then get back.’

  The corpse’s hand flopped away from Pasquale’s face as the wagon turned, fell back again when it drew to a halt. There was a spell of silence, and then the end of the tarpaulin was thrown back and a corpse slung on to the load-bed. The deep-voiced corpsemaster talked with someone about money. The wagon started up again, rolling ponderously along the silent streets, the corpsemasters talking in subdued voices until at last the wagon stopped again and there was a brazen clash of gates.

  The corpsemasters exchanged pleasantries with a guard. The wagon rolled forward a short distance before halting again. Then a lurch, and the sensation of falling amidst the pounding of steam machineries and rattling of iron chains. The wagon was inside the New University.

  6

  The falling stopped with a thump. Sudden light outlined the edge of the oiled canvas sheet over the load-bed. The wagon rolled forward slowly. Dull echoes, the noise of an engine thumping mindlessly over and over. Pasquale fumbled out his little knife and was about to risk cutting the canvas when the end of the sheet was lifted and flung back.

  Pasquale lay still, peeking through the stiff fingers of the dead hand which still lay across his face. Bright lights burned overhead, a ring of acetylene jets depending from a vaulted ceiling painted plain white. It was freezing cold, a cellar deep under the ground. The corpsemasters began to unload the wagon, using an iron hook to pull a corpse to the end of the load-bed, then swinging it away by hair and feet.

  Pasquale eased himself up, and saw that beyond the wagon were rows of slabs, most with naked corpses laid on them. The two corpsemasters were busy with the body they had just unloaded. One was taking down details on a scrap of paper while the other made measurements.

  Pasquale scrambled up and jumped over the side of the wagon, landing with a clatter on the cold slate floor. The horses snorted and stamped, dragging on the wagon’s brake. The two corpsemasters turned and shouted and gave chase. Pasquale dodged amidst bodies laid on slate-topped slabs and ran for the nearest door, slamming it shut on the faces of the corpsemasters.

  He was in a small circular closet caged round with a shell of latticework iron a hand’s breadth away from the rough stone walls. The corpsemasters banged on the door, and the floor shivered and swayed beneath Pasquale’s feet. He grabbed at a rope and whooped with surprise as the room rose, carrying him with it.

  The room rose a long way, swaying with a small motion, at one point passing a shield of lead that slid around it in a clatter of chains. When the room finally banged to a stop Pasquale did not at first trust himself to let go of the rope, half-convinced that if he did the room would promptly plunge all the way back down to where it had started. The door, when he pushed it open, let out on to windy night.

  The mortuary must have been lodged in the cool deep basements of the Great Tower, for the moving room had delivered him to the tower’s very top. He was looking out across the roofs and terraces of the New University towards the river, its channels defined by the lights of the floating water-mills. The dark hills rose beyond, only thinly mantled with lights. Armies gathering out there, an unseen menace heavy in the air, like storm-clouds.

  Wind quite blew away the confusion of the wine Pasquale had drunk. He shivered in the tumble of cold air. His hose clung to his legs, clotted with jellied corpse blood and worse. He was on a kind of platform that took up half the roof. A confusion of lesser towers bearing signal arms rose behind him. Even as he watched, a set of arms on the tallest structure turned and clapped upwards before commencing their swooping formal dance, sending a message out to the edge of the world. Their lanterns seemed to leave traceries of red and green light in the air.

  Winding-gear jutted beyond the edge of the parapet, two sets of triple drums angled either side of a Hero’s engine with a tall narrow chimney. The chimney was topped with a kind of cap that spun and clattered in the constant wind. Cables threaded through pulleys rose into the darkness beyond the parapet. Pasquale could just make out the precise geometric shapes that made swooping shadows against the night clouds. Kites, tethered by thin yet strong copper cables, flying in the constant wind above the tower top.

  Pasquale laid a hand on a cable, felt its thrumming. Clinging to the cable, he looked down and whooped with exultation. The bulk of the tower dim
inished darkly, tapering down to its base. Pasquale could see foreshortened lights on the tower that must be windows, and here and there balconies and platforms jutting from its wall like the nests of swifts in the eaves of houses. Lights defined the shape of the Piazza della Signoria, and then the maze of streets that webbed the Palazzo and the floodlit Duomo and a thousand lesser buildings, the whole night-time city stretched between the river and the city walls.

  Chains clattered behind Pasquale, unwinding from the drums on top of the shed which housed the moving room. The room was making a fast descent. By the red and green light of the signal-lanterns Pasquale could see the chains swaying down, far down the long long shaft, to the flat disc of the room’s ceiling, diminished by perspective to the size of a coin. As Pasquale watched, the disc passed through the ring of the lead counterweight and halted for a few moments before starting to rise again in a roar of chains.

  Pasquale looked for something that he could jam into the chains, or into the winding-drums, or the chain-drive which turned the winding-drums, driven by some engine far below, but there were only big drums of cable which he could not shift by even a finger’s width. He could hide amongst the signal structures, but not from any prolonged search—and even as he thought of it a hatch banged open on the far side of the tower’s roof and a man climbed through and began to shine a lantern this way and that.

  Pasquale ducked down, crouching at the base of the winch. The moving room banged to a stop. Its door opened and two men rushed out, one dragging a big leashed hound, the other a lantern whose light shot out across the platform. The man searching amongst the signal-towers turned towards his fellow, and his lantern-beam brushed over Pasquale. The dog barked, pulling its master forward, and Pasquale jumped up and caught a kite-cable and swung out into the rush of the wind.

  As soon as Pasquale trusted his weight to the cable, the tethered kite swooped down, and Pasquale was at once plunged below the level of the platform. He kicked out as the smooth stone of the tower rushed past, managed to hook a leg over one of the kite’s three cables. He hung upside down by his hands and the crook of a knee, looking up at cloudy night sky and the tower’s looming shadow. He could feel the long drop at his back. Strong cold wind plucked and sang in his ears, lashing his hair around his face and numbing his hands, but he was elated rather than scared, believing that he must have seemed to have run into darkness and disappeared like a wraith.

  Then the guards looked over the edge of the parapet, and three lantern-beams shot out, crossing and recrossing.

  Pasquale started to climb along the cable, and as he did so the kite rose, unreeling its cables and Pasquale with it. The guards hauled at the cable to which Pasquale clung, but their efforts were nothing compared to the smooth power of the wind, and transmitted only the faintest of jerks. One of them called to Pasquale, something to the effect that he shouldn’t be a fool, he wouldn’t be hurt if he came down, but most of his words were blown away in the wind. The others were bent at the winch’s Hero’s engine, trying to spark a light in its boiler-pan with a flint.

  Pasquale, knees hooked around the cable, hauled himself hand over hand until he was directly beneath the great kite. Its surface, canvas stretched over a frame of ash, shivered and boomed. By the fugitive light of the guards’ lantern-beams, Pasquale saw an open harness or frame of wicker like a short sleeveless tunic lashed to the crossbar of the framing. A steering-bar curved beyond it. He climbed on until he was dangling just beyond the harness, at the point where the cable entered a leather collar and split to fan out in a dozen strands which anchored at the kite’s blunt nose.

  An urgent vibration started in the cable. Pasquale glanced down and saw that the chimney of the Hero’s engine was spitting sparks. In a few minutes it would be warm enough to begin to wind in the triple cables, something that couldn’t be managed by main force unless, as Pasquale had seen on carnival days when smaller kites were flown from the city walls, twenty men united their strength.

  He steadied his grip on the cable and unhooked his legs and slowly turned himself around. It was no more difficult than his tricks with the ape outside the big windows of Rosso’s rooms, even though the drop was a hundred times greater—but he must not think of the drop. His hands were almost numb now, and his fingers seemed to be swollen to twice their usual size. He drew his knees to his chest, then kicked backward. For a moment his feet tangled in the harness and he felt a stab of pure panic, because, stretched out as he was, the twisting of the kite’s frame could make him lose his grip. He kicked like a frog, and inched backwards, hand over hand again, until he felt the harness cradle his hips and his chest.

  The guards were shouting at him again. Their lantern-beams shook back and forth on the kite’s undersurface. Working with one hand, Pasquale pulled the harness-straps tight, something easier than he’d thought it would be; little teeth in the brass snaps let the leather straps slide one way but not the other. His feet found hooked stirrups, and he finally let go of the cable with one hand. The harness creaked and took his weight and held. He grasped the bar in front of his face with both hands and twisted it hard over, as he had seen the carnival kite-riders do so many times that summer, when he had begun to search for the shadow of the reality of his angel.

  The kite slid down the air at once, alarmingly fast. Its right edge rattled, letting air spill into the space caused by the wind blowing over the top of its surface. He knew from his conversations with the boys who rode the brief loops of the carnival kites that they flew because air moved more quickly over the top of the cunningly shaped lifting-surface than beneath. Air lifted the kite as it sought to fill the emptiness so created, for God so loves His creation that He abhors any space that is incomplete, no matter how small, and crams the world with detail upon detail.

  Now, with air spilling under its right edge, the kite fell sideways. At the same moment someone declutched the cable-drums and the kite immediately gained a good two hundred braccia of cable. It swooped down and down before the engine started to wind in the triple cables.

  Pasquale had been aiming for a platform that cantilevered out beneath the last tier of the tower, but he misjudged the liveliness of the kite. The balcony rushed by him and then he was below it and falling away from the tower. He tried to tip to the left, and with air spilling under both edges the kite lost lift entirely.

  For a horrifying moment it plunged straight down. The lights of the piazza spun dizzyingly. Then the winch made up the slack and the kite jerked backwards with such force that Pasquale’s hands were wrenched from the control-bar and his breath was driven from him as the harness crushed his ribs. The cables snagged on the edge of the balcony and the kite swung inward, pivoting on this hinge-point. Pasquale saw a tall stained-glass window rush at him: an angel, a white angel raising a burning sword in triumph over a prostrate serpentine devil. It burst around him in shards of white and red and gold.

  7

  Fortunately for Pasquale, the guards were quick-witted, and they threw the brakes of the winch as soon as they saw what had happened; otherwise he would have been dragged up with the remains of the kite and smashed into the base of the balcony. Instead, Pasquale found himself caught amongst the burst and twisted lead framework of the window with multicoloured glass falling around him, tinkling to the floor of a big, vaulted room. Its wooden skeleton smashed, the kite’s lifting-surface folded around him like broken wings. He looked like a crucified angel.

  The cross-braces of the kite and the wicker harness had taken the brunt of the blow, but still his breath had been knocked out of him. Cold air howled, fretting the rags of the kite. By the time he remembered the straps that held him and started to fumble with them, guards had burst through a door and were running towards him between long tables strewn with papers and pieces of machinery. The guards all wore steel armour plated to a mirror finish. Wind blew papers into the air like a flock of startled birds.

  An old man, with long white hair and a long white beard falling in waves around hi
s shoulders and over his chest, supported by a guard, blinked up at Pasquale. Another man swaggered in, splendid in red velvets.

  It was Salai. Like an actor in a pageant, he threw out an arm, pointing at Pasquale. ‘There, master! You see! There is the traitor!’

  Despite his dizzy confusion, Pasquale realized at once who the old man must be. He struggled against the bonds of his harness, waking pain in his arms and back. The guards made noise, finding a ladder, moving a table littered with machine parts and glass fragments away from the window where Pasquale hung.

  ‘Don’t listen,’ Pasquale shouted. ‘He is the father of lies. Please…’

  Salai grinned at Pasquale. He did look like a fat little devil in his red tunic and doublet and red and black particoloured hose. He said to the old man, ‘I will bring you proof directly, master, and tell you all.’

  The old man mumbled something to Salai, laying a hand on the plump man’s arm. But Pasquale could not hear what he said, for now the ladder banged into position beside his head and two guards started to climb it while others jumped on to the table and started to prise apart the twisted framework of lead strips in which the kite had become entangled.

  Salai made a long speech to the old man, whispering into his ear and now and then glancing sidelong at Pasquale with a mischievous malevolence. When Salai was done, the old man started to speak, but Salai laid his hand on the old man’s arm and said something to the guard, who helped the old man away.

  A guard cut the straps of Pasquale’s harness; then others had his legs, his arms and in a minute they had him down. He tried to struggle as Salai went through his scrip, but the guards were all burly beef-fed Swiss: as easy to wrestle bullocks to the ground. Pasquale could only watch as Salai tossed aside his knife and bits of paper and charcoal with a delicate contempt; then he picked out the little flying device in its paper shell.

  Salai unwrapped the device and held it up, turned it this way and that so that shadows and highlights ran amongst its intricate paper spirals and the fretted mechanism. ‘You see,’ he said to one of the guards. ‘Mark this well. The boy had it with him.’