City of Masks (5 page)

She had scarcely noticed it then, in her hurry to carry out her plan, but now, with the service droning on around her, she had time to reflect. Why had a monk been in the cathedral then and not out in the square watching the fireworks like everyone else?

Everyone in Bellezza paid more attention to state ceremonies and celebrations than they did to religion, even the priests and monks. Tradition was what mattered in the lagoon. Tradition and superstition. That’s why her family were here today, because traditionally all islanders forsook their churches, even the special one on Torrone, and came to Mass in the basilica of Santa Maddalena on the Sunday after the Marriage with the Sea. The Duchessa herself was seated prominently in the front row, slender as a new bride, dressed all in white, with a silver mask in the shape of a cat’s face.

Arianna had done this for every one of her fifteen years and it had always been the same. But today was different. As they left the cathedral, her parents steered her away from the Piazzetta and into the little streets to the north of the main square.

‘We’re going to see your aunt Leonora,’ was all the explanation offered.

They got to the house of Gianfranco’s sister-in-law, off the Campo San Sulien, which Arianna had always loved visiting because of its unexpected garden with its stone fountain. Water in the heart of the water-surrounded city was always a surprise. But it was clear this visit was to be no treat.

Leonora invited them in warmly and poured red wine for them. But the atmosphere was tense. Arianna’s brothers were perched nervously on the edge of Leonora’s spindly chairs. Gianfranco cleared his throat.

‘Since you disobeyed not just us, Arianna, but the laws of the city,’ he said, ‘putting yourself in danger and causing us so much worry, we have asked your aunt to have you here with her for a while. Perhaps this will get Bellezza out of your system. Perhaps you will learn to value your home, which, though it isn’t exciting, is safe and filled with people who love you.’

He blew his nose after this speech, which was a long one for him, and Arianna wanted to fling her arms round him. But she was too amazed to move. What kind of punishment was this? This was like condemning a child who steals marzipan to a whole week in a sweet shop. Arianna didn’t know Leonora at all well and she had no children. But her husband, Gianfranco’s older brother, had died a few years ago and left her his considerable wealth, made from selling trinkets to tourists. So the house was comfortable and Leonora herself was kind. And it was in Bellezza! Arianna knew she had got off lightly.

But when her parents and brothers said goodbye, the tears gathered obstinately in her eyes. Much as life on Torrone bored her with its endless tedium of few people and fewer adventures, she felt desolated by homesickness and clung to her mother, begging to be forgiven.

*

Lucien woke in the hard little bed to see sunlight pouring in through the window. He looked out and saw a green canal under a bright blue sky.

He was back. It seemed to be the next day in Bellezza, though it had been night-time when he left his own world. He’d had an interminable dreary day in his bed in London, enlivened only by the colour pictures in Dad’s library books about Venice.

Lucien put his hand to his head, hardly daring to believe it when his fingers sank into thick curls. There was a soft knock at the door then a rather ugly old man put his head round it. ‘Quick,’ he hissed. ‘We must get you away before they realize you’ve gone.’ Without waiting for a reply, he led Lucien by the elbow out of the room, across the courtyard and down to the Scuola’s landing-stage, where a sleek black mandola was moored. He bundled Lucien into the boat, then skilfully turned it in mid-canal and set off at an impressive pace.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Lucien, not sure if he was being rescued or kidnapped. As with his last experience of Bellezza, he found himself just going with the flow, luxuriating in the feeling of being ordinarily well in the middle of this extra-ordinary setting.

‘To the laboratory,’ said the mandolier shortly. ‘Signor Rodolfo is expecting you.’

Since he could make nothing of this, Lucien remained silent until the mandola glided to a halt by a landing stage that must have been back near the big Piazza where he had found himself the day before. He could see the silver domes of the cathedral quite close above the roofs.

His guide led him up some marble steps, straight off the canal, and in through heavy wooden doors which seemed to be kept permanently open. It was dark inside the house, or palace, or whatever it was, and Lucien stumbled, having trouble adjusting his vision after the bright sunlight on the canal.

On, up many steps until he was sure he must be at the top of the building. The mandolier stopped by a thick dark wooden door and knocked before thrusting Lucien through it in front of him.

Lucien stood on the threshold, trying to understand what he was seeing. It was a mixture of a workshop, a chemistry laboratory and a library. It didn’t quite have a stuffed alligator hanging from the ceiling but one certainly would have looked right at home there. It was filled with leather-bound books, shelves full of jars, and glass bottles containing coloured liquids and nameless objects. There were huge globes and a weird collection of metal circles on a stand. And a model of the solar system, which Lucien was sure was moving.

In the corner by a large window with a low sill sat a man dressed in black velvet. His clothes looked expensive and Lucien immediately knew he was someone important, though this had less to do with how he was dressed than his own aura. He had silver hair and he was tall and thin. He sat hunched in his armchair like a hawk roosting.

But there was nothing frightening about him, in spite of his air of controlled power. The man told his servant, Alfredo, that he could go and Lucien heard the door close heavily behind him.

‘Welcome,’ said Rodolfo. His eyes were glittering with excitement. He looked as if he might rub his hands together with glee. ‘I have been expecting you.’

‘That’s what that man said,’ said Lucien stupidly. ‘But I don’t see how. I mean, I don’t know how I got here myself. Or why.’

‘But you must have worked out it was something to do with the notebook,’ said Rodolfo. ‘I mean, you’ve done it twice now.’

‘Yes, but...’ Lucien stopped. How did this man know about the book and how did he know it had happened twice? It had taken him all day back at home to try falling asleep with the notebook in his hand – and sleep had been reluctant to come. He had put the book back in his pocket before the strange man had burst in and it was still there now, although hidden under Arianna’s Bellezzan boy’s disguise, which he had been glad to see again.

‘I didn’t know it was you I was expecting,’ said Rodolfo. ‘But I knew it was you when I saw you at the Scuola Mandoliera.’

‘I didn’t see you there,’ said Lucien.

‘I wasn’t there to be seen,’ said Rodolfo, simply.

He stood up and motioned Lucien to follow him to a dark corner of the room, where a silver brocade curtain hung on the wall. When Rodolfo pulled it back, Lucien wasn’t sure at first what he was looking at. He would have said it was a bank of television screens, except that sounded modern and high tech and this was anything but.

Six small oval mirrors, ornately framed in what might have been ebony, showed moving pictures of scenes, some of which Lucien recognized. There was the Scuola and the Piazza where he had first seen Arianna, something that might have been the interior of the great cathedral and three other places, all richly decorated rooms, which he didn’t know but which were obviously Bellezzan.

Under them was a complicated collection of knobs with knurled edges and brass levers aligned with what looked like signs of the zodiac, though some of them were new to Lucien. He gave up trying to understand. It was easier really to go back to thinking of Bellezza as a dream.

Rodolfo pointed to the mirror which showed the Scuola Mandoliera and Lucien realized how he had been seen the day before. And even as he watched, fascinated, he saw a tiny mandola glide into the frame and an elegant miniature figure step lightly out of it and into the School amid much bowing and scraping of officials.

‘Is that the Duchessa?’ Lucien asked.

‘She has come to inspect her new recruits,’ said Rodolfo. ‘She will wonder what has happened to you.’

‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,’ said Lucien. Rodolfo looked at a loss.

‘Magic,’ said Lucien.

‘Not at all,’ said Rodolfo, with an expression of distaste. ‘Science.’

‘So that’s how you saw me,’ said Lucien. ‘But how did you know I was the person you were expecting? Is it because I don’t look Bellezzan?’

Rodolfo scanned his face hard. ‘You really don’t know, do you?’ he said. ‘Come with me and I’ll show you something.’

He strode over to the deep window, opened the casement and swung his long legs out over the sill. Lucien was startled until he realized there was some sort of roof garden outside. Rodolfo beckoned and the boy followed him out.

It was an oasis in the heart of the city. But Lucien saw immediately that it took up more space than it should have done. It covered an area much larger than the roof of the building they were standing on. It stretched away into the distance and Lucien thought he could see peacocks at the far end.

Huge pots held full-size trees and there were flowers everywhere, filling the air with their heavy scent. In the middle of the roof garden, a fountain played – more science, thought Lucien. Most of the garden was shaded and there was even a hammock slung between two orange trees, but close to the stone balustrade that enclosed it, the sun beat down on a tiled terrace.

Rodolfo stood in the sunshine and waited for him. When Lucien came up to him, he took the boy gently by the shoulders and encouraged him to look down.

‘What do you see?’ he asked.

Lucien looked first through the balustrade at the incredible beauty of Bellezza, its silver spires and bell-towers dazzling against the blue sky, but Rodolfo didn’t mean that. He directed Lucien’s gaze on to the tiles, with their intricate astronomical patterns. Just the sort of garden you’d expect a magician to have, thought Lucien.

And then he saw what he was meant to see. At their feet stretched out the black silhouette of only one figure.

‘I have been waiting for someone without a shadow.’

Chapter 4

The Stravaganti

Time seemed to have stood still on the roof garden. Or at least slowed to a sluggish trickle. Lucien was still staring at where his shadow should have been. Rodolfo had gone back inside and now came out holding two glasses of a sparkling blond drink.

‘Prosecco,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a shock.’

Lucien started to say he didn’t drink but then realized he was very thirsty and had no idea what the water was like in this city. Where he might be was one thing, but the time he was in was clearly not the twenty-first century and all the city’s beauty could not disguise the bad smell coming off the canals.

He drank the prosecco. It was cold and a bit sharp and to Lucien quite wonderful. Alfredo, the old mandolier who had brought him from the Scuola, had followed Rodolfo out of the window, with the bottle in one hand and a tray in the other, laden with untidy ham sandwiches. Lucien discovered he was ravenous. When had his last meal been? Pastries in the café with Arianna? Or the few spoonfuls of scrambled egg he had managed to get down before bedtime in his other life?

Whichever, it now seemed long ago and he had eaten three sandwiches and drunk two glasses of the sparkling wine before he asked Rodolfo any of the questions crowding his brain.

The silver-haired scientist, or magician, or whatever he was, sat in companionable silence while Lucien finished his meal, though he ate nothing himself.

‘Feeling better?’ he now asked.

‘Yes, thanks,’ said Lucien. ‘Actually, I feel great.’

He put his glass down on the terrace beside him and stretched, taking conscious note of how each limb, each muscle felt. There was no tiredness, no weakness, no aches. It might have just been the wine, but he felt energy coursing through him.

Rodolfo was smiling. ‘Tell me about yourself and your life in the other world.’

‘You don’t know then?’ asked Lucien, who had assumed Rodolfo must be a powerful all-knowing sort of magician.

‘Only where you must have come from and approximately when,’ Rodolfo answered. ‘Nothing about you personally, not even your name.’

‘Lucien,’ said Lucien. ‘But it seems to be Luciano here. At least that’s what I told the Duchessa.’

‘Then Luciano it had better be,’ said Rodolfo gravely, with just a hint of a smile.

‘I don’t know what you want to know,’ said Lucien. ‘In my real life, I’ve been very ill. I’m having some treatment which might eventually cure me but in the meantime it makes me feel a lot worse. I feel wonderful here, though. Nothing wrong with me at all.’

Rodolfo was leaning forward, listening carefully to every word. He spent the next hour questioning Lucien about every detail of his ordinary life, even quite trivial things like what his family ate at mealtimes and where they did their shopping. His dark eyes glittered at Lucien’s descriptions of quite mundane things, like supermarkets, the Underground, football matches. Even pizza, which Lucien assumed he would know all about, caused Rodolfo’s brow to wrinkle in puzzlement.

‘A round flat bread with cooked tomatoes and cheese on top?’ he asked. ‘Are you sure?’

Lucien smiled. ‘Or chicken tikka, or Christmas dinner, or even haggis, for all I know. Anything goes these days.’

Rodolfo looked blank. ‘We do not have these things you mention in Talia. Are they good to eat?’

‘Yes – some of them – but not necessarily on a pizza,’ said Lucien.

Rodolfo leaned back in his chair and stretched, cracking his knuckles.

‘Now it’s your turn,’ said Lucien. ‘Tell me about Bellezza, about Talia.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything.’ Lucien gestured around him. ‘I don’t understand any of it. I mean, why am I here and why don’t I have a shadow and why were you expecting someone like me?’

Rodolfo got up and walked over to the stone parapet. He looked out over the silver roof of the cathedral. Then he turned and gazed at Lucien.

‘To answer your questions, I have to start further back. Some time ago, a traveller came from your world to mine. It was hundreds of years ago in your time, though not in mine. He was the first to discover the secret, the first member of the brotherhood I belong to. He was the first Stravagante.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A wanderer. For us, a wanderer between worlds. He was a powerful scientist from your country. You may have heard of him. His name was William Dethridge.’ Rodolfo paused and looked hopefully at Lucien, who just shook his head.

‘Ever since Doctor Dethridge made that first journey,’ Rodolfo continued, ‘there have been Stravaganti working on the principles by which such journeys are made. It is difficult work and sometimes dangerous. As time has gone by, we have discovered the risks of crossing from one side to the other.’

‘Like in
Star Trek
,’ said Lucien, and saw immediately he was going to have to explain himself. ‘It’s a TV programme about the future. They mustn’t tamper with the time/space continuum or there are terrible consequences. And they mustn’t interfere with alien cultures. That’s the Prime Directive.’

‘I do not understand most of that,’ said Rodolfo slowly, ‘but the spirit sounds right. Every journey between your world and ours is fraught with hazards and is not to be undertaken lightly. It can be done only by those who have studied the science of stravagation and familiarized themselves with its pitfalls and restraints.’

‘Hang on,’ said Lucien. ‘I haven’t done any of that. I just held the book and thought about the city. Only the first time it wasn’t Bellezza. I was thinking about Venice, which I think is like Bellezza in my world.’

‘Ven-iss,’ said Rodolfo, thoughtfully. ‘It doesn’t sound like a Talian word, but I have heard it before. It was what Doctor Dethridge called our city.’

‘Anyway, I haven’t done any of that training.’

‘And yet you are a Stravagante,’ said Rodolfo. ‘And that puts you in great danger here.’

‘Why?’ said Lucien. ‘You haven’t really explained why I’m here at all.’

‘It is very hard for you to understand,’ said Rodolfo, pacing the roof terrace. ‘I don’t claim to understand it all myself and yet I have been studying this science for years. You say you “held the book”. May I see it?’

A little reluctantly, Lucien drew the book from the pocket of his blue pyjamas, which he still wore under his Bellezzan clothes, and handed it to Rodolfo.

Rodolfo held it reverently, like a Bible, turning it in his hands. ‘Do you know where this came from?’ he asked.

‘My father found it in a skip on Waverley Road,’ said Lucien.

‘No. Whatever that means, it did not come from there. It was made in the workshop of my brother Egidio, here in Bellezza.’

‘Then how did it get to London, to my world?’

‘I took it there myself.’

Lucien gasped. ‘You’ve been to my world?’

‘Of course,’ said Rodolfo. ‘Did I not tell you I am a Stravagante?’

The thought of Rodolfo striding round London in his black velvet made Lucien smile. But he’d probably just be put down as an ageing hippy and not raise an eyebrow; people would assume he’d wandered over from Hampstead, not another dimension.

Rodolfo handed the swirly red and purple notebook back to Lucien.

‘Look after it. Don’t show it to anyone else. There are those who would take it from you.’

‘But why?’ asked Lucien. ‘What good would it do them?’

‘It might help them to discover the secret of travel to your world. More importantly, if you lost it, you would not be able to get back,’ said Rodolfo, gravely.

‘Who do you mean?’ asked Lucien. ‘Other Stravagantes?’

‘
Stravaganti
,’ corrected Rodolfo. ‘No. Even if someone else’s talisman fell into his hand a true member of the brotherhood would not take such a shortcut. But we have enemies. People who would like to plunder your world and bring its magic here.’

‘Magic?’ said Lucien. ‘There’s no magic in my world. It’s completely ordinary.’

‘And yet you can move large numbers of people in metal boxes under the ground and on the ground and even above the ground!’ said Rodolfo. ‘You have machines you can talk into to order your dinner and other machines to bring it to you. You have many ways of communicating with people miles away from you and reading books in libraries in other countries. Is not all of this magic?’

‘No,’ said Lucien. ‘I understand why it seems that way to you, because you haven’t got things like aeroplanes and the Internet and mobile phones. But they’re not magic – they’re inventions. You know, technology – science.’

Rodolfo seemed unconvinced. ‘What I do in my laboratory is science,’ he said. ‘But let that pass. It is your kind of science, which I would call magic, that the di Chimici are after.’

‘The “kimmichee”,’ repeated Lucien. ‘Are they your enemies?’

Rodolfo nodded. ‘They are one of the oldest families in Talia. A big family, always marrying and breeding. Six city-states in Talia are ruled by them as dukedoms or principalities. And they won’t rest till they rule them all. Even the Pope is one of them.’

‘The Pope?’ said Lucien, surprised. ‘You have a Pope?’

‘Of course,’ said Rodolfo. ‘Don’t you? Ours rules, technically, in Remora. But his older brother, Niccolò di Chimici, is really in charge.’

‘What would they do if they got into my world?’ asked Lucien.

‘If they got not only into your world but into your time,’ said Rodolfo, ‘they would bring back all kinds of magic – cures for illnesses, spells to make inanimate objects move, mystical weapons which can kill and maim from long distances away... Need I go on?’

‘And the Stravaganti?’ asked Lucien. ‘What do they do? They don’t take any of those things?’

‘No,’ said Rodolfo, quietly. ‘They – or I might say “we”, since you are now one of us, whether you like it or not – do not bring anything from your world to ours except what ensures a safe return. We have become guardians of the secret of this kind of travel. Ever since Doctor Dethridge made that first journey, by accident, it has needed someone to watch over any comings or goings between worlds.’

Lucien frowned. ‘Hang on. There’s something I don’t follow. I mean all of it, really, but didn’t you say this doctor was from hundreds of years ago in my world?’

‘Yes, the sixteenth century. The time of your Queen Elizabeth.’

‘We’ve got another one now,’ said Lucien. ‘Queen Elizabeth the Second. But if you don’t know anything about supermarkets or the Tube and you all wear these old-fashioned clothes, what century is this?’

Rodolfo sighed. ‘Still the sixteenth, I’m afraid. That is why the di Chimici are so eager to get their hands on your twentieth-century magic.’

‘Twenty-first now,’ said Lucien absent-mindedly. His thoughts were racing. He was beginning to grasp something of the situation, even though there were huge gaps in what he understood. ‘You mean the di Chimici don’t want to wait till all those things are invented here. They want to sort of speed up civilization?’

Rodolfo looked at him sadly. ‘If it is civilization to kill vast numbers of people at a stroke, then yes, that is what they want.’

‘But it’s not all like that,’ protested Lucien. ‘You said yourself, there’d be cures for illnesses, things like that.’

‘Are they harmless? Would the di Chimici know how to use the magic that is supposed to be making you better?’

Lucien had a vision of some sort of crazed villain in a velvet cloak trying to inject chemicals into a Bellezzan who might or might not have cancer. ‘No. You’d have to be a trained twenty-first-century doctor, I suppose.’

‘And if they did have these cures and the skills to apply them,’ persisted Rodolfo, ‘do you think they would be made available to all? No. The di Chimici want to help only the di Chimici. They would steal whatever made them strong, made them live long, made their women have easy childbirth and healthy babies. And the devil could take everyone else.’

He was striding up and down the terrace now, angry and rather frightening. For all that Lucien was still grasping the rules of the game he was caught up in, he was glad he was playing on the same side as Rodolfo. The Stravagante would make a terrifying enemy.

Suddenly, Rodolfo stopped, as Alfredo came struggling through the window.