The Warring States (The Wave Trilogy) (32 page)

‘A host as large and merciless as the sea,’ Geta cheerfully interrupted.

‘Geta, of course, managed to save himself,’ Leto said, ‘but the Ninth simultaneously suffered its first defeat and destruction. When the Frankish tribes learned of this, they forgot their differences and united and I returned with the Eighth Legion as fast as I could.’

‘Too late to save the Tenth.’

‘They were unready. I returned in time to safeguard the mines; obviously our metal supply is more important than men. I pummelled the tribes into quiescence, then turned east to salvage what I could of the débâcle …’

Torbidda listened as his old friend described the ruin that had confronted him when he returned to Dalmatia, and his struggle to keep the triumphant advancing army of Prince Andronikos within the Dalmatian pass, and he realised that the enthusiastic boy of the Guild Halls no longer existed. The battle was done, but its echo was still with Leto. He’d heard war cries give way to sobs of terror, then death rattles followed by the exultant squawking of a thousand carrion birds. His voice was cracking when he finished, ‘Then I relieved Geta and dragged him back to the capital in chains.’

Corvis was partially satisfied. He turned to the accused. ‘Lord Geta,
this is recklessness verging on treason. Byzant is the northern capital of Oltremare – to wake that dragon in this time of crises was madness. Do you know how costly the peace we negotiated was? The humiliating price – all our recently acquired Ariminumese colonies, all our gains, gone in a moment of overreaching vanity. First Apprentice, what shall we do with this fellow?

‘Dishonourably discharged. Consider yourself lucky not to hang, Geta. And you, General Spinther, are lucky not to be demoted. Your Triumph, of course, is cancelled.’

Torbidda stood up and looked down at the Collegio. ‘Consuls, we have lost the Twelfth, the Ninth and the Tenth Legions. Morale is low, but let’s keep things in proportion: a twenty-five per cent reduction is not so great a disaster in an endeavour so fraught with risk as war. Fortune will smile on us again. If that’s all, Consul Corvis, I must return to my work.’

‘Of course First Apprentice.’

Another in his position would have slunk from the city, but not Geta. Disgrace became him. He wore it stylishly, just as he covered the standard fine-mesh vest of the legion with a tabard chequered orange and black. This innovation wouldn’t be tolerated in a lesser soldier, but one needn’t be a vexillologist to recognise Lord Geta’s colours. They were well known, as was his contempt for the Collegio’s prohibition. Recently many nobles had begun to emulate Geta and wear their colours in the street. The débâcle at Rasenna had reminded Concord’s bluebloods of something too long forgotten: the engineers were men like them. The Dalmatian March, though a disaster, they saw in a different light, as a chivalrous
jeu d’esprit
, vainglorious, needless and magnificent.

Geta took a different lesson from his court-martial than the one the Collegio had wished to impart. The Guild was weak: they hadn’t stuck his head on a spike on the Ponte Bernoulliana,
and that was weakness. The First Apprentice sitting mute while that upstart consul ran the trial: weakness. Indeed, Corvis’ new prominence was the most telling sign that the Guild’s greatest asset, its collective cohesion, was ebbing. Signs of weakness all around. Actors, buffoons, tooth-pullers and quacks freely roamed the streets. The Collegio of old would never have allowed such scoundrels entry. But the Collegio of late was a fair reflection of the wider Guild: indecisive and divided.

Most scandalous of all were the processions of Fraticelli everywhere. No one could remember the first time they saw Fra Norcino; how long
had
he been around – months? Years? He had become a familiar sight, wandering the Depths like a lost child chased by the rattling stones of city boys, beaten by soldiers for warning strangers to repent before the imminent arrival of …
something
. He was just another desperate face in the crowd: tolerated, like the Mouth of Truth. No one could possibly take him seriously. Everyone laughed at the old maids who, after hearing Fra Norcino talk, became anxious for their souls and broke off the heels of their shoes and waddled home to smash their mirrors. But anyone who makes promises in senseless times finds an audience. Fra Norcino promised bereaved parents their children, and orphans parents. He promised remission and absolution, indulgence and youth, and it was madness to believe – so they forgot their sanity and followed him.

As he walked on hurriedly, Geta heard a droning noise, interrupted intermittently by savage wailing and ecstatic moans. It conjured up the drear masses his pious relatives had dragged him to as a child. But those illegal gatherings had been held in attics and basements, never out in the open. Geta had survived battles and duels and not much gave him pause, but
this
– the echoes of outlawed devotion – this made him shiver.

He peeked out into the square, and found himself involuntarily
drawing back at the size of the crowd. As Fra Norcino’s oratory grew increasingly seditious, so his audience swelled from dozens to hundreds. Now their attention was entirely focused on the blind Fraticelli perched like an anchorite of old on the stone pillar, the
Umbilicus Urbi
, the official centre of the Concordian Empire, the point from where all measurements started.

‘Surely no
man
could have burned the Molè?’ The voice was unpleasant, reminding Geta of a soldier’s roar-strained squawking after battle. Could that appalling wreck of a man truly be the notorious Fra Norcino?

‘Only God!’ they screamed. ‘God! God!’

‘Aye, surely – for if God is master of this world, then surely it was God. The engineers gave ye an idol to worship, that impious tower, and in a single night He threw it down.’

‘O Woe, He is jealous!’

‘Consider the fate of the city of vice – consider Iram and Gomorrah and Jericho. Consider Jerusalem! For make no mistake, Concord is a new Jerusalem. As God visited destruction on the city of Solomon, so he visited it on the city of Bernoulli. Solomon built his temple by enslaving the wind, just as Bernoulli enslaved
your
spirits. The Babylonians broke Solomon’s temple because they had learned the awful truth: that
all
towers offend God. Solomon had his Jinn and Bernoulli had his engineers. Our temple mount is empty, my children, but you must complete God’s work. Tear down every tower! This time the Jinn are not buried beneath the mountain. They are within us!’

‘Cast it out!’ they chanted.

‘Only when vanity is exorcised, Children, will Concord be a city of God. Only then will He grant us victory!’ The timbre of his voice was harsh – his violent screaming had scraped the cords ragged – but the pain behind the hoarseness wrought the
crowd’s enthusiasm into passion. ‘Our enemies’ blood will flow: the Rasenneisi, the Ariminumese, the Veians, all the dogs of the south, aye, even the cannibals of the Black Hand. Yea, there will be new rivers. Then we shall cross the Middle Sea to complete our work in Oltremare. We shall slaughter the schismatics and the apostates together, we shall make holy the land again and rebuild the true Temple—’

Geta had heard enough. He turned and hurried away. He had an appointment at the Dolore Ostello and he did not fancy being about when this sermon reached its climax.

The circling children carried flagellant whips and they used them on the crowd’s backs, turning the circle every faster, increasing the pressure at the grinding centre, who pushed and swayed around the pillar, groaning with animal passion, mirroring the wild undulations of the preacher’s voice. Those around the base climbed on top of one another to get closer, to touch Fra Norcino, though they achieved little except to injure one another. The bottom of the pillar glistened with bloody handprints.

Fra Norcino paused and looked fondly through his hollow sockets at the mayhem below.

The groans and cheers of the crowd formed an atmosphere that rose up like smoke and hung like a sticky cloud over the streets and piazzas and canals of New City. The scent of it warned those still sane that the streets were unsafe; the rest it drew like flies to carrion. They forgot their businesses, abandoned wives and husbands and infants and joined the procession of toothless old men, fallen women and starving children down the stairways to Old Town.

Lord Geta muttered a blasphemy and drew his sword.

‘Give it up,’ said the man to his left. ‘There’s no way out of this.’

‘He’s a grown man. I’ll take that bet,’ said the one sitting opposite. ‘I always wanted an Ebionite sword. Where’d you get it?’

‘I took it from an Oltremarine soldier. He didn’t mind, since I’d just killed him. And he – well, I assume he liberated it from an infidel in similar circumstances.’

‘Geta! For the Madonna’s love, quit,’ said the shrivelled crone next to him, ‘before you end up betting your spurs.’ Madame Filangeiri, the proprietor of Concord’s most exclusive brothel, wore a faded low-cut gown that had last been in fashion before the Re-Formation. The Dolore Ostello offered clients a range of nubile children and games of chance for those who still had money left over. She’d done well lately: Norcino’s fanciulli had hunted gamblers from their traditional street-corner haunts into gloomy attics and cellars like this one. Norcino’s objection to dice-throwing was nothing to do with the more traditional view that the habit ruined families; rather, that it was vain to contest with God, who had decided long ago how all throws must fall. Normally Madame Filangeiri was content to let her clients beggar themselves, but Geta was an old customer, and as close as she had to a friend.

‘Madame, I don’t know much, but I know when to leave the table,’ said Geta. ‘I am still hot.’ His self-esteem had been increasing with every draught.

She sighed, and said dismissively, ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you. The wager’s three hundred silver and one heathen sword. Who’s in?’

‘Saint Maria!’ they heard from the streets above. ‘Queen of Concord!’

‘I wish they’d shut up.’

The basement’s wood ceiling bulged with age and was shrouded in an inert smoke cloud; the only natural light came from a narrow little window that showed a sliver of the street
through dirty brown glass. Hundreds of naked feet went by: a procession of murky, chanting ghosts the gamblers pretended not to hear.

‘Who rolls the Die will tell a Lie,

Who rolls the Dice is full of Vice!’

Geta threw down his cards – the Horseman, the Tower and Virgin – and laughed greedily.

‘Porca bestia!’
The legionary who lost the bet exclaimed, ‘To lose to this – this – what are you anyway? You even made centurion yet?’

‘Truth be told, I’m not sure
what
my rank is now. They’re always tearing off my epaulets or adding more bars, so I don’t pay attention any more. I just do what I do and people follow.’ Geta proffered his bar-laden shoulder. ‘What do they mean?’

The other man swallowed. ‘Um … Lieutenant …’

‘Really? You should probably salute me then, Soldier. That’s the protocol, isn’t it?’ As Geta reached for his winnings, there was a thunderous knocking from above and Madame Filangeiri paled beneath her thickly caked lead paint.

Geta chuckled. ‘Didn’t pay up this month, dear lady?’

‘Bribe people who melt gold into bonfires? I’d sooner be fed to the Beast.’ She kicked her sleeping doorman awake. ‘Get up and see who’s there – and tell ’em there ain’t no one here.’

As the doorman climbed the narrow staircase, Geta turned his predicament over in his mind. He looked at the procuress. ‘Don’t suppose there’s a back door you’ve never told me about?’

Her eyes never left the ceiling. The pounding stopped. ‘One way in. One way out.’

‘A chap ought be able to let his guard down here of all places,’ Geta said sulkily.

The other gamblers in the cellar listened to the footsteps overhead with dawning comprehension.

‘Madonna, defend us,’ Madame Filangeiri whispered and blessed herself.

This was a rarity enough to clear Geta’s mind. ‘What about blades?’ he whispered.

‘No shortage there – that’s what most of my customers end up gambling.’ She produced a key to the chest behind the bar and Geta quickly distributed the hardware. ‘Stand up, ye heartless hinds,’ he cried softly. ‘Remember: it’s a disgrace to die without blood on your sword.’