Veritas (Atto Melani) (96 page)

To escape the shots of his adversaries, my heroic assistant had passed behind the ball stadium, as I had heard, and from there had slipped into the gallery that bordered the ditches of the
animals, from where they could be observed. Here, however, the final act was about to be staged. Ciezeber’s thugs had hemmed him in: there was one at each end of the corridor. To escape them,
Simonis, like a tightrope walker, had begun to make his way along the wall that divided the lion cage from the cage containing other wild animals, hoping to reach the opposite side. But he had
forgotten that the other end was blocked by an iron grating.

The darkness was only faintly relieved by the moonlight. I at once guessed what the matter was: they had run out of ammunition. It was now just a question of numbers, and Simonis was on his own.
Probably he had hoped, by nimbly passing along the wall between the two ditches, to get beyond the abyss. Instead he had found himself up against a dead end: the wall terminated in a long series of
iron bars, placed there to prevent anyone from accidentally falling into the ditches.

Approaching the scene of action had been imprudent on my part; if I were to try to steal away now, the dervish’s henchmen might hear me. I noticed that Ciezeber had approached the
beginning of the wall on which Simonis was dangerously poised, and was leaning forward as if he wished to address the fugitive. In the darkness I could barely discern Simonis, and I imagined that
he could not see me at all. But suddenly I realised that he had spotted me. At that very moment the dervish spoke.

“Stop,” he ordered Simonis in a dry, serious voice.

“I don’t have much choice,” answered my assistant in an ironic tone.

“You have no way out.”

“I know, Ciezeber.”

The dervish paused to take breath, then said:

“You know me as Ciezeber the Indian; others call me Palatine Caldeorum. Yet others, Ammon. But my name is of no consequence to me. I am one, no one, and a hundred thousand. But I need
nothing, I look for no one, I do good to the poor and the imprisoned. I appear to be forty-five years old, but I have travelled for fifty-eight and I am ninety. I can become young again, change my
facial features, smooth out my skin, make my fallen teeth return. My dominion is everywhere. I have trodden the roads of Turkey and Persia, I have been a guest of the Great Mogul in Siam, in Pegu,
in Chandahar, in China. I have learned to suffer hunger in the desert of the Tartars, I have shivered with cold in Muscovia, I have been a pirate on the seas of the Indies. I have miraculously
survived seven shipwrecks and have been locked in prison eight times, even in that of the Inquisition in Rome. Each time powerful protectors have got me out, but prison itself is nothing to me. On
a pure whim, I once had all the other prisoners escape, and I remained in my cell.”

Simonis said nothing. The dervish went on:

“I was thirty when I left my land. Then I was called Isaac Ammon. I was the firstborn son of Abraham Ammon, patriarch of the Nestorian Christians of Chaldea. For generations our family had
proudly passed down the honour of the patriarchy, but it was of no value to me. I admired only one man: my mother’s brother, who had retired to a mountain in Chaldea. He was like me, like us:
more than a mere man. A great sage and astrologer, he lived as a hermit and treated all others as beasts. He raised me with the whip, teaching me the occult virtues of the herbs and the stars,
their links with the stones, the animals of air and water, the quadrupeds, the reptiles. He revealed to me the periods and hours of the day to exploit these virtues, their temperament and the
effects they have on men.”

Simonis still said not a word. But Ciezeber did not seem disappointed by his adversary’s silence.

“You’ll say: why don’t you shut up, dervish? Why are you telling me all this? Why don’t you just kill me? But I’m not talking just to brag about myself. The loser
must know he has lost, and suffer. We, the winners, feed on your pain: it’s our lifeblood and our reason for living.”

Then Ciezeber (or Palatine, as he said he was known) continued in a more relaxed tone, as if he had now said all that was important to say.

“It was a relative, my mother’s brother, who enlightened me with real wisdom. This is nothing if you possess it, but everything if you do not know it. Thanks to it a healthy and
whole man can live a thousand years, as in the days of Abraham and Noah: he just needs to keep away from women and excesses. My master, my uncle, was seven hundred years old.”

I was listening to the words of a fanatic; and Simonis must have had the same idea:

“He must have a good many stories to tell,” said my assistant sarcastically. “I imagine it was he who advised you which poison to put in the Emperor’s dish.”

The dervish took no notice of the irony.

“What do you know of poisons?” he answered, quite unruffled. “There are seventy-two different types, and the subtlest are not taken via the mouth. A pair of shoes, a shirt, a
wig, a flower, a curtain, a door, a chisel, a letter: a thousand objects can be poisonous. But for each one there exists an antidote in nature. Some only work at certain hours, or on certain days,
or weeks, or months – but they are all infallible. One just needs to know the condition and temperament of the person. In Joseph’s case, you think it is poison and not illness. Well,
the illness is poison, and the poison is illness. They are not alternatives, but the same thing: a disease induced by medical means. The smallpox was injected skilfully into the Emperor’s
limbs, as into those of the Grand Dauphin of France, obviously with the help of the traitors who can always be found among you Christians, and in both cases it will seem a natural death.”

I held my breath: now we had the answer to our questions. The smallpox that had struck His Caesarean Majesty and the heir of Louis XIV was indeed an illness, but caused artificially, as if by
poisoning!

Ugonio had told me that the instruments in Ciezeber’s ritual were used to inoculate, but I had misunderstood the true meaning of “insanitary” and believed that their aim was
therapeutic, not criminal.

“For you it’s the ideal solution,” remarked Simonis. “No one will suspect. It’s not the first case of fatal smallpox in the House of Habsburg. Ferdinand IV, the
elder brother of the previous Emperor Leopold, was carried off by smallpox fifty years ago. He was too clever, too cultured, too sharp, at the age of just twenty-one. Just like Joseph, no?”
continued my assistant with bitter sarcasm. “Two annoying exceptions among the Habsburgs, who are emperors precisely on account of their mediocrity and malleability. As soon as one of them
causes any trouble, away with him! Bring on the second-born. And all the better if he’s a coward, like Leopold.”

“Leopold, with his mildness, reigned for almost half a century,” retorted Palatine inscrutably.

“But he himself was the source of one or two disappointments for you. It wasn’t enough that he fled from Vienna when the Turks arrived in 1683: the Christian armies won all the same.
Despite all your efforts, Palatine, your wishes are never quite fulfilled – it’s your destiny.”

“You think so? Everyone knows, and you yourself know it: the death of Ferdinand IV made this war possible,” smiled the dervish.

“All of this – why?” asked Simonis in a cutting voice.

“That’s the real question,” answered the dervish. “But only those like you, like me, know it.
Why. How
and
who
are just distractions for the rabble.
Maybe one day someone will suspect that Joseph the Victorious was assassinated and will wonder: who gained from it? Who had the power to cover it all up? Was it smallpox, or poison . . . Always
who
and
how
. We’ll keep the people busy as in a game, preventing them from asking the most important thing,
why
.”

“And yet it’s not very hard to guess,” said Simonis. “First of all the war: Joseph is thinking of dividing Spain with the French, and leaving Catalonia to his brother
Charles.”

I started. That tallied with what Atto had told me: the Emperor wanted to divide the Iberian peninsula, leaving his brother with just Barcelona and the surrounding area.

“That settles the Spanish question,” continued Simonis, “and peace begins. But you want the war to go on, to reduce Europe to total ruin, and then impose an armistice on your
conditions, so that you can do whatever you want.”

Ciezeber kept silent, as if in agreement.

“Then there’s trade,” persisted my assistant. “War is bad for business – at least, for small-scale business. But your people are engaged in selling arms, building
ships, designing fortresses: war is highly profitable for you. And it’s big money. With peace, things dry up.”

Ciezeber-Palatine answered with an amused whimper.

“Finally you want to get rid of dangerous rulers and replace them with more malleable ones. It’s always been your strategy, but now you’ve perfected it. For centuries you have
been busily laying waste to the world, conquering one city after another. By manipulating the Infidels you conquered Jerusalem. Then you moved northwards, taking Constantinople in 1453, then
Budapest as well. It took centuries for you to obtain all this: enormous sums were squandered, armies were sent to wholesale slaughter, whole nations were annihilated. Only Vienna said no to you:
despite the invention of Luther’s schism with which you made Europe rot in the Thirty Years’ War, your Ottomans lost the siege in 1529, and then the one in 1683. It was the last holy
city before Rome, the final target. And so you had to reconsider your projects. Instead of attacking the Christian kingdoms directly, you concentrate on internal action: exterminating the kings
directly. Then you take possession of the minds of their sons, the future sovereigns, by means of court tutors: tormenters of the spirit, whose only task is to crush the characters of the young
princes and destroy all their good qualities. It’s a technique you have known for centuries: here in the Empire, Rudolph, son of Maximilian II, was subjected to it. But from now on it will be
your speciality.”

And I remembered: had not my assistant told me that Rudolph the Mad, son of the creator of Neugebäu, had been bullied by his educators? Simonis and Ciezeber were referring to a subterranean
conflict whose protagonists were such individuals as Ilsung, Ungnad and Hag, the conspirators who had plotted against Maximilian.

Simonis first looked up, towards the sky, then shot a meteoric and imperceptible glance at me, and finally down, towards the lions that were quivering and slavering, enraged by the prey that was
so close but unattainable.

“Good. You know a great deal, and you suffer because you cannot do anything about it,” replied the dervish. “So listen now: I tell you that Louis XIV, King of France, will die
from poison. It will look like gangrene in the leg, but it will be an artificially induced illness. The doctors, who are the most ignorant of men, will be in the dark. Before the Sun King, it will
be the turn of the Dauphin, the Duke and Duchess of Bourgogne, and their son the Duke of Berry: they will all end up the same way, with a skilfully induced false illness. The late King of Spain,
Charles II, whose inheritance has set all the nations of Europe at each other’s throats, even though he had just months to live, was poisoned in the same way. Now you know: the Emperor,
Joseph the Victorious, is about to die. This evening the decisive inoculation will be administered.”

I started again: Ciezeber was talking about the medical treatment that Cloridia had heard about that morning at Eugene’s palace: but instead of curing, it would kill him. So Joseph had
been betrayed by his own Proto-Medicus! And by countless others along with him. Abbot Melani was right.

“The Emperor will die – how can I put it? – poisoned by smallpox,” continued the dervish. “It is a fitting end for one who thought himself so powerful that he could
do without us: the only man alone on earth.”

“Ah yes,
soli soli soli
,” recited Simonis.

“Exactly. With that phrase the Agha announced to Prince Eugene how things are: either with us or against us. The Emperor thought he could do as he wished: finish the war in his own way,
divide up Spain with the French, as if we did not exist. But the war will end on our terms, as and when we say. For Joseph thinks he governs the Empire, but actually he is a man all alone, who
cannot even decide for himself: the Turks came
soli soli soli
, ‘to the only man alone on earth’. Eugene of Savoy, who understands oblique phrasing, understood perfectly, and
has chosen to abandon his sovereign and join us. There is your valiant general, your great hero: another traitor, like all the others.”

I was listening in utter amazement. Thanks to Atto we had guessed the real meaning of
soli soli soli
; now we were learning why the phrase had been said by the Agha to Eugene of
Savoy.

“You say ‘we’. But who are you? Ottomans? The English? Dutch? Jesuits?”

“Are you so ingenuous? No, I don’t believe it. You just want my confirmation, but you already know. We are everywhere and we are everyone.”

I looked around: a pair of henchmen were standing stiffly by as their master talked away in a language incomprehensible to them.

“We are the real power,” continued Palatine. “He, the Emperor, is as outcast and isolated as the most miserable beggar. The Turkish Agha said nothing but the truth to Eugene,
which is there for all to see, but which no one does see. This is our power. We are everywhere, omnipresent but invisible, we eat at your table, sleep in your beds, rifle through your purses, and
you do not see us. We seem to be very few and isolated, but we are in fact legion. You think you are many, and yet you are all the same person – a man alone.”

“You feel omnipotent: that’s why you had the Agha pronounce his phrase in public.”

“We never hide anything from you. It is you who have no eyes to see.”

“No, Ciezeber, the people have eyes to see, but faced with your inhumanity no one believes what they see. And this is your real strength.”