The Kingdom of Light Read Online Free

tightly shut. Then he tottered to the cabinet and took out his manuscript of the
Aeneid
. Between the pages he had concealed a sheet of paper upon his return from the ship.
    It had been found by one of the customs guards in an anonymous-looking bale of silk. He read it for the umpteenth time:
    Entrust yourselves to our work, O Fedeli d’Amore, and welcome from the four points of the horizon anyone who comes to accomplish the plan. First the new Temple will be built, then its magnificent gates. Last of all will come the nave, and the incredible dimensions will have been achieved. There lies the key to the treasure of Frederick, which opens the portal to the Kingdom of Light.
    A sealed parchment, with no recipient identified. A sign that he knew it was on its way, and was waiting for it in the warehouse, had a casual inspection not got to it before he did.
    He reached his hand towards the bag that he had thrown on to the big chest at the end of the bed, and took out the notebook that he had found on the galley. He began delicately opening the pages, which were stuck together by the dampness of the sea. It must have been the logbook, judging by the navigational notes that were repeated with monotonous regularity. Here and there the ink had been diluted, making the writing illegible. He deciphered a few Mediterranean place-names and an inventory of goods. One of the last notes listed some names, perhaps the members of the crew, followed by a short record of repairs carried out in Malta.
    A Christian ship. With an unusual crew, however, if those names were really what they seemed to be. A lot of Frenchmen from the Languedoc. And then the passengers, indicated as ‘people from beyond the sea’.
    But why would a Christian ship have been carrying pagans, and not as galley-slaves, but staying in the captain’s cabin? And under that macabre banner, too. The imperial treasure had been entrusted to them. And what was the Kingdom of Light?
    And yet there was something comprehensible in that text. That name, the Fedeli d’Amore. The sect of which he too had been a member in his youth, the secret group struggling against the despotism of the popes. Frenetic thoughts, passions of love. He had known nothing more about them since leaving to devote himself to the political struggle in his city. And now they were coming back, in the company of death.
    Death. For some time it had been his travelling companion. He heard its silent footstep as he crossed the sun-drenched streets of Florence, he noticed its breath when his hair stood on end for no reason, like a dog’s pelt.
    It lived in every line of his next work. The big poem about heaven and earth. A pilgrim’s dialogue with the great souls of antiquity, in which he would reveal all the secrets of the beyond.
    His eye slipped over the pile of sheets on the desk, papers and parchments collected from everywhere possible, carefully scraped so that they could be used again. He ran a few pages through his fingers.
    On one of the first he had traced a picture of the earth, perfectly divided into land and water. And in its belly the vast cave in which the damned would be placed, arranged in circles in a vast amphitheatre, around the dreadful well where Lucifer groans for all eternity. And then the huge cliff rising from the waters, in which sins are purged by climbing. And then … and then nothing. His imagination seemed blind, unable to find anything that might with the same precision convey the state of beatitude and the visible form of the heavens.
    Evil was so much simpler.
    F OR SOME time Dante had heard the unusual sound of people moving, apparently heading towards the Ponte Vecchio. As if a crowd was coming back up from the Oltrarno, heading for the northern districts. First of all, immersed in the rereading of his own writings, he had paid no attention to the sounds and voices. But now the hubbub had grown intense. Instinctively he glanced at the door. Perhaps there was a riot going on,