The Kingdom of Light Read Online Free Page A

or worse, an uprising by the wool-carders, who were always on the brink of revolt. He ran outside, to find himself in the middle of an excited crowd running down the narrow street like a river in flood.
    Amongst the throng of people, most of them dressed in the modest clothing of workers, every now and again one could see the more refined outfits of some members of the upper classes, and the uniform of the district guards. Among them he recognised a face.
    ‘Messer Duccio, what are you doing here? What’s everyone doing?’
    The secretary of the Council, a middle-aged man, completely bald, had almost fallen on top of him, pushed by the crowd.
    ‘They’re all going to Santa Maddalena, Prior!’ the man panted at him. ‘The reliquary of the East has arrived!’
    Dante slipped to the side, dodging the crowd that was moving like a tidal wave along the street.
    ‘Hunting for relics? This gang?’ the poet muttered in disbelief.
    The secretary braced his shoulders, as he shoved a peasant out of their way. The man didn’t even seem to notice, so anxious was he to run ahead with the others.
    ‘The monk Brandano, the preacher of miracles, has arrived from the lands of France!’
    ‘Nothing good has ever come from the lands of France, only the corruption of our honest customs and the worst kind of pestilence. And less than ever since the treacherous Philip has reigned there. They all seem to have gone mad.’
    ‘You’re right, they all seem to have gone mad. But when you’ve seen it for yourself …’
    ‘What am I supposed to see?’
    ‘The miraculous Virgin. Come on!’
    Dante stared at him, startled. But the other man had already slipped ahead, driven forward by the crowd, and was gesturing to him to follow.
    ‘Come on, you come too!’ he heard the secretary calling again as he was sucked in by the crowd.
    T HE ABBEY of Santa Maddalena rose up behind the old Forum, just beyond Santa Maria in Campidoglio. A massive construction, built on the foundations of an ancient Roman
insula
, whose rectangular perimeter it repeated. In front of it loomed the abbey church with its simple baked-tile façade, followed by a second construction beyond the apse, which had once housed a small community of Benedictine monks. A tall, blind wall on the left closed from sight the cloister, caught between the church and the adjacent buildings.
    ‘Tell me, Messer Duccio,’ Dante called to his companion, as he pushed his way through the crowd that thronged before the portal, trying to enter. ‘I thought the abbey was abandoned.’
    ‘It is. The community that lived there has almost disappeared. The last abbot died about ten years ago, in the days of Giano della Bella.’
    ‘So who owns it now?’
    The town clerk shrugged. ‘Hard to say. It was supposed to return to the ownership of San Pietro. But in practice, adjoining the houses of the Cavalcanti, it was annexed to their possessions in the two adjoining streets.’
    Dante looked up towards the neighbouring buildings. He knew those walls very well. The two-hundred-foot truncated tower and the other houses crowding round it, connected by buttresses and walkways. By walling up the outward openings and fortifying the doors, the family dwellings had been transformed into a fortress in the heart of the old city.
    ‘Perhaps Messer Cavalcanti felt the desire to own a family chapel before dying. But it was abandoned, now that his son Guido, the ruffian, has been exiled for factionalism,’ Messer Duccio went on.
    Dante merely nodded. He himself had signed the banning order. And his heart was still trapped in a vice of suffering.
    I NSIDE THE church a crowd of men and women thronged into the nave, crushed against the pillars and the unadorned stone walls by the pressure of the people still pouring in. Between the two last pillars an iron chain had been hung, which cut the space, preventing anyone from passing beyond it to the altar. Behind the plain marble table a little wall closed off the