CHAPTER 25
‘Any thoughts?’
‘I think it’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic.’
Pedro said, ‘I invited you down here for a soldier’s opinion on how we might use it in another siege.’
Levi considered it. ‘Well, the last time the siege ended before it really began. We won’t be so lucky twice. If the walls were breached, this might be a last line of defence. But if things got that bad … your thinking’s taking a dark turn.’.
‘Never hurts to consider the worst that might happen.’
‘Don’t you have to get to the Lion’s Fountain?’
‘There’s time,’ said Pedro calmly. Down here there was no shortage of time. Down here Rasenna wasn’t red and yellow but blue and murky-brown. Down here the air wasn’t dry and spiced; it was moisture-laden and iron-stained. The only light came from a flickering lantern, the only sound was the Irenicon’s rumble through the miles of stone that surrounded them, buried them, hid them. They were alone. Pedro wound the angel’s springs and waited for a heartbeat. He held the device to his ear and listened to the courageous ice-pick chipping at eternity.
tik tok tik tok tik tok
He remembered his godfather’s stories – strange now to think of Gonfaloniere Bombelli like that – stories that Fabbro had heard from Ebionite dye-traders from Oltremare, of miracle-working Jinni imprisoned in lamps under the sea, in deep caves; surely it was no less miraculous to confine tomorrow’s endless minutes in a brass prison, to corral the fleeting moth-winged moments until they piled into millenniums, ages in which all things would come to pass and Natural Philosophers would work miracles routinely.
The annunciator hovered and moved forwards, carrying the swaying lantern down the dark tunnel, a scout to ensure no gaping holes lay ahead, until it was stopped by the broken engine jamming the tunnel. Pedro wriggled through the confined space until he reached it. The metal was cold and weeping, and the angel cast its light irregularly. He rested his head against the engine and left it there, like a rider letting a horse become accustomed to the presence of its master, then he grabbed hold of the end of the digger and pushed.
After the siege, Pedro had salvaged dozens of these abandoned diggers, the mechanised screws that made Concordian siege-craft legendary. Most were beyond repair, but he had rescued enough for Rasenna’s engineers to become familiar with their principle and to duplicate them, at least as far as they had the materials.
‘Put your back into it!’ shouted Levi, his voice weirdly distorted by competing echoes.
‘No,’ Pedro said to himself, then louder, ‘It’s good and stuck, Levi. The bit’s fixed deep in the stone. I’ll get the lads down to dig arouuaahh—’
Without warning the ground shifted, and great clumps fell away into the darkness. Pedro reacted instinctively, scrambling back. The digger’s back end hung precariously out over the new chasm, but it didn’t fall.
Levi grabbed Pedro in case the rest of the floor followed, but after a moment the strange creaks and rumblings subsided.
‘All right?’
‘I’ll let you know when my heart stops hammering.’
A wet wave of chilled air rushed up from below.
‘How deep do you think it goes?’ Levi threw a pebble and waited for the splash. And waited.
‘There’s a better way to find out.’ Pedro said, inserting silk plugs in his ear. He pointed the Whistler into the darkness and Levi covered his ears.
BeeeeEE beeeeEE.
Pedro had adapted the Whistler to work in other media than liquid; the strength of the beep’s echo revealed distance, but also what type of surface it had struck: rock, soil, ice, water and so on.
‘Well?’ said Levi with forced casualness. Though he considered himself far more cosmopolitan than most Etrurians, he still thought of Natural Philosophy as a Concordian tool.
Pedro was less superstitious. He might not have a Guild Hall education, but he had the equivalent. Like the Cadets, he’d been raised around machines – in his case, his father’s looms – and he had learned the craft from a Concordian engineer with an impressive lineage: Giovanni’s grandfather was the Stupor Mundi himself, Girolamo Bernoulli (though that was a secret that Pedro knew he must hide deeper than these tunnels).
‘These numbers makes no sense. This cavern’s about fifty braccia deep, but if I didn’t know better I’d say that’s water at the bottom – flowing water.’ He stared pointlessly into the darkness.
‘You mean that rumble isn’t the Irenicon? So what is it?’
He looked up to see Pedro smile in flickering light. ‘Let’s find out.’
The stars were coming out when they finally emerged from the tunnels and they might have been even longer if Levi hadn’t remembered Pedro’s appointment. By the time they got to Piazzetta Fontana, it was thronged with revellers. The blood from this morning’s fracas was washed away with vinegar, then forgotten with wine.
He looked about for other engineers in the Lion’s Fountain, and when he found none he was both gladdened and disappointed. On the one hand, his men had work to do; on the other, he wanted his engineers to be seen as part of Rasenna. Weird theories about Giovanni’s death showed the Rasenneisi suspicion of engineers hadn’t yet been exorcised; the very idea of a Rasenneisi Engineers’ Guild still made many nervous. That was why Pedro had agreed when they asked him to adjudicate the duel of li doi Ziganti.
The crowd made way and watched suspiciously as he tested the table’s balance with a spirit level and great ceremony. He measured its dimensions, and made his compass do an elaborate dance across the breadth. Then he put away his instruments, took a piece of chalk from behind his ear and drew a line between the contestants, and an X on either side. The two giants sat opposite each other, backed by their partisans.
Pedro pulled up a stool and stood on it to announce, ‘As Chief Engineer, I declare this table to be of sound mind and body. Gonfaloniere Bombelli, will you do the honours?’
Fabbro bowed. ‘All yours, my boy.’
Pedro did not demure, but leapt suddenly onto the table and called for a flag. One came flying and he caught it with a graceful flourish – which surprised those condottieri who didn’t know Pedro was a flagmaker’s son.
‘I declare this contest of strength between Jacques the Hammer and Yuri the—’
‘Rolling-pin!’ Sofia shouted.
‘—and Yuri the Rolling-pin ready to commence. Signori, on your marks.’ The giants slammed their elbows onto their respective Xs.
The condottieri had great confidence in Yuri; the company’s cook had bested champions the length and breadth of Etruria. Both men towered over the assembly – Yuri, perhaps, by a few inches more, but his opponent made up for it in breadth. Both men were stripped to the waist, though the bandieratori champion kept on his long-eared leather cap. Jacques the Hammer was an immigrant not long settled in the Smiths’ Quarter. He was built like a menhir, concave at both sides. He wore loose, coarse-threaded britches, a soot-grey vest and a thin leather apron that looked more suitable for a smaller man. His neck thrust forward from between the unbroken curve of his shoulders.
Pedro waved his flag – left, right, then a nice overhead slice – and shouted ‘Avanti!’ as he leapt from the table. Immediately supporters crowded round, baying like hounds.
Yuri’s technique was straightforward: push. He strained and turned red, and Jacques’ arm tilted slowly to seventy degrees. The blacksmith’s strategy of letting Yuri make an all-out effort was risky, the touts agreed. A little bit further and Jacques would find himself at the point of no return. The condottieri pounded the tables rhythmically, shouting, ‘Hawks! Hawks! Hawks!’
‘Hammer! Hammer! Hammer!’ the Rasenneisi countered.
‘Come on, Yuri!’ Levi hollered, ‘I’ve a month’s pay riding on you!’
The men were eyeball to eyeball now, and both had stopped breathing. Two towers. Two mountains. Sweat streamed into Jacques’ eyes, and he blinked to clear them. His arms weren’t defined like Yuri’s; they were pillars of knotted muscle and flesh with the mindless endurance of iron. A grin began to form on Yuri’s face when, suddenly, a gasp escaped him and he shifted in his seat. His forearm and bottom lip quaked in tandem. He strained. His arm began to retrace its journey, steadily, inexorably, over the halfway point, then downwards.
‘Ham – mer! Ham – mer! Ham – mer!’
Jacques’ forge-scorched face was tranquil. The chant grew louder, more insistent, as the crowd watched Yuri’s steadily descending arm, as inevitable as a falling tower. His face rippled with agony. ‘Aaahieeeeeee!’
Slam!
His fist hit the table and a great cheer went up. Amongst the crowd that rushed to congratulate the winner was Fabbro. ‘Well done, Jacques! Been meaning to call in for weeks. How goes it?’
Ignoring the dozens of hands slapping his great back, the blacksmith finished his beer in one long drink, wiped his mouth, and said calmly, ‘Well. Come tomorrow.’
Fabbro offered to buy him another, but Jacques refused. Fabbro was still wondering why later that evening as his godson excitedly related his adventures in the tunnels.
‘—then Levi lowered me into the pit—’
‘You ought to be more careful, Pedro,’ said Maddalena. Tower Bombelli and Tower Vanzetti had always been close, and Maddalena still took a big-sisterly attitude to Pedro. She couldn’t dominate her real brothers; they were much older. ‘Let Levi take the risks. That’s what Papa pays him for.’
Levi raised his drink sarcastically. ‘Too kind, Signorina.’
‘Well, what could you see?’ Fabbro asked.
‘Not much, though I inserted glow-globes at regular intervals. I passed several caverns hollowed out of the tufa, some clearly the work of erosion but others, roughly square in shape, well, they looked manmade.’
‘How old?’ Fabbro asked.
‘Etruscan if I had to guess – but that’s still not the strangest thing. We didn’t have enough rope to go all the way down, so I dropped my last globe. It fell, there was a splash, and then it vanished. A river, Fabbro! There’s a second river, flowing beneath Rasenna. All this time!’
‘How fascinating,’ Maddalena interrupted. ‘Pedro, I know that southsiders do things differently, but can’t you wait till tomorrow to discuss sanitation?’
The way Pedro reddened reminded Fabbro that Rasenna’s Chief Engineer was still a boy. It was easy to forget. Though adolescence lingered on his face, there was hardness too. Life had tested Pedro early.
‘Hush, Maddalena,’ Fabbro scolded. ‘Since when are you so prudish? The cloaca is an endeavour every bit as noble as Giovanni’s bridge, and just as necessary.’
Giovanni was still alive when Rasenna’s boom had began, and he had warned the Signoria it could be make or break for them. Concord had experienced a similar expansion in the last two decades, and if her antique sewer system, the old Etruscan cloaca maxima, had not been still functional, disease would have destroyed the city. The siege of Rasenna had proved doubly serendipitous in this case, for the Concordians’ discarded diggers made extensive rapid digging possible.
Few in the Signoria saw the urgency and clamoured instead for more public buildings, wasteful vanity projects, needless improvements. Pedro was continually frustrated by losing his newly trained engineers to lucrative private commissions. Their short-sightedness amazed him. Since Giovanni’s death, Rasenna’s growth-rate had quadrupled: nine months after each new influx – the Hawk’s Company, the labourers drawn by work – a wave of babies followed. Children, like men, produce mountains of dung and torrents of piss. The Irenicon could take only so much before it became a festering source of disease.
‘Well, let’s all turn troglodyte, then!’ Maddalena snapped and turned to pester Levi.
After the Gonfaloniere had escorted his daughter home, the traditional grumbling began. Where once the Small People had complained about the Families’ exploitation, now they complained about those who sat in the Palazzo del Popolo and kept them out. It was curious: the wider the enfranchisement, the more emboldened the Signoria was to gather taxes. More curious still, the Small People, those without votes, did not complain about the Signoria’s greed but that they could not feed at the trough.
Levi and Sofia did not partake in the griping. They drank and listened to Yuri’s gruff voice beating an Etrurian dirge into some Slavic shape in which he found a pleasing melody. He was in fine spirits despite his defeat.
‘A night in the stables will do Uggeri good,’ Levi said.
Sofia was still irked by Fabbro’s high-handedness, and naturally defensive of her men. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that boy but the want of a war.’
‘You look ready to do battle yourself,’ Levi remarked.
Sofia threw him a streak of silver, which he tried to catch but missed. The coin floated to the bottom of his tankard. When he saw it was Ariminumese, Levi sighed.
‘I got that on the bridge today. We’re trading with those dogs!’
Levi knew what was coming. ‘We’re going to need them.’
‘They sold John Acuto. They stood by as Concord attacked us. What’s the point of keeping your company in beer if we—’
‘I hate Ariminum as much as you, but do you really want to start a second war when we still have the Concordians to worry about? This town’s not big enough to—’
‘We’re a city now, Podesta,’ Pedro interrupted. He sat down beside them, pleasantly tipsy.
Sofia relaxed and eyed Levi humorously. Pedro didn’t drink often, but when he did he talked like his father. ‘What’s the difference?’
‘In a town you know your murderer’s name.’
‘When did you get so cynical?’ Levi asked.
‘When the Palazzo della Signoria was renamed the Palazzo del Popolo,’ said Pedro without hesitation. ‘A sop to the Small People.’
‘The Families used to ignore them,’ Sofia said. ‘Surely that was worse?’
‘Was it? Farmers think of spring lambs often, but their thoughts are not kind. They change the name and hope the Small People are too stupid to notice that a body that can’t agree on anything agrees that every new tax proposed is vital. And if one’s repealed, they execute a flanking move and tax the food we eat and wine we drink. The Morello used only to break our legs. At least they left our hearts intact.’
‘Listen to the communard,’ Sofia laughed.
Levi finished his drink and said, ‘Long live whoever wins.’