The Kingdom of Light Read Online Free PDF

will go back there to free the Sepulchre and make ours once more all the wealth that the pagans stole from our brothers. Listen to her words, when they are announced to you! And meanwhile help her cause with the contributions that each one of you can give,’ Brandano went on, pointing at a low, squat figure covered down to his feet by a habit similar to his own, which hid him completely from view.
    For some moments the newcomer had begun to move around the crowd, waving a bag in which he was collecting the money that so many hurried to give him. Dante noticed that the figure was keeping his distance from him, head plunged deep in its hood, as if afraid to meet his eye. Perhaps because one could clearly read on his face all the perplexity that stirred within him, Dante thought.
    Meanwhile the ritual of the exhibition of the Virgin seemed to be reaching an end. The relic slowly closed its eyes, and once more pressed its hands against its chest. It seemed to have returned to its endless sleep, lost once more in its dreams of Gloria and justice. After closing the doors and securing the belts that held together the various bits of battered marble, the monk Brandano turned to face the still-agitated crowd, pulling behind him the door that closed the aedicule, and covered the miraculous chest once more with the embroidered cloth.
    Dante was disconcerted. But he did not share the stupid astonishment of the ecstatic crowd around him. At fairgrounds he had seen maimed and deformed creatures so many times before, apparent insults to life itself. There must be some explanation that reason could – and had to – find.
    And yet the Virgin really did seem to be a triumph of the impossible. How could a body survive without half its vital organs, its most intimate fibres slashed to pieces? And breathe without contorting in the most dreadful pain? How could that creature feed itself, unless the hand of God really did intervene at every moment of its deformed life?
    The ancients too had confronted wonders, and even Aristotle had admitted that, in the face of the supernatural, reasons for believing and reasons for denying were equivalent to one another.
    But why would a superior power choose that mode in which to manifest itself? His mind refused to accept it. Could God’s majesty really reveal itself in those convulsive ways, in the horrendous mutilation of the flesh? In the form of an acrobatic spectacle? All to rouse the rabble to an enterprise that should instead have prompted ardour and virtue? Did God really need this, to free the birthplace of the Son from his enemies? ‘It brings misfortune … it’s cursed,’ someone murmured behind him.
    Dante turned round in search of the source of the voice. Those words gave form to the sense of unease to which he had fallen prey since seeing the relic. It was an old man, bent double with his years, dressed in modest but not plebeian clothes. ‘The Virgin? Why is she cursed?’ he enquired.
    The old man was staring at the passage along which the two men had vanished with the reliquary. ‘Not the Virgin of Antioch … whoever she might be, but the obscene wrapping in which she is kept. I have seen that form before, in the days of my youth. I know the hand that carved that face. I saw it more than half a century ago, at the workshop of Maestro Andrea the bell-maker, where we learned the art of casting metal, he and I.’
    ‘Who was he?’
    ‘Guido Bigarelli.
Magister summus. Magister figurae mortis
.’
    ‘Guido Bigarelli? Architect to Frederick the Second? The great Bigarelli?’
    ‘Oh, great, certainly … at designing evil. That reliquary – I know how he made it …’
    The old man shook his head from side to side. Dante was perplexed: perhaps the man’s mind had reached its twilight, or already descended into darkness. But that name, Guido Bigarelli, echoed like distant bells.
    The Emperor’s architect, Frederick’s right-hand man in all his most perverse dreams. Bigarelli was said