Cosimo Amati knew all the stories about over-reaching, under-estimating fools who lured demons and then failed to control them, and he was not going to add to their number.
He had gone about his preparations very carefully indeed, and he had not told anyone what he was going to do in case of failing and being laughed at. You had to be cunning, you had to be secretive and sly about these things. But there the music was and there the legend was, and he was going to take his courage in both hands and see whether it was all true or only a burned-out myth.
Aside from that, it would be very gratifying if he could be the one to banish the plague-rats from Cremona, especially when everyone in the town had prayed until they dropped and Heaven must be weary of their pleas for deliverance from the evil diseased things.
It would be really be very satisfying if he was destined to go down in Cremona’s history as the man who saved an entire town. ‘Cosimo Amati,’ people would say in years to come. ‘My word, what courage. My word, our forefathers had cause to be grateful to him.’ His mind roamed pleasurably between a plaque in the Cathedral (which would be nice for his descendants), and a yearly pension from the City fathers, (which would be of more immediate benefit).
After much furrowing of his brow he decided to use his workroom which was a long, low-ceilinged room, a half-cellar in fact, with the windows at street level so that people could not look in on you unless they bent down on all fours which was not something you needed to worry about at midnight. And if Isabella awoke and found him not in their bed, she would only think he was working late again. She would smile the thin enigmatic smile that always drove him demented – he suspected it drove half of Cremona demented as well, although naturally Isabella, dear innocent girl, would not realise it – and she would turn over and go back to sleep.
He stacked his half-finished lutes and the lyres at the far end of the workroom, leaning them carefully against the wall, because several were commissioned works and Cosimo was not going to forego any of his patrons’ payments, not if he found himself entertaining Satan and the entire hierarchy of devils.
He arranged a small velvet cushion to sit on, because while it was all very well to be large-minded and loftily say you were going to call up the Servant of the ancient music and order him to save your city, you did not want to get a splinter in your buttocks in the process. Uncharitable people said that Cosimo was fat, but Cosimo thought of himself as nicely rounded which meant that there was plenty of flesh for recalcitrant splinters. He smoothed the velvet and turned to set out the candles. Everything had to be in accordance with the ancient ritual: Cosimo had made a list, which he consulted anxiously at intervals.
As he made his preparations, he thought it was surely a terrible desecration to light the thick repulsive candles made from dead men’s fat and the brains of a still-born child. These had been the hardest items to acquire, because when you were a respected lute-maker and a responsible member of Cremona’s little community, you could not go rummaging about in graveyards. In the end, he had engaged the services of the two men who pulled the plague-cart through Cremona’s streets at curfew each night, swearing them to secrecy under threat of punishment of the most gruesome kind. Earlier that evening, directly after supper, he had pounded the nasty substances together, shuddering and sickened, but not flinching because a man ought not to flinch from any worthwhile task, and more to the point the stuff had cost a disgracefully large sum of money.
As the candle flames burned up their stench filled the room, driving out the ordinary, safe-feeling workaday scents. This was eerily in accordance with the ancient legend: Isabella, spinning the tale for him one night, singing the cool silvery sequence of notes in her high sweet voice, had said her grandmother always told how, if you ever dared to use the ritual and summon the Creature, its stench would drive out all else. The devil trailed its own aura with it, Isabella’s grandmother had said: at least, that was the belief handed down and down through the women of their family, and you could believe it or not, just as you chose.
Cosimo seated himself on the velvet cushion, the candles burning up strongly and smelling very nasty indeed by this time. He could almost imagine there was a whiff of horse manure about them which was odd, because the two carters would not have dared to cheat a man of Cosimo’s standing, especially not when he had paid them so well.
It was not supposed to matter what instrument was used: Isabella had said that if the music was played in correct sequence, the Servant had to come, that was the legend. Perhaps the candles and the melted corpse-fat did not really matter either. Perhaps they were only trappings, tricks to dazzle the gullible.
Cosimo took a deep breath and lifted the lyre in his hands. It was the oldest one he possessed, and it was made not from polished wood, but from human bone. It felt cool and light to his touch and it was rather a grisly feeling to know that the bones had once belonged to a person who had walked and danced and laughed. For a moment he could almost fancy that he felt a ripple of life from it.
This was going to be it. This was going to be the playing of the devil’s music, the incantation that Isabella’s family called the Black Chant, and that they had guarded over the centuries; the music that her grandmother believed had been forged in the blood of Lucifer and seared in the fire-drenched furnaces of his domain. Cosimo had memorised Isabella’s sweet cool song and had hummed it to himself a number of times to be sure he got it right. He had done this very softly and he had been careful never to hum it after sunset, because it did not do to take chances with these matters.
And now he was going to play the musical sequence that would reach the devil’s Servant slumbering in his deep unknown tomb and that would draw him into the old house in Cremona and force him to obey the bidding of the one who summoned him.
He took a deep breath and plucked out the sequence of notes.
The first thing that Ahasuerus was aware of was the music trickling into his mind like coloured water trickling through cracks in a wall. Marvellous enchanted music: come with me and come to me . . . dance to my piping and follow me into hell and beyond . . .
The second thing was the feeling that he was waking from a long, long sleep. He remained motionless, letting the memories seep into his mind.
The cellar beneath the Temple where he had been chained and manacled and left without food and only a few sips of water. The travesty of a trial, and then the Sanhedrin’s grisly sentence of death and the horrified gasps of the listeners. And above all, the monks: the Fratres Cruciferi, sly-eyed, greedy-fingered, waiting until they could shoulder their burden and receive their blood-tainted payment. Had they done so? Towards the end Ahasuerus had been blind and deaf with agony and so near to death he had been almost beyond thought, but he had known that the monks were on the edges of the crowd, their black robes turning them into the carrion crows they were. Had they carried out their promise to take his unmarked tomb to the depths of a bottomless pit, or the subterrenean hall of some lonely mountain? Was that where he was now? He thought the monks would have kept their word: they had been a little afraid of him – they had certainly flinched when he had flung that last threat at them – ‘I shall return!’ They would have taken the mutilated body of the High Priest and carried it to a dark desolate resting place.
But now the music was calling him back: Susannah’s music that she had coaxed or bullied or seduced out of the old Scribe, and whose history stretched so far back that no one could trace it, and that Susannah said would stretch just as far forward. Time was like a great unrolling carpet and if you possessed the knowledge, you could walk back and forth on its surface. Perhaps the Nazarene had possessed the knowledge? Susannah had said, slyly, and Ahasuerus had stared at her, his mind tumbling, not daring to believe, but caught for a moment by the dazzling allure of such an idea.
Whether Christ had had the knowledge or not, he had never known and he never would know. But lying in the dark silence, the music soaking into his bones and his mind, he knew now that Susannah had not lied and delight poured through his whole being. Her promise was coming true; she had guarded the music, and after his death and hers, she had passed it on and passed it down, so that at some future neither of them could see it would call them both back into the world.
Ahasuerus opened his eyes. The darkness and the silence were absolute and there was the feeling of being in a narrow, enclosed space. Memory unrolled a little more, and he saw again the stone sarcophagus, the waiting sepulchre on the edge of the crowd that had gathered to witness his execution. Its massive lid had been propped against its side and the interior yawned blackly. Even through the choking death agonies he had been aware of black bitter fury, because they might at least have hidden that from him until he was dead.
And now he was inside it. He was entombed in the elaborate stone coffin that the greedy friars had prepared for him. How long had he been here? He had no idea, and it did not matter yet.
He moved for the first time, and cried out with the pain that flooded his body. His cry was harsh and weak, but it was a terrible sound in the dark silent tomb. He moaned in agony as the congealed blood moved in his arms and legs, and his moans echoed eerily in the confined space and came back mockingly at him.
The tomb-stench was stifling and Ahasuerus drew in a breath, and felt the winding-sheet sucked into his mouth, stinking of mildew. Disgusting! He choked, retching, and spat out shreds of the rotting cloth, forcing his mind to concentrate, forcing back the mists that clung to his brain. It was like pushing through a shaled-on crust, like fighting out of a membraneous sac, but he was doing it.
Overcoming death . . . Climbing out of the tomb.
With the thought he reached upwards, and at once his hands met resistance. The stone lid? Yes, of course. They had not nailed it down, because stone could not be nailed, but it was a huge heavy slab and it would be squarely across the tomb and it would take every ounce of his strength to move it. Panic gripped him, and he thought: I can’t do it! I’m trapped! Susannah, you wanton bitch, did you unknowingly sentence me to a far worse death than the Sanhedrin’s? A silent lonely death in the blackness of the tomb. Am I to end as a ravening madman, screaming with hunger and thirst, blind and deaf, my mind splintered into insanity?
He pushed upwards again and this time there was a rasp of sound, stone scraping against stone, the faintest scratch imaginable. But Ahasuerus heard it, and dizzy gratitude flooded his mind, so that for a moment the darkness was shot with light. Moveable. It may take hours or days, but I shall move it. I shall get out.
Slowly, with many pauses to gather his slowly returning strength, he inched the stone lid aside; not trying to overturn it which would surely be beyond him, but sliding it to one side. To begin with the progress was so painful and so slow that he thought after all he would never do it, but to be trapped down here until he went slowly mad was so gruesome a prospect that fierce determination gave him extra strength. Eventually, sweat soaking his hair and his skin, a faint dim line of light appeared. The sweetest thing I ever thought to see. Only a little more and I can grasp the edge and gain more purchase . . . Only a very little more . . .
And then he was pushing the lid across and the light was stronger and there was a dry stale stench gusting into his face. Ahasuerus sat up cautiously. He was light-headed and he was trembling and weak, as if every muscle had been beaten with knotted scourges, but his mind was clearing. He drew in a deep breath and looked about him.
First, the practicalities. The where and how and what. The where was necessarily first: he was somewhere underground, somewhere that was nearly airless and that reeked of death and age and old, old bones. His eyes were adjusting now, and he could see that the stone tomb was ledged on a rock shelf, and that in dislodging the lid he had dislodged what looked to be corpses, heavy soft bodies wrapped in winding sheets. Was this some kind of burial pit? He glanced upwards to the rock ceiling, and quite suddenly understood where he was. Catacombs. The brothers of the Cruciferi Order, may they rot in living torment, had put him in a catacomb cavern.
So. So the curs had brought his murdered body down here, together with paupers and plague-corpses and criminals, and all the other poor creatures who could not afford proper burial. He could smell the stench of too-ripe meat, like fruit bursting and leaking its rottenness.
But he could sense, far above him, fresh clean air. He forced himself to climb out of the stone tomb, pushing back the press of bodies as he did so. He had no idea of where he was; he might be just outside Jerusalem, or he might be just outside of anywhere. How far would those greedy monks have taken his sepulchre? He glanced at it. As he had thought, it was lying on a shelf of rock, with more shelves above and below, each one stacked with corpses, some of them incompletely shrouded, the winding sheets loosened and trailing. He turned his back on it and set off through the tunnels.
Ahasuerus had no idea how long it took him to find his way out of the catacombs. His eyes were still only partially adjusted to the light, and he could scarcely see. His whole world and his every sense was focused on the hewn-out rock of the caverns and on the piles of half-rotting corpses. There was nothing by which to measure time and the thick smothering stench of decay was everywhere. As he walked on, his feet making no sound on the hard rock floor, he could hear the dripping of water somewhere over his head and it was a terrible and a desolate sound. I am the only living creature here. Yes, but I am returning to the world.
He padded on, seeing that he was coming to the newer part of the catacombs, seeing that the burials were more recent. The deeper part had been drenched in the stench and the feel of crumbled bones, and there had been a sprinkling of grey bone-dust on the ground. But there was a stench of putrefaction in his nostrils now, and the winding sheets of these later bodies were wet and stained with the leaking body decay within . . .
Ahasuerus stopped abruptly and bent over, retching, his forehead beaded with sweat. But if I am sweating it is a living sweat and if I am sick being sick is a living experience. Susannah, you were right about the music . . . Awe, tinged with fear, brushed his mind.
And then directly ahead of him was a slanting ray of light: sweet dark blue twilight, pouring in from over his head. With it, he smelt the clean pure air of the world again. Almost there!
He broke into a half-run, and then he was standing in the pouring twilight, at the mouth of the caves and the cool clean night air was filling his lungs, and the grave-stench was behind him, but nothing had ever tasted or felt so good: not the best wine in all the world, not the body of a woman you loved.
He was out of the catacomb city of the dead.