Part Three: Architecture of... Submission?
Running, I ran.
The thing about foreign cities, especially those as well and standard-made as Pavia is that even if you don't know where you are, you know which direction to go to rectify that. It helped that these were pre-automotive cities I'm talking about here – exclusively; and no few of the towns were built without consideration of even two lanes of carriage traffic. The point is that you could walk these cities end to end. We're not talking anything even remotely close to the kind of urban sprawl the US is known for. Pavia was maybe a mile across, on roughly a square plan.
But, as I ran, my mind worked.
I see the stone of the buildings – the tell-tale signs of unpracticed masters in every art everywhere I look. And after less than a minute, I'm asking myself what I'm running from – and where I'm running to.
My run becomes a jog, becomes a walk.
No one was following me. Did I expect there might be? Yes? But, no – that didn't make sense.
R – If he visited you to work against the Scholeio—
I – Not the School – the Nine.
S – The Ninth.
This revelation is as obvious and has about as much effect as the dawn. This is the nature of Circles, isn't it? For the members to work against one another – and for the one at the Center – the Archi, the Grand Magister, the King – to organize that Chaos to the benefit of all? Is it not the myth that the best American presidents had warring cabinets?
But what happens when the Archi chooses the path of Darkness rather than of Light?
Was that what I thought? It felt right. What I had seen – Metus's making.... I could see no Light in that. Did that make the Ninth the Center of a Scholeio of Darkness? Could I prove the existence of such an order by the suggestion of a Center? If there could be an order dedicated to Evil, it seemed like as good a place to start looking for them as any. And why not? Where there's one, there's always a second. And where there's two....
Am I really considering a Dark Ogdoad and their D'Archi?
Is that what Adalbert meant?
My head is spinning. Not least of which with irritation with myself that I'm such a fucking dork.
I feel like I'm trying to spin imaginary plates – balancing them aloft and maintaining the centrifugal force all with the effort of my mind. And there are too many to remove myself from engagement with the spinning to so much as ponder what might be on the plate - without them all crashing down.
What does that even mean? To let spinning-plate-thoughts crash?
S – And? So what? Drop them. You keep saying you're going to leave.
This is said in my head, in my voice, but the words are not my own.
I stop.
And I realize something:
I'm not done.
S – You said no more, Awen.
I did. And I'd say it again: No more.
No more running.
“I need to find Peitho.”
* * * *
I find the inn we'd stopped at easily enough – at a run. Such places are near the gates, and the one we'd stopped at was at the south such. The aforementioned Lombard kings Authari and Agilulf – by whatever order they came – didn't only build their wife churches. Theodolinda's name means Beauty of God, and that is her legacy, as well. It is a shame that she was so readily forgotten by a world that she worked to beautify.
While she was building churches all over Lombardy – Milan and Pavia and Breschia and Como and, and, and – her husbands and their successors were building cities – erecting walls and laying roads, establishing lasting building codes and standardized contracts.
But don't get me wrong.
The Lombards were not (quite) some sort of Dark Age Renaissance. We're talking 568 to 774 – their rule kind of spelling or marking the end of the Roman Empire in the West, their churches like magnificent cairns. Now, look. I'm not an art historian. In fact, I'm little more than an art, uh, cognizer. I'm aware of it – and I'm aware that I'm not very good at it. You know this by now.
It has come to my attention via conversation with my esteemed producer that these things Adalbert said to me about which I had little frame of reference nor enough interest to care about – that is, the architecture stuff, not the Scholeio-Comacine connection – are genuine mysteries today. Who were the Comacine, really? Where did the Lombard style come from? Where did the Romanesque and Gothic styles come from?
Again, because he evidently does not trust my information on my memory alone – which— We all have gaps in our understanding. I was quoted once, again by that bastardly Conan Doyle, as saying something to the effect that our minds can only contain so much content. And such may be true. Am I wrong in understanding that neuropsychology believes that old, irrelevant information is in some ways deleted to make room for new in the brain? What do I know? I'm just a thousand year-old wizard – in every sense of the word, let me tell you.
Anyway, what am I rambling about? Do I feel the need to impress upon you the historicity of these things? No. If you have made it this far, you have done so for your own reasons – and believe me, I'm not sure I am sure of them, yet. You hardly need any prompting from me to continue – Hell, I am being prompted to move this along.
There is a very real and lasting mystery as regards the Lombard style of architecture. It has nothing whatever to do with my story – that is, not this, the Lesbos Serpent. If it were a novel, I might have omitted Adalbert even mentioning anything related to the Comadice. V is reminding that, in fact, I did, originally – and that that omission is why this is taking so long. Move it along.
But it matters in the context of history. It explains, in a lot of ways – but not entirely, and not really – not really – why so many different people wanted Pavia and that entire region of Italy, between the Alps and the Adda river – which also describes the center of resistance to Berengar's rule. Maybe that's why I'm stuck on this – why I have for so long been circling over this in my mind, unable to move past it. An historian would tell this story in detail. Dan Brown would find a way to make a maze of the city, it's churches and monuments and graveyards somehow attached to the plot.
But they weren't.
Not really.
If you think of the map of Italy and her neighbors in terms of a war game like Risk – or Civilization or one of its clones – this region, Lombardi, is under Cultural and Military influence of all of these various places because of marriages and religion which have absolutely no connection to Berengar besides a few walls and/or castles he allowed them to build – literally last year. After a devastating series of losses to the Magyars – Hungarians, in every sense of the name.
Castle- and wall-building are, by this time, exclusive privileges of the king – one of those features which is so frequently pointed to of the Feudal government. This is necessary, and it should be, by the set-up of this conflict alone, obvious. A king and his army can only be in so many places at once. Namely one. And when his army is suffering losses every time it takes the field.... So he needs to be able to absolutely trust the people he puts in power around his kingdom – the people he's entrusting to maintain his authority. Well, if people who aren't worthy of that trust go around building walls and castles, they can suddenly have their own little city-states and even kingdoms if enough of them confederate under his nose.
So what does Pavia have to do with the mystery of the Lombard style, right? Well, it should be evident that the Lombard style started with the Lombards. But a question which might be as old as the Lombards themselves – that is the transition in their civilization from identifying as the Langobards (or Longobards, depending whom you read) to the Lombardi – is where the hell did a mostly nomadic, pastoral people who rarely built anything in wood learn to build, frankly, marvels of stone in a time when everyone who was supposed to be able to work stone was either dead or in the East?
In addition to that, where did this people who never worked in painted or rendered images of people learn to adapt the decidedly Greek frescoes into mosaics?
I have said that I could see the tell-tale signs of unpracticed masters in every art everywhere I looked. That is to say I could read in the construction of the city the marks of trained, educated masters of every art, but those who had not worked in a vast majority of the mediums to which they were contracted. But you can see it, in the newer buildings, a rapidly developing perfection of a style. The most poignant example to me is the Lombard textile style carved so prominently in their buildings. This smacks to me of a sculptor working from a piece at hand, commissioned to blend his talent with their tradition.
Is this the Romanesque? Yes. Sort of. But really the Romanesque churches you will find throughout Europe are, evidently – trust the word of experts, not my own eye and memory – really Lombardesque. Because the non-Italian peoples of my century and later, those nobles and monarchs who visited Milan and Pavia and, especially, Como, who saw the, again, marvelous churches there needed them for their own – and contracted either the same builders, architects, or those affiliated with them to erect copies in their own lands. This explains – to me – how a style can spring almost spontaneously into being across an entire continent in a single century – a time when the building of these very buildings we're discussing could take centuries.
Did you know the Corporation dates back to Rome? It was a compromise to the Guild. You see, the Guild could charge whatever they wanted to the city – and often did. In fact, there is extant Lombard legislation limiting the prices the Comacine Guild could charge. Because in their contracts the Guild also provided for the families of their workers, pensions for debilitating injuries, funds to provide for burials. The Guilds, in other words, weren't fucking cheap. But they were the best. So instead the Romans allowed the various related companies to group together as corporations, dedicated to one particular building project or one particular town. They were cheaper, but the skill remained the same.
Those corporations were but one subset of the substructure of the Scholeio – the visible one. The Guilds, too. Those corporations died in the fires which consumed Rome and Italy for the centuries following the Visigoth and Ostragoth invasions. The Guilds....
See, the thing about the guilds is that they weren't just skilled laborers who got together to secure and share jobs at fair prices. They were also quasi-, maybe, is the word I should use today, religious – that is, quasi-religious organizations. The Freemasons track their history through these Guilds, and I feel I should leave it at that. There is some debate, among the Freemasons, that is, whether the Comacine fit into their history – that is, whether the Freemasons aren't themselves an offshoot – maybe a disgraced one? – of the Comacine themselves, copying, as it were, the rites of a group they couldn't quite remember, being as they were separated by yet another degree from the Source.
Is that degree of separation the Knights Templar?
Or maybe I'm stirring the pot for intrigue. Because these things are all centuries in the making – churches, the foundations of which I feel I would be irresponsible if I did not make perhaps overly-adequate to maintain, which I am building and which will take up considerable iconic space.
The Pavia of the year nine and hundred, however, is situated north of the Po river. A wide avenue runs north-south of the gate along the river, which sort of cuts the city in third, rather than half. That's where I find the inn, as I mentioned before I went off on that wildly relevant tangent. I find Ted in his room, of all places. He's not exactly pleased that I'm asking where Peitho is, but he tells me she's gone.
“Gone?” I nearly shriek. “Where? Why?”
“What am I, her keeper?” he gruffs. “She said she was going to pray.”
“Pray,” I repeat, feeling as stupid as if he'd just hit me in the head instead.
“Aye.” Ted's eyes are bored with this, and I'm wondering what I've done to upset him.
Have they talked about what we're doing and that I'm bailing on her here?
God damn it.
I'm not bailing anymore!
Instead of allowing my face or my body language to show any of this – not exactly going on in my head, there's no voice to it – I ask, “Do you know where?”
“Kid—“ Ted sighs. “No. She didn't tell me. One suspects that when a girl says she's goin to pray, she doesn't want an old man like me followin her. But wha'do I know? Now, you— You gone done or said something stupid, I can tell it. I can see it in your face, and I saw it in the way she was mopin round til dark came down. So, listen, and Ol' Ted's gonna give you some advice, all right?”
When I start to balk at this idea, looking back toward the door like I might see through the wall and realized that Peitho is, in fact, in the hallway, Ted laughs.
“She ain't out there. Come on, sit down. The worst thing that happens is she comes back while we're talkin. And you lose, what, two of your precious minutes?”
I sigh, but do as I'm told. Sitting on the bed as far from him as I can without being rude.
“All right, now. That's good. Much better. Now, you know, Missus Ted ain't always thought the best of Teddy. Can you believe it? I know, a shocker, that one. Innocent lamb like me. Practically a baby mewlin in my crib. But, now, that ain't true. You see? Teddy's done said and done some things that Missus Ted didn't like so much. But Teddy's still got his Missus Ted. The first one, the only one. You understand? Cus Ted knows when to say he done wrong and make good on it. You hear me?
“Son.... Look, I know I ain't your dad. But a young man like you, you ought not be so far from him, don't you think? You need the counsel of an elder man. A man you can trust. So you just listen to Ol Teddy and know you can trust im. You can trust me, kid. I taken you this far faithfully, haven't I? I ain't got no horse nor chariot in this race, you hear?”
I'm nodding kind of stupidly at all of this. I'm impatient for it to be over, but I was impatient to be away from Peitho – and Adalbert – and look where that impatience has gotten me: stuck between a flan and a Jell-O mold.
“That woman— When you find one like that who likes you, you do what she wants. Do you hear me? She tells you to jump, you ask her how high. Not because she says so, but because she's tryin to make you into something special. A woman like that... she needs a man who can keep up. More than that, she needs a man as strong as she is who's willin do what it takes to see her vision made real. You hear me?”
“Guinevere?” I breathe?
Ted scoffs. “No. Morgan Le Fay.”
That makes me swallow hard. “She brings about Arthur's destruction in the end.”
“I know. That's why I said that. She destroys im cause he didn't do exactly what she told him to. He tried to play her – to use her power for his own. That ain't the way of the Wild Woman, Son. You be careful with her, now. Vipers bite – and I got a feeling that one'll spit if you look at her cross too long.”
I'm standing.
I didn't know I was going to stand. I didn't even realize that the conversation was over.
I guess it is. Ted's smiling and shooing me gently away.
All right, then.
S – Hey, wait—
I turn back to Ted, frowning. “You don't know where she might be at all?”
He kind of laughs, closing his eyes – and, if I'm guessing right, has to restrain himself from rubbing the space between his eyes. “All right, kid. If I know her— Try Santa Maria foris portam.”
“Foris portam? Out of the door?”
“Outside the east gate, kid. Jesus.”
“Thanks,” I say, flinching a little bit, and turn to leave.
“Don't mention it. Really.”
That makes me stop. Had Peitho told him not to tell me?
“Hey—“ I look at him from the side of one eye, turned, as I am, in the door. “Maybe get the horses ready. I have a feeling we're going to be leaving Pavia at a run.
This perks up his mood.
Not the reaction I'd anticipated.
“You in some kind of trouble?”
“You could say that. I just have a feeling. A bad one.”
S – Like someone is going to try to kill me for what I'm about to do.
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