SWNOVELS Chapter Chapter Sixteen
Occasional swells awoke me, and I sensed the vessel was sailing again. No sooner had I opened my eyes than a knock came from the cabin door.
“Donna?” Angelo called from the hallway. “We will arrive soon. Do you need help?”
I didn’t know how to respond.
“Should I come in?” he asked.
“I’ll be there shortly,” I answered and heard him withdraw from the door.
When my senses had awakened more, I rose from the bed to prepare to leave. I wanted to bathe but would never disrobe in such a place. Soothing my hair and clothes, I settled for washing my face.
When I emerged from the cabin and made my way up to the top deck, the looks of several men confronted me, including Duccio. Behind them all, I saw our destination not five thousand feet ahead.
Como, Duccio said to me privately.
“We are nearly home, cousin,” he said aloud.
I nodded and walked along the deck until I came to stand beside him. Even from this distance, the town seemed enormous. The buildings were much taller than those of Morbegno—some five or six stories. Even the private homes built around the half bay’s perimeter rose to stunning heights along the hillsides. Throughout the principal town were several taller structures, but there was one that rose so high near its center that I couldn’t take my eyes from it. The building, still under construction, already rose above them all with its three domed roofs covered in a light blue stone that refused to go unnoticed in the sunlight. At its center, climbed a taller tower with soaring arches that promised to become a fourth roof. Its beauty gave me chills.
The cathedral, said Duccio. I will show it to you another day, if you like.
After the sail barge docked, he led me to a carriage waiting near the foot of the pier. It was not the same carriage we had ridden through the country nights earlier, but the same hands had unmistakably crafted it. The same breed of black stallions waited impatiently to move their monstrous legs.
Once Duccio and I boarded, the carriage jerked forward into the heart of the city. I couldn’t take my eyes from the windows, gawking left and right at all saw. The buildings were not only tall but more finely crafted than anything I’d ever seen, covered in stone carved by masters that looked too perfect to believe. The city’s designers had created a landscape with beauty in mind, just as much as function. They paved the streets with the same delightful stonework, patterned and moulded as if even the most common things here should be beautiful.
“Is it far?” I asked him, eager to step down into the city to touch it.
Up there, Duccio said, and he nodded at the eastern hills where a series of enormous buildings cut into the sides, almost precariously. We will arrive in twenty minutes.
No sooner had he told me this than the carriage pulled sharply eastward to ascend a seemingly endless series of winding roads. To my surprise, the horses never faltered as we rose to cooler breezes. Our wheels rolled over smatterings of orange and yellow leaves, which had already fallen in the early of autumn.
I seized my carriage seat in a panic when the vegetation cleared for a moment, and I saw just how high up the hill we had traveled. From our vantage, I could see most of Como laid out beneath us to the west. The town was far more massive than I understood. It rolled south from the lake at least five times farther inland than I had seen from the upper deck of our sail barge.
Though we eventually stopped our ascent, the carriage continued to wind its way along the steep hillside. We ultimately returned all the way back to the lake where we began, though hundreds of feet above it now. There, we turned into a smaller road that led downhill for a way before opening wide onto a large plateaued garden.
Surrounded by stately evergreen and deciduous trees, this private field of short-cut emerald grass bore a series of small ponds. From these ornamental repositories, water inexplicably shot several feet into the air, only to fall back into the ponds like droplets of rain. They rippled the surfaces to shimmer in the daylight. Along the small paved road and scattered throughout were exquisite flowerbeds filled with violet, yellow, and white blooms I was unfamiliar with.
We shot straight through all of this constructed and manicured loveliness, which treated us to the heavenly scent they gave off.
In short order, our carriage turned around in a sizable forecourt where the bronze statue of an obscenely naked woman stood at the center of a bubbling pool. With her uncovered hair swept back by the wind, she held up a bow to pull back an arrow to shoot. At her feet was a wolf with its teeth bared, running in pursuit of its prey.
Around the perimeter of the court stood what I thought were white tree trunks. I noticed at least a dozen of them standing some twenty feet tall.
“Columns,” he said aloud.
From his mind, I realized Duccio meant to expand my vocabulary again.
“It’s the style of my father’s people. The ancient way.”
Upon closer inspection, I realized they were not wood but made of light polished marble. A mason had carved long ridges in perfect symmetry down their sides to produce a striking sense of length. Crowning each were dramatic flourishes moulded from solid gold. They rose out and up almost like fire, only to end at a perfect horizontal cut.
Duccio rose from his carriage seat when the driver opened the door for us and stepped out. I followed down onto a highly polished grey stone, laid in a beautiful pattern throughout the courtyard. The sight before us, however, made all the other beauty of this place fade away.
It was a building resembling nothing I’d seen before. There was not one structure in Como or beyond that looked even remotely similar.
At its front stood a dozen more of the columns, only these were twice the height and held up a massive stone roof. The columns made the stunning triangular roof appear to float fifty feet above the ground.
Attached at its far end was an even more colossal structure, which rose even higher on account of the flawless dome that served as the building’s second and primary roof. Like the forecourt columns, the builders had made the shimmering dome entirely of gold, and it blazed like the sun.
As I stared dumbfounded at the stunning marvel, a strange sound reached me. Though, to describe what I heard as conventional sound is misleading. I didn’t listen to it with my ears, and I couldn’t block it out. It was both a dull tremor, full and alive, but also an echo as if reaching me from a far-off distance. It writhed around me like water in a pond, pushing and pulling ever so slightly—but these are also insufficient descriptions.
Whatever I detected, it came from within the brilliant building.