The Fire. Katherine Neville

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ not long before Keats’s death in Rome.

      This waterlogged book had been found on the body, just as Shelley had left it: shoved within the pocket of his short, ill-fitting schoolboy’s jacket. It was still turned open and marked at Shelley’s favorite poem by Keats, ‘The Fall of Hyperion,’ about the mythological battle between the Titans and those new gods, led by Zeus, who were soon to replace them. After the famous mythological battle, which every schoolboy knew, only Hyperion, the sun god and last of the Titans, still survives.

      This was a poem that Byron had never much cared for – and that Keats himself hadn’t even liked enough to finish. But it seemed to Byron significant that Percy had taken pains to keep it on his person, even at his death. He had surely marked this one passage for a reason:

       Anon rushed by the bright Hyperion;

       His flaming robes streamed out behind his heels,

       And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire…

       On he flared…

      At this premature end to a poem that was destined always to remain unfinished, the sun god seems to set himself aflame and whisk into oblivion in a ball of his own incandescence – rather like a phoenix. Rather like poor Percy, immolated there upon the pyre.

      But most critical was something that none of the others seemed to have noticed when the book was found: At just the spot where Keats had laid down his pen, Shelley had taken his own up, and had carefully drawn a small mark at the side of the page – a kind of intaglio, with something printed inside. The ink was badly faded from the long exposure to the salt seawater, but Byron was sure he could still make it out by closer examination. That was why he had brought it here with him this morning.

      Ripping the page loose from the book, Byron slipped the volume away again and carefully studied the small drawing his friend had made at the edge. Shelley had drawn a triangle, which enclosed three tiny circles or balls, each in a different colored ink.

      Byron knew these colors well, for several reasons. First, they were his own – the colors of his matrilineal Scots family heraldry, which went back to before the time of the Norman Conquest. Though that was merely an accident of birth, it hadn’t helped his sojourn in Italy that Lord Byron had always displayed these colors proudly upon his enormous carriage, a vehicle patterned after that of the deposed, deceased emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte. For as Byron should know better than anyone, in secret or in esoteric parlance these particular colors signified far more.

      The three spheres that Shelley had drawn in the triangle were colored black, blue, and red. The black stood for coal, which signified ‘Faith.’ Blue symbolized smoke, meaning ‘Hope.’ And red was flame, for ‘Charity.’ Together, the three colors represented the life cycle of fire. And further – depicted as they were here, within a triangle, the universal symbol for ‘Fire’ – they stood for the destruction by fire of the old world as prophesied by Saint John in the Book of Revelation, and the coming of a new world order.

      This very symbol – these tricolored orbs within an equilateral triangle – had also been chosen as the secret insignia of an underground group that intended to carry out that same revolution, at least here in Italy. They called themselves the Carbonari – the Charcoal Burners.

      In the aftermath of twenty-five years of French revolution, terror, and conquest that had nearly shattered all of Europe, there was only one rumor more frightful than rumors of war. And that was the rumor of internal insurrection, of a movement from within – one that might demand independence from all external overlords, from all imposed rule of any kind.

      During these past two years, George Gordon, Lord Byron, had shared the same roof with his married Venetian mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, a girl half his age who’d been exiled from Venice, along with her brother, her cousin, and her father – but minus the cuckolded husband.

      These were the notorious Gambas – the ‘Gambitti,’ as they were called in the popular press – highly placed members of the Carbonaria, the very group that had sworn eternal enmity to all forms of tyranny – though it had failed in its attempted coup, during last year’s Carnival, to drive the Austrian rulers from Northern Italy. Instead, the Gambas themselves had been exiled from three Italian cities in succession. And Byron had followed them to each new encampment.

      This was the reason why Byron’s every contact, whether in person or in writing, was now being assiduously tracked by, and reported to, the official overlords of all three parts of Italy: the Austrian Habsburgs in the north, the Spanish Bourbons in the south, and the Vatican itself in the central Papal States.

      Lord Byron was the secret capo of the Cacciatori Mericani – ‘The Americans,’ as the popular, populist branch of the underground society was known. He’d financed from his own private funds the weapons, shot, and powder of the recent abortive Carbonari insurrection – and more.

      He’d supplied his friend Ali Pasha the new secret weapon to use in his rebellion against the Turks – the repeating rifle – which Byron had had designed for him in America.

      And Byron was now funding the Hetairia ton Philikon, or Friendly Society – a secret group that supported the thrust to drive the Ottoman Turks from Greece.

      Lord Byron was surely everything that the imperialist dragons had most cause to fear – an implacable foe of tyrants and their reigns. The powers understood that he was exactly the ferment such an insurrection wanted. And he was rich enough that, if necessary, he could also water it from his own well.

      But in the past year all three of these nascent insurrections had been brutally repressed, severed at the jugular – sometimes literally. Indeed, after Ali Pasha’s death seven months ago, it was told, he’d been buried at two different locations: his body at Janina, his head at Constantinople. Seven months. Why had it taken him so long to see it? Not until this morning.

      It was nearly seven months since Ali Pasha’s death, and still no word, no sign…At first, Byron had assumed there’d been a change in plan. After all, much had changed in the past two years while Ali was isolated at Janina. But the pasha had always vowed that if he were ever at risk, he would find Byron by any means, via his Secret Service – which was, after all, the vastest and most powerful such organization ever forged in history.

      If this were to prove impossible, then in the pasha’s final hours on earth, he would destroy himself inside the great fortress of Demir Kule – along with his treasure, his followers, and even the beloved and beautiful Vasiliki – before letting anything fall prey to the Turks.

      But now Ali Pasha was dead, and by all reports the fortress of Demir Kule had been seized intact. Despite Byron’s repeated attempts to discover any news of the fate of Vasiliki or the others who’d been taken to Constantinople, there was as yet no word. Nor had Byron received the object that was intended to be protected by himself and by the Carbonaria.

      Percy’s book of poems seemed to hold the only clue. If Byron had read correctly, only half of his message was contained in the triangle he’d drawn. The other part was the poem itself: the passage Percy had marked in Keats’s ‘Fall of Hyperion.’ Putting those two clues together, the full message would read:

       The old Solar God will be destroyed by a far more dangerous flame – an eternal flame.

      If this was correct, then Byron had grasped at once that it was he himself who had most to fear. He must act, and quickly. For if Ali Pasha was dead without the promised bombast – if there was no word from survivors who’d СКАЧАТЬ