Read Online The Book of Blood and Shadow by Robin Wasserman - Free Book Online
Authors: Robin Wasserman
Ads: Link
divine ends, and I fear my strength is not equal to the temptation .
This is all that remains of our Father: the machine his genius devised, and the words with which he guided my hands from beyond the grave. I study them often, thinking of him splayed on the floor of his cell, quill flying as he translated the words of God. The angels gave him their names, and he gave them to me, this one meaning water, that one air, this danger, that transgression. Do you ever envy him, dearest brother, and wish that you could hear the angels with such clarity? Envy is weakness, our Father taught us, and yet I know he envied Bacon, though he would never admit it. Our Father spoke to angels, but Bacon spoke to God .
Even in our Father’s absence, those pages seem still to belong to him. All but one. That one details the task assigned to Thomas, and for a time, he carried it with him wherever he went. It still holds the familiar scent of his laboratory, acrid smoke, burnt metals, bitter vapors. This page, Thomas’s page, is mine. It is all that remains of a lost future, and will make its home with Petrarch, the one who taught me to know love resting forever with the one who taught me to speak it .
Time grows short, and I have a decision to make. I urge you, as I so often do, not to worry for me, but this time I point not to my strength or my courage but to the mere fact that one can have no cares when one has nothing left to lose. It seems all I have left is you, my loving brother, and so you must save your worries for yourself .
27 April 1599 Prague .
None of it made much sense. There was the reference to “the gift of the Greeks,” which I recognized, from years of translating, as the Trojan Horse. The Lumen Dei , whatever it was, whatever untold riches had apparently been promised, had brought the opposite. Chaos and disaster, a world in ruins.
I couldn’t begin to imagine the nature of a machine that promised “sacred answers” and “ultimate truth”—or rather, when I tried, I couldn’t help picturing one of those Guess Your Fortune carnival machines—but I understood all too well what had been left in its wake: grief. That delectable combo of confusion, guilt, self-doubt, what-ifs, regrets about the unchangeable past and paralysis in the face of an unpromising future. She had lost, badly—and in losing, had lost her father all over again. I knew how that worked, too. It was simple physics: Loss attracted loss.
Enough, I told myself, sounding like her . The letter wasn’t adistress call across the ages from a sixteenth-century maiden in search of a twenty-first-century shrink. It was a clue.
I pulled the Petrarch collection out of the pouch that the archives were stored in, and rifled gently through the yellowed pages. The text was faint, nearly illegible. There were a few poems underlined or circled, with no notes in the margin to indicate why they might have mattered. I didn’t speak Italian so couldn’t even begin to guess.
Trovommi Amor del tutto disarmato
et aperta la via per gli occhi al core ,
che di lagrime son fatti uscio et varco .
Maybe less a clue than a dead end. Feeling vaguely stupid, I closed the book again. As I did, I felt something. The leather binding was incredibly soft, rubbed smooth by age. But my thumb had bumped over a rough spot on the inside front cover. No, not a spot, I realized, taking a closer look. A seam. A slightly discolored square patch of light tan stood out against the dark, with a thin seam running along the edges, an impressive but imperfect repair job, as if to disguise a hole in the binding. Or something else.
There was a bottle opener on my key chain, and on the bottle opener, a sharp enough edge to rip a fraying sixteenth-century stitch. The Hoff was still snoring; Chris and Max were still absorbed in their battle of wits and pedantry. No one was watching.
Not that I would think of defacing a four-hundred-year-old book.
This is all that remains of our Father: the machine his genius devised, and the words with which he guided my hands from beyond the grave. I study them often, thinking of him splayed on the floor of his cell, quill flying as he translated the words of God. The angels gave him their names, and he gave them to me, this one meaning water, that one air, this danger, that transgression. Do you ever envy him, dearest brother, and wish that you could hear the angels with such clarity? Envy is weakness, our Father taught us, and yet I know he envied Bacon, though he would never admit it. Our Father spoke to angels, but Bacon spoke to God .
Even in our Father’s absence, those pages seem still to belong to him. All but one. That one details the task assigned to Thomas, and for a time, he carried it with him wherever he went. It still holds the familiar scent of his laboratory, acrid smoke, burnt metals, bitter vapors. This page, Thomas’s page, is mine. It is all that remains of a lost future, and will make its home with Petrarch, the one who taught me to know love resting forever with the one who taught me to speak it .
Time grows short, and I have a decision to make. I urge you, as I so often do, not to worry for me, but this time I point not to my strength or my courage but to the mere fact that one can have no cares when one has nothing left to lose. It seems all I have left is you, my loving brother, and so you must save your worries for yourself .
27 April 1599 Prague .
None of it made much sense. There was the reference to “the gift of the Greeks,” which I recognized, from years of translating, as the Trojan Horse. The Lumen Dei , whatever it was, whatever untold riches had apparently been promised, had brought the opposite. Chaos and disaster, a world in ruins.
I couldn’t begin to imagine the nature of a machine that promised “sacred answers” and “ultimate truth”—or rather, when I tried, I couldn’t help picturing one of those Guess Your Fortune carnival machines—but I understood all too well what had been left in its wake: grief. That delectable combo of confusion, guilt, self-doubt, what-ifs, regrets about the unchangeable past and paralysis in the face of an unpromising future. She had lost, badly—and in losing, had lost her father all over again. I knew how that worked, too. It was simple physics: Loss attracted loss.
Enough, I told myself, sounding like her . The letter wasn’t adistress call across the ages from a sixteenth-century maiden in search of a twenty-first-century shrink. It was a clue.
I pulled the Petrarch collection out of the pouch that the archives were stored in, and rifled gently through the yellowed pages. The text was faint, nearly illegible. There were a few poems underlined or circled, with no notes in the margin to indicate why they might have mattered. I didn’t speak Italian so couldn’t even begin to guess.
Trovommi Amor del tutto disarmato
et aperta la via per gli occhi al core ,
che di lagrime son fatti uscio et varco .
Maybe less a clue than a dead end. Feeling vaguely stupid, I closed the book again. As I did, I felt something. The leather binding was incredibly soft, rubbed smooth by age. But my thumb had bumped over a rough spot on the inside front cover. No, not a spot, I realized, taking a closer look. A seam. A slightly discolored square patch of light tan stood out against the dark, with a thin seam running along the edges, an impressive but imperfect repair job, as if to disguise a hole in the binding. Or something else.
There was a bottle opener on my key chain, and on the bottle opener, a sharp enough edge to rip a fraying sixteenth-century stitch. The Hoff was still snoring; Chris and Max were still absorbed in their battle of wits and pedantry. No one was watching.
Not that I would think of defacing a four-hundred-year-old book.
Similar Books
