Part 26 (1/2)

'There is no hurry, Jacopo.' Hawkwood turned on his chancellor, his eyes grown cold. 'This is a family squabble, nothing more. We'll bide our time.'

There was a heavy pause as Pietrasanta absorbed the condottiero's decision. Hawkwood's chancellor had no idea what his master was planning, nor the bearing of these plans on his own future. Within a few weeks the dirty wars of the Visconti would be only a memory to the man they had both served for so many years. And Pietrasanta would be out of a job.

'Very well, sire.' Pietrasanta turned to exit, pus.h.i.+ng past a young man entering from behind him. Desilio's boy, sent up from the villetta.

'What is it?' Scarlett asked him.

'Master Desilio requests your presences, good sirs,' said the breathless youth.

'Oh?' Hawkwood's eyebrows arched up, and he turned to Scarlett with an intrigued grin. They walked together to one of the villette, the line of small cottages in a line down the hill from the main house. The grapevines reached from the path up the sweeping rise to the south, and the late afternoon had settled into a mellow glow. My last season in Italy, Scarlett thought, whispering a quiet prayer.

In the villetta they found Desilio wedged among several piles of books on a trestle table, which was covered with scribbled papers arrayed in an unpatterned mess around the quire. The scholar's eyes gleamed with excitement as he stood, though he maintained a respectful silence until Hawkwood asked him to speak.

'I have broken the first cipher, Ser Giovanni, and will soon break the second.'

'Is that so?' said Hawkwood, his gaze s.h.i.+fting between Desilio and the table. 'Sit, please, and explain what you've found.'

Desilio took his chair, Scarlett and Hawkwood each to one side.

'The key was the first cipher. Without it everything else in the quire means nothing. It took a bit of thought and effort, but I was able to decipher these first pages without difficulty once I realized what was before me.'

Scarlett peered over his shoulder. 'And what is it?'

Desilio waited a moment, letting the curiosity build. 'Sardinian,' he finally whispered.

'Sardinian?'

'Yes. Nothing complicated or encoded, just Sardinian. He used it as the first of his ciphers.'

'So you read the language yourself, Maestro Desilio?' Hawkwood asked.

'Hardly,' the logician scoffed. 'I asked around among your men, and one of them knew another who was from that island. I read him the first few sentences, as well as I was able-'

'You what?' Hawkwood exploded, his hand poised to strike.

Scarlett put a hand on his arm. Desilio was wagging his beard. 'Nothing to worry about, I a.s.sure you, Ser Giovanni. The ciphers mean nothing in isolation. The man had no idea why I was even pulling him in here.'

Scarlett felt Hawkwood relax, and took it upon himself to move the conversation along, reaching over Desilio's shoulder to turn the page. 'What about here, and here?' He pointed to the script on the facing folio. The alphabet was Roman, the hand legible, but the words themselves were clearly nonsense, full of letters bunched seemingly at random, and what looked like extra vowels and consonants, such as an X within a circle.

'It's an extraordinary thing,' Desilio said, a touch of pride in his voice as he looked up at them. 'He was inventing a lingua ignota, as I've heard such things called.'

'A new language,' Hawkwood murmured.

'It's rudimentary, of course, without declined nouns or conjugated verbs, and the tenses are rather primitive. But a few hundred words is all one needs to put together fairly sophisticated messages.'

'But how would the recipient know the meaning?'

Desilio smiled. 'A glossary, owned by both parties, translating each word back into Italian. Or any other language. The only way to decipher the code without such a glossary would be through an a.n.a.lysis of letters and their frequency, but for that to work you'd have to have a much larger sample of the language than the mere four pages here.'

'So then,' Scarlett said, confused, 'how were you able to decipher the unknown language?'

Desilio rubbed his palms. 'It all begins with the Sardinian, the simplest of the ciphers. It's merely another language, and anyone who knows it can crack the code, which I've now done with the help of your man. And as I've discovered in the process, the Sardinian is in effect the glossary to the lingua ignota. The Sardinian, that is, provides the key to the next cipher.'

'Explain yourself,' said Hawkwood.

'Certainly, Ser Giovanni. Look here, at the beginning of the first column. It reads, ”Word seventy-nine is mintza” and mintza is Sardinian for ”spring”. The next sentence reads ”The twelfth word is bidduri” Sardinian for ”hemlock”. Once I had all of this translated I was stymied. The seventy-ninth word of what? What twelfth word is he talking about? Then I realized what your cryptographer was doing here. What he's telling us is that word seventy-nine of the secret language the next cipher in the quire is ”spring”. And word twelve is ”hemlock”. And so on and so forth. And now, by translating the lingua ignota as the key, I believe I am opening the lock to the next code, which follows in the quire. The Sardinian unlocks the secret language. The secret language unlocks the numbers. Do you see?'

Hawkwood nodded, all admiration. 'Indeed I do, Master Desilio. You are Theseus in a labyrinth of sorts, with each cipher a length of rope guiding you to the next corner, and the next solution.'

'A perceptive a.n.a.logy, Ser Giovanni. I should have the solution to the subsequent code worked out as soon as I have transcribed and recombined the lingua ignota.'

'And what is this next cipher?' Scarlett asked him.

Desilio turned back to the ma.n.u.script, showing us the next three pages, filled with scribbled numbers stacked in equations and scattered along lines, shapes, and angles. Once again they meant nothing to Scarlett.

'The next one is numerical, drawing on the mathematics of Master Gersonides,' said Desilio. 'A Jew, and an astronomer of moderate renown. I believe your cryptographer was constructing a cipher based on some of Gersonides' more arcane calculations. Extraction of square roots, binomial coefficients, that sort of thing.'

Hawkwood laughed lightly, slapped him on the back. 'Ah yes. Binomial coefficients. I eat them with my rabbit.'

'It sounds more complicated than it is,' Desilio said modestly. 'This mathematics is several generations old, nothing I cannot untangle. A few more days, Ser Giovanni, and I should be ready to tackle the final cipher.'

'And this final cipher? Do you have an inkling as to its solution?'

'Not yet, sire, though I am confident I'll get there.' He thumbed through the booklet's last few pages and set his finger in the middle of one of them. 'Your cryptographer organized the last cipher around four discrete images, arranged in different combinations across these pages. Here is what looks like a falcon, perhaps. This one is clearly a sword, the next a flower a spindly one, like a thistle. And here we have a grape, if I'm not mistaken.'

'A plum,' said Hawkwood, his voice suddenly taut. 'It's a plum.'

'And the bird is a hawk,' said Scarlett, seeing it at the same instant. Hawks, thistleflowers, plums, and swords. The four suits of Hawkwood's cards, written in neat rows and columns across the last four pages of the quire in small groups of two each group, Scarlett suspected, a letter or a word. The phrases came back to him, like pinp.r.i.c.ks along his arms. At Prince of Plums shall prelate oppose ... By Half-ten of Hawks might shender be shown ...

He should have seen it during his own scrutiny of the ma.n.u.script, yet these symbols had blended in with all the other mysterious writing in the quire, and he hadn't taken the time to examine them in their own right before extracting Desilio from the studium. How differently all this might have turned out, Scarlett would think later, if he had.

Hawkwood, who always carried a deck of cards slung in a purse, removed them and spread the painted ovals out on the table as they explained to the scholar what the two of them had noticed. Desilio nodded eagerly, getting it right away, and promising to let them know as soon as he had untangled the mathematical cipher and turned to the cards.

'I am entrusting you with my favourite deck, Maestro Desilio,' Hawkwood said as they prepared to leave him there. 'Treat it well.'

'I shall, Ser Giovanni.'

As they turned into the lower gardens Scarlett repressed a s.h.i.+ver. Hawkwood knew him too well to let it pa.s.s.

'What is it, Adam?'

'Think about it, John,' he began. 'A book that just happens to survive a deliberate burning in the villetta, yet with enough of its pages intact to allow the ciphers to be broken. The first cipher is simply a translation into Sardinian a tongue Il Critto could have heard spoken in the streets of Florence more than once. It would have been a simple matter to hire a Sardinian man and have him translate the words he needed. The next cipher, Desilio tells us, relies on mathematics that's years, maybe decades old, presumably solvable by anyone with university training. And the final cipher? The only way to break the encryption is with your own cards, John. Doesn't all of this feel too convenient somehow too easy?'

'Well, I suppose one could-'

'It almost seems as if ...' Scarlett paused on the garden path, a hand to his mouth.