Chapter 20 #2
He stood in the candlelight with his hand pressed over his mouth.
Above him, the columns went up into the soft dark.
The water spoke quietly at the cavern’s edge.
Lucy came to him across the floor of Matteo’s cathedral and was gathered in and held so hard her ribs creaked, and neither of them was in any condition to mind.
She tipped her head back to look at him.
“Lorenzo. It waited. It let you tear yourself to rags, and the very night you chose to live, it opened. As though it wanted to be sure of you first. As though the door was never going to open for the man who needed it. Only for the man who had learned to live without it.”
“The door did not open for me at all,” said Lorenzo.
His hands came up and framed her face, and his thumbs moved over her wet cheeks, and his eyes, ruined and blazing, held hers.
“Be exact, amore. The door opened for a woman on her knees at midnight with a candle laid flat to the floor, reading tool-marks in the middle of her own grief. You found it. Not I. You—” And the words caught, and she stood with her hands fisted in his shirt and let it be true.
They came to the pedestal last.
It stood at the heart of everything, where nave and columns and painted bays all turned inward to face it.
Lucy understood before they had crossed half the distance that this was the altar the whole church existed to serve.
Matteo had taken a living pillar of the cave, a great flowstone mass rooted in the floor of the world, and dressed it into a broad rising of shallow steps, and crowned the steps with a block of the white, grained marble, squared and polished like glass.
Upon the block, carved from the same stone so cunningly that it seemed to have grown there, lay an anvil.
The anvil in the stone, out of the oldest telling of all.
Across the top of the anvil ran a long cradle, dressed and fitted and lined, a resting place worked to receive one thing and one thing only, a blade the length of a tall man’s arm.
The cradle was empty.
The display was empty, no sword in sight, nothing in the fitted channel but years of fine dust. The whole cathedral seemed to gather and lean in around the emptiness; every painted eye and marble face turned toward the vacant heart of it.
Lucy stood at the foot of the steps and felt the disappointment come up through her on Lorenzo’s behalf like cold up through stone.
After everything. After the journey that had scoured him hollow, after the miracle of the door itself, to climb down into glory and find the one thing missing, the thing, the point of it all, the object every hope had hung upon since a morning in a secret room when he had said the word and her whole inner world had ignited.
Her eyes burned. Her hands had gone cold around the lantern ring.
“Oh, Lorenzo,” she said, and it cracked. “I am so sorry. After everything, after all of it, that we did not find Excalibur here, I am so sorry—”
She could not bear, for a moment, to look at him. She stood dreading the raising of her own eyes, dreading the sight of his face lined in loss, the guttering she knew, the gray she had watched seep through him at Hwitmarbel.
But when she finally raised her eyes, she found ecstasy there.
He was not looking at the pedestal at all.
He stood with his head thrown all the way back, craning up into the candle-lit dark above the anvil stone, his face wide open, streaming, transfigured, lit from inside like a lamp carried up through a dark house and out onto its roof.
His voice, when it came, rang away down the nave and returned from the columns doubled and trebled, a whole choir of him.
“It is exactly as I imagined! Esattamente! Lucia, look, look up, Matteo was a genius, il maestro, do you see, do you see what he—”
And Lucy looked up.
Above the pedestal, above the empty anvil, the cave’s ceiling drew itself together into a great natural dome.
Into the dome, fitted panel to panel in a vast ring of English oak so that the painting seemed to float unsupported in the dark of the earth, Matteo di Bianchi had set his heaven.
It gathered from the edges inward, cloud and gold and rushing figures, banners and wings and white horses, all of it streaming toward the center.
At the center, huge and radiant and alone, stood King Arthur in his victory, both arms flung high, holding Excalibur above his head against a burst of painted glory, the blade catching a light that came from nowhere and everywhere.
His face, tipped back to look up along the steel, wore an expression of pure awe.
The boy at the entrance, grown. The same soul, the same wonder, the whole arc of a life sprung between two works of one man’s hands.
The painted sword blazed above the empty cradle in exact and deliberate answer.
Lucy stood beneath the mastery of it with her mouth open and felt Matteo’s work reach down through three hundred years and take hold of something at the very depths of her soul and pull.
And standing there, under the painted ceiling, with her husband-to-be weeping for joy beside her at an empty altar, Lucy Carroway finally heard the conversation they had been having all spring.
Every scene of it came back and played itself again in the light of the burning ceiling, and every scene meant something different now. The secret room in May, his eyes shining, and her breathing, Treasure, and him answering, Sì, Matteo’s work, and her hearing, Yes, the sword.
The chapel in Devon, her lamp held out over dark water, surely Excalibur waits somewhere, and his silence, which she had read as a man too broken to hope, and which had been, she saw now, blindingly, a man who could not find one kind way to tell her that the sword was nothing to him.
A hilt without a blade. An afternoon’s work for a good smith.
The library at midnight, her offering to hunt the thing itself to the end of the earth, the whole of her held out with the sword on top like a crown on a cushion, and him kissing her knuckles in an agony she had cataloged as courtesy, because how does a man say to the woman, Amore, you are offering me the wrapping and I cannot make myself want it, and I cannot tell you so without seeming to scorn the gift of your whole heart.
She had heard what she wanted to hear. That was the truth of it, and she stood under Arthur’s painted rapture and accepted it without flinching, because she had got rather good, this year, at honesty in the dark.
The sword had been the most exciting part, and so the sword had become, for her, the point.
It was Uncle Henry’s gold at the end of every story, the idol in the drowned temple, the treasure that made the ending real, and she had carried it into Lorenzo’s quest the way one carries one’s own lamp into another man’s house, and lit his rooms with it, and then wondered that the furniture looked strange.
It had been her treasure. It had never once been his.
His treasure was hanging above her head this minute and standing all around her in the breathing dark, the making, the mastery, the soul poured into stone and pigment, the name given back to the man.
The sword, the actual sword, could lie at the bottom of whatever lake had it and be welcome.
And the understanding came down through her and rang, rang like her uncle’s voice on the cliff, the same note an octave deeper, because it rhymed. Her whole year rhymed. She had believed the adventure was the prize, and learned, on a cliff top, in a garden, on a rainy doorstep, that the person was.
She had believed the sword was his prize, and here in the deep of the earth stood the truth. The making was, the art was, the long conversation with the stone was all he had ever chased.
She had fallen in love with a man she had partly misread from the first morning, mistaken his cathedral for a strongbox and his grief for greed and his silence for despair, and standing now inside the true answer, she found the misreading did not shame her at all.
It completed him. It was the last panel of her portrait of him sliding into place, and the finished portrait was better, dearer, more entirely his, than the one she had made up, and she loved the true man immeasurably more than she had ever managed to love the one she invented.
“It was never the sword,” she said.
Lorenzo brought his eyes down out of his heaven and found her, and whatever stood in her face, it stilled him.
“I offered it to you so many times.” She was laughing, she found, laughing and crying at once.
“So many times. I held it out, surely the sword, surely Excalibur, and you went silent, and I thought your silence meant my words could not reach you, and, Lorenzo, you could not answer because there was no answer, because I was consoling you for the loss of a thing you never wanted, and you were too kind, too hopelessly, ruinously kind, to tell the woman spending her whole heart that she had brought the wrong quest—”
“A blade,” said Lorenzo, hoarsely, helplessly, “is so much less than this … this tribute,” and it undid them both entirely, and they met in the middle of the pedestal steps, and held on.
“This,” he said at last, against her hair.
His voice came up from somewhere at the very bottom of him, wrecked and shining.
“Lucia. Hear me say it in the place itself, so that you can never doubt it after. This is what I wanted. Not the relic. The proof. That he was, that we were, that the waiting was true. Every generation of us handed down a fire we could not see, and here it is, alight. It was alight the whole time, and I have found my dream. I am standing inside my dream with dust of it on my boots, and shall I tell you the strangest thing, the thing I will be understanding for the rest of my life?”