The Kingdom of Light by Giulio Leoni

among the remains where the beams had been both thicker and more numerous, as though they were a kind of buttress, or elements with a particular function.
    ‘Look along the perimeter of the fire for remains similar to this, and stop beside them. Give me one end of your ropes and stretch them out between you,’ he ordered the men.
    They all started wandering around among the charred remains, pulling the ropes tied between them. One after another they stopped, raising the ropes to make them more visible.
    The shape of a perfect octagon had formed before the poet’s eyes.
    D ANTE WENT on looking for a possible meaning in what he was seeing. Around him the comments of the
bargellini
mingled together, as they shouted to each other from the corners of the building. Dante was growing increasingly puzzled. Suddenly he heard one of the
bargellini
calling to him in a loud voice.
    ‘Here, Prior. This might be something!’
    He stepped towards the man who had called to him. He seemed intent on looking for something among the blackened wood and was becoming frantically agitated as he went on shouting.
    There really was something there. At first it looked like some kind of burnt plant. Five jointed sticks pointing towards the sky. A charred human hand.
    The body lay supine, reduced to a carbon statue. The terrible heat that must have been imprisoned in that spot had dried all fluid from the body, turning it into a fragile mummy. But it hadn’t altered the general lines of the body. Perhaps its clothing, apparently a leather jerkin, had melted with the body and protected its shape. The head too was intact, still wrapped in what remained of a strip of fabric.
    Dante studied that face, which now looked as if it were made of black glass. Rigo di Cola, one of the two wool merchants staying at the Angel Inn.
    In the end the devil really had appeared in his ring, he thought. And something along those lines must have passed through the minds of the men who had been drawn by his cries. He saw more than one of them making the sign of the cross, certainly to invoke protection for himself, and certainly not in honour of the deceased.
    Beside the corpse there were fragments of glass, again covered with what looked like a dark shadow. Dante picked up a piece of the substance on the tip of his finger. ‘Lampoil,’ he said to the Bargello, who had joined him.
    ‘Clear as day,’ the man exclaimed, sniffing a piece of glass. ‘Our friend set light to the oil to start the fire. But he must have miscalculated. Something went wrong and he fell victim to his own plan. The justice of God has many eyes – it comes when we think it furthest off.’
    The poet leaned over the body again, staring at the sharp features of the face, which seemed to have preserved a terrible expression of wonder in the dark cavities left empty by the melting of the eyeballs. Then he turned the body over and went on examining it.
    ‘I’m sure it happened as I told you, Prior,’ exclaimed the chief of the guards, in a loud voice so that his men could hear.
    Dante pointed his index finger against Rigo’s back, at a level with the heart, showing the Bargello something. Two deep parallel cuts in the burnt jerkin. He drew the dagger from the inside pocket of his habit and delicately inserted the blade into one of the two cuts. The steel entered without encountering any resistance in the lacerated tissue.
    Still in silence, he tested the other wound as well, with identical results. Then he turned to stare disdainfully at the Bargello. ‘So he was caught up in the torment of the flames, and out of remorse for the crime he had committed he stabbed himself in the back?’
    The Bargello didn’t say a word.
    ‘Or,’ Dante continued implacably, ‘have you noticed anything else?’
    He stretched his arm out towards the dead man, pointing to something close to the body. The remains of some large sheets of parchment, completely consumed by the flames. Whatever had been written on