The Master of Verona

Pietro was pleased to know something his companion did not. "That's Uguccione della Faggiuola, my father's current patron. He brought us here to renew father's introduction to the Scaliger — though I think he wants to use us to impress Cangrande. He needs an ally in the north."

Looking wise, Mariotto nodded. "Ah."

"He also bought me my old hat."

Mariotto grinned. Uguccione looked up and gave Dante's son a cheerful nod. Pietro was in the midst of waving back when a prickling sensation crept up his spine. Eyes traveling a few feet beyond the Pisan lord, he saw his father's gaze fixed upon him. A muscle below the poet's left eye twitched as his eyes flickered up a fraction to take in the new hat. Pietro felt his blood drain to his knees.

Dante and Cangrande were debating with a young abbot, a bishop whose aged gonella swept the floor, and a midget with a wide nose and dark skin. This last was dressed extravagantly, with bells on his cuffs in an outlandish parody of style. Moving closer, Pietro strained to filter out the overlapping conversations along the loggia to hear the discussion.

The elder clergyman was saying, "…Clement is dead. The Church should move to reclaim the papacy from Philip!"

"What does the nationality of your pope matter?" asked the garish midget in an innocuous tone.

Pietro's father and the bishop both responded with varying degrees of heat. Their sentiment was the same, but Dante expressed it better. "My dear misguided juggler — through converting the noble pagans of ancient Roma to Christianity, God chose Italy to be the seat right royal of his faith. Rome is the true home of the papacy, and the office belongs to an Italian! You are a Jew. Compare the exile of the papacy in France to the Babylonian Captivity, and you will perhaps grasp the significance."

"Or the captivity of the Jews in Rome after the destruction of the Temple?" asked the motley fool wryly. "Besides, Italy is a myth! An intellectual's conceit. A philospoher's fancy. Or a poet's."

"A dream of truth is no fancy, fool."

"Yet the last Italian pope was no friend to you, poet."

"True, fool, but a French pope is friend to no one."

Mariotto tugged Pietro's sleeve and together they drifted towards the raucous sounds of those nearer their own age. The bridegroom was at their center, answering war questions put to him by a large, well-muscled fellow with a thatch of unruly sand-coloured hair. Cecchino related the events of the fall campaign, and the failed attack on Padua. But the majority of the groom's friends were only interested in plying him with liquid courage and eliciting love poetry from him. "Ah, Constanza!" sighed Cecchino, earning a chorus of catcalls. Pietro and Mariotto joined in.

"I should be so lucky," groused a man in his twenties, muscular and broad-shouldered, handsomely bearded. Absentmindedly tricking with a scrap of rope, he smiled even as he complained, "I'll never get married!"

The groom cried, "Of course you won't, Bonaventura! You've managed to get on the wrong side of every father in Verona!"

"I know it!" growled the grouser, hunching forward, the rope suddenly lifeless.

Someone else joined in. "Ever since your father — God rest his blessed soul — kicked off, you've been on a rampage! Wine, women, and song!

"Not too many songs, I think," said Cecchino. "Mainly wine and women."

"Don't forget his hundred falcons!"

The fellow called Bonaventura groaned. "If I don't marry soon, I won't have any money left!"

Cecchino shrugged. "Well, you better start looking outside Verona's walls."

"There's a world outside Verona's walls?"

"You best hope so. If not, you'll die a bachelor." The groom's eyes were taking on the sly look drunks get. "Maybe we'll win this war with Padua soon. Then you can go there and steal a wealthy Paduan heiress."

The rope began to dance again as Bonaventura grew thoughtful. "A Paduan heiress…"

"Oh, yeah, the women there have the biggest…" Cecchino sighed. "But I'm married now! Ah, Costanza!" The jeers began anew.

A hand descended on Mariotto's shoulder. "Son. A moment." Pietro looked over to see a man with Mariotto's good looks, weathered and grown more patrician and grave. It was a proud face, and a handsome one, but sad.

Drawing his son aside, Lord Montecchio spoke softly to Mariotto in a manner that young Alaghieri knew all too well. Pietro decided perhaps he ought to join his father's conversation. Just to be safe.

As he shuffled back through the circle of adults he could hear the abbot speaking vehemently. They had evidently abandoned the topic of the papacy, for the object of the abbot's ire was now Dante himself.

"There cannot be more than one Heaven! Even the pagan heretic Aristotle affirms that this cannot be so. The very first lines of his ninth chapter on the heavens states it irrefutably."