And when he sees the child next, for a set of scans, she welcomes him with a smile that would be shy if it weren't visibly shaken. He thinks: The pain. It's starting. It will wring her until she cries out to be killed.
But it is not the pain. Not yet. Something else drives her brown-petal face ashen. "Dr. Kraft," she tells him excitedly, swallowing the consonants in a ghostly holdover of lost Asian highlights. Ghostly for them both. "I have seen him. He's here, right here on my floor. The boy. The boy who never grew up!"
(A softbound text works its way to the top of the To Do stack. Its ocher cover mirrors a map maker's fantasy: the Land of Faith, the Land of Infidels, the Promised Land, all bound by the Unknown Ocean, crossed bravely by two intrepid small craft and a spouting sea monster. An ink noose tightens around the book's title, The World Awakens, Part III. The loop fills with snorer's zzz's. The spine is split and a sewn signature of pages slips loose.)
… occupational rescue work in a dark time — the stopgaps that a people summon at the moment of collapse — would make a profitable study. The psychology of decline, the realization that progress has reversed and that history is entering upon a long, perhaps terminal decay, must be one of the most revealing of civilization's convictions. But such speculation lies beyond the scope of this endeavor…
… a narrow span of nine years in the Europe of the early sixteenth century. Few periods have been more ambivalently explosive than the years 1527 to 1535. The dissemination of printed matter through movable type, rapid expansion of trade, advances in medicine led by Paracelsus's epochal surgical manual, a density of artistic genius such as the world never again produced, and the daily exodus of ships embarking westward on a salubrious footrace of nations were cause for the highest optimism.
Yet the underside of the era's developments more than kept pace. The scale of political intrigue and social dislocation stripped conviction from even the age's most gifted. Signs and portents — the comet of 1531, the Gnostic calculations pointing to the fifteenth centennial of the Savior's death, Columbus's prophetic fulfillment in gathering together the globe's scattered races (a collision from which the world has yet to recover) — become the basis for a more substantive chiliasm. The renewed Turkish incursions, Müntzer's Peasants' Uprising, the endless roles of famine and crop failure, returns of Plague, horrific distribution of wealth, the sundering of the sole institution that had held Europe alive for the thousand years since the collapse of the Western Empire, and Luther's new timetable for the perpetually impending Visit all attest to a climate of frightened expectation.
For one highly cultivated, multinational confederation the size of Western Europe, these years truly were the end of history. Pizarro and his two hundred soldiers sprung their ambush in Cajamarca town square, captured the Incan emperor, and slaughtered his four-thou-sand-man bodyguard. The Cuzco hegemony fell, and an empire as remarkable as any the world has seen vanished into legend.
From the home ports, a fabulous, golden land seemed to rise up from the sea in the nick of time expressly to solve intractable overpopulation, inflation, stagnation, unemployment, and restless violence. Yet the overnight infusion of new goods — tobacco, tubers, maize, gold, human lives — only increased the disruption of populations. By 1527, all Europe was crisscrossing the seas in carracks and caravels. Assembling a fleet became a nation's rite of passage, a frenzied, peripatetic hunt for commodities and resources. But by a process that has become historical law, a sudden, often inflationary increase in the material stakes brought about a proportional expansion in the risk of disastrous…
(A passage obscured here by vigorous Crayola spirals, scarlet, canary-yellow, Adriatic blue-green.)
… had angered Charles with the Cognac maneuverings. The emperor's response was to incite a force of mercenaries under Frunds-berg. We are fortunate to possess, almost intact, the diary of Michael Klotz, a Lutheran lance commander in the condottiere's band, a remarkable document providing, like Cellini's on the other side, a firsthand account of the Sack. Klotz writes of the devastation the Landsknechte cut on the way through Lombardy, where they merged with the duke of Bourbon's army for a combined drive down the Via Emilia upon the Eternal City.
Privately, Klotz favored the last-minute attempts to patch up a truce between pope and emperor. But the terms offered by Clement and accepted by Charles's agent were too niggling for the twenty thousand German and Spanish troops, stoked by promises of pillage and booty. Klotz could no more sway his own brigade than Frunds-berg or Bourbon could restrain the force as a whole. The army now advanced on the capital of Christendom with an independent will.
By April, Rome at last realized that it was the object of the march. On Easter, a crazed recluse ran through the streets, calling on the bastard children of Sodom to repent or be destroyed. Desperate defense preparations commenced, but these came too late. The pope's guard were outnumbered at least five to one. Skillful use of the walls and existing artillery managed to thin the attacking squares. Soon, however, the pope was forced back upon the Castel Sant'Angelo. Cellini tells us how he single-handedly…
(Two more pages of florid Crayola, now a jeweled, sunken garden through which float disembodied figurines, boats, fireworks, and several uppercase Hs and Os, alongside a chorus line of amorphous shepherd's crooks.)
The task of safeguarding the endless inventories of artistic splendor in the papal treasuries fell to the younger Antonio da Sangallo. Antonio, nephew of the great Sangallo architect brothers, then headed the building project whose funding schemes — excessive taxations, selling of papal indulgences, and the like — had precipitated the calamitous unraveling of the Western world…
Many of the treasury objects were melted down rather than allowed to fall into the hands of the Northern invaders. Cellini himself (who derided Antonio as a tasteless woodworker) personally destroyed unique masterworks of his own art, as well as works by his greatest contemporaries and predecessors.
But Sangallo had another plan, equally outlandish, one that meant to preserve the achievements of civilization from the storm. The shape of the secret measures emerges only from gaps in the record. The master builder worked around the clock in the confines of the Vatican, packing sandbags to fill Sixtus's private chapel, hoping to protect the Botticelli, Perugino, and Ghirlandajo frescoes from falling mortar and to absorb the bombardment's shocks to Michelangelo's already world-famous tabernacle to Creation. Antonio worked steadily and without much hope to preserve the triumphs of the imagination from reality's latest onslaught, stacking sand in the full knowledge that this was neither the first, nor the last, nor even the most senseless of polities' annihilating sieges.
Antonio's daring plan was carried out on the night of May 6, as the invaders poured through the breached walls in a turmoil of fog and artillery fire. He assembled, in the now-barricaded papal apartments, as many of the quarter's juvenile homeless as he could find. Street urchins were the ideal cover, the last bodies that a pillaging mercenary would think to shake down. On his own initiative, Sangallo doled out priceless medallions, cameos, portraits, reliquaries, vessels, precious glass, and jewelry to this band of cutthroat children, instructing them to carry the fortunes away and threatening them with God's eternal damnation if they should fail to return so little as a single piece of sacred art after the danger subsided.