‘Perhaps you should have offered more money, Master,’ Luca says, sensing Bruno’s anger.
‘More money? For this stuff? It would still be extortion if it was half the price.’
‘I didn’t mean the wine-seller, Master. I meant Signor Santucci. You should have upped the offer. It is the doge’s scudi anyway – His Serene Highness can afford it.’
Bruno grunts contemptuously as he refills the glasses. He sticks his little black-hosed legs out onto the cobbles. ‘Who needs a creep like Santucci anyway? Master of the Spheres! Pompous Florentine ass, more like it. Santucci isn’t even master of his own sphincter. I told him so to his face.’
‘Maybe that’s why he won’t play,’ Alonso suggests.
‘I only told him that after he’d turned me down. I’m not stupid, Alonso.’ Bruno sips at his Artimino. He runs a hand through his black ringlets. He scowls, which on such a small face gives him the looks of a slapped child. ‘All this way, and he turns me down just so that his master, the fucking Grand Duke of fucking Tuscany – Ferdinando de’ fucking Medici – can thumb his nose at Venice!’ He spits onto the cobbles in disgust. ‘They hate us. A pox on them all!’
Alonso looks horrified. ‘Hush, Master. Keep your voice down. You’ll get us a hard floor in the Bargello – or worse. A brand on my forehead is not the sort of souvenir I’d planned on taking home from Florence, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘I still don’t understand what’s so important about this great sphere of his, anyway,’ says Luca.
Bruno favours his servants with a condescending smile. ‘It’s a wondrous engine of science. The cosmos, laid out in brass and gold leaf. You have to hand it to Santucci: it’s more than clever. I’d wager even the great Leonardo would have struggled to contrive such a thing. More important, it was going to open the door to the doge’s treasury and a hefty commission!’
‘Yes, but what does it do?’ Luca asks. ‘I still don’t understand.’
‘That’s because you Veronese have dust for brains.’
‘Alright, Master – explain it in terms that a Veronese dust-forbrains can understand.’
‘Well, I’m not versed in natural philosophy,’ Bruno begins, ‘so I cannot rightly explain how he’s done it, but somehow Santucci has contrived to construct a moving model of the cosmos – one that enables a man to see where the heavenly bodies will lie at any given hour of any day. It’s twice the height of a man and, when you look at it turning, you see what God sees when he looks down from heaven. At least, that’s what Santucci claims.’
‘Trust a Florentine to think he has the same viewpoint as God,’ says Alonso, belching a mist of wine into the air.
‘But what use is it?’ asks Luca.
‘It can tell you things before they happen.’
‘What, like if Alonso gets drunk, they’ll ban him from Signora Volante’s whorehouse? Who needs a giant golden sphere to tell you that?’
‘It’s the new science, Luca,’ Bruno says airily. ‘I wouldn’t expect a pair of numbskulls like you two to understand.’
‘You don’t really know what it does any more than we do,’ Alonso says under his breath.
Bruno puffs up his little chest in indignation. ‘It’s the latest thing in astronomical calculation – an engine that can see into the future,’ he says laboriously, as though reading a set of instructions. ‘It can tell you where the stars and the moon and the planets will be on any given night or day, in any given latitude. It can tell a mariner where the north star will be; allow the astrologer to cast more accurate charts so that he can advise his prince when to start a war, or when to sire an heir. That’s what Santucci says. For all I care, it can predict the Day of Judgement. What sticks in my gut is that the Doge of Venice was going to shower us in ducats to build him one of his own.’
‘This engine – can it predict when you’re going to pay us, Master?’ Luca says with an air of fragile innocence.
Bruno nails his servant to his stool with the eyes of death. ‘Only after it tells me when you two are finally going to get off your lazy backsides and clean my trunk-hose and polish my boots like proper servants.’
Alonso frowns. ‘But that’s blasphemy.’
‘What? You doing an hour’s honest work? I should say so.’
‘I mean, putting yourself in God’s place, Master.’
Bruno licks the wine off his lips. ‘Maybe. But Antonio Santucci doesn’t mind making these engines for the King of Spain and these Medici bastards. But Venice… Where Venice is concerned, apparently the Master of the Spheres is not for sale.’
‘Must be the only Florentine who isn’t,’ Luca growls softly.
The little Paduan cockerel slowly lowers his cup. He leans forward towards Luca. ‘Say that again.’
For a moment, Luca thinks he might have overstepped the mark. Bruno Barrani is a small enough cockerel, but he can deliver a mighty peck when he’s roused. ‘I meant that Santucci must be the only Florentine you can’t buy – that’s all, Master.’
Bruno jumps from his stool, sending his glass tottering across the table. ‘Luca,’ he says, ‘if you weren’t so pig-ugly, I’d kiss you!’
‘Why, what have I said?’
Bruno reaches forward and waggles the lobe of Luca’s left ear. ‘When I said “The Master of the Spheres is not for sale”, you answered, “Must be the only Florentine who isn’t”.’
‘So, Master?’
“Well, Santucci didn’t make that thing on his own, did he?’
‘I don’t know, Master. I didn’t see it, did I?’
‘Take it from me, he had help: carpenters, clocksmiths, any number of artisans. They must have drawings, plans… And just as you said, friend Luca, they can be bought.’
Luca puts out his cup for a refill – the way only a servant who knows all of his master’s foibles and indiscretions may do. ‘You mean you intend to make one of these things yourself, Master? Saving your pardon, you can’t even fit a door hinge straight.’
Bruno seems quite untroubled by this insult. He sits down again, without his eyes ever leaving Luca’s. ‘Florence isn’t the only place with its own tame genius, my lad,’ he says knowingly.
‘Do you have someone in mind, Master?’ Alonso asks.
‘As a matter of fact, I do.’
‘Who?’ Luca demands to know, leaning inwards as he catches a sniff of conspiracy.
‘I was thinking of the new professor of mathematics at Padua University. He’d be the very man to oversee the project.’
‘How can you be sure he’ll do it?’ Luca enquires.
‘Because we’re friends, and I happen to know he gets paid half of what the other professors get paid, on account of the Palazzo Bo esteeming mathematicians well below physicians and lawyers, and only just above the night-shit removers. I also happen to know he’s in need of coin. If we can get a plan and show it to him, and he agrees, then the professor gets to pay off his debts, His Serene Highness gets his toy, we get our commission and Master of the Spheres Santucci gets a length of good Venetian sopressa up his backside.’
Luca and Alonso digest this in much the same way they digest any other of their master’s get-rich-quick plans.
‘But if the mathematician isn’t to eat up most of the profit, what exactly do you intend to offer him?’ Luca asks.
Bruno grins. ‘I’d have thought that was obvious. You know how jealous those professors are of their reputation. My good friend Signor Galileo Galilei will get to have his name lauded down the ages as the man who built the doge’s great golden sphere.’