The Empire of Glass - Andy Lane [10]
but he always returned to her. Eventually.
He spat on the tavern's sawdust-covered floor and wiped his sleeve across his mouth. Enough of this puerile thinking. He had a problem to solve. That bizarre apparition that he had seen through his spyglass still occupied his thoughts, crowding out all rational argument with its incontrovertible presence. He could formulate no theory to account for it. It had a man-made look, and it had moved in an unnaturally direct manner, like a cart on a road, but he had never before seen or heard about phenomena that travelled between the Moon and the Earth. And it had made that journey: he had observed its progress, swivelling his spyglass to track it as it moved and grew larger in his sight, until he lost it somewhere over the rooftops of Venice. It seemed to him that it had come to rest somewhere in the Adriatic, just off the Lido. Was it a delusion of celestial vapours, like the one Johannes Kepler had written to warn him of five years before, or was it some messenger of God - an Angel sent to walk the Earth?
He took another mouthful of wine and swallowed it before the taste could make him retch. Natural science was full of such puzzles, and God had set him the task of unravelling them. It was his curse and misfortune to be the greatest genius in Europe, if not the world.
As he was about to set his flagon down, a passing figure jogged his elbow. The base of the flagon hit the edge of the bench, spilling most of its contents in a crimson tide over the sawdust-strewn boards. To tell the truth, he wasn't sorry to see it go, but the figure looming over him said, in English-accented Italian, "My pardon, good sir. Please allow a clumsy foreigner to refill your flagon."
Before Galileo could argue, the man had gone. He watched the man shoulder his way through the crowd. Fine clothes, if old - a lace-collared shirt beneath a scuffed leather jerkin. An English noble, down on his luck perhaps? There were a thousand stories in the city. Nobody came to Venice without the baggage of their past.
As his thoughts drifted, he became aware that there were a lot of foreign voices in the Tavern of St Theodore and of the Crocodile that night. Most of them seemed to be speaking English. Venice attracted visitors from East and West, of course, but, as he thought about it, it seemed to him that there had been more Englishmen than usual since his arrival. Perhaps it had something to do with the accession of the Scottish King, James, to the English throne.
The crowd parted again as the Englishman returned, and Galileo was struck both by the width of his shoulders and the way he moved, cat-like and sure-footed, through the thronging mass. They seemed to part for him, as a shoal of fish would part for a shark, then seal up again behind him. "Your drink, kind sir," the man said, placing a fresh flagon before Galileo. "And my renewed apologies."
Galileo stared up into his weatherbeaten face and his grey eyes, the same shade as his profusion of prematurely grey hair, and felt a chill of unease. A scar ran from the man's forehead across one eye and down his cheek, like a fissure in baked earth.
"My thanks," he said gruffly, but the man had gone, pushing past a group of young noblemen who were clad in silks and satins. The noblemen, disturbed and angered at his careless effrontery, gazed after him, then turned their attention to Galileo.
Galileo was about to take a swig of wine, hoping that it was of better quality than the last lot, when a voice said, "By my lights, it is the Florentine Galileo Galilei, is it not?