Chapter 6: The Sum of All Parts

The fortnight passed as such labors do—swiftly for the mind, slowly for the spirit. Aldric of the Vosges had constructed water clocks before, and astrolabes, and once a curious device of gears that predicted eclipses well enough to frighten a bishop. But this machine was different. It was vast. It was hungry. It demanded numbers the way a wolf demands flesh.

The hall they gave him stank of tallow and iron filings. He had requisitioned—or rather, had requisitioned for him by Gerold, who grumbled at every errand—a dozen wax tablets, three reams of vellum, and the services of two young monks from the palace scriptorium who could add columns of figures faster than he could drink a cup of wine. They were named, he believed, Bertram and Odo, though he had already forgotten which was which. They looked at him with the terrified reverence of men who believed genius was a kind of holiness.

It was not. It was a kind of torment.

On the fifth day, the machine began to take shape. A series of interlocking bronze wheels, each etched with numerals, arranged in tiers upon a frame of oak. Turn the crank, and the wheels engaged in sequence, carrying sums from one column to the next. Aldric had seen the principle in an old Greek manuscript, buried in the palace library beneath a layer of dust thick enough to plant turnips. He had refined it, expanded it, and made it speak the language of the treasury.

“My lord,” said Bertram—or Odo—one morning, “the Emperor’s scribes wish to know when they may begin training upon the device.”

Aldric looked up from a wax tablet covered in cramped notation. His eyes ached. His back ached. His soul, which had once been content to dream of trellises and grape clusters, ached with the particular dullness of a man who had not slept properly in a week.

“Tell them,” he said, “that they may train upon it when the snows melt in July.”

The monk blinked. “My lord?”

“That was a jest,” Aldric said, rubbing his temples. “Tell them I shall have a full accounting of its functions by the end of the week. And tell them, if they value their fingers, not to force the crank when it resists. The wheels are delicate. The mechanism is precise. And I will not have my work broken by the clumsy enthusiasm of men who cannot count past their own fingers.”

The monk bowed and scurried away.

Gerold, who had been leaning against the wall in his customary posture of baffled vigilance, spoke. “You speak of it as though it were a living thing.”

Aldric turned to him. The Saxon’s scarred face was half-lit by the guttering candle, and there was something almost amused in his one good eye.

“Everything that thinks is a living thing,” Aldric said. “This machine thinks. It thinks in numbers, which is the only honest language there is. Men lie. Words lie. But a column of figures, properly reckoned, tells the truth whether you wish it or not.”

Gerold considered this. “And that is why you built it?”

“I built it because the Emperor demanded it,” Aldric said. “If he had demanded a poem, I should have written him a poem. If he had demanded a tapestry, I should have woven him a tapestry—poorly, and with much complaint. But he demanded arithmetic, and arithmetic I shall give him.”

He stood, stretching his stiff limbs. The morning light was filtering through the high windows, and he could hear the distant sounds of the palace waking: the clatter of pots in the kitchens, the bark of a dog, the shout of a groom. Life continuing, indifferent to his misery.

“But there is something else,” he said, more quietly.

Gerold straightened. “My lord?”

“The letter Alcuin mentioned. To the Pope. I have been thinking on it.”

“And what have you thought?”

Aldric moved to the window, looking out over the rooftops of Aachen. The city was still growing, still being built, still being shaped by the will of a man who had never once in his life been satisfied with what lay before him. Charlemagne had torn down a Roman bathhouse to build a chapel. He had drained a swamp to build a palace. He had conquered a people to build a peace.

And now he wanted a crown.

“I have thought,” Aldric said, “that the Emperor does nothing without purpose. He does not write to the Pope for the sake of pleasant correspondence. He does not discuss crowns unless he intends to wear one. And if he intends to wear one, he will need more than the acclamation of his nobles. He will need the sanction of the Church. And the Church will need a reason.”

Gerold frowned. “Is not the Emperor’s power reason enough?”

“Power is a reason for fear,” Aldric said. “Not for blessing. The Pope will wish to crown a man who appears to deserve it. A man who has defended Christendom, expanded its borders, and brought light to the heathen. A man, in short, whose reputation has been carefully polished until it gleams.”

He turned from the window. “And who do you think has been tasked with the polishing?”

Gerold’s face went blank. “You?”

“Me,” Aldric said, with a bitter smile. “The Emperor does not merely want my machine, Gerold. He wants my mind. He wants me to calculate the sum of his glory. He wants me to make the numbers come out in his favor.”

The Saxon shifted his weight, uncomfortable. “That is a great honor.”

“It is a great trap,” Aldric said. “And I have walked into it with my eyes open, as I always do, because the alternative was to refuse him to his face, and I am not yet so desperate for obscurity that I wish to die for it.”

He sighed. “But I have a plan.”

Gerold’s eye narrowed. “You always have a plan, my lord.”

“Yes, and this one is a good one. The best I have yet devised.” Aldric lowered his voice, though the monks were at the far end of the hall. “The Pope is an old man. He is surrounded by advisors, many of whom have their own ambitions. If I can plant a seed of doubt in one of those advisors—a suggestion that the Emperor’s coronation might be a burden, a weight upon the Holy See rather than a blessing—then the Pope may hesitate. And if the Pope hesitates, the coronation may be delayed. And if it is delayed, Charlemagne’s attention will turn elsewhere. And I, at last, shall be forgotten.”

Gerold stared at him. “You intend to sabotage the Emperor’s coronation?”

“I intend to nudge it,” Aldric said. “Gently. Like a cart that has veered from the road. A small correction, and the whole journey changes course.”

“And if it does not?”

Aldric met his gaze. “Then I shall be in Rome, beside the Emperor, when he receives his crown. And I shall have built him a machine that will count the taxes of an empire. And I shall be exactly where I do not wish to be, doing exactly what I do not wish to do, for the rest of my life.”

He turned back to the window. Below, in the courtyard, a figure in a veil of fine linen was crossing toward the chapel. He recognized the gait before he recognized the face, and his heart, against all reason, gave a small, treacherous leap.

Hildegard of Metz. She had come to Aachen.

And Aldric knew, with a certainty that chilled him more than any prophecy, that his plan had already begun to unravel.