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Prologue
The manuscript is missing pages.
That is the first thing anyone learns about it, and almost the only thing no one disputes. The numbering jumps. There are leaves that once had a partner and no longer do. At some point in six hundred years, someone removed a few of them and left no record of why, or when, or what they were.
Everything else is disputed.
It has been called a lost language, a cipher, a joke, a Renaissance forgery, the work of a sick man and the diary of an extraterrestrial. Serious people have said so, and people who were not, and by now the list of those who have tried is longer, and better documented, than the book itself. Cryptographers who had broken the ciphers of entire empires. Philologists with careers behind them. Now, machines. Not one of them has got a sentence out of it.
It is usually told as a string of failures, and I understand why: six hundred years of clever people running up against the same thing make a comfortable story, almost a reassuring one.
What I am going to tell is the other way of telling it.
· · ·
I came to this through a man who came to it on his own, my father, and who wrote down almost nothing of what he found out. What was left of him was two boxes and a word he used without being able to justify it. That is what I have worked with.
It has taken me longer than is reasonable to put the material in order. Part of the time went into understanding that what I had in front of me was not a puzzle with a solution but an object with instructions for use; the rest, into accepting that the instructions were not meant for me.
· · ·
This book does not explain the manuscript. It tells what happened around it: who made it, under what conditions, against whom, and what went on happening to it afterwards at the hands of everyone who wanted to have it.
There are papers on almost all of that. On her, none.
I begin where I began, which is not the beginning of the story but the only point through which it was possible to get in.
Chapter one opens in Alicante at twelve minutes past four on a Monday morning in January 2026, and goes on to Petriolo in May 1419.