The Scaffold Above the Abyss

The eastern rose window took them twenty-one days.

Brianda drew the full-size cartoon on the floor of the hall in vine charcoal: a boreal sun rising between three peaks, thirteen hundred pieces, each one numbered. Bruno forged the iron frame and the reinforcing bars. The apprentices blew sheet after sheet of the ugly pale blue, and Brianda used it for the sky, where the paleness looked like a winter morning instead of a mistake. The good cobalt, the little that was left, she kept whole for the center of the sun.

Ciro didn't appear on any of those twenty-one days. Bruno kept his ration at the forge just in case. Every night he threw it to the dogs.

On the day they raised it, a wind was blowing from the crests. They had built a scaffold of larch and tarred hemp hung from the wall, two hundred varas above the gorge of the Arlanza, in front of the empty opening. Six men hauled the panel up with a block and tackle, and when it was resting on the planks, the six went down and only Bruno and Brianda stayed up there, each with a rope tied around the waist and fastened to an iron ring set in the masonry.

"Hold the left upright," said Bruno. "As soon as I get the cotter into the bracket, the frame will hold on its own."

"Why did you take me in?" she asked suddenly, her cheek pressed to the cold lead. "In the stable. You could have called the guard."

Bruno went on feeling for the hole in the bracket with the cotter.

"Because out of a thousand pieces you chose the best," he said. "And because your fingers were bleeding from gripping it, and you wouldn't let go. I know few people who don't let go."

Brianda set both gloved hands on the lead rim. Below, the river was a silver thread among crags the size of pinheads. She didn't look down. She looked at Bruno's back, at the arms holding the whole sun against the wind.

The gust came without warning, a swipe that raked the facade from top to bottom. One of the scaffold guys snapped with a crack of hemp and the platform tilted toward the void. Boxes of nails, buckets of putty, Bruno's hammer: everything went flying toward the river.

Brianda slipped on the wet wood. One boot went, then the other, and she was left hanging off the scaffold, held by the rope at her waist and by Bruno's left hand, which closed on her wrist like a pair of tongs.

With his right hand Bruno held the rose window. The frame had come loose from the bracket and was leaning outward, toward the void, with thirteen hundred pieces of glass and twenty-one days inside it.

"Don't let go of the sun!" she shouted, swinging over the gorge. "Bruno, the sun!"

Bruno looked at her. He looked at the rose window. He knew exactly what was inside it: the cobalt from his grandfather's chapel, the ugly blue of the furnace nights, the lead he had poured without stopping to think.

He let go of the sun.

He watched it tilt, slowly, like a falling tree. The wind turned it once in the air, and for an instant the afternoon light passed right through it and threw a circle of colors onto the wall. Then it fell. They never heard it hit the rocks; the gorge was too deep.

Bruno already had both hands on Brianda's arm. He dug his heels into the batten and pulled until he had her on the planks again, crushed against his chest, both of them shaking, the scaffold creaking beneath them like an old ship.

"Twenty-one days," she said against his neck, unable to stop shaking. "You're an idiot."

"Days can be done again."

She lifted her face. In his eyes there was none of what she expected to see in a man who had just thrown three weeks of work into the river; only an enormous fear, not yet spent. She laid her hand on his scarred cheek and kissed him, there, hanging over the void, with the wind carrying off what was left of the afternoon.

When they finally came down, there were people in the courtyard. The six men from the tackle, the apprentices, a dozen neighbors who had watched the rose window fall from the walls. No one said anything.

At the back, leaning on the well curb, was Ciro. He had seen it all. He looked at Bruno, who still hadn't let go of Brianda's hand, and then looked toward the gorge, toward the place where the sun had fallen. He turned and left without a word.

Brianda tried to pull her hand out of Bruno's, out of shame or habit, and he wouldn't let her. They stood like that, in front of everyone, with dried putty on their sleeves and the wind still tousling their hair.