There were almost no commonalities between Ariadne De Mare and Vincenzio Del Gato, the Porto merchant currently conducting the auction, yet both were harboring the exact same thought.
‘Count Cesare, you madman!’
‘That insane bastard!’
The Porto merchant stiffened, his face reddening as he bellowed at Cesare.
“Why on earth would you say such an absurd thing!”
“Well, how would I know? The young lady who said it would likely know.”
Cesare continued, nonchalantly examining his well-manicured fingernails.
“Perhaps it’s a forgery?”
The hall erupted, as chaotic as if a bomb had been dropped.
– “A forgery? Did I hear that correctly?”
– “The Goddess of Victory is fake?”
– “Is it real?”
Every gaze in the hall shifted toward Cesare and Ariadne, who sat beside him. Ariadne wished she could press a cold towel to her head and simply collapse.
Cesare had been like this throughout their fourteen-year engagement—or perhaps it should be called a common-law marriage. He would occasionally trigger unimaginable disasters and then smoothly shift the blame onto her. Back then, bound by the title of his fiancée, she had silently scrubbed away the filth he left behind, but she couldn’t fathom why she was still doing so now.
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
Ariadne shook her head, trying to distance herself from the spotlight. Just as she prepared to protest that a young noblewoman who hadn’t even had her debutante ball couldn’t possibly possess such knowledge, Cesare told a blatant lie.
“The lady just said it. That it’s a forgery.”
“I said no such thing!”
Ariadne desperately protested, her eyes locked onto his. She wanted to demand an immediate retraction, to declare that she had nothing to do with this, but the message was stalled by the silent, vicious profanities she was hurling his way.
“Yes, you! If you’ve spat out such words, you must take responsibility for them!”
The Porto merchant, wheezing with rage, leaped off the podium as if to grab Ariadne by the collar.
Ariadne quickly calculated her options. Could she burst into tears, scream that the adults were behaving like children, and insist she was too young to understand such things? It might have worked.
Just then, she caught Prince Alfonso watching her from the front row, his expression one of pure shock.
‘…If I just leave this mess behind, Alfonso will be stuck with that troublesome statue, won’t he?’
Unfortunately, the winning bidder wasn’t Count Marcello; it was Prince Alfonso.
‘Was it 2,000 ducats?’
It was a significant sum, though not insurmountable for a prince. He wouldn’t be left destitute, nor would the Prince’s Palace go bankrupt. He would merely have to curb his spending on grand events and delay renovations for a few years. Eventually, the King or Queen would surely bridge the gap.
But if that happened, Prince Alfonso would lose the support of the people. The throne, which should have been rightfully his—though she still didn’t know where the timeline had splintered—would inch closer to the madman sitting beside her. She couldn’t let that happen.
Beyond the crown, she simply didn’t want to watch Alfonso become a laughingstock. For his sake, Ariadne decided to clean up Cesare’s mess one final time.
“Huu.”
She let out a long breath, smoothed her dress, and straightened her spine. Having steeled herself, Ariadne stared the merchant down and spoke with a voice that rang clearly through the hall.
“Vincenzio Del Gato of Porto. Are you not a merchant with deep experience in fine art auctions?”
Her resonant, deep voice filled the hall, drawing the audience’s rapt attention. Ariadne stepped onto a wooden footstool placed on the floor to ensure she was visible to everyone. It was about a single step high. Having gained a little over half a piedi (approximately 25 centimeters) in height, she was now positioned to look down upon the people gathered in the flat hall.
“In your view, does this statue truly seem to be the mentioned in Halicardotus’s ?”
“I brought it because it is, you ignorant young lady!”
The merchant, caught in his own agitation, seemed to have discarded all decorum and honorifics. Ariadne ignored his outburst and continued.
“Halicardotus lamented in that, ‘Her delicate wings were already damaged and restored due to a one-time destruction caused by the Moor army that swept through the temple during the Celesphon war…’ Is that correct?”
was a standard textbook used for teaching boys Greek. Several noblemen in the crowd had even memorized the passage.
“Yes, there is such a passage.”
“Isn’t it the passage that says it was damaged and restored?”
The Porto merchant raised his voice convulsively.
“What’s wrong with it being restored! Sculptures are meant to be broken and put back together! If it was damaged long ago and restored during the Hellenia era itself, its value as a fine art piece shouldn’t be diluted at all!”
The actual remainder of the passage read: “The restoration was impossible. The had no wings, no head, and no arms.” However, that portion of the text had not yet been revealed to the world. She had to manage the situation using the remaining circumstantial evidence.
“Do you know the proverb that says even if you glue a broken bowl back together, it remains a broken bowl?”
Ariadne stared directly at the Porto merchant, then reached out toward Cesare, who was standing idly by her side. Cesare opened his hands, questioning her intent, before pointing with his finger to the long sword at his waist.
‘The sword, perhaps?’
Ariadne glanced at his side and frowned.
‘The club. You carry a club.’
Cesare looked surprised, as if wondering how she had known, yet he unhooked the iron club he kept tucked behind his long sword and handed it to her.
Clutching the club, Ariadne stepped away from the guests’ seats and climbed onto the podium set up at the front, where the was displayed. The platform was raised about 2 piedi (roughly 1 meter) from the ground, ensuring her figure was perfectly silhouetted against the audience.
The Porto merchant continued to shout.
“If the broken wings were restored, there would be tiny cracks. But does that ruin the value of a statue? Is a statue a bowl? Are you going to pour water into it? What’s wrong with a few cracks!”
“If a broken bowl is dropped, it will likely shatter again in the same spot, won’t it?”
“How are a bowl and a statue the same?! A decorative statue isn’t a bowl used every day. There’s no reason to pour water into it, and no weight is being applied, so what’s the big deal about some cracks in the wings! It was all made in the Hellenia era! It’s the same thing!”
Ariadne, no longer sparing a glance for the fuming merchant, strode toward the , which rested on a wheeled pedestal.
The statue was extremely heavy; to facilitate transport, the wheels of the base had been made unusually large. The diameter of each wheel appeared to be at least half a piedi (about 20 centimeters).
She took a sharp breath, assessed the base with a keen eye, and raised the iron club high. She targeted the front wheel, the one closest to the audience.
Crack!
With all her weight behind it, she struck.
1.
The club hit the wheel squarely. Though Ariadne De Mare’s strength was not enough to shatter the iron joint connecting the stand to the wheel, the wooden wheel itself cracked magnificently into three pieces.
As the wheel splintered, the stand tilted, and the giant statue, losing its center of gravity, began to topple forward slowly.
“What on earth are you doing?!”
The Porto merchant let out a scream of horror a beat too late, and the invited guests below the platform shrieked at the sight of the falling statue.
— “Get out of the way!”
— “It’s tipping over!”
Although there was a set safety distance between the dais where the Goddess Of Victory stood and the seating area, the guests panicked, rising from their chairs and scrambling backward in a frenzy.
The Porto merchant clutched his hair and continued to shriek from behind, but strangely, he made no attempt to take any measures to catch the collapsing Goddess Of Victory.
— Creak, creak, creak, creak… Thud!
The sound of the remaining three wheels grinding against the floor—failing to roll properly due to the misaligned direction and the skewed angles—filled the hall with the screeching friction of marble against wood. As the incline grew sharp, the marble statue slid off the stage and plummeted toward the ground floor where the guests were seated.
The wheel Ariadne had destroyed was the left one. The Goddess Of Victory fell diagonally, lead by its left corner, and slammed its left wing squarely into the smooth, sturdy oak floor of the House Of Marquis Cibo.
The statue crashed, and silence descended upon the room. The Goddess Of Victory, which had smashed the oak floorboards into splinters, remained entirely in one piece without a single crack.
“Are you certain this statue really has hairline fractures?”
She added, her tone deceptively kind, just in case the people had missed her point.
“If it had hairline fractures, the wings should have shattered upon impact, but this statue is as smooth as if it were newly crafted.”
Ariadne hopped off the platform before the shocked crowd and walked to the side of the fallen Goddess Of Victory. She stroked the pink marble.
“If it isn’t something newly made, someone must have done an incredibly good job restoring it, or it must have been preserved very, very well underground. But tell me, do you all know the two biggest differences between sculptures from the Hellenian era and the marble sculptures of our time?”
She traced the marble with her finger. Everyone gathered in the hall was watching her, breathless.
“The pagans of antiquity painted their marble statues. They used pigments to make the skin apricot-colored, the hair brown, and the clothes colored according to the subject’s status. The better preserved a statue is from the Hellenian era, the more residue of dye it bears. Any seasoned dealer in antiquities knows this.”
Her finger came away clean.
“This statue is remarkably clean.”
“And yet, isn’t this statue a truly beautiful pink? If the marble were naturally this rosy pink, there would have been no need to paint the skin separately. Isn’t that right, Marchioness Cibo?”
Ariadne turned to the Marchioness Cibo, who stood nearest to her. Startled, the Marchioness nodded in automatic agreement.
“I—I suppose so?”
“Then why would the ancient Hellenians bother to paint their marble?”
“I… I wouldn’t know.”
Ariadne released the Marchioness Cibo, who seemed overwhelmed by the sudden public attention, and turned back to the statue.
“Because the people of the Hellenian era lived at the eastern tip of the Central Continent, and the marble found there wasn’t pink, but a dull, grayish-brown. Pink marble is a specialty found only in northern Etruscan, and specifically in Lastera—the very city where this statue was supposedly excavated!”
Ariadne stood tall beside the giant statue, her gaze sweeping over the crowd.
“How on earth could a statue that was perfectly fine in Tibos, at the eastern tip of the Central Continent, be discovered in Lastera—a remote, rural corner known for nothing but quarries? It wasn’t the Moor Empire, where it would have been taken as plunder, nor San Carlo, where it would have surfaced on the black market if stolen!”
She slammed the club she was still holding against the fallen —or rather, the imitation of the .
“Do you still have something to say, Vincenzio Del Gato?”
“I have one more thing to ask him.”
A male voice, rich and resonant, cut through the room Ariadne had commanded. It was Count Cesare De Como, who had been sitting among the guests, watching Ariadne’s one-woman show with leisurely interest.
“Is your name truly ‘Vincenzio Del Gato’?”