The Daughter of Siena (10 page)

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Authors: Marina Fiorato

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical

BOOK: The Daughter of Siena
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Pia’s rotund father was looking straight at Faustino, his dark brows drawn together in a question, not sure where this tale tended.
‘The Hill of Bad Meals. Your family, Salva, the Tolomei, had a feast there once to reconcile with the Salimbeni. Both houses came to table but here is the meat of the matter – or rather, the lack of it.’ He laughed alone. ‘There were not thrushes enough for the company.
Capite?
Not enough birds to eat.’ The table was silent. ‘And the families quarrelled again. And your family, Salva, killed one and twenty Salimbeni and so named the hill to be known ever since as the Hill of Bad Meals.’
He paused, nodding repeatedly, weaving where he stood.
‘Now. Here we mourn the passing of my son, but we also unite our two
contrade
in marriage. Now we have a pact – our son and daughter joined in matrimony – the thrushes are plentiful, and there will be no bad blood between our two families. Welcome, all, to this strange meeting – a wake and a wedding all at once.’
He waved an expansive arm to encompass the assembled, nearly sweeping aside a candelabrum as he did so.
‘Welcome, Pia.’ He waved the other arm to his daughter-in-law. ‘I regret that you changed one son for the other.’ Riccardo held his breath and dared not look at Nello. ‘But welcome, Pia, and your father likewise. Our alliances are well, and good for this house. Welcome to the Torre too.’ Faustino’s hand descended on Riccardo’s shoulder like a blow. ‘Here. This noble fellow from the Tower
contrada
, a good man. Riccardo. A good man. Didn’t mind the hooves or the blood. Tried to save
him
.’
Riccardo felt the eyes of all upon him, but looked only at Pia. Yesterday, with her gaze trained on Vicenzo as he died, had she known then that she would be forced to change one brother for another, that her alliance would stand? Faustino broke in on Riccardo’s thoughts, bringing his fist down on the table with a crash that made the plates and glasses jump and the candle flames leap high.
‘But I won’t let him go – his death won’t be in vain. We will make our friends know us, make our enemies know us. Eagles, owls and thrushes, the whole grim order of raptors. We may hunt the little birds together. And if you are on the side of Aquila, if you are with the Eagles, there will always be thrushes enough.’
Faustino sank down heavily to an appalled silence. Riccardo could not look at Nello’s face – his father’s meaning had been abundantly clear: ‘
I regret that you changed one son for the other.
’ He looked instead at Pia and read fear in her great eyes. She had registered the slight against her husband and Riccardo felt a sick twist in his gut, an unaccustomed pang of foreboding.
So
this
was fear.
He was not afraid for himself, but for her. He glanced sideways at the grim-faced Faustino. Something had just been announced, a gauntlet had been thrown down.
Into the silence Faustino’s handclaps sounded like twin thunderbolts, as a quartet of pages advanced into the room. All were garbed in Eagle colours of yellow and black. The first pair bore a great confection from the kitchens; the second bore the Palio banner itself, folded into a neat triangle between them. The dish was set on the table to a collective intake of breath, and the flag set before Faustino with no fewer gasps. Riccardo fixed his eyes on the great platter placed directly before him – Faustino’s pastry chefs had outdone themselves. The pudding was a wondrous and terrible thing: a great white sugar horse, prancing and arching on a celestial clouds of baked meringue. And on the horse’s back Death himself rode, with his face hooded and his evil scythe curved above his head. Death’s robe was not solidly black but pied in black and white like the Balzana flag of Siena. Unsteadily, Faustino reached forward, broke the end off the scythe and offered it to Riccardo. It was licorice, a strange enough sweetmeat for a funeral, but for a wedding the portents were disastrous.
Faustino took the Palio banner from the tablecloth and waved it under Riccardo’s nose, stroking the folded fabric in his hand as if he held a hobbled dove.
‘That barren bitch sent it me,’ Faustino mumbled. ‘The duchess. Sent it to me as condolence for my son.’ He exhaled a long breath. ‘It was a noble act. ’Tis such a shame.’
Riccardo’s senses prickled. ‘A shame?’
‘By the Palio dell’Assunta she’ll be gone. She’s got till the sixteenth day of August.
Novus novem
.’
Riccardo wondered exactly how much Faustino had had to drink. Was the duchess in danger? That little Latin tag at the end – Riccardo was not much schooled but it was close enough to Tuscan to guess that it was something about ‘nine’ and ‘new’. What was happening to him? Since when did he care about the fate of others? Why had his cold heart been touched twice today, by a young woman and an older one? And yesterday too, what had made him run back, through the flying hooves, to help Vicenzo? That gesture had brought him to this place tonight and to the
palazzo
and its chamber of horror earlier that day. It was better to have nothing to do with any of it. Riccardo got to his feet.
‘Nello!’ bawled Faustino.
His younger son stood to mirror Riccardo. Riccardo froze.
‘Take him. Show him,’ Faustino commanded and turned to his guest. ‘Signor Bruni. Riccardo. Goodnight.’
Riccardo wondered if Faustino had thought better of allowing him to live. His back prickled as he left the room
after Nello. He could sense Pia’s eyes on him, but he dared not turn to look at her.
Riccardo and Nello walked down the panelled passages, an unlikely pairing. Riccardo knew Nello did not want him here, that he resented his reckless act of compassion for his older brother. But something was making him act with civility, something beyond his father’s directive. Nello needed him for some reason.
‘I hear it said that you will ride for the Tower next month in the Palio dell’Assunta?’ Nello’s gambit was a polite enquiry.
Riccardo was sure of it, but answered carefully, ‘If they elect me.’
Nello nodded. ‘You should know, then, that I am riding for the Eagles. And I will win.’
This was no challenge; Nello did not say it to provoke. It was said with complete confidence and more: satisfaction. Riccardo knew that his earlier instincts had been right – Nello was glad his brother was dead. He was now the Eagle’s champion, something that, throughout his freakish childhood, he must always have longed to be. Riccardo made no reply, as he followed the pale figure down the stone stair, his feet stumbling only a little as he realized where they were headed.
The Panther was still there, his beaten flesh beginning to stink and stretch on his bones in the summer heat. Nello began to unbind the body. With an increasing feeling of unreality, Riccardo began to help and felt the slippery ropes come away in his hands, jellied gouts of blood gathering like blackberries at the Panther’s wrists.
Nello laid out a long feed sack on the stony floor. Riccardo had no choice but to help Nello roll the body up in the sack. He took the legs as Nello took the head, but instead of turning up the stair again, Nello approached a blind wall with a stone eagle carved into it. As they moved closer, the torchlight carved deep shadows in the stony grooves, throwing the eagle’s single eye into relief. Nello pressed his thumb to the eye and the wall sprang back, not with the stony grating of a long-closed tomb, but quick and silent and well used.
‘Come on,’ he said.
The dark door closed behind them on some hidden spring and they entered a stony tunnel with torches burning in sconces placed a man’s length apart. This was one of the
bottini
, the underground network of aqueducts and sewers below the city that radiated out under the
contrade
to the hills. They carried the body carefully along the white stone walkways, skirting the green pools of stagnant water. Riccardo fixed his eyes on Nello ahead of him, his white hair gleaming in the torchlight.
Riccardo’s misgivings were a cold stone in his stomach.
‘Is he to be laid in some private mausoleum of the Panthers?’ His voice sounded forth into the black beyond and returned to chase behind them, as if spirits rose to moan at them from their necropolis.
Nello’s laugh, likewise, circled around the tunnels and back. ‘He’s to be laid in the most beautiful place in the world. None too private, though.’
The way was long and the grisly burden heavy but Riccardo did not mind if it meant the dead Panther would
be given some small rite of passage. All the same, his arms were aching by the time Nello stopped and set down his end of the body on the walkway. Riccardo did likewise. Above them, a square of light, bleeding white, showed around the edges of a trapdoor. Nello stood tall and pushed, and with a grating of ancient stone a paving slid sideways to reveal a rectangle of sky pricked out with stars. Nello vaulted up until his head and shoulders were in the night air and looked around.
‘Clear,’ he said. ‘Push him out.’
This was no easy task. In the end Riccardo, being the stronger, had to clamber into the fresh air to yank the body from below. He had expected to emerge into some clandestine cemetery outside the city, where the body could be disposed of in secret, thus minimizing any reprisals from the Panther
contrada
. He could not have been more wrong.
He was right in the centre of the deserted Piazza del Campo, and the paving from which they had emerged formed the lowest balustrade of the fountain. He and Nello dragged the body out, under the noses of the stone wolves who spouted water, silvered by moonlight, into the bowl of the fountain, as if they gathered to feast on the carrion. They rolled the Panther out like a ham from a cloth, like Cleopatra from her carpet.
Pia
, thought Riccardo.
She is part of this now.
Nello dragged the body to the very centre of the piazza’s shell. Riccardo helped him unwrap the body, but refused to help him place the arms wide in the position in which the Eagle
contrada
left all their dead – the knifed
knave in the alleyway, the greedy prelate on his own altar. Everyone would know who had done this deed, and if the Aquila wanted to send a message, it was not Riccardo’s message to send. The dreadful flesh gleamed pale in the moonlight, angelic, not aquiline; in the cruciform almost Christ-like. Sickened, Riccardo turned away from the Panther’s ruined corpse and looked Nello in his eyes. In the moonlight he seemed almost normal – his white hair merely blond, his pink eyes darkened now to an amber hue. Hawk’s eyes, like his father and dead brother.
‘What now?’ Riccardo asked.
‘Now?’ said Nello, all pretence abandoned. ‘Now you go back where you belong.’ With that he vaulted nimbly down into the tunnel again, pulling the opening closed behind him.
The sound of stone on stone alerted two officers of the Watch, who had turned a corner into the piazza. Their tricornes were sharks’ fins in the moonlight, the barrels of their pistols gleaming.
Without hesitation Riccardo made straight for the Palazzo Pubblico for the second time that day, Saint Bernardino’s medallion, IHS, the name of Christ in the sunrays, leading him there like the star of the nativity. His step quickened faster and faster as if it was the ghost of the Panther rather than the Watch who pursued him, and despite the lateness of the hour he hammered fit to wake the dead on the great doors. Sure that no one inside had heeded him, he turned back to face the square: he could not evade the Watch now. But as he looked at the vast moonlit space, he felt the doors open at his back. His last
thought as he plunged into the palace was that Nello had been right. It was the most beautiful place in the world.
 
 
Pia retired to her chamber as soon as she could, her head aching, reeling from the day she’d had to endure. The wedding feast had held a surprise for her, as if to taunt her further: the unknown horseman whom she had seen at the Palio, the one she had secretly named as her champion. The comparison between him and Nello was even more extreme than it had been between him and Vicenzo, but when she had watched the horseman leave the feast with her new husband, she’d known him for the Eagles’ creature and she damned all three of them in the same breath. Them – and all the men on the earth, including her father: he could burn too. There was no point remonstrating with Salvatore – it was too late for that – but she had begged him at the feast to send on her books and her mother’s clothes. He’d waved away her requests and turned from her to discuss grain quotas with the Eagle
capitani
. She suspected he had forgotten her words as soon as they were uttered.
She’d gone up to her chamber after the feast and sat there waiting as the moon rose, with a growing sense of dread. Her bedding had been changed, so Nicoletta would have told Nello that she was undergoing her woman’s courses. She prayed it would be enough to keep him away, even on their wedding night.
But he came. She heard his step on the stair: dreaded, expected and lighter than Nicoletta’s. When he entered
the room, his hair was disarranged, his pink eyes glittering; he seemed excited. As he came towards her she saw something else glittering – something in his hand.
A pair of small horse shears.
Pia was sure she was going to die. She kept quite still, sitting on her bed, while he set about her. But instead of slicing her throat, he began grabbing great chunks of hair and shearing them off. Her beautiful locks fell about her in swags and hanks of blackness on the white coverlet. At first she held her hands over her scalp, trying to protect her hair, but when he sliced at her fingers too, as if he would cut them off, she moved her hands to cover her face instead. The blood from her fingertips seeped into her eyes but she did not care: anything was better than seeing the look on Nello’s face as he chopped at her in a frenzy. She went limp, letting him fling her about and turn her as he would, thinking that only by letting him wear himself out would she survive. At last, his fury spent, he yanked her to her feet. He stood her in front of the window, turned into a looking-glass by the lamplight inside and the darkness without.

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