The Daughter of Siena (12 page)

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Authors: Marina Fiorato

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical

BOOK: The Daughter of Siena
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He bowed and went to leave by the great doors. ‘Wait,’ she called, ‘it is better that you are not seen. Gretchen, lead Signor Bruni out through the kitchens.’
She watched him hesitate, and thought that he would thank her, but his thoughts were elsewhere. ‘And Egidio? The Panther?’
She liked him for his question and opened her mouth to say that she would send her sergeant-at-arms to recover the Panther’s body, that she would have him returned to his family directly with a pall for the funeral. But other words came.
‘Signor Bruni. Riccardo.’ She laid her fingertips on his arm. ‘I promise you that by nightfall he will be in the ground. But for a few more hours he must lie where he is.’
 
 
When Riccardo had gone, Violante wandered back to the map room and looked again at the
contrade
of the city, divided into thirds, the thirds of the city bounded by walls, and the she-wolf and her boy twins presiding over all. One twin suckled and one looked straight out of the etching at her.
She called for her riding cloak and set forth, alone, on a pilgrimage. In the grey light of dawn she passed through the silver city, a slip-shadow, hurrying east across the piazza. In the near-dark she could see a body lying in a cruciform shape by the fountain, but she averted her eyes and hurried past. She took the little streets to the Giraffa
contrada
, the ward of her chief councillor Francesco Maria Conti. She passed his
palazzo
, the hereditary seat of the Conti family, and wondered if Conti was watching her from behind his blank, black windows. She quickened her steps before her practical self assumed control once more. After all, Conti knew that she had come here. He knew why as well. Conti knew most things. She reached the Giraffa church of San Francesco, the plain, block frontage looming from the dark, laid her hand on the door and went within.
Inside, there were candles burning, and an acolyte sweeping in readiness for morning mass. She smiled at the boy who stared, round-eyed. Violante walked forwards, the familiar length of the nave, to the icon that hung above the altar. She paused to genuflect, crossed her bosom. Then, with no disrespect but merely friendly familiarity, she smiled at her friend, the Madonna del Latte.
Violante had first seen the painting when, as the new governess of the city, she had made it her business to visit every
contrada
and its attendant church. At mass, sitting in the prominent pews of the Conti family, she had laid eyes on the most wonderful representation of the Virgin she had ever seen. Violante had always been drawn to
Mary, a woman who had known what it was to love a son and lose him and mourn him. Here before her, Mary fed the infant Jesus, holding her breast to his mouth, while the infant suckled hungrily.
Before that mass and that day, Violante had been telling herself how well she was doing, throwing herself into her new position, learning about every family, every
contrada
, every trade and tradition of her new city. Then, looking at the Madonna feeding her son, both parties gazing only at each other, absorbed in this elemental bond, she had felt a physical pain in her breast. For the rest of the service she could neither speak nor sing.
Afterwards, dining with Francesco Maria Conti at his house, she had asked about the painting, as casually as she could. Conti, with the pride due to his
contrada
, told his new mistress that the painting was by the Sienese master Sassetta, and told her defensively that the panel could not be moved into the palace. She would never have desired such a thing, knowing that the painting gave her such pain; but over the coming weeks she had been drawn back again and again to the quiet church, to commune with the mother and child. Gradually, the panel had begun to give her peace, not pain, and she had begun to share her problems with the Madonna.
Today, in the grey dawn that would reveal the Panther’s body to the city, she told Mary that Egidio Albani had been slain and laid out like her own son Christ. Under the almond eye of the icon, she suddenly felt a terrible misgiving. How could she let Egidio’s mother find him like that, let the city talk of his torture, just to win allies
against Faustino? Egidio was a boy of twenty.
Twenty
, Violante read in the Madonna’s eyes.
The same age your twins would have been, had they lived.
Violante ran from the church, hurrying in the grey, unpromising dawn light to the Piazza del Campo. She would instruct the Watch to gather up Egidio’s body, to wash him and box him and take him home to his mother. But as she reached the great shell-shaped
campo
she stopped, abruptly. A small knot of people gathered next to the fountain, over the Panther’s body.
She was too late.
The She-Wolf
T
he sorrowing sun was setting at the end of a battle-battered day in Milazzo when the young Riccardo Bruni was taken to be one of a scouting party in the hills. General Alvaraz y Leon, the notorious Spanish general, had been firing villages that had harboured the Austrians. Advance parties of Spanish had been rounding up villagers, ready for Alvarez y Leon’s men to ride through with their firebrands.
In one village Riccardo’s troop came upon a little church with a stone cross, in which all the citizens had been trapped within, save one. A young woman tugged at a vast tree trunk that had been cast across the door. ‘I cannot move it by myself,’ she gasped, ‘and my son is within with his grandam. It is time for his feed.’ Riccardo could hear the shouts from within, overlaid with the high, keening cry of a baby. The men began to dismount but Riccardo reached her first. The woman turned to him. ‘Help me,’ she begged.
She was fair, with the apricot skin of the South and pleading eyes as dark as pansies. As she grasped his arm in desperation, he could smell the sweet heat of her body. His eyes dropped from her gaze to where her breasts strained at the lacings of her bodice. What he saw there made him take a step back. A dark stain spread from each nipple into the open weave of the cambric. The thudding of his heart became the thudding of distant hooves: the captain laid his ear to the ground. ‘Above a hundred horse,’ he said, ‘heading this way. Let’s be gone.’ He did not need to explain; they were only five men. Riccardo, his knees giving way with fear, allowed himself to be dragged away.
The woman screamed after them until they were almost out of sight and then turned back to the wooden trunk, clawing at it desperately. Riccardo rode with his eyes shut, as behind them Alvarez y Leon and his hundred horse swept into the village with their torches. He wished he could shut his ears too.
That night on the cold hill he did not feel the heat of the fire nor hear the songs the men sang to cheer themselves. He turned his back to the blaze and watched instead the little church burning merrily in the valley below, the cross silhouetted black against the flame.
In the morning they rode down the hill into an eerie blanket of silence. No birds sang. The church was charred rubble, with a hundred black skeletons within and one without, her hand outstretched to the door. ‘Aye,’ said the captain with grudging respect, kicking the skull of the single skeleton with his scuffed boot. ‘The she-wolf will stay with her cub even as it burns.’
Riccardo threw up again and again into the ashes, and as he emptied his stomach on to the razed ground he vowed never to be afraid again.
 
 
Riccardo awoke in the hay of the Tower stable, with his father shaking him by the shoulder. The skeletons disappeared, insubstantial as smoke. Riccardo raised himself up to a sitting position. He looked on his father’s stocky form and smiled, half relieved and half strangely sorry. It was morning, and outside an angry horse clopped and neighed on the cobbles. Domenico Bruni, squat and bearded, cocked his head to one side and smiled back at his son, his dolorous day in bed forgotten. He was back to work and, it seemed, happy about it.
‘Give me a hand, Dawdle Bones,’ he said, not without affection. His voice, unused for a whole day, was gruff. ‘I’ve a mighty tricky fellow in for shoeing.’
Domenico thrust down his arm, to haul up his son. It was encircled with the leather bracelets of the farrier’s trade and smelled, like Domenico’s whole body, of horse. After his strange dream, after everything that had happened yesterday, Riccardo could not have imagined anything more comforting than his father’s arm. He grasped it and rose to his feet, draping his own arm over his father’s shoulders as they walked companionably to the street. The younger man, taller by a head, looked nothing like his father, but Domenico was the sum total of Riccardo’s family, and family was all.
Riccardo followed him to the cobbles, where a black stallion danced and spun, its inky flanks shining wetly in the morning light. The song of the bells, the screech of the starlings, the smell of the fearful horse, all served to root him here. Of course he would not help the duchess. This was his
contrada,
the Torre, the Tower. These were his people. He was home.
The waiting beast bucked and skittered, his eyes full of fear, rolling to show the whites. The ubiquitous Zebra, on one of his many disparate missions around the city, was making a gallant attempt to hold the head-rein. His little tricorne hat lay on the ground where it had been knocked; his nose was bloody where the creature had raised its head too fast. Riccardo rapidly tossed the boy a rag.
‘Stand clear,’ he said.
Zebra did not need to be asked twice. Cheerfully enough, the boy went to sit on the mounting block to watch the drama, rolling the rag into two little nubbins, which he stuffed up his nose.
Riccardo eyed the plunging horse. He could tell at once that the animal was not naturally bad tempered – horses rarely were. There was usually something frightening them and with this one it was clear what it was. The horse could see the farrier’s bench and his father’s instruments: the paring knife, the rasp and the hoof pick. Riccardo walked forward, talking all the time, of anything, of everything, of nothing. He took the huge, heavy velvet head in his hands, felt the warm nap of horsehair under his hands, and the massive skull beneath the skin. Riccardo cupped his palms behind the creature’s
eyes, blinkering them, closing off the world, letting the creature see only forward. Only him.
‘
Buongiorno
,’ he said.
The horse calmed at once, snorted, nibbled his collar. Riccardo felt the breath, sweet with hay, on his cheek. He wanted to rest his head on the black silken cheek and close his eyes.
He needed to come to ground, to blinker his own view. He needed to block the unwelcome sights from his mind’s eye: the events of last evening, his night in the palace, the map, the revelation of the Nine and, overlaying it all, the image of the Panther, decomposing, arms spread, in the Piazza. He thought of the duchess and her kind eyes, of how she had rescued him, of her concern that the Panther should be buried with all rites. But he also understood why she had to leave the body where it lay. He understood, but he was sick to his guts.
To help his father, that was the thing. To shrink the world into a circle, to the earthbound round that was the horse’s shoe. To do something essentially Sienese, with a man who, like him, was also Sienese, born and bred here. To forget about the duchess and what he had promised her.
He thought, now and again through the morning, of the beauteous Pia, of her long luxuriant hair as black as this horse’s cheek, of how it would look tumbled across a pillow. When he’d told the duchess they needed help, he’d thought of Pia, of how she’d looked at the feast, of how he’d seen her eyes as fearful as this yearling’s. He’d thought of saying her name out loud to the duchess,
claiming that Pia would help. She would like, he knew, to walk in peace, to raise her children – even if they were Nello’s – without the threat of the blood eagle.
But he had stopped his tongue. He had seen Nello’s freezing gaze when her smile had fallen upon Riccardo, and he did not want to compound Pia’s troubles. Nello was a man who could talk of the Palio one instant, and the next drag a ruined body into the night, to grow warm with the dawn and reveal itself to the city stinking in the full glare of the sun. He whispered all this to the horse, into the warm twitching ear that flicked past his nose like a black feather.
Yes, I’m listening.
Riccardo’s morning pleased him – the simple rhythm of the hammer, the burning smell of the pared hoof. His father’s familiar homilies fell from his lips on to the cobbles like horseshoe nails.
‘No shoe, no horse.’
‘A horse runs on one toe … ’Tis as if we walk on tiptoe or balance on a single finger.’
‘The foot, the hoof is all.’
Riccardo smiled at his father, glad that the old man’s spirits were lifting with the approach of the next Palio, in a little more than a month. Domenico talked on, expecting no reply, getting none. He talked of this horse, of others, of the trials run out in the nearby Maremma, of likely
fantini
, unlikely winners.
Zebra crept forward off his block, closer and closer, to watch the shoeing. In a city obsessed with horses, Domenico Bruni was a shaman or an alchemist, possessing knowledge that could heal a lame horse, or craft
special shoes to correct an uneven stride. He could work magic, and on most days strangers would gather at the forge, to ask advice about feed, or tack, or bedding. Every day Zebra would hang around, helping and hindering all at once, hoping one day to know a fraction of what Domenico knew.
Like most men, Domenico was happy to talk of the subject he loved and, kindly man that he was, began to talk to Zebra, the boy’s answers muffled by the rags up his nose. Riccardo, communing with the yearling, heard his father’s gruff voice teaching the boy exactly the same things he’d been told as a child: the anatomy of a hoof, the topography, the little hills and valleys, the names and terms that were the longitudes and latitudes of his father’s world. The sight of the old man and the little boy bent over a hoof took Riccardo back to his own education, the only schooling he had ever had. Zebra, rapt, was almost bent double, peering close, fascinated. Domenico was thrilled to have a pupil.
‘The hoof is like a castle, or a citadel. On the outside there are very strong walls, and the hoof is the same. This dark layer on the very outside is the wall, it is hard and brittle. The walls are a protective shield for the softer hoof within; they are very tough, and gather the impact of the hoofbeats and spread it evenly.’
He moved his pick inwards to the concentric lines of the hoof.
‘Here’s the water line, just inside the walls, like a moat. It is very resistant – it carries the force of the strikes upon the ground and supports the outer wall.
‘The white line is the inner layer of the wall. It’s this yellowish ring, see? This is like the grass-filled motte of a castle. It is spongier so it wears faster than the hard walls and actually goes in a bit; see, it is a groove, and look – it has got sand and grit inside.
‘When a horseshoe is applied, it is fixed to the wall. Nails are driven in, oblique to the walls. Watch me. You bang them in here through the outside edge of the white line and they come out at the wall’s surface.’
Domenico grasped the foreleg firmly between his knees and began to hammer. Riccardo steadily kept up his stream of talk, crooning to the horse, gently pulling its ears. The horse stood stock-still.
‘Does it hurt?’ asked Zebra, as the hammer struck sparks from the iron shoe.
‘Does it hurt to bite your fingernails?’ countered Domenico. ‘No. Not unless you bite them to the quick. ’Tis the same here. For that is all this hoof is – like a fingernail. If you drive the nails into the walls correctly a horse won’t feel a thing.
‘Now, inside the walls we have the thirds of the hoof. The frog is the dark island in the middle, like the bailey or the keep of the castle. It is this heart-shape – see? It is squashy and gives to the touch – it absorbs the shock of the hoof striking the ground. If the hoof is the fingernail, this is the fingertip.’
Domenico dropped the hoof with a clang, took Zebra’s hand and pushed one of the child’s little fleshy pads with his heavy hardened fingertip. Riccardo remembered how his father had taken his own hand at the same age and
pressed their fingers together. Domenico bent again and took up the next hoof.
‘And see – this is the sole. It is soft in shod horses because it never touches the ground. It is crumbly too, like ciabatta, and you can scratch it out with a hoofpick – see?’
He suited the action to the words and Zebra watched, fascinated, as the soft flesh crumbled away to the ground like the sand in an hourglass.
Domenico shifted around, to move his shadow from the heel of the hoof.
‘And here is the final third – the castle gateway, at the back here. It is called the bars – like a portcullis. They are inward folds of the wall at the heel of the hoof. And above it all,’ he finished, ‘just like in a castle, there is a crown at the top: the coronet. This is the crown of the hoof.’

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