The Road to Damietta (3 page)

Our band of five and the five watchful servants were huddled on the cathedral steps, trying to decide how best to find our way back to San Rufino, when Francis with a leap was suddenly in our midst.

"Come, young ladies," he shouted above the sounds of the swarming crowd, "and let us dance the rites of our wild forefathers—a goaty crew, I must say."

With that he seized upon fragile Amata di Renaro, flung her
into the air, and caught her as she was about to strike her head on the steps. Next came crippled little Benedetta, countess of Spoleto, for whom he did a squatting dance step and whom he kissed upon the brow. Then Damiella di Malispini, whose hair he clasped in both hands and gently shook until it hung to her shoulders. He paused to glance at the crowd that had pressed around to gawk at him. With a cry he grasped Giacoma, one of the servants, and twirled her about. Then he did the same to Leonarda, Consolata, Patrizia, and blind Lucia Barbrero.

Only Clare and I were left. It was she whom he chose. Taking her hands and gazing mournfully, like a rejected lover, into her beautiful eyes, he moved her about in a circle, muttering words I didn't catch.

The crowd pressed in, leaving him little room to dance. He was out of breath. He looked at me, the very last, and with outstretched hands he silently begged me to let him rest. I smiled and turned away with a sinking heart, only to feel his hands grasp mine.

There was no place to dance. He begged the crowd for a yard of room, no more. Laughing, it took no heed. But to my delight I was suddenly moving down the step, dragged by the hand, to be gathered up by a swirl of revelers and swept round and round in dizzy circles, while I clung tight, like someone who, drowning, is about to be saved.

The piazza was a stormy sea breaking against a rocky shore.
Above the roar I thought I heard Francis say words I had heard before. Yes, the ballad he had sung in San Rufino. The last words of the ballad that had drifted up to me in the night.

"
In my heart
You are locked forever
And the golden key is lost.
"

I tried to think of a word to say in reply. If a word had come to me, I could not have said it, yet I did not faint. I held my breath and clung with both my hands to his, moving lightly in a dream I had dreamed before.

At last the flood swept us ashore on the cathedral steps, at the feet of my four companions and the five watchful servants. I turned to thank Francis for the dance. He had disappeared, borne away by the tide of revelers.

Our little band, desperately clinging together, got back to San Rufino before the bells tolled the hour of midnight, but in a frenzy of excitement the revels went on, with only a brief pause at dawn, though the pope had issued an edict against reveling—on and on for days and ending in a pagan rout.

Drunken men, tipsy priests, women in flimsy dresses, the rich and the poor, artisans and nobles, the curds and the cream, joined hands with disorderly youth and danced in the cathedral, ate food and drank wine from its altar, which served them as a
table. To the sound of castanets, horns, and cymbals, carts rumbled about the city streets, filled with half-naked women bound with leather thongs who were sold by an auctioneer.

Francis's role as the mock bishop lasted for days and ended with his riding on horseback to the bishop's palace. There he summoned Guido to the door and in a leering speech accused him of dancing drunken in the piazza, of joining the crowd eating and guzzling at the altar, and of other outrageous acts. This attended to, Francis raised his hands in a supercilious benediction; everyone had a hearty drink of wine, then all trooped off to pray.

I saw none of the orgy, it being described by my brother one night at supper, though I did hear the horrendous noise and the bacchic songs. I could easily imagine how Francis looked when he stood at the bishop's door, his black brows drawn down, a clown's smile on his face.

I didn't see Francis again until a month, a month and three long weeks, had passed. Raul fell ill and forgot about him. The Bernardone shop was not far away. I thought of going there by myself. I thought of going with my mother, but I was sure that she would talk Francis to death while I stood around in silence. I also thought of asking Clare to go with me. This would be quite silly, I decided, since she was the most beautiful girl in the city of Assisi and the province of Umbria as well. Then I decided not to go at all, thinking it much too bold if I went by myself.

Truthfully, I never decided. The decision was made for me. One night an unheard voice spoke. An unseen hand reached out in the dark and quietly took mine.

At dawn I sent a servant into the courtyard to sample the day. She came back to report an overcast sky and a north wind, so I dressed to suit the weather in what I thought might catch his eye—a blue surcoat trimmed at the cuffs and hem with gray squirrel.

The falconer brought Simonetta, my trim saker hawk, hatched in Venice and given to me by my father months ago on my birthday. I wore a blue gauntlet threaded with yellow stones on my left wrist to protect me from her talons. Simonetta wore a golden hood to protect her from the weather and from any temptations to fly away that she might encounter. White hawks were fashionable at the moment, and I had three of them, but Simonetta, jet-black with yellow legs, was my favorite.

Remembering that Francis was said to sleep late, I started off at noon, but no sooner had I reached the square than Raul, still suffering from a cold and wrapped to the eyes in a woolen surcoat, came riding up.

"You're quite bold," he croaked.

"Bold?" I asked innocently.

"You're on your way to meet Francis Bernardone, alone."

"How do you know where I am going?"

"By your favorite hawk and your pearl-encrusted shoes. Also
from the look in your eye. By chance, have you told your father about all this?"

"Yes, I told him that I wished to shop for cloth and he asked where. 'At Bernardone's,' was my reply.

"'There's no other place to buy cloth in the city of Assisi, except the place owned by the scoundrel Bernardone?' Father asked.

" Yes,' I told him."

In all of the provinces of Umbria and Tuscany, there was no place that had finer cloth in the latest weaving and colors than Bernardone's.

"'Your mother will go with you.'

"'Mother likes things that I don't like. She's a little backward in her ideas about cloth.'

'"Then you will go with a maid and a proper number of serving women. Also with guards.'"

Raul grumbled but fell in beside me. As we crossed San Rufino Square he said, though it seemed very painful for him to talk, "I heard that your idol, Francis Bernardone, stole a length of expensive cloth and some money from his father. The cloth he gave to a beggar, and the money he spent on a drunken party."

"The city of Assisi hatches rumors like summer flies," I said. "Where did you hear this one?"

"Yesterday, from your father."

"I don't believe it."

"It does sound odd. A son stealing from his own father. But Francis Bernardone is an odd one. You can expect most anything from him. And not only this. His father is angry. He's even threatened to summon Francis before the authorities."

"I still don't believe it." And I didn't believe so much as a single word of the story.

Flanked by servants and guards carrying the pennons of the House of Montanaro, we set off at a leisurely canter for the Bernardone establishment on Via Portico, which is reached by a lane lined with unpleasant stalls where animals are slaughtered. As we rode down the lane our horses trod in pools of blood.

The Via Portico itself is crowded with shops and large signs—the apothecary's cluster of gilded pills, the striped arm of the barber-surgeon, the goldsmith's unicorn. Bernardone's shop was at the far end of the street, an unlikely place for a merchant dealing in expensive cloth.

By placing trestles stacked with merchandise in front of his store from one side of the street to the other, Bernardone had made a dead end of it. This was against the law, a law my father had helped to write, which required merchants to pile their goods no closer to the center of the street than one inch, and on one side of the street only. Thus we had to dismount halfway down Via Portico and give the horses to our guards, which annoyed Raul.

"Bernardone has been fined a dozen times," he said as we
threaded our way through row after row of bulging trestles. "But the fines are small; he pays them and goes right on littering the street. Like his son, Bernardone thinks himself a noble cavalier, scornful of the law."

He sent one of our guards to announce that the daughter of Davino di Montanaro was waiting, and at once boys came running out to make a path for us. A stout gentleman with a scraggly beard, wearing a shabby robe, appeared in the doorway.

"I am honored," he said, after introducing himself with a courtly bow, "to welcome a member of the Montanaro family. And please excuse the confusion. Only yesterday I received a shipment of cloth from Flanders—seven carts and seven donkeys loaded down with treasures, which we haven't had a chance to arrange on the shelves."

I made out the slim figure of his son. He was looking at me, his head cocked to one side, as I walked sedately toward him over the cobbles, my heart beating.

Raul introduced himself and me to Bernardone, who got my name wrong—Pica instead of Ricca—which was not a good beginning. Then to his son.

"I have seen you before," Francis said, smiling, "on the way to San Subasio."

"And other places," I said. "In our courtyard with the bull. And months ago when you sang in the square."

"Oh, yes, you were on the balcony, dressed in a white gown. I saw you while I was singing."

Singing to me, I desperately wanted to say, not to Clare di Scifi. Not to anyone but me. Instead, I reminded him that we had danced in the square on the night of the December Liberties.

He frowned at this and fell silent. He had changed. From the glimpses I'd had of him in the cathedral, filled as it was with candle smoke, and in the square, dense with the oily smoke of torches, I didn't have a true idea of how he looked. But now as I saw him in the daylight, I was certain that he had changed. He was no longer the smiling young man I had seen before.

He was thinner than I remembered. And his eyes, deep-set beneath their black brows, had changed. They seemed troubled. Could Raul's story be true? Was he worried about the angry threats his father had made against him? To belie this troubled mood, he was dressed in the gayest and most charming of costumes—one leg of black silk, one leg of red silk, and a tunic of three or four different colors cinched tight by a rainbow belt.

"Don't just stand there gawking," Signor Bernardone said. "Show the young lady the new damask that arrived only yesterday from Flanders. And the precious Venetian sendal, which is in short supply."

I hadn't come to buy sendal or damask, but since I couldn't say why I had come, I said nothing.

Francis disappeared into the shop, a long, narrow arcade lined with shelves, gloomy as a tomb save for the feeble glow of lanterns. He came back with two bolts of cloth, slipped into the
street, and spread them out on a trestle. Draping a corner of the sendal over his arm, he held it up to catch the sunlight.

"Notice, if you will," he said, trying hard to be friendly, "the enchanted glow."

I ran my hand over the silk.

"Doesn't it remind you of a spring day," he said, "when the meadows are green and the wind blows her sweetest and God's flowers bloom?"

I nodded and strove to follow his flight of fancy.

The three bells of San Niccolo broke forth, calling workers to their churchly tasks. The sound of the bells echoed in the narrow street. Raul, who had bought a parcel of serge, stood in the doorway watching. Signor Bernardone was also watching. He darted forth, took up the bolt of sendal, pushed his son aside none too gently, and said how well the silk matched my coloring. Without a word Francis quietly slipped away.

"I'll take a piece of sendal," I said. "And my father will pay you."

"That's not necessary," Bernardone explained. "Pay when you visit us again. I'll have Moorish cloth quite soon. This coming week, perhaps, depending upon the thieves that guard the way and the cloth thieves themselves."

The sky had darkened, and as we left the shelter of Via
Portico the wind swooped down upon us. Simonetta ruffled her feathers and took a firmer grip on my wrist.

"You're very silent," Raul said. "You seem somewhat chastened. What goes on in your head?"

"Lengths of lovely cloth," I said, "that Signor Bernardone has collected from over the world. The velvets from Paris and the sendal from Venice and—"

"No," Raul said, "not the cloth, of course not. Something else. What is it?"

I spurred the horse to a canter and left him behind, but I had not gone far when I felt a sharp tug at the saddle cloth. Francis Bernardone was running along beside me. With all sorts of wild thoughts racing through my head, I reined in and waited for him to speak.

"What do you call your little hawk?" he asked, out of breath, his face clouded.

"Simonetta," I said.

"A very pretty name for a very pretty bird. But tell me, why do you keep her chained on such a wonderful day? The wind blows and there's music in the sky. Please, friend, take off the hood and let her loose to share this wondrous hour."

I looked down upon him in dismay. His dour expression had not changed. Was he mad? Raul had ridden on and was beckoning to me from the far side of the square. I was tempted to follow him and leave Francis Bernardone standing there in the bitter wind.

"You carry the falcon on your wrist because all the other rich girls do so," he said. "It's the fashion these days. But the falcon wishes to visit heaven, which is her home."

"How do you know what she wishes to do?" I asked, turning the horse round him in a circle.

"I know because I see it in her eyes."

"How can you see her eyes? You can't, because she's wearing a hood."