The Road to Damietta (8 page)

"Your cart is full already," I said to him. "Your poor beast will founder long before it reaches San Damiano."

He asked Nicola to put the piece of marble in the cart and kept the heavy one balanced on his shoulder.

"Thank you," he said.

I thought he was talking to me. Instead he was talking to the donkey.

"Thank you for all that you have done this day and for what I will ask of you before we reach San Damiano. I swear that I will not burden you further with another stone, large or small. Thank you, dear brother."

The beast did not answer; at least, I did not hear him answer. Then Bernardone spoke to me. "And thank you, dear friend. God will bless you doubly for these generous gifts."

"The stones you are taking away are not gifts," I said. "They are stolen."

He was silent. I seized the torch and angrily shone it in his face, to confound him, to make him aware that I, Ricca di Montanaro, was standing in front of him.

The light penetrated the cavernous hood. It revealed the same face I had seen on the morning he had knelt on the palace steps. It was the face of Adam, the face that had haunted me every hour of every day since the moment I stood before him among the trees in the Garden of Eden.

"I am the Lord's thief," he said, "but I'll return the stones, if you wish."

It was the voice of Adam speaking to me again, the same gentle voice I had heard before, long ago in God's beautiful garden. "No," I said impulsively, "take all the stones you need."

"The cart is full," he said.

"Then come tomorrow with an empty cart."

"I am in need of a thousand stones, but let others give us stones. Thus they too may receive God's blessings. Blessings shared by many are far better than those shared by only one. They are like rain to the desert rose."

Tilting under the weight of the cumbersome stone balanced on his shoulder, he asked the donkey to leave the courtyard, if possible. Obligingly, with groans and grunts, the beast pulled the cart into the street and I followed, walking at Francis's side as he staggered along, Nicola at my heels.

He would soon grow sick of gathering stones for a ruined church, of wandering about from house to house holding a begging bowl, starving himself, listening to insults, being pelted with rocks and offal. It was a game he was at, different from the game he played as a troubadour, different and novel and tiring. All I needed to do was wait with patience and quiet understanding.

We crossed San Rufino Square, which was deserted save for a watchman and a slinking dog.

"Let's go down the hill," Nicola said, "and help Francis with the stones."

"Let's," I said, reluctant to leave him.

"To San Damiano?"

"Yes."

But before we reached the far side of the square we heard the clatter of hoofs on the cobbles. I pulled Nicola into the shadows behind the fountain and we waited for the horsemen to pass. There were six men, Rinaldo, my father, and Giuseppe di Luzzaro among them. By this time Francis was on the road that led out of the city. I could barely see him trudging along and hear the creaking of the cart.

"He has a long way to go," Nicola said.

I was sorely tempted to run after him, to lift the stone from his shoulders, but the consequences of such rashness held me back. Only my heart followed him down the long road to San Damiano.

We hid in the shadows and watched until father and his
companions reached the square and turned toward home. Then we followed them at a distance.

Two doors opened into our palace—the big main door that faced the square, and just around the corner near the courtyard gate a second door, an arched break in the wall, called the Door of the Dead. My two baby brothers were carried through this door in their little white coffins covered with flowers. Also my brother Lorenzo, after he was killed on the battlefield in Perugia.

We slipped by the guard and down the long passageway, no one seeing us. Nicola scurried to the kitchen to finish making her tarts and I to the scriptorium. When my father came in a few minutes later I was seated at the bench, busily at work on the initial for the twenty-third chapter of Genesis.

He glanced over my shoulder, complimented me upon the progress I had made in the art of illumination, and as he left
gave me an affectionate pat on the head. Since my hair was still damp from the night air, it would have given me an anxious moment had he not been wearing leather gloves. I worked hard until the trumpet announced supper, though I made a mistake and had to paint the initial a second time.

At supper I was seated across the board from Giuseppe di Luzzaro. He was in a good humor, flushed ruddy by the sun, quite handsome in his fur-trimmed tunic, with his black curls nicely arranged across his forehead. He took off his garnet thumb-rings and washed his fingers carefully in the bowl of scented water, and then instead of passing the bowl to his right, as was the custom, he smilingly passed it to me.

This was the first time 1 had encountered Luzzaro since the day I disrobed in Santa Maria Maggiore Square. If he had not seen me, then surely he had heard about what I had done. When I sat down to supper I kept my eyes to myself expecting to find a hostile light in his. But if anything, his smile was warmer than usual; there was no hint that he was upset with me. Suspicions lingered. Was his passing the finger bowl to me and not around the board a gesture of defiance? Was he not flaunting his forgiveness of an act that had repelled everyone else?

Yet everyone was in a festive mood. The men had hunted in the country from early dawn and returned with strings of meadowlarks. The birds were brought on after a serving of lentil soup, roasted in their feathers and pinned in a row on pine
branches. I had eaten larks before, stuffed with small gobbets of fat, bread crumbs, and pine nuts, and had found them delicious, but on this night, with Francis Bernardone in my thoughts, the sight of them turned my stomach.

We were entertained by a pair of wandering minstrels, man and wife, who presented the sad story of Tristan and Iseult, the husband reciting while his wife played the zither. At the moment when Tristan pierced the monster's heart with one thrust of his sword, I cheered. And at the end, as Iseult lay down beside her dead lover and died of grief, I thought of my own love for Francis and hot tears rolled down my cheeks.

After supper I hurried to the scriptorium and closed and bolted the doors. I had decided during the meal to write a letter to him. He would never again sell cloth in his father's store. Nor would he return to our courtyard to gather stones. Nor would I be apt to meet him on the street. And if by some odd chance I did meet him, what would I say? We had talked in San Rufino Square and in our courtyard. Yet in all that time I had not been able even to hint at the passion that was consuming me. And worse still, most of what I did say was coldly said, to embarrass him.

As I sat on the bench smoothing out the sheet of parchment I had chosen to write upon, wondering whether to write a long letter or just a note, how to begin and how to end, and what should lie between, a wild thought struck me. If I addressed him
in a graceful phrase, then copied bits of the Song of Solomon, which by chance I had stumbled upon, then closed the letter with a brief salutation, would he think me overly bold?

I need not explain why I was writing to him. If he wished to take it as such, it could be a love letter. And if he didn't, if he wished to believe that the Song of Solomon was about love for the Church only and not about earthly love, as Bishop Pelagius believed, then at least he would have to admire my devotion to holy things.

I began at once and wrote rapidly, not taking time to illuminate the first letter of each verse, choosing the verses not in order but as they appealed to me:

As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.

Behold thou art fair, my love; behold thou art fair; thou hast dove's eyes within thy locks; thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from Mount Gilead.

Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn which came up from the washing.

Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely; thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks.

Thy neck is like the tower of David budded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.

The voice of my beloved! Behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.

I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh's chariots.

I was turning to another page of the Bible when a voice sounded in the hallway and a loud knock echoed through the room. I spread out the Bible to conceal the parchment I had written upon, hurried to the door, and slid the bolt. Count Luzzaro stood in the doorway, puffing out his cheeks in an expansive grin.

"I have heard you were a scholar," he said in a sober voice, though he had consumed a flagon of wine at supper, "but I could scarcely believe this to be true, since you're such a light-hearted miss."

"Not a scholar," I said. "A copyist. I write what scholars have already written. I have never had a thought in my life worth writing down."

"How charming!" he said. "How fortunate! Girls should never, never think. Their minds should waft gaily hither and yon on a summer's breeze, in tune with lithesome dreams. They can think in times to come, when they are women and have more to think about and more need to think. Youth is far too brief a time to squander."

He glanced over my shoulder at the narrow room and the shelves crowded with books and reams of parchment.

"There's a quiet room in Castello Catanio that would be just right for a library," he said. "You've seen it. You have danced there. Remember?"

"No," I said, though I did remember, vividly.

"You are cramped here. You can't move without running into yourself," he observed, choosing to ignore my cold reply. "Papers strewn about like a raging snowstorm."

He shivered and hugged himself, as if an icy blast had struck him, and playfully pushed past me into the room. His gaze fastened upon the bench where I had been working, the Bible that lay on the table, and the sheet of parchment half-filled with words from the Song of Solomon.

"Your pen moves like a spider spinning a web," he said, taking a light from the table to hold close to the parchment. "It's all circles and curlicues and spidery lines wandering up and down. Beautiful to behold, but most difficult to read."

Difficult for you, most powerful count of the Assisi commune, because your Latin is not very good, I said to myself. He had told me once that he'd read the whole story of Abelard and Heloise, but this I doubted. Most likely he had heard it from a troop of wandering players.

"Song of Solomon," he said, rolling the three round words on his tongue, casting his green eyes lightly upon me. "Well, well."

"So, well, well," I said to have him understand that I was not embarrassed. "From the Bible, the Old Testament." I added the fiery warning Bishop Pelagius had flung from his high loft in San Rufino on Palm Sunday months ago: "Freezing hail and devouring fire await those who mock the Lord, those who use this song for a worldly purpose."

"Ho! Protect us against devastating hail and devouring fire—
Grando nec ignis edax peprimat hos nec mala pestis,
" his lordship exclaimed in halting Latin. Shining his candle on the open page, he gave me a daring, conspiratorial glance and began to read:

"'By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth. The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman. Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins. His legs are as pillars of marble. His locks are bushy and black as a raven. I sought him, but I could not find him. I called him, but he gave no answer. The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me. I charge, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him that I am sick with love.'"

His lordship straightened himself and said, "Wheeeew! Whence comes this torrent? 'Thy navel is like a goblet, which wanteth not liquor.'"

"Round goblet," I corrected him.

"'His legs are like pillars.'"

"Pillars of marble, your lordship."

"'His locks are bushy and black.'"

"Black as a raven."

"But tell me, who speaks these ravenous words?"

"The Rose of Sharon, the Shulamite."

"To whom does she speak them?"

"To her beloved, of course."

He was silent for a moment or two, turning the ring on his left thumb round and round. "Taking note," he said, "of a pen on the bench beside an open ink jug, inkstains on your fingers, and a parchment sheet peering out from beneath the Bible on which are visible several words freshly written, I hope that you are composing a copy of the Song of Solomon in your beautiful spidery hand and that you will sign it prettily 'The Rose of Sharon,' and then, and then, send it off to me by the fastest of messengers."

I closed the Bible and hid the letter I was writing to Francis Bernardone beneath it. My silence encouraged him. When I looked up, he had cocked his curly head to one side and his lips had broken into what he must have meant as a fetching smile. To me it held the faintest shadow of a leer.

I didn't blame him. A girl who shed her clothes on the steps of the Santa Maria Maggiore palace before a gaping crowd. A girl who wrote down verses from the Song of Solomon. What was a warm-blooded man to think, though he was a lord and a gentlemanly knight?

He glanced the full length of my figure, at my neck, my bosom, my waist. His glance fastened upon my golden slippers, sewn with rubies, the ones my father had brought home from France for my birthday, which were gossamer-thin and made my feet look smaller than they really were.