‘Come closer, Riccardo Bruni.’
The horseman took three steps forward; now he could see the boy in the box, the coffin resting on a trestle, which, had circumstances been different, would have been used for a feast. Vicenzo’s eyes were closed, his jaw tied up with a bandage knotted around the top of his head. The blood had been washed from him, his neck straightened and the place where his spine had broken through his throat covered by the high collar of his yellow-and-black Eagle livery. His face was untouched, his aquiline nose unbroken.
‘How old are you?’
‘Near on twenty.’
Faustino nodded his silver head, once. ‘The same as …’ His face crumpled; he could not say his son’s name.
Riccardo looked away, unable to gaze upon the ruin of this man’s countenance. But Faustino spoke again. ‘A terrible thing, for the sire to witness the death of the yearling. My house dies with him.’
Riccardo frowned slightly, for he had heard there was a younger son to carry the Aquila line – a sickly but wiry fellow, yet cast in the hawkish mould of his brother and father. He assumed that this boy had met his end in the time Riccardo had been away from the city.
The
capitano
turned from the coffin and fixed his yellow eyes upon Riccardo.
Here it comes
, he thought.
‘When he bled and you held him, you pressed your hands to his neck.’
‘I did.’
‘To stop the blood.’
‘Yes.’
Now Riccardo thought he knew where these questions tended. Could he have done more? Could he have saved the boy? But Faustino began to walk around him in a circle, a buyer purchasing horseflesh, considering.
‘Have you seen service?’
‘Why do you ask?’ Careful, now.
‘It is a soldier’s trick, to compress the wound. To not let it bleed out.’
Riccardo knew now whom he was dealing with. Faustino was not a thug, but a clever man. Little wonder then that he ruled here and had done for so long.
‘I served at Milazzo. I was in Sicily these past two years.’
‘At Milazzo? You fought for the Austrians? Why?’ Faustino stopped walking and turned, interested.
Riccardo met his raptor’s eyes. ‘I like to fight.’
The captain’s expression told him that on another day he would have smiled. ‘
Do
you.’ It was not a question. ‘You were looking for a war.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you found one.’
‘Yes.’
There was a silence, long enough for Riccardo to reflect that this tragedy had truncated the usual processes of acquaintance. Having just met, they had nonetheless travelled, somehow, some distance to this place where he and Faustino completely understood each other.
‘You are quite a rider.’
Riccardo, knowing that he was, did not gainsay the older man.
‘If you had not leaped to save my son, you would have won the Palio.’
This was also true. Riccardo remained silent. There was a thoughtful pause and then, as if consciously changing tack, the captain brought his hands together with a clap that sounded hollow through the chamber.
‘Today, I bury my son.’
It was said with a businesslike dispatch that belied the words. But there was a clue here to real feeling, which had come and gone across the captain’s face moments before; still, he could not say the boy’s name.
He continued, ‘Tomorrow, in the evening, you will feast with us here. Although you are not of our
contrada
, I owe you a debt of honour.’
Riccardo’s eyes widened. He had expected censure, perhaps punishment, and had walked to the Eagle’s lair to meet it willingly. His life was cheap to him. Perhaps that was why he rode faster than any other, perhaps that was why he had walked into the house of Aquila without the quickening of a heartbeat: because at the heart of his courage was the fact that he really did not care if he died. Such courage is not true courage. True courage is when a man quakes with fear in the face of death, yet still risks his life for something he cares about. Riccardo Bruni did not know this yet, but he was to learn it soon.
‘Here at sundown, tomorrow,’ stated Faustino.
Riccardo did not accept nor refuse; nor, it seemed, was he expected to. Faustino was well used to being obeyed without question.
‘Before you go,’ said the captain, now almost conversationally casual, ‘I have another dead man to show you.’
Faustino swiped aside a tapestry of the Eagle arms and passed through a dark door. As he trod smoothly down a steep turn of stone stairs, Riccardo, curious, followed. The tapestry, the stair, once again gave him the strong impression that he was entering the past, reverting to a time that respected brutality and shunned civilization. Once, in Milazzo, he and his troop had come upon a blackened village where no crickets chirped and no birds sang. He walked the streets with his fellow and realized that every soul was dead, put to the fire by the Spanish. Heavy wooden bars had been placed across each doorway to trap the villagers, the women and children too. He had felt the same prickling then, coming over the hill
of parched grass and down into that damned village, as he felt now. With every step he knew he was about to witness a horror to which the boy in the box up above was but a prelude.
There was the glow of a guttering torch below and a sharp fierce odour of metal. Riccardo’s eyes adjusted slowly and he became aware of what he saw, only seconds after he knew why his shoes were stuck to the floor. The beast before him was a man: the metallic smell was the well-remembered scent of blood.
A man lay face-up on an iron grid that resembled a rack. His body was horribly beaten and broken. This was retribution. Faustino, unmoved, reached over the horror to grasp a chunk of the unfortunate’s hair and raise the head – so Riccardo could better see, better understand. Below the swellings of flesh and the bulgings of eyes and the breakings of teeth, he could just make out the features of the rider of the Panther
contrada
, limitless suffering writ there, his hair soaked with sweat of unbelievable pain. This was a man who had not known what he was dealing with when he swiped his whip across Vicenzo’s face in the heat of the race, who had not known that, when he unhorsed Vicenzo at the San Martino corner, the stroke of the whip was the stroke of a pen upon his own death warrant. No fresco could ever re-create such suffering. Riccardo could not look in the Panther’s stillopen eyes, for to do so would be to look into the pit of hell itself.
He did not ask why he had been shown this man. He understood. ‘
This
is war,’ he said, simply.
‘Yes.’
Faustino’s yellow eyes were calm and unrepentant. He had started a fire and he did not care. He had taken the life of another young man, the same age as his son, and he did not care. Another father would grieve and bury his child. And he did not care. There was no attendant torturer, no guard in the dim dungeon, no companion for the Panther’s last moments, and Riccardo knew, in that instant, that Faustino had done this himself.
Suddenly unable to stay, Riccardo walked up the stone stair and out of the great doors into the day. The new light was already sinful, already tainted by what had passed. He sensed rather than saw the captain follow him and, when he turned in the sunlit street and paused to look back into the gloomy hall, he was in time to see Faustino return to his coffin-side vigil. But something had changed. Now two carpenters in Eagle colours lifted a coffin lid between them and waited for a nod from their
capitano
. Faustino craned to gaze his last upon his heir, then dipped his head. The heavy lid was lowered into place, causing a shadow to fall across legs, breast and finally the face of the young body: a shroud of perpetual darkness. Faustino’s head stayed low, as if he could never raise it again. Unable to countenance a man who felt such agony of loss over one young man while he tortured another to death in his dungeons, Riccardo could remain there no longer. He turned to go without taking his leave, his footsteps on the stone punctuated by the hammering of the coffin nails.
As he walked away a scream followed him down the alleys from the coffin’s side: ‘Vicenzo!’ Faustino could
utter the name at last, this one final time. Head down, striding as fast as he could away from this house of death, Riccardo did not notice that someone in the upper windows was watching him go.
Black for tomorrow.
Pia, her eyes shadowed from sleeplessness, dressed herself in the black gown as she’d been told. She eased the tight sleeves carefully to her shoulders, wincing as she noted five black fingermarks on each slim white upper arm. Pia looked at the marks dispassionately. Abuse seemed commonplace to her now. She peered, straining her head over each shoulder, trying to determine whether Nello or his cousin had hurt her more. Nello had it by a whisker – his bruising, on reflection, was more defined. She caught herself in the middle of this exercise and wondered if she was losing her wits.
The maid came to do her hair before the great window of her prison, smiling and talking all the time, friendly, garrulous and utterly malicious. Pia knew by the cruel pull of the sausage-like fingers on her hair that the spill of the oil lamp the previous night had been no accident.
From her eyrie she saw the horseman – the man she had noted yesterday, the fellow who had leaped to Vicenzo’s aid – enter the house at the stroke of six. Why was he here, a man of the Torre? She leaned forward a fraction, as if to call out a warning, placing her outspread hand on the window. But the maid pulled her back by her ringlets, the poker around which she turned her hair
threatening to singe her ear. Pia registered the warning. She watched her handprint vanish from the cool glass, leaving just five smoky fingerprints. They looked like the marks on her arms.
Half an hour later, when the maid had gone, the horseman emerged again, walking freely from the place as Pia had wished to do the previous night. This time Pia did not lean forward, nor place her hands against the window. Her mistrust of men, planted by her father, given libation by Vicenzo, was brought into full bloom by this man. Why had he jumped to save Vicenzo? How could he walk in and out of this place, a palace of a rival
contrada
, as if he were kin? Because he was complicit, in the pocket of the Eagles like her father, all of them boiling in the same stew. Pia placed her fingers into her own prints on the pane, carefully, precisely. Before she had got to the thumb, he was gone.
She ate the plain pastry that had been left on a tray and drank all the ewe’s milk. She knew that she must stay strong, not get ill. Today there would be a laying-out and a burial, no more. She must remain strong, keep her wits. It was not the black-dress day she feared, it was the white.
She was summoned downstairs and covered her head, processing behind the black-clad family as the body was churched and interred in the Eagles’ chapel across the square, in the Eagles’ crypt. She stayed quiet and small, but was made to stand, ominously, between Vicenzo’s white-haired father and white-haired brother. She mumbled the creed and kept her head bowed.
At the end of the mass she hung back in the church doorway, until the family had gone. When the last black figure had gone into the house, she lifted her heavy skirts and ran, flitting from shadow to shadow, deep dark slices of merciful shade in the bright new day, friendly shadows that would hide well a slim woman in a black dress. Her heart was bursting. One more street and she would be in the Dragon
contrada
. The Dragons were friends to the Owlets; they would shelter her. She almost laughed. She’d been right, so right to wait, to be docile, to seize her chance. One more courtyard and then she could laugh, laugh at her father’s plans, laugh at the great fat maid, laugh at the white dress she’d never have to wear.
A shadow blocked her way. It was all right – shadows were her friends. But it was not all right.
‘Now, my pet, you’ve lost your way and no mistake. But Nicoletta’ll help you, have nay fear.’
The maid’s grip on her upper arms deepened the bruising of yesterday.
Riccardo had known for a long time that something was rotten at the heart of his beloved Siena. It was why he had left. Now he knew what ailed the city and he could give the pestilence a name.
Faustino Caprimulgo.
Riccardo walked the golden streets back to his father’s house, thinking of the next day and the next night to come, of the invitation he could not refuse. He opened the door of the Torre stable: the boy Zebra was gone
from his bed and the horse too. At daybreak his father would have led the stallion out, and walked him gently back to his owners in the Maremma.
Riccardo squatted and took a handful of the straw, cold now, letting it fall through his fingers. He said the horse’s name: Taccola. Jackdaw. He remembered another time and place, when he was no older than Zebra, the day he had seen the eagle and the daw, the daw he had brought home and kept here in this very stable till it died. It seemed an innocent, golden time – before Milazzo, before this new war he was embroiled in – and with all his heart he wished himself back there. It was this, not anything else he had seen that morning, nor anything he would encounter the next night, that made him want to cry.