Beneath Ceaseless Skies #167

  Issue #167 • Feb. 19, 2015

  “Madonna,” by Bruce McAllister

  “Y Brenin,” by C. Allegra Hawksmoor

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  MADONNA

  by Bruce McAllister

  Many have asked how the Child Pope and I, boys that we were at the beginning of it all, first met the Sienese girl Caterina, that she might become our companion and friend on the long journey to that cold, northern lake. After all, had she not joined us, we would not have had the power to defeat the Drinkers of Blood on that lake’s shores and, by our victory, end their dark communion before it reached all of Christendom. The Oldest Drinker—born on the same night as our Lord fifteen centuries ago, his first drink not milk but blood—and living even then in the shadows of Rome—would certainly have prevailed.

  The minstrel who found me on the wharf one night in my fishing village, carrying word from the father I had never seen, certainly did not mention a girl. He said only that I must find the Child Pope Bonifacio, who had been hidden on the windy Island of Elba by his uncle, the Cardinal Vocassini; and that from this boy no older than I obtain the holiest water in the land. I was, the minstrel insisted, the emissary of La Compassione’s spirit to the world, whether I knew it or not; and, as my body changed to serve her, I was essential to any hope for the Drinkers’ defeat. I would (he explained) need the holy water not only for what would occur at that lake but also to save those who mattered to me most on my hurried journey to the lake’s icy waters.

  I did as I was told. I took what the minstrel gave me: the pouch of florins, the tiny glass vials for the holy water, and on its leather cord the tooth of a great beast. I also took my beloved dog Stappo—big and ugly though he was. At Elba’s abandoned monastery the Child Pope Bonifacio and I barely escaped a monstrous Drinker that had once been a priest, reaching the mainland again only by the blessings and winds of La Compassione.

  We did not know what to do next. If we traveled north at night, the Drinkers would find us. Surely they sensed our importance to their fate. Would my rash, and the light that turned my skin into a blinding sun when a Drinker was near, be enough to save us from more than one Drinker? Yet if we traveled by day, we might be captured by the soldiers of the Medici, whose territory this was, or by the interloping mercenaries of the Venetian Doge, who wanted Bonifacio for his own political machinations.

  When, as we headed north in sunlight, we were nearly captured by the Doge’s men, we turned south instead, and, hiding in olive groves, culverts, and tall wheat, began toward Siena—whose walls, we told ourselves, might protect us from both the Drinkers and the soldati of two states while we re-thought our journey north.

  Had we not turned south that day we would not have met Caterina.

  * * *

  When we reached Siena’s great walls at last, we sat down on the earth far from the main road and caught our breath. Before too many minutes had passed, Stappo appeared with the moldiest piece of bread we had ever seen. Bonifacio closed his eyes as if to escape an alimentary nightmare, and I sighed, but we both praised Stappo and took the bread. Hunger was hunger, and weakness was not a blessing for any human on the run.

  Despite the crowds on the road entering Siena, the night passed without boot steps or inhuman wailing in the darkness around us. Whether the latter was because of the vials of holy water within whose circle we slept, Stappo with us, or simply that the Drinkers had not found us yet, we did not know; nor did it, for the moment, matter. What mattered was that we lived to arise the next morning at first light, gather up the vials, eat the remaining bread (spitting out green pieces that tasted like metal), take two drinks from a spring near a gully and prepare to enter the city along with the teeming hordes arriving for the races.

  “I have never seen a dirtier pope,” I said to my new friend. He was indeed dirty. Bonifacio had abandoned his satin gowns on Elba and donned a camicia, a vest and red leggings that made him, chubby as he was, look like an odd fruit. His hands belied his clothes. They were, even with earth smeared on them, as pink as his cheeks. Nor did his imperious scowl, something he had adopted from the adults of his world—the cardinals and tutors, not a single woman among them—fit the paesano he needed to be.

  “And I have never seen a dirtier emissary,” he answered pompously, feigning insult. “Though of course neither of us has seen more than one of the other.”

  Stappo for some reason looked clean, which made us feel even dirtier.

  “Dogs have useful tongues,” Bonifacio pointed out, “while human beings need to bathe.”

  “Our dirt will help us, I think,” I said.

  “I certainly hope so.”

  We indeed fitted into the crowds at the gate. It was Palio, after all, and travelers were filling the roads into the city, riding on horses and carts or simply walking to the city’s iron gates. As we joined the crowd, no one looked at us in curiosity, as if to say, “Why were those boys walking by the wall instead of the road?” Many had already imbibed enough celebratory uva to paralyze a horse, and people either nodded at us with bleary looks or ignored us completely. Who would imagine that two boys and a dog were going to the Palio to hide from the soldiers of two city-states, and, worse, from inhuman creatures few people this far from Rome believed even existed.

  * * *

  The Palio—the horse race in honor of the Madonna of Provenzano—was a fourteen-day affair. If our calculations were right, this should be the twelfth day and the fourth of the qualifying races. The seventeen neighborhoods of the city—the “quarters,” the contrade—would be celebrating. The ten neighborhoods chosen to compete this year would be celebrating with particular enthusiasm and would be the best to hide in. People would be eating day in and day out in the open. The horses would be receiving the official blessing of priests. The standard-bearers that represented each quarter would be practicing their tricks, tossing their great flags with their neighborhoods’ emblems into the air and catching them until they got it right. The race itself, in which even a horse that had lost its rider could win, would be in two days.

  “What day should we leave?” Bonifacio asked when no one could hear.

  “I am not sure, Bonifacio. If we leave before the final race, the roads will be empty and we may look suspicious. We should leave when everyone else is leaving.”

  “Do the celebrants leave all at once?”

  “I do not know. There are of course festivities after the race, and much drunkenness, according to our village priest, Father Tamillo, who does not approve of excessive drinking but cannot disapprove of a race in honor of the Madonna of Provenzano. But to answer your question, there may be a time when more leave than not. We will have to watch for it.”

  “We will be safe in the neighborhood we choose to hide in?”

  “We will have to be careful, Your Holiness. Father Tamillo told us that sometimes neighborhoods try to poison one another’s horses—even the riders—and we do not want to be taken for poisoners or spies. We must be pretend to be, I would think, relatives of a family in the quarter we choose.”

  “Yes, that would be sensible. You say each neighborhood has a design. Perhaps we should carry that design on our persons and act exceedingly passionate about it.”

  “We may have to steal those designs.”

  “God will forgive us.”

  “You are certain?”

  “Yes, I am certain.”

  “You are the pope.”

  “Yes, I am the pope, but He would forgive you just the same.”

  “That makes me happy.”

  “If you are afraid of
God at the moment, it is only that you are tired. We both need sleep. And where will we do that, Emissary?”

  “That could be tricky, Bonifacio. Sleeping in the Piazza di Campo will not work because that is where the soldiers, and any townspeople working for them, would look. That is where those not from the neighborhoods—from outside the city—would sleep on the clay the horses run on, or on hay placed there for both horses and travelers. Sleeping on the street within a quarter would make us too visible. And we do not know anyone we might stay with—inside a home—in any of the neighborhoods.”

  “Then perhaps we need to meet someone—someone with a home.”

  “I was thinking that exact thing myself, Bonifacio, and, since Stappo always knows what it is that we are supposed to do, I imagine that he, ugly though he is, was too.”

  I had never seen so many people, and certainly not so many drunk and happy people. The streets and alleys were full of them. The Piazza di Campo overflowed with them. Everywhere was food, drink, dancing, hugging, drunk men and women falling down, slightly less drunk friends picking them up and laughing, children running, dogs barking. Most of these of course were the carefree spectators, those who had come from distant towns for the race and for whom the only serious matter was the betting. The contrade were celebrating, too, but would be doing it in the neighborhoods themselves, not out in the Piazza or main streets; and they would, drunk or not, be much more serious. There was much at stake. The honor and pride of each quarter. The year-long blessing of the Madonna to the quarter that won. The pride of the entire city, whose horse race was in fact called “the portrait of the Madonna.” Some of the most serious men might indeed poison a horse or cripple a rider for such rewards, even if no Madonna could possibly condone it.

  “How will we know what neighborhood to choose?” Bonifacio asked as we jostled our way through the crowd.

  “If Stappo fails to tell us, we will still know.”

  It was true. As we passed from the Tortoise Neighborhood—with its central fountain and its marble tortoise spewing water from its gaping beak—a different emblem appeared on doorways, and we stopped. Stappo, at my side, was whining.

  The new emblem was a seashell. A scallop. A pettine. And there, to our right, above the fountain in this new neighborhood’s square, was the same seashell but as big as a shield, carved from white marble. Water flowed from the shell, filling the fountain, and the shell’s rays were like a sunrise, one that might save the world if the world would only let it.

  The rash on my arms and legs was tingling, but not in the way it did when a Drinker was near. I did not understand, but I knew I should listen. La Compassione, I had learned, had so many ways of speaking, though never with words.

  I couldn’t look away from the scallop.

  “This one,” I said.

  Bonifacio laughed. “Why am I not surprised, Emissary?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A divine sign, is it not?”

  He was, I knew, thinking of his seashell collection—the one he’d shown me proudly on Elba—though a scallop was a clam, and clams were not snails, and his collection was rare “left-handed” snails, which he loved because (he explained) they were as different from others of their kind as he often felt from other boys. “Have you not always felt this way, too, Emilio?” I had nodded.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  Bonifacio beamed. “A pope who collects mollusks and an emissary from a fishing village whose skin has always been irritated by salt water. What a pair of travelers! And how perfect a scallop is for them!”

  I was nodding. Bonifacio was saying, “That fountain’s water is not salty,” and before I knew it I had walked through the crowd to the fountain, climbed in, and was sitting in the cool water, my burning skin murmuring its gratitude.

  Soon I was in a dream. People in the square had stopped and were gawking at me, but I was no longer there, in an old city called Siena. I was in a great, cold lake, swimming, my skin cool, no longer tingling, blue sky and snow-covered peaks above me. My father was close by, calling to me with a cornamusa, a little bagpipe just like the one the minstrel had played on the wharf to call me to him. I was swimming with other great creatures like me, and there were other men playing cornamuse on the shore, calling them as well. I was happy to be there at last. I was happy to see my father’s face on the shore and know he loved me.

  “Emilio!” a voice called from somewhere.

  The cold lake water parted around me like a song as I swam.

  “Emissary!” the voice said again, anxious, stern. I could hear other voices too, shouting too, unhappy, hostile.

  When I opened my eyes, the little square was packed with people, everyone staring at me disapprovingly, some heckling with Sienese epithets, others calling for the city’s guards to remove me from their fountain.

  A horse snuffled.

  I could not but blink. There, only a few strides away from me, was a horse and rider, both decorated with the blue and white silk of the scallop emblem. The rider was a boy perhaps a year or two older than I, the horse a beautiful brown creature. The boy gazed down at me while attendants, decorated with the same emblem, fussed at the flanks of the horse, and behind them stretched the citizens of this contrada in a procession that had now come to a complete standstill.

  I could not tell whether the rider was smiling or frowning. There was an odd expression—though not an unkind one—on his face, and his riding cap, which would keep his hair from his eyes when he raced, seemed large, too big for his head.

  He stared at me, head cocked as if in a question, but said nothing.

  I looked down at my arms and legs and saw what I had not expected: Though my rash, reddish blue and scaly as it always was, was no longer itching, there was more of it—much more. It had spread on my arms and legs even as I sat in the fountain dreaming.

  A tall man rushed toward me from the procession.

  “What is the meaning of this?” he shouted, spittle on his lower lip. “This is desecration!”

  A priest followed behind the man; but rather than shouting along with him about desecration and other offenses, he simply looked back and forth between Bonifacio and me, as if trying to understand something.

  “Call the city’s guardie!” the tall man was saying. He grabbed my arm.

  As he did, the patches of rash on my arm grew hot again and the man jerked back as if burnt. But because this made no sense to him—that a boy’s skin might burn him—-he responded in the only way he could:

  “This boy is ill!” he cried. “Look at his skin! He defiles our fountain!”

  The priest had stepped forward to stand between me and the tall man and three other men who had joined him, all of them quite incensed. The priest was of course looking at me but also at the rider, as if more interested in what the rider was feeling than anything else.

  Who was this rider—that a priest would be so interested in a boy’s reaction?

  The rider was dismounting. He was a thin boy, a little taller than both Bonifacio and I, with a sharp nose, and hair in the Tuscan style, almost to his shoulders. His hands, though roughened by a rider’s training, had long delicate fingers; and there was something odd about him, I thought, though when I looked at Bonifacio I saw nothing in his manner that suggested he agreed.

  The four angry men parted to let the rider approach the fountain. When he reached it, he looked down at me with the same expression—neither frown nor smile—and said simply, “We would ask that you remove yourself from our fountain.”

  The rider’s voice had cracked once as he spoke, and sounded low for one his age. Perhaps, I told myself, he was older than he seemed and was simply becoming a man. A boy’s voice must change.

  I obeyed, inspecting again at the new rash on my arms and legs.

  “Are you ill?” the rider asked matter-of-factly, glancing at the priest. The priest looked back without expression.

  “No,” I answered, feeling my face grow hot as I did. “It is on
ly an irritation. Fresh water relieves the discomfort.”

  “Enough talk!” the tall man said. “Summon the guardia. These boys are not Nicchio. They may be Tartaruga or Leopardo. How are we to know? If they so willingly despoil our fountain, they might just as easily despoil our food.”

  “I am certain it does,” the rider was saying to me, ignoring the man, “but does your fresh water have to be our fountain?”

  “No. I am sorry.”

  A guard from the Piazza was approaching.

  The rider, who had, I felt certain, almost smiled at me, was looking again at the priest, who had been listening intently and now stood by the rider and whispering in the boy’s ear.

  The rider nodded, turned to the four irate men, and said: “That will not be necessary, Tomaso. Father Salemi has recognized these two boys as fourth cousins of the Borsinis. They are from Terranova and of no threat, even though their behavior be rude.”

  The four men grumbled, deprived of their mission. The rest of the procession was losing interest and moving back to their apartments to prepare for the next neighborhood event.

  “The procession,” the rider said, turning back to me, “is over for the day, ragazzo, and our horse has been blessed.” He was looking at Bonifacio now.

  The priest whispered again into his ear.

  “Our priest, who is rarely wrong, feels that I approve of you,” the rider said quietly to Bonifacio and me, “and his feeling is right.” Again, the boy’s voice cracked, as if he were struggling with it; and again, I felt an oddness from him. “He is right because when I first saw you both I felt you posed no threat to our contrada; and so we must, if we are to behave as the Madonna would have us behave—especially at this time of the year—welcome you as guests. I did utter a falsehood to those who would remain suspicious and less than hospitable, but you are indeed our cousins in spirit if not in physical fact. You may stay with my father and me. Our abode is down that alley.”

  Why had the boy lied to the procession—to the citizens of his neighborhood? Why had the priest collaborated in the lie? And why would a priest care so much about what the boy felt?