by Philip Kazan
There is a howl, which must be her, though how can she be howling, now that her throat is almost cut through by the leather thong? Then she feels a hot gush across her right hand. The thong comes loose. She takes in a vast lungful of pain, but there is air as well, and she opens her eyes as Augusto bucks on top of her, his body arching backwards as he screams again. He rolls away from her, scrabbling behind him, his thing bobbing vilely between his legs, and she shoves herself in the opposite direction, toppling over the edge of the bed without warning. She somehow gets on all fours and vomits, almost choking again as she breathes in. She can’t even sob; her breath comes out of her in growls and whistles. Augusto … He screams again. ‘Little cunt! I’ll fucking … Jesus, I hurt!’
Onoria drags herself over to the window and pulls herself upright against the sill. The air outside is red. She drags in another lungful and tastes smoke as well as blood. Forcing herself to turn around, she sees Augusto kicking at the pillars of the bed, letting out little shrieks as he tries to reach the knife, which is sticking out of his doublet below his right shoulder blade. She is staggering towards the door when she trips over something: Augusto’s sword. Without thinking she squats, gasping at the pain between her legs, and picks it up. A short, wide-bladed storta, a murder-sword. That’s what her father calls them: murder-swords. Some distant part of her mind sees blood and hair clotting on the steel. She stands, turns. Augusto has got hold of the dagger and is trying to pull it free. The stump of his missing finger twitches like a blind grub. Rolling on his back, his breeches half down, hairy white skin stark against black cloth, he sees her. ‘I’ll fuck you!’ he bellows. Onoria takes two steps across the floorboards, grips the sword with both hands, raises it high above her head with every spark of strength she has left, and brings it down across his body. He makes a noise like the bray of a donkey and, eyes tight shut, she strikes him again. Then she is on the landing. Whimpering in terror, she begins to stagger, as fast as she can, down the stairs.
Bartolomeo’s room is directly below hers. As Onoria steps out of the stairwell she is looking straight through its open door. In the dim glow of a rush light, all that she sees at first is a great spray of dark, shiny wetness across the white of the bedsheets. And then, on the floor, head towards the door, her brother, sprawled on his stomach. He is half dressed, his shirt slashed and soaked with blood. His head is twisted all wrong. She drops to her knees in front of him and shakes his shoulder.
‘Barto!’ Onoria pleads, but his head lolls away from her. His chin knocks against the floorboards with a clack of bone and teeth. She pushes herself away from him like a crab and can’t stop herself from being sick next to his half-open clothes chest. Bartolomeo is neat, but someone has been rifling through his clothing. The sleeve of a black doublet trails down to the floor. Onoria is shivering so hard that the muscles in her stomach have cramped. She is almost naked, she realises. Her nightgown is hanging from one shoulder, plastered against her skin with her blood – or Augusto’s blood … She sits, rocking, for a moment. Then she drops the sword and tears what’s left of her gown away, then pulls out the doublet and manages to get her trembling arms into the sleeves. It is too big for her, of course, but not very much so. Her fingers are numb, and she only gets three buttons done up, but her breasts are covered. In a frenzy, she digs down through the clothes until she finds a pair of breeches: trunk hose, with a modest codpiece sewn into the crotch. Standing to put them on, she sees the deep scratches on the insides of her thighs, the streaks of blood. She has to lean against the wall to stop herself from falling. The rough cloth chafes horribly against her wounds and the breeches are too wide for her, but in amongst the heaped clothes she sees a belt. Faded and cracked, it was once bright red, with gold tooling. As she buckles it, she pictures it around Bartolomeo’s waist. Her father had brought it back from Rome for him and she had been so jealous …
Down on all fours again, she crawls over to her brother and tries to heave him onto his back, but he is too heavy, and when his head lolls towards her, she meets the stare of his white, unblinking eyes. ‘Oh, God, help him,’ she prays, yet nothing comes from her throat but a thin wheezing. Feverishly, she tries to turn him again, and as he comes over onto his side, something clatters onto the floor: Tommaso’s dagger. She grabs it. Something she knows well; it fits into her hand and the reassurance of it calms her enough so that she can lean down and kiss her brother’s head, eyes closed so she doesn’t have to see his.
There are loud men’s voices coming up from below, and smoke. What was before a taint in the air is now a thick haze. Onoria peers round the door, then she sees the bloody footprints leading from Bartolomeo’s body towards her bedroom.
‘Augusto! What the fuck are you doing up there?’ someone shouts from downstairs.
‘Fucking!’ someone else barks. There is laughter. ‘Come down, you dick! The place is on fire!’
‘Keep your voices down, fools!’ Onoria recognises this voice. It is Lodovigo Ellebori. And now Onoria knows what has come to her home. ‘I want every one of them dead. Do you understand? The priest, Antonio – is he taken care of?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘Go and fetch Augusto. You, idiots. Go with him.’
War has come back to Pietrodoro. Their own little war, which Onoria was so certain was just a story. ‘I fly to Your protection, O Holy Mother of God,’ she whispers. ‘Do not despise my petitions in my time of need …’ She crawls into the hallway, pushes herself upright against the wall and runs down the short corridor that leads to her parents’ room. With the awful predictability of a nightmare, the door is open. Her father is in bed, on his back as if asleep, except that his throat has been cut so violently that his head is almost off. Her mother is on the floor, half under the bed. All that Onoria can see is her bare white legs, and the blood. Her mother’s body is an island in a lake of her own blood. Booted feet are clumping up the stairs behind her. Onoria turns, the dagger out in front of her in porta ferro. Let us all die, she thinks. But I’ll kill some of you, you beasts. You’ll see how he trained me. You’ll see …
At that moment there is a crash from outside, and a flurry of sparks swirl up past the open window. She turns to look, sees the window, her mother’s writing desk next to it, a book – the fat old Virgil – open where she had left it. And beyond … Onoria knows what’s beyond the window. She has been staring at it for years while her mother has tried, so patiently, to educate her.
The Rocca forms part of the walls of Pietrodoro. In some places those walls merge with the living rock of the mountain and plunge a hundred feet or more towards the olive groves. Below the palazzo, though, is the old road which used to lead to the Rocca, disused now, except by shepherds. At some point in the past an arbutus sapling got its roots into some hidden vein of soil and has grown until its topmost branches come halfway up the palazzo’s walls. One of the thicker ones is just outside the window. Her father was meaning to have someone cut it off, because it is scraping the mortar, but it is such a beautiful thing, with its shiny toothed leaves and tasty fruit, that he never quite got around to doing it.
Another gout of sparks. The outbuildings must be blazing. Boots are coming closer. She looks at the dagger in her hand. If I had a sword … But her legs are almost giving way and the pain between them is savage. She knows, because she has been taught to understand her body like a duellist, that they will fail her. A man will come through the door, take her blade, push her down …
‘I am sorry, Papà,’ she says, though only she can hear the words that are trapped in her swollen throat. ‘I can’t stay with you. Goodbye, Mamma. Until we’re reunited.’
Tucking the knife into the belt in the small of her back, she climbs onto the writing table, her knees sliding across pages of Virgil, takes hold of the window frame and steps out, as she has done countless times in her imagination, into the air. Just for a moment she is falling, and then she is clutching the rough bark of the branch, surrounded by pointed, shiny leaves that are
reflecting the flames licking out of the lower windows. She pulls herself along until she is inside the crown of the tree.
Branches surround her like a cage, and she knows she is hidden from the sight of anyone looking out of the palazzo. Men are shouting above her, in her bedroom.
‘Is he dead?’ She recognises Antonio Ellebori’s voice.
‘It was the boy! Must have been!’ A rougher voice, in an accent that isn’t from Pietrodoro.
‘Augusto! Is he dead, for God’s sake?’
‘Bartolomeo must have done this! The little fucking priest! But he’s in his chambers …’ Girolamo Ellebori, his young voice laced with rage and confusion.
‘He must have crawled down there to die. Christ, Augusto’s really bleeding, Father …’
‘Where’s the girl?’ Lodovigo Ellebori sounds out of breath.
‘He’s breathing! Augusto!’
‘Augusto, where’s the girl?’
‘Grab his legs. We need to get out of here, lads. The whole place will be ablaze in a minute!’
‘What about the girl?’
‘The little bitch must be hiding. Don’t worry, she’ll burn, like the monster she is. Get a move on, now!’
Onoria works her way through the branches until she has the whole crown of the tree between her and the palazzo. Gingerly, her limbs barely under her control, she lowers herself until she is hanging by her arms and drops the last foot or so to the ground. It is no height at all, but even so she lies there winded. When she is able to stand, she sees fire, great hungry tongues of flame, shooting up from behind the courtyard wall. As she watches, the ground floor windows are lit from inside by a red glow, and an instant later, flames are groping out into the night. The Rocca is old, and its timbers are bone dry. It seems to take no time at all before it is a stone shell bursting with fire. It jets from the tower, from behind the battlements, with a vast, strangled roar. Onoria is transfixed. Her parents, Bartolomeo – Holy Mother, what about the servants? – are gone. A moment ago, she was looking at their corpses, and now they must be ash. The flames pouring from the nearest window seem to beckon. She could just climb back inside and let herself be consumed. Why not? She gathers her courage. But as she stands there, contemplating – there will be heat, horrifying pain, but it will be over so quickly – she realises that she feels alive. Not in the way she does when she spars with her father, or shoots hares in the olive groves, or races across the piazza with Federigo; she feels alive simply because she is not dead. She is in pain. The sheer horror of what Augusto did to her is only just beginning to cut through the numbness in her mind. Her family is dead. But she is still here, barefoot in the dry leaves. She can feel the sparks that are pouring down onto her, stinging like jewelled wasps. She can feel that she wants to be sick again. She closes her eyes and sees Santa Celava, her face burnt black with age but filled with kindness, with holiness. Our Lady of Hidden Things. ‘Why do you care what she’s called?’ she’d asked her brother. This morning. It had been this morning. And he’d replied, in his kind, serious way – a cardinal, one day, everyone said so – he’d told her, ‘Because the truth is important.’
‘Santa Celava, what should I do?’ she shouts, but the pain of the words almost chokes her. ‘I repent all my sins!’ Her voice is a hiss of air through a wound. ‘If I have ever done anything to offend thee, I …’ She can’t remember any prayers at all. Her mother would know what to ask for. She looks up at the burning window. ‘Please help me, dearest Santa Celava! Help me, Mamma!’
Something in the heart of the Rocca gives way, and a huge gust of flame and sparks is thrown into the sky. The blaze jets from every crack, every loophole, and from her parents’ window a fist of smoke and fire punches out, unravelling in a cloud of light. And, whirling inside it, what Onoria thinks at first is a bird with beating wings of fire that hangs in the air, caught in a vortex of heat, and then begins to fall, its feathers unravelling: a book. The great Virgil, tumbling and dissolving into floating cinders.
Oh, Onoria, don’t fidget. Look, here, what Virgil says: ‘Endure, and preserve yourself for happier days.’ Well, he says ‘yourselves’, but honestly, cara. You’re as miserable as Aeneas’s followers. Could you at least try? Sometimes – some things, Onoria – we just have to endure.
Dogs are barking. Suddenly the church bells start to clang. She can hear shouts from beyond the fire, distorted by the heat like her own voice. The last of the numbness in her head clears. She turns and slips over the edge of the terrace, clambers down a low stone wall and begins to run.
Inside, the ruined hut is almost pitch-dark. The dirty red glow of the fire in Pietrodoro hasn’t made its way in here. Onoria finds her way to the old bread oven by touch, hands patting along stone and crumbling wood until they find the oven’s mouth, pull away the rock she has blocked it with, and grab the roll of clothes, and the bow and quiver of arrows inside.
She has to strip again to put on the hose and shirt. Wondering hazily about scorpions, she pulls the worn hose up over her legs, finding the smallest grain of comfort in the familiarity of the things she has always worn for play. She can barely manage to tie the points of the hose to the old serge doublet. The newer, larger one fits over the other like a short jacket. When she slips her feet into the shoes she realises she has cut through the skin of her soles.
She can hear voices above her in the village: no words, just sounds that could be men and women, or the howling of beasts. The church bell is still ringing.
What about the girl?
The little bitch must be hiding … It was Lodovigo Ellebori’s voice, hoarse with smoke. Now she remembers his words. Don’t worry, she’ll burn, like the monster she is.
Onoria pulls her plaited hair from inside the jacket. As she feels its smooth weight she remembers her mother’s fingers working through her hair, and the feeling of contentment it always brought. Then she sees, horribly clearly, her mother’s bare legs splayed in the great pool of blood, and the pain as Augusto almost tore the braid from her scalp. Without thinking – or so it seems to her – she picks up Tommaso’s knife and begins to saw at the plait at the nape of her neck. The knife is sharp, and in three strokes she is holding her braided hair like a limp, dead thing in her hand. She stares at it in confusion. Something seems finally to have broken. Not her body, but something deeper. It must be her soul. That thought is the last thing she remembers as she runs, as fast as her wounded feet allow, into the night.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Morning – is it the morning after, or some other morning? Onoria has no idea – finds her lying on an uncomfortable nest of twigs and leaves. She is in a cave … No, under a pile of branches. She crawls out from under them. She is in a steeply sloping wood and has been sleeping under a fallen tree. She stares wildly around her, rubbing her stinging eyes. Chestnut trees and holm oaks. She fumbles with the points of her hose, squats and makes water. It hurts. Everything hurts. Her neck feels as if she is wearing a collar of briars. She can barely swallow. Then she remembers how he choked her as he did that thing … Retching, her empty stomach knotting and unknotting in waves of nausea, she stumbles down the slope until she comes to a gap in the trees. Not far away, across a deep valley, a pillar of black smoke is rising straight up into the clear blue sky from a golden village that sits like a carefully placed coronet on the skull of an almost bare hill.
She knows where she is now. The chestnut forests of Monte Amiata spread their skirts wide, and this is a fold of them where she has often played with Federigo. She retches again and whimpers at the pain. Federigo, her best friend. He’d sat across from her at the feast, next to his brothers. Next to Lodovigo, who’d stood up and toasted her father, again and again. The brothers, drinking with Bartolomeo until his face was red and his eyes out of focus. But Federigo … He’d kept his face away from her. She’d tried to joke with him, but he hadn’t been able to look at her. He’d known. He’d known.
A breath of wind cools the back of her head. Onoria lifts a hand to th
e unfamiliar sensation and finds that her hair is almost all gone. Stubble at the nape, where the skin beneath is almost too raw to touch, longer above her ears and forehead. She thinks she must have done this herself, but she can’t quite remember. She shakes her head and it’s as if she can feel her brain sloshing around inside her skull. Suddenly she’s very thirsty. There is a spring further down this slope that often runs in the summer – she thinks that’s right, though all these thoughts might belong to someone else. She’s been here before, but this is the farthest she has ever come from home.
Home.
She retrieves her bow and quiver from under the dead tree and makes her way downhill, walking like an old crone. Sure enough, the spring, a crude fountain cut out of the rock a long time ago, is running, a thread of water trickling noisily into a shallow stone basin. She leans over to drink, and sees a creature staring back at her. There is a monster drinking out of her hand.
‘Holy Mother, what has happened to me?’ Onoria gasps. But she has no voice, just a hollow whisper like wind hissing through bare branches. Half of her face is purple-red and swollen. Her eyes are bloodshot, and one is ringed with a bruise like the yolk of an overboiled egg. Blood has crusted between nose and top lip. An uneven fringe of short brownish hair covers her head like some kind of crude felted cap. But worse, much worse, is the gash that runs across her throat below her chin, across the crook of her jaw and up towards her left ear. It is a deep crease filled with dried blood and crusted yellowish matter, swollen and crinkled at its edges, surrounded by black bruising.
She dabs at her neck with a wet hand, and though the pain is appalling, she dips and pats, dips and pats until it is more or less clean. Then she scrubs at her face. The water in the fountain is pinkish now, threaded with blood. She forces herself to look again.
Filthy little boy-girl.
She stands up, and she can see the whole of herself, the perspective stretching her away towards the sky. Skinny legs in dirty hose. Hips, crotch, waist hiding under a sagging pair of breeches, with a padded codpiece bulging from the centre. Revolting thing. She gropes for her knife, thinking to cut it off, but something makes her pause. Her upper body is wrapped in her old doublet, and Bartolomeo’s bigger doublet sits squarely across her shoulders, widening them. The handle of a long, naked dagger, smeared with mud and leaf mould, juts from the belt cinched too snugly around her waist. Above, there is the disaster of her face and the hideous remains of her hair. It isn’t a girl reflected in the water, what she sees there is a stranger. A stranger in every possible way.