by Philip Kazan
Every way, though? Not quite. As she stares at the distorted contours of her face she begins to see other faces appear and vanish. Her brother Bartolomeo, when he was younger, softer in the chin and cheeks; when he was plump and unbearably superior, and she called him Cardinal Piglet, because it made him cross. Someone from longer ago, too: the dimly remembered eyes and nose of the first one to die. Tommaso. Her dead brothers rise below the surface of her own skin like the faces of drowned boys drifting under milky water, reaching for the light and sinking down again into the forgetful dark.
Bartolomeo had never come here. Or perhaps he had, but not with Onoria. Yet now she remembers something he once told her: This is Santa Celava’s spring. The legends of Pietrodoro had got it wrong: the ancient hermit had lived in these woods, not on the crag, and she’d drunk from this spring. Grandfather had told him about it: how, when he’d been a boy, unimaginably long ago, old village women remembered when the village had made a yearly procession here, and how their mothers had come to the spring to ask for Celava’s help in finding things they had lost – mostly lovers, Bartolomeo added, with a judgemental sniff.
‘But I’m lost!’ Onoria blurts, in the hiss that seems to be her new voice. She squeezes her eyes shut, so tightly that red and purple lights flash across the blackness. The praying space, where Our Lady comes to listen sometimes, and God too, and always little Celava. Now there is no answer, except for a squirrel or a jay rustling far above her in the chestnut trees. ‘Celava, dear one, it’s me who’s lost!’ She opens her eyes and sees the filthy little boy-girl still looking up at her. Hardly a girl at all. A ragged, damaged, filthy boy. She understands. Santa Celava always finds hidden things. The saint’s message is so hard, so painful, that she has to fight not to be sick again. But when she stands and limps away into the wood, she understands.
Onoria wanders through the woods all day, angling across the steep slopes, steering away from Pietrodoro, whose smoke is still rising like the gnomon of a sundial behind her. She isn’t hungry – at least, her head doesn’t want food, but her body is starting to grow impatient. Close to sunset she sees a family of rabbits in a glade and shoots one of them with her bow. When she picks up the limp creature, though, and feels the warmth of its life leaking out through her fingers, she feels like a murderer. Worse, she has no idea what to do with it. She doesn’t have any means to make a fire and doesn’t know any of the tricks with sticks and leaves that boys are always boasting about but never seem to actually do. So she tucks the little corpse under some roots and stumbles on. It is getting dark, and Monte Amiata’s wolves will be waking up. When it is too dark to find her way, she scrambles up into the crown of a fallen chestnut and props herself against its lattice of dead branches.
Wolves. When they begin to howl, they’re much closer than Onoria has ever heard them. The forest is alive with alien sounds. Something large grunts and snuffles for a long time beneath her tree. She is too frightened to sleep, but when the short night is over she is glad, because she knows she has at least been spared the dreams she might have had. She climbs down, feeling as stiff and crooked as she imagines the old ladies of Pietrodoro must be, and carries on her slow, limping way. In the east, the sky is clear. Her home must be cold ashes now.
She soon forgets how long she has been walking and sleeping, walking and sleeping. She drinks from springs and eats the only thing she recognises: unripe chestnuts, which fur up her mouth with bitter juice after their spiky shells have pricked her fingers. At some point, around noon (but on what day?) she wanders into a long-abandoned garden: four walls surrounding a thicket of trees heavy with fruit. Figs, apricots, apples, pomegranates, even some misshapen citron. Behind it, a small ruined hut. A snake, one of the fat, striped vipers that live on the mountain, is guarding the door in the wall, but as Onoria stoops to pick up a stone she sees that it is only the sloughed-off skin of the creature, still fresh and colourful. She steps past into the small enclosed space, which is alive with wasps gorging on the spoiling fruit. She ignores them, lurching from tree to tree, swatting the insects away and feasting blindly like a bear. There is a small roofed space in the ruin, and she huddles on a stone table, curls up around her full belly and goes to sleep. When she wakes again it is almost dark and she discovers that she has been asleep on an altar. The building is an abandoned hermitage. That makes her feel safe, and she goes to sleep again. In the thin light before dawn she opens her eyes to the scrabbling of a gecko in the rafters above her head. The pallid creature is stuffing a huge white moth into its wide mouth with its strangely human thumbs. She laughs, because the sight is so ridiculous, and finds that her throat is not quite so sore. This would be a good place to live, this little ruin. Plenty of fruit, a wall to keep out the wolves. Could she stay here? But when she considers, she decides she doesn’t want to. As she has wandered, she has only felt two things properly: fear and anger. Onoria doesn’t know where she is, but she does know that she can’t be far enough away from Pietrodoro and the Ellebori to be safe. She has only been out of sight of Pietrodoro twice (she doesn’t count Pienza or San Casciano, because you can sort of see the village from there). Her mother has relations in Orvieto, but she doesn’t remember who they are and she thinks they might be dead; Viterbo was grey and depressing. As she lies there, watching the gecko eating the moth as if it were a tiny unplucked chicken, she decides she has to go somewhere. The only places she can think of are Florence and Rome, so she makes up her mind: Florence, because her family came from there, a long time ago. Maybe she’ll find some Ormanis there. Maybe they’ll look after her.
Because – and the idea shocks her, sending a strange heat through her veins – she wants to stay alive. She wants to become strong and fierce. She wants to … Onoria rolls over and feels the knife against her hip. She looks down at her body, the gangly limbs, the dirty male clothes. Santa Celava showed her, back by the spring. She has lost herself, yes; left Onoria Ormani behind in her bedroom in Pietrodoro, but that was just her old skin, sloughed off like that snake outside. There must be a new creature underneath, because – she sees it clearly now – that was what the saint was trying to tell her. A new Onoria, as strong and supple as a viper. And as dangerous.
She takes off her jacket, knots it into a sack and fills it with fruit. Sunrise finds her at the edge of the forest. In front of her, a short slope falls towards open country, golden, rolling, stitched with tree-lined paths and stippled with vineyards and olive groves.
CHAPTER NINE
The first thing she steals is fire. Making her way as carefully as she can along a narrow, overgrown valley that snakes outwards from the skirts of the mountain, she eventually comes across a little hamlet of houses clustered so close together that they are more or less one building. A little off to the side is a hut from which puffs of dark smoke are rising, and the clang of metal striking metal. A smithy. She runs over to a patch of reeds and pushes her way into it. After a long time has gone by, the hammering stops, and a large man in a sweat-soaked tunic stumps out and, swearing loud enough for her to hear, goes over to a ditch that runs between the smithy and the hamlet. He turns his back and begins to fish inside his breeches. Without hesitation, she slips out of the reeds, sprints over to the smithy and darts inside, her heart banging in her ears like fireworks. Her eyes flick desperately around the small, cramped space: the furnace, against one wall; a huge pair of tattered bellows folded like a giant sleeping bat; the stump of an oak tree in the middle of the floor with an iron anvil set into the top; hammer; tongs of all sizes. She knows what she wants. She knows … For a horrible moment she forgets. And then she remembers. There, by the furnace: a wooden box filled with shards of flint. She runs over, scoops out three sharp flakes. The other thing she needs is everywhere. Flakes and lumps of raw metal. Bars and ingots. Nails … She grabs a big iron nail, drops it and the flints into the quiver, where they rattle down through the arrows. There is a gourd with a string tied around its neck on the ground near the furnace. She picks it up. The
n she sees something else: half a loaf of greyish bread and a hunk of cheese. Her stomach leaps with yearning and she is reaching for it when she hears a paroxysm of coughing just outside. She turns and runs. A figure, no more than a shadow, yells in profane surprise. Her arm brushes against damp cloth and firmer flesh. Horror floods through her. When she stops running, she is in an olive grove, and the hamlet is no more than a blur in the distance. Her chest is heaving, and the inside of her throat feels as if it has been raked with a carding comb. She climbs up through the grove’s gentle terraces, and at the top she finds a family of rabbits grazing a patch of thyme. She shoots the biggest cleanly through the chest and carries it down to where, on the other side of the ridge, a fold of rock has gathered a small stand of cypress trees into itself, forming a perfect shelter. She makes a pile of dry twigs and curls of cypress bark, and fishes her stolen prizes from the bottom of the quiver. She has never had her own tinderbox, but she has watched people use them many times. Even so, she is delighted when she knocks the flint against the nail and produces a shower of sparks. She does it again, and again, and then threads of smoke begin to rise from red points of light in the bark. With a sudden whoosh! the pile of twigs is alight.
She laughs aloud. It is the first time she has felt pleasure since … No. She won’t allow it, and lets the wet, revolting business that needs to be done with her knife and the dead rabbit drive the feelings out. But as she works, she can’t help remembering. Hunting with Federigo … She won’t allow that either. But she can see Giacomo in the kitchen, paunching the rabbits and hares she brought him. His mocking laugh the first time he ribbed a hare out of its skin ‘like this!’ – mocking, but kind. He’d given her a sip of wine to settle her stomach, then shown her how to stuff the empty body with herbs and salt, spices and pepper, thread it onto a spit. The herbs she gathers – rosemary, thyme and some pungent mint – just fall out again, but she sharpens a straight stick anyway, pushes it through the limp, pink thing and props it on some stones over the fire. The smell of searing meat is unbearably good.
Onoria will wonder, later, whether the stolen fire and the roasting meat had forced her mind back to the burning palazzo. But that evening under the cypress trees, it doesn’t. Or perhaps she is just too hungry to think of anything at all. When the rabbit is blistered brown-black all over she rips it to pieces, burning her fingers in the process, and tears every scrap of meat from the bones with her teeth. Her throat is still so raw that she has to chew the meat to pulp before she can swallow it, and her jaws are aching by the time she has finished. The gourd, which she had almost forgotten about, is empty and smells of stale spit, so in the failing light she makes her way down the hill to where a line of reeds tells her water must be running. She is right: there is a tiny stream filled with watercress where she washes and fills the gourd before climbing back to her shelter, where she stretches out beside the warm ashes of her fire and watches the Milky Way begin to drift like smoke across the sky.
That was the first day away from the mountain. By the third day, she is lost. At least this is what she tells herself, as if this is something new, as though she once knew where she was going. Florence. She is heading for Florence, where the Ormanis had once been a rich and splendid family, and which is somewhere to the north, between the rising and the setting sun. Florence is a great city. If she just keeps going north, she’s bound to just bump into it eventually. But by now she’s had to leave the last of the hills that spill out from the edges of Monte Amiata like bristly piglets keeping close to their mother. The country she finds herself in is a gently undulating patchwork of fields burnt almost white by the sun. She can see the few settlements there are from a long way off and takes a long detour around each one. There are some hills a long way in front of her. There are rabbits and partridge and long-legged bustards to hunt. When she shoots and cooks a bustard, there is enough meat left over for her to wrap in fig leaves and take for tomorrow’s lunch. She walks, hunts, eats, sleeps – though her nights are feverish and hateful dreams wake her again and again. She can feel Augusto Ellebori’s crushing weight on her, his scrabbling fingernails, the awful sensation of choking. Every morning feels like a deliverance from evil. She walks, telling herself she is well, that she is free, walks until she has to eat, until her body gives her no choice but to revisit the hell of sleep.
She keeps to the flatlands. A wide valley seems to be leading her northwards, and that, she thinks, must be a good omen. More than once she has to wade across the shallow river that meanders across the valley floor. She creeps past a couple of small villages at dusk, nondescript places that are nothing like Pietrodoro. Halfway through one of these days it starts to rain, a light, warm drizzle at first, then a deluge. There is nowhere to shelter, so she makes sure her bowstring is tucked safely inside her breeches where it will be more or less dry, and trudges on.
The rain doesn’t stop. The rabbits are all in their burrows. She loses an arrow shooting at a pigeon, and by nightfall she is hungry, cold and soaked. She crawls under an abandoned cart that is sinking into the earth in a corner of an overgrown vineyard, finding a little respite beneath the rotting wood and rusting iron, but the next morning the rain is still coming down in thick pleats. She wakes up cold and trembling, and the chill only deepens as she begins to walk. She isn’t in a valley any more: around her stretches a rolling plain of fields under sodden corn or freshly ploughed, a vineyard here and there, and lines of poplars and willows to mark a river or ditch. Everything is grey and dead brown. She finds a half-sunken track that seems to be going in the right direction, puts her head down and begins to walk.
It might be midday; it might be almost dusk. She’s been limping along for hours, her shoes completely sodden, wet leather raising blisters on her skin. The air is muggy, and she is sweating inside her clothes, though she still feels cold. Her stomach is rumbling. ‘Plenty to drink,’ she says aloud to herself, because it sounds like the kind of thing people could say at times like this. But she doesn’t really know if that’s true. She is so far outside her own experience that she feels completely raw, like a skinned rabbit. She is so hungry. ‘I’m starving’ was something she said all the time when her mother was there to listen, when Giacomo had been ready to cook something for her. But now the words feel different. They describe something real, something frightening. After she has stumbled and landed on her knees in a puddle for the fourth or fifth time, she notices that her legs and hands are shaking. She must find something to eat, but what? Even if she shoots a bird or a rabbit, she won’t be able to cook it. Then she’ll have to steal, she tells herself. But when she scrambles out of the track, which has become more of a culvert, there are no houses to be seen through the heavy mist that is lying across the plain. The valley seems to have narrowed. There are soft, cypress-spiked hills on either side of her, nothing but faint, velvety grey silhouettes. Closer to hand, chalky outcrops rise to her left, and on her right, a spinney of holm oaks. At least there she’ll be dry, she thinks. She might be able to start a fire. She starts towards it, but the mist and the thin, wet light has deceived her. The spinney is on rising ground, further away than she thought. The freshly ploughed field she is crossing sucks at her feet. By the time she gets to the far side, her shoes are encased in two globes of clay, as heavy as lead. It takes what seems like hours to knock them free against a stone. When she looks up, though, she sees, crossing the next field, a small group of bustards. They stalk and stop, bend and peck, their feathers silver with water. Her numb fingers fumble for the bowstring, which is miraculously still not wet, and strings her bow. There is a low hedge along one side of the field, and she crouches and makes her way over to it. Hidden by its screen of bushes, she creeps along, planning to outflank the birds. They are quicker than they look, though. Peeping through a laurel bush, arrow nocked to her bowstring, she finds that they are already beyond the ploughed land and climbing the slope of the nearest hill. She moans with annoyance, but there is something else there in her chest: fear, as if h
er heart were being patted by a cat with only half-sheathed claws. She closes her eyes and says a prayer to Santa Celava, then starts to wade through the wet grass and bracken towards the birds. They bob here and there, stopping and starting. She’s almost close enough … The biggest bustard pecks, looks about him. Onoria begins to draw back the arrow. Then he nods his head and stalks away. Suddenly he’s gone. There is a fold, a wrinkle in the land before it rises smoothly again towards the blurred horizon. A curse, a proper oath, the kind her father used when he thought she wasn’t around to hear, rises in her throat. She runs along the hedge, which stops abruptly at the lip of a shallow gully. Thick scrub hides the northern end. The stand of holm oaks is less than a quarter of a mile away. The bustards are browsing contentedly amongst some thorny shrubs. She slithers down the slope on her bottom and hunkers down behind a mastic bush. Down here, she finds she is underneath the mist, which hangs above her like a hazy ceiling. Hoping her bowstring hasn’t got too wet, she aims at the nearest bird, draws, murmurs Santa Celava’s name and lets her arrow go. There is an almost human cry and a whirl of feathers. The bustards take off all at once, but one of them is still on the ground, long legs twitching, Onoria’s arrow skewering it through the middle. She runs over. The bustard claps its beak once, twice, then its eyes go dull. She pulls out the arrow; bending down, she wipes it clean of blood on the grass, and drops it into the quiver. The only thing she can think about is the taste of roasted meat. The shelter of the holm oaks is just ahead. The trees are thick so the ground will surely be dry. She picks the bustard up by its curled, sharp-clawed feet.