Beneath Ceaseless Skies #167

by Bruce McAllister

  At this the father choked and the bread flew at last from his mouth. His hand, horrified by what his mouth had done, reached out wildly to grab the piece in midair but had no luck. The morsel of bread fell to the floor not far from my left foot, and there it lay until Stappo, wondering at the silliness of humans, found it and ate it.

  “Emilio is the emissary,” she went on, “we have heard rumors of, even as we have heard rumors of the Drinkers of Blood and chosen foolishly not to believe them. His light healed my father, and that he carries such light is evidence not only that he is emissary, but that the rumors are true: the Drinkers do exist. They have, as we have heard, taken Rome, turning five hundreds priests in the Holy City to their immortal devices. And the hideous figures of the night that those priests have become now travel throughout Christendom to bring about its fall as well.”

  The priest was nodding. His kneeling had become awkward for everyone. I stepped to him and offered him a hand. He hesitated, staring at my hand.

  “It will not burn you,” I said.

  He took it, rose and, with a tremble in his voice, said: “Thank you for blessing us with your presence, Emissary.”

  The girls’ father was up, too, and was trying to speak. “Caterina. What is happening here? “

  “Father,” she answered lovingly but firmly. “You will tell no one in the Nicchio what you have heard and seen and heard in these rooms. I wished you to know the truth, so that you might join me in giving thanks to the one who returned your life to you and you to me.”

  “But you are the Madonna!”

  “I do not know who I am, Father; and if I do not, no one does.” She paused, then looked at me. “Except perhaps the Emissary....”

  I thought that Bonifacio might frown, feeling slighted, but he did not. He simply stared at her.

  “We have a race to race today,” she said, “and I must leave soon for the Piazza. I have asked Father Salemi to come here this morning to meet you both. It is important for reasons that will become clear. He will also lead you to the Piazza at the right time, so that you do not get lost.”

  Again, her tone was matter-of-fact, but beyond it, as always, something else whispered too. Something not at all matter-of-fact. Something immense and important.

  Feeling like children, Bonifacio and I nodded and said, “Of course.”

  * * *

  The Piazza di Campo was pure madness. Whether those present were inebriated or merely enthusiastic mattered not, for either of those taken to an extreme produced madness. I had seen this at the Carnevale in Viarreggio, south of our village, on the two occasions my mother had taken me there: men and women pummeling each other with leather batons. Whether it was passion or wine or both that numbed their pain had not been clear to me. In their madness they had laughed, kissed, grabbed, fondled, slapped, pummeled, bled, and then laughed even more.

  But there was something especially insane about the Palio. While the richest of the city readied themselves to watch the race from windows high in the buildings around the piazza, the rest were packed like over-heated cattle into its center, the race course a circle of empty earth around them. The poor were elbow-to-elbow with no room to stretch and only stale air to breathe. How the crowd resisted panic, I did not know, but I was starting to panic myself just looking at them from where we stood by the track. Bonifacio looked even worse. We had somehow made our way through the crowd at the piazza’s center and were now pressed against the wooden barriers that kept the revelers from the course.

  Perhaps if this were your city—if you had grown up here and in your father’s arms had watched every race from the year you were born—if the Madonna of Provenzano, for whom this race was always run, was your Madonna—the insanity of the crowd would not feel insane but instead beautiful?

  “Are you going to faint, Bonifacio?”

  “I am not sure, Emissary,” Bonifacio called over the din of the crowd, looking somewhat green of face. “I have not been in such circumstances before.”

  “Nor have I.”

  “Perhaps it is the Sienese. It is in their blood and they love living like this. Perhaps they all sleep together as children in little apartments, and Siena is one great family to them and they prefer this to vast, empty piazze with endless elbowroom. Perhaps they even die of loneliness in piazzas where is too much—”

  “You are starting to babble, Bonifacio.”

  “Yes, but, if I speak, there is less chance I will faint.”

  “Then please speak. I would hate to have to—”

  A bell sounded from the great tower. Bonifacio and I jumped, but the noise had absolutely no effect on anyone around us. These simply continued with their yelling, their affectionate or ill-tempered insults, their bad breath and belches, and, of course, their wagers. “Twenty on Draco because I love you, cugino!” “Tartaruga wins or your children will be born with horns. Fifty on Tartaruga!” “Thirty on il Nicchio! The Madonna will deliver!” “Eighteen to your thirty—the Madonna wants speed, not a porker!”

  And then the horses tore by the barrier beside us in a cloud of red dust, bright contrada colors and little clubs with which the riders beat each other with determination.

  “Did you see her?” I asked.

  “I saw one long horse with forty-eight legs and twelve riders.”

  “They will spread out more, will they not?”

  “Perhaps, but the race is only three laps. We only have two more chances to see her.”

  Before the horses could circle the course again, we heard a cry go up from the crowd. Something had happened.

  The crowd, I could see, was breaking through the low wooden barriers at the other end of the piazza.

  As I stood there, I sensed it was Caterina the cries were about. A strange light was filling the piazza, one the crowd seemed not to notice.

  I squinted at it—the light. I did not know at first what was making it, but then I saw it.

  Where the light was brightest, a figure hovered in the air high above the crowd.

  Even at this distance, I recognized the figure. I had seen her in Caterina’s apartment, confusing her with Caterina herself, but had assumed she was but imagination.

  As she drifted closer, she looked at me in silence, and I could see her face—the moon of it, her hair beautiful, a halo for that moon. She was dressed in the finest gown, white and the palest blue and the yellow of the smallest flowers on the hills above my village in spring.

  “Do you see her now, Bonifacio?” I asked, barely able to speak.

  Bonifacio looked around. “Who, Emissary?”

  “Her. Over there.” I pointed above the crowd to the exact place where she floated.

  “Now you are babbling, my friend. Do you feel faint?”

  I ignored him. I started pushing my way toward the commotion. My legs wanted to run, but the bodies around me would not let them. All I could do was push and keep pushing.

  “Bonifacio,” I called back. “Caterina has been hurt! The Madonna has come for her!”

  As I pushed, the figure floated near me. It did not leave.

  * * *

  When I reached the far barrier, which the crowd had easily toppled, I scrambled over it and was on the race course itself now, earth not cobbles.

  The figure floated above me. It had been my guide.

  I looked around, coughing from the dust, and there, in front of me, was what I had most feared.

  Caterina was lying on the earth unmoving, as if asleep. Her horse was upright, apparently uninjured, its muzzle lowered to her, pushing at her shoulder, trying to get her to rise.

  I felt more fear than I could bear. Do not take her from us, Nostra Signora—from her contrada—from her father and her people—from Bonifacio and me—please!

  I looked up and the light was gone. The figure was gone.

  I looked down at Caterina again and saw what I’d somehow known I would see: A wound on her head, the blood seeping into the earth as if the soil were a rag.

  This
was why Caterina had wanted me to be here.

  This was why she had insisted.

  She had known this would happen, but why had she not stopped it? She was the incarnation of our Lady, was she not?

  She wanted you to be here with her when she died, but why?

  When I knelt by her side, no one tried to stop me. Those standing on the track simply stared. She was still a boy to them. Clothes and cap and hair of a boy. The boy who had won two races for the Nicchio.

  The Madonna was there again, hovering high above us, waiting, and that could mean only one thing: That I needed to tell Caterina goodbye.

  I could hear footsteps running toward us, but they were not important. I sat down beside her, leaned over her, moved her shoulders so that I could put her head gently in my lap, held her head with both of my hands, and whispered to her, “Thank you for being who you are, Caterina. For being in my life even if briefly.”

  “No!” a voice whispered hoarsely.

  In astonishment I watched as one of Caterina’s eyes, the one that was not so bloody, opened, and she whispered again:

  “It is not time...”

  I nodded, wondering whether I had fainted and was dreaming, or we were both dead and in another world. Someone with a wound like hers could not be speaking, could not be thinking so clearly.

  The footsteps were louder now, voices with them, and Bonifacio knelt beside me.

  “We must give her rites,” he was saying.

  “No.”

  “What do you mean ‘No’? She is dying if not already dead!”

  “Help me carry her,” I said to him, to give him something to do, to calm his frantic hands, to keep the Latin she did not want from his lips. But then others arrived, and they were the civil guards of the Nicchio contrada. It was their arms that began to lift her up and away.

  “No one can live with a wound like that,” one man said.

  I wanted to argue, but how could I?

  * * *

  As the men carried her back to the contrada, I stayed by her side, and Bonifacio stayed by mine. Father Salemi was with us, too, hurrying beside the guards.

  “Why isn’t Father Salemi giving the rites to her, Emilio?”

  “I do not know, Bonifacio.”

  “Please do not let her die without them, Emissary.”

  I could not find words with which to answer.

  * * *

  At the apartment the guards rushed the girl to her father’s room. The priest was shouting, “Here, here! Put her here!” When the men obeyed, placing her on the floor where her father had lain so recently, the priest shouted, “Now leave! Please!” The men stepped back, blinking, and confused.

  “Leave!” the priest insisted.

  Now he will try to give her the rites. I must stop him!

  But the priest did not kneel beside her. No Latin came from his lips.

  Caterina’s father was there now, standing behind Bonifacio and me. Without a word he stepped to Father Salemi’s side. Both of them just stood there looking at me, waiting.

  “Father, please!” Bonifacio cried out. “If you do not give her last rites, I will have to.”

  “It is too late for that,” the priest said. “She died in the piazza before I could reach her—even before you could reach her, Your Holiness.”

  I thought I might be sick there on the floor. How could she have been dead on the track? I had heard her voice.

  “Bring her back to us,” the priest said to me then.

  “Yes, Emissary. Return her to us,” her father said.

  I stared at them both. If the Madonna could not bring her back to life, how could I? How could the spirit of La Compassione, if the Madonna could not? This was not a Drinker that only needed to be filled with fear. This was not a father ill and dying on the floor. This was a girl, a wonderful girl, and she was dead, her flesh already returning to the earth.

  Even Bonifacio was looking at me, waiting.

  “I cannot,” I said. “The Madonna will come for her. She will take Caterina’s soul to a life beyond....”

  The priest said: “No, the Madonna will not. That is not why the Madonna was here, Emissary. Caterina foretold all of this.”

  Then a voice—one without lips or throat or words—said:

  Bring me back, Emissary.

  I started to shake. I thought I would fall to the floor.

  Bring me back, Emissary, the voice said again, and it was Caterina’s voice, and a woman’s too. Only you can do what must be done today. It is the only way you will become the instrument of La Compassione the world needs you to be.

  At her words, though for a moment I refused them, my body began to change. My rash became a fire, just as it had with the girl’s father, but now my arms began to glow like coals as room brightened like the sun.

  I stepped to Caterina’s body, knelt down, placed my right hand upon her brow, and saw that my hand was no longer a hand but something else, something a creature might need to swim with—and something of fire that could both give life and take it away, as it would soon on the blood-washed shores of a distant lake.

  Caterina’s face became the Madonna’s, and then a girl’s again, because they were indeed the same. There was no blood now on her head because tears—or the waters of a great lake—had washed it away, so that her flesh might heal. The boy inside me was crying, of course, but that meant nothing. Mortals weep in the face of Truth, its beauty and the grace it is.

  * * *

  When I opened my eyes, I was still kneeling, the light was gone, my rash no longer hurt, my cheeks were still wet from mortal tears.

  Caterina was different. There was no blood on her. The wound by her eye was gone, the gash in her skull had smoothed over, and her skin was perfect once more. And she was sleeping.

  I stood up and looked from Bonifacio to the priest to the father. Their faces looked as exhausted as those of soldiers after a battle. What they had seen while I had dreamed a dream I could not remember, I did not know.

  * * *

  “The story is complete,” the priest said.

  I did not know what he meant, but then I did: The story Caterina had first told us, the odd lie about her brother. How he had died from a terrible head injury in a race two years ago and how she, disguised as a boy, had taken his place because she was a good rider, too.

  “She knew this day would come,” I said.

  “Yes, Emissary. And so it has happened, and now the people of Siena will believe her brother died, just as she told you he did, and in a race, while the sister will now run off with a boy for the sake of love.”

  “But the people of the Nicchio will know,” I said.

  “They will know only that she was brought back from death. They will assume it was by the grace of the Madonna, out of love for her daughter. Which is as it should be, Emissary, if your presence here is to be kept a secret, and you are to continue your journey.” The priest paused. “It is also, as you might imagine, a gift to this contrada—to any contrada in this city—for it to believe that the Madonna performed such a miracle for those who love her.”

  “We are all instruments of La Compassione, Father,” I found myself saying. “The Madonna was present, overseeing it all, I assure you. I saw her at the campo. She led me to Caterina. I think I saw her in this room as well....”

  The priest bowed his head. “Of course.”

  We watched Caterina struggle up on one elbow. She was not in pain. She was smiling, as if amused, and she was looking at me. I blushed.

  “What will you do now, Caterina?” Bonifacio asked, seeing my reddening face.

  “I will travel, as a boy, with you and Emilio to Assisi,” Caterina answered, and in that tone we had heard before—one that said no argument would be tolerated. “That is where you must travel next, Emissary, if you are to elude those who seek your capture.”

  “You have seen it?” I asked.

  “I have.”

  I was no longer surprised.

  “This was your
plan all along,” I said.

  “Yes, Emilio. To make of our story the great circle it should be.”

  “But what will the Nicchio do now? Who will ride for them?”

  The priest answered for her. “There is a boy, Iacopo, who is blessed by the Madonna. You can see it in his eyes. He was too young to race three years ago when Caterina began riding for us. He is old enough now, and he is gifted. It is his time...or so the Madonna told me in a dream a year ago.”

  “He will win next year,” Caterina said quietly. “He will win for four years,” she went on, “and then another young man will begin to ride for the Nicchio. He will be tall and loud, but a good rider, and he will dream of the Madonna every night, as we all do in Siena, whether we know it or not....”

  I could only stare.

  * * *

  When we parted Siena the next morning, the road to Assisi was packed with travelers, many of them bleary-eyed and uncoordinated in their steps from the previous night’s carousing, and more than a few quite irritable about the work they needed to resume in the grain fields and mills and vineyards. As a consequence, few were in any condition to pay attention to our little troupe—three boys and a dog—pretty as one boy was, pink-cheeked as another, and rash-decorated as the third.

  Just before Montepulciano we heard the hooves of horses, and a group of fifteen soldiers road by. Whether they were looking for Bonifacio and me, there was no way to know. Later, in Cittapieve, and after stopping to eat and drink, thanks to the florins that remained in my pouch, we found ourselves exposed in front of a church as another complement of soldiers road by; but, again, we were not noticed. Was La Compassione watching over us, or was it simply not our time?

  Assisi lay before us—Caterina had seen it—but what lay beyond Assisi’s pink-marble face remained a journey of fog and doubt whose footsteps we could not see even as they took us inexorably to the shores of a distant lake and the future of the world.

  Copyright © 2015 Bruce McAllister

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  Bruce McAllister’s science fiction and fantasy stories have appeared over the years in the field’s major magazines and many “year’s best” volumes (like Best American Short Stories 2007, Stephen King ed.). His short story “Kin” was a finalist for the Hugo Award; his novelette “Dream Baby” was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards; his novelette “The Crying Child” was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. He is the author of three novels: Humanity Prime, a chronicle of humanity on a water planet in the far future; Dream Baby, an ESP-in-war tale; and 2013’s The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic. His short stories have been collected in the career-spanning The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories. He lives in Orange County, California, with his wife, choreographer Amelie Hunter, and works as a writer, writing coach, and book and screenplay consultant.