‘Buongiorno,’ he said.
The horse calmed at once, snorted, nibbled his collar. Riccardo felt the breath, sweet with hay, on his cheek. He wanted to rest his head on the black silken cheek and close his eyes.
He needed to come to ground, to blinker his own view. He needed to block the unwelcome sights from his mind’s eye: the events of last evening, his night in the palace, the map, the revelation of the Nine and, overlaying it all, the image of the Panther, decomposing, arms spread, in the Piazza. He thought of the duchess and her kind eyes, of how she had rescued him, of her concern that the Panther should be buried with all rites. But he also understood why she had to leave the body where it lay. He understood, but he was sick to his guts.
To help his father, that was the thing. To shrink the world into a circle, to the earthbound round that was the horse’s shoe. To do something essentially Sienese, with a man who, like him, was also Sienese, born and bred here. To forget about the duchess and what he had promised her.
He thought, now and again through the morning, of the beauteous Pia, of her long luxuriant hair as black as this horse’s cheek, of how it would look tumbled across a pillow. When he’d told the duchess they needed help, he’d thought of Pia, of how she’d looked at the feast, of how he’d seen her eyes as fearful as this yearling’s. He’d thought of saying her name out loud to the duchess, claiming that Pia would help. She would like, he knew, to walk in peace, to raise her children – even if they were Nello’s – without the threat of the blood eagle.
But he had stopped his tongue. He had seen Nello’s freezing gaze when her smile had fallen upon Riccardo, and he did not want to compound Pia’s troubles. Nello was a man who could talk of the Palio one instant, and the next drag a ruined body into the night, to grow warm with the dawn and reveal itself to the city stinking in the full glare of the sun. He whispered all this to the horse, into the warm twitching ear that flicked past his nose like a black feather. Yes, I’m listening.
Riccardo’s morning pleased him – the simple rhythm of the hammer, the burning smell of the pared hoof. His father’s familiar homilies fell from his lips on to the cobbles like horseshoe nails.
‘No shoe, no horse.’
‘A horse runs on one toe … ’Tis as if we walk on tiptoe or balance on a single finger.’
‘The foot, the hoof is all.’
Riccardo smiled at his father, glad that the old man’s spirits were lifting with the approach of the next Palio, in a little more than a month. Domenico talked on, expecting no reply, getting none. He talked of this horse, of others, of the trials run out in the nearby Maremma, of likely fantini, unlikely winners.
Zebra crept forward off his block, closer and closer, to watch the shoeing. In a city obsessed with horses, Domenico Bruni was a shaman or an alchemist, possessing knowledge that could heal a lame horse, or craft special shoes to correct an uneven stride. He could work magic, and on most days strangers would gather at the forge, to ask advice about feed, or tack, or bedding. Every day Zebra would hang around, helping and hindering all at once, hoping one day to know a fraction of what Domenico knew.
Like most men, Domenico was happy to talk of the subject he loved and, kindly man that he was, began to talk to Zebra, the boy’s answers muffled by the rags up his nose. Riccardo, communing with the yearling, heard his father’s gruff voice teaching the boy exactly the same things he’d been told as a child: the anatomy of a hoof, the topography, the little hills and valleys, the names and terms that were the longitudes and latitudes of his father’s world. The sight of the old man and the little boy bent over a hoof took Riccardo back to his own education, the only schooling he had ever had. Zebra, rapt, was almost bent double, peering close, fascinated. Domenico was thrilled to have a pupil.
‘The hoof is like a castle, or a citadel. On the outside there are very strong walls, and the hoof is the same. This dark layer on the very outside is the wall, it is hard and brittle. The walls are a protective shield for the softer hoof within; they are very tough, and gather the impact of the hoofbeats and spread it evenly.’
He moved his pick inwards to the concentric lines of the hoof.
‘Here’s the water line, just inside the walls, like a moat. It is very resistant – it carries the force of the strikes upon the ground and supports the outer wall.
‘The white line is the inner layer of the wall. It’s this yellowish ring, see? This is like the grass-filled motte of a castle. It is spongier so it wears faster than the hard walls and actually goes in a bit; see, it is a groove, and look – it has got sand and grit inside.
‘When a horseshoe is applied, it is fixed to the wall. Nails are driven in, oblique to the walls. Watch me. You bang them in here through the outside edge of the white line and they come out at the wall’s surface.’
Domenico grasped the foreleg firmly between his knees and began to hammer. Riccardo steadily kept up his stream of talk, crooning to the horse, gently pulling its ears. The horse stood stock-still.
‘Does it hurt?’ asked Zebra, as the hammer struck sparks from the iron shoe.
‘Does it hurt to bite your fingernails?’ countered Domenico. ‘No. Not unless you bite them to the quick. ’Tis the same here. For that is all this hoof is – like a fingernail. If you drive the nails into the walls correctly a horse won’t feel a thing.
‘Now, inside the walls we have the thirds of the hoof. The frog is the dark island in the middle, like the bailey or the keep of the castle. It is this heart-shape – see? It is squashy and gives to the touch – it absorbs the shock of the hoof striking the ground. If the hoof is the fingernail, this is the fingertip.’
Domenico dropped the hoof with a clang, took Zebra’s hand and pushed one of the child’s little fleshy pads with his heavy hardened fingertip. Riccardo remembered how his father had taken his own hand at the same age and pressed their fingers together. Domenico bent again and took up the next hoof.
‘And see – this is the sole. It is soft in shod horses because it never touches the ground. It is crumbly too, like ciabatta, and you can scratch it out with a hoofpick – see?’
He suited the action to the words and Zebra watched, fascinated, as the soft flesh crumbled away to the ground like the sand in an hourglass.
Domenico shifted around, to move his shadow from the heel of the hoof.
‘And here is the final third – the castle gateway, at the back here. It is called the bars – like a portcullis. They are inward folds of the wall at the heel of the hoof. And above it all,’ he finished, ‘just like in a castle, there is a crown at the top: the coronet. This is the crown of the hoof.’
Domenico’s gnarled finger circled the glossy hoof, indicating the coronet, his lesson done.
It was suddenly borne in upon Riccardo that his father’s life was bounded in a horseshoe: the grand amphitheatre of the Piazza del Campo and the smaller, horned foot of the animals that raced there. His world was no greater than that. It struck him too, with the singing clarity of the hammer blow, that the hoof was the map he had seen that morning in the palace: Siena with her boundary walls and her regional thirds. For a moment the revelation seemed hugely significant, a key to unlock the future of the city. He did not know quite what to do with the concept, so he recounted all of it to the horse, which nodded sagely. Riccardo was jolted from his warm, golden Sienese reverie by his father’s voice as the fourth foot was placed, ringing, on the floor.
‘Now, that’s enough schooling, Zebra. Get you to the fountain for me – fill this bucket.’
Riccardo was so drowsy that for a moment he did not register what his father had said. Slowly, the significance of the command penetrated. Domenico had sent Zebra for water from the Piazza del Campo, from the fountain where the Panther’s carrion rotted as the sun rose high.
He dropped the horse’s head and ran, not heeding his father’s shout. Zebra was swift and as the great square opened out before him he saw the boy ahead of him, running to the well, under the shadow of the pa
lace and the great tower, swinging his bucket. Before he could stop him, Zebra had pushed his way through the knot of people by the fountain. Riccardo slowed, defeated. He was too late. He looked up as a black cloud of starlings passed overhead. As the boy’s scream pierced the air, they checked and turned as one, changing direction back to the tower. Riccardo ran to the boy’s side, dropped to his knees and turned Zebra’s head into his shoulder, away from the terrible sight. The constables were here now and a physician whose presence was twelve hours too late. Zebra vomited, suddenly, and Riccardo held the back of his clammy little neck over a drain. He doused his own kerchief in the fountain and wiped the boy’s forehead and mouth. Zebra’s lips were soft, his skin tender. He did not deserve this.
Riccardo realized that all of this morning had been a dream. A dream of Siena not as it was, but as it could be.
As he stood the boy wrapped his arms round his leg, tight, not letting go. Riccardo gently loosened Zebra’s grip. He kneeled again and looked into the boy’s face, a face that would never again see a world that had no evil in it. The face of innocence lost.
Enough.
‘Zebra, do you want to stop this? Do you want us all to live in peace?’
An old woman, a middling one and a young man, the duchess had said. To that, add, a boy. Useless, she might say, but Zebra could go anywhere, was tolerated by all, questioned by none. Zebra nodded and Riccardo knew he was done with holding his tongue.
‘Then help me. Find out when Pia of the Tolomei takes her shrift in the Aquila church.’
8
The Goose
Pia lifted the little bottle that Nello had handed her to the dying light of the pantry window and read the white apothecary’s label. ‘Mullein’: she spelled out the writing inscribed in a neatly inked hand. ‘Birch bark, myrrh, indigo, mulberry, rock alum, black sulphur.’ Above the black characters was a tiny picture of a white goose with an orange beak and a black bead of an eye, and, above him, the green-and-white pennant of the Oca, the Goose contrada.
Pia looked down at her husband, sitting, shirtless; his white hairless flesh and scooped chest luminous in the sunset. ‘What is this?’
Nello took the ribbon from his white hair and shook it free. ‘Dye,’ he said briefly. ‘I did not ask you to question me. I told you to apply the pigment. Begin.’
He dipped his head over the sinkhole of the stone basin. Pia could see the bones of his spine protruding from his pearly skin. She did not know what he intended by dyeing his hair – perhaps he was, at last, tired of his strange colouring; perhaps he had some shred of vanity in his barren soul and wanted to resemble normality in time for the Palio dell’Assunta in August when every eye in the city would be upon him. Whatever his reasons she would not argue. Not after last night.
Wordlessly, she poured water over Nello’s head to wet the hair as directed on the bottle. The water was cold and she had the satisfaction of seeing him flinch. It seemed wrong that his hair was longer than hers. She applied the inky mixture to his scalp, rubbing it in, reluctant even to touch his flesh, until all the white was subsumed under the pitch-dark pigment. The harsh mixture stung her palms as she rinsed the excess away from his head, the black swirling away like a long inky serpent. She imagined the mixture draining and spreading into the bottini aqueducts far below the city, poisoning the waters just as Nello had poisoned this house.
When all was done, she wrapped his head in a cloth, the hair now as dark as her own shorn locks. Nello flung from the pantry without a word of thanks. Pia tried to rinse her palms, washing them over and over again in the stained basin, even applying a tough little pig-bristle brush until her flesh felt raw. But no amount of scrubbing helped: they remained as black as sin.
As the bells tolled three times, Pia of the Tolomei stepped out into the Eagle contrada from her new palace. She had pulled a lace veil high over her head. She might have worn a wig, as older ladies did, but the wounds in her scalp hurt too much, so she covered her shame, assuming that she was now hideous to behold. In this she was quite wrong. Her hair, neatened with the shears, swung in a shining black bell. Her face, under the little cuts and scratches, was still perfection, her extraordinary eyes still undefeated. With her lustrous hair short, the resemblance to Cleopatra was even stronger. In his misguided attempt to blight Pia’s beauty, Nello had given it new potency.
Pia, knowing none of this, quickened her step. She was a little late for shrift. She went without erring through the now-familiar streets. It gave her no pleasure that she had changed one contrada for another and now knew the ways of the Eagle by rote. Back in the Civetta contrada there was a quiet little square called the Piazza Tolomei. She’d always felt safe there; now she wondered if she would ever see it again.
Pia heard Nicoletta, her constant millstone, puffing behind her in the heat and was glad she was in discomfort. For the past two days Pia had taken to going to shrift. The maid could not come with her into the confessional so Pia was able to talk to the priest uninterrupted, or just to sit in peace. Her faith had been shaken by what had befallen her of late. She had no great wish to talk to God and placed more faith in the little heathen coin around her neck, but the chance to escape from her life – even for a quarter of an hour – was too tempting to miss.
She thought of the first Pia, languishing in Dante’s Purgatorio, and envied her the comfortable limbo the poet had constructed, where boredom and sameness and regret were the only ills that could befall her. For this Pia, the purgatory in which she lived was never free from fear. First Nello had shorn her hair, then he had forced her to dye his – her hands were still stained black – and every night she had to contend with the very real fear that he would come to her bed and claim what was his as her husband. At least, as she knew from Faustino’s instruction to the cook, her husband and his father would be away from home tonight at some convocation in the duomo. At least tonight she would be spared.
The contrada was sleepy as the sun reached its height. Most of the Aquileia would be asleep at this time. Pia skirted some children playing on the warm cobbles. Three days ago she would have smiled at them. Three days ago she would have dreamed of what her own children would look like. Now their little limbs and glossy curls hurt her too much and she avoided them as if they were curs. Pia dodged a bucket of slops flung from a doorway, but the filthy water doused Nicoletta, cheering Pia considerably. The maid, cursing, set about the perpetrator’s shoulders with her fan, chasing the goodwife back inside.
There was a minor commotion going on outside the church. A little boy in black and white was engaging an elderly priest in a conversation about the Devil. The boy had seen him, he insisted, in the Piazza del Campo. The Devil was lying in a cross like Jesus but was hideously ugly and covered in blood. The boy pulled at the old priest’s robes. Come and see, come and see, come and see! Pia recognized the boy – it was Zebra: messenger, water-carrier and the boy who had given her the duchess’s purse of alms. Pia was surprised. She had always thought him a level-headed boy. And yet she still crossed herself. She had never before believed in the Devil; now she knew she was married to him.
As Zebra pulled the priest around the corner, Pia slipped inside the church on silent feet. It was dark now, and cold. As her skin cooled she quickened her steps up the nave, leaving Nicoletta puffing in the back pews. Pia seated herself in the blessed, walnut-scented dimness. She drew the curtain, dark red as arterial blood, across the box. It fell almost to the floor, but was not quite long enough to cover the toes of her silver slippers. It was enough, though. She was alone at last.
She heard the priest climb into the confessional box and the creak as he sat. Someone had blown out the candle on his side of the grille, so Pia could not see him, but like everyone else in this city he smelled of horses. His step was lighter than the usual priest; he must be new: a younger man. What would he say when he heard her guilty secret?
She began to speak as he took his seat, the familiar patter of the confessional, rehearsed, familiar.<
br />
‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one day since my last confession.’ She paused. ‘The truth is, Father, I prayed for someone to die, and they did. I killed a man.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
She leaned forward, abruptly. ‘What?’ she hissed.
‘If you mean Vicenzo, the guilt for that lies elsewhere. It was the Panther who whipped his face and made him fall. You can set that burden down. But you may take up another, if only you will.’ It was the horseman.
Pia had an ear for accents. This man’s Sienese was not as broad as Nicoletta’s, but he had the same slightly long A. He pronounced the word ‘can’ just as he had in ‘Can you ride?’, the question that had set her mind to work.
She was suddenly angry, and with relief felt her rage rush and rise in her. She’d been so afraid, it felt good to feel this.
‘Then try this for a confessional,’ she spat. ‘I have angered my husband. He found me disobedient and he punished me.’
‘How did he punish you?’ It was a whisper.
‘He cut off my hair. Look at what he did.’
Pia pulled down her veil with a swish of lace on hair. She heard a creak as the horseman craned forward. Her candle was lit, his was not; she knew he could see clearly the dark tresses chopped close and dense around her head, curling around her chin, the shorter chunks sitting choppily on her forehead.
‘Can you pay the penance for these locks, the tax on that one smile bestowed and unreturned, on the one question asked and answered? Leave me alone.’
The voice came again, angry too, but not at her.
‘I will. Forgive me. I should not have come.’
‘Why did you come? What have you to ask me?’ She did not even know his name. ‘Who are you?’
The Daughter of Siena: A Novel Page 10