Spira Mirabilis

by Aidan Harte

  The eastern wing was entangled with the xebecs and had by now turned so it was perpendicular with the strait. The conflagration drifted west like a great trawler net, trapping everything it touched, and explosions started fires on those few ships not already burning and infused the cloud of gun smoke drifting before it with foggy blackness. Storms of men draw storms in nature: the sulphur merged with the gathering storm clouds and the cannons’ report was now echoed by real thunder.

  The ships of the western wing were thoroughly entwined: one great rootless island drifting west. The arsenalotti had regrouped sufficiently to stop the Sicarii advance, yet it was too late to do more. The Lazars took control of the guns of each ship as she was claimed and spread confusion with random fire; those not yet taken did the enemy’s work by firing pre-emptively on each other.

  The galleys Scaevola had sent ahead had already become hopelessly entangled in the fray. The Bernoulli itself was in a corridor of sorts between the two merging wings, and burning debris surrounded them. If they tarried much longer they would be trapped – so surely now the imperative must be survival. He desperately wanted to turn north and sail back to Veii, but his navigator insisted the corridor behind them was closing too fast.

  ‘We can’t take the niponti!’ Scaevola screamed.

  ‘Well, if you have any better—?’ The navigator’s head was whisked off by a piece of spinning spar as a portside explosion buffeted the Bernoulli. She listed precariously. Grappling hooks flew from the clouded island to starboard and when the Bernoulli righted herself, she pulled dozens of Sicarii up into her yards. More hooks portside came flying from the smoke as arsenalotti, Sicarii, Lazar and pirate alike sought to escape the general doom.

  ‘Cut the ropes!’ Scaevola screamed at the deck-crew, but they were too few and the enemy too many.

  CHAPTER 51

  ‘How can I serve?’ she asked again, but taunting silence was the only answer Carmella got from the stained-glass Madonna. She’d called Isabella a child, but here she was, dumbly replicating her actions. Why was she praying in the chapel? Because Isabella had done so – but it hadn’t worked. The Madonna in the window looked reproachful, certainly, but there was no forgiveness.

  As was just. Carmella believed in old Rasenna’s law: blood for blood. She’d blamed Isabella for not letting her shine, but there was no one to blame now. This wreckage was her doing. She alone had elected to stay, and she alone had stained the baptismal font with blood. Uggeri’s blood.

  ‘What do I do? Speak!’

  This time she heard something.

  ‘Unhand me, you dirty peasant!’

  ‘Shut up. It’s time you made your confession.’

  Carmella went out into the garden to investigate the raised voices. Bocca came striding into the baptistery, pulling a young woman along. ‘Hello, Sister. Still take orphans here?’ He did not wait for an answer before throwing the woman at Carmella’s feet.

  Maddalena’s head had been roughly sheared and her lip and cheek were bleeding and swollen. She stared at the font. Her lips moved, but she was dumb with terror.

  Carmella said, ‘Who did this?’

  ‘Me,’ Bocca said resolutely, ‘and I’ll happily do worse if you don’t keep her from mischief. Them dancers outside is nearly all dead now, so the last thing we need is for some lunatic to open the gates and start it all over again. If she wants to kill herself, I’ll provide the rope, but I won’t let her endanger Rasenna.’

  ‘Papa will have you whipped!’ Maddalena screamed.

  ‘I told you already, slut: your papa’s dead and even that criminal Geta’s abandoned you. The Signoria is back in charge.’

  ‘Signor, there’s no cause to abuse her,’ Carmella said calmly.

  ‘Perhaps not, but it feels great to give a Bombelli a good hiding. You should try it – you look like you need a laugh. Or treat her like a principessa if you prefer, she’s now your responsibility. But if you don’t keep her here, out of trouble’ – he leaned close – ‘I’ll chain her up like the bitch she – ahhh—!’

  Maddalena’s claws drew blood and Bocca raised his fist, but Carmella deflected the blow with one hand and with the other spun him around and off his feet.

  He got to his feet with an offended dignity and said, ‘You’ve been warned.’

  When he was gone, Carmella led Maddalena into the garden. Away from the font, she calmed down and began to speak. ‘There’s no justice. Our podesta has fled. The Furies have come for the rent and my purse is empty. I’ve seen them knocking on our gates and they won’t let me sleep and if we cannot give them justice, we must show them hospitality—’

  ‘How long since your last confession?’

  Somehow Carmella’s question cut through her mania. ‘I’ve never made one,’ Maddalena answered. ‘Not truthfully, anyway.’

  Carmella took her hand. ‘Then do so now. It’ll ease your mind, I swear.’

  Maddalena pulled her hand away, rigid and proud, and Carmella braced herself for a tirade. Instead, she collapsed and buried her face in Carmella’s habit. ‘Sister, I killed my papa – what penance answers that?’

  Carmella glanced towards the font inside the baptistery. ‘You’ve already been punished for that.’

  ‘I want to be whole again,’ she wept. ‘I want to be … like you.’

  Carmella grabbed her by the shoulders. ‘You shall be!’

  *

  Geta and Leto entered the tavern together. The old buttero was surrounded by stacks of empty bottles and strumming a mandolin.

  ‘You’ve been busy.’

  ‘I have not been inactive, signori. Will you assist me with the last jug that Tagliacozzo has to offer?’

  ‘Certainly. You didn’t lie about the Big Pebble, Sergio, or the Highlanders.’

  ‘They know how to make a fella feel welcome, don’t they?’

  ‘We return poorer in men and equipment,’ said Geta, mournfully concluding, ‘I lost a toe.’

  ‘You’ll recover,’ Sergio said, waving his four-fingered hand. ‘I was always afeared of losing a finger and then it happened. Weren’t all that bad after all – nothing’s bad as all that.’

  ‘The mind conjures monsters,’ Leto remarked, sceptically studying the buttero.

  ‘Well put, young fella. This your boy, Geta?’ Sergio pinched his cheek before Geta could stop him.

  Leto kicked his chair back and drew his dagger. ‘Back off, you drunken oaf.’

  Geta faked a coughing fit to stifle his amusement. ‘Sergio, this is General Spinther.’

  ‘This is the mighty warrior? I ain’t going to lie, I expected taller. I heard they started young in Concord, but I never rightly believed it. Hell of a thing, to see a calf leading bulls.’

  ‘Don’t be so touchy, Spinther,’ said Geta patting the empty chair. When Leto sat down, Geta refilled Sergio’s glass. ‘The general has a proposition.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘As the mountains are closed to us, we need a guide, Signore. The Minturnae has a fearsome reputation but you butteri pass over it as easy as the birds of the air.’

  ‘That’s a flat-out exaggeration but I can find my way across, just about. Don’t rightly know whether to be flattered at the offer or offended by the implication. What makes you think I’d betray my folk?’

  Leto stared at him coldly. ‘We’ve been making our way south these last months. Some towns we have to burn, most are handed to us. There’s always someone willing to strike a deal. I was given to understand that you were left to burn in this town’s dungeon – that or be executed – which would surely have been your fate had anyone but Geta here found you. Your folk, as you call them, consider you an enemy.’

  ‘I ain’t from round here, for your information.’

  ‘No, you’re a Salernitan. And butteri don’t let their brothers get locked up. I see you’re missing more than one digit.’

  Sergio self-consciously pulled his other hand into his poncho. ‘Ain’t you sharp. What of it?’


  ‘The transgression that led your folk to permanently ostracise you was not your first, which makes you a recidivist. And it gives you two choices: you can try to drown your criminal nature in this hovel’ – he leaned forward – ‘or you can accept what you are and strike a blow to make your countrymen rue the day they shunned you.’

  The buttero had begun by staring defiantly at Leto. He ended with his head bowed. When Leto had finished speaking he turned to Geta. ‘He don’t talk like no calf.’

  Geta tilted his head. ‘Maybe not – but he does talk sense. What do you say? We’ll pay.’

  ‘Corpo di Bacco! Why’d you leave that till last?’ He grabbed his hat. ‘I’ll show you the way, but let me warn you this before you all start grumbling that I sold you something you didn’t want: the Big Pebble offers frostbite and pneumonia; the marsh offers footrot, flux and fever. She’s a treacherous bitch, even for those who know her intimately. My former partners won’t make it easy on us neither—’

  ‘Men we can afford to lose,’ said Leto. ‘It’s the attacks on the wagon-trains that are causing the longest delays. Even when the engines survive, the wagons are often beyond repair. I’m damned if I know how they know which to attack – it’s not like we announce which are carrying our engines and which carry supplies …’

  Sergio laughed. ‘You don’t need to say a damned thing,’ he said. ‘The tracks announce it loud and clear. And even if they didn’t, it don’t take much smarts to know folks’ll take the best roads when they’re hauling something worth something. Once you cross the Liri, it’s all marsh till you get to the Garigliano. They’ll expect you to avoid the lowlands with your heaviest loads but I know some lowland ways what’re dry. That won’t fool ’em fer long, but if we keep up a pace it won’t take long. So what now, young fella? You want another finger to make sure I’m bonifide, or do we just shake on it?’

  ‘Let’s drink,’ said Geta, ‘to revenge.’

  ‘To justice,’ Leto corrected.

  ‘Long as I get to settle the score,’ said Sergio, ‘I don’t give a cuss what it’s called. Salute!’

  The three men drained their glasses, and Geta and Sergio threw them over their shoulders. Much to their amusement, Leto keeled over, coughing and spluttering.

  ‘He don’t talk like a calf but he sure drinks like one,’ Sergio observed.

  *

  Maddalena cast off her clothes onto the cold stone. Despite the night’s chill, she smiled rapturously and repeated, ‘Sisters!’

  Carmella lit a circle of candles around the font and in front of the pedestal of the Madonna of Rasenna. Without turning, she began, ‘Madonna, I present a poor candidate in a state of darkness.’ She waited till Maddalena had stood up next to her, then took her hand. ‘The first rule is obedience.’

  Maddalena didn’t even flinch when Carmella took the Herod’s Sword from around her neck and pricked her small finger. She placed the bloodied icon around Maddalena’s neck, then stepped up to the font. Looking into its dark water, she whispered, ‘Come into the light, Sister.’

  ‘Sisters,’ Maddalena echoed softly as she approached the font.

  Carmella took her hand and squeezed out a red drop. ‘Let your blood be mingled with those innocents.’

  ‘Sisters!’ she wept as Carmella slowly pushed her head into the water.

  ‘Become innocent once more.’

  Carmella numbly repeated the questions she had once herself been asked: ‘Do you solemnly swear to obey the Madonna, without secret evasion of mind; binding yourself under no less a penalty than that of having your body severed in twain, your bowels taken thence, burned to ashes, and the ashes thereof scattered to the four winds …’

  As the seconds passed, the trail of bubbles coming steadily to the water’s surface slowed. Carmella tightened her grip on the back of Maddalena’s neck. It would be so easy …

  ‘—of so vile and perjured a wretch as you should be, should you ever violate this solemn obligation?’

  She yanked her up and Maddalena spluttered and gasped for air and sobbed, ‘I swear! I swear! I swear!’

  While Maddalena spun rapturously around the moonlit garden, Carmella kneeled before the Madonna of Rasenna and gave thanks herself. She had held her enemy’s life in her hands and spared her. If that wasn’t Grace, Grace was a myth.

  CHAPTER 52

  The Peoples of the Black Hand: A Bestiary

  A Salernitan’s first decade is considered spring; it is spent in training body and mind. When he attains manhood he is ‘exiled’ from the city, to spend his summer and autumn years in the contato as a buttero. The butteri herd water buffalo over the river-scarred Campania plains and learn to accommodate themselves to the rigours of the Minturnae marshes or perish. Though the life is hard, the butteri learn to treat nature gently. They hate only the flies that plague their flocks in summer; their buffalo do not know the yoke. When two-score years have passed, the buttero’s banishment is lifted, for he is deemed to have attained wisdom. He returns to the city, less vigorous but wiser, to live out the winter of his life training the next generation. These elders are called Doctors.

  In the last century, Salerno’s Doctors began to explore Natural philosophy just as their Concordian contemporaries were doing. Though hypothetical questions are ordinarily worthless12 the conscientious scholar inevitably asks why it is that Concord dominates Etruria, not Salerno? Many explanations have been proposed13 but the reason Salerno did not conquer the South as Concord conquered the North is simple. The Black Hand has suffered under a succession of yokes; having shirked them off themselves, they do not seek to subdue others. No doubt this is very worthy, but it is also a failure of ambition that has left Salerno no part in Etruria’s glorious future.

  CHAPTER 53

  The Concordians were a river of green and black banners winding their way along the narrow tratturi. Attacks occurred, but Sergio’s juggling managed to keep the engine-carriage safe. Leto was not pleased that the old paths Sergio chose often meant dividing the legion into smaller cohorts, but he could not complain, for they were finally making progress.

  The general was so intent on moving his pawns over the maps that he could not see what Geta saw very plainly: every day they were regressing. The south was more than another country; it was another age. The green of the Concordian banners was a cold teal, but the green of the Minturnae was the remorseless colour of moss burying a grave. Nature grew strange and engorged down here. The men’s chief terror was the grosso, a massive leech that left limbs withered to dry bone. It could not be burned off and the only treatment – digging it out, together with the surrounding flesh – was usually fatal to the patient. Every mile they waded deeper into this primitive land they backslid further into that long night when Man did not hold the whip and when the darkness belonged to the wild things …

  The horsemen of the south rode out to harass, delay and complicate the Concordians’ progress. The butteri were less an army than a collection of autonomous bands who kept their raiding parties small by necessity and preference. They were capable of hitting hard and swift, and then vanishing into the marshlands where none but the foolhardy could – or would – follow. They rode to battle well warmed by their moonshine grappa while the Concordians slurped down slimy grass soup and weevilly oat-cakes.

  Hungry and maddened by an enemy that did not fight fair, according to their rules, the legionaries developed a particular loathing for Spinther’s pontonniers, who needed all available wood for trestles, beams and planks. They had declared camp fires a luxury that all must forgo and immediately confiscated the rare tree the butteri had left standing and the few logs the legionaries managed to drag intact from burning cabins.

  They didn’t try hard to hide their glee when the butteri methodically targeted each battalion’s pontonniers, leaving the rest alone – only later did they realise that without pontonniers, the legion was like a great Man o’ War without oars: it was moribund and vulnerable.

  Sergio called the marsh
Campania Felix as a grim joke. One liquid continuity, moisture permeated every inch: it swam in front of their eyes as they slouched through frozen bindweed and brackish puddles. The foul-smelling quagmire clung to their boots until the leather was sodden, then lapped at their exposed feet till they too reeked of decay. At night, they pulled off their soaking clothes and burned off and ate the silver worms that have been feeding on them all day. Any man venturing forth in the darkness to defecate took his life in his hands; all too often he failed to return.

  With every mile, memories of Concord’s dread walls, pristine aqueducts and night-defying globes became more threadbare; and the feeling deepened that this chaos was the natural state of things and that fighting it was as great a folly as trying to fight a river – and when their hardy chauvinism reminded them that they had mastered the rivers once, a louder whisper insisted that Bernoulli was long-dead.

  *

  Palisades, embankments, sharpened poles and a full watch kept throughout the night: the camp was as thorough as any Geta had seen on the Europa front. He sat outside the shelter of its wooden walls, whittling a piece of wood and staring up at the mountain as though daring the tormentors who’d made their march so hellish to come and attack him and be done with all subterfuge.

  Sergio called the highland Ursonia, the Kingdom of Bears, but if so it was a kingdom contested by wolves and foxes and wild cats and boars, and their wars were overshadowed by the quarrels of eagles and peregrines against the sparrows and pipits. Their shrieks and barks and grunts and howls filled the darkness between vespers and matins. And amidst this incessant bestial chorus was an interloper: the owl-whoop of bolos, somewhere not too distant, and answered by another set, some miles away.

  He was listening so keenly that he jumped when someone nearby whispered his name. He saw who it was, sheathed his sword and continued whittling. ‘Isn’t it past your bedtime, Spinther?’

  The slot shut and the gate was hauled open. ‘The Night Watch told me you were keeping solitary vigil.’