The Very Best of Kate Elliott

by Kate Elliott

  “Take care of my treasures,” she said. Then she was gone with her new husband and children.

  Jontano gave the marbles to Roman, and the rest of the things from old Aldo’s shop he gave to Mama, thinking that she might find some use for them, keeping only the six cards for himself.

  At night, the bed seemed enormous with only himself and little Roman, Aunt Martina’s youngest child. For the next ten nights he barely slept, wondering, each time he heard cannon blast, each time he heard shots ring out, if Stepha and her new family had won free to Trassahar-held countryside, or if that had been the barrage that had killed them.

  “You must accept that we may never hear,” said Uncle Martin. “That is the way of things now.”

  “Why must it be the way?”

  Uncle Martin smiled crookedly. “My poor boy. We had a decent life when I was young.”

  That night Jontano ran his hands over the painted card that showed the forest. Strangely, the trees looked slightly different and it took him a moment to identify what had changed: The leafy buds were no longer tight and pale green. They had begun to unfurl.

  If only he could walk the paths that led out of Trient toward the west, and freedom. He recalled once walking with his Papa, years and years ago, when he had been just a little child, up in the woods to the west of the old temple, so that Papa could paint. Jontano traced the painted forest with his fingers, and he felt himself walking there, on quiet paths among the trees. The violets were fading, but now new flowers bloomed in patches of bright sun, flowers his father had names for, names he had known once but now forgotten.

  The path wound up into the hills and he followed it, feeling strangely that it was this path that fugitives followed, fleeing the city. He came to an open escarpment and looked out over the valley of Trient. There, across the bowl, lay the rock outcropping where he had stood before, a gray smudge against the distant trees.

  Water fell, racing away down the hill. He was alone, except for the animals. There were no bodies, no furtive travelers, no one skulking but a lone fox that darted from cover, then vanished into a thick stand of shrub.

  He walked for hours. He saw no one, found no one, heard nothing but animal noises and the flood of wind through the leaves. The silent weight of the sun scattered its light down through budding foliage. It was so peaceful.

  “Jono? Jono!”

  His mother’s voice jolted him out of the forest.

  He felt her hands on his arms, shaking him, and he dropped the card and tried to sit up, only she was holding him down and Aunt Martina and Uncle Martin looked on, their faces worn tight with anxiety.

  “What is it?” he asked, coming to his senses. “Do you have news of Stepha?”

  Mama began to cry. Oh, Lord, they had received terrible news. Pain stabbed in his chest.

  “Can you walk?” Aunt Martina demanded.

  “Lord, boy, you scared us.”

  Jontano felt dizzy. What had frightened them? What had happened?”

  “Can you stand up?” repeated Aunt Martina.

  “Of course.” He threw his legs over the side and stood up, and only then did he realize that it was full morning outside. He didn’t recall being asleep. Indeed, he felt very tired, as tired as if he had been walking all night.

  Mama crushed him against her in a hug. “Jono,” she whispered. Then she pushed him away, dried her tears, and straightened her apron and dress. “I don’t care what it costs. I am going to send for the doctor.”

  “Is Stepha back? Was she hurt?”

  All three adults examined him so closely that he became nervous. Aunt Martina asked him to raise and lower his arms. Uncle Martin jerked his chair closer to the bed and peered into Jontano’s eyes and ears and mouth, and listened to his chest.

  “He’s never had such a fit before,” said Mama in a low voice. “You didn’t hear or respond to me, Jono, and you lying there with your eyes wide open, seeing I don’t know what. It’s as if you weren’t there at all.”

  “I’ve seen it take soldiers,” said Martin, “after they’d had too much. They just go out of themselves.”

  “If only we had more food,” said Aunt Martina. “The boys get little enough as it is. They’re all so thin. He needs more meat. And milk. Ah, if only I’d been able to bring the goats. They’d have done well enough on weeds. Then we could have had milk and cheese every week.”

  Jontano knew he couldn’t tell them what he’d really been seeing. He didn’t know what they’d do, except he knew they’d take the beautiful cards away from him. “I feel fine. I was just asleep.” He sat down on the bed and searched through the rumpled quilt. Finding the card, he tucked it into the drawer of the sidetable—one that had escaped being broken up and burned for fuel last winter.

  “What’s that?” asked Mama sharply.

  “Only some cards Stepha found when she got the other things at old Aldo’s shop.”

  “What kind of cards?” asked Aunt Martina.

  Uncle Martin shook his head. “Old Aldo had a way with things. He wasn’t the kind of man you cross, or he’d have his revenge, whether in little things or great. I remember the time about eight years ago now, when the girl in his house got into trouble. I don’t know whether it was his daughter or granddaughter—no one did, and it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d ask a man like that. She’d come from the country when she was a tiny thing, and he’d raised her. He doted on her, which we all remarked on since he was as ill-tempered as a caged wolf. He was the kind of man who would as soon throw a rock at a boy as give him a piece of candy.”

  He smiled his twisted grin, and Jontano wondered which of the two had happened to Martin. Jontano’s own memories of Aldo were hazier, mostly his parents’ prohibitions not to bother the old man who stood in the dim doorway of a shop from which wafted the most interesting and bizarre smells.

  “But that girl—Lord, I don’t even recall her name now—grew into a taking thing. Even we married men liked to stroll down the boulevard just to get a glimpse of her sweeping the sidewalk or grinding herbs into pastes and such. She had two suitors. One was the son of an officer in the Trient militia, a Trassahar boy, back when there was a city militia that any boy from the city could join . . .”

  “One of General Vestino’s boys, wasn’t it?” asked Mama. “He had six or seven. No one could count them all.”

  “The youngest of them, yes, I think it was. It scarcely matters now. The other was the son of a Marrazzano merchant, grain and oil, if I remember rightly. That was the proof of how beautiful she was, that sons of good family like that came courting her. But she was a good girl, too, well-spoken, polite. She could read and do figures, and some even said she had the touch of healing in her hands.”

  “Yes.” Mama’s voice grew soft with remembrance. “People would bring ailing children to her, and she’d make poultices and drinks for them, and more of them got well than got sicker, as I recall. Girls would go to her for love potions, which I heard she never gave out, but if they would give a tithe to the church or donate some bread for the poor, she’d tell them when they would get married. I remember her.”

  “What happened to her?” Jono tried to remember a pretty young woman stationed at old Aldo’s shop, but he could not, only the old man standing in the doorway, and the musty, inviting scents.

  “It came to insults first, between the two suitors, and then to blows. Alas.” Martin sighed. “She broke into the fight, trying to stop it, and by one means or another, she got a knife in her side and died. Ah Lord, that was a bitter day. No one knew which boy’s knife had taken her. Perhaps they didn’t either, but what did it matter by that time? Old Aldo cursed them.”

  Mama rested a hand on Martin’s shoulder, as if to stop him, but he went on.

  “He cursed them to be at one another’s throats ever after, like dogs worrying at a bone until there was nothing left to be had; and only then would they find peace again.”

  He lapsed into silence. Mama went to the window and looked out ov
er the city. In the distance, they heard the crack of musket fire.

  “Nine months later the war started,” said Mama in a soft voice, “as if it was a babe born of the curse. People shunned old Aldo after that, but he stayed in his shop. I suppose he also had nowhere else to go.”

  “Or nothing to go for,” added Uncle Martin. “But the war got him in the end. That’s the trouble with curses. They’re as likely to rebound on you as to stay fixed on others.”

  “I haven’t heard this story before,” said Aunt Martina. “What happened to the two suitors?”

  “The Trassahar boy joined the militia and got himself killed in the first month, defending Saint Harmonious Bridge before it was blown to pieces. As for the Marrazzano boy—who knows? He might be up in the hills now, firing down on us. He might be rotting in his grave.”

  The adults had by now all gone to the window, to look out, Martin bumping his chair over, following the well-worn scratches in the plank floor—this was the window where Martin sat with his musket. The lush greenery of carrots lapped over the windowsill, and Aunt Martina absently thinned a few out as she stared toward the center of the city. Their home stood on just enough of a rise that they could see out over the rooftops below, and the tall boulevard trees that had once obscured the central city from view were now all cut down.

  Downstairs, Cousin Gregor sang a counting song to his little brother. From two doors down Jontano heard Widow Angelit singing in her robust voice a tune from an opera popular when he was little—when the opera house in town had still been open. It cheered him, hearing her sing a rousing chorus, even if she was off-key.

  Uncle Martin laughed and turned away from the window. “Lord, Martina, you’d want me to marry a woman who can’t sing?”

  “Better a woman who can’t sing than a woman who can’t cook, like that woman you courted last year.”

  “All to no use!”

  “Better luck for us!” Martina tilted his chair back and dragged him out of the room. A moment later Jontano heard him bumping his way down the stairs while Martina followed with the chair, hectoring him about his poor choice in sweethearts.

  Mama remained. “I don’t like you having things from old Aldo’s shop.”

  “Please, Mama. They’re so pretty.” He opened the drawer and took out the cards, displaying them for her. “Look at the brushwork. Doesn’t it remind you of something Papa could do? Please let me keep them.”

  “Some said the girl wasn’t his daughter by the flesh at all, but that he’d created her by sorcery. It’s not safe to touch the things of a man who might have worked magic.” She sighed, handing the cards back. “But these are just playing cards. I suppose no harm can come from something like that.”

  “Thank you, Mama.” He kissed her on the cheek.

  She tousled his hair, then swatted him lightly on the back. “Go do your chores. The rain has made the weeds sprout like flies on a rotten apple.”

  So the days passed.

  But every night, drawn by the lure of green trees and silent paths, he took hold of the card and wandered in the forest. Only now he made sure to keep track of the time; he learned to recognize the path that would take him out of the woods back into his bed, back into the damp spring air of Trient, back to the serenade of intermittent explosions and musket fire, to the wailing of the alarm and the wailing of the newly grief-stricken, to the constant guard they set over their well and garden.

  No trees stood within the city now. It was only by walking in the forest hidden in the card that he could watch the trees unfurl their leaves to their full grandeur, only by squinting out over the bare and broken rooftops that he could see the distant line of forest surrounding the city turn a deeper green. There, concealed by the trees, now and again he saw the puffs of smoke that betrayed Marrazzano cannon emplacements as they fired down onto Trient.

  “You’re tired all the time,” said Mama, looking worried, and Aunt Martina braved the marketplace to look for decent cuts of meat. They traded away the sidetable for a slab of pork, so he had to hide the cards in his pillowcase.

  Cousin Gregor turned fifteen and left to join the militia. Aunt Martina wept, a little, but she told him to fight bravely, to protect what remained of his father’s heritage. Now there were only five in the house, the three adults, the two boys.

  Clouds rolled in and settled over the valley. It rained for days.

  On the ninth day of torrential rain, when the streets ran with water and the roof leaked, and even the clothes hanging in the wardrobe exuded a damp odor, the Marrazzanos chose to launch a new and brutal bombardment.

  “It’s taken them that long to build shelters over the guns,” said Uncle Martin, “or they’d never fire in such rain. I don’t know how they manage it, even so.”

  Jontano leaned out the window next to Uncle Martin, watching the flash of fire in the hills, hearing muted explosions and watching smoke rise, dense and packed heavy with moisture, and then fall again, unable to catch fire, or to rise up into a sky drenched with rainfall. “I heard from Bobo’s son that the Marrazzanos got a new kind of cannon, a better kind.”

  Uncle Martin only grunted. He peered out at the distant hills. He was renowned for his keen vision, sniper’s sight, and now he frowned and shifted the muzzle of his musket through the carrots so that droplets of water sprayed down on his hands. “I don’t like it. They’re closer than they were a month ago, new guns or no. Our people have lost ground to them, the bastards.”

  Was he calling the Marrazzanos the bastards, Jono wondered, or the Trassahar militia that had failed to do its duty? He thought about asking, opened his mouth, even. The next instant he was thrown to the ground.

  The foundation of the house rocked beneath his body. Whimpering, he grabbed for a leg of Uncle Martin’s chair and realized that the chair had tipped over, spilling the legless man onto the ground.

  “Curse it!” swore Uncle Martin, scrabbling like a turtle to roll himself from his back onto his chest. “That’s taken the widow’s house to pieces. Run downstairs, Jono. Get the others into the root cellar.”

  Even as he said it, a shattering noise deafened Jontano. The wall beside him cracked, splintering.

  “Run down, boy!” shouted Martin. “Those bastards have us under their sights and they don’t even know it!”

  But Jontano grabbed Martin under the arms and dragged him toward the stairs. Just as they got under the safety of the lintel a ball crashed into the window. Dirt and carrots and glass and shards of wood sprayed the room. Jontano yipped in pain. Uncle Martin merely grunted.

  Aunt Martina ran up the stairs. “Down, you fools! Can’t you come down any faster?” She shoved Jontano aside and heaved Martin up and with him cursing and her shouting, their argument drowned out by the rain of cannon balls on their house and the neighboring houses, by the sudden onslaught of a driving rain, got him down the stairs. They fled to the root cellar and there, huddled together with only musty old potatoes and the few precious remaining bottles of wine and ale, with a finger’s deep pool of water turning the dirt floor into muck, they sheltered while the bombardment went on and on and on. They listened to their house being destroyed, and to the shouts and cries from neighboring houses, and, later, to the silence, except for the endless drone of rain.

  At last, when the light began to fade and the bombardment had, seemingly, moved on toward a new neighborhood, they ventured out. Jontano tried to go out first, but Aunt Martina shoved him back.

  “I’ll go,” she said curtly. “I’ve had a life, a good one, before this war came. You deserve a chance at a decent life, so we won’t go taking chances with you yet, my boy.” She lifted Roman from her lap, and he wailed and clung to Uncle Martin, sobbing as his mother pushed open the root cellar door and crawled out into the gloomy, wet afternoon.

  After a while, when they heard her footsteps overhead but nothing else, she came back. Her face was drawn and white. Her hair lay in wet strings over her dress. She was soaked to the skin, and it still rain
ed.

  They crawled out, all except Martin. The house was destroyed. One wall still stood its full height, but the others were shattered. The roof had caved in. The stairs veered crookedly up to a nonexistent floor above.

  They stood in silence for a long time, sheltering under a blessedly dry corner, and watched the rain pour down over what remained of their home. Dimly, Jontano heard Uncle Martin calling to them from the root cellar.

  Finally, Mama shook herself. “There’s no point in waiting here. If we wait until the rain stops, looters may come. Roman, you go down and wait with Uncle Martin. There’s nothing he can do until we’ve salvaged what’s left.”

  “I’ll walk down the street,” said Aunt Martina. “Perhaps our neighbors need help.”

  So Jontano and Mama picked through the wreckage. Of their armament—two muskets and a pistol—one musket was dry and still usable and the others were not too badly damaged. The powder and shot had remained dry because they kept it in metal tins, and those in a cupboard which had come through the bombardment mostly intact. Mama set Jontano in the dry corner and put him on watch while she filled bags and blankets with what remained of their possessions: clothing, a few jars of pickled figs that had gotten wedged into the corner of the cupboard, the kettle and three unbroken plates, two pots, silverware, Roman’s toy horse and wagon not too dented from its fall from the upper story, a bucket, a shovel, the last of the bread from the morning, a length of silver ribbon, and the butcher knife. She piled the bags and the single intact headboard next to Jontano.

  After a while he realized that the street and alley were empty and likely to remain that way. The bombardment had quieted and moved back south again, and the rain had slackened to a steady drizzle. He ventured out of the ruined house to the well. The little roof had fallen in, and a few of the stones had tumbled out, crushing turnips, but as he tugged the boards out, he saw that the well itself remained intact. And though the garden was half covered with debris, as he picked up boards and tossed bricks aside he found that a fair portion of the vegetables were only crushed but not severed. He leaned the musket against the stones of the wall and began to clean up the garden, his heart racing with excitement each time he uncovered an unhurt plant.