“Let go of me, woman.” He swatted her hand away.
“You are bound to our quest.”
He mounted the sumpter. “I have a quest of my own.”
“That’s my donkey,” Giovanni said.
“I’m keeping the donkey. I give you your lives.”
Spurring the animal, Marco rode to the light of the glade, and then into shadow.
CHAPTER 10
“Hurry,” said Nadja.
Giovanni massaged his wrists. I smell like a blacksmith. Hairs on the back of his hands were singed, blackened, curled by the heat. Red welts appeared where the rope had chafed him, but the skin remained unbroken. The marks would fade. The memories would not.
The girl was in the cart, rummaging through the bags. She held her drawing board in one hand, a sheaf of papers in the other. Her hair swung loose at her shoulders, hiding and revealing her face in turns as she moved from one bag to the next. She found her pouch of herbs, set it to one side, and searched for something else, probably the charcoal sticks Giovanni had made. He had put them in his satchel when Marco ordered him to load the cart. She’ll find them, he thought, and let her go on looking.
William sat on the ground, head in hands, his breath soughing with syllables, some prayer or private rumination. Marco was gone. Apuleius, too, was gone.
Not gone, Giovanni thought. Stolen.
He had raised that donkey up from a foal, feeding him, grooming him, sheltering him. How many times had he picked pebbles from the donkey’s feet? How many times had he filed down the hooves? Cleaned the saddle rug? Mucked out the stable? How many apples had they shared? Apuleius had been a constant companion. He had never run off. He loved to wander, yes, in search of sweeter grass, but would always return to the sound of a ballad. He was the best listener a bard ever had. Giovanni’s friends, his family, and his Fiammetta were gone, but Apuleius remained. Until now.
His stomach clenched into a stone. He crossed his arms and leaned against the cart. “Hurry where?”
Nadja did not look up. “After him.”
“After that scapegrace? That donkey thief? That lying, pillaging, hostage-taking rogue?”
Nadja fixed Giovanni with a stare. “We don’t have time to argue.”
“We don’t have a donkey, either.”
“You have two feet.”
“Who’s going to pull the cart?”
She looked down at the floorboard and shrugged. “Your cart,” she said, with no hint of concern, and stepped off the tumbrel with her bag in hand.
“What about all this stuff?”
“Leave it.”
“It’s not your stuff.”
“Nadja’s right,” said William, glancing up. His eyes looked tired, defeated. “We must go north.”
“After what he did to us?”
“‘et quicumque te angariaverit mille passus vade cum illo alia duo.’”
Giovanni paced beside the cart. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You’re not going to follow him all the way to Rome.”
“If we have to,” Nadja said.
“What about the cave? The gate? The Grail?”
“God will guide us to the Grail,” she said.
William retrieved a spoon and a mazar bowl from the culinary bag and handed them to her. These were the dishes she had carried south from Munich. The rest belonged to Giovanni.
Picking up his burnt rope, William tied the blackened ends together and wrapped the remaining length around his waist. Thin though he was, there was not enough rope remaining to make a knot. He cinched the belt tighter and tried again.
Giovanni gathered his own rope, which had bound Nadja and William. He offered it to the friar. “Use this.”
William accepted it. “Thank you.”
“I can’t find the drawing sticks,” Nadja said.
Giovanni pulled them from his satchel and gave them to her. She added the bowl and spoon to her bag, along with the sticks and the paper, then went back to Giovanni and kissed him on the cheek. “God bless you on your journey. Naples sounds like a marvelous city. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
“I don’t know what I’m looking for.”
“You will find it,” said William. He pulled his cowl over his head and made the sign of the cross. “Dominus vobiscum.”
“Et cum spiritu tuo,” Giovanni replied.
The old man shouldered Nadja’s bag, then took her hand in his. They ambled north. When they reached the spill of sunlight in the road beside the cottage, the girl looked back at Giovanni and sent him a smile. Her hair shone bright in the luster of the glade. Her eyes glistened. She did not look back a second time.
Giovanni filled his satchel, consolidating his belongings. He repacked his writing supplies and most of his food, but kept a hard biscuit and a wedge of cheese, which he chewed bitterly. He chased the meal with the dregs of his wine.
Brooding, he considered pulling the cumbered cart himself. Easy enough on the Appian Way, but the hills between here and the Roman road were daunting, and even if he could pull the cart to Naples he did not want to enter the city looking like an ass.
The books were a problem. He could not take them all. Giovanni turned the volumes over, trying to choose among them. He traveled with his favorites: Metamorphoses, Ars Amatoria, Consolatio Philosophiae, La Chanson de Roland, Roman de la Rose, Perceval, and a passel of others. Some he had copied himself from the private libraries of his friends and mentors. Others were gifts. One he purchased from the estate of a noble Florentine who died with no literate heirs. His own father had given him no such inheritance.
Too many books, he thought, for the first time in his life. In the end he kept only his Inferno, his Aeneid, and a collection of Petrarch’s sonnets.
His personal manuscripts, his poems and stories, could not be left behind. Giovanni’s rhymes might not be worthy of Dante and Petrarch, but they were his best hope of a life in Naples. His second best hope was to play merriment for the royal dancers. There was always a demand at court for a gifted minstrel. These days, with pestilence dropping young men like old fruit, an adequate musician might suffice. Giovanni was nimble on the strings but his music was more suited to the tavern than the court. Still, if his verses found no favor he would not go hungry.
His rebec had a broken high string. No matter. He could play with two strings almost as well as three. He grabbed the strap and slung the rebec over his shoulder, then tucked the rosin and bow into his bulging satchel.
The rest of his things would have to be abandoned. What he could not bring he buried in the woods. Using the trowel from the tool bag, he dug a shallow grave some distance from the road and interred most of his worldly belongings. His spare clothes went into the pit, even those that had come from the hands of a king. Most of the tools he buried, though he kept for himself the flint and the trowel. He promised himself that once he reached court and found a patron, he would return to claim the wealth he had left behind.
He pulled the cart to the cottage and abandoned it near the door. No passersby would imagine, looking at it, that the contents had been buried up the road.
Investigating the house, he found two plague-stricken corpses. The countryside was safer than the towns—many had fled Florence for the Tuscan wilds—but no one could escape the pestilence forever. One day, when you felt safe in your bed and far from danger, the Devil’s breath would find you.
As he was exiting the house Giovanni saw a small block of wood on the lintel above the door. He pulled it down and examined it: an angel carved in birch, the work of an expert carver. He took a second glance about the house and saw more carvings grouped along the beams: saints and angels, Christ and the apostles, Hebrew kings and prophets of old. They were beautiful and intricate and powerless. They had stood in the shadows and watched their maker die.
Placing the wooden angel back on the lintel, he returned to the road and headed south to Naples. He had gone no more than a hundred steps, pondering his prospects and cursin
g his luck, when he nearly stepped in a fresh pile of dung. He stopped and stared. Two flies had already found the heap. The odor was familiar. It smelled like a stable he had once built for an animal he loved.
Something rustled deep in the forest. A bear, perhaps, or a sounder of boars. He waited a long time but did not hear it again. Dante had faced a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf. Giovanni could only imagine what waited for him down this road.
What am I doing?
There was nothing for him in Naples. His friends in the city were surely dead. If not they would be soon. Years ago, he had fathered two illegitimate children, Mario and Giulio, in the Angevin capital. He knew little of them now. His letters to their mother had not been answered, and he feared the worst. The mortal murrain had come up from the south. It had struck Campania as hard as Tuscany. Was Queen Joanna still alive? Was there anyone left at court? In the spring he had sent letters to Niccolò Acciaiuoli, Ricciardo Minutolo and others of his acquaintance, but he had received no reply. In Siena he had met a wine merchant from Salerno with news of the south. The news was not good. It was never good.
War and pestilence.
A new thought, sharp and sudden: what if William and Nadja were his last two friends in this life? He did not know them well, but they were good company. The plague had not destroyed their spirit as it had done to so many others. The friar and the girl had something to live for, something they believed in, even if it made no sense. They had the one thing Giovanni most needed.
Hope.
His plan had been good one: stay with William; bring him to Naples; introduce him to the queen. When this business with the knight was resolved, for better or worse, the friar would head south again. What did it matter if Giovanni arrived at the queen’s court in three days or thirty?
Daylight dwindled in the glade.
Choose.
Adjusting his satchel, he turned toward the light and followed his donkey’s redolent trail, walking north.
CHAPTER 11
Marco emerged from the woods onto a wind-blasted ridge. He glanced back to see the pilgrims a bowshot behind. For three days they had followed him through the vale, over roots and rills and rivulets. He had no desire for their company, and wanted nothing to do with their pilgrimage.
A journey into Hell? To steal the Holy Grail from the Devil? Has the world gone mad?
His head still felt like a blacksmith’s forge. Hammers pounded in his skull. Daylight glared off the rocks and a swelter rose in his face, but there was no help for it. Shade was hard to come by on this stretch of the trail. He needed to keep moving. At least his sunburn was beginning to heal, fading from scarlet to russet on the back of his arms and legs. The skin on his face did not vex him as before.
To keep his mind from these afflictions, he played the naming game. A bird wheeling in the sky became a hawk. A tree beside the road became a pine. An animal darting across his path became a lizard. The words felt right. He could test them later in conversation.
Riding past a bush, Marco saw tiny black dots in among the tangles. These looked inviting. He stopped, dismounted, and reached his arm into the bramble to touch one of black dots. It felt soft and cool, with clusters of tiny bumps. When he plucked it from the bush it squished between his fingers.
Juice.
He pulled his hand back. Something pricked him.
Thorn.
But it was not until he tasted the moist, sweet fruit that he found the word he was searching for.
Brambleberry.
He ate another and another and another, until his hands were purpled with brambleberry juice and bloody with scratches from the thorns. When he could reach no more berries without hacking through the bush, he remounted his donkey and rode north again, naming a thousand misforgotten things.
As he climbed the stoney mountain the wind picked up, buffeting his clothes. The bandage around his head came loose at one end, flapping like a banner. Marco unraveled it and saw that it was black with blood. He let the bandage go and watched it flutter back down into the valley.
He crossed an intermontane field, high and sere and beaten by the sun. On the stubble and stone lay a flock of dead sheep, their flesh picked clean by scavengers who had left behind a testament of white bone and dusty fleece. The field bloomed with tufts of wool, white blossoms on the brown and yellow heath. Marco smelled dust but no decay.
Dead for weeks, then. Or months.
The animals had not been shorn. It was summer now, it felt like summer, and yet the carcasses were thick with wool. When did shepherds shear their flock? May? June? The world was coming back to him, but he could not be sure. He remembered sheep grazing on a mountainside. Not here, but somewhere. Those sheep had been noisy and alive. These were silent.
Where’s the shepherd? he wondered. Where are the dogs? He felt certain there should be a shepherd and some dogs.
He saw no broken bones. No shafts of arrows. No marks of iron or steel or claw. This was not the work of man or wolf.
What were the words of the old friar?
Half the world is dead.
The donkey tired beneath him, so Marco continued on foot, leading the beast around a bend. Before departing the field he glanced back to see the pilgrims falling farther behind.
In her dream she saw a man crowned with a circlet of leaves. He held a spear, which he gave to a blindfolded knight whose face she knew. Marco. The knight took up the spear. The first man faded. The tip of the spear began to glow with a Heavenly light. Behind Marco flowed a river of fire. Behind the river loomed a wall of grey stone and an iron gate. The knight wore no helm, no chestplate, no vambrace, no greaves. Sweat ran in rindles down his neck. He turned to face the darkness and fought with a monster veiled in shadow. From the darkness came a sound like the hissing of a snake—
Nadja opened her eyes.
The dream fell away, but the hiss continued.
Snake.
She lay on her back and listened. The snake was near her feet. Dead leaves scratched against reptilian skin as the serpent approached.
It was night. The woods were dark. She did not smell the ash of the campfire, only the fusty air of the forest, spiced with the scent of urine. Her kirtle was wet. She remembered stepping away from the camp to make her water in the woods. The falling dream had seized her.
The snake was on her left side. Its cold skin slid against her small toe. Nadja felt along the ground with her right hand and found a stone. She gripped it. She stomped her left foot down on the snake, then rolled, the stone clutched in her fist, and brought the weight down hard on the serpent’s body and then the head, and again, and again.
By the time Giovanni arrived, the reptile’s head was pulp. “Nadja,” he said, taking her shoulders in his hands.
She dropped the stone and remembered to breathe. He helped her to her feet. When he saw the mangled snake, he questioned her with a glance.
“First catch of the day,” she said.
His laughter kindled hers.
Marco sat chewing hard bread and washing it down with sips of small wine. He saw Nadja approach with something in her hands.
“Morning,” she said with an easy smile.
The knight repacked his rations. “Aren’t you afraid?”
“Should I be?”
Marco stood, slapping crumbs from his tunic. “You were kind to me, and I hurt you.”
She offered him a large flat leaf with cooked meat on it. “A theriac,” she said. “Snake meat and herbs. It will make you stronger.”
Marco accepted it with a nod. “Thank you.” He held the meat under his nose. It smelled like...what? Smoked lamprey. He ate it with his fingers. “Good cook,” he mumbled.
“I cooked for a family in Munich,” she said. “A cook and a maid and a wetnurse.”
This surprised him. “You have a child?” he asked, but when he saw her face he regretted the question. “I’m sorry.”
She shook her head and studied the ground. If the girl did not want to speak o
f it, he would not pry. Instead, he ate the remainder in silence.
As he licked his fingers clean, the girl said, “It will protect you from snakebite.”
“I have not been bitten by a snake.”
“You will be.”
Nadja walked off, leaving Marco to wonder at her words.
Giovanni heard a rustling in the woods and glanced up from his book to see Nadja walking back to camp. He returned to his reading and did not hear the attackers until it was too late.
A startled cry alerted him. Two men had grabbed Nadja from behind. Four others broke from the shadows and rushed the spot where Giovanni sat with William. One, wearing a breastplate, hurtled the fire and nearly landed in the poet’s lap, but Giovanni rolled and scrambled away, then got to his feet and made a valiant effort to flee, dodging tree trunks and ducking branches before the soldier tackled him, pinned him to the ground, mashed his face into the earth, grabbed his hair, yanked his head up, and put a cold blade to his throat. Giovanni knew instantly he was going to die. It took a little longer to discover he was wrong.
They dragged him back by the scruff of his tunic and forced him to sit with a cold blade under his chin and a bony knee against his spine. The soldier bit Giovanni’s earlobe, a quick nip. The poet felt his own blood cooling on his neck.
A whisper roared in his ear: “Hop again and I’ll roast you like a bunny.” The man’s breath smelled of rotted teeth.
There were seven of them, all men. Two were dressed like soldiers. The others looked like field hands, sunbaked and brawny. They were young—three about Nadja’s age—but the bandit leader was at least as old as Giovanni’s father’s: loose skin and grey hair and dark eyes that withered you with a look.
“She’s a sport,” said the one holding Nadja.
“I could use a little sport,” said another.
The leader said, “Down, dog.”
A third bandit searched the pilgrims, taking particular interest in what Nadja’s kirtle might reveal. Giovanni’s satchel was upended, his books and papers scattered. His relic pouch was emptied and flung aside.
“We have no money,” said William.
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