Wolves in Winter

by Lisa Hilton

  With the long evenings, I grew bold, relishing my freedom from the confines of the palazzo. The gates were barred at the last bell, but I discovered a way to prolong my absences. Set into the wall near the porters’ bunk was a tiny window, for putting out alms, or receiving supplies in plague times, when big houses were shuttered down to keep quarantine. I found I could wriggle through it, small and slight as I was. It was hard to hoist myself up the wall outside, but I had always been light and agile and my muscles were lithe and taut from the hard work in the kitchens. If I wanted to return after the bell, I would push the shutter ajar as I left the courtyard and work my fingers above the wooden lintel when I returned. I was not afraid of the porters – rough men who spent their evenings in the taverns and slept it off in the lodge – and even if I were discovered I didn’t imagine I had anything worse to fear than a whipping. The thought of a few minutes of pain did not deter me. It was a strange way to learn courage, I thought ruefully; that it comes when one has nothing one cares to lose. But I was never caught.

  As the city emptied during the suffocating heat, business grew slow. One evening, Margherita and I had sat a long time in the porch, with no clients to serve. As the sky turned from bright blue gold to a soft purple, she stretched herself, sending up the usual foetid whiff from her nest, and asked me if I was hungry. I nodded. There was plenty of plain food for the servants at the palazzo, but I hankered after the savouries I smelled in the streets each night.

  ‘Come on then, mooncalf.’

  She tottered to her feet and arranged herself for travel, which took quite some time, as all her oddments and mysteries had to be stored in two sacks, which she pushed into a corner of the porch. Presumably no one would dare to steal them. As she stood, it occurred to me that I had never seen her legs, but she set off at a sort of bounding hobble, and I was surprised to find I had to trot to keep pace with her. We turned to the left, slapping at mosquitoes as we followed the river along the Borgo San Frediano until we reached the city gate, which Margherita circled around, taking us up a rise covered in scrubby trees, where the city wall ran flush against the steep hillside. We climbed laboriously up the slope and descended on the other side, leaving Florence without passing the gates. As I picked my way along behind her, I could smell woodsmoke and roasting meat and hear music, a reedy piping with a drum beneath it.

  ‘Nearly there, ciccia,’ Margherita encouraged.

  We arrived at a scene from carnival. Three shabby wagons with tattered streamers were drawn up in a circle, with placidly cropping horses staked to rings beyond them. In their shelter, a fire burned on a flat rock, tended by a man whose massive shoulders and thick black beard distracted me for a moment from noticing that he had no legs. He was seated on a low wooden trolley with little wheels, which he manipulated dextrously with strong hands, turning himself this way and that to baste a line of rabbits turning on a spit. On the ground beside him sat two young women, wearing colourful cloaks over men’s breeches and shirts. A thick-necked dwarf in a soldier’s jacket was idly turning cartwheels around them, flicking tiny spurred boots into the air. I had seen dwarves before – they were popular servants for grand people in Toledo. Two more men, long nosed and grey eyed and alike as reflections in a looking glass, were mending a pair of metal hoops with wire, as though it were usual to carry out such work in nothing but red satin drawers. The music came from another man, whose eyes were bound by a black cloth to advertise his blindness, puffing into a long metal pipe and keeping time on a tambour with a drumstick held between his bare toes.

  They all looked up and greeted Margherita, but glanced suspiciously at me.

  ‘Come on, ciccia, come on now. Show yourself!’

  Cautiously, I put back my headcloth to reveal my coin crown, my hair, my eyes. At once the two women came up to me, pawing at my skin, even tweaking a tuft from my scalp as though to check it was real. Close up, I could see how pretty they were, slim and golden haired, their breasts provocatively visible under the lawn of their grubby shirts, and I was suddenly conscious of my own meagre limbs, my chest as scrawny as a pigeon’s. I lifted my chin and caught their expressions as the firelight lit up my eyes.

  ‘Where did you find her?’

  ‘What can she do?’

  Margherita was settling herself by the fire, chuckling, reaching for a flask of wine from the trolley man.

  ‘Oh, she’s a good ’un. Dumb, but she’s got it, she’s got the sight, haven’t you, my green girl?’

  One of the girls leaned towards me, mouthing loudly, as though I were a simpleton. But her expression was kind.

  ‘I am Annunziata. This is Immaculata. You?’

  ‘I told you, dears. Dumb as a statue.’

  The others came up, even the trolley man trundling over to courteously kiss my hand, introducing himself as Casinus. The twins were Chellus and Gherardus, and the blind musician Johannes. The dwarf approached, and I tried to make my expression friendly when he bowed to me, the buttons on his toy-soldier coat glinting, and gave his name as Addio.

  ‘What my mother said when she saw me, young mistress,’ he said solemnly, twisting back suddenly so that his lumpy face appeared between his knees. ‘A dio to that one!’ I smiled.

  ‘Come on then,’ hooted Margherita, swigging busily, ‘ain’t you going to give the girl a little show?’

  The girls exchanged glances with the twins, then stripped off their jackets. Johannes paced carefully back to his drum and began to beat out the tense, regular rhythm of an expectant heart. Chellus and Gherardus dragged over the hoops and set them atop each other in a figure of eight. Addio went first, taking a run and hurling his compacted body through the upper hoop, landing bent over, nose to knees, followed by the girls, one after the other, landing on top of him. Then the two men swung over, catching at the girls’ elbows and raising them, slowly, impossibly, until their bodies fanned out like branches either side. I could see the thickly compacted muscle of their torsos, admire the strength and control it took to hold their bodies to such a disciplined line, but before I had a chance to applaud, they flip-flopped over, pulled Addio from beneath their feet and inserted him into the lower hoop. They produced scarlet whips from their breeches and began to spin the hoop. The dwarf whirled round inside it until he became like a hummingbird, buttons and spurs flashing. The twins, wrist to ankle, locked their bodies into another hoop and made circles round him, rolling over and over like a crazed astrolabe, until Annunziata and Immaculata leaped in, raised the hoop with Addio inside it gripping the rim, and held it high above their heads. He flipped his body upwards like a leaping fish, swivelled, caught the rim, repeated it a second time, a third; and then he landed in the hoop in a crouch. In a flash, Chellus and Gherardus dived through the hoop, their heads barely missing him, and the girls held it side on, like a picture frame, their own flushed faces peeping prettily in on either side.

  I had never seen such a thing. I was dazzled by their skill and clapped as hard as I could, grinning with delight.

  ‘Good, aren’t they?’ asked Casinus, as we moved to sit by the fire.

  I nodded as vigorously as I could, but there was something sad along with the pride in his tone.

  ‘No work here, though. We’re moving on.’

  I wanted to say politely that I was sure such talented acrobats could make all the money they wanted, but I minded and held my tongue. As we picked at the rabbits, smeared with a sweet, spicy mostarda, and cleaned our hands on soft, charred flat bread that Casinus pulled from the embers, they talked with Margherita of the changing times in Florence.

  ‘You’re well off, mistress,’ said Addio to Margherita, ‘there’s always plenty as’ll pay for charms, discreet like, but we can’t work without a public.’

  ‘And they won’t have us any more,’ added Annunziata indignantly. ‘Called us whores, if you please! As though we were puttane who can only stick their legs in the air!’

  ‘You’ll be glad of what I’ve brought you then, dears,’ said Margherit
a, taking a last gulp of wine and getting to her feet. I heard the chink of coins in Johannes’s lap. ‘Where are they? Come on, mooncalf, you too. I’ll be needing you.’

  Puzzled, I followed her to one of the wagons, where the twins pulled aside a leather curtain, releasing a powerful musty stink. They unlocked a slatted wooden grille and held up a lantern. I gasped and jumped back against Margherita’s steadying arm. Inside the wagon was an ape, and next to the ape, a bear. And next to the bear, a wolf.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, ciccia. Sleepy, they are.’

  Cautiously, I peered into the stinking space. Each animal was held by a short, thick chain, allowing no more than a few inches to move its head. The ape’s eyes were open, staring at us in a disgruntled fashion, but the bear, a poor mangy thing that looked too thin for its patchy fur coat, was so still it might have been dead. My heart lurched with pity for them. The wolf had stretched out along the width of the wagon, its hindquarters bunched against the grille. The head was buried in the forepaws, but it was not sleeping. The very tips of its ears twitched minutely.

  ‘We drugs ’em, see, when we travel,’ said Chellus apologetically. ‘Has to keep ’em quiet.’

  Deftly, Gherardus slipped a leather muzzle over the wolf’s jaw, then undid the collar chain, fastening it to a longer one. He tugged and the animal came awake, getting slowly to its feet and then dropping heavily out onto the turf. I caught a whicker of fear from one of the horses. Margherita had produced a pot and handed me a rounded, blunt knife.

  ‘Give him a scrape, that’s my girl,’ she whispered, ‘you give his skin a good old scrape. Right under the fur now.’

  She showed me, rubbing forward with the knife and then scraping it against the lid of the pot.

  ‘Brings it on, see,’ she hissed, ‘boil it up nice, swallow it down, and hee hee, no more baby. There’s ladies in Florence who pay good money for Margherita’s special tea.’

  She was quite mad, I thought, but with all those expectant eyes on me I didn’t dare disobey her. I laid my hand on the wolf’s warm flank, feeling the coarse hair on top and the unexpected softness of the under pelt.

  *

  And there it was. He recognised my touch, I knew it. That skein of silk, twining into me, binding us together. I felt his heart, I heard his breath. Without knowing why I did it, I bent forward over the splayed bone of his shoulder, as high as my head, and hummed softly in his ear. Somewhere, far away, I could hear Margherita’s voice, ‘I knew it, I knew it. My good girl, my shadow child,’ but there was nothing near me but the scent of him, the coil of his strength under my hand. I tried to speak to him, to tell him not to mind, that I would not hurt him, and that I knew what he longed for, for the stretch of his body over the ground and the wild flight and the sweet salt of warm blood on his tongue. Slowly, I began to work the knife along the thick skin of his neck, delicate, so as not to startle him—

  *

  And then one of the horses neighed and reared, mad with fear at the scent of him in the darkness, and he came awake, snarling under the muzzle and bolted, the chain snapping taut and pitching Gherardus to the ground. The acrobat hung on, as the creature ran for the wood, battering the man’s body over the stony ground as the other horses picked up the panic and suddenly the air was full of screams as the troupe ran to calm them.

  ‘Help him!’ yelled Chellus in my ear.

  Only Margherita was calm, looking at me steadily.

  ‘You heard.’

  I took a few staggering steps, but I knew it was useless. Beyond the firelight, the wolf had turned, swiping at Gherardus with his strapped jaw, pawing at him to drop the chain and release him. I was afraid to call out, but then I knew that I didn’t need to call.

  *

  Send him your anger, your rage, your hate. Summon him to you, calm him with all you know of captivity, of longing, of constraint. Let him see the ice in your eyes and the silver wind in your hair. Let him see the forest in the blue wire of your veins. Have him come back to you out of the dark, but let him know it is just for a little while.

  *

  I found the flame in the wolf’s eyes and held it. He stopped butting his head at Gherardus. I trotted up gently and took the chain from the fallen man’s hand, stooped and sank my face into the thick reek of his pelt, searching for the beat of his heart tight against my own. Then I led him back, quietly, to where the others were waiting. The girls moved past me to tend to Gherardus.

  ‘Phew-ee,’ breathed Addio, ‘where d’you learn that then?’

  ‘I told you,’ giggled Margherita exultantly, ‘she’s a clever one. Deep like a spring she is, oh yes!’

  ‘Well, if ever you need a job, missy, you come to us. Never seen anything like it.’

  I tried to smile, shook my head to clear the dream. This was part of the gift, my mama’s gift. Her people, my people, the fire-conjurers, the wolf-worshippers of the north. It was in me, in my eyes, what Margherita called ‘the sight’; it had called me through my dreams and rescued me – from the hateful old man in Toledo, from the palazzo kitchen. I shook my head again. And then I was just me, Mura, my lips still spicy with rabbit, my tatty fancy dress scarf unravelling down my back. But I didn’t feel lonely any more.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MARGHERITA WAS DOZING, HER STUBBY FEATURES covered in what looked like an altar cloth. No matter how the sky blazed, she never seemed too warm. I was half-asleep myself, lulled by the thick air and the soft cooing of the doves in the bell tower above us. I had seven florins now. In a little while, perhaps when the summer ended, there would be ten. Ten, I thought, was the sum I needed. I was dreaming, imagining myself in Venice, a floating city of books, or on a boat, the breeze rippling across my skin, bound for Constantinople, for Kashmir . . .

  I started at a soft touch on my arm, and as I opened my eyes I almost cried out before I remembered myself, for the face bending towards mine was one I recognised from the palazzo. A boy with a thick crop of reddish hair under a faded blue cap, and a face as speckled as a brown egg. Where had I seen him? Trotting through the courtyard with piles of papers – he must be a clerk’s assistant. Although my throat was suddenly icy with fear I thought hurriedly; there was no way he could recognise me in my silvery disguise, no way that he could associate the wise woman’s companion with one of the creeping, grey creatures of the household. I stared blankly into his face, which looked friendly and somehow amused, and nudged Margherita awake.

  ‘What’s is to be, Messr?’ she asked, her voice sharp and bright with the hope of a profit. ‘A charm for a midsummer’s night, eh? Though you’re a bit young for that, shame on you, hee hee! What’s it to be?’

  The boy looked behind him and inclined his head before stepping back respectfully as a tall, slouching figure emerged from the violet shadow of the porch. The coldness, which had begun in my lungs, spread through me and I began to shiver, my hands shaking until I twisted them tight together in my lap. The tall figure whose broad shoulders momentarily obscured the sun seemed to be the young man from my dream. As in the dream, his face was hidden by a black velvet mask. I watched as his full, sensuous mouth curled into the same anticipatory smile. I sucked the musty air that rose from Margherita’s rags slowly, deeply, trying to calm myself with its comforting odour. Although the man was plainly dressed and wore no sword, Margherita sat up straight and addressed him almost reverently, with none of her usual bawdiness.

  ‘How may it please you that I help you, Messr?’

  The man handed her a scrap of parchment.

  ‘I want you to tell me what you know of this, Suora.’

  Margherita squinted at the inked characters and turned the paper about. Of course, she could not read. I held out my hand to her. If she was surprised at this sudden skill in her mooncalf she had the sense not to show it. I read to myself silently.

  ‘The cross of God’s anger rises from Rome. The black cross hangs over Florence. Repent, oh Florence, while there is still time. Clothe thyself in the garments of purificati
on.’

  I nodded to show that I had understood what I had read. A warning: anger, purification. I screwed up my eyes to stop the sharp memory of the soldiers in Toledo. This was part of the shift I had sensed in the city’s atmosphere, the words like those I half-remembered from the hushed talk in my father’s shop, when the Spanish queen sent her men to my home to stir up blood and fire as her god demanded.

  ‘It was in the tamburo,’ the man spoke again, his voice calm and deep as though he were trying to control it. I knew of the tamburo from Margherita’s conversations with her clients. The drum in the cathedral piazza was a depository for anonymous letters where people could inform the magistrates of their neighbours’ vices; petty, spiteful things usually, dropped by cowards after dark. The man repeated the words to Margherita in a whisper.

  ‘What does it mean? Is it true?’

  Margherita recovered a little of her showmanship.

  ‘Well, Messr, my girl here has the sight, you see, the gift? She’ll see the truth in it, if there’s truth to see. What she could tell us if only she could speak! Her mother was a mermaid, you know, from beneath the frozen lakes.’

  ‘Tell me.’ He had cut her off, irritated by her nonsense. I took the paper in my hands again, and looked into his face, into that smooth blackness.

  *

  I plummeted into my dream, wrapped in velvet night. A she-wolf howled beneath a city wall, and under the howling I heard deep, rasping growls. I saw two great golden beasts, lions, tearing at one another’s throats until the growls were choked with blood that streamed like a banner across the sky, spreading over the outline of the city that I saw was Florence, the mountain of the Duomo swelling over it. Through the blood pierced a sword, a gleaming sword, which became a bolt of lightning, juddering through the night towards the dome until it struck and, in my dream, the crack splintered the sky and brought me back to my senses, gasping like a landed fish.