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Authors: Marina Fiorato

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There was an awful silence, broken eventually by the first authoritative voice. ‘And Domenico?’
Riccardo strained his ears through the dull, thick cloth. Was his father in danger?
‘There’s no doubt he knows horseflesh – he will know the true quality of the beast I feed into his stable. But Domenico is a Torre. First, second and last. If his son has a new horse, what is that to him? He knows nothing of our plan.’
‘And the next step?’
‘The Unicorn next. I will move tomorrow and report to the next meeting: nine days from now, at nine of the clock, in the—’
‘Don’t say it! Even here we may be overheard!’
Riccardo’s blood thrummed in his ears.
‘Father Pietro prepared the place, emptied the church. He is my cousin’s nephew, an Eagle to the bone. And Nello is without, guarding the door. No one will pass his rapier.’
‘Still, we must be sure.’ Salvatore again, blustering and peevish.
‘Sure of what? The starlings in the eaves? The altarboy behind the curtain?’
Riccardo nearly left his skin as a hand caught at the cloth before his face – he could see the rough folds, caught in an unseen grip. He crammed every inch of his flesh further and further back into the window till his ribs and the cross-ribs were as one. If the toes of his boots could be seen, he was dead. But the cloth relaxed and fell to its full length. Riccardo breathed again, but almost swallowed his own heart as a blade came swinging through the curtain to strike a spark on the stone, inches from his left arm. The blade vanished again and he heard it punching through the tapestry covering the neighbouring window. Amid the universal censure of the other voices, Salvatore Tolomei could be heard above all, spitting with rage.
‘What are you doing? You can’t draw in the house of God! Do you want to bring ill luck to our enterprise?’
‘He’s right,’ said a new voice, rough and straightforward. ‘You shouldn’t even be carrying a blade. I care not for the house of God, but it’s what we agreed.’
‘I’ve a right to wear a blade,’ prickled the unknown voice, ‘a unique right, for we are the governors, and we were given the right, thanks to the valour of our
contrada
at—’
‘The battle of Montaperti against the Florentines,’ finished Faustino. ‘We know. You’ve bored us all with the story. But if you take my point,’ he emphasized the word, ‘we must all act as brothers in this. No blades in future.’
‘You’re one to talk,’ scoffed the unknown voice. ‘It’s your hot head and your blade that has taken this enterprise backward. No, no, Gabi, don’t try to stop me.’ The
voice shouted down a mediator. ‘He beat up Raffaello Albani’s son, left him in the square like carrion. He will not touch the Tower boy, but he lost us the house of the Panther – they’ll never join us now. And you’ve opened us up to reprisals—’
He got no further. Riccardo heard Faustino’s furious snarl.
‘Beat up his son?
His
son? What about my son? What about
my
son? He bled out in the square too, and only the Tower boy held his throat to stem the flow.’
There was an appalled silence. Riccardo imagined the Eagle had flown across the room to wrap his talons round the speaker’s throat. For some moments he could hear only Faustino’s heavy breath. When the new voice spoke again, it was in calmer, measured tones.
‘Salva, you wanted me to make sure. I
made
sure. And since when has a Sienese needed God? We are a city. The
contrada
is our God.’
Salvatore fretted still. ‘And those are priceless tapestries! My family tapestries, brought back from—’
‘Yes, yes, brought back from Rome by your illustrious papal Pannochieschi pisspot.’
Riccardo, knowing Salvatore might inspect the damage, shrank behind the tapestry and felt the sweat trickling down the small of his back. A clean hole from the sword strike now let the candlelight through, and golden dust motes danced in the soft beam. Beyond the cloth there was a strained silence, a silence that told Riccardo no one would gainsay Faustino Caprimulgo when they recalled what he had done to the Panther.
When Salvatore spoke again it was in a tight, small voice dripping with resentment. ‘I mean to say, Fausto. Look to yourself, that’s all. Look to yourself.’
They would do well to get to the end of their objective with any sort of accord, Riccardo thought. The alliance of the Nine was already shaky, so shaky there was surely a way to cleave them apart.
The elderly voice again, learned, assured. ‘All right, gentlemen. When we meet again it will be in – how shall I put it? – let us say in the church of the Once and Future King. Apt, don’t you think, Faustino? It could pertain to you and Nello.’
‘The Once and Future King,’ repeated Faustino, his voice heavy with irony. ‘I like it. You, Ranuccio, undertake to bring the Giraffa there? The Giraffa
contrada
hold the mechanism for the horse draw. If we do not fix the draw, then the race is out of our hands.’
Ranuccio. Riccardo quickly calculated he was listening to the voice of Ranuccio Odeschalchi,
capitano
of the Bruco
contrada
, the Caterpillars. The Caterpillars were historical allies of the Giraffa.
‘The Giraffa are a certainty,’ Ranuccio agreed. ‘I am sure of our man. In the affair of the donkey he did not miss a step. He cannot come to this meeting because it is crucial he is not suspected. He is adamant, though, that we will take the city. Not only by way of the draw, but by reason that the Giraffa are the only imperial
contrada
, and will give us the sanction of the ancient law. Then we will have three nobles, one imperial. And a prior.’
Riccardo could picture Salvatore, prior of Siena, mollified
by this salve to his pride. Then there was movement, the ring of bells and the scrape of a chair as one man stood. It was Faustino.
‘Gentlemen, before then we will place the horses and begin our training. I will ready the Unicorn, for all depends on the Unicorn. Ranuccio, make sure of the Giraffa, they must have all ready for the draw. The ninth of the Nine. Until the next meeting, we will maintain our old rivalries, maintain the semblance of discord.’
‘And Romulus?’ asked the learned voice.
‘He will contact me before we meet next.’
‘And will he come to our gathering?’ Salvatore was all eagerness.
‘That depends on the Giraffa. Now leave at intervals,’ commanded Faustino, ‘different doors, remember.’
Riccardo could hear the footsteps recede and, accompanying one of them, the scrape of a scabbard. Sword and Faustino stopped at the door.
‘Faustino. This boy of yours. I don’t need to tell you. He must win.’
‘He will.’
Riccardo Bruni forced himself to stay where he was for another quarter of the bells, his head spinning. So – Nello was to win the Palio dell’Assunta in August. He and the other eight of the Nine were to lose it. This much he knew, but there were many unanswered questions. Who else had been in the room? Who had carried the forbidden sword and pierced the tapestries? What did the Unicorn
contrada
have to do with this? Where was the church of the Once and Future King? How could the
Giraffa fix the draw of the horses? And who or what was Romulus?
As the bells rang again he crept from his hiding place. The door opened under his hand and he raced down the dark nave and into the night. As soon as he reached the safety of the
campo
his legs buckled under him. His knees hit the still-warm stones and for a few moments he could not rise again.
This time, he did pray.
The Unicorn
V
iolante’s father had had a cabinet of curiosities in his palace in Bavaria. On rainy afternoons when she was freed from the schoolroom, Violante used to wander into the small panelled chamber and look at her father’s collection of wonders. The item that drew her again and again was a single spike of horn, suspended in a glass case, bone white and turned like a chair leg, sharpened to a wicked point. This, said the tiny card leaning against it, was a unicorn’s horn. Violante pressed the pads of her little fingers to the glass, leaving a collection of smoky prints, which she knew would anger her father. But she wanted to get close to it, to touch it.
She learned, as she grew, that only a virgin could capture these fabled creatures; and although she would never tell, she used to look for them on her daily walks in the forest, turning quickly in the hope of catching the creatures unawares, convinced she could see a flash of white disappearing between the
trees. She continued in this secret quest even when she was old enough to understand what a virgin was. She never saw a unicorn but used to seek them out in art, and dream that she could catch one and have it lay its heavy head in her lap, in the attitudes she saw in tapestries and Books of Hours.
As a newly married woman, delighted by the library in Ferdinando’s Florentine palace, she sought the creatures out in books. She read, once, to Ferdinando, shyly, a passage from the writings of Marco Polo, fascinated that the traveller had seen a unicorn at first-hand. Ferdinando laughed at her.
‘He is describing a rhinoceros, an ugly horned brute from the Africas. Unicorns do not exist.’
Violante closed the book and put it down as if it burned her. ‘They do,’ she said quietly. It was the first time she had dared to gainsay him. Ferdinando came closer to her and took her chin in his hand. She could not meet his scornful, beautiful eyes.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if they do, you may still capture one yet, my little
maid
.’
He left her then, feeling the imprint of his hand, feeling the full meaning of the words. She was, a month after marriage, still intact.
 
 
‘The Once and Future King,’ Violante repeated. ‘The Once and Future King.’
She walked along the shelves of her library, trailing her long fingers along the spines of the books with love. She looked at the age spots on her hands and at the beautiful books with their jewel-coloured leather, tooled and
chased with gold. She would die and rot but these things would remain for all time.
She had embraced literature and music when she had married Ferdinando, adopting his loves as her own, and when it became clear he had no love for her, these things had abided with her and been her comfort and joy. Living in the cold winter of Ferdinando’s disregard, she had nonetheless enjoyed the company and courtesy of his circle, including the composers Scarlatti and Vivaldi, whose names would live for ever in their works. Ferdinando’s books were her inheritance; she had brought them all to Siena and lined this room with them. She had escaped into those tales, casting herself as the tragic Iseult or the feckless Guinevere, women whom she could never have been, women who could once have captured a unicorn.
Now, she sought, with her ageing fingers, the solution to a puzzle, the echo of a chime that Riccardo had sent ringing in her head, the phrase that he had brought to her from the cathedral:
the Once and Future King
. It had fluttered around her head, intangible, and come to roost here like a dove in its cote. She sought it among the stacks.
Riccardo sat, wondering at the room in which he had found himself. There were more books here than he had ever seen all together in his life. They had met, as before, at the top of the Torre del Mangia, and Riccardo had given his account of the meeting he had witnessed, ending with the cryptic direction for the next meeting place in nine days’ time: at the church of the Once and Future King. The duchess had led Riccardo through the
inner door joining the tower to the palace. Gretchen, wearing her night-time plait, had joined them there, giving Riccardo a curt, but not unfriendly, nod of greeting.
‘Gretchen,’ said the duchess, ‘go and find Zebra. Direct him here and come back yourself.’
So there were four of them in this unlikely alliance to save the city, a council of war comprised of the least warlike people that could be imagined. At length, Violante took down a book, bound in green leather, thick and heavy as a keystone. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘The Once and Future King.’
She placed the book carefully on the dark wood table around which they were seated. Riccardo tried to make out the letters, but they were not in any language that he knew. LE M-O-R-T-E D’-A-R-T-H-U-R.
He raised his head. ‘What is it?’
‘
The Death of Arthur
by Sir Thomas Malory, an English writer.’
‘Who is Arthur?’
‘Was. Arthur Pendragon, ancient king of the Britons.’
‘What is he to do with Siena?’
‘I do not know, but that was what he was called: the Once and Future King.’
Violante leafed through the volume as she talked, the printed pages rustling under her hands.
‘He was the son of a great tyrant called Uther Pendragon. Arthur plucked his legendary sword Excalibur from a stone, when no other man could draw it. He was king of a great court known as Camelot where his knights met around a round table. He had a beautiful wife called
Guinevere, who betrayed him with his first knight, a fellow called Lancelot.’
Violante looked at Riccardo carefully under her sandy lashes. She wanted to warn him of the perils of an attachment to a married woman.
‘And at the end of his life, he gave his sword back to a lady in a lake.’
Riccardo shook his head. It all seemed nonsensical. He grasped the one element that made sense to him. ‘In the duomo, one of the conspirators carried a sword, even in the church, and said it was his right, something to do with a battle.’
Violante sat down opposite him. ‘The battle of Montaperti. The man with the sword must be an Oca, a Goose. At the battle of Montaperti the Goose
contrada
fought so valiantly against the Florentines they were given the right to wear swords at any time. They were given the title “governors” of Siena.’ She appreciated the irony of the title. ‘Orsa Lombardi is the captain of the Geese. The swordsman must be him.’
‘Then perhaps,’ said Riccardo tentatively, ‘they may all meet in the church of the Goose
contrada
? In nine days’ time? For is not a governor a sort of king?’
The duchess was not convinced. ‘We will think on this later. Let us ask Zebra what he knows of these horses of which the Nine spoke.’
Violante could not remember the last time she had had a proper conversation with a man. With Conti, her chief councillor, she discussed the dry business of state, and at formal dinners she uttered the small nothings and niceties
expected between the high-born at leisure. But not since she had been with her brother-in-law, Gian Gastone, in Florence, when she was lately married to a man who did not love her, and he was to be married to a woman he did not love, had she discussed something real. He had taken her to the Boboli Gardens and they had talked, with great candour, about the nature of love. Today, once again, she had been forced to think. It felt good. Her dull brain was beginning to wake up.
The door opened and Zebra was ushered in by Gretchen, yawning, scratching, his hair standing up like a palomino’s mane. He had clearly been pulled from a bed of straw somewhere. The city was Zebra’s home and he had a different stable every night – it was a credit to Gretchen that she had tracked him down so swiftly.
‘Our
own
stables, madam, if you please,’ said the old lady, her mouth set in a hard line.
Zebra grinned sleepily.
‘Never mind,’ said Violante. ‘Sit down. Will you take something?’
Zebra’s eyes snapped open. ‘I liked that bread and milk from the other day.’
Violante nodded to Gretchen, who vanished. The duchess leaned forward in her chair until her corsets bit. ‘Zebra, when does the next horse fair come to town?’
‘Wednesday fortnight,
’donna
.’
‘Too late,’ said Riccardo, pacing behind the boy. ‘The Nine are meeting again in nine days’ time … They said they were placing horses in their stables before then. One for Nello, and one for “the boy from the Tower” – me.
Their plan, as we understand it, is to feed ten horses into the city, secretly. Nine are to be
asini
.’
‘
Asini?
’ questioned Violante.
‘Asses. Donkeys. Slow and stupid,’ supplied Zebra.
Violante recalled suddenly the tale of the rotting donkey that had been cast, a week ago, over the Camollia gate. ‘Go on,’ she said.
‘Only one horse, Nello’s, will be a runner. They intend to fix the horse draw, with the help of someone from the Giraffa
contrada
, so that only the New Nine, and my own
contrada
of the Tower, shall run in the Palio dell’Assunta on the sixteenth day of August. By the laws of our city only ten can run – those will be the ten. Those ten will run and Nello will win.’
Zebra had a child’s capacity to cleave straight to the point. ‘Well, the traders can bring horses to order. Outside traders and the
capitani
can visit other cities.’
‘What do you know of this man they mentioned – Boli from Arezzo – who supplies the San Martino fair? Is he corrupt?’
Zebra’s eyes were round as coins. ‘No,
’donna
. Straight as a Roman road.’
‘That does not signify. The trader may not have been told what they are for. He may have been merely told to bring nine duds and one runner.’
‘I’ll tell you this, though,’ Zebra broke in, ‘Nello’s horse will have to be a star. ’Tis all very well being a good runner, but to
win
?’ He turned to Riccardo, two men discussing horses. ‘You’ve run it, you’ve seen the San Martino corner. You’d have to be a class horse.’
‘Like Berio?’
‘Like Berio, but, as one of the conspirators said, Vicenzo rode Berio in the July Palio. It’s forbidden for a
contrada
to ride the same horse again. And yet I have never seen a better mount than Berio.’
‘They are taking as few chances as they may.’ Violante broke into their discourse. ‘But I still don’t see how that will let them take the city.’
‘Bets,’ said Riccardo briefly.
‘Bets?’ questioned the duchess.
The horseman nodded. ‘Yes. The Nine will create a betting syndicate. An enormous amount of money changes hands at each Palio, but this time none of the other
contrade
will know that the race will be fixed. The Nine will make enough on one race to finance the coup and unseat your rule.’
Violante swallowed.
‘But even this is not all,’ said Riccardo gently. ‘There is more – the talk of Romulus.’
‘Zebra, have you ever heard anyone being called Romulus?’ questioned Violante.
‘Never,
’donna
, only the wolf’s child.’
‘Romulus and Remus. Twin symbols of Siena. They are known by all – there are statues everywhere,’ said Gretchen, speaking for the first time.
Violante breathed out. ‘Very well. Let us leave that aside for now. Let us set down what we know so far. Who are the dancers in this quadrille?’
There was silence.
‘Who was at the meeting?’ Violante persisted.
‘Faustino,’ answered Riccardo. ‘Salvatore.’
‘Let us be methodical.’ She took up her quill and paper. ‘Faustino Caprimulgo of the Aquila. Salvatore Tolomei of the Civetta.’
‘Ranuccio Odeschalchi of the Bruco, the Caterpillar
contrada
, was named,’ added Riccardo, ‘and then there was the fellow with the sword.’
‘Orsa Lombardi, of the Oca, the Goose.’
BOOK: The Daughter of Siena
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