The Road to Damietta Read online

  My heart beat wildly; then it seemed not to beat at all. "Tell the guards," I said, "to tell Francis Bernardone that my father is away and he's to come back another time and ask for permission to gather stones."

  Nicola grumbled something that sounded rude, then said, "But he's here. And there are dozens of stones lying in the courtyard. Against the wall, back where an old pillar has fallen down. They're covered with moss and of no use." Tossing her blond curls, she grumbled again.

  "Apparently," I said, "you have forgotten the 'Rules for Girls of Gentle Breeding' my mother lovingly had me prepare for you."

  "I haven't. I know them by heart. Sometimes they seem silly. As they do now."

  "You've forgotten the very first one."

  Nicola smiled. "The one that says that a girl of the gentle class should not raise her voice in anger or act impatiently. But I am not angry or impatient. I am only saying that a young man who wishes a few stones for a ruined church is out there waiting in the cold."

  A chill thought seized me. The man waiting in the cold was the one who had turned his back upon me, who had deserted Ricca di Montanaro for the life of a barefooted mendicant.

  "Go," I said, "and deliver a message to the beggar. Say that I have no authority to give him stones for a church."

  Nicola wheeled about and ran down the hall, sniffling, but before she ever reached the courtyard I overtook her.

  10

  The last of the sun lay on the summit of Mount Subasio in the distance. The gate to our courtyard was open, and just inside it stood a hooded man.

  "There he is," Nicola said. "Francis Bernardone."

  "It's not Francis Bernardone," I said.

  "I've seen him before. I saw him begging in the street. It was yesterday, when I went to pray in the cathedral."

  "It can't be!"

  Yet the moment I spoke these words I realized that it was Francis, the new Francis, barefooted, wrapped in a tattered robe held together by a rope like those used to tether oxen. My heart sank.

  Skipping along like a dancer, he came toward me and stopped but a stride from me. "Praise the Lord for this beautiful day," he said. "Praise Brother Sun for the task he has just completed. Praise Sister Night who is about to visit us again. And praise the stars also, the first of which I see there beyond the mountaintop and shy as a maiden rising from sleep."

  His words issued from the hood that nearly hid his face, words from the depths of a cavern.

  "Lest I frighten you," he said, "I am the Francis Bernardone who, you may remember, has been in this courtyard before, on the day of the bulls. Who has sung beneath your window. Who has sold you cloth. A length of sendal, or was it samite? I can't recall."

  "Sendal," I said.

  "Yes, sendal becomes you more than samite."

  "The cloth faded the first time it was cleaned," I said.

  "Then please return it to Signor Bernardone. He has a good name, which he wishes to keep, I am certain."

  "The cloth was given to a servant," I said, angered at the pain that had pierced my heart. "You also persuaded me to free my hunting bird, who is dead by now, an act for which my father has severely punished me."

  "Your bird is in God's care. It is safer than on your wrist."

  The bird story that Bishop Pelagius had told me quickly came to mind. "You seem to know all about God and what He does. Does He speak to you as you speak to the sparrows?"

  "Yes, and how fortunate for me, humble sparrow that I am."

  In the failing light I couldn't see his face, hidden as it was by the heavy folds of his hood, yet I felt that he was serious. Yes, Francis Bernardone spoke directly to God in the voice of a sparrow. Perhaps he talked to God in the voice of the poor little donkey that was now waiting beside the gate.

  Impatient with talk, he began to dance quite gracefully—a joyous little dance, one foot to the side, then the other foot forward. "We are gathering stones," he said, pointing to the donkey, including the beast in the task. "We gather them for the church of San Damiano, which is in a perilous state, weed-grown and close to falling down."

  "I've seen it. It has already fallen down. Why waste time with it? There are many beautiful churches in Assisi, and a new cathedral and an old one, too."

  "I've had a shining vision. In the night the Lord appeared and asked me to put back the stones of San Damiano that people have taken away to build houses and barns for themselves." He gestured toward the far wall of the courtyard. "I see a pile of stones over there."

  "They weren't stolen from San Damiano, not a single one of them," I said. "They all came from a small temple that stood there once. It was dedicated to Venus. As you may know, Venus was the goddess of love."

  A muffled sound came from the cavern of his hood. The word Venus seemed to have disturbed him.

  "Since Venus was a pagan," I continued, "the stones are not suitable for a Christian church."

  "God created the stones, as He created you. They are His, as everything is His. Stones, like people, can be put to many uses, and like people they may be redeemed, though with people redemption is far more difficult than with stones."

  Dusk changed to night and the guardians of the gate lit torches. From San Rufino Square came the sound of watchmen setting off on their rounds of the dangerous streets.

  "One stone," Francis said, "will bring one blessing. Two stones and the giver is doubly blessed. Three and he's—"

  "My father has built two churches in his lifetime," I said. "Both of them bigger than San Damiano. By now he must be blessed a thousand times over. He's in no need of further blessing."

  "There are never enough blessings," Francis said. "A thousand are not enough. And those who give, though rich, are not called upon to pass through the eye of the needle."

  "Come when my father is home," I said. "Let him decide about the stones and if he is in need of more blessings."

  "When is he home? He travels much."

  "Perhaps tonight. Perhaps tomorrow."

  A chill wind had come up. Francis wrapped the tattered robe around himself and tightened the rope around his waist. In the darkness he seemed to change. He loomed larger against the dark walls. His dark robe turned black. The heavy folds that hid his face took on a forbidding shape. A cold finger ran down my back. I was seized by an impulse to flee. But as I turned away from the silent figure, Nicola came running with a torch.

  Francis took the beast's tether and for a moment I thought that he meant to leave and not come back.

  "Your friend Clare di Scifi," he said, "sent word that she has a stone for me, a small one she's been using for a doorstop, which she wishes to give to our little church. I'll go to get it tomorrow; then I'll come here and talk to your father."

  Clare offering her doorstop to Francis Bernardone? He must be lying. It wasn't just an ordinary stone. I had often noticed it, a piece of precious jade, sea-green and shaped like a monkey's head, which her mother had brought from the Holy Land. She would never give it up. Or would she? Painfully, I remembered how she had defended Francis against my father. Was it true? Was she secretly in love with him?

  "Signor Montanaro is a very Christian man. He will surely forgive us," Nicola said, grabbing Francis by the arm and leading him across the courtyard.

  I watched the torchlight flickering among the temple stones, hoping that my father would return at that moment and find the two pilferers in his courtyard.

  They were not gone long. They came back, Nicola carrying a piece that looked like the hand of a goddess, Francis Bernardone with a heavy square stone from a fluted pedestal.

  "Your cart is full already," I said to him. "Your poor beast will founder long before it reaches San Damiano."

  He asked Nicola to put the piece of marble in the cart and kept the heavy one balanced on his shoulder.

  "Thank you," he said.

  I thought he was talking to me. Instead he was talking to the donkey.

  "Thank you for all that you have done this day and for what I will ask of
you before we reach San Damiano. I swear that I will not burden you further with another stone, large or small. Thank you, dear brother."

  The beast did not answer; at least, I did not hear him answer. Then Bernardone spoke to me. "And thank you, dear friend. God will bless you doubly for these generous gifts."

  "The stones you are taking away are not gifts," I said. "They are stolen."

  He was silent. I seized the torch and angrily shone it in his face, to confound him, to make him aware that I, Ricca di Montanaro, was standing in front of him.

  The light penetrated the cavernous hood. It revealed the same face I had seen on the morning he had knelt on the palace steps. It was the face of Adam, the face that had haunted me every hour of every day since the moment I stood before him among the trees in the Garden of Eden.

  "I am the Lord's thief," he said, "but I'll return the stones, if you wish."

  It was the voice of Adam speaking to me again, the same gentle voice I had heard before, long ago in God's beautiful garden. "No," I said impulsively, "take all the stones you need."

  "The cart is full," he said.

  "Then come tomorrow with an empty cart."

  "I am in need of a thousand stones, but let others give us stones. Thus they too may receive God's blessings. Blessings shared by many are far better than those shared by only one. They are like rain to the desert rose."

  Tilting under the weight of the cumbersome stone balanced on his shoulder, he asked the donkey to leave the courtyard, if possible. Obligingly, with groans and grunts, the beast pulled the cart into the street and I followed, walking at Francis's side as he staggered along, Nicola at my heels.

  He would soon grow sick of gathering stones for a ruined church, of wandering about from house to house holding a begging bowl, starving himself, listening to insults, being pelted with rocks and offal. It was a game he was at, different from the game he played as a troubadour, different and novel and tiring. All I needed to do was wait with patience and quiet understanding.

  We crossed San Rufino Square, which was deserted save for a watchman and a slinking dog.

  "Let's go down the hill," Nicola said, "and help Francis with the stones."

  "Let's," I said, reluctant to leave him.

  "To San Damiano?"

  "Yes."

  But before we reached the far side of the square we heard the clatter of hoofs on the cobbles. I pulled Nicola into the shadows behind the fountain and we waited for the horsemen to pass. There were six men, Rinaldo, my father, and Giuseppe di Luzzaro among them. By this time Francis was on the road that led out of the city. I could barely see him trudging along and hear the creaking of the cart.

  "He has a long way to go," Nicola said.

  I was sorely tempted to run after him, to lift the stone from his shoulders, but the consequences of such rashness held me back. Only my heart followed him down the long road to San Damiano.

  11

  We hid in the shadows and watched until father and his companions reached the square and turned toward home. Then we followed them at a distance.

  Two doors opened into our palace—the big main door that faced the square, and just around the corner near the courtyard gate a second door, an arched break in the wall, called the Door of the Dead. My two baby brothers were carried through this door in their little white coffins covered with flowers. Also my brother Lorenzo, after he was killed on the battlefield in Perugia.

  We slipped by the guard and down the long passageway, no one seeing us. Nicola scurried to the kitchen to finish making her tarts and I to the scriptorium. When my father came in a few minutes later I was seated at the bench, busily at work on the initial for the twenty-third chapter of Genesis.

  He glanced over my shoulder, complimented me upon the progress I had made in the art of illumination, and as he left gave me an affectionate pat on the head. Since my hair was still damp from the night air, it would have given me an anxious moment had he not been wearing leather gloves. I worked hard until the trumpet announced supper, though I made a mistake and had to paint the initial a second time.

  At supper I was seated across the board from Giuseppe di Luzzaro. He was in a good humor, flushed ruddy by the sun, quite handsome in his fur-trimmed tunic, with his black curls nicely arranged across his forehead. He took off his garnet thumb-rings and washed his fingers carefully in the bowl of scented water, and then instead of passing the bowl to his right, as was the custom, he smilingly passed it to me.

  This was the first time 1 had encountered Luzzaro since the day I disrobed in Santa Maria Maggiore Square. If he had not seen me, then surely he had heard about what I had done. When I sat down to supper I kept my eyes to myself expecting to find a hostile light in his. But if anything, his smile was warmer than usual; there was no hint that he was upset with me. Suspicions lingered. Was his passing the finger bowl to me and not around the board a gesture of defiance? Was he not flaunting his forgiveness of an act that had repelled everyone else?

  Yet everyone was in a festive mood. The men had hunted in the country from early dawn and returned with strings of meadowlarks. The birds were brought on after a serving of lentil soup, roasted in their feathers and pinned in a row on pine branches. I had eaten larks before, stuffed with small gobbets of fat, bread crumbs, and pine nuts, and had found them delicious, but on this night, with Francis Bernardone in my thoughts, the sight of them turned my stomach.

  We were entertained by a pair of wandering minstrels, man and wife, who presented the sad story of Tristan and Iseult, the husband reciting while his wife played the zither. At the moment when Tristan pierced the monster's heart with one thrust of his sword, I cheered. And at the end, as Iseult lay down beside her dead lover and died of grief, I thought of my own love for Francis and hot tears rolled down my cheeks.

  After supper I hurried to the scriptorium and closed and bolted the doors. I had decided during the meal to write a letter to him. He would never again sell cloth in his father's store. Nor would he return to our courtyard to gather stones. Nor would I be apt to meet him on the street. And if by some odd chance I did meet him, what would I say? We had talked in San Rufino Square and in our courtyard. Yet in all that time I had not been able even to hint at the passion that was consuming me. And worse still, most of what I did say was coldly said, to embarrass him.

  As I sat on the bench smoothing out the sheet of parchment I had chosen to write upon, wondering whether to write a long letter or just a note, how to begin and how to end, and what should lie between, a wild thought struck me. If I addressed him in a graceful phrase, then copied bits of the Song of Solomon, which by chance I had stumbled upon, then closed the letter with a brief salutation, would he think me overly bold?

  I need not explain why I was writing to him. If he wished to take it as such, it could be a love letter. And if he didn't, if he wished to believe that the Song of Solomon was about love for the Church only and not about earthly love, as Bishop Pelagius believed, then at least he would have to admire my devotion to holy things.

  I began at once and wrote rapidly, not taking time to illuminate the first letter of each verse, choosing the verses not in order but as they appealed to me:

  As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

  O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.

  Behold thou art fair, my love; behold thou art fair; thou hast dove's eyes within thy locks; thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from Mount Gilead.

  Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn which came up from the washing.

  Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely; thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks.

  Thy neck is like the tower of David budded for an armoury, whereon th
ere hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.

  The voice of my beloved! Behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.

  I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh's chariots.

  I was turning to another page of the Bible when a voice sounded in the hallway and a loud knock echoed through the room. I spread out the Bible to conceal the parchment I had written upon, hurried to the door, and slid the bolt. Count Luzzaro stood in the doorway, puffing out his cheeks in an expansive grin.

  "I have heard you were a scholar," he said in a sober voice, though he had consumed a flagon of wine at supper, "but I could scarcely believe this to be true, since you're such a light-hearted miss."

  "Not a scholar," I said. "A copyist. I write what scholars have already written. I have never had a thought in my life worth writing down."

  "How charming!" he said. "How fortunate! Girls should never, never think. Their minds should waft gaily hither and yon on a summer's breeze, in tune with lithesome dreams. They can think in times to come, when they are women and have more to think about and more need to think. Youth is far too brief a time to squander."

  He glanced over my shoulder at the narrow room and the shelves crowded with books and reams of parchment.

  "There's a quiet room in Castello Catanio that would be just right for a library," he said. "You've seen it. You have danced there. Remember?"

  "No," I said, though I did remember, vividly.

  "You are cramped here. You can't move without running into yourself," he observed, choosing to ignore my cold reply. "Papers strewn about like a raging snowstorm."

  He shivered and hugged himself, as if an icy blast had struck him, and playfully pushed past me into the room. His gaze fastened upon the bench where I had been working, the Bible that lay on the table, and the sheet of parchment half-filled with words from the Song of Solomon.

  "Your pen moves like a spider spinning a web," he said, taking a light from the table to hold close to the parchment. "It's all circles and curlicues and spidery lines wandering up and down. Beautiful to behold, but most difficult to read."