Our village was as tiny as its castle was large—tinier, in fact, than many villages on our coast, perhaps because fishing there was so difficult. Why would such a village have reason to grow?
That the city-states (a word I would learn much later) of Pisa and Genoa continued to fight with the Archbishops of Parma and the Medici family of Florence over who should possess our castle was not real to us, tiny and isolated as we were. Soldiers and sailors never arrived to engage one another in our castle. Emissaries from Parma and the City of Flowers never visited us in their bright finery to assess our maritime value. We were important perhaps as one of a thousand game pieces to the meetings of powerful men in distant rooms, but, in the end, not >that important. Our castle, worn down by ghostly battles of another age, stared out as if stunned by time and the silliness of men at the great green Ligurian Sea, and all we could do was ask it—and the patron saint of fishermen—to bless our tables with the pretty fish of the only sea we knew.
And the rumors…that the Drinkers of Blood, those terrible, misshapen creatures that had once been men, had stormed Rome at last and taken the Holy City…that they were the children of a Dark Father born fourteen centuries ago on the same starry night as our Lord, but in a filthy Jerusalem alley, his first meal not his mother’s milk but her blood…these rumors had reached us like the mumblings of a man asleep and could not be real to us either. How could they be, crazy as they sounded and of no use at all to us in our lives? “You don’t catch fish with rumors,” my uncle always said.
The people of our village were what mattered, always had and always would, and, because our village was so small, I—even at twelve years of age—felt confident that I knew which men in it could have been my father.
There were only eight, I had decided. I knew them all by sight and name, had in fact met them all when they had come to visit my mother, though only some acted as if they knew me. There was Paolo, the boat maker, whose skin was just as pale as mine, and who had sunspots, too, though he was much taller than I could ever hope to be. There was Cosimo, the net-dyer with his purple hands and hair like mine—even if it was actually red, a dark red, in fact, and not the orange of mine. And Ugo, the carpenter who hated boats, but would make anything else, and whose front teeth had a gap in them, and whose ears were like pitcher handles, as were mine. And Stefano, the butcher, whose body, if you were to draw it, would be just like mine—a little short, a little squat. And Matteo, Giacopo, Federico, and Luca, all of whom had parts that made me think of my own.
I would have chosen Cosimo for his red hair above the others—it made me feel good to know that I was not the only one in the village with the “devil‘s hair”—but Cosimo was dark-skinned, and I was not.
I had asked my mother, who was tall and pretty, more than once to point to my father during the procession of Saint Erasmus, patron saint of the village, but she had ignored me every year. When I had pushed, she had stomped away every time, shouting, “Non e cosi facile!” It isn’t that easy! Everyone had turned sharply to stare at us, but then had turned back to the colorful procession because Livia Musetti was always shouting, was she not, so what was new about this? I had thought of asking Father Tamillo if he knew, since priests often knew what others did not, but was certain my mother would be furious if I did. She herself did not go to mass except occasionally, and only to confess, and she did not like to go (she explained) because she did not think that God wanted her near His house.
Back at our room in the old part of the village, where she could, free of the eyes of the village, be happier and therefore considerably calmer, she would agree that there were indeed probably eight, but also (she added, as if to herself—as if I weren’t in the dark, damp room with her) as many as fifteen, if you counted the four that had visited her only once and, beaten silly by their wives for that one transgression, had never visited again; and the three that had, like so many men who avoided marriage, left this village for another village…because of their “itchy feet.”
“You don’t know?” I would say to her. I was a little angry that she did not know, but did not think she would mind a little anger from me. She seemed to have no trouble with her own.
“Don’t make your face the color of your hair,” she would answer. My hair was orange, not the red of an angry face, so this made no sense; but she liked to say it, and so why not let her? “How would I know, Emilio?” she was saying. “A man is a man. What I know of him is what I know of all men who visit. Your guess is as good as mine, figlio.”
“Would you know my father if you kissed him?” I asked.
“No, I would not. One man’s kiss is like any other’s.”
“But he would be my father. The kiss would be different, would it not? Would it not feel different?”
Now she was angry and about to shout. “Why do you ask me these things, Emilio? I love you, but a mother is not supposed to discuss fathers and kissing with her son. Already every mother on the street thinks I have taught you what I should not.”
“Taught me what?”
My mother turned and sighed. “My business!” She shouted it. “My business! Now shut up and go to bed or I will throw you in the ocean.”
Maybe there were mothers who said that—made that threat—the way they would say, “You had better be good or La Strega will get you,” but my mother meant it differently. She would never throw me off the wharf, of course. If she did, I would get the rash and dreams of huge bodies I always got from the sea—the one that had made her cry the first time she saw it—but this was something she sometimes said to me to make me stop and think more clearly: “I will throw you off the wharf!”
I could swim. That was not a problem. I could swim in fresh water without making my rash, which I always had, worse. In fact, I loved swimming in the lake just beyond the olive groves. I loved walking there and back wet, even in cold weather—even though my mother worried about me, thinking I might drown if I swam by myself, which I loved to do. No one had taught me how to swim—my mother certainly did not know how—but somehow I had known without learning. I had known how the first time I had jumped into the sea, when I was five, from the rocks at San Terenzo, and the rash had appeared. My mother had screamed, seeing me jump in. I had jumped in because the sunlight was dancing on the water and the water was smiling at me, telling me to jump, and she had screamed; and two men—the Antonini brothers—had jumped in to save me. But I was swimming. I was swimming just fine; and though my skin was starting to itch that first time, it was not that bad. Only later that day did the rash appear.
Afterwards, my mother, angry—because she had been frightened for me—said to her brother, Giorgio, a blacksmith, “You have been teaching him how to swim, have you not?!” Giorgio denied it, and it was true: No one had been teaching me. She found her cousins, Tito and Gian Felice, a few days later and shouted the same thing at them, but they shook their heads, too. That night she had stared at me in our room as I lay on my pallet and put a salve made of herbs on my rash. She had stared at me with love (she did love me, I knew—and very much), but also with a look that said, “You, my son, may be special, and I may love you, but that does not mean I am not frightened for you.” The salve felt good, but of course did not make the rash go away.
That same night—the night of the day I had first swum in the sea and my rash had first appeared—I also had my first dream. In this dream—the one I had had nearly every night for the next twelve years—I was not a boy, or I was, but I was something else too. In this dream my rash was not really a rash. It was a different skin, as a creature of the water would have; and because I was both a boy and something else, I could swim like a fish or a turtle or one of the snakes I saw at the lake. It did not make much sense, this dream, if you thought about it—if you tried to tell someone about it—but most dreams made little sense, and what mattered anyway was how you felt in the dream, did it not? In this dream—the one I still had—I felt wonderful. The fresh water wanted me to swim in it, and I swam so well, and there was something or someone waiting for me in the darkness of that water, something or someone who knew what I was (a boy but something else too) and loved me and was also proud of me.
Other boys, the sons of fishermen mainly, would sometimes invite me to swim in the sea, and I would have to say no, and they would say, “It is past June, Emilio, so it is safe.” When they learned about my rash, they stopped inviting, and that was all right. Sometimes a friend would tease me, and that was all right, too. “Do you itch from the sea?” “Do you want a bath after you swim?” It was all right because the teasing was not cruel. I could hear their friendship. “That is the way boys are,” my mother told me. “If you have someone tease you kindly, you have a friend. And if you have a friend, you know who you are.”
Once a bully—an immense, not very intelligent boy named Maurizio—threw me off the wharf, and my three friends were too scared to stop him. I had to stay inside for a week, the rash was so angry. Some mothers thought—or pretended to think—that my rash was contagious, and so did not let their sons play with me; but this, I knew, was actually because they did not like my mother and what she did.
My mother, I had happily noted more than once, did not have the rash. Salty water—the water of the sea—did not bother her, though she never swam in it because she did not know how to swim. If she had had the rash, I knew, men would not want to visit her and she would not be able to make money for the two of us; but more importantly she would be unhappy, which I did not want.
The old woman I liked best at the wharf on our little bay sold fish from two big tables. Her face was always red from the sea wind, and her hair hung over her eyes unless she flicked it away with her fishy fingers. She always snorted when she saw me. She was old enough to be a grandmother, but I could not be sure she was even a mother. I never saw a husband or daughter or grandchildren coming or going from her tables, and no one helped her set them up or take them down when the last fish had been sold.
If she was busy, she would make me stand to one side of her tables, out of the way, while she bargained with the villagers who had come to the wharf to buy or trade for the bocca d’oro, dentice, cefalo and muggine—the fish the fishing boats always brought in at noon, after leaving the little bay before dawn.
“How much is the muggine today?” a mother would say, either ignoring me or looking at me and smiling as if to say, “Why should I blame the boy for the mother’s business?”
“Two tenths of a florin cheaper than yesterday, Signora,” the woman would answer, and the joke—a very old one at these tables—would either make the mother squint up her face in annoyance, or, if she were of kinder personality, laugh for the sake of the fishwife’s feelings. Two tenths was nothing, but the old woman liked to drive people crazy. She had admitted it to me one day. “How long do you think I would last at these tables, ragazzo, if I couldn’t make people jump and squeal and dance every day like puppets?”
If she was not busy, she would give me a box to sit on. That my arms and hands and neck had a rash did not bother her. In the beginning, the first times I spoke to her, she would say, “Go play with the other boys. There are enough boys on the wharf to feed a big family. More boys than fish. Go!”
I had always gone, and the third time I returned from the other boys with a bruise on my head or a cut on my lip—no tears, but she could see the injury for herself—she sighed, produced the box and said, “Sit. The sons are no different from the mothers and fathers, yes?”
I had nodded, but did not feel sorry for myself. What was a cut lip, a purple eye or a knot on my forehead if my mother did the work she did because she loved me and I loved her? What was a little damage to my face if it came, like a story God wished to hear, from love?
“Your father was not from here,” the old woman said to me one day.
My heart stopped beating. “You knew my father?”
“No. I mean only that how you look is not from this village, that your father could not have been from this village.”
“Why do you say this?”
She snorted. “Have you not noticed your hair?”
I was silent for a moment.
“But there is a man in the village with hair like—”
“No, ragazzo. His hair is the color of rust, and his skin is dark. Do not be silly. You are as pale as a fish belly, with more sunspots on your skin than even the Tedeschi to the north have, and your hair is the color of Spanish fruit. Your father was not from this village, and he is no longer in it, ragazzo.”
“But there is a man who has—”
“Stop arguing. If you are going to look for your father, you cannot look here.”
How did she know I was looking? Had I told her once and forgotten it?
As if hearing my questions, she said:
“Boys always look for their fathers if they do not know them; and the stranger the boy is by appearance, the more he must look. That has been my experience in this life.”
She did not mean to be cruel. She was just stating a truth. With my hair and skin and dreams—though no one beside my mother knew of the last—I was indeed strange. I knew it and so did everyone else.
“Then how will I find him? I am a boy.”
“I am not telling you to run away and look for him. That would be unkind to your mother, and no mother deserves such grief. I am simply telling you that when you are a man, when your leaving—for a time at least—will not break your mother’s heart, you may wish to look elsewhere.”
“Where?”
“There are people who look like you, I have heard—many of them, in fact—but they are far away and on another sea. Your father must have traveled here, passing through, standing out like a firebrand with his hair, which no travel could have quenched. You have the ‘devil’s hair,’ as he certainly did, and I cannot imagine that your mother has forgotten. But if she does not wish to tell you—or even to remember it—that is her right, and you must place your love for her, and hers for you, above the question of your father. I know what it is like to have those you love forget you. It is a terrible thing.”
The old woman had trailed off in her speech and was staring at a big dentice still flapping on the table before her.
I was quiet, too. I was looking down at my feet, which dangled at the end of my legs. My legs hung over the sides of the box she had again produced for me so that I would stay and not have my head damaged by the other boys—boys whose heads knew only what their mothers and fathers told them.
Had my mother lied to me all of this time? Had she known all along who my father was?
I did not often feel like crying—I was, at twelve, too old to cry—but at this moment I did. I would not, of course, because the old woman would see me do it, and I would feel ashamed. Lord, do not let me cry, I prayed.
Miraculously, tears did not come.
But the old woman knew. She patted me on the head—how I had come to dislike that from adults even when it felt like affection—and said:
“Maybe it did not go well for her…”
I said nothing and did not look up until my eyes stopped blinking.
“Or maybe it went too well,” the old woman added. “Maybe she fell in love with him, but he left her. Maybe he was just business, but still she fell in love; and he went away because he could not face love…” Again she was staring at a fish—a different one this time—as if remembering something.
“This happens to people,” she said. And then, as if regretting what she had said, she brightened and added:
“Had he known that you would be born—that you would have the color of his hair—he would certainly have stayed, ragazzo. Indeed he would have. He would have found the courage to stay and face love because you were his son.”
I said nothing; and the old woman, having said all she could think of to say, was silent now, too. She looked worried about me, and I did not want her to be.
“If it was about love, then that is all right,” I said when I found words.
The old woman’s face softened. “I suppose that is true,” she said, wanting, I could tell, to believe it.
One week later, I saw the man.
I had gone to market with my mother, and we had gotten fennel, flour, apples, olive oil, chicken eggs, and a few other items, and my mother was ready to go home.
“I want to see the lizards,” I told her. “De Corsini feeds them this time each morning.”
The lizards were big and horny, with frills on their heads, and came from an island in a sea far away, a gift from the man’s sea-faring brother. They lived in a big wooden cage that Signor De Corsini went to the trouble of putting out every Saturday morning in front of his butcher shop just up from the little church of our patron saint. The butcher had named the biggest of the three lizards Erasmo, and would laugh every time he said its name. “Watch over us, Erasmo!” he would say, and the dark, ugly lizard that was nevertheless beautiful with its wattle and spikes would stare up at me—yes, me—as if asleep with its eyes opened; and I would stare back, feeling sleepy too, and wanting, for a moment anyway, to lie down with the lizard in its cage.
The first time I had seen the lizards, I had stuck my fingers through the wooden slats. The lizards had wanted me to—that is what they were saying, like a whisper: “Put your hand where we can lick it.” One lizard had indeed licked me, but also bit me, though not badly. De Corsini, a big round man, had come around to my side of the cage and shouted. “I told you no fingers! What have you done?”
There was only a little blood from the tiny teeth, and I had liked hearing the whisper. I had even liked the feeling of the teeth, but the butcher was afraid my mother, known for her temper, would throw a fit, so he was shouting, “Who told you to do that? I did not give you permission. Are you pazzo?” Though I was smiling, not at all injured, the man felt he needed to shout for a moment.
I started to put my fingers back in the cage—because the lizards wanted me to—but the man grabbed my arm, pulled it up and wiped the blood away with his own beefy hand so that no one could see it.
“Maybe you do not feed them what they want,” I heard myself say.
“I feed them fish! They are fish lizards. They come from an island in the sea. If they do not eat the fresh acciuga I give them, that is because they are not yet accustomed to living here. You have confused them with another kind of lizard. You cannot come to look at the lizards if you are going to stick your fingers where they can bite them. Promise me you will not!”
“I promise,” I said, but the man was wrong. The lizards, whispering to me, had told me that they needed other food, and that was why they were weak and cranky.
“You must give them seaweed from the rocks by the wharf,” I said, “or they will die, Signore. You can obtain it easily yourself. If you do not, they will die. They are weak and they will die.”
Offended—by a boy’s presuming to tell a butcher about food—the man had sputtered, dropped my hand, and returned to his customers. “I will feed them what I will feed them, ‘gazzo!”
“You will make me carry all of this by myself,” my mother was saying, “just so you can see the ugly lizards?” She sounded hurt, but was only pretending. It was only one armful of items. Playing along, I said, “I promise to clean the room tonight and pick olives for you tomorrow.” I would have done these things anyway—I had begun to do more and more things for her because I was, after all, becoming a man—but she liked the game. “Then you may,” she answered, and off I went.
Not long after the lizards bit me, De Corsini had indeed gotten seaweed from the rocks for them, and the lizards had not died. Their strange colors had brightened and they were less sleepy now, and I was less willing to put my fingers in their cage, though the lizards still wanted me to. Something to chew on—something to attack! they whispered. De Corsini did not want to talk about the seaweed, but he was glad to see me every time I visited. His brother’s lizards had not died, and he was grateful.
As I entered Via dei Santi, running down its cobble pavement, I heard the sound. I had no idea what it was. It sounded like a musical instrument, but also like an animal in great pain. As if music were being made by stepping on a pig and trying to make it sing.
The market crowd parted to let the singing pig through, and I saw the man at last: a dark-skinned man—not an African, no, but dark, as people often were in the South—and, miracle of miracles, he had orange hair. It did not look real—it looked dyed—but it was as orange as mine. The man was dancing up the street and playing a strange musical instrument no bigger than a small dog. It seemed to be made of a bladder—a sheep’s or pig’s perhaps—and also a reed the man blew air into, and little flutes attached to the bladder for the air to escape through, making the terrible music that it made.
“Cornamusa!” a woman beside me said to another. I had heard the word once perhaps, but certainly had never seen such a device. The man played it as if he were crazy, dancing from shop to shop as if possessed, and with both hands on the instrument as if it might escape him. The pig continued to groan and sing.
The crowd, because it had its morning business to do, filled the street again and I could no longer see the man, though I could hear him.
Pushing through the bodies, I followed the sound, which suddenly stopped. I hurried now, and when the crowd finally thinned to nothing—because there were no more shops, only ancient stone walls—I heard it begin again, then die just as quickly in a long, miserable note, as if the pig had expired.
As I turned a corner into an alley—which is where the miserable note had sounded, I was sure—there stood the man, as if waiting for me. The alley was empty. Everyone was at market. The man looked at me, bladder and reed in his arms, smiled, then turned and ran.
I did not know what to do. I wanted to talk to the man. I wanted to know why the man had orange hair, whether it was dyed, and why he played a cornamusa, but a boy does not chase a man he does not know, does he?
I walked through the empty alleys of the village quickly, hoping for the sound; but it did not come again, and, finally, tired and unhappy, I walked home.
My mother of course gave me a tongue-lashing, but I heard the affection in her worry: “You could have fallen off the wharf and drowned! Dogs could have gotten you!”
“I know, Mamma.”
“Are you very sorry you made me worry?”
“Of course. I love you, Mamma.”
After dinner that evening, and before my mother’s one visitor of the night could appear at our door, I did what I always did—left our apartment to walk the alleys of the old part of town. If I did this, I had learned, my mother would be less embarrassed when her visitors arrived, and I did not want her to feel embarrassed. I did not want her to have to introduce me to men who did not wish to know me.
As darkness settled over the village, even over the castle that towered above it, over its wharf and a Ligurian Sea darker than the night itself, I heard it again. The cornamusa. It was near, near enough to make my heart jump, as if it were a song for me and only me, though this time it sounded like an animal so lonely it might die.
I followed the lonely animal through three alleys, and, as I turned into the fourth, I saw a man at the end of it. He was at the wharf now, and a lamp tied to a post on the seawall glowed behind the figure, silhouetting it. The man didn’t move, but he was holding something in his arms, and I knew what it was, for it sighed again in loneliness.
The man was making me come to him. This had happened twice today.
Why? I wondered.
A voice—my own—in my head—answered: He did not make you come to him, Emilio. You chose to follow him.
Yes, because of his hair.
Yes. And—
And because of the sound.
Yes…
What all of this meant, I had no idea, but here I was, and now, in the dark, I felt afraid. It wasn’t wise to meet a man I did not know at night, even if the man had orange hair. No one would advise it.
I itched, as I always did, in the sea air of evening, heavy and salty as it was. But the itching was for some reason worse, as if the cornamusa’s sound was making it so. But that made no sense. Maybe I was just excited. I was chasing the man, after all. In any event, I was scratching myself, too—as always—without thinking about it. Where to find fresh water? The fountain in the square? The horse-watering trough at Tragano’s? This was a strange thing to be thinking in a dark alley with a stranger at the end of it, I knew, but when you itched, you itched.
The figure stayed where it was, and then spoke:
“I know who you are.”
I jumped and readied myself to run, but the figure added:
“Do not be afraid. I do not know your name, but I know who you are. You would not have followed the cornamusa and you would not have the hair you do if you were not your father’s son.”
My heart began to thunder. Was it possible? Was this the man I had dreamed of since I was old enough to dream?
“I do not understand…”
“I believe you do, even if only in your dreams, where our truest truths often sleep.”
“My dreams?”
“You know which dreams. The ones that make you drown until you breathe.”
Yes… Not the daydreams of finding a father I did not know, but the other ones: the dreams of scales and great wet bodies, big as sea monsters. Water that burned, and other water that healed. And swimming, as a boy, out into the middle of an endless lake until I reached those great bodies—
“Are you my father?”
The man did not answer at first, as if he knew what disappointment was.
“No, I am not, but I…”
“Yes?”
“I do know your father and I have a message for you from him.”
“From my father?”
“Si.”
For a moment I said nothing and neither did the man. The cornamusa made no sound. The alley was silent. The voices of the village were distant.
“Your father has asked me to make this request.”
“Yes?”
“He asks that you, though you are a boy, find the holiest water in the land.”
“Cosa?”
“If you are your father’s son, you will be able to do this. If you are your father’s son, you must save what needs to be saved in this world; and to do this, you must find the holiest water and bring it to him.”
“I want to see him.”
“I know you do; and he, you. But this task is more important, and in the end it will take you to him.”
I did not know whether to believe the man, but the man knew too much not to be believed, I thought.
“Holy water?” I asked. “I do not understand.”
“You do in your dreams, for you are his son and yet not his son.”
“And when I have found it, if I am able to find it, I am to take it to him?” “Za dubio.”
“Where?
“Do you know the lakes of the North, the great ones?”
“Yes, the priest has told us, and so have men who have traveled there for trade.”
“You will meet your father on the shores of one of them, Como.”
“How will I find him?”
“He will find you when you reach its shores. But first you must obtain the water. He cannot leave the lake himself—he must remain there playing music for what lives in its depths and calls to you as he calls to it—but he needs this water if the Drinkers of Blood are to be defeated.”
“The priest at the church has holy water.”
“It is not holy enough.”
“The Holy City must have even holier water. But how can I travel there? I am but a boy.”
“Even the Holy City no longer has holy water. The only person you can get it from is the Child Pope, Bonifacio, who is in hiding from the Drinkers at his uncle’s insistence on the Island of Elba, sleeping on a bed that has been blessed for his protection.”
I did not know what to believe. I did not know what to say except: “How will I find him?”
“You will discover how as you go; and there will be those—those who have followed me tonight—who will try to stop you the closer you are to that holy water and the closer you are to taking it to your father. They may not be able to kill you—for reasons you would not understand—but they may injure you so terribly that you would wish you were dead; and they may harm those you love, and in other ways make your journey difficult if impossible. Your father has asked me to tell you this as well: there is one place you can go that those who follow me this night and will follow you, too, cannot go. You know what it is. You know it by your skin.”
On the wharf, footsteps sounded—footsteps that were more like hooves—and with them a faint wailing that was not the cornamusa.
“You will need money,” the figure said quickly, “and you will need an introduction to see Bonifacio.” The figure’s right hand pulled away from the cornamusa, moved, and an object flew up in an arc and landed on the cobbles at my feet even as the hooves and faint wailing grew louder. It was a pouch. I grabbed it and felt the weight of coins.
“Get to the light now and bolt all doors, figlio dell’aqua. May God go with you!”
With a single step and a bleat from the cornamusa, the figure was gone.
I turned and ran to the building where my mother, even now, was probably saying goodbye to the man she had entertained that evening.
At the top of the stairs, I stopped. I heard no hooves on the cobbles, no wailing. Perhaps whatever had made such sounds was pursuing the man instead. I opened the leather pouch and squinted, but could not see in the darkness, and so let my fingers confirm what I had heard jingling: Florins and ducats. Certainly ducats. And something else. A leather cord and an object attached to it.
At the top of the stairs, where the moonlight reached, I looked at it again. It was a leather cord, yes, with a piece of bone dangling from it. No. A tooth. A long tooth—twice the length of my finger and much thicker—curved like a little dagger and as pointed as one. Smooth, like ivory, but with a cutting edge, like a fine knife, one my mother would have used for fish. I tugged at it, and as I had suspected, it was a necklace, the tooth a pendant. I put it around my neck for safety, and as I did, heard hooves on the cobbles below.
Opening the door quickly and bolting it behind me, as the figure had told me to, I blinked in the candlelight of the room, expecting to see my mother standing there, waiting for him, even a tired smile on her face.
But she was not.
The candles flickered in the room, as they always did, but there was no one on either pallet. On the little table was a plate with fruit on it, and bites had been taken from an apple. Olive pits lay on the plate as well, along with a crust of bread. Sometimes she fed the men who visited her. But they always ate everything she offered, so this must have been her meal. But why had she stopped?
The hooves—which no longer sounded like hooves, but heavy boots—and the wailing, which sounded now more like voices—had stopped just below our room; and unless I was wrong, there was the sound of boots, two of them, on the stairs now.
Had what was waiting outside for me already taken my mother? It was a terrible thought and I could barely think it. Or had she simply left with a man to walk in the square or on the wharf, as she sometimes did if it was late and no one could see them? That was the thought I wanted to think.
I could not, I knew, leave their building until daylight, not if the man with the cornamusa was right and what I had heard on the cobbles was the terrible thing the man had claimed: a man or creature that could, even if it did not kill me, hurt me and those I loved and in any case keep me from my father.
I bolted the second bolt on the door and then began to pick up the candles and take them to my mother’s room.
Go to the light, the man had said.
When I was younger, I had imagined terrible creatures in the corners of our room at night—creatures that could come out and get me even if I slept on my mother’s pallet. Tonight I would make sure there were no dark corners. The candles already lit were not enough, I discovered, so I lit another six—the biggest, so they would last till morning—placing them on the floor around my own pallet. A voice inside me—my own, or the man’s, or a voice from me dreams, even from De Corsini’s lizards—was whispering something to me, but I could not hear it. I lay down on the pallet, but the whispering nagged. Getting up, I stared at my mother’s pallet, and the voice now said clearly: Inside the circle. Inside the light.
Putting the two pallets together, one on top of the other, and in the center of the room, I made a circle around them with the candles, lit them, and then crossed myself and gave a little prayer that the candles would all keep their fire until daybreak.
The whispering was not finished. The tooth, it said. Taking the tooth in my hand—the hand whose rash always turned reddest from sea water or the salt air—I lay down fully dressed, squeezed the tooth tightly, and watched the shadows of the room jerk and dance until, hearing nothing more on the stairs, I fell asleep and dreamed a dream I would not remember.
When I awoke, it was to sunlight, and when I saw that my mother had still not returned, fear filled me like cold soup and I did not know what to do. The candles were out and what had waited for me in the alley that night had, thank the Lord, departed.
When I reached the wharf, it was empty, as empty as the alleys had been when I had followed the sound of the cornamusa the day before. This made no sense. Where were the fishwives, their customers, the fishermen? Where was the man without a throat who always greeted the fishing boats as they returned to the wharf and made words by spitting air? Where was the old woman who was my friend? There was absolutely no one, and this made my blood even colder.
I walked toward the square, and still no one. When I looked up at the castle, no soldiers moved in the parapets. No army had done this. It was like a dream, and yet it wasn’t. I thought I heard a baby cry somewhere, but could not tell what direction the sound came from. Across the bay, in the cove of San Tirenzo, I thought I could see figures moving on the sand, men and women dyeing fishing nets perhaps, but again I could not be sure.
Perhaps everyone was at an event. A funeral. The sudden death of someone important. A discovery of something important in the hills. It had happened twice before, when I was little. The village had emptied of its people—absolutely everyone—when they had traveled over the hill to the mouth of the Magra River to see the face of Mother Maria in the rock of a hillside, a miracle; and again, for a funeral—the funeral of a duchess who had been kind to the village in her youth.
But why would my mother have left? Why would she have left without telling me or taking me?
You cannot help her now, a voice whispered, and though I wanted it to be the man’s somehow, as if we were brothers and spoken words were not needed, it was not. It was something else, a voice I had been hearing for a long time but had not wanted to believe. She is alive, but cannot be helped now, Emilio. Go to Elba. Go to the Child Pope and get what you must to save the world and your mother and father with it. If you are not away from this village by sunset, what has taken her will take you and everyone else, and you will never see your father.
I took a breath, clenched the leather pouch in my hand, and began to run. I ran across the empty square toward the groves, and when I reached them, looked down for a moment at the village that had always been my home. The long road to Bocca di Magra, Viarreggio, and Piombino—and the bay where I would, if I were lucky, find a boat to take me to Elba and to, if the man had told me the truth, the Child Pope—was over the hill, and I had no choice but to take it.
The road passed through the village of Melania, which was full of people who paid me no notice because, despite my orange hair and big ears, I was not really so different from other boys; and, besides, I wasn’t making mischief. I was simply traveling, going from one place to another, wherever those places might be. I used four florins to buy bread and jerky, enough for two days, and four candles and three matches—enough for one night—wrapping them all in a piece of cloth I found by the road. Where I would be exactly at sunset, I did not know; but if I needed to reach Elba and make the long trek to the northern lakes, I could not afford to spend any of the coins—which filled the pouch, though barely—on a ride on a cart with pigs and chickens or other people. And I did not know whether what had sought me in the village was following me now, making hurry even more important.
The King’s Road, with its towering pines, was beautiful. The sunlight came out for an hour and I felt warm in it as I made my way toward Viarreggio—city of carnivals—named for the same road and a king from another time. Two carts full of painted wooden faces—for the carnival later in the spring—passed me. Though I smiled at the drivers, neither smiled back or gave me more than a glance. You never knew what a boy, even one who smiled, might do to your painted masks when you were attending to your oxen and not looking—masks for which the royal families in Viarreggio would pay you richly.
I reached Bocca di Magra just before nightfall and, paying two florins to the owner of the sorriest vineyard I had ever seen—a man who needed two florins more than I did—was allowed to sleep with the oxen, horse, and milk cows in the barn. The barn was colder than I thought it would be, but still warmer than the vineyard itself, which was chilled by the wind that rumbled from the Apennines down the Magra River to the Ligurian Sea. In the vineyard I could not possibly have kept the candles lit; but here in the barn—on a spot free of straw that might catch fire, and on a pile of burlap bags the owner had given me as my bed—I was able to arrange the candles around me. When I tried to fall asleep, however, I could not. The oxen kept shuffling in their stalls. A hen clucked occasionally. A rat darted past the candles and I startled. The more I looked into the shadows beyond the little flames, the more I saw. The quieter I lay, holding my breath, the more I heard. How could I possibly sleep not knowing whether Drinkers, for that is what they had to be, followed me?
Just as the sounds grew familiar to me—the clucking of the chicken as it dreamed what chickens dream, the oxen stirring twice, a rat’s footsteps no louder than a whisper—I heard something else. Something from a dream…
Instead of inviting me to sleep, as a dream should, the sound got louder. It was a child crying. A baby’s cry, the sound both near and far away, and I shivered.
The baby was crying in a dream—his own or mine or both—one that would never, like his pain, end.
I got up and shook my head.
The sound was still there.
I went to the barn door and looked out at the house of the owner. The crying was not coming from the house. It was coming from somewhere else, and yet it was also inside me.
How could this be?
Emilio, a voice said suddenly.
I stopped and did not move. I had heard it in the wind and in my own head. My name. The crying had stopped for a moment so that the same voice could say my name.
Emilio, the voice said again. Please…
Was I dreaming—was I asleep on the burlap bags dreaming and simply did not know it?
They are killing me, the voice said.
“Who are you?” I asked out loud, hoping that, if I were dreaming, the sound of my own voice would wake me or at least make the voice in my head fall silent.
But this did not happen.
I am the Bleeding Child, the voice answered.
“Are you real?”
I am as real as you, Emilio…
“I can hear you, but you are far away. What do you want?”
If you can hear me, I am not so far away. I need you, Emilio. They are drinking my blood…
“Where are you?”
Do you know the red doors of Pozzuoli?
“I do not know that village.”
You will before long. I am in its well and no longer alone. This is where I have bled for a thousand years, unable to die, but they will kill me if they continue to drink… Please come. The spirit whose emissary you are does not wish me to die. I am important to you…
“I cannot come. There is something I must do first.”
Then there is no one in the world who will love me for anything more than my blood…
“I am sorry…”
I am, too, for they will take you as well, Emilio, as they have taken me—these drinkers—the ones who follow you, who are with you in the night even now…
The voice stopped. I stepped back from the barn’s open door to the bags, where I sat down once more and looked beyond the candles into the shadows, my heart hammering, not wanting the voice to leave.
“I will come for you, child, when I have done what I must do.”
The voice did not answer.
“I promise that when I return from Elba I will look for you…”
Still the voice said nothing.
I lay on my stomach and watched the candles flicker, wondering whether the wind through the open doorway would snuff them out while I slept. The quiet crying and the voice that belonged to it were gone, but there were other sounds—new ones—outside the barn. A hoof or a boot perhaps. A distant wailing. Were these only memories of the wharf and the man who claimed to know my father, or were they indeed what the voice had implied, and doing what it said: the Drinkers were with me and would be every night I tried to sleep?
When I finally did sleep, it was fitful. Each time I woke, I saw the candles, still lit, giving light, and this gave me enough peace that I could drift again into dreams of blood, a baby that should not have been born, and strange men that were not men, but giants with feet hornier than feet should be and immense, and jaws as big as a lion’s—before one sound or another, in my head or in the night, startled me awake once more.
The candles held their light; and as dawn arrived and I realized I could sleep at last, I heard steps of another kind and the farmer’s voice saying, “Bon mattina, ‘gazzo. I must milk the cows.”
As I stepped squinting into sunlight and let the man go about his business, I saw how disturbed the earth was around the doorway to the barn—not by the familiar hooves of farm animals, but by the grotesque feet of grotesque men—and I knew that not all of the sounds that had kept me awake had been my imagination. They had left the man and his family alone, and the candles had protected me.
I had heard of animal spirits that took human form. I had heard of witches who could become cats, owls, and snakes. I had heard of bats—those flying rodents that lived in caves or barns or the belfries of cathedrals, coming out at night to find the insects they needed—and how some of these creatures in far-away lands drank the blood of other creatures, including men. But bats were tiny and did not have the feet of men, and these footprints were neither human nor any animal I knew.
I wondered where the creatures hid during the day. If they did not like the light—sunlight or candlelight, as rumors insisted—they would need places where they could protect their eyes. Was this not why they traveled at night and why my candles kept them at bay? What did the light do to them? Did they have a leader, like a pack of Maremma wolves, and the faint wailing I had heard was theirs—like the howling of wolves; or did they travel like a school of bocca d’oro, shifting direction in the sea of night without needing a leader? Were there only men? Were there any women among the creatures? If the rumors were correct, they didn’t have children; they made more like themselves by their bites and the transformation of those bitten. And why did they want to stop me from doing what the man in the alley wished?
When I had tired myself with such questions, I found myself far from the vineyard, walking quickly again on the King’s Road, and hungry. A piece of the hard bread, chewed carefully, quieted my belly; but then the barking began not far away, in vineyards that lined the wide road, and grew louder. I began to walk faster. Once I was free of the vineyards, there would be fewer dogs, and the ones I encountered might be friendlier; but I should have waited, I realized, at the kind man’s farm until a cart came by and paid a few florins—even a ducat—for a safe ride. What had I been thinking? At night I needed to avoid the creatures that wailed; but during the day, it was dogs, especially vineyard dogs, I needed to avoid. Any boy knew this. Such dogs were notorious. What would I do if one bit me and I was bleeding and needed a poultice? The vineyard owners would not help me. I was not traveling with a family. I might be an orphan or runaway or, worse, a gypsy boy looking for things to steal. I would bleed and get sicker and probably, if the wound were bad enough—which it would probably be—never make it to Piombino, let alone Elba. I would become too sick to do what was needed, and possibly even die. I had known a boy on the wharf who had been bitten by an olive grove dog and lost his right arm; and another boy, a foolish one who had tried to steal from the kind Duchess in Sarzana and been killed, through no fault of hers, by the wolfhounds she owned.
If I died, I would not find my father.
If I ran, however—which I was getting ready to do as soon as any dogs appeared—it might make the dogs even madder and more determined to catch me. Every boy knew this, too.
The barking was louder now, and far too close, and I turned to the sound. There were three dogs and they were faster than I was, so why bother to run? Perhaps if I faced them with a kind voice, or stayed perfectly still, or waved a big stick. But there was no stick. People collected anything that fell from the pines for firewood, and there was only grass at the side of the road.
One was a big dog, white with brown spots and a head the size of a good-sized calf’s. The other two were smaller—one as lean as a knife, and fast, the other a small, yappy, nearly hairless animal that I knew had no courage without its friends.
The skinny dog got to me first, glancing off me when I hit at it with my fist, but it was the big dog, spittle flying from its jowls, that struck me fully in the chest and knocked me down.
I was going to die, I was certain. I was trying to hold the dog’s face away from my face, but the dog was too strong, and it definitely wanted to bite me and to keep biting. This is what vineyard dogs did. They protected the vineyards, and they hurt you badly if they failed to kill you.
The dog suddenly stopped its frenzy.
It stood over me, legs holding me down, pink, watery eyes drooping just like its jowls, and cocked its head. Then it sniffed at me. It moved its nose toward my neck and sniffed and sniffed again.
It was sniffing at the tooth, I realized. It was sniffing at the necklace and the tooth.
The dog made no sound for a moment, but then looked up at my face, sniffed it too, and began licking my cheeks where my tears were. I did not breathe. I did not move. The breath from the dog’s mouth was a great warm wind smelling terribly of meat and vegetables and rodent fur.
The dog took a step back, touched my leg with its own, stopped, and lowered its jaws to my hand, sniffing again. It was, I saw, sniffing a spot where the rash was particularly bad. Its head jerked back, returned, and this time began licking the rash just as it had my cheeks.
I moved my hand slowly, offering it palm down to the animal. The dog did not get off me or growl. It was looking at the tooth around my neck, and a puppy-like whine was beginning in its throat.
When I tried to pat the dog’s head, it jumped off me at last, its big body scrambling backwards over the tangle of its own legs. It barked once at me from a safe distance, but did not run. Its front leg was touching my right foot.
The other two dogs had run away, I saw, and were watching the big dog and me from a rise in the road.
When I got up, turned, and began walking down the road again, I held my breath, wondering if the big dog would leap on me again. But it didn’t bark, and, though I heard its feet approaching behind me, I didn’t turn. In a moment it was beside me, sniffing the rash on my hand again, but rather than licking the rash, nudging my hand again and again, as if to let me know my rash was more important than I knew.
According to Father Tamillo, when God created the world He put all of the metal that would ever be needed to make crosses in honor of His son in the ground at the southernmost tip of Liguria. He also put all of the jewels—the emeralds, rubies, and semi-precious stones—that would be needed for those crosses and the chalices that would hold the communion wine. While all of this may or may not be true, Piombino—the city where the metal ore was mined and smelted and had been since the time of the Romans—did not look like the work of God’s hand at all, but instead something infernal, or at least something quite sullied by man.
When the dog and I reached Piombino, it was just before sunset, and the pall—from the dust of the mining and the smoke of the smelting—lay heavy over the city and made my eyes water. I did not want to stay long. The air here would be as bad as saltwater on my skin. I could feel it begin to itch already, the fingers of my left hand moving of their own will, and without my permission, to scratch at the red patch on my right.
The walk to Piombino—even through Viarreggio, which had a reputation for ruffians bored by winter and irritated that the carnival was so many months away—had been an uneventful one, with one exception, and I knew the dog was the reason there was only one. Who would want to cause trouble with a dog as big and mean-looking and slobbery as this one, when I was just a boy and boys have no money? That is how accomplished thieves would think. But boys—boys were stupid and had time on their hands—and so, just outside Viarreggio, where the great pines left the road, preferring the endless sandy beaches of the coast, a gang of six of them, all of them about my age, followed me and the dog for a while, taunting us.
“Where did you get that funny necklace, barbarossa?”
I did not have a beard yet, but that did not matter. When you had red or orange hair—when hair that color, like a blind eye or two eyes of different colors, meant the devil’s work—you were barbarossa. Red beard.
The dog, which I had decided to call “Ciccio”—”Fatty”—because the word made me smile, growled at the boy who had shouted at us. That boy was tall and the leader, and Ciccio, a leader too, knew it; and of course the boy would, like the littlest dog, have no courage without his friends.
“Zito, Ciccio.” I said it quietly, and Ciccio obeyed me. There was no need to be afraid or angry and growl if the boys kept their distance. Like the carnival ruffians, these boys were bored too. They should have been helping their fathers and uncles with the fishing boats or vineyards or olive groves, but they were not. They were (my mother had explained more than once) the kind of boys who were always bored because they did not do work that had meaning. What my mother meant, I was not sure, but I always nodded.
“From my father.”
“I do not see your father.”
I continued walking, turning my back on the boys.
“My father is with me…” I said.
“I still do not see him. Are you simple—an idiota?”
The other boys laughed and jeered, emboldened by the leader. They were following him and, like vineyard dogs, wanted me to be afraid and run.
I ignored them, letting Ciccio, who trotted beside me, watch them for me.
“Is that your dog?”
It was the same boy. His voice was deep. He was becoming a man, and yet did not act like one yet.
“Yes, it is,” I answered.
“I think not,” the boy answered. “It belongs to Ferragamo. I recognize that dog.”
“It is mine now,” I heard myself say, surprised by what came from my mouth. Why was I being so brave? This many boys, my back to them, and heated words? Perhaps it was because of Ciccio.
The leader did not know what to say, and this made him angry. He had never, I knew, known a stranger—especially a boy—to invite a dog, especially one as large as this one, from its vineyard only to have it follow him as if it were his own. He did not know what to say, and so was angry. When a rock landed at my left foot, I was not surprised. I was also not surprised to see, when I turned to look, Ciccio charging the boy. I let him.
The boys ran, and when Ciccio, not running to catch them but only to make them run—dogs were like boys in this way—had followed them far enough that they were too tired to run back, Ciccio returned. We began to walk again together.
In Piombino, where I found that I had to breathe through the cloth my bread was in if I wanted to avoid coughing, the innkeeper at the great wharf where the ships arrived with their cobblestone ballast and departed with their smelted metal, was quite willing to take a florin and even give me change in the form of a vase of drinking water. It was a smelly inn with only a dozen men in it now, men who were drinking because perhaps they could not find winter work in the mines or on the ships; and the keeper was happy to have an extra florin for a body that would take up little room.
But he would not let Ciccio in.
When the innkeeper—a big man with a scar on the side of his neck and a clouded eye that might have been blind or not—stepped between me and Ciccio to keep the dog from entering, Ciccio lunged at him and I had to grab him by the neck and hold on.
“You see why I take no dogs!”
“He is only trying to protect me.”
“No dogs! That is my policy!”
“He will sleep with me, perhaps on me even, and will take up little room. A florin for him?”
“No!”
Sighing, I turned my back on the innkeeper and pulled the leather pouch from my pocket. The man knew I had florins, but not how many. The sight of money—especially a pouch full of it—could make a man, even one who might otherwise not be greedy, greedy.
When I turned back, I had a ducat in my hand. One of the remaining five in my pouch.
“No,” the man said. “Even a ducat is not enough for a big dog that might be vicious. What if it bites someone? The bitten one will want his money back. There may be a fight. Your dog may think it has to protect you from everyone and will bite people and they will want their money back, and then where will I be?”
Ciccio was beside me, head pressed against my leg.
“Favore, Signor…”
“Two ducats,” the man said.
I sighed again. The man had seen the pouch, so that was that.
“Bene,” I said.
The man grew stern. “But only if you tie him to you with a rope so that he cannot get into trouble.”
“Of course.”
I did not know whether Ciccio would put up with this or not; but when the man brought the rope to try it out, Ciccio stood still and let me tie it around his throat snuggly.
“Where do we sleep?” I asked.
“With the men. Where else, ragazzone?”
There were no men sleeping in the two big rooms yet. Not even drunks. It was early. Wool blankets littered the floor, giving the rooms with their pine walls and beams the smell of human sweat; and I knew it would only get worse when the men were there and, after a hard day’s work, sleeping at last.
“What should I do?”
“About what?”
I was not sure what I meant. Perhaps: What do I do before I sleep? But it was a silly question to ask an innkeeper and one only a very tired boy would ask.
“I will come back when it is time to sleep,” I said.
The man snorted. “Of course you will. You have paid for your blanket and your dog’s place. If you do not come back by midnight, I will give both to someone else. Midnight. No later.”
Outside, Ciccio scratched his ear with a hind leg.
“Yes,” I said to him, “I have a piece of bread for you. You will be with me inside and will not be able to catch a rat outside to eat.”
Dogs do not generally nod, but Ciccio looked up at me as if he might.
Together, we walked to the great wharf that many hands had made long ago of marble and granite blocks from Carrara and Asegno to the east and wood from the beach pines to the north, and sat there while the last two ships of the day unloaded their cobblestone ballast onto a jetty that kept the biggest waves of winter out. In the morning, I knew—because my other uncle, a crewman once, had told us village boys about it—they would take on the crates of marble and smelted metal destined for distant ports.
When the bell of the shipbuilders’ church—the church of their patron saint, Peter—sounded at 11:30, we turned and headed toward the inn.
Once, during the night—the wool blanket harsh against the spots of rash on my legs and arms—I heard Ciccio growl and woke to a man’s face looking down at me and a hand reaching toward Ciccio’s neck. For a moment the man’s eyes looked red to me—red as blood—and the teeth in the man’s mouth tiny as needles; but then it became a drunk’s face and only that. The hand withdrew quickly and the face disappeared even as I said, “Zito, Ciccio,” and Ciccio—straining on the rope tied around my arm—relaxed against me.
When I looked at my own hand, however, the one holding the rope, it seemed for a dreamy moment that my skin had its own light, a faint blue one, especially where the patch of rash was; but this was impossible, of course, and only what tired eyes would imagine, and so I fell asleep again.
In the morning, the only boat willing and able to take Ciccio and me to the island was a small red fishing boat with a dirty white sail that also needed, it turned out, to go to Marciana Marina, the very bay on the island of Elba that I needed to reach to find the Child Pope. “Our brother has been sick,” the two men who owned the boat explained, “and someone there—we shall not say who—has been willing to bless him even at the risk of his own life. Our brother waits for us there. At Marciana Marina, yes.”
The brothers did not seem bothered by Ciccio. In fact, they cheerfully petted Ciccio, who let them. Perhaps these men had grown up with dogs, I told himself—the way children grow up with puppies—and so loved dogs the way you loved anything that gave you love in return when you were small. But if they loved dogs so much, why did they not have dogs themselves? Many of the fishing boats had one or two to guard against rats and thieves; and if anyone should have them, these brothers should.
When I asked, one of the brothers—the one with green eyes, eyes that kept the two brothers from being perfect twins—laughed and said, “We used to have them, but people kept stealing them.” He stared at me, which made my face turn hot, but the man was only teasing.
“Did you have dogs when you were very little?”
“No,” the other brother—the one with grey eyes—said, taking four florins from my hand. “Our father hated dogs, but we had little brothers, brothers we loved and gave bones to—we still have those brothers, in fact, do we not, Francesco?—and that is why we like dogs so much.”
This brother, too, was a teaser, and I smiled. Both young men were smart. They saw into people’s hearts, too—that was clear—and I wished then that I had brothers like them.
“If you do not have enough money to stay in Marciana Marina,” the green-eyed one said, “you can stay on our boat, maestro. But only for one night. We must leave the next morning with our brother, who, the doctors say, must be kept in the sun.”
Though I wanted to ask what color their brother’s eyes were, I knew it would be rude. And yet the grey-eyed one guessed my question and said, “You are wondering about his eyes, I am sure. It is a question we are often asked. Our brother’s eyes are like ours, yes, but we had to share him.”
The other brother laughed. I did not understand.
“Our brother—who looks just like us, though he is younger—has one grey eye and one green eye. Our father says that we are all cursed, and that our curse is why we went to sea, the three of us, to take our poor eyes where they might not frighten others. Three is a holy number, and yet people fear it. They fear eyes that do not match, too, just as they fear orange hair, as I am sure you know, ‘estro. The fish do not care about strange eyes. The sky does not care either. And the horizon, vain as she is, loves being looked at by young men as handsome as we are, whatever the arrangement of our eyes.”
The other brother was still laughing, and I wished even more that I had brothers like these—young men who loved the sea and dogs and each other, and who could laugh about life and not take it too seriously.
The talkative brother sighed, glanced at the laughing one and said. “We know things we should not know, do we not, Francesco?—and that drove our poor father crazy, too.”
“Yes, it did.” The other brother sounded a little sad. Both of the brothers seemed sadder suddenly and stood up as if to shake sadness from them. They were not the type of men who sat all day in an inn thinking sad thoughts and drinking themselves silly. The grey-eyed one called to Ciccio—who jumped from the wharf to their boat’s deck quite willingly—and also even offered me a hand if I needed one, which I did not—and the green-eyed one raised the dirty sail.
It would take them all day with a decent tailwind from the west or south to get them there by sunset, they explained, and this was fine with me. The creatures that followed me could not walk on water, I told myself. Only God’s Son could do that, Father Tamillo insisted. And according to Father Tamillo, God’s Son had been able to do this only because God wanted to make a point. That was how Father Tamillo always put it: “God wanted to make a point, so He did such-and-such.” This, of course, allowed the priest to make his own points—something we boys of course would never say to him.
So, unless some of the creatures already lived on the island or had their own boats to get there, I should have nothing to fear tonight on Elba. And the man in the alley would certainly have mentioned any water-walking ability, would he not?
Shortly after midday, the sea calmed and the wind died, and would not start up again; and the more talkative brother swore a little, though not enough to excite Ciccio, who was lying on the wet deck to stay cool in the heat of the sun. And then something happened. I did not see it at first, but I felt it. The boat had started to rock even though there were no swells.
The quieter brother stood up from the rudder to look at the sea and then gestured dramatically to the other brother to look, too.
Not far from the boat the sea was beginning to boil. It made no sense. There was nothing there—no school of fish, no sharp fin of a squalo or the back of a great balena to explain it. It was simply boiling and a roiling, and the disturbance was moving closer to the boat.
When it was so close that the boat rocked again, this time violently—bringing Ciccio to his feet with a growl—I could see that the ocean around us had darkened to a wine color, and that what looked like wine-red seaweed was somehow churning in the water, too. If I kept my balance, hands on the gunnel, and squinted hard enough, I thought I could see something under the surface—something that looked like an animal’s skin, wine-red too and as big as a whale; and, as I blinked in disbelief, I looked up into the quieter brother’s face and saw the young man’s fear.
When the talkative brother came over to the gunnel to look, he also saw the great wine-red back below the water, started to swear, and stopped.
“Perche noi?” he said, staring at the boiling water. Why us? Then he turned to look at me, staring with his green eyes.
“You,” he said at last, eyes widening. “It is you.”
“What?” I said.
“It is here because of you,” the young man was saying, glancing at the boiling sea again and stepping toward me. He grabbed my arm, looked at the rash on my hand, and dropped my hand quickly.
“Madre dio,” the young man whispered. “Salvaci!” All joking was gone.
He was truly afraid.
The other brother was looking at me as well, and I saw the same fear.
The talkative brother reached over again and grabbed the necklace, and the tooth, looking hard at it. “Can you use this?”
“Use it?”
“Can you make it go away with this?”
“Make what go away?” I asked. I felt dumb because I was indeed dumb. What was that thing in the water?
“Who are you?” the quieter brother asked suddenly.
“I am Emilio Musetti.”
“No. Not your name.”
“I do not understand.”
“He does not know,” the talkative one said.
“No, he does not,” the other one answered even as the talkative brother said to me, “We do not want to die. You must leave the boat. It has come for you, not us.”
“I would rather not leave the boat, Signori.”
“I understand, but you must. If you do not, she will destroy the boat to reach you and we will all die—except you, Emissary.”
The green-eyed brother had me by the arm and was pulling me toward the gunnel and thrashing sea.
“No!” I shouted.
“If you are who we think you are, she will not harm you. If you are not, then we are all dead anyway, for to trick the Woman of the Sea is to trick the sea itself, and no one tricks the sea and lives.”
The quiet brother had me by my other arm, and Ciccio was snarling, unable to decide which brother to bite. But before Ciccio could make up his mind, the brothers had me in the air and I was flying toward the sea.
“Ciccio!” I shouted, and it seemed to me that the dog was in the air, too, leaving the boat just as I had; and then my mouth was full of water and the dark-red seaweed was around me, like hair, and a face as big as a cart—a woman’s perhaps, rough as pumice and terrible with its sharp teeth, pig-like nose and wide-set eyes bigger than my hands—was staring at me, as if it would either bite me or kiss him; and my arms, where the rash stung from the salty water, were glowing a faint blue against the seaweed, which was indeed her hair; and since none of this made any sense, I went ahead and screamed even if the scream just let more water into me and I drowned.
When I awoke, it was to the sound of coughing. My own. And to a burning feeling—on my arms, where the saltwater had made the red rash even angrier-looking. When the coughing sound stopped, there was a moaning sound, and that was mine too, I knew.
I was in a little bay, and there was a church on a hill above me, and there was a sound like a wet cough, which might have been me or might have been someone else. I shook my head to clear my thoughts, looked around and there, covered with sand too, was Ciccio, eyes pinker than ever, droopier too, and jowls sandier than any dog’s muzzle had ever been.
“Ciccio,” I said.
Ciccio crawled over to me, rubbing against the sand as if he were full of fleas.
It was Heaven, I was sure of it. I had drowned, Ciccio with me, and somehow we had been admitted to Heaven. Unless it was a dream. I was tired of dreams, and tired of events that felt like dreams but were not. This did not feel like a dream, however. My rash hurt far too much for that, and, besides, I had never dreamed of my rash before—only of scales on my arms and legs, and of great bodies that were both mine and not, and water and night. It was not night. The sunlight was so bright it hurt my eyes. There was no great body under me—though I thought I could remember one from somewhere. A boat… Boiling waves… An immense face that did not, frightening though it was, mean me ill and that had carried us both to this bay, which was quite real. Ciccio, with his slobbery sandy jowls, was real. It was not a dream.
Remembering the pouch, I reached for it, but it was no longer in my pocket. I checked my other pocket, and it was empty too.
I had no money now. How would I return to Piombino and make my way north—even if the Child Pope gave the water what I needed? I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. If I was my father’s son, I would find a way, would I not? That is what the man in the alley would tell me were he here.
I touched the tooth at my neck to make sure it was not missing as well and felt something else there with it. Seaweed. Long strands of it. When I pulled it from my chest, it came off in a great clump, and it was not seaweed at all, but what I had imagined as I drowned: Hair.
A woman’s. Wine-red and cold as the sea and slippery like seaweed, but still hair. I could remember her face, and what she had whispered to me as I drowned: Save what falls from my head, figlio—for you have made it fall with your own light—and make of it what you need when you most need my cold, wet darkness in the days ahead…
When I thought of that face, it scared me, and yet the voice did not. How to save the hair? All I could do was wad it up like twine and carry it with me on my person, even if, like seaweed left on the sand, it began to stink and people stared at me and made rude remarks. If I stank, so be it.
And then I remembered the dream, the one she had given me as I slept on the sand, that I might know what was before me should I choose to follow it. La Compassione has asked me to give you this dream because, though you do not know it yet, you are her emissary to the world.
In my dream, there was a great, cold lake, and I knew which one. The lake boiled with the bodies of dragons that were not dragons, bodies I knew from the dreams I had dreamed my entire life.
There were people on the cold, pebbly shore. I could not see them clearly at first, but I knew them—or would when my journey was through.
I did not stand with them on the shore. I could not have any longer, given what I had become.
I was in the lake, no longer a boy, watching with eyes that were not a boy’s.
As the people on the shore waited, scaly bodies as big as boats—bodies like mine–began to move, I with them, leading them, and when we reached the shore, the waves we made were as tall as men, and the people on the pebbly beach stepped back to avoid them, and parted to let us through lest they be trampled in our hurry.
I could see the eyes of a pretty girl who was dressed as a boy, her skin darkened by the sun. Her name was Caterina. Though I could not see the rest of her face, her green eyes said that she had come to love me, or at least care greatly about me, on our long journey north to this lake from a pretty walled city—Siena, I remembered—and the horses she had raced there each year, posing as a man.
I could see, standing beside her, Ciccio, the dog that had been so important to me on my journey because of his courage, because he had thrown himself at more than one Drinker without concern for himself. His mangled ear was healing at last, and I could see clearly in memory the Drinker, once a Venetian priest, now nearly naked in its hideousness, that had mangled his ear.
I could see the face with its red cheeks and paleness, the dirty satin vestments below it barely covering the plump body of a boy who was, I knew, the Child Pope Bonifacio, whom I had met and befriended on Elba, that the Drinkers of Blood might be defeated with the water he had blessed.
I could see the baby in Bonifacio’s arms, quiet, not squirming. I could not see what marks on the little body produced the blood, but I could see blood on its skin and swaddle. The Bleeding Child who never dies…
And I could see the bright hair, though not the face or body, of the man standing by my mother (who was safe at last)—a man who held a musical instrument of sheep’s bladder and wooden pipes—a cornamusa—the one he had used to summon the great bodies in the lake, that we might, under the spell of its strange song, leave its waters and begin our march south to Rome and the battle that faced us.
He was playing his cornamusa even now, casting its spell upon us. Beside him was a man I had met on a wharf once long ago, one who held his own cornamusa, and behind him were five other men, all with cornamuse that played the same ancient song of lakes and creatures that might, if awakened, save the world.
The man in front, whose face I could not see, had orange hair, like mine.
This was my father.
I was barely able to stand. The coughing took me again and I thought my lungs were going to fly from my throat. They did not, and, when I could, I took a deep breath and heard Ciccio get up and shake.
Ciccio heard the footsteps first and stared in their direction.
I followed his stare and recognized the figure at the top of the beach, though only from my dream.
The cheeks were just as red and the body just as plump. The satin was clean, however, as it should be, and the round face, like a funny moon, was smiling in a lop-sided way. What a strange boy the Child Pope is, I thought to myself. But no stranger than I…
“Hello, Emilio—figlio mio,” the boy said as he reached me.
“How do you know my name?”
“It was given to me last night in a dream,” the boy answered nonchalantly, “a pleasant one.” He took my hand in trust and guided me, while Ciccio followed, up toward the little church, where I knew we would talk, where I knew we would plan our escape from Elba to the mainland and to Siena, Venice, the Po Valley, the Seven Castle Towns, and the great icy lake.
As his delicate hand touched mine, my body began to itch and my skin to glow more brightly than ever—not as brightly as I knew it soon would, yet bright enough that the Child Pope jerked away in surprise for a moment, but only a moment.
“A boy who glows,” he said. “How wonderful!”
As we walked, he continued:
“You have already dreamed—this very day, I think, and on the sands of the beach you woke upon—the ending of your journey, but reaching that ending is another matter, as it is for us all in this life, is it not?”
“I will require help,” I heard myself say, and I knew it was La Compassione suggesting I say it, so that I would be as ready as the Child Pope already seemed to be.
“Yes, indeed,” he answered, this child who spoke like a man. And then, with a smile on his round, pale face, he added: “We do not need dreams to know that we all require help, do we, Emilio?”
“No, Your Holiness. We do not.”
“Please, I am Bonifacio. Let us start there…”
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Bruce McAllister‘s short fiction has appeared over the years in science fiction, fantasy, and horror magazines and in”year’s best” volumes; and won or been short-listed for awards like the National Endowment for the Arts, the Hugo, the Nebula, Locus, and the Shirley Jackson. His most recent novel is The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic; his most recent collection, Stealing God and Other Stories. After a peripatetic childhood spent in a Navy family on one ocean after another (including Emilio’s fishing village, though five hundred years later), he lives happily now not far from the sea in southern California. |