The Road to Damietta Read Online Free Page B

servants and guards carrying the pennons of the House of Montanaro, we set off at a leisurely canter for the Bernardone establishment on Via Portico, which is reached by a lane lined with unpleasant stalls where animals are slaughtered. As we rode down the lane our horses trod in pools of blood.
    The Via Portico itself is crowded with shops and large signs—the apothecary's cluster of gilded pills, the striped arm of the barber-surgeon, the goldsmith's unicorn. Bernardone's shop was at the far end of the street, an unlikely place for a merchant dealing in expensive cloth.
    By placing trestles stacked with merchandise in front of his store from one side of the street to the other, Bernardone had made a dead end of it. This was against the law, a law my father had helped to write, which required merchants to pile their goods no closer to the center of the street than one inch, and on one side of the street only. Thus we had to dismount halfway down Via Portico and give the horses to our guards, which annoyed Raul.
    "Bernardone has been fined a dozen times," he said as we
threaded our way through row after row of bulging trestles. "But the fines are small; he pays them and goes right on littering the street. Like his son, Bernardone thinks himself a noble cavalier, scornful of the law."
    He sent one of our guards to announce that the daughter of Davino di Montanaro was waiting, and at once boys came running out to make a path for us. A stout gentleman with a scraggly beard, wearing a shabby robe, appeared in the doorway.
    "I am honored," he said, after introducing himself with a courtly bow, "to welcome a member of the Montanaro family. And please excuse the confusion. Only yesterday I received a shipment of cloth from Flanders—seven carts and seven donkeys loaded down with treasures, which we haven't had a chance to arrange on the shelves."
    I made out the slim figure of his son. He was looking at me, his head cocked to one side, as I walked sedately toward him over the cobbles, my heart beating.
    Raul introduced himself and me to Bernardone, who got my name wrong—Pica instead of Ricca—which was not a good beginning. Then to his son.
    "I have seen you before," Francis said, smiling, "on the way to San Subasio."
    "And other places," I said. "In our courtyard with the bull. And months ago when you sang in the square."
    "Oh, yes, you were on the balcony, dressed in a white gown. I saw you while I was singing."
    Singing to me, I desperately wanted to say, not to Clare di Scifi. Not to anyone but me. Instead, I reminded him that we had danced in the square on the night of the December Liberties.
    He frowned at this and fell silent. He had changed. From the glimpses I'd had of him in the cathedral, filled as it was with candle smoke, and in the square, dense with the oily smoke of torches, I didn't have a true idea of how he looked. But now as I saw him in the daylight, I was certain that he had changed. He was no longer the smiling young man I had seen before.
    He was thinner than I remembered. And his eyes, deep-set beneath their black brows, had changed. They seemed troubled. Could Raul's story be true? Was he worried about the angry threats his father had made against him? To belie this troubled mood, he was dressed in the gayest and most charming of costumes—one leg of black silk, one leg of red silk, and a tunic of three or four different colors cinched tight by a rainbow belt.
    "Don't just stand there gawking," Signor Bernardone said. "Show the young lady the new damask that arrived only yesterday from Flanders. And the precious Venetian sendal, which is in short supply."
    I hadn't come to buy sendal or damask, but since I couldn't say why I had come, I said nothing.
    Francis disappeared into the shop, a long, narrow arcade lined with shelves, gloomy as a tomb save for the feeble glow of lanterns. He came back with two bolts of cloth, slipped into the
street, and spread them out on a trestle. Draping a