Blood Ties by C.C. Humphreys Page B

somehow to keep the fear from his voice. Haakon paused, his son on one side, his old comrade on the other.
    ‘Father, you should go. The Fugger and I will look. We’ll find Maria and join you in Montalcino.’
    Haakon’s reply, when it came after a long pause, was gruff. ‘See that you do, boy. And take no chances!’ He cuffed his son around his head.
    ‘Me?’ There was a swift smile, a touch of a scimitar in salute, and he was gone.
    To Jean’s great relief, Anne was back in a moment, ladling some fresh water into her mother’s mouth. On hearing that Erik had gone to look for Maria she cried out, ‘But I know where she went. To the gate, to try to barter gold for food with the Florentines. This gate, the Porta Romana I think.’ Seeing the looks on their faces she said, ‘I should have told you before.’
    Haakon started back toward the city for Erik.
    ‘No, Haakon. We will look for her outside and we will send word. You will not find them now. And look. Look!’
    Jean’s panicked words brought Haakon around and, far ahead down the Via Roma, now the Sienese Republic’s Via Dolorosa, he too saw the Porta Romana start to swing open. Everyone around began to lift weapons, stretchers, babies, packs, carts, anything that held their goods or their wounded, and pressed forward. Haakon, with one long last look back, bent to the handles of the cart. Beck moaned as it rose.
    ‘Hold tight, Anne. Do not let go of the cart,’ Jean ordered. He tried to breathe calmly. With a little luck, they would be out and clear soon. On their way to Montalcino and, beyond that city, maybe on their way home. His lips twisting in barely remembered prayers, he set his mind to the road ahead.
    They had arrived at the gates near dawn after two day’s hard riding from Rome. There, just behind the Florentine siege lines, on a scrap of barren earth, the horses were hobbled and nose-bagged before twenty exhausted men fell upon the hard ground as if it were a feathered mattress. The grey-cloaked figure who had pushed his horse the hardest, impatient with any rest, now went off to reconnoitre, to gather news of the surrender. Gianni Rombaud felt he would never sleep again. Not, at least, until this mission that was his salvation was complete.
    Not so the man in the black cloak. When his head finally reached the stiff comfort of his pack, Thomas felt that he might never wake again. His body ached, his mind numb of everything except a desperate desire for oblivion. When the words reached through the cloud of his head that the French and Sienese would not march out till two bells of the afternoon, eight hours away, it was as if he’d been granted a lease on paradise.
    Yet his rest was not untainted. The mustering of the Florentine forces, the cries and orders in Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian disturbed him not at all; but sometime toward midday, when the first heaviness of sleep had passed, it began to fill with images, jumbled recollections of things present and things past – a whiff of the coffin, a snatch of a rhyme, a child’s hand pressed into his. This last led him on, until he was both holder and held, his father and himself, walking into the desecrated buildings of Wenlock Priory. Half the walls were down yet men still carted blocks away to the village beyond. The great rose window was a mere frame, bare of its stunning glass. On one of the few remaining leaded casements, a crow was perched, its beak upraised, cawing notes that Thomas could not hear, yet summoning fellows, until the window was filled with black feathers, and silent screams.
    His father let slip his hand, and Thomas floated away from the boy on the ground, up above the sacked priory buildings, over his native village of Much Wenlock. There was his home, the comfortable brick manor house built next to the covered market, location and manner befitting the squire of the prosperous Shropshire town. But it was not his home any more, he remembered now, others lived there,