The Daughter of Siena by Marina Fiorato

confidence and more: satisfaction. Riccardo knew that his earlier instincts had been right – Nello was glad his brother was dead. He was now the Eagle’s champion, something that, throughout his freakish childhood, he must always have longed to be. Riccardo made no reply, as he followed the pale figure down the stone stair, his feet stumbling only a little as he realized where they were headed.
    The Panther was still there, his beaten flesh beginning to stink and stretch on his bones in the summer heat. Nello began to unbind the body. With an increasing feeling of unreality, Riccardo began to help and felt the slippery ropes come away in his hands, jellied gouts of blood gathering like blackberries at the Panther’s wrists.

    Nello laid out a long feed sack on the stony floor. Riccardo had no choice but to help Nello roll the body up in the sack. He took the legs as Nello took the head, but instead of turning up the stair again, Nello approached a blind wall with a stone eagle carved into it. As they moved closer, the torchlight carved deep shadows in the stony grooves, throwing the eagle’s single eye into relief. Nello pressed his thumb to the eye and the wall sprang back, not with the stony grating of a long-closed tomb, but quick and silent and well used.
    ‘Come on,’ he said.
    The dark door closed behind them on some hidden spring and they entered a stony tunnel with torches burning in sconces placed a man’s length apart. This was one of the bottini , the underground network of aqueducts and sewers below the city that radiated out under the contrade to the hills. They carried the body carefully along the white stone walkways, skirting the green pools of stagnant water. Riccardo fixed his eyes on Nello ahead of him, his white hair gleaming in the torchlight.
    Riccardo’s misgivings were a cold stone in his stomach.
    ‘Is he to be laid in some private mausoleum of the Panthers?’ His voice sounded forth into the black beyond and returned to chase behind them, as if spirits rose to moan at them from their necropolis.
    Nello’s laugh, likewise, circled around the tunnels and back. ‘He’s to be laid in the most beautiful place in the world. None too private, though.’
    The way was long and the grisly burden heavy but Riccardo did not mind if it meant the dead Panther would
be given some small rite of passage. All the same, his arms were aching by the time Nello stopped and set down his end of the body on the walkway. Riccardo did likewise. Above them, a square of light, bleeding white, showed around the edges of a trapdoor. Nello stood tall and pushed, and with a grating of ancient stone a paving slid sideways to reveal a rectangle of sky pricked out with stars. Nello vaulted up until his head and shoulders were in the night air and looked around.
    ‘Clear,’ he said. ‘Push him out.’
    This was no easy task. In the end Riccardo, being the stronger, had to clamber into the fresh air to yank the body from below. He had expected to emerge into some clandestine cemetery outside the city, where the body could be disposed of in secret, thus minimizing any reprisals from the Panther contrada . He could not have been more wrong.
    He was right in the centre of the deserted Piazza del Campo, and the paving from which they had emerged formed the lowest balustrade of the fountain. He and Nello dragged the body out, under the noses of the stone wolves who spouted water, silvered by moonlight, into the bowl of the fountain, as if they gathered to feast on the carrion. They rolled the Panther out like a ham from a cloth, like Cleopatra from her carpet. Pia , thought Riccardo. She is part of this now.
    Nello dragged the body to the very centre of the piazza’s shell. Riccardo helped him unwrap the body, but refused to help him place the arms wide in the position in which the Eagle contrada left all their dead – the knifed
knave in the alleyway, the greedy prelate on his own altar. Everyone would know who had done