The Madonna of the Almonds by Marina Fiorato Read Free Book Online

severest wound – a gash so deep that Amaria gasped, and Nonna wondered that it had not killed him. Yet this was the only gash he carried – the other punctures in his flesh were not slashes but holes – a rash of round wounds in his chest and shoulders, as round as arrow holes with the arrows gone, and yet smaller, much smaller. Nonna crossed herself and called on Saint Sebastian, a Saint who knew the pierce of an arrow or two. She looked closer, covering her face with a barm cloth lest she breathe pestilence into the fellow. Peeping from one of the punctures was a round metal pea. She eased it out and it rolled from the flesh, dropping with a neat click on the wooden boards on which the wildman lay. Both women leant close.
    ‘What is it?’ breathed Amaria.
    ‘Shot,’ replied Nonna, the syllable itself as short and sharp as gunfire. ‘ Pallottola di Piombo . We are in a new world indeed.’ She held the metal up to the firelight where it gleamed evilly – a beady metal eye. She eyed it back. She had learned much of warfare since she had watched Filippo burn – she kept her eyes and ears open as the mercenariesand soldiers had passed through town. ‘Tiny cannon balls shot from cannon that a man can hold. Called a hackbutt, or arquebus. Many, many died this way, this time.’
    Nonna took the bowl from Amaria and tipped the water on the rushes. It was not suitable that a maid should touch the flesh of a man, even such a case as he, so this task was hers. She heated the blade of Filippo’s dagger in the fire and began to dig.
    Amaria gasped. ‘What are you doing?’
    Nonna did not look up. ‘These beans must be taken from his flesh. They are made from an alloy of lead and will poison his organs if left.’
    Amaria rolled the first ball in her hand. ‘It is perfectly round,’ she marvelled. ‘How are such things created?’
    ‘They are made everywhere now. Even here in Pavia.’
    ‘Here?’
    ‘Yes. The two red towers near Saint Michele’s church, you know the ones?’
    Amaria nodded. ‘Yes. The Devil’s legs. You must run between the two as fast as you can with your eyes shut lest the Devil shit on your head.’
    Nonna allowed herself a smile at Amaria’s nonsense, even at such a time. ‘Yes, the Gambe del Diavolo . There. These are made there. The Devil shits bullets now.’
    ‘Truly?’ Amaria’s eyes were wide.
    Nonna kept digging through the tender flesh. Some were near the surface, some deeper in. ‘No, child. Like mostevils, these are made by men. Hot lead is dropped from the top of the tower to the floor below. When it falls, as water does, the droplets become perfectly round in the air. By the time they reach the floor they are dry, and hard as Christ’s nails.’ She sighed. ‘Most of those that died at Pavia were shot through.’ She fell silent as she pulled the metal from the wildman’s torn muscle. The wound clustered on the white wastes of his flesh like battle sites littered across Lombardy, across the whole peninsula. As she searched the landscape of his body for more of the insidious shot, Nonna named the battles like a litany. She dropped the bullets into the dish with an attendant click for each. She began with Garigliano, the place where she had lost Filippo. Click. Agnadello. Click. Cerignola. Click. Bicocca, Fornovo, Ravenna. Click, click, click. Marignano, Novara. The Siege of Padua. And last of all, the Battle of Padova. The war had come home from far away to their very doorstep. Click. The bullets dropped into the clay dish like the Virgin’s tears and lay there clustered together in a string – the beads of a bloody rosary. Nonna bowed her head for a moment in sorrow for all the battles and all the dead.
    Then she took the shears and asked the girl to turn her back as she snipped back dead yellow flesh from the lips of the gash – this was the hacked maw of a sword, for sure. She handed Amaria the shears to clean and her granddaughter then used them to attack