The Reckoning - 3 by Sharon Kay Penman Read Free Book Online Page B

man accustomed t0 public accolades. Just as his father had once been acclaimed in the streets of
London, so was Guy acclaimed in the streets of Siena, as HugK watched and marveled that this de Montfort son should have found his destiny in a land so far from England.
The fan-shaped Piazza del Campo was the converging point for the city's three hills, the heart of Siena. Here markets were held, livestock Sinned up, fresh fish kept in huge wooden vats. Here fairs were celeorated. Here were played the rough-and-tumble games of elmora, in which young men formed teams and did mock battle with quarter staves, and pugna, in which weapons were barred, and palone, a boisterous form of football. Here stood the baratteria, a stockade roofed in canvas that served as the city's gambling hall. And here were clustered the citizens of Siena, eager to take what pleasures they could in a bleak Lenten season, unwilling to squander such a spring-like Saturday on mundane matters of work.
Hugh was enthralled by it allthe noise and confusion and merriment, the circling doves and pealing church bells, the sun slanting off the red roofs and rich russet-brown bricks of the houses fronting upon the square, even the clouds of dust stirred up by the brawling elmora players. Siena seduced with practiced ease, and as he elbowed his way through the crowd, following Bran toward the baratteria, he decided that Italy was verily like Cockayne, that legendary land in which night was day and hot was cold, so completely had his own expectations been turned upside-down. For he had been utterly certain that he would dislike Italy, and just as sure he would like Guy de Montfort, his lord's brother.
Italy was a term of convenience. Hugh knew there was no "Italy" in the same sense that there was an "England" or a "France." The independent city-states of Tuscany and Lombardy were part of "Italy." So were the Papal States. So, too, was the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, which was ruled by a Frenchman, Charles of Anjou, uncle to the French King Philippe, and Guy de Montfort's powerful patron. They were not linked by language, for each region had its own dialect, its own accent, its own idioms. Even in Tuscany, the Sienese speech was notably less guttural than that of their Florentine neighbors. Nor were they bound by political affinities. People were "Guelphs" or "Ghibellines,"
the distinction part of an enduring quarrel that had its roots in a forty-year-old breach between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. Cities like
Siena and Florence and Venice minted their own money, adhered to their own systems of weights and measures, even their own calendars. And their rivalry was known the length and breadth of Christendom; men spok£
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a and Florence or Venice and Genoa in the same breath with Rome and Carthage, Athens and Troy.
So even before they reached the Apennines, Hugh had judged Italy
, found it wanting; a veritable Tower of Babel, an alien land of bandits
4 d blood-feuds, a region notorious for its "pestilent air," its "Roman ers and catarrhs," a foreboding world of droughts and earthquakes, Icanic mountains that "belched forth infernal fire," and Lombard ney-lenders almost as unpopular as the Jews. It was the true measure f Hugh's devotion to Bran that he'd not balked upon learning that Italy lay at the end of their journey.
He was to discover that the Italy of his imagination was not a total distortion of reality; the roads were indeed bad and fevers were rampant and he had trouble remembering that the lira was not a coin but still worth twenty silver soldi, the same as a gold florin. He'd not expected, though, that Italy would be so beautiful, a land of alpine grandeur and icy mountain lakes and deep valleys and burnished, bright sunshine. The Tuscany hills put him in mind of his native Shropshire; he took pleasure in the vales and woods of chestnut and cypress, the olive groves and vineyards, the snow-white oxen and the lingering twilight dusks. And he had not