26

 

Niccoluccio knew, in theory, that riots had ravaged Florence. Every Florentine, educated or not, knew about the civil war between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, which had ended with the city ostensibly allying with the papacy. They knew about the magnates, the wealthy young men who ran wild through the city. And everyone lived in fear of food riots each bad winter.

But when he heard the yells outside the Church of San Lorenzo, at first he didn’t know what to make of it. He stared at his lone, foggy window. It wasn’t until he heard glass smashing – close – that he realized.

He rushed into the church proper, his habit rustling at his heels. The stained glass behind the altar had burst. Red, violet, and blue shards glittered in the sunlight. The moment after he arrived, the doors cracked open. Three men burst in, a jeering crowd behind them.

The handful of parishioners in the church were already rushing away from the doors. Frantic, Niccoluccio looked about for the head priest or any other clergyman, but he seemed to be alone. One of the women was weeping, trying to hide underneath her wimple.

Niccoluccio stepped forward before he realized what he was doing. The church had an exit in the back, hidden in a hallway tucked in an alcove. He waved the parishioners toward it.

The intruders were interested in looting, not chasing harmless men and women. They broke toward the altar. Niccoluccio got the seven men and women out unmolested.

A handful of people had lined up to throw rocks in the alley behind the church. They must have been the ones who’d broken the stained glass. They watched Niccoluccio and the parishioners warily. When it became clear that they hadn’t come to counter-attack, the rioters picked up loose stones and hurled them into the church.

Niccoluccio knew he shouldn’t have fled. It was his duty to protect the church’s treasures and shrines. In the flash of the moment, he hadn’t even considered that. He couldn’t think of himself as a part of the church. San Lorenzo was somebody else’s property, somebody else’s responsibility.

At Sacro Cuore, it would have been different.

The sounds of tumult and fury echoed over the roof. The worst of the crowd was on the street. The parishioners still looked to him for guidance. He took them down the alley, through puddles and waste runnels, around overturned barrels and an uncollected pest carcass.

Once the shouting dwindled and the immediate danger ended, they fled in their own directions. Niccoluccio saw the last of them off. And then he turned back to the street.

When he poked his head around the corner, he found the street empty but for a handful of men running past, all in the same direction. Peering that way, he could just see the crowd outside of the church. For as loud as they were, it was amazing that he hadn’t heard them inside. Maybe they’d gathered that much strength since he’d left.

Niccoluccio gathered his courage and stepped into the path of one of the runners. The man slowed. His skin was pocked by some old disease, but otherwise he’d come through the pestilence strong and hale. Haste and fear glittered in his eyes.

Niccoluccio asked, “In God’s name, what is happening here?”

“Interdiction,” he breathed. “The fools have gone and got us interdicted.”

Niccoluccio let him go. Everything had become clearer. Interdiction was the worst punishment a city could receive short of mass excommunication. It meant Pope Clement VI had decreed no services could be held in the Diocese of Florence. No sins could be confessed. No weddings officiated. No Last Rites administered. Whoever should die without either confession or rites would not be smiled upon by God.

In one breath, Pope Clement had placed the city a hair’s width from damnation. It didn’t matter if the churches continued to perform their business. None of it would be sanctified in the eyes of God. No one would trust a marriage issued under an interdiction.

This had certainly happened because the clergy of the cathedral chapter had, in concert with the civil authorities, unilaterally appointed Ambrogiuolo their own bishop. Not everyone had been in favor, but they’d been intimidated into silence. Now this was the dissenters’ chance to prove that they had been right all along.

Pillars of smoke rose from the other corners of the city. Men clustered around a bonfire at the end of the next street. When Niccoluccio walked closer, he saw the fire had been fueled with chairs. A table burned as its centerpiece. The doors of the nearest home had been smashed. At least the rioters were civic-minded. They hadn’t set the actual house ablaze and risked the fire spreading.

Niccoluccio should have gone to his brother’s home. At the last street crossing, he turned to the neighborhood in which Elisa lived.

A loose formation of men passed, heading in the opposite direction. Half were dressed no differently than the rabble Niccoluccio had left behind, but the rest had the caps of the wall watch. The parish’s aged, knobby elbowed constable was among them. Niccoluccio knew he ought to have been relieved to see someone moving against the rioters, but mostly he didn’t care.

Elisa lived near where she’d grown up, in a row of formerly up and coming merchants’ homes only blocks away from the Arno River. Each home was tastefully designed to hide the economy with which they had been built. Stone and brick had been painted white to resemble marble. They bore wide porticoes, but there was no servants’ housing.

There was nobody left to be impressed. The quarantine boards over her neighbors’ doors hadn’t been removed even by squatters. Niccoluccio wouldn’t have been surprised to find pestilence corpses still in them, untouched.

Elisa’s home was flanked by columns carved garishly in the shape of boars, birds, and game animals. Niccoluccio knocked gently. Elisa peered through the upper shutters before coming down. She stepped aside to allow him in.

All the shutters were closed, shrouding the interior. There was a dusty shadow on the wall where a painting had recently hung. Niccoluccio shuddered to think that this was where she’d lived all those months.

“Are you sure you want to be seen entering my home unescorted?” Elisa asked, bitterly.

“As if there were anybody to see. I wanted to be sure you were all right.”

“Nobody would come here to riot. Why would they? There’s nothing important left.”

“You don’t have anyone here? No servants? No family?”

“Our kitchen girl died of the pestilence. I couldn’t have hired another even if I had the money. But this is my home. I’m not afraid of it.”

Niccoluccio hadn’t asked about her finances. He’d assumed, perhaps naively, that her husband had provided upkeep for after his death, or at the very least that her father-in-law would do the same.

“I’m glad to find you safe,” he said, fumbling to find words. “I thought you would be panicking as much as I am.”

“When my husband was alive, all he could talk about was obtaining his knighthood. It was so important to him. His knighthood would have made everything we’d suffered through worth it, he said. It would mean that no one could look down on him anymore. Our children would have their places secured.” She stopped outside an empty doorway and curled her nose. “All that fighting didn’t help him or them in the end.”

Niccoluccio peered in the doorway. In the dark, he could just see a stack of five books, a pair of shoes too large for her. Elisa said, “You had the right idea, leaving Florence when you were young, learning about death and all other things precious to God. That’s all that matters after everything else passes.”

Niccoluccio had said this before, but he’d never felt it so keenly. “I learned nothing in the monastery.”

“You’re certainly a different person from who you used to be. And better than if you’d stayed here.”

“All my brothers are dead. It was only a fluke that I survived.”

“A fluke? I thought it was a miracle.”

Niccoluccio blinked. He’d said the word before he realized what he meant. He nodded, slowly. “It can be both.”

Elisa gave him a strange look. She led him through the buttery and into the pantry. Open and half-empty cupboards lined the walls. “I can’t have you in without at least offering something to eat. I’ve had to throw too much of it out already.”

She poured the pair of them a glass of wine each, and bread with wafers in pewter dishware. “I wish I had richer food to offer you.”

“This is far richer than I am accustomed to.” In Dioneo’s home, after the first day’s feast and the unfortunate digestive experience that had resulted, Niccoluccio had instructed the cook to furnish him with simple meals: breads with no butter, and milk. After a few bites, his pulse slowed. The fear that had burned since the riot dwindled.

“You know, it’s strange how safe I feel with you,” Elisa said. “Any other man on Earth, I would have felt like you’d come only to assault me. But you were never like that. You or Pietro, even after all the things we did.”

Niccoluccio shifted. “I feel like a beast, thinking about that.”

“The beasts are the men conspiring to pit us against the papacy so soon after the pestilence.”

Niccoluccio took another bite to keep from saying anything about his brother. Elisa rolled her bread back and forth. She hadn’t touched anything but her wine. She asked, “If this is the end of the world, why can’t it hurry and arrive? Why does God have to leave so many lingering?”

“When the world ends, it will end in stages, none of which have come to pass.” He meant to be comforting when he said, “This is not the end of the world.”

She asked, “Why must suicide be a mortal sin?”

He knew what he was supposed to say. If she was a Christian, her life was pledged to God. It was not hers to give away. But, in many moments these past few days, he’d wondered the same. “I am no longer equipped to give spiritual advice.”

Another odd look. “You, the Carthusian monk, not qualified? You’ve spent more years studying God than any priest in this city.”

“I don’t know what I am anymore. I feel my spirit being ripped in many directions.” He’d been anxious about asking her a question, and he hadn’t realized what it was until now. “If you could go anywhere you want – if you could leave here, and never come back – would you?”

“You always ask the strangest questions.”

“It’s always sincerely meant. Do you think you could be happy anywhere else?”

“It seems like being happy after all that’s happened would be a sin.”

“There must be some end to the misery.”

“Maybe it comes when we die and are forgotten,” Elisa said. “I know this is where my life is going to end. There’s nothing else for me. I also know that, wherever I go, I’ll never be free of what happened here.”

The weight in his throat became a weight in his chest. He swallowed. He’d been near to asking her if she would accompany him when he left Florence, but he already had her answer. “Thank you for indulging me in my oddities.”

When he stood, Elisa followed him to the door and stopped just beside it. “Do you think you could be happy?” she asked.

“I don’t suppose so.”

“I imagined as much. We’ve both lost so much.”

There was so much he wanted to say, and nothing he could. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. He had to force himself to leave.

The fires still burned in every corner of the city. He passed no crowds on his short trip to his brother’s home. He breathed out when he found the neighborhood left untouched. A trio of magnates, the wealthy young barbarians, had formed a guard at the end of the street. Even the sight of Niccoluccio’s tonsure wouldn’t convince them to allow him to pass until he told them his name. It prompted the lead man to grin, and say, “The widow-taker.”

As Niccoluccio passed, another said, “Some monk,” and spat on Niccoluccio’s shoes.

They’d seen him with Elisa one too many times.

Catella ran to the door when Niccoluccio knocked, but deflated when she saw it was just him. She told him Dioneo had gone running to the heart of the city. Niccoluccio hardly paused for breath before setting off.

He found his brother in the shadow of the Palazzo Vecchio’s single ugly tower. He was in bitter conference with a semicircle of gray-haired parish constables. After waving the constables off, Dioneo stormed toward the Palazzo Vecchio’s doors. He gave no indication that he had seen Niccoluccio until he waved Niccoluccio after him.

“There is no way to win with the rabble of Florence,” Dioneo complained, sitting behind his desk as if to shield himself. “Had we not appointed Ambrogiuolo, they would have rioted when the church raised rents and fees and called in its debts.”

“You should feel lucky your home hasn’t been targeted. I thought you might feel better knowing that Catella and your children are safe.”

“We’ve almost got the rabble under control. There’s no question about that. The city is ours, and it will remain ours. You’re going to help.”

“What? How?”

“You can start with the priests and monks. I thought the clergy would support us, but the lower orders of the hierarchy are almost as much in arms as the rioters.”

Niccoluccio said, “They have more to lose from the interdiction than anybody. They’ll get just a fraction of the pittance they used to receive for services.”

“You’d figured that, and you didn’t say so until now?”

“I didn’t need to say what I thought you already knew.”

Dioneo ground his teeth, but didn’t bite back. “Go to Santa Reparata. It’s crowded, but people will listen to you. You can tell them to supp–”

“I’m not taking part in this.”

Dioneo stuttered to a stop. “You’ve already taken part.”

“I’ve been dragged along. All anybody in this city can do after the pestilence is make the world worse.”

“You wouldn’t dare to side with the papacy, not after what you’ve seen.”

“I’m not siding with anyone. I’m withdrawing.”

Dioneo sat there, mouth in a twist of confusion and frustration. Niccoluccio turned to the door.

Dioneo said, “I never dreamed I would have to threaten to close my home to my brother. If you walk through those doors, don’t come back to mine. This is too grave for philosophical scruples.”

“If that is what you feel obliged to do, then I cannot stop you.”

“Go back to your whore, then!” Dioneo shouted at his back. Niccoluccio’s step caught, but he forced himself to continue.

He marched past Dioneo’s secretary, trying to keep his face as composed as he hoped he had sounded. His bare scalp burned by the time he reached the plaza. He ran his fingers across his bare scalp. He felt as though there were a fire in his head. He leaned against the side of the Palazzo Vecchio, and only moved on when he noticed the disapproval of passersby.

He walked in the first direction he could think of, toward the western gates. No attempt at calm could keep his breath from coming in quick, shallow gulps. He had nothing in Florence, no reason to stay. His family and his home had been the only reason he’d come. He had no home elsewhere. He had no money, little knowledge of the cities beyond Florence’s walls. If he tried to travel on his own, he would be no better off than he had been when he’d fled Sacro Cuore.

Applying to join a monastery wasn’t an option either. He no longer felt a man of the church, which was tantamount to saying he was no longer a man of God. Losing his brother made him shake, but losing sight of God was what made him want to weep. And he couldn’t explain the reasons for it to anyone in this city.

The pillars of smoke had dwindled to candle wisps, but shops remained closed and the streetside food carts and stalls had vanished into the ether from which they came. At least four men stood guard outside each church he passed. They stared at Niccoluccio as he went by.

His feet turned south, toward the Arno. Elisa’s home.

Elisa looked only mildly surprised to see him again so soon. When he was safely inside, he said, “You asked me earlier why suicide should be a sin. I don’t have an answer.”

She needed a moment to understand. “Are you coming to me for support?”

“I usually did. You and Pietro.”

“Back when we were little older than children. Can’t you see how things are different?”

She didn’t know what had just happened between him and his brother, and he wasn’t inclined to explain. “I never felt like I belonged in this city since the day I came back.”

“Long before that, I’ll bet,” Elisa said.

“I should have died at the monastery. Or frozen to death on the roads afterward. I have no right to be here.”

Elisa glanced back to a half-opened door. Niccoluccio couldn’t see anything behind it, but the knob was covered in dust. “Maybe we should both be dead,” she said.

A flood of guilt nearly pushed him to the floor. He’d come to her for some comfort, some grounding, but of course he wasn’t alone in feeling like this. Elisa had lost her children. However close he’d felt to his brother, she’d been closer to her family. She’d explained that before, with words he hadn’t tried hard enough to understand.

“I’m beyond sorry. There’s nothing I can say to ease your suffering.”

“I wish you hadn’t had to discover that the same way I did.”

“How do you bear it?”

“I don’t. And I won’t. What about you? Do you think you’ll find another monastery?”

There were some parts of him that she couldn’t understand, not any more than he could her. He shook his head.

“Then – would you like to stay with me?” He could hear the reluctance trailing from her voice.

“Neither of us really wants that.”

Elisa looked back toward the half-open door, and nodded.

She said, “I hope I’ll be able to see you again, before–”

“It will be as God wills it.” Short of God’s aid, neither of them were in control of themselves.

He took her hand, squeezed it one last time before heading for the front door.

When he got outside again, he didn’t know where he was headed, but he felt many times lighter. It was as though he’d dragged chains with him ever since he’d left Sacro Cuore – ever since he’d heard of the pest approaching – and he’d finally managed to lose them.

His brother’s home was only a few streets away. If it weren’t for the interceding rooftops, he could have seen it. It might as well have been in Xanadu. His head still burned. He turned to the southwest, and the neighborhoods of porters and laborers who made their homes near the river. He’d been there a few times in the company of Pietro and Elisa, searching for privacy.

There was more of that to be found now. As elsewhere, whole streets had been abandoned. Doors and windows were boarded over. Quarantine signs hung over them. Other houses had been left open to show off the rot inside. Most of the city’s dead had come through here, on their way to corpse barges. They’d left annihilation in their wake. The pestilence had cleaved through the neighborhood like steel through flesh.

There were no corpses in the streets anymore, but indoors there would be plenty. Niccoluccio stopped outside one of the boarded-up houses. He had a good idea what he’d find inside, and the smell when he pried loose the boards and opened the door left no doubt.

He counted three adult-sized bodies, each with several children. The house had only one room, and they all shared it. Three of the children were tucked underneath sheets as if to be tended on their sickbeds. Their skin was gray, and their hair had become wisps. Their bones poked through their elbows. One adult had a mummified infant glued to his or her chest.

One of the children looked to have died long after the others. A girl, about seven years old, was in much better condition than the others. She looked as though she might merely be sleeping. but the skin on her arm had started to slip loose, and maggots had made a home of her belly. She’d laid down sideways to keep a bubo under her arm from tormenting her.

The riots had started the fire in Niccoluccio’s head, but the heat had been there long before.

There was no one to talk to but Habidah, and nothing to say except to hope that she had been listening all along. She might understand what he was about to do.

Florence had cemeteries near every church. All of them had been overwhelmed with the dead. Still, when Niccoluccio visited the nearest churchyard, he found space in the margins of the last row of graves. Whether or not the church’s builders had intended to bury anyone in there, it was still consecrated ground.

Finding a shovel proved of little difficulty. The last gravediggers had abandoned it against the side of the building.

He started with the girl who’d died last. He wrapped her in one of the sheets, carried her through the streets. People stared and stood well aside. When he reached the cemetery, he dug as deep as he could before his arms lost their strength. He laid her down and recovered the blanket.

He reused the blanket each time he had to carry someone, but it was so fouled that it didn’t serve as much protection. Dark, evil-smelling fluid dripped from the places the corpses’ skin had burst, and soiled his clothes. The blanket was more for their dignity than his.

With so little space to dig, he had no choice but to bury the adults atop one another, next to the children. After he was sure each of them was far enough down that they wouldn’t risk spreading the pestilence, he filled in the grave. It was hardly the finest burial, but it was the best he could manage, and more than anyone else had been able to give.

He sat and caught his breath. He’d fallen out of practice gravedigging since Sacro Cuore. His throat burned and a chill had settled into his core.

Maybe that was how the pestilence started its work on its victims.

If this was how he was to die, he would not complain. It was how he should have died long ago. He remembered the monks of Sacro Cuore standing one at a time to declare their intention to face the pestilence. He wondered how many of them would have made the same decision if they’d known all that would happen. He certainly wouldn’t have.

Now he knew what was coming, and he wasn’t afraid. He wouldn’t call Habidah or seek any other kind of escape.

 

He worked through the night breaking quarantine boards and burying the abandoned dead. Finally, he had to stop and rest. He sat against the back wall of the church, rested his head.

The next time he looked up, the sun had traveled across half the sky. His stomach pained, but not from hunger. He just resisted the urge to vomit.

His skin burned from long hours under the sun. He braced himself against the wall, heaved himself to his feet, and returned to the streets. Dizziness made him waver. More people were out. Yesterday’s troubles seemed to have ended, no doubt leaving his brother’s faction in control.

The dead would have been buried eventually. The city would bring its gravediggers. But the gravediggers from the countryside were notoriously irreligious and treated the dead like bundles of logs. No, it was best that he do whatever little he could. It was a better service to the city than any he’d done as treasurer.

Habidah told him, “You don’t have to do this to yourself.”

Niccoluccio startled. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, accidentally aloud.

“I’ve been tracking your heartbeat, your body temperature. You’re sick, and you’re moving rather than resting.”

Niccoluccio didn’t answer, and she didn’t speak again.

His next two corpses were both children, on the floor of a one-room house with no beds, nestled together. Their faces had decayed into gray shadows. He couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls. Passersby stepped back from him as he carried them, one after the other, to their graves. After he finished, people lined up to watch him as he trudged to his next house. They didn’t say anything.

After he’d exhausted the available space at the first churchyard, he turned to other cemeteries farther away. Blisters stung his hands, and his legs and shoulders ached from lifting.

By mid-afternoon, his stomach had stopped hurting. All he felt, as he marched under the shadow of his growing number of watchers, was hollow. His forehead prickled with sweat even as he shivered. He should have felt hungry.

After sunset, he no longer had an audience, but he continued until it was so dark that he couldn’t tell one house from its neighbor. Then he dug fresh graves, ready for tomorrow. When his arms at last gave out, he sat hunched under a church wall. The air bit his scalp. He shivered uncontrollably, and swallowed bile.

“Why were you so bent on saving me?” he asked Habidah. He wondered if she heard his teeth clattering. “Why me and not these children, or my brothers, or this whole city?” It was the first time he could remember feeling bitter toward her.

“All I’ve ever done is what I’ve needed to,” Habidah said.

“What do you mean by that?”

She didn’t answer, even when he asked again.

Niccoluccio wasn’t woken by the cold, or even the blazing pain in his shoulders. Rather, it was the shouting man running down the street. When Niccoluccio sat upright, the man’s words were drowned out by the rush of blood in his ears.

Dawn had only just brushed the sky. Rain clouds were gathering in the west. He could already feel their bite. The pit in the center of his stomach widened. He crouched to his side, and retched a trickle of watery, greenish fluid. The rush of pain from his head nearly made him faint. His vision dwindled to a blood-encircled tunnel.

It took too long for his vision to return to normal. His pulse drummed in his ears. Still no buboes, but it hardly seemed to matter. He staggered to the street, but the commotion had passed. He was left with a shroud of darkness, and a fog of thoughts.

Time, then, for the next bodies. An old woman had died in an abandoned tavern kitchen. The rooms above were all empty, so the owners had either died elsewhere, or fled the city. By the time he returned from her grave, the sky had brightened enough that he could see smoke rising again from the corners of the city.

One of the locals had risen early to watch Niccoluccio carry his burdens. Niccoluccio nodded to the smoke, mouth open with an unasked question.

The man bowed his head. He, too, was tonsured – a monk. “Begging your mercy. News is that the pope hasn’t waited for an answer to the interdiction. He sent for help from Queen Joanna. She’s back in Naples and raising an army. They want to force our bishop to abdicate.”

Niccoluccio looked to the smoke. After a while, and without any other choice, he resumed his work.

Before he’d finished digging the next grave, he sagged on his shovel. When he looked up, the fires had grown larger. Some seemed to have spread to houses. A fire spreading out of control could be as destructive to Florence as the pestilence.

Though some people had come to watch him again, the streets were unusually quiet for this time of morning. He gathered as much of his energy as he could manage. His next cadaver was a bony young woman who probably looked little different in death from how she had in life. His arms threatened to give out halfway through filling her grave. His knees buckled, and several times he nearly collapsed, leaning on his shovel – until a pair of hands helped him to a seat.

It was the monk he’d spoken with earlier. Without a word, he took Niccoluccio’s shovel and resumed filling the grave. There were two others, two women, with him. They took turns digging the next while Niccoluccio sat and rested.

They helped him to his feet and escorted him back to the street, past another line of watchers. There were more of them this time – about thirty. Niccoluccio pointed them to the next house on his list, and they helped him carry the hefty man who’d died within.

The most remarkable thing was that no one spoke. They seemed to know what to do the moment he indicated the house. When he grabbed the corpse’s legs, they took the arms. None of the corpses he’d carried had felt so light, so distant.

He sat to rest while they dug. Afterimages swam in front of his eyes. His head spun. He checked again for buboes. Nothing. His followers finished and continued.

He got up to follow, and his vision disappeared down the end of a dark tunnel.

The next time he was conscious, drizzle kissed his cheeks and lips. Someone was trying to drip water into his mouth. He sputtered, hacked a cough, and pushed the hands away. When his vision returned, he saw the monk holding a bowl.

Niccoluccio’s throat burned, but the water only made it worse. He waved him away and fought to stand. Somehow he managed to get upright. On another day, he would have appreciated the gesture. Bread and water were as poison to him.

Throughout his childhood and monastic career, he’d drunk deeply of the lives of the saints, and tales of their agonies. He’d thought he’d understood why so many of the saints had chosen their suffering. He’d thought of agony only as a trial to be endured, but this was very different. It changed him and how he perceived himself. It forced him to hold himself at a remove from all the evil influences of his body.

This was the suffering he’d shirked at Sacro Cuore. His brothers had accepted it. He would still have his chance.

The monk asked him something, but Niccoluccio didn’t hear. Clarity was not one of the blessings of this new state. He went past the people watching him.

His followers milled outside an unused dockhouse, as if uncertain whether to go in. Niccoluccio led them in. A pair of vagrants had gone inside to die. Niccoluccio uncovered the bodies, and the others lifted.

His followers outpaced him on their way to the graveyard. Niccoluccio gradually fell behind. He stumbled into an alley between houses. He leaned against the grimy wall and caught his breath. More smoke spires twisted across the sky, merging smoothly into the dark clouds overhead. The light rain wasn’t enough to put the fires out.

His energy had fled him. He craned his neck to look at the sky. The fires had been burning all day now. When he strained his hearing, he could hear yelling, though it was difficult to tell what was real.

He allowed his curiosity to get the better of him and picked his way down the alley. The boundary between this neighborhood and the next wasn’t discreet. The houses grew taller and their sides cleaner. He stepped into a boulevard twice as large as any he’d visited over the past few days.

The street was so bustling that, for a moment, he could have mistaken it for an ordinary day. There were no carts, though. The shops were closed. The men passing bore wore grim faces, and were all headed in one direction.

A pot-bellied man with hair like the head of a mop stopped and stared. He looked up and down Niccoluccio’s filthy habit with a flash of recognition. “It’s Prior Caracciola’s brother!”

One of the few women elbowed him. She said, “Leave off. He’s a monk.”

“Prior Caracciola’s brother used to be a monk. It was all an act. Another trick.” He seized Niccoluccio by his filthy collar. “Are you a monk? Swear it to me in the name of God if you are.”

Niccoluccio fought to speak through the pressure. The idea of lying occurred only briefly. “I am no longer a monk.”

That was all the excuse the man needed to smash his forehead into Niccoluccio’s nose.

Niccoluccio staggered into something hard. He couldn’t have kept his balance if he’d tried, and he didn’t. He slid to his knees. Before he could breathe, another pair of hands grabbed him and yanked him back up.

Someone punched him between his ribs. Another blow landed, and again, lower. Niccoluccio gasped, but couldn’t draw any breath. His vision tunneled into darkness. He landed on his side and felt a hard kick against his stomach. Its impact felt muted, as though it were happening to some other person.

There was a second kick to his head, and then another to his stomach. And then nothing.

It was almost anticlimactic how fast it happened. He was alone, in a void. Still conscious.

When he died, he had always expected company, even from condemned spirits of Purgatory. The solitude undermined him immediately.

Isolation was something he expected only of the outer darkness, cut off from God. A moment here felt as an eternity, as if he were clawing the inside of his head. He’d made a mistake in coming here. He understood that with a clarity like a thunderclap.

He instinctively fought his way back to the world of sensation. It was not done with him yet. It yanked him back, stubborn, like knee-high mud tugging at his shoes. He gasped at the pain in his chest. Wet clay clogged his nostrils.

He’d been tossed into a muddy ditch like a broken doll. Close, slick walls bundled his arms. He leaned up, choking for air. Another hard impact against his head knocked him back down. Someone trampled on his hip.

Then, there was a second thunderclap. He hadn’t hallucinated the first after all. His ears stung.

One bolt after another blended into a continuous, terrifying noise. Someone’s panicked footfall rolled him onto his side just as his vision returned from the end of the tunnel. He gaped at the clouds – at the hole opening between them.

A black bird soared out of the rain, splitting a seam across the sky. White and gold stars burned on every edge of its body. They hurt to look at.

The rain landing on Niccoluccio’s face turned to steam. A burst of dry, freezing air chilled his skin.

“Not now,” he mouthed. Though he couldn’t hear himself, he knew somebody else could. “I don’t want this.”

In spite of the thunder, Habidah’s voice was clear as daylight. “You don’t need to be afraid.”

Niccoluccio said, “I’m not afraid. I don’t want to be saved again.”

“I’ll help you understand,” Habidah said, like she was soothing a child. He had never heard her sound like that before. “You won’t fight when you do. You’re a good man, Niccoluccio Caracciola. And I’ve chosen you to help me with my work.”