6.The Beasts - Duncan McGibbon (inspirational novels .txt) 📗
- Author: Duncan McGibbon
Book online «6.The Beasts - Duncan McGibbon (inspirational novels .txt) 📗». Author Duncan McGibbon
the wooden stairs, her bare arms steaming.
Catherina made off into the shadow
of an archway
“Aspetta, un poco...”
Catharina waited, then grabbed her friend
and drew a knife. It flashed in the dark.
‘Cassa star : io non buoglio in questata.‘
The fair-haired girl cried, fear making
her voice tremble.
Catharina held on.
“Don’t hurt me, please.”
The dark-haired
girl suddenly put her arms around Orenetta.
‘Compania, ben si la trovata. I gave
Paparo the mazata with a knife.’
“Oi mé! santa Maria, Is your master hurt.?”
Caterina fixed Orenetta with a long stare.
The other girl groaned softly.
The two girls hid beneath the arch.
“Help me just tonight. -Non posso caca
I can't shit “E, buona fe, io caca to tutta braca.”
“I’m so scared I’ve been shitting in my drawers.”
No one in the Richo household noticed
the two bundles asleep under the cellar steps.
The sentence of death,
'irato animo et malo,
scienter et dulone et appensate,’
knifing her master.
February Sixth Thirteen Eighty Nine.
The children had found her.
There were too many of them
to struggle free. A little girl,
on the way to the magistrates,
had asked her how she plaited her hair.
“The flesh was torn to pieces
of a female slave
who had poisoned her master
a Pistoiese.
She was drawn in an open cart
through the streets of Florence
while the population watched
her flesh being torn to pieces
with red hot firearms
to the place of execution
where she was burned.”
Femmine Bestiale.
Accounts Rolls
Richo wrote his daily accounts
“Cost of a slave forty-nine florins,
Orenetta, five ducats plus five ducats
purchase tax, three ducats for her journey
equals a free maid servant for eight years.”
Richo told wife that spring.
'Lock the door behind you
with three keys if you are going to Florence.”
“The old slave we have
with us is sick, or rather full of boils
so that we find none
who would have her.
We will sell or barter her
as best we can.
Furthermore I hear she is with child
two months gone or more and
therefore she will not be worth
selling.”
'Turn out and sell the evil
and guilty woman.
who brought a dead child
into the world.
Let them keep instead
an old woman or man, or boy to cook.
that because of your lenience
your boy and mine be not destroyed.
Caroldo kept up his groans
“They sometimes corrupt by their evil ways
and manners of respectable maid-servants
and even the daughters of the house
use of magic arts and poison
against their masters.”
'They are femmine bestiali.
You cannot trust the house
to such as they.
They might at any moment
rise up against you
After freeing them
they remain in their
master’s home
speaking a strange,
jargon of their own’
We have sold Orenetta because wine
was beginning to go to her head
and besides she was immoral
and the wives since they had young daughters
would not have her in the house.
July Eleventh Thirteen Ninety Eight,
Caroldo's journal:
'We do not want to buy them.
We do not want them
to sell their own flesh,
causing venereal disease.’
Thrown out in Fourteen hundred,
Orenetta worked for a priest.
One night she returned to Richo.
“No man will have her.
She says she is with
child by you and assuredly
seems to be. The father she
names so great
she might be the Queen of France.
We spoke to the chaplain
to whom your slave belonged
and he says you may
throw her into the sea
with what she has in her belly
for it is no creature of his.
And we deem he speaks the truth
for had she been pregnant by him
he would not have sent her.
Me thinks you had better send the
creature to the hospital.”
Orenetta took the long hard walk to Florence
in the blazing sun. On the gravel tracks
she met up with jesters, wizards and vagabonds.
Boccaccio's plague
waxed with the wind and sun.
In Pistoia,di Richo, a merchant, died, ,
his wife and two children.
one married, survive.
Pontano writes.
“The old liberated slave
reaching her dwelling
to give audience
to a girl and a servant boy.
Who came with
A black hen, nine eggs
laid on Friday,a duck
and white thread.
They visited the woman at night
making assignations in daytime .”
When she died the magistrates
refused her consecrated burial.
To prove their bent
they found hair, skulls, navels of children
soles of shoes, pieces of clothing
from graves, stolen pieces
of rotting flesh in a box
with pictures of knights
painted on it,
to feed to her lovers,
and figures of wax,
one wearing merchant’s clothes,
stabbed with a thorn
and written charms:
“Before the flame goes cold,
bring him to my threshold.
Let my true love stab him
as I prick this heart so trim.”
Bita went to live in a convent.
When she died, she left money for Orenetta,
if she could be found,
remembering her daughter.
'God grant her a true pardon and protect her a little.’
Morelli noted
'there were twenty people
out of a hundred in Florence
who had any bread or corn
nd even these had very little.
Many lived on herbs and roots
(bad ones which you
would not know today)
and all the countryside
was full of people
who went about
eating the grass
like cattle.”
Parceled Codices
At minus one below the sphere, the sky was black,
the brighter stars still visible and at zero, black as well,
the deck dense and huddled with sleeping life.
‘Et ades sera l’alba, soon it will be dawn.’
As the mude from Tunis to Genoa plunged
and swayed from tired oarsmen in two rows, ,
at one degree, smoke black, all was still on deck,
those pointers to the pole-star lingering sharp,
Ursa Major, Arcas, Callisto, glowing for the astrolabe.
‘Et ades sera l’alba: soon it will be dawn.’
At two degrees, the light was conformed to blue.
At six, natural illumination flooded the galley deck.
and men began to shift and spit
and reach for dew-soaked ropes.
while some were unable to rise,
from under the foremost arbor de prova masts,
taller and heavier than the arbor de medio.
The masts carried three sails the other, two.
And the sails were lateen, not square,
steered by two long timone lateral rudders
one on each board near the stern.
‘Et ades sera l’alba: soon it will be dawn.’
At seven degrees the colours of dawn begin to shift
white to blue, at eight, blue to white
to be as lichen in the mist, at nine, yellow
at ten, gold and at eleven orange, luminous bands
washed through the clouds, then turned deep red.
‘Et ades sera l’alba, soon it will be dawn.’
At twelve, the sun began to leave its hiddeness,
the light refrangible now, instead of spectral dark.
Stirring the castellum and supra castellum
covered with flapping sail-cloth. The skipper
was the owner, Buonsegno di Matteo, worried
about his foenus nauticum, the insurance of slaves
left in Genoa, the number being the same
as the number of mariners whose lives were down.
Blue-white rays scattered in the then impure haze
belched from the century’s volcanic dust.
At fifteen degrees, white-green, against cloud and the horizon,
at sixteen green white-banded clouds and the moist wind tugging
on seventeen degrees with white-green bars on a cloudy sea.
The cargo was lacquer, pepper, cotton cloth,
saffron, et omnes res subtiles, cotton, copper,
lead, tin, iron, canvas, hemp,
manufactured wooden wares and
parcels of codices from Constantinople.
‘Et ades sera l’alba, soon it will be dawn.’
Morning twilight began when the sun rose
eighteen degrees above the grey blue distance,
with stripes of white-green clouds ,
civil twilight being six degrees below nautical twelve.
Buonsegno’s merchants had paid naulum freight
for the cargo ad cantarum, which was the weight
of each whole cargo. He had left with sixty mariners
three mates, the nautae nauderii, eight boarders
and men at bays armed with cross bows.
He stared out at the fleet,
gave the order for prayers, then for cutting
the ropes that held the sheeted bodies.
How many more had the plague on board?
He avoided seeing them sink,
the general outline of lesser stars still visible,
those specks of light, Nashi, 'Ash, 'Ayish.
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Publication Date: 10-14-2010
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