Page 41 of The Stone Witch of Florence

FORTY

SAN ROMOLO

July 12th of 1348, Village of San Romolo

I n the morning of the next day, the town that must be San Romolo appeared in the distance. They walked through orchards of peaches, roots littered with the spoiled fruit nobody had harvested, until they came to the bottom of the steep plateau upon which the town was perched. Thick stone walls encircled it, built of mammoth blocks of rough volcanic tufa, and rising vertically, as if a natural extension of the plateau. Mounds of garbage lay on the valley floor, thrown over the edge by the inhabitants.

The pair and their donkey walked quickly, up a steep and slanting path cut in zigzags in the side of the cliff and slick with moss that grew when no footsteps were there to wear it down. Ginevra pointed to the center of the path, where the moss was crushed. “Somebody has walked here recently,” she said.

They continued on in hurried silence, the pleasant ease of the early walk evaporating in the late morning heat. The two people wondered what the deranged jettatore -potter had in store for them. The donkey wondered when he could sit down. Flushed and more sweaty than was comfortable, they reached the top of the steep pathway.

The stones of the city walls now loomed gigantic as if placed by cyclopes. They craned their necks to see above them, and saw flying swallows jerk this way and that, silhouetted against a yellow sky. The gate presented the now-familiar sight of a precious portal left open and unattended. The heat and the long walk meant that finding a well was the first priority.

Though the trash outside the walls indicated that death had come for the town’s inhabitants, swift and brutal, inside the gate there was none of the stench they had grown used to in Florence. And though they saw no one, and doors and windows were open, the homes were not in the chaotic state of the abandoned places in Florence. Rather, doors were left slightly ajar, as if guests were expected and welcome, or to let in a breeze. Ginevra poked her head into one such home: it looked swept and clean with fresh mats on the floors and wood piled in the hearth.

Soon, they arrived at the town’s central piazza, the little well they sought at its center. San Romolo was compact; the whole perimeter might have been circumnavigated in less than an hour. The piazza was an elongated triangle, two sides occupied by loggia shops, and the shortest side taken up by the facade of a church that seemed absurdly grand for the tiny town. The original Roman arches had been surmounted, only recently, with an upper pediment and a golden mosaic of Christ Ascended floating above his admiring apostles. Such artwork would not have been out of place in Florence, but to find it in this minor village felt presumptuous. The largesse of the wealthy pottery merchant, Ginevra decided. She shivered as she tied the donkey up to a stone hitching post. The thief was real, and this was his home. The inquisitor lowered the bucket down into the well with a terrible clang . Ginevra grabbed the chain.

“Sorry!” he said. “I’ve never drawn water before.”

“It’s alright, I’ll do it, just shhh...” She pulled it up as quietly as she could, and they took thirsty gulps from the bucket.

“I’m glad I had your elixir,” said Fra Michele. “If ever a well was infected, it’s this one.”

A hot gust of wind blew through the piazza and caught the door of the church, swinging it open. Foul air exited, drifting to the well. Ginevra felt a sting on her breast, and pulled out her coral. It was hot to the touch, an unnatural saturated red. She showed Fra Michele, who looked at her charm curiously as she whispered, “The jettatore is near.”

The inquisitor pointed to the church. She nodded. They walked toward it together, and slipped through the open door.

The interior of the church featured the standard arrangement: a central nave flanked by two aisles, divided by arched colonnades. The pitched roof was supported by thick timbers, painted in gaily colored stripes and knots. The round columns were decorated with black-and-white stripes, and the floor was of terra-cotta tiles, polished shiny by the faithful feet of the village. But on the walls, the stations of the cross, the birth of Christ, and the torments of hell were painted on new glazed tiles, in colors now too familiar: purple and green. Purple demons in green flames. Green sinners skewered by purple stakes.

Ginevra’s assumptions were confirmed: this rich patron in his small town had spared no expense glorifying himself. He had refurbished the church in his own taste, in his own tiles. Would he fill this place with the saints of Florence? But aside from the garish decor, all was quiet and unremarkable. Other than the smell.

Ginevra traveled down the right aisle and Fra Michele the left. In equal intervals, the sun shone through alabaster window panes and cast golden light upon the floor. Nothing stirred, but as Ginevra walked, she could feel something bad was hiding in this church. The stinging coral, the faint foul smell. Behind the altar, she saw it: a lantern left flickering beside a dark square hole in the floor. An iron grate pulled to the side. The entrance to a crypt. She gestured Michele over, and they both knelt down to get a better look. It was too dark to see anything, but the stench slapped them in the face like water thrown from a window. They struggled to contain coughs and retches, and closed their eyes against it. Here, the odor was so powerful it seemed a physical thing.

“Michele, I must go down there. You wait above.” She pulled out the heliodor and put a foot on the stairs into the subterranean vaults.

“I’m coming with you,” he whispered.

“You will not. I can move quietly, unseen. And the coral protects me from the jettatore ’s gaze.”

“I have my own protection for that,” he whispered, pulling a carved wooden crucifix out from his robe.

“That will not work! The malocchio is older than Christ.”

“I will pretend I didn’t hear that blaspheme.”

“It will be very awful down there, Fra Michele. You have been cloistered in your house. You have not seen—”

“What is a priest who’s afraid of a crypt, hmm? Besides, you will need two people to carry the relics back. I will not make you go alone.”

“Fine! Fine. Do you see this?” She pointed to the heliodor. “It emits light, but only to those holding it. You must keep hold of my hand, or you will see no light. If the jettatore comes, drop it. If you cannot see his eyes, he cannot curse you.”

Before the inquisitor could express his marvel or disapproval, Ginevra tucked her coral away, grabbed his hand, and descended into the black. Down a steep and spiral stair that deposited them into a crypt cut entirely out of the tufa stone. The whole hill that formed the foundation of the church was made of tufa, she realized. Most crypts she had seen followed a typical plan: orderly columned spaces that followed the footprint of the church above. No such architectural conventions were followed here. The room was the shape of a round loaf of bread, with an opening in the center of the floor, a passage that sloped downward.

This unorthodox design was because the crypt was carved long, long ago. Before Rome, before churches, when nothing was on top of the hill but long grass. The archaic builders found the stone of the hill was soft in places and resilient in others, so they carved their chambers and passages as the rock allowed them, with as little order as holes formed in a cheese.

As Ginevra and Fra Michele descended these passages, they came across openings in the walls, doorways that led to amorphous rooms, branched off from their path like organs grown off their central tubes. Into the walls, niches were carved for the dead. But they were not filled with dusty bones. They were squeezed full of new corpses, still clothed in their flesh. Here were the people of San Romolo, laid out not just in the niches but all over the floors of the chambers, like the mottled mosses that cover the forest. Only small paths were left bare between them; it was these Ginevra carefully followed, trailed by the gagging inquisitor.

The deeper down they walked, the stronger the stench and the more intensely the coral stung Ginevra’s chest. The golden strings that connected her to ancient magic began to hum and then buzz, the air alive with their vibrations. She felt the antiquity of the chambers, felt how they were made by people so old that nobody remembered them anymore. People so ancient that when the Christian builders of the church had first discovered and cleared out the rooms for use as their own catacombs, they found, embedded in the dirt, ivory statues of women with fat breasts and no heads, and they smashed them because they were afraid. But smashed or not, the ivory goddesses still held some sway over the place, and as punishment to the men who had destroyed them, they allowed evil to come and go from the little town as it wished. As a result, the malocchio long ago marked San Romolo as a favorite place to cause mischief and misery.

Ginevra felt these ancient spirits cling to her like naughty children, weighing her down so her steps became labored as she continued through the dark caves. The ground appeared to shimmer and swirl, and she realized that it was covered with thousands of the burying beetles she had seen in the graveyard at San Paolino—their iridescent shells clicking and twinkling, jewellike in her magic light. At last, the passage seemed to level out and the pair were so deep underground they felt they might hear the heartbeat of the earth. In this very deepest and darkest place, they came to a doorway flanked by columns carved out of the living rock. They stood on its threshold and observed through it a round room with curved walls. Its floor, too, was host to a number of beetle-covered bodies save for a bare circle four feet in diameter. By the light of the heliodor, they saw a stone bier in the very center of the room, the resting place of some forgotten king.

But today, the king’s bones had been swept from their bier and shattered into a dusty mess, leaving the spiders who lived for generations inside his ribs scattered and homeless. And upon his stone bed were now, carefully arranged, the desiccated remains of other men. Here the disparate parts of the saints of Florence were laid out like a cadaver at an anatomy lesson. Here, too, was the thief himself, flitting about, in his hooded cloak.

Ginevra dropped Fra Michele’s hand before he could protest, leaving him outside the door. Alone in her light now, she moved forward into the room, each step making the coral pulse and burn, like splashes of boiling water. She inched closer, the noise of the beetles muffling her steps, trying to understand what the thief was doing with the relics. He leaned over the bier intently, absorbed in his task. The light of his small lantern cut only inches into the darkness, a glowing orb in a sea of black.

Cruuunnnnnchhhhhh. Ginevra whipped her head around and saw Fra Michele, in his blindness, had stepped off the cleared path and put his foot through some poor person’s skull.

She turned back around and the thief was inches from her face. A man of middle age, with eyes that glowed like a dog’s in the meager light of his lantern, the rest of his face obscured by dark hair and bristly beard. Her coral burned so hot her eyes watered.

“Good,” he said. “You are here, come.”

“What?” said Ginevra.

“Not you ,” hissed the thief. “ The priest. I know he is with you. I watched you walk up the hill together. I opened the gate and unlocked the church for him. The saints must have brought him to me, to save me the trouble of finding one.”

“One what?” called the inquisitor.

“Michele, close your eyes! Do not look at him,” cried Ginevra.

“Be quiet. You are extra. Go over here.” The thief grabbed Ginevra and threw her hard against the wall at the back of the chamber. Her head slammed into the rock, and the heliodor was knocked from her hand, sending her into darkness.

“Foul thing!” cried the inquisitor, who could see nothing at all and was still trying to shake his foot free from the skull. “We have followed you here to your cursed den and in the name of Jesus Christ, the holy Virgin, and all the saints, I command you to cease your work and cede the relics you have taken or be damned to the fires of eternal hell!”

Ginevra tried to shout out a warning, but the wind was knocked out of her and she lay on her back, gasping for breath.

“Oh, potter, maker of painted plates, mixer of secret colors! Your wealth has corrupted you. You take what is not yours,” yelled Michele. He held the wooden crucifix before him and flailed blindly.

The thief laughed. “The relics let me take them. They belong to God, not to a city or a man. The people of Florence took them for granted, locked them away in cupboards, so they came with me where they are needed. Come.”

“I will not! Where is Ginevra? Give back the relics, save yourself from the fires of hell.”

“Do not try to scare me with talk of hell, Priest! Hell has already broken through to the living earth. For months, I have waited and gathered and fasted and punished my flesh and now you must do your part. Come, and do not interrupt me.”

In a flash, he was behind Fra Michele and shoved him hard into the bare circle on the floor, forcing him to his knees and binding his hands to an iron stake driven into the stone floor at the circle’s center. “Good, now stay. I will tell you what to do.” The thief returned to his bier and began lovingly adjusting the relics, but each time he got one into just the right spot, another rolled out of its place and had to be adjusted again.

Ginevra found her air and let out a moan.

“Be quiet, you are extra,” he repeated, as he nudged the foot of Santo Stefano up against the thigh bone of San Barnaba for the hundredth time. The scapula of San Giovanni Gualberto tipped over. He sighed, repositioning it.

Ginevra was baffled. What did he mean, extra ? Right now, it mattered little. What she needed to do was find a way out. Her coral was stuck to her, burned into her flesh . She picked it out, hung it outside her dress. She forced herself onto all fours, and began to search the ground, swiping away beetles and feeling for the heliodor.

“Where is my friend?? Untie me!” yelled Fra Michele.

“No! Do not interrupt me.”

“Why do you build a saint made of saints?” he persisted.

“Do NOT interrupt me.”

“If you answer my question, I’ll stop interrupting you!”

The thief was silent for a moment. “You will think I am mad.”

Ginevra paused in her search to listen.

“We already think you’re mad,” Michele said. “What difference does it make?”

“If it will make you quiet...” said the thief. “The secret of it matters little now. These separate relics will soon be joined together into a new saint, the sum more powerful than the separate parts. He will be called the Holy of Holies and will speak to God on my behalf and compel Him to bring these dead around you back to life.”

“It is not possible,” Ginevra said from her spot behind the bier, hands moving frantically through the mire. At last, they closed around the heliodor.

“Are you a virgin?”

“Uh—”

“If you are a virgin, like the priest, I’ll put you in the circle instead of hitting you on the head.”

“Yes, yes! I am,” she lied. With large rough hands he dragged her to the open space where Michele sat, binding her with the other end of the rope to the same stake.

“There,” said the thief, “this is easier now.”

“It matters not. What you seek is not possible,” said Ginevra.

“Yes, it is! I found an ancient spell. How to make the dead appear again as the living. ” He held up a thin volume. Gold letters winked in the lantern’s light: Liber Iuratus Polydoros . It was Agnesa’s book.

“The spells in such books are false,” said Fra Michele. “It is a heresy to believe them!”

“It seems straightforward enough to me, Priest. Listen: Upon the ground draw a circle of white chalk that is twelve fingers for the twelve disciples of Christ. Done. Within the circle draw a cross with its axis in the top half of the circle, in lines twice again as thick. Done. Then a triangle with its points all the way to the edges (on account of the three magi) and this is where a virgin, at least one, (we have two!) must willingly sit in the center. Around the circle you must write the 180 letters of the sacred name and they are i.b.n.a.b.n.e.x.a.t.r.o.m.u.m...etc. All done, as you would be able to see, if it were not so dark.”

He turned again to the crumbling bits of saints. Ginevra held up the heliodor and saw the words he spoke were, indeed, copied onto the ground beneath them in chalk. They, the “virgins,” sitting in the center.

And even though she never believed that spells of this type were valid, she could feel the ancient holiness of the place, and while one relic was almost surely useless here, he had a dozen together and there were some spells that never worked except for when the situation was perfectly correct, and perhaps this was that time?

“Ginevra...you do not believe this ritual is legitimate, right?” whispered Michele.

“No—no, of course not. Do you?”

“No, definitely not. But just in case, we must try to distract him.”

Ginevra looked at the bodies upon the floor.

“You have waited too long, friend, look at them, fingers are bones, mouths cannot close. What would it be for them to live again?”

“Be quiet! You said if I answered your questions, you would not interrupt me, and I have answered many! They will be as they were. I have prepared their homes and all will be joy!”

“Even Lazarus, raised by Christ himself, was only dead four days,” said Fra Michele. “These poor souls have been dead for months.”

“Be quiet! I did not lead you down here to insult me! Now: Virgins, do you say you sit willingly inside the circle? You must say it.”

“Never,” said Fra Michele.

The thief went over to the columned doorway they came down through, and pulled a rock from its lintel. There was a rumble and a crash, and the air was filled with dust.

“You see?” he coughed. “That was your path out. I’ve smashed it. Only I know the secret passages. If you do not say you are willing in the circle, I shall seal you up forever and go find some different virgins who are willing and quiet!”

“We are willing, we are willing!” cried Ginevra. Her head ached from where it had hit the wall, and she could not bear the noise of another passage collapsing. The time had come. The person they chased had caught them, and now they must bear witness to his designs. She fought a wave of nausea, rolling down through her from her sore head. The jettatore nodded, satisfied his captives were willing, and untied them from the stake, though they remained lashed to each other.

“Good, now all you do is stay in the center, and do not say one word or I will smash you.” The thief turned back to his assembled saint, precariously stuck together. He took off his cloak and there was the hair shirt, wiry, frizzled, and stuck to his raw skin. He placed his hands upon the bier:

Oh, angels of the heavens,

Oh, celestial orbs, lords of the day and of the night,

I have completed your rituals and so you are bound to me and required to hear my story and make it so and the story is:

San Miniato was walking through Florence when a soldier cut his head off but he took it back and put himself together again and that is how

I, Giancarlo di Sporco, who has adhered to God’s strictest penance of ninety days, wish you to turn these separate saints into one saint who is called the Holy of Holies and in gratitude he will speak to God and ensure my request is granted NOW.

He picked up the relic of Christ’s blood soaked into bread from Sant’Elisabetta and then paused and flipped through the book. “It does not say... It does not say how to add the blood...” In the end, he decided to stuff it through a hole in old San Piero’s torso. Then he kneeled on the ground and made the sign of the cross and said:

All this is done in the name of the one true God,

from whom all blessings flow, whose will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven, forever and ever, Amen.

And then he waited for something to happen, but the Holy of Holies just laid on his table, dark and still and made of many parts.

“Aha! He moved a little!” said Giancarlo after a while.

“It is the beetles, Giancarlo, who crawl on him and trick your eyes,” said Ginevra. She touched the back of her head and pain shot through it. She was getting tired.

“No! He moved and is awake, now it is time to make my request.”

Ginevra slumped.

“Ginevra,” whispered Michele, shaking her. “Ginevra, stay awake! Do not leave me here!” But she was so tired, so in pain, she could not answer and slid down to the ground.

Holy of Holies I request of You

For these dead in this crypt that

You make their still tongues to talk

Cold feet walk

Shut eyes to see,

Gone souls come back to be—

A great roaring and whooshing immediately filled the chamber and the light from the lantern and even from the heliodor went out. Fra Michele screamed and the jettatore whooped with joy and Ginevra passed out.