As he blacked out he would have smiled if his face had not felt as if it had turned to syrup. It was a rush of triumph he experienced, the ecstasy of the sacrificial, but his features were disobedient and he brought his hand up and touched the warm liquid stuffing coming out of his head. He - Davide Pittagora, tongue-tied, indecisive, and withdrawn - had managed to speak out; he heard singing, and the singing was not only the bloodlet from his skull but a wild chorus, giving voice to his joy.
He'd declared his sisters his own, now; everyone would know they
had to reckon with a champion. For that he'd fall and fall again till his last breath. This was the southern land where a woman was worth a dozen fights, no, more - twenty, fifty, a hundred - where the princess in the picture with her hands joined in prayer over the battle was worth her weight in gold, and where, when an indemnity was paid to the victim's relations after a trial by combat, the price of a dead man was fixed at ten times less than the price of a dead woman. Rightly, Davide knew, for you can only measure a man's value by his women, you can only appraise a country through its women. The queasiness in his stomach rose; he was plunged into a blood-pudding world where all was dim. Then there came through the total eclipse splinters of colour, humming as they came. He strained to see them, they were approaching in a heat haze, their shapes resolving themselves, tapering, dividing,until at last he recognised them. Their arms were intertwined as they swung lightly over the earth, and Caterina was dancing along alone beside them; their dresses flared transparent like the petals of sweet peas. Or was it their faces, opening like flowers with honey in their throats? Even the advancing tide of blackness could not blot the sweetness of their chorus, greeting him in full voice as he leant over the balcony; he was singing too, in unison with them, something strong and lyrical, and the doves were fluttering upwards into the dome in the last act - and he was going under, to be admitted to their company in paradise.

< publications

< Lost Father page