6.The Beasts, Duncan McGibbon [important books to read TXT] 📗

girl darted down

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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