came
toward
her and
whispered
to her, afraid
almost to be heard.
The second time I spoke
her name she turned her head
and looked at me with red-rimmed
hating eyes and screamed to get away.
I wanted to comfort her, to tell her I was
sorry, but when I came close she sprang to her
feet and ran at me, striking me and flaying at my
face with her fingernails while she cursed my name.
I meant
to put my
hands on her
shoulders to hold
her still but when I
reached for her they found
her smooth white neck instead.
Her
father
and his
fellows and
my unemployed
friends discovered
me weeping over her.
Running my fingers through
the silk of her long black hair.
Her father fell to his knees and took
her in his arms and for a while the hills
rang with her name repeated over and over again.
Another
man, who held
a rifle, asked me
what had happened and
I told him-I told him-
the Arab, that monkey from the
desert, had lured her here and when
he couldn’t force her innocence from her
he throttled her in the grass and I found them
and we fought and I killed him with a block of stone.
And
as I
told it
the tin bird
began to whistle
and sing, the most
mournful and sweetest
melody I had ever heard
and the men listened until
the sad song was sung complete.
I
held
Lithodora
in my arms as
we walked back down.
And as we went on our way
the bird began to sing again as
I told them the Saracen had planned
to take the sweetest and most beautiful
girls and auction their white flesh in Araby-
a more profitable line of trade than selling wine.
The bird was by now whistling a marching song and the
faces of the men who walked with me were rigid and dark.
Ahmed’s
men burned
along with the
Arab’s ship, and
sank in the harbor.
His goods, stored in a
warehouse by the quay, were
seized and his money box fell
to me as a reward for my heroism.
No
one
ever
would’ve
imagined when
I was a boy that
one day I would be
the wealthiest trader
on the whole Amalfi coast,
or that I would come to own the
prized vineyards of Don Carlotta, I
who once worked like a mule for his coin.
No
one
would’ve
guessed that
