The Winds of War

worth knowing, Dad. It has some parallels to our own day. I think you’ll like Dr. Jastrow’s new book. He’s just a scholar and wouldn’t know a torpedo boat from a medium tank, yet he has a way of grasping an ancient campaign and describing it to anybody can understand it and sort of picture what those times were like.

Siena’s going to be overrun with tourists for the Palio, a goofy horse race they put on every year. The nags run around the town square, and they say all hell usually breaks loose. Warren will make a great flier. Well, I guess that’s about it. Love to all,

Byron

Chapter 5

Since the fourteenth century — so Byron had learned — nothing much had happened in Siena besides the Palios. A rich city-state of the Middle Ages, the military rival of Florence, Siena in 1348 had been isolated by the Black Death, and frozen in its present form as by a spell. A few art lovers now drifted here to admire the fourteenth-century paintings and architecture. The world at large flocked to Siena twice a year to watch the mad horse races, and otherwise let the bypassed town, a living scene out of an old tapestry, molder in the Tuscan sunshine.

In nine years of living just outside Siena, Aaron Jastrow had never attended a Palio. When Byron asked why, Jastrow held forth on the cruel public games of Roman the forerunners of all these burlesque races of the Middle Ages. The Palio had happened to survive in mountain-locked Siena, he said, like a dinosaur in the Lost World. “Some medieval towns raced donkeys or buffaloes,” he said. “In papal Rome, they raced Jews. I’m not exactly afraid I’ll be pressed into service if a horse should break its leg. I’m just not very interested.” Moreover, his friend the archbishop had told him long ago that elderly people avoided the Palio, because of the risk of being trampled.

But now there was the article to write. Jastrow obtained tickets for both runnings, and sent Byron and Natalie to research in the town while he read books on the subject.

They first learned that the race was a contest among Siena’s neighborhoods or parishes. Each district, called a contrada, comprised a few square blocks of old houses. All of Siena contained but two and a half square miles and some thirty thousand people. But these little wards — there were seventeen, and ten competed each year — took their boundaries, their loyalties, their colors, their emblems, with inconceivable seriousness. They bore curious names like Oca, Bruco, Torre, Tartuca, Nicchio (Goose, Caterpillar, Tower, Tortoise, Seashell). Each ward had its flag, its anthems, its separate churches, and even a sort of capital hall.

Byron and Natalie spent days walking through the angular streets. When an occasional old omnibus snorted by, they had to flatten against the high red-brown walls for their lives; there were no sidewalks, and the somnolent, deserted streets were hardly wider than the bus. Maps in hand, the pair visited the tiny districts one by one, trying to pin down the background of the Palio. They found out about alliances and hatreds going back hundreds of years. Panther was friendly to Giraffe, Tortoise loathed Snail, and so forth, in a tangle of emotions, very real and current.

They came to realize too that the famous race itself was just a crooked farce, and that everybody knew it. The contrade owned no horses. A few days before each race, animals from the nearby countryside were brought into town, and the competing districts drew lots for them. The same stolid durable nags came back year after year, shuffling from one neighborhood to another by the luck of the draw.

What then made a race of it? Bribing the jockeys, doping the animals, conspiring to block the best horses or injure their riders: only such devices turned the Palio into a murky contest of a sort. The largest, richest neighborhoods therefore tended to win; but the outcome was unpredictable, because a poor, small district might put on a desperate surge. It might squander funds in bribes, pledge future alliances, swear to future treacheries, just to win a banner to bear off to its hall. For that was what the “Palio” itself was: a banner painted with a picture of the Virgin. Like all medieval races, this one was run on sacred days; it was a manifestazione in honor of the Virgin. Hence her portrait graced the prize, and faded Palios by the dozens hung in the contrada halls.

After a while, even Jastrow became interested too, in an ironic way. The crookedness, he said, was obviously the soul of the thing; old European skulduggery, bribes and counterbribes, doublecross and triplecross, sudden reversals of old alliances, secret temporary patching up of ancient enmities, convoluted chicanery in the dark — all leading at last to the horse race, when all the shadowy corruption was put to explosive proof in red sunset light.

“Why, this article will write itself,” he said cheerfully one day at lunch. “These Sienese have evolved willy- nilly a grotesque little parody of European nationalism. The archbishop told me that a woman from the Panther neighborhood who marries a Caterpillar or a Tower man will go back to have her babies in a house on a Panther street to make sure they’ll be Panthers. Patriotism! And of course, the insane explosion every summer is the key. All this obsolete mummery — Snails, Giraffes, what have you — would have died out centuries ago, except for the lovely colorful outbursts of excitement, treachery, and violence in the races. The Palio is war.”

“You ought to go over to town, sir,” Byron said. “They’re laying the track. Hundreds of truckloads of this golden-red earth, all around the Piazza del Campo.”

“Yes,” Natalie said, “the way they’re decorating up the streets is quite amazing. And wherever you look the flag-wavers are practicing -”

“I’m taking off two whole workdays for the races themselves. That’s plenty,” Jastrow said severely.

* * *

“You know what?’ Byron said. “This whole thing is utterly idiotic.”

Natalie looked at him with startled, excited eyes, touching a handkerchief to her sweaty forehead. It was the day of the first Palio, and they stood on the balcony of the archbishop’s palace, watching the parade. The great facade of the cathedral gave a bit of shade at one end of the balcony, where Jastrow in his big yellow Panama hat and white suit stood talking with the archbishop. Byron and Natalie were crowded among privileged onlookers at the other end, in the hot sun. Even in her sleeveless light pink linen dress, the girl was perspiring, and a seersucker jacket and silk tie were making Byron acutely uncomfortable.

Below, the Caterpillar marchers in green and yellow costumes — puffed sleeves and trunks, colored hose, feathered hats — were leaving the thronged cathedral square, waving great banners to cheers and applause from the crowd; and the red-and-black Owl company was coming in, repeating the same flag stunts: intertwining whorls, two flags flung pole and all in the air crisscrossing, flag-wavers leaping over each other’s poles while keeping their banners in fluid motion.

“Idiotic?” Natalie said. “I was just deciding it’s rather magical.”

“What is? They do the same things over and over. We’ve been here for hours. There’s still the Porcupine, the Eagle, the Giraffe, and the Forest to come and show off with their flags. I’m roasting.”

“Ah, Byron, it’s the liquid flow of color, don’t you see, and the faces of these young men. So help me, these people look more natural in medieval togs than in their workaday clothes. Don’t they? Look at those long straight noses, those deep-set sad big eyes! Maybe they’re really a remnant of the Etruscans, as they claim.”

“Six months of work,” Byron said. “Special buildings and churches for Unicorns, Porcupines, and Giraffes. Thousands of costumes, a whole week of nothing but ceremonies, general marching hither and yon, trumpeting and drumming and trial runs, and all for one crooked race of decrepit nags. In honor of the Virgin, no less.”

“Oh, beautiful,” Natalie exclaimed, as two Owl flags flew high in the air in crossing arcs, and the wavers caught them and whirled red-and-black arabesques to the applause of the crowd.

Byron went on, mopping his face, “I was in the Goose church today. They brought the horse right inside, up to the very altar to be blessed. I didn’t believe the books, but I saw it happen. The priest laid a crucifix on its nose. The horse had more sense than the people. He didn’t misbehave, but I guess that finished the Palio for me.”

Natalie glanced at him, amused. “Poor Briny. Italian Christianity really troubles your soul, doesn’t it? Leslie was right, you’re simply a Protestant.”

“Does a horse belong in a church?” Byron said.

The sun was low when the parade ended. In the short walk from the cathedral to the Piazza del Campo,