Eric Flint: The Shadow of the Lion

There was just enough room under the "roof" to sit hunched over, with his chin on his knees?but it was safer than anywhere else in the swamp, especially with Them out after him. Only he, and old Sophia and Chiano, had these hideaways that he knew of. Chiano taught the two of them how to make the hideouts. The half-crazy old man swore they were called "blinds" in the Camarque and that you used them to shoot birds from. Marco's hide was the reason he was still alive; he'd waited out many a loco-gang hunt in his, and no end of searches by Big Gianni.

But would it hold against Them?

Whoever They were. Mama had had plenty of safeguards, but none of them had helped her…

Ends of reeds tickled his back and arms as he pushed the thought of discovery resolutely away. No. He wouldn't think about it, he needed to think about something else. But songs weren't any good?the only ones he could remember right now were all grim. Think. Get calm. Keep your mind occupied, or you'll panic.

He began breathing deeply and quietly, willing his pulse to slow, making himself a bit calmer, telling himself he had nothing to worry about. The raft bobbed a little; if anyone came by Marco would know it by the disturbance of the water. There was no way anyone could get near him without him knowing.

As usual when he wanted to relax and calm down, Marco relied on mathematics. He loved figures and calculations. Now?if you started with a load of salted fish; say forty barrels, say two hundred thirty-seven fish to a barrel, and you transported up the Po, with your costs going up but the worth of those fish going up, the farther you went…

The heat under the basket, the bobbing of the raft, the close air and exhaustion, all conspired to put him to sleep.

It began again.

Benito tugged at his elbow. "Si?" Marco responded absently; he was doing Mama's accounts, and there'd been a lot of business today.

"Mama said I should stay with Theodoro overnight?Marco, can he be on the ship up to Milan? Please?"

Dream-skip again; stumbling around in water and mud up to his waist, lost in the dark and crying?that was how the marsh-dwellers had found him. And beat him up, and robbed him of everything but his breeches and the paper he kept clutched in one hand. He lay in shallow mud and water; freezing, dazed, hurting and crying…

He woke crying?but silently, silently. He'd learned since then never to make a noise. He wiped the tears from his face with the tail of his hair, and listened. Nothing. And it was getting on towards sunset, judging by the red that filtered through the basket and the go-to-bed sounds the marshbirds were making.

Oh, God?he was supposed to meet his younger brother Benito at dawn. He had to warn him that They were on the hunt again. Benito could be in as much danger as Marco. But first he had to find Chiano and Sophia.

They would probably be out on their usual squat?the bit of dry sand bar off the end of the Lido. It had formed during the last really big storm, and likely the next one would take it away again, but for now it provided a good spot for clams and driftwood.

Old Sophia and Chiano. As unlikely a couple as ever decorated the face of the lagoon?Sophia maybe forty and looking four hundred, Chiano ten years older and looking thirty. She had been a bargee's wife, until a fifteen-hundred-ton roccaforte with a following wind behind it ran down their small barge and sent her man and kids to the bottom. Chiano claimed to be everything from a stranded Sicilian seaman to the Prince of Damascus.

She was the closest thing to a chirurgeon and healer the marshes boasted, and so was inviolate from most of the mayhem that raged among the marsh-dwellers. He proclaimed himself to be the One True Prophet of the Great Mother herself. He was treated with superstitious care, although Marco was sure that if Chiano hadn't lived with Sophia the marsh-dwellers would have burned him out.

The two of them had found Marco, in pain and half delirious?and for some reason known only to themselves picked him up and carted him back to Sophia's hovel, and nursed him back to a semblance of health. They'd taught him how to survive, during that vague six-month period during which shock had kept him pliant enough to adapt. He'd paid them back for their care by sharing the scroungings that Benito gave him and writing down Chiano's "prophecies." Chiano induced visions with fly agaric and was obviously then in no condition to record his prophecies himself. Why he wasn't dead twenty times over?well…

It was a mystery, like where Chiano came from in the first place, or got the paper, or what he did with the pages after Marco filled them with the "holy words" in his careful, clear hand. Chiano kept him safe too. Chiano wasn't big, but the fear that he really might be a witch helped Chiano keep the swamp-dwellers, who wanted a boy, at bay. The swamp gangs wanted runaway boys as their slaves; Big Gianni wanted them for?other things. All of them were crazy, mostly from chewing blue lotos, and no telling what they would do to someone who got between them and what they wanted. But Chiano stood by him until Marco was big enough to fight back and canny enough to hide from what he could not fight.

Chiano and Sophia were where he expected to find them. They had lit a small fire of driftwood and were grilling fish spitted on reeds over it. They looked like images out of hell; red lit, weather-and-age-twisted faces, avidly watching their cooking dinner.

Marco didn't make much noise, but they heard him anyway. "That you boy?" Chiano called into the dark.

"Si. Chiano, I got trouble."

"Boy, the world got trouble," replied Chiano easily. "Neveryoumind. What's the matter this time? Big Gianni? One of the gangs?"

"Wish it was just that! Somebody jumped me, out at the wharf?a man dressed all in dark clothes, with his face covered, and waiting like he knew I was coming. He had a knife. I think They've found me."

"Damn! That be trouble and more'n ye need!" Sophia coughed. "You got any notion who They be?"

"No more than I ever did. Could be anybody: slave-takers, Schiopettieri, even…"

"Milanese," Chiano growled.

"Damn it all, no! Not Milanese; never Milanese. Milanese would be trying to help me, not kill me!"

"I'll believe that when I believe…" Sophia hushed Chiano before he could say any more.

"Fine," Marco said, "But whose mama was a Montagnard agent, huh? Who saw Duke Visconti's agents coming and going? So who should know?" It was an old argument.

"And whose mama was probably killed by the order of the Duke Visconti she served, hmm? Marco, leave it, boy. I know more politics than you do. Still, I notice you may have thought Strega. But you didn't say it. You off to give Benito a warning?"

"Got to. He's in danger too."

"Boy?" This was another old argument.

Sophia chimed in forcefully. "No buts! Ye're young; this ain't no life for th' young. We'll be all right."

"She's got the right of it, boy." There was a suspicion of mist in Chiano's slightly crazed eyes. "The Words of the Goddess are complete now, thanks to you. You go?"

Chiano claimed the Words were complete about once a month.

"Look, I'll be back, same as always. Benito won't have any safe place for me, and I won't put danger on those as is keeping him."

For the first time in this weekly litany Chiano looked unaccountably solemn. "Somehow?I don't think so?not this time. Well, time's wasting, boy, be off?or They might find Benito before you do."

Sophia's face twisted comically then, as she glanced between Marco and their dinner; she plainly felt obliged to offer him some, and just as plainly didn't really want to have to share the little they had.

"You eaten?" she asked reluctantly.