Free The Road to Damietta by Scott O’Dell Page A

complimented me upon the progress I had made in the art of illumination, and as he left
gave me an affectionate pat on the head. Since my hair was still damp from the night air, it would have given me an anxious moment had he not been wearing leather gloves. I worked hard until the trumpet announced supper, though I made a mistake and had to paint the initial a second time.
    At supper I was seated across the board from Giuseppe di Luzzaro. He was in a good humor, flushed ruddy by the sun, quite handsome in his fur-trimmed tunic, with his black curls nicely arranged across his forehead. He took off his garnet thumb-rings and washed his fingers carefully in the bowl of scented water, and then instead of passing the bowl to his right, as was the custom, he smilingly passed it to me.
    This was the first time 1 had encountered Luzzaro since the day I disrobed in Santa Maria Maggiore Square. If he had not seen me, then surely he had heard about what I had done. When I sat down to supper I kept my eyes to myself expecting to find a hostile light in his. But if anything, his smile was warmer than usual; there was no hint that he was upset with me. Suspicions lingered. Was his passing the finger bowl to me and not around the board a gesture of defiance? Was he not flaunting his forgiveness of an act that had repelled everyone else?
    Yet everyone was in a festive mood. The men had hunted in the country from early dawn and returned with strings of meadowlarks. The birds were brought on after a serving of lentil soup, roasted in their feathers and pinned in a row on pine
branches. I had eaten larks before, stuffed with small gobbets of fat, bread crumbs, and pine nuts, and had found them delicious, but on this night, with Francis Bernardone in my thoughts, the sight of them turned my stomach.
    We were entertained by a pair of wandering minstrels, man and wife, who presented the sad story of Tristan and Iseult, the husband reciting while his wife played the zither. At the moment when Tristan pierced the monster's heart with one thrust of his sword, I cheered. And at the end, as Iseult lay down beside her dead lover and died of grief, I thought of my own love for Francis and hot tears rolled down my cheeks.
    After supper I hurried to the scriptorium and closed and bolted the doors. I had decided during the meal to write a letter to him. He would never again sell cloth in his father's store. Nor would he return to our courtyard to gather stones. Nor would I be apt to meet him on the street. And if by some odd chance I did meet him, what would I say? We had talked in San Rufino Square and in our courtyard. Yet in all that time I had not been able even to hint at the passion that was consuming me. And worse still, most of what I did say was coldly said, to embarrass him.
    As I sat on the bench smoothing out the sheet of parchment I had chosen to write upon, wondering whether to write a long letter or just a note, how to begin and how to end, and what should lie between, a wild thought struck me. If I addressed him
in a graceful phrase, then copied bits of the Song of Solomon, which by chance I had stumbled upon, then closed the letter with a brief salutation, would he think me overly bold?
    I need not explain why I was writing to him. If he wished to take it as such, it could be a love letter. And if he didn't, if he wished to believe that the Song of Solomon was about love for the Church only and not about earthly love, as Bishop Pelagius believed, then at least he would have to admire my devotion to holy things.
    I began at once and wrote rapidly, not taking time to illuminate the first letter of each verse, choosing the verses not in order but as they appealed to me:
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
    O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy