Cover

The Miracle (Storycuts)

Frederick Forsyth

The Miracle

The Miracle

SIENA, 1975

The sun was a hammer in the sky. It beat down on the clustered roofs of the walled Tuscan city and the medieval tiles, some pink but mostly long baked to umber or ashen grey, shimmered in the heat.

Shadows dark as night were cast along upper windows by the overhanging gutters; but where the sun could touch, the rendered walls and ancient bricks gleamed pale, and wooden sills cracked and peeled. In the deep and narrow cobbled alleys of the oldest quarter there were restful pools of further shade and here the occasional sleepy cat sought refuge. But of local humans there was no sign, for this was the day of the Palio.

Down one such alley, lost in a maze of tiny cobbled ways, hardly wider than his own shoulders, the American tourist hurried, red as beef. Sweat trickled down to soak his short-sleeved cotton shirt, the tropical-weight jacket felt like a blanket dangling from his shoulder. Behind him his wife tottered painfully on unsuitable platform sandals.

They had tried to book far too late for a hotel inside the city, in this of all seasons, and had finally settled for a room in Casole d’Elsa. The rented car had overheated on the road, they had eventually found a parking slot beyond the city walls and now scurried from the Porta Ovile towards their goal.

They were soon lost in the labyrinth of alleys dating back 500 years, stumbling on the hot cobbles, feet on fire. From time to time the Kansas cattleman cocked an ear towards the roar of the crowd and tried to head in that direction. His well-upholstered wife sought only to catch up and fan herself with a guidebook at the same time.

‘Wait for me,’ she called as they hurried down yet another defile of brick between town houses that had seen Cosimo of Medici ride by, and been old even then.

‘Try to hurry, honey,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘We’re going to miss the parade.’

He was right. A quarter-mile away the massed crowds in and around the Piazza del Campo were straining to catch the first glimpse of the Comparse, the parade in medieval costume of the seventeen great guilds of Siena who once ruled and administered the town. According to tradition, ten of the seventeen Contrade would race their horses that day for the honour of carrying away to their guildhall the painted banner, the Palio itself. But first, the parade.

The American had read aloud from the guidebook to his wife in their hotel bedroom the previous evening.

‘The Contrade or Districts of Siena were created between the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century,’ he read.

‘That was before Columbus,’ she objected, as if nothing had happened before the great Cristobal sailed from Palos, on the River Tinto to head west into oblivion or glory.