“There are so many people,” he said, sounding surprised. “There’s gotta be half the city down there!”
“Not quite. But some of the bigger fights could draw thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. It was free entertainment.”
“But with so many fighting at once, it looks like a battle down there!”
“Most of those are onlookers,” I said, amused, because the battle hadn’t even started yet. “They were merely jostling for a good spot.”
I peered down alongside him for a while, at people crowding the streets and balconies, at hawkers selling sweet fritters and sausages and veal liver fried in olive oil, at old ladies clutching handkerchiefs, ready to wave them furiously at their favorites, and at men holding rotten vegetables and rooftiles, with which to pelt the cowardly.
“You did have a good spot,” Ray said, watching Coletta come up alongside us, to toss scraps to the pigeons. It caused a mini battle in the skies, with the faster birds catching her offerings mid-air, swooping and diving at fantastic speeds, and making her laugh delightedly.
Then the main event began, while the birds still cawed and circled overhead. The teams were from different neighborhoods: ours, who were mostly fishermen, and one from close by the Arsenal shipyard, who were mostly shipwrights. There were only fifty or sixty combatants per group, unlike the hundreds who sometimes participated in later centuries. But their taunting cries filled the air nonetheless, stirring up the crowd, who were already rowdy enough.
“The locals are missing out,” Ray said.
“How so?”
“Everybody’s getting buffeted around down there, and the fight hasn’t even started. I bet it gets worse later.”
“Frequently,” I agreed.
“Well, if it had been me, I’da set up a stall selling wooden shields with the different faction’s symbols on ‘em. Protect yourself on the day and keep them as a souvenir for later.” He shook his head. “These people got no idea how to merchandise.”
I grinned. “They became better at it in later years. They started holding the battles on bridges, allowing spectators to watch from their gondolas, which was marginally safer.”
“Marginally?”
“People did tend to get tossed off the bridges.”
Ray laughed. “Godddamn!”
“The gondolas were so closely packed that vendors could walk from boat to boat, hawking their wares. But we always watched from the top of a local church.”
“Wasn’t that considered sacrilegious?”
“Of course.” I smiled. “That’s why no one else was up here.”
I turned around to show him our little group. We’d spread out a blanket on the flat roof of the church to hold our feast. Zilio’s father was a fisherman so he’d provided the spiced anchovies; Gerita and her little sister Maria had brought cheese stuffed eggs; Rigi had not been there, having come down with the pox, but his brother Gallo had brought a custard tart. Luysio and I had arrived last, having stolen some honey spiced walnuts from a vendor. We’d shown up breathless and pink cheeked, just before the fighting started.
There was a shout on the street, and we turned back to the fight, with Ray batting at long dead pigeons in order to see better, and me laughing when it didn’t work.
The captains gave the command and the two sides rushed together, each group running from a different end of the street, waving canes and cudgels and knocking over any observers who got in the way.
“Shit!” Ray yelled, as the two groups came together, with a clash of arms and a roar of approval from the crowd. An all-out melee immediately resulted.
The weapons being used were wood, but they still struck a good blow, and so did fists and feet and sheer momentum. One man duel wielded a couple of pointed canes, clearing a space all around him; another had a shield that he was using less for protection and more as a cudgel to batter his enemies; yet another lost his shield, but had stolen a cloak from a bystander to wrap around his arm instead. That gave him some protection, but also inadvertently brought another foe into the fight when the furious bystander waded in to the fray, determined to retrieve his outwear.
Eyes were blackened, faces were bloodied, and tender areas received rough treatment. There weren’t a lot of rules to the fracas, and bystanders were not above tripping or even punching members of the opposing team, to help out their favorites. It was a crazy, sweaty, chaotic good time, unlike anything I’d seen in the modern world.
“They fought for the honor of their neighborhoods,” I told Ray, as he laughed at a group who staggered off the main road and into a peddler, who saved his great dish of sardines in saor, a popular sweet and sour sauce, by holding it high above his head. “But they or their families often also had bets on the outcome.”
“So bragging rights and money, same as today,” he said, grinning.
I nodded, and we watched the fight for a while, because I found that I didn’t want to leave. I could feel that long-ago sun baking into my skin and see it sparkling on the distant water, could hear my friends’ laughter from behind us, could smell the food and the salt and the sweat and the blood. It had been a savage time, but I had loved it here, in this strange city in the sea.
I had never thought to feel at home again, after father took me from the dense forests of Wallachia, the only world I’d ever known. But I had been wrong. I had grown attached to our little sagging house on stilts, where you could sit in the open back door off the kitchen and dabble your toes in the surf. Had enjoyed getting up early to help Horatio, our old servant, fix breakfast, and to greet my father when he came home from a long night of gambling, having tricked the humans into providing our bread. Had loved . . .
Him.