The Wolves of Paris Read Free

his sword, but ignored the saffron-colored cross that Marco was holding out to him.
    “Just pin it on,” Marco said.
    “If the king’s provost is so devout,” Lorenzo said, “let him wear it himself.”
    “Don’t be difficult. These French can be prickly. We don’t want trouble.”
    “We already have trouble. I haven’t been living on the road for the past twenty-nine days so I can impress Lord Nemours with my piety. If I wanted that, I’d still be wearing the black and white. And I thought we were not going to see Nemours until tomorrow.”
    “He might send for us tonight.”
    “And if he does, I’ll put it on.”
    It was a chill day across northern France. Unlike their native Tuscany, much of this country was wild and wooded, plagued with wild beasts and bandits. They never traveled without their swords, and more than once had drawn them to show steel to the curious and incautious.
    But the small party of traders had emerged in the past few days into a more civilized land, roads in better repair and speckled with villages. With the English finally retreating to the west and Burgundy somewhat less meddlesome thanks to a couple of spanking defeats at the hands of the French crown, there was hope in Florence that France was entering a period of stability more conducive to the regular business of buying and selling, borrowing and lending.
    “Listen to me, little brother,” Marco said. His tone was more grave now. “You can either stop this blasphemy or I’ll see to it that you wear the black and white again.”
    “Don’t fool yourself. The priory wouldn’t take me back now. Yellow cross or no.”
    Nevertheless, he stood still while Marco came and pinned the cross above his right breast. “Give thanks to the Virgin the Inquisition was merciful,” the older brother said. “And that the Boccaccio name still has some influence. You’re lucky they didn’t put you to the question.”
    Lorenzo stared at his brother with growing anger. Marco had no idea what questions , as he put it, had been asked, and how they had been answered. The strongest recidivist Jewish converso, the most hardheaded heretic—every man wilted eventually. But what would Marco know about that? Under mother’s direction, he’d resolved Lorenzo’s difficulties with the Dominicans the same way he always did, with a purse of silver and a boast about their famous ancestor, the writer Giovanni Boccaccio. Not that Marco had ever read the Decameron .
    The muleteers got their animals up and harnessed. Men saddled horses for the Boccaccio brothers and their agent. Only eight miles from the city now, they’d tried to press on the previous evening, but a broken wagon axle stopped them short. Instead, they had pitched tents at the edge of some woods midway between two villages and set a watch. Axle repaired, morning fast broken with dark bread and hard cheese, they were eager to reach the city and figure out what had happened to the Boccaccio agent there, why they’d received no word from Paris in months.
    On the road, the brothers traveled in silence at the front of the caravan. Lorenzo was in a foul mood, irritated by the yellow cross on his breast, and bored of his brother’s company after so many days on the road. Marco criticized the villagers and peasants as superstitious, as pagans, while insisting they stop at every shrine, then take confession and mass whenever they came across a church or abbey. Once, passing through Provence, they’d wasted eight hours crawling on their knees through the streets of some village so they could receive expiation of their sins in the presence of a piece of the True Cross.
    “Three trips to the shrine is as good as one trip to Rome,” the local bishop assured them.
    Lorenzo was exhausted mentally as well as physically. These last few miles at the end of the trip were the worst, the anticipation crushing. Paris wasn’t Florence, it was a filthy, violent northern city, worn down by decades of war and