Soldier From the Sky, Book Three: Sword of Fire

By M.C. Clary

A Twice-Told Warriors’ Tale
World War II. Nick Mancuso, a Brooklyn-born, deadeye gunner on a B-24 bomber is severely wounded in aerial combat, bails out over the wintry Apennines and loses consciousness while still in his parachute, his last thoughts on his lover, Theresa.
He awakens displaced in time, under the care of Italian partisans. By ancient magic and force of fate he’s become his own medieval ancestor and leader of a peasant rebellion in collusion with the tyrant's dangerously enchanting daughter.
To return to Theresa and parallel existence Nick must fight for his life in a world of hidden treasure, superstition, star-crossed love, intrigue, brutality and betrayal, and show fierce bravery in an epic battle for gold, glory and survival in 14th Century Italy.

Book Three: Sword of Fire
On a bitter winter night,1342, in the peasant village outside San Michele, Niccolo Mancuso is born in the last minutes of his mother's life. Though the Jewels of Saladin have never been found but the walled town has continued to prosper and grow. While the Montagna family and their financiers live palatially behind the walls, the paesanos lead a merciless, indebted life in the fields. Niccolo is a peculiar child, born with a gold fleck in his left eye, and unnerving presence and precocity. The superstitious believe if he is unearthly and avoid looking in his eye.
Days after bailing out, Nick awakens in a mountain lodge, amnesiac and under the care of partisans, an old man learned in the ways of forest medicine and a woman whose husband was killed by the Gestapo. Nick is uncertain who or where he is, but recognizes her from another time and place. They explain his American origins, how he was shot down and rescued, nearly dead from a tree. He remembers nothing of it, but upon seeing himself in a hand mirror, realizes the gold flake is now in his opposite eye.
Nico's odd behavior, knowledge and curiosity make him outcast. At twelve, he meets a companion. The Baron Montagna's daughter was born with an abnormality that keeps her veiled and locked away in a private world in the palace. She convinces her father Nico's savant powers will increase their fortunes and begins teaching him writing, reading and numbers.They concoct foolish ways to free her from her father's tyranny and swear they will go to China and ride elephants.
Nick the American flyer passes in and out of dreams and limbo wakefulness, his strength returning, but not his identity or past life. His conjoining memories make no sense.
When the baron's daughter is taken to a nunnery and kills herself rather than live imprisoned, Nico swears a chivalric oath to her soul to destroy the Montagna house in her name, with whatever power he possesses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M.C. Clary
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015

M.C. Clary

M.C. Clary is a world traveler, shepherd of strays, visitor of the night, singer in the rain, bronco buster, gold digger, hell raiser, zombie killer writer of fact and fiction in all their many forms, He lives and works in a crow's nest looking over Manhattan.

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Soldier From the Sky

a novel in six books

by M.C. Clary

c2015 Michael Clary

All rights reserved

Cover design by Larry Carroll

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for use of brief quotes in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Generations of men are like leaves,

In winter, winds blow them to earth,

But when spring comes again,

budding wood grows more. And so with men.

One generation grows, another dies.

Homer, The Iliad, 6:181-5

∞

Book Three

∞

Sword of Fire

Sword of Fire

Chapters

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

Old World People

Italy 14th Century

Popolo minuto

Bianca Mancuso, Niccolo Mancuso’s mother

Maffeo Mancuso, Niccolo’s father, peasant farmer

Maria, Maffeo’s widowed, older sister, Niccolo’s aunt

Giorgio Mancuso, Niccolo’s eldest brother

Violante Mancuso, Niccolo’s eldest sister

Ambrosio Mancuso, Niccolo’s older brother

Annunziata ‘Nightengale’ Mancuso, Niccolo’s older sister

Roberto, Mancuso cousin, soldier in the Gold Rose Army

Fiore Grosso, butcher for Montagna House

Imelda Grosso, Fiore’s wife, tanner

Leo Grosso, eldest Grosso son

Beppe ‘Big Mouth’ Grosso, second son

Francesco, Grosso cousin

Claudio Panettiere, village baker, dairyman

Flore Panettiere, Claudio’s wife, loomer

Rosana, Panettiere daughter

Pasquale, Panettiere son

Giovanni Bonati, woodcutter, builder, Niccolo’s brother-in-law

Sebastiano, blacksmith

Maximo, Sebastiano’s son

Levi, a traveling glover

Rebekah, Levi’s wife

Rachel, daughter

Aaron, son

Galiana Massaro, a village girl

Marco Massaro, Galiana’s older brother

Scryer of St. Celestina, forest forager, seer, healer

House of Montagna

Baron Carlo Montagna, Signore of San Michele

Rodolfo Montagna, eldest son, Vatican banker

Filippo Montagna, second son, Knight of Gold Rose Army

Antiocha Montagna, sole daughter, Signorina of San Michele

Eduardo Vallone, Montagna physician

Renaldo Greco, Montagna consigliere

Arturo, Renaldo’s nephew

Friar Tomasso, Montagna Franciscan counselor

Helmut, Knight/Palace Guard

Franz, Knight/Palace Guard

Corina, Montagna maggiordomo, midwife, duenna

Captain Patrice Renouard, Field Marshal with Filippo Montagna

Enemies of San Michele

Pope Gregory XI, Ruler of Christendom

Sir John Sudbury, Mercenary Knight, Commander of Gold Rose Army

Lorenzo Datini, youngest son, House of Datini, Knight of the Gold Rose

Count Vittorio Valori, Signore of Sarago

Cardinal Paulus Valori, uncle of Count Valori

Father Umberto, Dominican agent for Sudbury’s Gold Rose Army

New World People

Italy 1944

Niccolo Mancuso, peasant rebel

Dr. Pietro Orsini, Resistance operative, Allied airmen rescue

Chiara Orsini, Resistance fighter, Allied airmen rescue

Miro, Resistance fighter

Carlo, Resistance fighter

Imilia, forest forager, hunter

∞

12

On a February night in 1349, eighty years after Ileana Montagna died, a creamy half-moon glazed the jagged, red cliffs of Mount Sibylline. Icy wind poured off her snowy crest, downslope, bending treetops, combing the winter-brittle grasses and effluvial marshes, gusting toward the writhing Adriatic where it pushed against the tide and sprayed spume onto the volcanic boulders. Such storms, called tramontana, ‘off the mountains’, blow all the way to the sea and are said to be stirred up by the wicked hand of Sibyl, the mythical enchantress, temptress, prophet and ruler of the mountain realm, showing her wrath at god for exiling her to a cave and at mortals for doubting her divinity. Long ago, pagan shepherds named the reddish cliffs the Crown of Queen Sibyl.

She howled and keened across the ice-scoured plains, snapping cypress trees, twirling broken twigs and straw, lifting winter chaff off the scythed barley and millet fields and carrying it over the six-foot, limestone, stucco and wicker wall surrounding the peasant village situated about a half-mile downslope from the thick, buttressed walls of San Michele

Mark me. Sibyl calls her black wolves tonight, the butcher Fiore’s wife Imelda told him, cocking her ear to the shutter. The Mancuso babe is born bad.

Pagan superstition is against the law, Fiore told her. Shut your yapper.

The wind scared the children and the goats, rattled windows and gates, and set dogs whining and pacing. It thumped like a monster claw against the town’s guard towers and the finely filigreed iron gates in front of the Montagna palazzo, blew at the hanging gardens and tapestries in the noble houses, shook the wattle and raked the thatch on the paesanos’ straw, cob and chalky stucco houses, and swung the bell that hung on a yoke from a post near their peasant village well.

Push Bianca! Push! Or your child will die. Push! Donina the midwife and her apprentice daughter Lucia wore knee-length leather aprons over woolen dresses, leather cowls and beaked masks. They inhaled smoldering herbs to ward off the miasma in the Mancuso home. Donina’s plump cheeks were flush. Lucia placed lanterns and candles around the family bedstead and used a scrap of burnished, polished steel armor to capture and aim the candlelight at Bianca’s Mancuso’s vaginal canal. It had been given to Bianca’s sister-in-law Maria by one of the baron’s guards, so Maria could look good when the caravans came. Donina’s sleeves were tied at the elbow and her hands and forearms were under a piece of flax cloth that was wet with natal blood.

Mercy, sweet Jesus! Bianca screamed.

Maffeo Mancuso squeezed her hand. Help her, Donina. Help her!

Her clothes and humours have plague! I will not touch her. She must do it herself. Push, Bianca!

A few years earlier, plague swept down from Venice. Some called it The Great Mortality, others Black Death. It scythed down whole families and towns in a few days, leaving survivors grief-stricken and terrified. The symptoms were believed to be significant of demonic manifestation, and superstition was as contagious as the germ.

Maffeo’s sister, Maria, gingerly ladled water from a wooden bowl into Bianca’s mouth, careful not to touch her skin and clothes.

The plague came in waves. They fumigated and prayed and burnt the dead, and their clothes, and sent the dying to the death house, a cavernous post, beam and board shed that Baron Carlo Montagna ordered his carpenters to build outside the village. Diseased nobles and peasants were shut away, to die in peace, under the cross. Bouts of plague came and left for weeks and months at time. It had not visited San Michele for over a year, until three days earlier, when, on the morning Bianca Mancuso felt the first stirrings of birth in her womb, she also found black pustules under her arms and at the crook of her legs.

I am sorry, Maffeo, Bianca said. The baron would have sent me to the death house. Our baby would die inside me.

Bianca’s fifth pregnancy was not easy. She had pains and cramping from the first month, prickly skin, watery eyes and farting attacks. Her four other children were born quickly, happily, but this time her insides were tight and tender, and she had been in labor since early morning. Her veins pounded and vital humors leaked down her thighs. The contractions twisted her gut so forcefully that she screamed mercy. Donina dosed her with mandrake and hyssop tea. Lucia passed rosemary and mint leaves to Maria to put in Bianca’s nostrils. The infant kicked and thrashed against her clenching womb, slowly suffocating, but fighting for life, to suck in a mouthful of air.

Bianca, Maffeo, their four children and Aunt Maria lived in a vaulted roof, cruck house, made of sticks, straw and powdery, lime brick, much like every house in the village. After Maria’s husband and two children died in an earlier plague, Baron Montagna gave her home to another family and placed her under Maffeo’s roof and care. Some villagers said Maria was not right in the head but the local soldiers liked her.

The Mancuso house was separated into two rooms by a half-wall of straw, potash and stucco. The family of seven slept and did domestic work, spinning and dyeing, candle making and cooking in the large room with a stone fireplace, hand-hewn stools and a trestle table, a cheese cupboard, a few baskets, a wood chest for clothes and a loft for storing winter food and straw, oil, dried, salted fish and wine.

Maria slept on a straw-stuffed pallet that was suspended by flax twine on a narrow bed, next to Hermes the dog, near the cobblestone oven for warmth. Maffeo and Bianca slept