condottieri had great confidence in Yuri; the company’s cook had bested champions the length and breadth of Etruria. Both men towered over the assembly – Yuri, perhaps, by a few inches more, but his opponent made up for it in breadth. Both men were stripped to the waist, though the bandieratori champion kept on his long-eared leather cap. Jacques the Hammer was an immigrant not long settled in the Smiths’ Quarter. He was built like a menhir, concave at both sides. He wore loose, coarse-threaded britches, a soot-grey vest and a thin leather apron that looked more suitable for a smaller man. His neck thrust forward from between the unbroken curve of his shoulders.
Pedro waved his flag – left, right, then a nice overhead slice – and shouted ‘Avanti!’ as he leapt from the table. Immediately supporters crowded round, baying like hounds.
Yuri’s technique was straightforward: push. He strained and turned red, and Jacques’ arm tilted slowly to seventy degrees. The blacksmith’s strategy of letting Yuri make an all-out effort was risky, the touts agreed. A little bit further and Jacques would find himself at the point of no return. The condottieri pounded the tables rhythmically, shouting, ‘Hawks! Hawks! Hawks!’
‘Hammer! Hammer! Hammer!’ the Rasenneisi countered.
‘Come on, Yuri!’ Levi hollered, ‘I’ve a month’s pay riding on you!’
The men were eyeball to eyeball now, and both had stopped breathing. Two towers. Two mountains. Sweat streamed into Jacques’ eyes, and he blinked to clear them. His arms weren’t defined like Yuri’s; they were pillars of knotted muscle and flesh with the mindless endurance of iron. A grin began to form on Yuri’s face when, suddenly, a gasp escaped him and he shifted in his seat. His forearm and bottom lip quaked in tandem. He strained. His arm began to retrace its journey, steadily, inexorably, over the halfway point, then downwards.
‘Ham – mer! Ham – mer! Ham – mer!’
Jacques’ forge-scorched face was tranquil. The chant grew louder, more insistent, as the crowd watched Yuri’s steadily descending arm, as inevitable as a falling tower. His face rippled with agony. ‘Aaahieeeeeee!’
Slam!
His fist hit the table and a great cheer went up. Amongst the crowd that rushed to congratulate the winner was Fabbro. ‘Well done, Jacques! Been meaning to call in for weeks. How goes it?’
Ignoring the dozens of hands slapping his great back, the blacksmith finished his beer in one long drink, wiped his mouth, and said calmly, ‘Well. Come tomorrow.’
Fabbro offered to buy him another, but Jacques refused. Fabbro was still wondering why later that evening as his godson excitedly related his adventures in the tunnels.
‘—then Levi lowered me into the pit—’
‘You ought to be more careful, Pedro,’ said Maddalena. Tower Bombelli and Tower Vanzetti had always been close, and Maddalena still took a big-sisterly attitude to Pedro. She couldn’t dominate her real brothers; they were much older. ‘Let Levi take the risks. That’s what Papa pays him for.’
Levi raised his drink sarcastically. ‘Too kind, Signorina.’
‘Well, what could you see?’ Fabbro asked.
‘Not much, though I inserted glow-globes at regular intervals. I passed several caverns hollowed out of the tufa, some clearly the work of erosion but others, roughly square in shape, well, they looked manmade.’
‘How old?’ Fabbro asked.
‘Etruscan if I had to guess – but that’s still not the strangest thing. We didn’t have enough rope to go all the way down, so I dropped my last globe. It fell, there was a splash, and then it vanished. A river, Fabbro! There’s a second river, flowing beneath Rasenna. All this time!’
‘How fascinating,’ Maddalena interrupted. ‘Pedro, I know that southsiders do things differently, but can’t you wait till tomorrow to discuss sanitation?’
The way Pedro reddened reminded Fabbro that Rasenna’s Chief Engineer was still a boy. It was easy to forget. Though adolescence lingered on his face, there was hardness too. Life had tested Pedro early.
‘Hush, Maddalena,’ Fabbro scolded. ‘Since when are you so prudish? The cloaca is an endeavour every bit as noble as Giovanni’s bridge, and just as necessary.’
Giovanni was still alive when Rasenna’s boom had began, and he had warned the Signoria it could be make or break for them. Concord had experienced a similar expansion in the last two decades, and if her antique sewer system, the old Etruscan cloaca maxima, had not been still functional, disease would have destroyed the city. The siege of Rasenna had proved doubly serendipitous in this case, for the Concordians’ discarded diggers made extensive rapid digging possible.
Few in the Signoria saw the urgency and clamoured instead for more