eye, a young man with curly hair, a girl with a blue scarf, and saw for an instant the grief they also knew was coming.
Then someone started a song or told another joke, and they all laughed, arms around one another, holding too tight.
He thanked them when he left to go.
He was tired and hope was fading, raw on the edge of despair, when he set out with Giuseppe, Maria, and their children to attend the Vespers service at the Church of the Holy Spirit, half a mile or so to the southeast beyond the old city wall. It was an austere building, and its spare beauty exactly suited his mood.
The square was crowded with people, as if half the countryside had chosen to come here for this most holy celebration. They milled around, excitement charging the air as if there were a storm to come, in spite of the calm spring evening.
Giuliano looked up at the columns and tower.
A dozen yards away a man began to sing, and quickly others joined in. It was beautiful, totally appropriate as they waited for the Vespers bell to ring and the service to begin, yet to Giuliano it seemed jarringly normal, when nothing else was.
Abruptly the singing stopped.
Giuliano swung around and saw horsemen in the street to the north that opened into the square, then to the east as well, leading from the city walls. There must have been a score of them or more, a foraging party come to take what they could. They looked happy and a little drunk.
The pounding of his heart almost choked him.
Gradually the singing stopped as the Frenchmen came forward, apparently intending to join in. They began singing loudly in French.
The man beside Giuliano swore. In the crowd people moved closer to one another, men reaching a hand to clasp a child or a wife. There was a low rumble of anger.
The Frenchmen were laughing, calling out to the pretty women as one or another caught their eye.
Giuliano felt his muscles ache and his nails bite into the palms of his hands.
One of the Frenchmen called out to a small boy and beckoned him over. The child hesitated, backing a little behind his mother's skirts. She moved a little farther in front of the boy. One Frenchman shouted something, another laughed.
Giuliano heard a cry and saw an officer. He held a young woman by the waist and drew her away from the crowd into the mouth of a quiet alley. Suddenly his hands were all over her body and she was struggling to avoid him, turning her head this way and that as he tried to kiss her.
Giuliano pushed his way forward past an old woman and several children, but he was too late. The young woman's husband had already pulled his dagger. The French officer lay sprawled on the stones, his chest scarlet and blood pooling on the stones beneath him.
Someone gasped and stifled a scream.
All around the square, Giuliano saw Frenchmen draw their swords to avenge their comrade. Within seconds the Sicilians had their knives drawn also, and the fighting escalated. There were curses, shouting, the sun bright on steel, and blood on the stones.
Above them all, the bells of the Church of the Holy Spirit began ringing the call to Vespers, and those were echoed by the bells of every other church in the city.
Giuliano was surrounded. Where were Giuseppe and Maria? He saw Tino, one of their children, looking dazed, his face white. He lunged forward and seized the boy's hand. "Stay by me," he ordered. "Where's your mother?"
Tino stared at him, too terrified to speak.
Ten feet away, a French soldier swung his sword and a Sicilian fell to the stones, blood gushing from his arm. A woman screamed. A Sicilian lunged at the man, arm out holding a dagger. The Frenchman fell and Giuliano dived forward to take his sword, then whirled around and snatched the child's arm.
"Come!" Giuliano shouted, dragging him along. He wanted to find Giuseppe and Maria and the other children, but he could not afford to let go of this one.
All around the square and in the streets leading off it men were fighting, and some women, seeming just as good with the knives. The French were badly outnumbered, and already there were men on the ground, some struggling to rise, others lying still. Generations of oppression and abuse, of poverty, fear, and humiliation, were finding a passion of vengeance at last, and the savagery was unstoppable.