the boy and siena

Golden-brick facades and gleaming buttresses lined the hills, reminding the boy of the future he couldn’t have. On this splendid day, the mountain-locked city of Siena felt alive: canyon-carried winds whistled through monastery arches, and priests hummed their familiar incantations — golden rhymes for the harvest season. But the Apprentice’s heart was dead. His destination for the fast-approaching noon — before the first rings of the temple bells! Or risk the wrath of the sanctioned priests — was the grand Monastero del Mare. A kraken of a cathedral, its amber walls almost competed equally with Siena’s mountain peaks, and to easily-frightened temple boys, it smirked sinisterly with giant brooches of stained glass. The Apprentice, in his grey-hearted lull, idled around the staired path below il monastero, azure glass and quartz-blonde saints reflecting a solemn spotlight onto his sullen countenance.

A familiar old man slowly descended the path from the monastery, a retired scribe that frequented the Apprentice’s school as a teacher when the regular fell ill to chills or mountain-plague.

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