Better Than Shopping
Mongreno, near Turin, Republic of Padania, February 2036.
Shortly after night fell across the city, the fire fights, and the fires, began. From the hills, you could watch them like a dull display of roman candles and sparklers, which brightened when the first power cut doused the city lights.
Daria leant against the stone Venus on the terrace, unconsciously caressing its cold back as she gazed over the city’s agony. At such times, her followers were wont to leave her alone with her thoughts, inviolate in her silence. Now, the sound and scent of a man approaching with caution sent her into alert mode.
“Daria …” She recognised the timbre as that of Davide, whose political ardour she was barely able to keep in check, a man whose commitment to overthrowing the Padanian regime had brought him close to death, yet was proving increasingly infectious in a land where hope was just one among innumerable commodities in very short supply. She felt his breath on her neck like a faint, warm caress.
“What is it, Davide?”
“I’ve brought someone to meet you.”
“Another of your rebel bigshots?”
“Someone you know. Someone you’ve met at close quarters.”
She turned towards Davide to reprove him for interrupting her thoughts. She glanced over his shoulder at the man following him, and her words froze on her chilled lips. The nose had been broken, the robust frame had lost its hard edges, the skin had regained colour, but the eyes were the same, as was the old-fashioned habit of fixing them directly on the eyes of a person in front of him.
“Tell me this,” he said. “Did you know I could swim?”
“I didn’t give it a thought. However, you’re old enough to have been taught as a child.”
“It wasn’t easy with the cracked ribs you gave me, but at least I didn’t have to pluck your knife out of my chest.”
“I had other things on my mind. I was hungry.”
“Aren’t we all? It doesn’t get any easier to find food. That’s why we need your help.”
“You’re getting all the help I can give you. Davide, tell him about the training.” But Davide had vanished.
“My name is Mercurio.”
“I know your name. I know every damned detail of your sordid life, up to the moment of your midnight swim in the River Po.”
“There’ve been worse lives. I risk mine every day to make amends.”
Mercurio moved close to Daria. The tall man stared down at her. As their gazes locked, she felt like an eye-contact virgin, resisting penetration. Then he was inside her head, filling her brain with his firm presence, his probing essence. Daria caught the lapels of his heretical overcoat and pulled his frame into contact with hers. His body’s warmth left her dizzy, and her light-headedness, their shared embrace in the cold garden, the physical contact magnifying the mental contact, made her, for the first time in years, ready to give herself as she had once abandoned herself to another older man, Father Francesco Fede, whose face, the way it had been in those last days of his seedy life, now forced itself onto her mind’s eye. And snapped the spell.
Daria slumped in Mercurio’s arms. Then, inhaling deep draughts of the night’s chill, she pulled herself together. Daria pushed Mercurio away as gently as she’d ever moved anyone out of her personal space.
“Come back when you have brought the children out of the factories,” she said.
“To do that, we need your help. We need your followers on our side. But yes, I will come back.” With that, he moved out of her life again.
The next night that tried to fall on the city of Turin retreated against the light of flares, exploding ordnance and fires.
Daria’s clandestine afternoon session for rebel cadres on tracking and strangulation techniques had gone well, and in the unsettled evening she brought her local followers into the main hall of Dardaria – the Home of Daria – to affirm their allegiance to non-violence, one of the keys to their protected status that made Mongreno out-of-bounds to the Greenshirt militias.
Daria noted that several of the men were younger than her. She had wanted to give her followers hope, and values that would keep them off the murderous paths she had followed. Yet the physical hunger etched into their cheeks was matched by a puzzled hunger in their eyes which she had thus far failed to assuage. Well, if she could not give, then she could take.
Peppe was a friend of Davide, though not a comrade-in-arms. Daria asked him to wait behind as the hall emptied.
“Peppe, would you do me a favour?”
“Sure, Daria. Anything.”
“Come to my room in a while. Spend the night with me.”
“You mean …?”
“I mean.”
“I’m honoured.”
“It’s the first and last time. You’d better show yourself worthy.”
“Daria, I will.”
He did. The flood of his passion triggered the passion dormant in her. Daria felt in it a release far beyond that afforded by plunging a knife between the shoulders of a turbulent priest, a connection beyond any that even Empathspray could fashion between her and the adoring mind of a soul-searching disciple. She felt it again the following night with Michele, the next with Ferruccio, then with Alex, Sandro, Filippo, Daniele, Edù. It felt so much finer than killing, more fulfilling than playing god; it was even better than shopping.
The civil war reached a watershed. The government had heavy weapons, fewer after every clash. The rebels had growing popular support, and a burgeoning flow of recruits that outweighed their manpower losses.
On the equinox itself, they took Turin, their first major city. The next morning, the first of the new era, the Steering Committee, which had Davide and Mercurio among its members, announced that the city would henceforth run itself in accordance with Italian and European law rather than with that of Padania.
This was an attempt to entice Italy and the European Union to take their side in the conflict, but there was substance to it. The first wave of decrees released all children under sixteen from factory or domestic service contracts, ordered them to register for free schooling, and encouraged the “foreigners” who had taken refuge in the woods and mountains to take the children’s place in the economy by restoring full citizenship to residents not born in Padania.
Few took up the offer immediately. The depleted Padanian army moved west to besiege the city. In vain, for the idea of freedom had breached their rearguard. Turin might fall again in the looming battle, but the eventual outcome of the wider war was scarcely in doubt.
At last, Daria declared wholeheartedly for the rebels; she gave her followers throughout Padania orders to go underground and help the rebel cause in any way they could.
In Mongreno, Daria spent three nights alone, cold, hungry and anguished. Mercurio came to her on the fourth. She sensed his limping arrival, greeted him with the sharpened knife in her hand refracting in the candle-light. He smiled. Daria turned its blade toward herself, wielded it to slice open her cassock, stepped into his warmth as he eased her body open to the night. Daria switched the knife to her other hand to make this simpler for him, then slashed it swiftly down behind his back and pulled away the remains of his own clothing. She saw that his old wound had healed.
Mercurio tended to Daria’s ancient wound throughout the long night. Even in its darkest part, Mercurio reflected in her eyes, spread his touch across her skin, expanded his being into the deepest recesses of her body and mind. As the new day insinuated its urgent foreboding into her consciousness, Daria wondered what else might be worth doing with the rest of her life.