Witch Craft: The Tale of Giacomo

All living things have souls, and all souls have colors that only Giacomo can see. But what does it mean when something living has no colors? Giacomo intends to find out, but fears where the answer may take him.

Ch. 1

Giacomo could see souls. He saw them as a halo of colors, a shimmering mist surrounding a living thing like the crown of the sun, although he did not always know what the colors meant. He had to stare at the person, or people, or creature, for a short amount of time, until all that existed were the things that lived – not the old stone buildings or the cobble-stone streets, not the rickety wagons or belching steam wagons, not the brass gear horses nor the ticking delivery birds. And when he stared, the colors would come like the waves of heat from the cooking carts that smelled of bread and baked fish, flowing in the air fine as silk and beautiful as butterflies.

Except at the fishery. Most of the haloes were overshadowed either by a sickly green or paltry blue nearly the same color as the gray sky. But souls would be sickly in a place where fish went to die and men earned a living by ripping out innards.

Giacomo brought the meat cleaver down. The fish’s head flew from its body. He took the paring knife, slit its belly and removed its squelching, bloody insides before tossing the body into the barrel of brine. He took another fish from the basket next to him and offered it the same fate. When the basket was empty, Giacomo went to one of the many salt-crusted lean-tos by the dock where more baskets waited – great wicker things he hefted onto his shoulder by its leather straps, and stumbled under a weight that had only gotten heavier over the years. He staggered back to his chopping table and resumed the rhythm of chop, slit and gut.

The brighter colors did not belong in a place like this.

The working day did not end until the sky was a pallid yellow. Then the steam whistle shrilled, and the men and women haloed in sickly colors dragged their weary bodies away from the fishery to whatever hovel they called home.

Giacomo hurried his way through the narrow streets of the city until he came to one of the many city fountains burbling clear water – this one a lion’s head carved into a stone wall. There, he cleaned the fish guts from his bare, thin arms tanned from spending most of his days outside. It was why he no longer wore shirtsleeves; bare skin was so much easier to clean, and the stink of fish wasn’t as tenacious with skin as it was with cloth. He washed his feet, splashing water onto the soles and scrubbing them free of the fish blood that slicked the ground at the fishery. He splashed water on the dark brown patches of his re-growing hair (he’d had to cut to rid it of lice). Then he smiled. He was ready.

Giacomo followed his mental map of the city and his private route through the cobbled, muddy streets until he reached the market square, where the congregation of a thousand voices was like the roar of an ocean wave. Men in silken wigs and pantaloons squeezed by men in ragged trousers and stained shirts. Girls in sweat-stained bodices sold flowers to women in the finest velvet, and men of learning tipped their top hats to the promenading Harlots. The square smelled wonderful, like flowers, sausages, and things baked with cinnamon. Giacomo bought a bit of bread and cheese from one of the steam-powered baking carts, then found a comfortable seat in the niche of a Greek goddess statue.

Giacomo ate his dinner, stared at the people, and watched the colors dance.

Giacomo had once heard it said – perhaps from one of the fathers at the orphanage, he wasn’t sure – that God was an artist. And if one wanted to see his brilliance then one had only to look to the birds in the sky and watch the sun as it rose (except to see the sun you first had to travel to distant lands, where the slate clouds couldn’t reach).

The father had been wrong. God’s art was here, in this square, in the shining aura of strawberry red fading to orange fading to gold of the hefty and happy barmaid, Elsa. It flickered in the green and violet of a man of learning from the witching school, in his top hat and tailed coat of midnight blue. The little flower girl with the blond curls was a rainbow of dancing light. The undertaker was a surprise, not deep violets and somber blues but spring green and gold like marigolds as he gave everyone a friendly smile even as they gave him a wide berth. There was a tabby cat the colors of fall, and a shaggy-haired mutt the colors of the sea.

Then there was the girl who sold iced cinnamon cakes, who smelled of cinnamon and walked glowing like the sun.

Today there was no gold.

Today, there was nothing. No colors at all.

Giacomo stared at her nervously, his heart beating uncomfortably fast.

He had never seen that before.

 ~oOo~

            The fishery’s cramped bunkhouse was quiet. The workers were far too exhausted to spare the energy to even snore. There were two lamps that remained lit so that people didn’t step on each other or relieve themselves on their neighbor’s head. Giacomo slept at the very end of the row in a pile of straw because he was always too late to claim a cot. A breeze was blowing, fanning the fish-stink that had soaked into the crusty gray wood and making the rafters creak like old bones. The Lullaby for the dying –that’s what some people called it.

Giacomo lay on his back, one hand behind his head, the other raised up in the lamplight. He moved his hand back and forth, and his halo shimmered like heat in cold air, clear as freshly made glass.

His aura’s transparency used to worry him to no end as a child. Here he was, surrounded by so much color, but all that surrounded him was nothing and it made him wonder more than once if that meant he was partly invisible. Which would certainly have explained why the fathers always startled whenever they came across Giacomo, as though suddenly remembering that he existed; or why Broc, the fishery master, would hit Giacomo across the face for startling him whenever Broc made his rounds.

These days, Giacomo often wondered if it meant he barely existed – caught between visible and invisible – and were his halo to fade until there wasn’t even a shimmer, if he would be a ghost; there, but never seen.

Or, maybe, he would cease to exist.

Giacomo shivered, jerking his hand back down to his side as if burned.

But neither could he say that he had absolutely nothing at all, like the cake girl at the market square. His halo was clear, but it was there, and that had to mean something more than not being there at all. And, sometimes, when he was outside and the clouds were thin and the day unusually bright, he thought he could see the faintest touch of gold, there, at the edge, where the halo hovered an inch from his skin.

But there had been nothing surrounding the cake girl.

Another shiver ran through Giacomo’s body like ice.

Everything had a halo. Every living thing with a beating heart and blood and a life that could be snuffed out like a candle always had something. Even the squids, even the fanged suckers with their clawed tentacles and gnashing teeth, or the gargoyles that skulked about the ledges at night looking for pigeons to eat had something. There was always a halo, always a color or a shimmer. Always, always, always.

Giacomo’s stomach tightened so deeply into its hollow cavity it seemed to knot itself, and Giacomo swallowed, feeling cold and sick. He curled onto his side like a frightened child and shivered.

Everything had a halo.

But not the things that were dead.

 ~oOo~

            Giacomo had first seen the haloes when he was about five. He’d told the fathers about them, of course, wondering if this was normal and wanting to share what he saw. The fathers had answered by sending for a physician and having his eyes checked. Since they had found nothing wrong, and since the experience of having his eyelids forcibly parted had been so unpleasant, Giacomo had decided that maybe saying nothing about the colors to anyone else would be wiser. And the fathers had let him be on the matter, assuming it some affliction that no medicine could cure.

But it was a useful affliction, if not merely pretty. Because there came a time when Giacomo could, on occasion if he paid close enough attention, “read” the colors and know who to avoid in the orphanage. Like the big lad, Felix, who everyone thought was a beast because of his size but who was actually quite nice if a bit simple. He had been haloed in powder blue and deep gold, and he made up the most ridiculous stories that always made Giacomo smile.

Simon, however, had been small and quick and mean, surrounded in a deep, pulsing blood red and orange, like fire, like anger. Pain had been Simon’s favorite game, one he inflicted whenever and however he could.

When five year old Jacques had been found at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck, the fathers had blamed a loose board. But Giacomo had seen the way Simon had smiled.

The colors sometimes told a story, and Giacomo tried to read those stories when he could. Even evil had a soul.

 ~oOo~

            Giacomo let the cleaver drop clumsily, and he had to hack twice before he was able to remove the fish’s head. He hadn’t slept well last night, and it was strange how, when tired, a body could feel at once both heavy yet move as though it were about to float away. He’d been plagued by dreams in which Simon had been standing within the crowd, a beacon of nothing in a sea of bright colors. He had smiled his secret smile at Giacomo, then ran away. Giacomo tried to follow him, to ask him where his colors had gone. He had ran until he left the towering stonework of the city behind for the trees and rutted dirt roads, and found Simon hanging from a tree by a rope.

Simon had hung, in point of fact. When the boys were old enough to work most were sent either to the meat factory or the fishery. Simon had been sent to the fishery only to run away, and three years later a boy with Simon’s blond hair and secret smile had been hung in the courtyard, where everyone went to hang when their souls were like Simon’s.

“Did you hear? About the girl who sells the cakes?”

Giacomo’s head shot up, startled by the possibility that the question was being addressed to him. The only time a question was ever directed to him was when someone needed to borrow his paring knife.

“Oh, I did,” said Marlice, who shared the table next to his but was looking at Amelia who was next to her. “Such a pity.”

Amelia shook her head, and a dark frizzy curl fell lose from her brown head scarf. “Madness, utter madness. Her body was untouched from what I heard. No bruises, no cuts, and she definitely wasn’t torn apart. There’s talk of Craft being involved. ‘Cept there’s been no death by witchery for years.”

“Bet one of those stuff-collars from the witch college did it on accident. They’re always talking sweet to the seller girls, and they don’t like being ignored.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Marlice said.

“They especially liked her. She was popular, what with her cakes.”

“True, very true.”

Giacomo’s stomach twisted.

The girl was dead.

The girl with no soul.

Giacomo let his clever fall, and the fish’s head went flying. Right into Broc’s thick chest.

“Oi!” Broc squealed. He looked down at his gray shirt as though the stain should have been visible. His bald head flashed in the pour light of the day when it shot up and he glared his fury at Giacomo. His halo, usually a mucky green and dingy silver, boiled with a dark red at the edge.

“You little piece of piss!” he snapped. He shoved Giacomo in the chest, his brawny arms like trees bringing down a twig. Giacomo landed hard on his back, the air shoved from his lungs and the world spinning. A kick in the ribs flipped him onto his side, then came a storm of blows from Broc’s cudgel onto Giacomo’s shoulders and back, each hollow blow punctuating Broc’s words.

“You. Watch. What. You’re. Doing. You. Little. Piss!” Followed by one more blow for good measure.

Satisfied, Broc straightened his shirt, gave a disdainful sniff, and lumbered away.

Giacomo lay there shaking, pain throbbing, the halo around his hand touched, he thought, with the pale, putrid green he came to associate with terror. But it quickly faded, leaving only the clear shimmer.

Giacomo pushed his way painfully to his feet. He picked up his cleaver, took another fish, and removed its head.

Maybe it was better to be invisible.

 ~oOo~

            Giacomo only had a copper piece for a stale piece of bread, and he sat in the deeper niche of a statue of a long dead archbishop. He wasn’t all that hungry to begin with, the pains in his shoulders and back making him slightly nauseas. But those same pains were going to make it impossible for him to sleep, he knew, so he might as well lose himself in the colors.

A fine white horse trotted by, radiating a warm pink like what sometimes splashed across the clouds when the sun set, while his rider exuded a color like lavender. The hooves of a brass horse cracked on the cobbles while it pulled a carriage of gilt gold and red velvet curtains. The curtains parted enough for Giacomo to catch a flash of strawberry pink and powder blue.

There were many fancy carriages today, some pulled by living horses, some by copper or brass horses, and some ticking with gears that slowly rolled the wheels. There must have been a play or an opera this night.

Another carriage rolled by, pulled by a brass polished horse so bright it was blinding even in the dusky lamplights. The velvet curtains were open in this carriage, and Giacomo saw the face of a trim young man, maybe Giacomo’s age, with long brown hair and bright blue eyes.

He had no halo.

Giacomo forced his bruised and aching body to move. He tried, he really did, to follow the carriage, but with the night growing late and the market place clearing, the carriage was able to move swiftly until it entered a street wide enough only for a single carriage to fit through. It was soon lost when other carriages fell into line behind it one after the other.

Giacomo slowed to a stop, panting and shaking from pain. Then he pushed on, following the carriages.

When on foot, the city could be a labyrinth, as though the structures had grown like a forest fighting for every inch of available space. But the wider streets for the carriages all followed as direct a route as possible to those places only people who could afford a private carriage would go. Places like the opera hall or the grand playhouse. Places where people like Giacomo were not welcome.

When he came to the playhouse with its doors painted in gold and walls of bas relief carvings of ancient dramas, where the street was so wide the carriages gathered like flocks of golden geese, Giacomo slipped quickly to the shadows. He slunk like a cowering dog to the shadow of a stoop, where he could see the patrons exit the carriages but they couldn’t see him. But the crowd was a mass of gaudy frills and lace, silken white wigs and feathered fans, and halos bleeding into halos. The air was heavy and suffocating with an unseen fog of flowery perfumes that seemed to clog in Giacomo’s lungs even from where he stood. But the noise, at least, was no different than what assaulted the ears at the market.

Giacomo did not see the young man. Neither did he have long to try. A man in a waistcoat of blue silk and a halo of yellow – accompanying a young woman in yellow silk and haloed in blue – spotted him and proceeded to make a haughty fuss. Two constables patrolling the area looked to where the man was pointing a podgy finger, and began to approach.

Heart in his throat, Giacomo ran, his bare feet slapping the cobbles. He ran until he no longer had enough strength or breath to keep running, then hobbled back to the bunk house at the fishery. The bunk house was crowded with bodies, every cot occupied, sometimes by more than one person. Giacomo dragged his own weary body to his hay pile at the back. Hay crackled beneath him as he curled up. But he didn’t sleep, even exhausted as he was.

Instead, he formed a plan.

~oOo~

To be continued with a chapter every Monday and Friday.