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fpbChapter two
One hour later, Ricky was washed and correctly dressed, and had managed to do it without help and without leaving any mess. He was still worried about his father’s mood and determined to be on his best behaviour. He did not even complain about the few minutes they had to wait before Maria Cassia Giraudo and Lapo d’Amalfi knocked at the door.
Lapo only waited until the Minister was out of sight and earshot before questioning Ricky. “So, little guy,” he drawled, “to what do we owe the pleasure of your company?”
“Dad says that I’ve been tormenting the chickens…”
“Tormenting the chickens?” asked both Lapo and Maria, almost with one voice.
“…but that’s not right! Dad just wouldn’t listen! I didn’t want to hurt them, I just wanted to count them!”
Both older children had stopped walking by now. Maria Cassia was shaking her head, as if trying to clear it. Lapo sounded stunned as he asked:
“Count them?”
“I was wondering how many chickens we had, so I went into the yard to see. But they kept moving around, so I couldn’t keep track… I started counting over and over again, and then I realized that the only way I could do it was tie them up and put them in one place. It took all day, it was so much work…”
And here Ricky stopped, because he realized that the two ten-year-olds were barely hearing him any more. Lapo D’Amalfi was almost convulsed with mirth, and Maria Cassia Giraudo was holding her sides trying not to choke on the gales of laughter that kept blasting out of her. Ricky blushed and felt horribly embarrassed – worse, in a way, than he had felt when his father had sent him to bed without supper.
“Look, kid,” gasped Lapo, “didn’t you think of just asking your house-elf?”
“Or your father?” added Maria Cassia.
“House-elf?” said Ricky in a bewildered tone.
“The house-elf can count all your animals in the time it would take you to breathe,” answered Maria Cassia.
“And she'd know anyway,” added Lapo, “’cause the chickens are one of her duties.”
“And your father would know too, because the house-elf reports to him.”
“I wanted to do it myself…” muttered Ricky miserably. But really, he knew he had no answer. He had never thought of the house-elves.
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The Italian countryside is not always a very quiet or lonely place. To those who have freshly come from the city, it offers a sense of peace; but it is densely settled and cultivated, ringing with the brays and moos of animals, the ever-present call of the cockerel, and, far in the distance, the sound of cars on a local road and perhaps a small factory or a piece of farming machinery at work. For silence and solitude, one has to move away from the farms and the ploughlands, into the occasional areas of swamp, wood or pasture where only herders and huntsmen go.
Montegufo, the estate of the Attanasio family, had a large tract of forest, whose end could not be seen from their home. Indeed, it spread on to other hills and into other estates until it became one with the great fir and pine woods of the high mountains, many miles away. But the Forest of Montegufo was enchanted, and all three wizard children had been warned from birth against it. The path that led through the woods was safe; it only went to the manor house of another old wizard family, the Aleramo-Attanasios, distant cousins of Ricky and his father, and no Muggle had any interest in it. But the children all knew never to leave the path, except to pick up mushrooms and berries, and never, for any reason, to lose it from sight.
Lapo and Maria Cassia were both ten, and like Ricky, they were too young for Beauxbatons or Durmstrang, and far too young to be left in empty houses alone. So, their parents had arranged for them to spend the weekdays with the Aleramo-Attanasios, whose manor house, unlike that of Ricky’s father, was always full of people. They could conveniently take in as many as half a dozen children without too much trouble.
(And if you wonder why Ricky’s father had not thought of these helpful cousins before, the answer is just: he hadn’t. Ricky had always been a handful, but he had never been left alone with the house-elves before, and the Minister, busy with all his daily work, had never stopped to wonder whether the elves would have been able to manage the boy.)
The children went on foot. It was rather a long walk for young children – and half of it uphill – but they had known it for as long as they could remember; it was, in fact, the only magical path in the neighbourhood, as one would expect for the road from Minister Attanasio’s Castle Montegufo to Count Aleramo-Attanasio’s Castle Aleramo. Such a route was of no interest to Muggles, and indeed Muggle maps did not show it. But they had plenty of time to get to know each other.
There was nothing much wrong with Maria Cassia, as Ricky would have admitted if he had been subjected to torture. She was a well-meaning creature, a bit stout and a bit plain, but kind-hearted and rather smart; only with a terrible case of the Older Sister, which would naturally annoy every boy within range. Although only a few months older than Lapo and two years and a bit than Ricky, she seemed to think she was in charge of them, which inevitably resulted in spats and the two boys walking on the other side of the path from her and refusing to say a word.
But though Lapo D’Amalfi could on occasion be an ally against Maria Cassia, Ricky knew from the start that he could never be a friend. Everything about him was creepy, uncomfortable and maddening. Flat and slightly greasy mousy hair falling lankily over a pale, pasty face from which grey-brown eyes peered out with a constant expression of sarcasm and superiority, a weak chin, and sickly red lips that looked as though all the blood had drained there from the rest of the face; an affected, intolerable drawl; and a constant habit of calling the younger boy “kid” or “runt” or “shorty” or the like, and generally treating him with barely veiled contempt. “It’s not as though he’s a grown-up!” thought Ricky angrily, and then reflected that grown-ups did not usually behave like that, either.
For a week and a half this went on, with Ricky growing ever more certain that sooner or later they would end up fighting. And eventually he was proved right.
The start of the row was mushrooms. The children knew that they were not allowed to stray off the path except for good reason, and never to lose it from sight; but mushrooms and truffles counted as good reason. Indeed, all three children had learned to know the path while out mushrooming with their elders. The forest grew an extraordinary amount of mushrooms of the best kind, including the rare and powerful truffle, and the Porcino, king of mushrooms.
Not only is it no exaggeration that Porcini are the best mushrooms in the world; they also have magical properties, and potions makers value them. When you are next in your local department store, look for the oddly dressed character who buys only an improbable amount of expensive bags of dried porcini mushrooms, plus perhaps a few herbs: he is probably a wizard replenishing his stock of ingredients. Porcini grown in an enchanted forest, drawing the effects of its mighty magic, would be twice as powerful. The children had all learned to know them, and looked for them every day on their way to and back from Castle Aleramo.
The Thursday of the second week – a cold, damp, foggy Montserrat autumn day, unpleasant enough for anyone and hardly made to make three fractious children feel better – they saw that a whole field of mushrooms had grown overnight near the top of the hill. Mushrooms do sometimes appear like that, from one day to the next, withut warning, especially when the air is damp and the ground is rich. There were many edible varieties, and more Porcini than Lapo, Ricky and Maria Cassia had ever seen in one place in their lives. Taking care not to lose the path from sight, they started picking everything they could.
“Hey! Don’t pick that!” shouted Ricky to Lapo, seeing his hand fastening on a bunch of white fungi with bright red caps with scattered white bits. “That’s dangerous!”
Lapo turned with an insufferably smug grin, and carefully picked the toadstool and put it in his bag. “Is that what you think, little boy?”
“That’s an Amanita! They kill people!”
“Did your father tell you that?”
“Yes!”
“That figures. Well, Amanita are useful to those who know what they’re doing. I don’t wonder your father didn’t tell you – he probably knows nothing about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what they say over the mountains, don’t you?
Le Ministère des Italiens
C’est le Ministère du rien.”
Ricky knew some French, and at any rate he had heard the insulting rhyme drip with frustrated fury from his own father’s lips. In a second, he was at exploding point.
“You take that back!”
“Why should I, runt? Because truth hurts?”
And here Lapo failed to understand the little boy in front of him. Lapo had provoked many people; he liked to push other children to boiling point, and quite willing to have a fight – especially with someone younger and smaller. But he did not expect the fight to start so fast. Children, like adults, have to nerve themselves, exchange insults, work up to the assault.
But Anastasio Attanasio, called Ricky, was not quite like other children. He was – and remained, as he grew – extraordinarily swift to move from thought to deed. Just as he had thrown himself into the enormous and bruising task of binding all his father’s chickens and dragging them in one place as soon as he had thought of it, so, now, having decided that this was the time to fight –
- there was a crack and a shriek, and Lapo reeled back with blood flowing from his mouth. Ricky had head-butted him, with all the weight of his little body behind his head. In a second, they were at each other with real ferocity, yelling and snarling, trying to do each other some real harm.
Maria Cassia shrieked and ran at them, trying to part them. She was knocked back, and as she tried to reach them again, a bush broke under their weight and she saw them falling down a steep slope, still holding and clawing and shrieking at each other. She looked at the slope…
…then she looked at the path…
…she realized that it was nearly out of sight…
….she looked down again….
…she ran back. She regained the path and raced down it, as fast as her legs could carry her; and the silent vaults of the Forest of Montegufo rang with a young girl’s cries and calls for help.
One hour later, Ricky was washed and correctly dressed, and had managed to do it without help and without leaving any mess. He was still worried about his father’s mood and determined to be on his best behaviour. He did not even complain about the few minutes they had to wait before Maria Cassia Giraudo and Lapo d’Amalfi knocked at the door.
Lapo only waited until the Minister was out of sight and earshot before questioning Ricky. “So, little guy,” he drawled, “to what do we owe the pleasure of your company?”
“Dad says that I’ve been tormenting the chickens…”
“Tormenting the chickens?” asked both Lapo and Maria, almost with one voice.
“…but that’s not right! Dad just wouldn’t listen! I didn’t want to hurt them, I just wanted to count them!”
Both older children had stopped walking by now. Maria Cassia was shaking her head, as if trying to clear it. Lapo sounded stunned as he asked:
“Count them?”
“I was wondering how many chickens we had, so I went into the yard to see. But they kept moving around, so I couldn’t keep track… I started counting over and over again, and then I realized that the only way I could do it was tie them up and put them in one place. It took all day, it was so much work…”
And here Ricky stopped, because he realized that the two ten-year-olds were barely hearing him any more. Lapo D’Amalfi was almost convulsed with mirth, and Maria Cassia Giraudo was holding her sides trying not to choke on the gales of laughter that kept blasting out of her. Ricky blushed and felt horribly embarrassed – worse, in a way, than he had felt when his father had sent him to bed without supper.
“Look, kid,” gasped Lapo, “didn’t you think of just asking your house-elf?”
“Or your father?” added Maria Cassia.
“House-elf?” said Ricky in a bewildered tone.
“The house-elf can count all your animals in the time it would take you to breathe,” answered Maria Cassia.
“And she'd know anyway,” added Lapo, “’cause the chickens are one of her duties.”
“And your father would know too, because the house-elf reports to him.”
“I wanted to do it myself…” muttered Ricky miserably. But really, he knew he had no answer. He had never thought of the house-elves.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Italian countryside is not always a very quiet or lonely place. To those who have freshly come from the city, it offers a sense of peace; but it is densely settled and cultivated, ringing with the brays and moos of animals, the ever-present call of the cockerel, and, far in the distance, the sound of cars on a local road and perhaps a small factory or a piece of farming machinery at work. For silence and solitude, one has to move away from the farms and the ploughlands, into the occasional areas of swamp, wood or pasture where only herders and huntsmen go.
Montegufo, the estate of the Attanasio family, had a large tract of forest, whose end could not be seen from their home. Indeed, it spread on to other hills and into other estates until it became one with the great fir and pine woods of the high mountains, many miles away. But the Forest of Montegufo was enchanted, and all three wizard children had been warned from birth against it. The path that led through the woods was safe; it only went to the manor house of another old wizard family, the Aleramo-Attanasios, distant cousins of Ricky and his father, and no Muggle had any interest in it. But the children all knew never to leave the path, except to pick up mushrooms and berries, and never, for any reason, to lose it from sight.
Lapo and Maria Cassia were both ten, and like Ricky, they were too young for Beauxbatons or Durmstrang, and far too young to be left in empty houses alone. So, their parents had arranged for them to spend the weekdays with the Aleramo-Attanasios, whose manor house, unlike that of Ricky’s father, was always full of people. They could conveniently take in as many as half a dozen children without too much trouble.
(And if you wonder why Ricky’s father had not thought of these helpful cousins before, the answer is just: he hadn’t. Ricky had always been a handful, but he had never been left alone with the house-elves before, and the Minister, busy with all his daily work, had never stopped to wonder whether the elves would have been able to manage the boy.)
The children went on foot. It was rather a long walk for young children – and half of it uphill – but they had known it for as long as they could remember; it was, in fact, the only magical path in the neighbourhood, as one would expect for the road from Minister Attanasio’s Castle Montegufo to Count Aleramo-Attanasio’s Castle Aleramo. Such a route was of no interest to Muggles, and indeed Muggle maps did not show it. But they had plenty of time to get to know each other.
There was nothing much wrong with Maria Cassia, as Ricky would have admitted if he had been subjected to torture. She was a well-meaning creature, a bit stout and a bit plain, but kind-hearted and rather smart; only with a terrible case of the Older Sister, which would naturally annoy every boy within range. Although only a few months older than Lapo and two years and a bit than Ricky, she seemed to think she was in charge of them, which inevitably resulted in spats and the two boys walking on the other side of the path from her and refusing to say a word.
But though Lapo D’Amalfi could on occasion be an ally against Maria Cassia, Ricky knew from the start that he could never be a friend. Everything about him was creepy, uncomfortable and maddening. Flat and slightly greasy mousy hair falling lankily over a pale, pasty face from which grey-brown eyes peered out with a constant expression of sarcasm and superiority, a weak chin, and sickly red lips that looked as though all the blood had drained there from the rest of the face; an affected, intolerable drawl; and a constant habit of calling the younger boy “kid” or “runt” or “shorty” or the like, and generally treating him with barely veiled contempt. “It’s not as though he’s a grown-up!” thought Ricky angrily, and then reflected that grown-ups did not usually behave like that, either.
For a week and a half this went on, with Ricky growing ever more certain that sooner or later they would end up fighting. And eventually he was proved right.
The start of the row was mushrooms. The children knew that they were not allowed to stray off the path except for good reason, and never to lose it from sight; but mushrooms and truffles counted as good reason. Indeed, all three children had learned to know the path while out mushrooming with their elders. The forest grew an extraordinary amount of mushrooms of the best kind, including the rare and powerful truffle, and the Porcino, king of mushrooms.
Not only is it no exaggeration that Porcini are the best mushrooms in the world; they also have magical properties, and potions makers value them. When you are next in your local department store, look for the oddly dressed character who buys only an improbable amount of expensive bags of dried porcini mushrooms, plus perhaps a few herbs: he is probably a wizard replenishing his stock of ingredients. Porcini grown in an enchanted forest, drawing the effects of its mighty magic, would be twice as powerful. The children had all learned to know them, and looked for them every day on their way to and back from Castle Aleramo.
The Thursday of the second week – a cold, damp, foggy Montserrat autumn day, unpleasant enough for anyone and hardly made to make three fractious children feel better – they saw that a whole field of mushrooms had grown overnight near the top of the hill. Mushrooms do sometimes appear like that, from one day to the next, withut warning, especially when the air is damp and the ground is rich. There were many edible varieties, and more Porcini than Lapo, Ricky and Maria Cassia had ever seen in one place in their lives. Taking care not to lose the path from sight, they started picking everything they could.
“Hey! Don’t pick that!” shouted Ricky to Lapo, seeing his hand fastening on a bunch of white fungi with bright red caps with scattered white bits. “That’s dangerous!”
Lapo turned with an insufferably smug grin, and carefully picked the toadstool and put it in his bag. “Is that what you think, little boy?”
“That’s an Amanita! They kill people!”
“Did your father tell you that?”
“Yes!”
“That figures. Well, Amanita are useful to those who know what they’re doing. I don’t wonder your father didn’t tell you – he probably knows nothing about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what they say over the mountains, don’t you?
Le Ministère des Italiens
C’est le Ministère du rien.”
Ricky knew some French, and at any rate he had heard the insulting rhyme drip with frustrated fury from his own father’s lips. In a second, he was at exploding point.
“You take that back!”
“Why should I, runt? Because truth hurts?”
And here Lapo failed to understand the little boy in front of him. Lapo had provoked many people; he liked to push other children to boiling point, and quite willing to have a fight – especially with someone younger and smaller. But he did not expect the fight to start so fast. Children, like adults, have to nerve themselves, exchange insults, work up to the assault.
But Anastasio Attanasio, called Ricky, was not quite like other children. He was – and remained, as he grew – extraordinarily swift to move from thought to deed. Just as he had thrown himself into the enormous and bruising task of binding all his father’s chickens and dragging them in one place as soon as he had thought of it, so, now, having decided that this was the time to fight –
- there was a crack and a shriek, and Lapo reeled back with blood flowing from his mouth. Ricky had head-butted him, with all the weight of his little body behind his head. In a second, they were at each other with real ferocity, yelling and snarling, trying to do each other some real harm.
Maria Cassia shrieked and ran at them, trying to part them. She was knocked back, and as she tried to reach them again, a bush broke under their weight and she saw them falling down a steep slope, still holding and clawing and shrieking at each other. She looked at the slope…
…then she looked at the path…
…she realized that it was nearly out of sight…
….she looked down again….
…she ran back. She regained the path and raced down it, as fast as her legs could carry her; and the silent vaults of the Forest of Montegufo rang with a young girl’s cries and calls for help.
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no subject
Date: 2010-04-02 06:52 pm (UTC)You're a bit inconsistent about referring to characters by first name, first and middle name, or full name. I know Italian names are a little different, but you should generally stick to one form to refer to a character (once his or her full name is given), unless there's a particular reason (such as emphasis) to provide a different form.
This implies that if they were younger, they could be left in empty houses alone. Which I don't think is what you meant. (Ricky notwithstanding, and apparently he wasn't really left in an empty house -- he had a house-elf. Which reminds me: why didn't the house-elf do anything while Ricky was dragging chickens into the living room?)
This is a great description -- but grammatically, it's a sentence fragment, and a very long one. Also, too many adverbs. And the word you want is "lankly," not "lankily."
So, here's a really nitpicky point: this is an example of where the dialog is just a bit... off. It's probably due to the way it sounds to American ears. I don't know how this would usually be expressed in British English, but we'd say "...the truth hurts." "Truth hurts" is grammatically correct also, but using "truth" as an abstract unquantifiable noun in that sense, in this expression, just doesn't sound quite right, and makes this ten-year old sound a tiny bit stilted. It's little things like this all through your dialog that sometimes throw me off; it's rarely anything that's ungrammatical or hard to understand, it's just not the way casual conversation sounds.
So, Ricky and Lapo are going to get themselves in trouble... I continue to enjoy the fairy tale nature of this story.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-02 07:13 pm (UTC)Ouch! Damn right. Of course I should have said the opposite. Shall be corrected.
"Truth hurts" is how I heard English children. Actually, as I have to write this in my mind both in Italian and in English, "the truth hurts" would be a bit easier, because Italian would always use the article.
you built up the scenery and the environment better, and have described a few more characters.
Thank you, I meant to. As I said a couple of stories ago, this series is meant to reach outwards with the growth of the child and his perceptions. I may want to go back and write a short story about Ricky and his siblings early on, if I get a decent idea, because that is the kind of family background that comes before anything else and that I haven't done as well as I might have.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-02 07:37 pm (UTC)Also, one other nitpick, while I'm at it:
Ricky has already been introduced. You gave his full name and an explanation of it back in the first chapter, and he's been "Ricky" all through this chapter. So if you want to use his full name here for emphasis ("Anastasio Attanasio was not quite like other children..."), adding "called Ricky" is confusing, because we already know he's called Ricky, so it sounds like you're reintroducing the character.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-02 07:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-06 05:49 am (UTC)