"Chelsea Quinn Yarbro - St Germain 2 - The Palace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yarbro Chelsea Quinn)

seal, a blue hand upraised on a field of red and white lozenges
Francesco Ragoczy da San Germano, alchemist, stragnero his seal, the eclipse on
a field of silver
 witnesses:


Tommaso Doatti Capella, jewel merchant, Veronese
Laurenzo di Piero de' Medici, banker, Fiorenzeno

1
In spite of the cold wind, Gasparo Tucchio was sweating. He swung the ninth
sack of gravel onto his broad shoulder and began the careful, dangerous walk down
into the large pit that would be the foundation of the foreigner's new palazzo. He
shifted the weight experimentally and swore.
"Ei! Gaspar', not so fast!" Lodovico da Roncale said as he, too, shouldered a
load. "Careful, careful, do not slip," he said somewhat breathlessly as they made
their way into the excavation.
"Damned foreigner," Gasparo muttered as he took careful, mincing steps down
the steep incline. " 'Dig it out to half again the height of a man,' he says. 'Fill it a
hand's breadth with gravel,' he says. He will supply us with cement, he says. He will
tell us how to mix it. Arrogant. Arrogant. He wants the gravel level, he wants the
corner mountings dug down even farther. He must think he's some kind of old
Roman."
Behind him Lodovico chuckled through his panting. "You're too stiff-rumped,
Gaspar'. Even foreigners have good ideas once in a while."
Gasparo snorted. "I've been a builder all my life, and so was my father before me.
He helped raise the Duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore. I've worked every day that I
could since I grew a beard, and never, never have I worked on anything like this. Say
what you want, Ragoczy is mad." To punctuate this opinion he swung the sack off
his shoulder and onto the floor of the deep, broad pit.
"Good, good," said Enrico, their supervisor, as the sacks were spilled out.
"Another five or more sacks and there will be enough."
"Five?" Gasparo demanded. "It's too cold. It's late. Sundown comes soon. We
can finish tomorrow."
Enrico smiled blandly. "If you carry one more, and Lodovico carries one more,
and if Giuseppe and Carlo bring down their sacks now, and carry one more each,
then there will be six sacks. It is not too difficult, Gasparo."
Gasparo made no reply. He glared at the carefully dug hole and shook his head.
"I don't understand it," he said to himself.
Giuseppe dropped his sack of gravel beside Gasparo's. "What do you not
understand, you old fake?" His leather doublet was open to the waist, so that his
rough-woven shirt hung loosely around him. "You hate work, that's all. It wouldn't
matter if Laurenzo himself had ordered the work, you'd still complain."
 The others laughed at this, nodding their agreement, which annoyed Gasparo.
"Are you so eager to work for that foreigner, then? When have any of you been told
how to make a building? It isn't right." He kicked tentatively at the gravel already
spread over most of the bottom of the excavation. "If he were here, I'd tell him what
I think, that's all."
An amused, beautifully modulated voice spoke from above. "And what would
you say to me?"