June 4, 1815
Corsica
Her given name was Maria Saveria, but her father just called her
Rabulliona, and laughed when he said it. [1] To her mother she was usually "
Mia Croce." [2] She preferred her father's nickname. If it came down to it, she preferred her father.
She was running.
Somewhere behind her was a pair of thin little-girl shoes, so the sound of barefeet slapping on cobbles and squelching in sandy mud followed her downhill. Her feet, oddly long and thin (like, truth be told, the rest of her) sent neat jets of water flying out to mark her path. It was raining now, and she hadn't gone back, so there was nothing for it but to get well out of earshot before trouble started.
Her mother would never have believed it, but there had been a long aching moment of hesitation before she burst down the hill, long black hair flying. Saveria had come out of the villa meaning merely to walk over a few hills to play in the desultory little patch of trees that passed as nearest thing to a wood in the area. There might have been other children there, though probably only boys. The prospect didn't particularly bother her. She had no more problem with boys her own age, who tended to be afraid of her, than she did with the older ones, who ignored her entirely.
Her plans had changed the moment she cleared the wall around the garden, and her view expanded from one of Ajaccio to the east to the sea stretching out southwards. The day had not been entirely cloudless, but now a storm was coming at her in a rush. A dark grey beast with a black underbelly, it was already sending a wind out ahead of it. Her dress had whipped up against her for an instant when she stopped. Against all the imaginings of her mother, she really didn't enjoy ruining her clothes. To go out now would mean a muddied skirt at least, if not torn, and that would mean the end of the poor garment. Saveria's mother would not have her daughter seen in a "ruined" dress. As she was wont to say, "No child with the cousins
she has will go about in rags."
So Saveria hung motionless at the point where the hill dropped from the garden wall toward the last pastures and the sea, and she watched the storm come. The storm seemed to her a personal affront. She had been hoping for an escape from the villa for three endless days now. More and more, propriety had forced her away from her father's protection into the hands of her mother, who was grimly determined to forge something like a woman from her troublesome child. This year had been the worst, and sometimes it seemed her mother intended for her not to go playing in the hills
at all (it had not yet occurred to Saveria that this might be literal truth). She had sat primly, and deferred politely, and now finally she was free and out of confinement and... and...
this!
Decision came with the first faint splattering of raindrops, driven by the wind to stinging intensity. She blinked and stepped back, as if from an attack. That set it. It was a second's intuitive leap from the thought that the storm seemed meant to spoil her fun to the sincere belief that it was meant to drive her back into that house. Go back and spend the day bored and fidgeting - for a storm? Let it blow her away if it could!
There had been no transition from standing on the hill to sprinting down it. One moment she was a picture waif, looking only slightly out of place in a girls dress, the next she was all scrawny flying arms and legs, hair out behind like a pennant.
At first she angled south toward the wood, where she'd meant to go in the first place. The wind though, was blowing into her side, a constant galling interference. There was no option but to turn into it and let it do its worst. She shot down one long hill into a disappointing lull then up the next into a blast of spray already sharper than the last. A thought flickered through her mind for an instant - when had a storm ever come so suddenly this time of year, much less one like this? She spent no worry on it. She was caught up in a joyous defiance. Energy seemed to be in the air, the storm egging her on to greater feats just as she defied it to stop her. Stop
her! She laughed.
Then she was at the top of a rise she new, a long slow curve down to the water with a lip curling up just above the stony beach. The heart of the storm had come, and the light of mid-evening was almost obliterated in the face of it. A brilliant bolt of lightning slit through the darkness and left a faint glowing circle of light in the spot where it struck the ocean. In its light a cluster of dark shapes jerked startled on the beach at the light and thunder. She laughed again, louder. It was such a
scene! Wind won't do it, or water, or mud, so put out the lights and make a big noise and - sure - let's have some mysterious shapes in the distance.
That will make the little girl go running back home!
She let out an intense burst of speed, and flew down to the beach. She ran straight at an awkward rock pressing out of the scrub and hurdled it, heedless of what might lay behind it. It was the sort of idiotic rush that only a child could survive. When the ground turned to brown liquid beneath her she didn't bother with anything so prosaic as balance, but rode on her side five feet, changed direction by grabbing a crippled dwarf of a tree, and was up and charging into the rain again without a pause.
Below her the dark shapes caught sight of her. Froze. Scattered. She rode the hill as much as she ran on it, and straight into their midst. Somewhere... there! Was a rock dramatically thrust up just beyond the lip of the cliff; you could jump that far if you had the speed....
She was at the nadir, coming up the lip, and then leaping like some night ape: arms and legs spread-eagled, brown eyes wide and alive. The little creatures on the beach cried out, at least one in obvious terror. There camp a damp *fwoomp* sound. She landed on all fours with her long fingered hands already gripping the where she knew the edges of the rock were. The figures around her resolved themselves into gun-armed men, staring at her open-mouthed, and boats pulled onto the rocks behind them.
"
Gesumaria, Pizzina! [3] I could have killed you!"
It was the final touch. Her laughter came again, cold and high this time like the shrieking cry of a valkyrie. And with that, Maria Saveria Buonaparte turned and disappeared from history.
Or at least from a decade of it.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Roberto Luccarini dropped his rifle with shaking hands. Let the others lead the way on this one. That had been far too close. The men around them were already set about turning what they had just seen into a soldier's myth, but he... He would carry the flag for the duration.
A moment later he hefted the pole and glanced between the rock thrust like a thumb against the sky, and the tricolor-shield-and-crown the wind was trying to pull from his hand. He shrugged, "
Viva il re!"
[1] If you get that reference, it's a gold star.
[2] "My cross," in Italian.
[3] Jesus and Mary, girl! Or at least my token effort in Sardinian dialect.
[4] Trying to get the image...
