The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird Read Online Free PDF Page B

felt a thrill when we had worked out the nature of the spirit from a concentration camp that had plagued Signora Galeazzo, or when my demon had recited ancient Greek the third time I had encountered him. Or when he’d spouted poetry.
    Because I knew now that my demon was a poet. Or at leasthe recited poems. I have memorized the lines he spoke to me in Italian:
    No, brothers, when I die I will not feel
    cool coins on my eyes, nor the Trojan bronze
    that pulled my breath with it when it withdrew
—
    but brothers, by Hera I beg of you:
    no soldier’s songs when the gluttonous fires
    lick at my corpse on our sandy pyre
,
    no “he died for our cause,” no show of spears
—
    for I will feel those lies, those words that praise
    this waste of men and boys and harvest days
.
    Better for me if this vast field of spears
    had been spears of wheat in my Sparta’s fields
,
    and far better for us to outlive our fame
,
    for mouths are not fed by a hero’s name
—
    better my firm sword arm should only wield
    my cup—let it shake as I gray and die
,
    at peace with men—with gods—with soil and sky
.
    I have only ever heard this sonnet once, recited to me by a startled boy my demon had borrowed for a mouthpiece. But I remember every word of it, and I made sure to write it down afterward.
    “Poetry!” I said aloud, breaking out of my thoughts.
    “What?” asked Nonno, who had been gazing thoughtfully at his sketch of the ring.
    “I’ve got to start trying to find that poem by my demon.”
    Giuliano knit his brows. “You haven’t found it yet?”
    “No, of course not. I haven’t started looking,” I grumbled.
    “Well,” he said, “I should scold you. But your freedom is so new to you, and as far as I can tell, that bell around your neck is giving you some time.”
    He paused, then looked at me. “No. I will scold you. Find the poem, Mia!”
    He cuffed my shoulder. Then he stood up, putting his notebook away in a desk drawer and tidying the books with swift hands.
    “In fact, come!” he said, grabbing his coat off the back of his chair. He paused at the door and asked, “Do you have the poem in your notebook?”
    I stared at him, even more annoyed by this question than by his pompousness or his peremptory command. “Yes, it’s in my purse.”
    “Good. We’ll take that walk now,” he added as I scrambled into my coat and followed him out the door into the freezing industrial fog of February. I pulled my scarf from my pocket and twisted it around my neck; I’d found it at the Thursday market in the Via San Marco, one of the first Italian things I’d ever bought for myself, edged with dangling circles of lace. I matched Nonno’s quick step as he turned down the Via Breratoward the center of the city. We threaded our way through the art students in front of the Pinacoteca, dodging their giant portfolios, and headed out of the pocket-size piazza into the narrow part of the Via Brera, before it crosses Via Monte di Pietà and Via dell’Orso, and the people stop being students and start being NATO and EU employees.
    “We are going,” said Nonno, “to a place where you can look for the poem. I know I said you should go to the Parco Sempione, but we are out in the fresh air, now—or fresh fog anyway—so let us go to the library first.”
    We turned right at La Scala, and I wondered if Emilio was going to get us tickets to the opera, like he’d said he would. All I knew of opera involved scratchy dresses and long songs that made no sense, so I hoped he wouldn’t. We headed down the Via Santa Margherita and crossed the Piazza dei Mercanti, past the ancient, covered marketplace that gave the square its name. I asked Nonno to slow down so I could look at the great iron horse rings in the walls, the high arches over the empty, raised platform where the market had once stood.
    “One of the oldest buildings in the city, covered with the young,” Nonno said, laughing. There were people my age all over the steps and