Let the Mountains Be My Grave, page 1
LET THE MOUNTAINS BE MY GRAVE
FRANCESCA TACCHI
Neon Hemlock Press
www.neonhemlock.com
@neonhemlock
© 2022 Francesca Tacchi
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Let the Mountains Be My Grave
Francesca Tacchi
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
This novella is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Cover Illustration by Mia Carnevale
Cover Design by dave ring
Interior Illustration by Matthew Spencer
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Print ISBN-13: 978-1-952086-40-3
Ebook ISBN-13: 978-1-952086-41-0
Created with Vellum
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Press
To the Landing Pigeons, may we all soar one day
“Se voi volete andare in pellegrinaggio nel luogo dove è nata la nostra costituzione, andate nelle montagne dove caddero i partigiani, nelle carceri dove furono imprigionati, nei campi dove furono impiccati. Dovunque è morto un italiano per riscattare la libertà e la dignità, andate lì, o giovani, col pensiero, perché lì è nata la nostra costituzione.”
— Piero Calamandrei
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“Sta rottura de’ coglioni dei fascisti”
— Sig. Ivano
1
Every day is a good day to kill Nazis, I always say.
Rame is belly down on the rocks, a blade of grass between his teeth and an excited smile curving his lips. A low whistle pierces the air, like the cry of a hawk.
Rame’s eyes glint amidst the dirt smeared on his face.
“That’s the signal,” he says. “The fuckers should turn that corner over there any second now.” He grabs his rifle and crawls toward the edge of the cliff, glancing at the trail below. “Aren’t you excited?”
I tighten the grip on my own rifle, the frantic beating of my heart deafening to my ears. “No, not really.” Excited is not the word I’d use. Hungry would be more fitting.
Rame misinterprets my words, though. He purses his lips. “You’re such a killjoy, Veleno.”
I close my eyes, inhaling the sharp air of the Lazio mountains. Fascists beat my uncle to death. Fascists put my father on a train and shipped him who-knows-where, never to come back. “Oh, trust me,” I hiss, “I’m still gonna enjoy shooting the shit out of those Nazi pigs.”
Rame grins and focuses back on the trail below, a rocky road barely large enough for two horses side by side. The clanking of stones and a small cloud of dust announces the arrival of the Nazi supply cart, and sure as death, the rest of its bulk rounds the corner, one soldier riding the horse—a gaunt black stallion—four walking next to the cart, rifles on their shoulders. Not a worry in their minds.
“The rider’s mine.” I pull the trigger before Rame can answer. My shoulders tense in anticipation as the bullet leaves the muzzle. The Nazi’s head jerks back, blood blossoming like a red flower between his eyes. The soldier closest to him barely has time to shout before Rame’s bullet cuts his voice away, lodging itself in his throat and spraying red like a fountain all around him.
The horse neighs in terror, kicking the cart with its hind legs and freeing itself from the harness. The sheer force of its kicks sends the cart crashing on the rocks that line the road, and the beast gallops away, terrified of blood and the shouts of the remaining three soldiers, who are now fumbling to aim their weapons. Slow, too slow.
“Eat lead, fuckers!” Rame yells, his words leaking adrenaline, and another Nazi falls down. I clench my teeth and aim for the other two. Aim, shoot, aim, shoot. One after the other, my bullets find their way right into my enemy’s chests. The Nazi pigs both go down, their blood mixing with the dust of my unforgiving mountains.
Rame rolls on his back and howls, punching at the sky in childlike joy.
Joining the partisans, for him, was a calling. He’s a communist to the core, dreaming of revolutions, moved by an ideal. Me, I joined because I wanted vengeance. What moves me is not the promise of a better future, it’s a rage that shakes bones. A rage that doesn’t leave space for joy.
The corpses below us are too distant for me to make out their faces, but I spit in their direction anyway. “Rot in hell,” I whisper.
Rame chuckles. “Religion is the opium of the masses,” he quotes, then runs a hand through his copper hair. His forehead is the only part of his face not covered in dirt—camouflage paint, he calls it. “Should we check the cart? Maybe there’s something we can smuggle back to the camp.”
“Yup, go check it, I’ll cover you just in case.”
He rubs his hands and gets up from his hiding spot. Then his shoulder explodes into a burst of red.
He falls back screaming and adrenaline invades my veins like liquid fire. I want to sprint over to him and check his wound. But I can hear him moaning, and if he’s moaning that means he’s alive, and if he’s alive he can wait for a couple of seconds until I shoot dead the fucker who dared harm him.
My heart races and pushes against my ribcage. I can’t breathe, can’t even focus my own eyes to aim, the image of Rame writhing in pain next to me burned in my mind.
Ignore him, I tell myself. Kill first, tend to him later.
I blink, and my vision regains focus. And...there! Behind the upturned cart, another Nazi pig. I can barely make out the muzzle of his rifle and the tip of his head. Idiot’s not even wearing a helmet.
My first shot is wide, and I curse between my teeth. Focus, focus, don’t think of Rame thrashing in pain, don’t linger on his curses...the Nazi straightens up from behind the cart, his rifle ready. His bullet scrapes the rock beside me, an inch from my forehead.
I smile. “Better luck next time.” I pull the trigger and the Nazi falls, smearing red on the rocks behind him.
There’s no time for me to relax, though. I let two seconds pass, barely enough to make sure there are no other soldiers hiding behind the cart, then I hurry over to Rame. He’s lying in a pool of blood, his face ashen white beneath the dirt. The bullet must have cut through an artery or something.
“Marx and Lenin, am I dying?” he asks between gritted teeth, his breath labored.
I fumble in my jacket’s pockets. He lost so much blood already, he would bleed dry before we reach the camp. And even if we got there in time, our brigata lacks the medical equipment to treat a wound this deep. He’s dying.
The good thing is, death is something I can stop.
Finally, my fingers close around the gold ring tucked inside my right pocket. It’s an old ring, been in my family for God knows how long, fashioned in the shape of a coiled snake. The sun glints off its scales as I press it to Rame’s wound, forcing it inside his tender flesh.
Then, ignoring my friend’s curses, I mutter the name my grandmother taught me to call whenever I need to perform healing magic. “Angitia.”
My skin crawls, as if something’s slithering beneath my jacket, coiling around my shoulders and down to my arms, to my hands pressed on Rame’s wound.
Rame’s breath catches in his throat, his eyes turning backward so only the whites show. A gust of wind sweeps the world away. The rocks around us turn to dust. The color of the sky changes from a bright blue to a deep black. The ground behind us shifts, and we’re not in the mountains of Lazio any more, but resting on soft snake skin. Two hands are cupping us, big as a mountain, made of thousands upon thousands of snakes coiled together. Two eyes open in the darkened sky, yellow irises and pupils as vertical slits.
The snakes hiss in unison, and somehow, I understand what they are saying.
You are cured.
And just like that, the vision stops.
I’ve used Angitia’s ring to heal dozens of wounds, but each time it’s just as disturbing as the last.
We’re back in the mountains, back under the blue sky of May, my hands stained with Rame’s blood. His wound is gone. I take in a deep breath, relaxing the muscles in my back, shuddering as the sensation of crawling snakes subsides.
“You’re good to go, Rame,” I say, patting his healed shoulder.
He opens his eyes and drags himself up on his elbows. “The fucker who shot me?” he asks, first thing, and I gift him a ruthless smile.
“Dead,” I answer, and pocket Angitia’s ring.
Rame rubs his shoulder, then moves his arm up and down. He whistles. “Perfect,” he says. “Still hurts like hell, but could’ve been worse.”
Death is something I’ve almost made my peace with. I know I probably won’t hit my twenty-first birthday. Rame and I won’t grow old together, our life will be a short, intense burst—this is what being a partisan means. What matters is that we take as many Nazis as we can down with us.
Still, I don’t like how close a call it was this time. I don’t like it at all. I lean down on Rame and hug him fiercely.
“Fuck those Nazis,” I say.
Rame laughs and kisses my neck. “Yeah, fuck them.”
2
Rame walks the trail back to the camp with a jolt in his steps. “Well, that was easy.”
“Except for the part where you almost died.” I stopped to wash my hands in a stream, but I can still feel his warm and sticky blood on my skin.
He grins at me. “Good thing my partner’s anointed to a goddess of healing, then.”
We descend between rhododendron bushes, their flowers a bright pink. The mountains around us are eerily quiet, our voices the only sounds carried by the wind. These are the few moments in which I allow myself to feel at peace. The quiet after the battle, just me and Rame and nothing else.
The corpse of the Nazi who harmed Rame, resting in a pool of his own blood, flashes back in my mind. A smile stretches my lips. “They’re getting sloppier, that’s true. Almost make me think we can win the war.”
“Oh, we will win. But freeing Italy from Nazi-fascist scum is just the first step,” Rame says. He fishes a toothpick out of his pockets and holds it between his teeth. “This resistance we joined...it’s setting a revolution in motion. A mass movement that should aim not just at freeing our country, but at radically transforming it into a socialist state.”
I grunt, swinging my rifle above my shoulder. I’ve learned long ago not to argue with Rame when he goes off on one of his communist rants. He grins at me, chewing on his toothpick. “This war...this war’s a mess. We find ourselves with the strangest bedfellows—the Catholics, the monarchists, the Action Party. But we shouldn’t forget that after this war, we’ll have to fight each other. The war for the people, our real war against capital. Because you see...it all comes down to capital. When the people don’t hold control over the means of production, then it’s only natural that Nazi-fascist regimes are born.’
I hold my tongue. To anyone else, I’d say that I really don’t care about politics, that I was born and raised in Cocullo and never studied further than primary school, so these talks about capital and seizing means of production are gibberish to me. But Rame was a factory worker back in the north, and almost died in a strike. He was fighting an invisible enemy way before joining the Brigate Garibaldi.
He turns to face me, the red handkerchief tied to his neck blending with the red of the blood on his jacket.
“So you see,” he goes on, speaking faster, with barely any pause between the words, “we won’t ever be truly free until every man stands equal.”
“That sounds nice,” I concede.
He grabs my shoulder, shaking me a bit—or at least, trying to. He’s a good head taller than me, but thin as a twig, not a muscle on his bones. I’m built thicker.
“C’mon, Veleno! There must be something that moves you. Something you look forward to accomplishing once this war is over.”
“Right now, I’m looking forward to dinner. Does that count?”
“Well, it’s something at least.”
I don’t have the heart to tell him that the only thing I can see in my future is death. Ever since they put my father on one of their death trains, I swore I’d die fighting Nazis. What is there for me after the war, anyway? What Rame and I have is fun, but he has plans I can’t join, and there’s a spark in him I don’t have. Not for the first time, I feel a pang of jealousy. It must be nice to fight for an ideal. For something greater than vengeance.
The slope gets gentler, rocks and tufts of green giving way to a softer field speckled with yellow and purple flowers. Crickets jump away from my boots, their chirps joining Rame’s humming. He’s singing one of our songs under his breath, his arms resting on his rifle put astride his shoulders.
“…e seppellire lassù in montagna
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao
E seppellire lassù in montagna
Sotto l'ombra di un bel fior…”
I’d ask him to cut it out, but who else is going to hear him up here? We might be surrounded by Nazi forces, a stone’s throw away from the Gustav line, but these mountains...these mountains are ours. The building at the end of the slope is proof of that.
Once a cottage housing sheep and cows, it has long since been taken over by our brigata, and serves now as the headquarters for our operations and as shelter to around seventy people, an entire division.
“Who’s there?” someone calls, and after a second, Folgore’s head appears from behind the gate. His pasty skin shares the same pattern of a viper’s belly, and behind him, framed by the door of the farmhouse, stands a woman with long black hair whipped by an invisible wind. She stares at me with reptile eyes, and a sudden, splitting headache makes me wince.
I blink, and she’s gone like smoke in the wind. Each time I use my ring, these visions haunt me—no more healing for today, if I don’t want to see snakes wherever I look.
Folgore, his skin smooth and human again, lowers his gun. He smiles at us. “Rame and Veleno! Back already?”
“Of course, we’re just that good at killing Nazis,” Rame answers, miming a shot with his fingers.
I nod to Folgore and add my own commentary. “We shot down six of those bastards. There were munitions in the cart, but they were too many for us to carry. Wanted to check with Orso and see if we can send a party to retrieve them,” I say, then pat Rame’s shoulder. “Also, Rame got almost shot in the neck.”
“Emphasis on almost,” he retorts, leaning on me.
Another spike of pain pierces my head, and I wince, pinching the bridge of my nose. I still hear, faintly, the hissing of snakes.
“You alright?” Rame asks..
“Yeah, just a bit tired. I’ll hit the sack, sleep a couple of hours.”
Folgore scratches the back of his head. “Well, I’m afraid that’s not possible. Orso wanted to see you both, something big popped up.” He turns and gestures for us to follow. “Come, he’s waiting in the radio room.”
Rame and I exchange glances, mine confused, his filled with excitement. “Something big, huh?” he says, reaching Folgore with ample strides. “What is it, killing some Nazi brass? Stealing intel?”
Folgore shrugs as we enter the farmhouse. “Don’t know, but everyone was pretty on edge. Word is this one’s come from Clark himself.”
I raise an eyebrow. It’s not rare for our brigata to cooperate with the Allied Forces, but receiving orders directly from General Clark, well...this must be big for sure. Even Rame falls silent, a somber expression darkening his face worse than the dirt he smeared on his cheeks.
Folgore guides us through the building, passing a room full of women unpacking boxes—some of the latest ammunition parachuted by the British. I recognize Staffetta’s dark curls, and wave at her. She answers with a raised fist, her lips as red as the star pinned on her chest.
“Comrade Staffetta,” Rame whistles, and raises his fist as well.
We joined Orso’s division together, the three of us. But now, Rame and I see her rarely, what with the Allied Forces slamming against the Gustav line over and over again—there is just too much to do. Too many Nazis for us to kill, too much secret intel for her to deliver. I miss the nights spent singing and dancing, guns under our arms, heads full of dreams of glory. Leading the revolution for Rame and her, burning as fast as a matchstick for me. A flame devouring as many Nazis as it can before turning to embers.
