by Hana Cole
Etienne comes skidding over the tiles to find the boy sitting in the corner, knees pulled up to his chest. He is a total stranger. Disappointment dips Etienne’s shoulders as he takes him in. Pale, doughy skin, the boy has a nest of ginger hair and a dusting of freckles over his round face.
‘I’m Etienne.’ He cocks his head to one side. ‘Alberto says you’re French?’
The boy’s face crumples like he is about to cry.
Alberto rolls his eyes. ‘Maybe we leave you two to talk.’
‘What’s your name?’ Etienne tries again. ‘Did you come on the boats?’
The boy winces like he is trying to duck a beating.
‘Please tell me your name. I’ve so wanted to have someone to talk French to.’
The ginger-haired boy mutters something into his knees. Etienne cranes forward and the boy repeats. ‘Christophe.’
‘Where are you from Christophe?’
The straw-coloured eyelashes blink rapidly. ‘Saintes.’
‘Saintes. You are not a shepherd then?’
Christophe shakes his head. Etienne instinctively wants to give him some reassurance, but as he reaches for it the platitude dies in his throat. He thought that meeting someone else from his country would make him feel better, but as he rummages up a smile for the terrified boy, he realises that the encounter has made him feel worse. What’s the point of being able to speak your own tongue if you can’t say what you want?
Just one look at the shell of a boy in front of him tells him he can’t talk to Christophe, not properly, like you do with real friends. Christophe is too brittle for the truth. And the truth is that it is not alright. The governor’s palace is not the slave boats, but the cool marble luxury that surrounds them, the rippling fountains, the lush gardens, the silver plates brimming with juicy little balls of lamb and dates are as far away from them as the King of France’s table. The truth is they are hardly freer here than they were on the boats.
He thinks there is probably a way to leave the governor’s palace, but he is almost certain that if he tried he would likely end up worse off, maybe even back at the slave market. It is funny to think that the best thing about Montoire had been the fact that he could leave if he wanted. That and his mother. The only person in the world who would still love him, no matter what idiot things he got up to. It makes him sad to think that she most probably thinks he is dead, or at least lost forever. Maybe I am lost forever, he thinks.
He looks down at the shipwrecked French boy slumped on the floor, and tries to shift the rancour he feels towards him for reminding him of home.
‘I have to get back to find out my tasks before lunch is over,’ he says. ‘Alberto says it’s the only break I’ll get for a while.’ With that he steps outside, pupils shrinking under the fierce, white glare of the sun.
Chapter Twenty
‘Bad weather?’ The old man’s face was impassive, although Gui fancied he was amused. ‘Well that depends on what kind of bad weather you’re talking about. The wrong bad weather and you’ll finish on the bottom of the sea with your Roman galleys and long boats from the North.’
‘I’m sure of it. But what about a better starred, bad weather?’
The navigator sniffed the air. It was hard to tell his age. His skin was weathered and couperose but looked as though it had been that way for a very long time and would still have the same aspect in twenty years. The corner of the man’s lip lifted and he nudged his cap up over his brow with a thick, knotted finger.
‘You think it’s not possible to smell fair weather after forty years at sea?’
‘If you tell me it is so.’
The blue eyes crinkled. ‘You are not a merchant, are you?’
Gui felt his neck prickle beneath the collar of his stolen cloak. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re too honest. That is what I mean.’
‘I am not a sea-farer,’ Gui replied. At least that was honest. ‘I’m journeying on behalf of my business partners.’
The old man’s eyes travelled over Gui’s clothes, and he gave a slow nod of comprehension. ‘If you say so.’
A moment of total stillness radiated from him. Time itself seemed to part like waves about them. Gui felt his body yield its tension to the old man’s unspoken understanding that before him was someone in desperate need of help. Gui heard a voice say, if you don’t speak now, it will be too late. He drew breath, and staring past the other man’s shoulder said, ‘I need to get to Alexandria because there is someone I am looking for.’
The navigator’s reply was a patient pause.
‘My son has been taken.’
‘Slavers?’
Shame cinched Gui’s stomach. ‘Yes.’
‘I’ll give false hope to no one, so I’ll tell you the slave trade is rife and there’s nothing those men won’t do to defend their business.’
Gui’s limbs felt weighted down, a lead line plummeting into the deep.
‘I have to find our son before it’s too late. My wife…I promised…It has only been a few weeks. There must be some way to trace him. Someone must know.’
‘Slow down, son. The men who take these souls do not mean them to be found. Rushing will only serve to trip you up.’
‘You know who they are?’
‘I know most who hazard their lives on these waters.’ The bright blue eyes looked right into Gui’s, and he could feel the man taking the measure of his heart.
‘Your son was taken from Marseille?’
‘He was.’ Gui answered abruptly, as though seeking to distance himself from the words. ‘I think he took the cross with a group of shepherd boys and went to Marseille to find passage overseas.’
It still sounded as absurd to hear it aloud as it had the first time he was forced to explain. It prompted the same, unanswerable question he knew lay coiled in his gut and perhaps always would: how did I let it happen? The navigator rubbed his teeth with his tongue. Gui steeled himself for a paternal admonishment, but all he said was, ‘And the man who robbed you?’
‘A Venetian merchant he claimed. Dark haired, stout, well-dressed. I took his cloak and hat to disguise myself.’
‘There are a thousand thieves at every port, but tell me more.’
‘He gave his name as Enrico Zonta.’ Gui spun the plumed hat around in his hand as though it might tell him something more about the man who poisoned him.
The navigator laughed. ‘I knew Enrico Zonta.’
‘You know Zonta?’
‘Knew him. He had a small fleet. We used to ferry back and forth to Ragusa, Rhodes, Constantinople. Wool and salt mainly. Sometimes wine, dye, house girls from Azov. I scrubbed down his keels in winter.’
‘You’re Venetian?’
‘Slav. From the town of Zadar. My father was a fisherman. He sent me to Venice when I was boy. Said its streets brimmed with gold.’
‘I thought that was Constantinople.’
‘It’s all Venetian gold now.’
From the upper deck one of the crew signalled to him, a silhouette against the morning sky. The navigator tipped his cap in reply – their talisman, acknowlegding all was well.
‘I was a boy then. Enrico Zonta is long dead. Your man might be a Venetian slaver, but most of them that trade in Christians prefer to keep their identity to themselves. Their Senate may turn a blind eye until they have reason not to, but who can tell the why and when of that?’
‘Well, this man has made that name his own. He had a mark on his neck. A purple birth stain.’
‘I’ll ask the crew.’
The galley was crossing the wake of a fishing boat and for a moment everything was drowned by the screech of sea birds. The coastline of Sicily lost to the waves, the boat it slid up and down on the swell.
‘Which direction is Alexandria?’ Gui asked, as if an answer might help him find his bearings.
‘The same direction the wind is coming from now,’ the navigator said.
Gui swivelled round to face the wind. The air sucked
his breath away. He trained his attention on the furthest point he could see, trying to conjure the shore into view. But the only reply was the grey chop of the waves against the boat and the cry of seabirds. He peered over the gunwale. A shiver fingered his spine.
He knew how to swim. Unseated while crossing a brook one summer, his father had been seized by the whim to teach his sons. A length of rope at his side, he forced the boys into a pond, its waters green from the stagnant heat. Gui recalled the panic as the water folded over him, how quickly his limbs had tired as he thrashed to keep his head above the water’s slimy coat. Lungs exploding, he and Simon had begged to be pulled out, pawing for the rope while their father barked at them from the bank. Gui had tried to beat away the water, the weight of his clothes dragging him down, confusion swamping his heart – is my father really going let me drown?
He had learned how to swim alright, but Etienne hadn’t. The thought of it turned his stomach. Gui closed his eyes, trying to remove the distance between him and his destination. It felt as though the water of all the seas was pushing down on his chest. Eyes still scrunched tight, he whispered,‘Please hold on. Your father is coming.’ The idea that his son may now never hear the words he longed to say made him want to howl.
*
The smell of the sea and spices mingled on the warm air adding a sweet fragrance to the stink of life. Gui scuffed his feet in the dust. Had this been Etienne’s first sight of land? There were a dozen or so ships anchored; cogs from the North with their square sterns and round, cargo-hungry bellies, sleek-silhouetted galleys, the bearers of luxury goods, and behind them, drifting in the channel, the angled lateens of river-bound Egyptian vessels. What lay beneath their decks? Wine? Oil? A hold of frightened children?
Even if their cargoes were pottery from Iraq, linens from Flanders, salt from the Occitan marshes, someone must know of those other, renegade boats. Someone must hear the cries of their haul, like calves newly separated from their mothers, full of white-eyed terror. The urge to search each one of them tore Gui’s gaze in every direction.
‘Your man, Zonta. He’s from Veneto all right, the mainland. Got as many names as he does tunics but we think he was born Roberto Sandolin.’
Gui started at the navigator’s voice. The old man rocked back on his heels, inhaling the harbour air contentedly, as though returning to a once familiar hearth.
‘He’s a small time trader for his own account and does some legitmate business with the Church. But makes his real money as a middle man to freebooters and slavers.’
Robbed of words, Gui found a business-like nod of gratitude for the mariner.
‘I’m sorry, son.’
The man’s sympathy stung Gui’s eyes, forcing them to the horizon where the sun was emerging, a flood of light burning away the deep pinks of the dawn.
‘Who is his master in this business?’
‘Money.’ The old man scratched his forehead. ‘The slave trade is the fastest growing business in the world. Men are growing fatter than kings from it. They get greedy, take more risk. And they aren’t going to let someone like you get in their way.’
Gui’s jaw tightened. ‘They took my son.’
‘See them.’ The old Slav’s head twitched in the direction of a cog that had docked alongside them. A group of light-blind slaves shuffled down the gangplank, pooling on the hard under the eye of three dockers who set about inspecting them.
‘They’re going to the slave market. If your son docked here then someone there knows what happened to him.’
Brow pinched, Gui watched as the men prodded at the slaves, binding them in small groups while their other cargo was checked by a reed-thin customs inspector, a large pouch at his waist and an armed guard at his side. Light-skinned girls with slanting, feline eyes, older boys of North African appearance, and scattered among them, ebony-skinned children who looked no more than five or six years old.
‘For the love of God, they’re only children,’ he whisphered. The idea that his son had been goaded like livestock twisted his guts with a hot, urgent rage that made him want to tear them out.
‘They are the lucky ones,’ said the navigator. ‘It means their households want them young enough to convert, teach them their customs. One day they’ll be more than likely be freed.’
‘Convert them? Are they heathen?’
‘Some. The rest are Christians. It’s forbidden for the Mohammedans to take a fellow Mohammedan as a slave. Unless they’re skin is black enough. Then they make all sorts of excuses.’
‘But those merchants are Europeans.’ Even as he spoke Gui could hear the childlike outrage pitch in his own voice. ‘It is forbidden for them to trade in Christians.’
‘Not over here it’s not.’
‘Do they have no fear of the penalty back home?’
Sharp, blue eyes twinkling under sagging lids, the navigator’s bearded lips parted in laughter. ‘At the dock they sometimes send a local Catholic priest onboard to inspect. It’s he who decides whether the slaves are Christians.’
‘And if they find Christians?’
‘Depends where they are and who’s paying. Sometimes they send ‘em back to where they came from. Orphanage, workhouse. Or they lie and call them Mohammedans. Sometimes they’ll sell ‘em on undeclared as contraband. Tax free profit.’
‘Sell them to whom?’
‘Mohammedans take Christian as slaves just as freely as the Italians take heathens. Pagans in the Crimea will pay highly for a fair European.’
‘Crimea? The land of the Tartars?’ To his embarrassment, Gui heard the tremor his voice. He rubbed his palm over his mouth. Hidden under months of beard growth, his face felt as coarse and unfamiliar to him as the place he was standing.
The navigator let his shoulders slump in a sad pause. He put a hand on Gui’s arm. ‘If you need help, look for a friend of mine. A lady called Yalda. She works out of rooms at the end of the copperware market. You’ll see the blue tiles that mark her door. She knows all you need to know about that market. Tell her Dušan sent you.’
The old man held out a flask. ‘It’s plum wine from my fruit orchard. In my land no-one starts their day without it.’
A slug of the fiery liquid shook Gui from his grim trance. He found a smirk for the old seafarer. ‘There are many wars?’
The navigator nodded slyly. ‘Fighting is good for men. Now and again.’ Gui offered him back the flask and but he returned his hand.
‘Keep it. And remember that each time you drink.’
*
Slender, painted fingers drew back the grille. ‘Who is it?’ The woman’s voice was deep and soft, like an unspoken invitation to recline. It caught Gui off guard.
‘The navigator of the Sea Phantom sent me,’ he stammered.
‘Dušan?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please wait.’
The grille closed, and Gui was left standing alone in the street. There was a dead seabird at his feet that had been part scavenged by a dog. It stank. Death smelt worse than shit, he thought. Two sets of brown eyes passed by, their owners concealed under black robes. Briefly they took in the foreigner standing outside the brothel. There was no mistaking the judgement they made as they hurried on. He turned his back to the street, arm resting on the doorframe, resisting the urge to knock again.
‘I am Yalda.’ The world seemed to stall as the beautiful prostitue opened the door. Her kohl-rimmed lashes fell down his body, in expert assessment of his means.
Yalda wore a continuous piece of fabric, wrapped skilfully over her body, permitting a glimpse of flesh at the waist and the cleavage. It was deep blue with a golden weft and it shimmered even in the dim light of her salon. Black hair loose beneath a gossamer veil, she wore a gold chain around her ankle. She looked the way that Gui had imagined a whore might look before he had encountered the bare-breasted portside workers at Marseille who called out for his coin with ribald laughter.
‘I don’t work in the morning. I can make you an appoi
ntment for this afternoon,’ she said.
‘No, no.’ Gui coloured. ‘I’m sorry. Dušan said you might be able to help me with some information. I don’t want to take too much of your time.’
‘Information?’ Yalda cocked her head one side.
‘I can pay, of course,’ Gui said hastily.
She smelt of jasmine and she floated over the tiled floor as though she and the fabric were one. ‘Payment won’t be necessary. I am successful enough,’ she said, melting down onto a floor cushion.
Gui felt his neck grow hot.
‘Please, go on.’
‘My son was taken in Marseille by slave traffickers. I have reason to believe he has been brought here. The navigator said you know something of this trade.’
‘I do.’ She ran a finger under her bracelets, dropping them as he noticed a silvery knot of scarring they concealed.
‘I was taken from my hometown in Syria and brought here. Fifteen years gone now. I escaped, with the help of Dušan, and made myself a living here with the only opportunity I was left with.’
‘I need to know where my son has been taken. Dušan said you might know who to ask.’
Yalda ran her hand over her arm, and Gui saw the accomplished mask of the courtesan slip.
‘I knew. Once.’ The beautiful prostitute looked away. Gui leant towards her, the quicksilver of desperation chasing through his veins. Fingers interlaced in supplication, he said, ‘Please. I have no other clues. If you can help, then I implore you.’
Yalda moistened her lips. ‘These men,’ she began, ‘you cannot imagine what they are.’
‘Oh, I’m sure I can.’
‘No, really.’ Yalda stared back, eyes glistening. ‘Believe me when I say you cannot.’
He glanced down. ‘Back in Corsica, I found one of their ships.’
Gui saw her shoulders stiffen. She shook her head.
‘If I help you, start asking questions, then…I have no other home.’ She pressed her palm to her cheek as though she were blotting invisible tears. ‘It’s been many years since I have dwelt on it.’
Sensing that a clue to Etienne’s fate was slipping away, Gui rose to his knees, suddenly animated. ‘There was a man who tried to poison me in Messina, Roberto Sandolin. Goes also by the name of Enrico Zonta. I am sure he is involved in this trade. There must be other working with him here. This dog trades in Christian souls!’