by Tanith Lee
He was cruelly sorry about Squashed Ear. He did not even know his true name, but presumably there was a widow.
It was another man’s wife, however, that he meant to see.
When he stepped ashore below the heavenly white dome, no one took much notice. His clothes had the laborer’s look, and his mask was different, a black dog’s short pugnacious snout, complete with whiskers.
They had known the other mask. They had been at pains to show him so.
Of course, they could have waited. Bribed the Amaris to keep quiet. (Would the Amaris have done that? Probably.) Whoever wanted Furian so much was also in no hurry, perhaps even enjoyed this game with a quarry who changed his appearance and ran stealthily away.
“Is Juseppi about?”
“No. No one’s seen Juseppi for a week.”
“A day,” said another.
A third wanderlier, a big man, came up whistling the Song. It was an omen. He bulked before Furian and said, “Hey, Doggy, I can tell you something. What’s it worth?”
“What’s the news?” said Furian, “and I’ll let you know.”
The big man, masked as Juseppi had been, but better, as a large bloated fish, hinged up his mask to reveal a fishy, thick-lipped mouth. “Clever, for a dog.”
Furian said, “I heard he was in difficulties.”
“So what? You’re a carpenter from Silvia, I’ll bet.
What’s a wanderlier to you?”
Someone, negating the omen, pushed the big fish aside and said straight out to Furian, “I heard he died, Juseppi. I was going by this morning. There was a row from his house. He had half the ground floor of the Palace Bertro. From his wife’s family, you see. But she was screaming away. She’s got a loud voice. It was Oh God, my Juseppi, what shall I do?”
“She’s a slut,” said another, “came down here, making a dance. She’s got an eye for a man.”
“Watch out, if you go there,” said another.
“The Palace Bertro?”
“See, he wants to go there now, meet her. It’s on the Blessed Maria Canal. Just behind the Little Church.” Dressed as he was, he should have very poor supplies of money, so he gave them nothing, and walked off, to barks and cries of encouragement.
The Blessed Maria Canal ran narrow and glass-green, and on the balconies above were flowers with the washing. The Palace Bertro had a courtyard before it, where an old woman sat in black like a suitable specter. She had a black cloth mask.
She paid him no heed. Everything was quiet. He went in at the door and was in a large room, its plaster peeling, shimmering with the water reflection through tall latticed windows. Three lean cats eyed him from a passage way out of which now rose a dull, ominous murmur. Then a woman wailed, long and rasping. It sounded more like fury than distress. He had come to the right place.
He knocked at an old door. There was silence now.
After a minute, a thin boy opened the door. He had lank fair hair and a terrified unmasked face. He wore the charcoal gown of the University. He was about fourteen.
“Juseppi,” said Furian, clearly.
“My father.”
“Will you let in.”
“No, Signore. No, no.”
“I want to help your mother.”
“No—no—”
Then, behind the boy, a woman came sweeping and pushed the door wide. Her black hair was half up, half down. She wore a black lace veil over it, askew, and wrapped across her breasts that two men had praised.
Her eyes were rusty from tears, her unmasked face coarse, beautiful, lined and raging.
“Who are you? What? Tell me! What do you know?”
“Nothing, Signora. I used his boat now and then.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I was concerned.”
She flung back her head on the rounded column of her fawn throat. She laughed roughly. The disheveled veil slipped and she yanked it back.
He saw her eyes were also half insane. There was a sort of blindness in their depths—she had been shown some thing that had made it hard for her to look at anything else, or give anything else her judgment.
“Oh come in. Come in. What do I care?”
The boy moved away from the door, and Furian walked into the room.
It was wide and gracious, like the chamber outside, with a terra-cotta floor, and one vast window where a glorious pot of basil towered. At a long table two men with eye-masks sat sullenly, grim-faced, and in the corner was another old woman, masked and wearing black, exactly like the one outside.
Things were scattered. A mending box, very full, (he could not picture her mending), a broom, a chest, open, and spilling sleeves, an overturned stool, soiled dishes set on the floor.
“Have some wine,” said Juseppi’s wife, loudly, scornfully. “Why not?”
“Calypso,” chided one of the men. He got up but at once she let out again a huge almost inhuman scream.
“Leave me alone! In God’s name, haven’t I earned it.”
And she tore her hair, violent, so a slender strand of it came loose in her grip. She waved this at Furian. “I’m not to be trifled with. Not now.”
Furian said, “What happened to him?”
“Oh? You want to know that? You do?”
“Yes, Signora.”
“Come here then. Yes, come and look.”
And she reached out and grasped his hand in her burning claws, and began to pull him—he could imagine her doing it to any man, her son, Juseppi, the Ducem of the City—towards another door.
The first man said, “Calypso—it isn’t fitting—”
The second man said more strongly, “The police will come back. No one else should see.”
“I’ve seen—I have! Let this bastard look.”
She hauled him into the other room. He would have had to use a lot of force to resist her. She was like a tigress.
The boy began to weep suddenly. And at that, her face collapsed like a shaken tawny rose.
“Hush—my love. Be still, Mumma is here.”
Left alone, Furian turned, and saw he was in a bed room. An embroidered rug hung on the wall, and an icon of Beautiful Maria in her magpie blue. There was a star on her forehead that appeared to be an opal. Outside, the boy sobbed as if his heart were breaking. Perhaps he had held it in till now.
Furian saw what lay on the bed, and understood from where the smell had come. The butchering smell of the shops on the Street of Meats.
When he sensed the shadow at the door again, Furian said, “Is this how you found him, Signora?”
“Yes. No. My brothers helped me lay him out. And the women. They’ve seen worse. But he was below in the canal. In a chicken basket in the boat.” Furian made an in voluntary movement. She said, “If you’re going to puke, lean out the window, if you please.”
“I’m all right, Signora.”
He wondered if she had done so. Doubtless not. She was a tigress, after all.
Juseppi had been cut in parts. Head, torso, both arms and both hands, both legs and both feet, (and his penis, under the towel?) had been severed, cleanly, maybe by a butcher’s knife. Everything was now laid together, in the proper line of a body. The blood was old, black and dry.
His face, seen now, since he was maskless, was pathetically peaceful. His eyes had been closed, and had violet bruises beneath them. He was a good-looking, unnotable man.
“Who,” said Furian, “did this, Signora?”
She came into the room and shut the door. The rose was reassembled.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Do you? Is this a threat?
Are you here for them? He offended someone. Tell me what to do.”
“I’m as much in ignorance,” he said, “as you.”
“That’s a pity,” she said. She stepped forward, graceful, took his hand. She put it over her round pale breast, paler than her face and neck, a breast like vanilla, sweet. And then she put her own hand into his crotch.
“You like me,” she said.
“But you’re used to that,” said Furian. He was hard, jumping in her hand.
She said, “I’ve got a nice mouth. Two nice mouths.
I’d wrap you up, carpenter. Yes?”
“You didn’t love him,” said Furian.
Her lips were rouged red. He could taste them.
He took his hand off her breast.
She said, “He was a man.”
As Furian went through the door, she slapped him hard across the back, exactly where the ones who wanted to kill him, and had conceivably killed Juseppi, struck him with the stone.
The boy caught his elbow.
“It’s all right, Signore. Mumma’s a bitch.”
“No,” said Furian, “she’s a tiger. Remember that.”
Outside he leaned over the canal and threw up again. The old woman in the black mask watched impassively. Some where a baby cried, as if it knew it should never have been born.
THERE WAS A CHILD CRYING too in the doorway of the Boatman’s Tavern. A little girl, about four, she stood in her rags while two burly men in eye-masks mocked her.
There seemed to be no reason why.
“Look at the sow. Stinky little whore.”
And the child wept in frozen, non-comprehending horror.
Furian went up to the men and pushed them aside.
He slapped the bigger one hard across the face, so a thread of color issued from his nose.
“Hey—bastard—”
“You want more?” Furian showed the knife at his belt. But they were the cowards he suspected, and dead drunk. One herded the other away up the narrow street: “Don’t tangle with him, he’s mad.”
Furian crouched by the child.
“It’s all right.” She wept. He picked her up and stood with her as she buried her wet face in his neck and hair. Even she had a little eye-mask, made of a rag, soaking now. She smelled of dirt and misery. But her skin was, under its filth, as smooth as his father’s silks.
“Where’s your mumma, Baby?”
She wept.
He carried her into the tavern. From its beams hung lamps on black brass cords, afloat in pipe smoke. A figurehead of Neptune, green-bearded, was propped against the bar.
“Whose child is this?”
The young woman with a lizard’s mask said, “Mine, Signore. Useless, she is. You want to buy her?” It was only partly a jest.
He set the child on the bar, and wiped her face with his sleeve. She had let go of him at once, used to being abandoned.
“Brandy.”
“Get to the dishes, you,” said the woman to the child, who slipped down and hurried to obey.
Furian took the bottle and the unclean glass, and went to sit on a bench among the wanderliers. There were others there, tradesmen of various types, a poulterer reeking of fowls.
Furian sat thinking for a while. He listened to their talk. It was of nothing.
A man rose at length and loomed over Furian.
“What’s your business, carpenter?”
“Take a drink with me. I’ll tell you.”
“That’s fine for me.”
They sat, and drank. The man pushed up his dolphin mask to the top of his head. He was barefaced, but no one challenged him. Here, apparently, it was a brotherhood. Furian would have to hope the two he had annoyed outside did not come back.
“Juseppi,” said Furian eventually. “Is it true he’s run off?”
“Why’s that?”
“If he doesn’t want her, I like the look of his wife.”
“She’s a cunt. But he’s not run. He’s dead.”
Furian paused as if surprised. He said, “All the better, God rest his soul. What did he die of?”
“Someone’s knife, I heard.”
“No,” said another man, leaning over to them with his pipe, “it was the Snake. It chomped him in bits with its teeth.”
Hands rose, crossing hearts. They were superstitious, the wanderliers, about the giant supernatural serpent under the lagoons and canals of Venus.
Furian said, “Had he done something to anger it?”
“Anger someone,” said the unmasked dolphin. “He’d found something, blabbed about it.”
“Found what?”
“He’d rowed a man about, looking for Carnival corpses for some cranky alchemist.”
“What man?”
“God knows. But Juseppi found a mask.”
“No ordinary mask,” said the other man, who had his eyes part covered by owl wings. He put down his fuming pipe, took the brandy bottle and filled his own glass.
“A mask’s a mask,” said Furian.
“This one was a-drip with evil,” said the man.
“How?”
“He didn’t say. He said he dreamed of it all night.
It—howled at him. He said it was a portent of his death.
He went to confess at Primo Suvio.”
Furian’s ears roared softly. The lights of the tavern swam through the air. The swallowed canal water had not done him good.
“Well, that’s enough for me. If he’s gone, she’ll be lonely.”
“Calypso? Not she. Heard tell she’d got another admirer already.”
Furian got up unsteadily. They laughed and gave him a supportive shove. The dizziness passed and he walked jauntily out of the tavern.
There was no one in the street. He thought of the child scrubbing at plates. Probably, under her dress, she was black and blue with her mother’s beatings.
You wanted to rescue them, all of them. But it was not possible. For everyone seen, there were a thousand more. All those blows, those tears. And God in his jewel-encrusted heaven, looking down, missing not even the fall of the sparrow. Smiling at its pain?
Juseppi had talked generously about the mask. He had made a confession of his sins. He had thought the mask foretold his death. It had.
Furian walked slowly. Long and warm and raw, the shadows of the houses slopped on him, and the noon sun sword-slanted between. It would be easy to drop down flat.
Like the slices of light and dark, the pieces of all this, whatever it was, swung round him. He glanced over them.
The mask lay on the water just beyond the reflection of a window. Cloudio del Nero’s mask. The window of the blue harlot. And Juseppi on the bed, in ten or eleven parts. While the knives of would-be assassins glittered like the quills of porcupines, and again the stone struck him in the back, and he gulped the urine of Neptune and went down.
Furian leant on a wall. He needed some medicine.
Shaachen would be excellent for that—Get to Shaachen. But then, Shaachen was also caught inside the swirling of loose bright pieces. Del Nero’s mask was in his cup board. Surely it was the mask which must give up the answer to all this?
5
CUPID SAID, “IF I PAY HIM, why won’t he come? Look. I’ve got eighty-seven silver duccas saved, and all these brass venuses. Surely he would? You’re not fit—”
“He wouldn’t, Cupid. But you’re a winged angel to say it. I shouldn’t be here.”
“Where else but with me, that likes you so?”
Furian lay on her bed, in the rose-death sheets, staring stupidly at the ceiling. His dog mask was on the floor but she still had the swan wings over her eyes, which were dark and anxious. A good actress.
He had gone to her by devious routes. Everybody went to prostitutes, for God’s sake, it should be safe for her. Anyway, if questioned, she would betray him at once. It would be a code, not to be sentimental, and kind only where able.
She had been kind this afternoon. Putting off a client, albeit an elderly one she disliked, giving Furian clean water and the juice of plums. He no longer vomited, but the slight nausea dragged on. She said he had a fever, a white fever. She had sucked and licked at him until he jetted into her mouth, saying this would help to cleanse him. She was an adorable girl, with her gilded curly head, like a slender cherub. Of course, he paid her well. Some of the eighty seven duccas were his.
/> “Your Doctor Dianus is a beast,” she finally concluded, “if he wouldn’t visit you. And you’re his friend.”
“Maybe. Yes, perhaps. Or no.”
He wanted to wait until the night came. He had a plain black eye-mask and a different coat, bought from a desperate Jewish tailor near Aquila. It was an elegant coat. Not his usual style at all.
There had been no one he had suspected, no attack all day. Probably he had built events into a ridiculous importance. They were all coincidences elevated by the fever.
When the sun set, he sat up, and waited for the room to steady.
“You don’t sweat enough. It should pour out of you to rinse off the poison. Those canals. They kill so many. Even a crab from there can kill you, if you eat it not hot enough. And you, to go swimming there.”
“I was pissed as a king, my Cupid.”
“Silly Furian.”
She kissed him, and then helped him to dress.
“Don’t—be careful who you speak to, Cupid.”
“Oh? What’s up?”
“I owe a man money.”
Outside the sky was magpie (alien) blue, and stars made patterns that fever-moved now, fascinating him.
He would go across Fulvia. He would, better yet, take the other route first.
Something said within him, rankled, like the sober voice in drink, Don’t be a fool.
He laughed it off, as one did the sober voice. To hell with it. He would.
* * *
THE CANAL TURNED, and they came into wider water. On either side the phosphorescent dimness of houses like cliffs. Iron balconies. Night-faded white roses from an urn. The lamp burned. No longer pink. It was grey, now.
As Juseppi had, the wanderlier started to sing, not the Song.
“If you were mine, my girl—”
“Shut up,” said Furian.
“Signore?”
“I don’t want to offend you. But don’t sing.”
“Very well, Signore.”