At that moment a cold shadow traced its way over the roof of Maria’s ferry.
The skeleton of a man-sized bat swept down to the deck where Maria cowered. Its bones were yellowy-white, bare of flesh. Except for the head, which was that of a human being, with a milky, jellified face, like that of a drowned man deep underwater.
The bat grabbed Maria in its claws and flew away with her.
“Help her! Someone help her!” cried Teo.
But no one could hear or see Teo. And Maria, once in the arms of the bat, became invisible, just like an apple in Teo’s hand.
All day Teo pored over The Best Ways with Wayward Ghosts, staring fixedly at one potentially crucial page after another. She tried to keep memories of Maria’s capture out of her head, filling it up instead with useful information for the night ahead. But her tears fell on the pages, gluing some of them together, blistering others.
At ten, when dusk turned into night, Teo was awoken by a shaft of moonlight. She must have fallen asleep over the thick little volume. She rushed to the window. Renzo was already waiting outside the hotel, looking pointedly at the clock tower. She hurtled down the stairs.
When he saw her tearstained face, Renzo hurried forward. Teo explained what had happened to Maria. Renzo’s eyes narrowed. “She doesn’t really deserve any better.”
“It wasn’t Maria who betrayed the mermaids. It was the scolopendre! Even Lussa said so. She’s just a prisoner. We have to try to find her. It may not be too late.”
Renzo was stern. “We’ve more important things … and remember what happened last time you didn’t do what the mermaids asked.”
As if Teo could forget Chissa’s white corpse and her hair flowing like blood in the cavern! She closed her mouth and led the way back up to her room. She bent over The Best Ways with Wayward Ghosts, soaking up the last few pages.
“What are you doing, Teo?” asked Renzo.
“I’m memorizing. You know my memory works like a camera. If I concentrate, I can take in the whole page at once. This book’s so thick! If only I knew which pages we’re going to need.”
Renzo said more respectfully, “Sorry. Forgot that’s how you do it. That’s not an Undrowned Child skill, is it? Or a Gasperin skill? You’ve taught yourself that one. Like reading upside down. One day, when this is over …”
“I’m ready.” Teo reached for a jacket and handed Renzo a pullover.
“It’s unspeakably hot out there!”
“Page thirty-two, bottom right: ‘Make sure you dress warmly for encounters with ghosts in-the-Cold. Such spirits carry a perishing iciness about their persons and diffuse it to others.’ ”
Rumors of the impending battle had already spread fast among the community of ghosts in-the-Cold. On every corner the children found spirits eager to talk to them. Some positively begged to be allowed to join their enterprise. Others graciously allowed themselves to be persuaded. Few ghosts turned them down.
“Now go to the garden of the House of the Spirits,” the children ordered each converted ghost, “and wait for instructions.”
When they had finished with the human ghosts, they started on the animals. The children recruited ghost cats that had lived duplicitously with two families; parrots that had frightened old ladies to death with their swearing; dogs that had been cat-killers. All these creatures too had a desire to redeem themselves and to save their city in the process.
No, it wasn’t hard to find ghost-defenders of Venice. The children’s problem was the chattering of their teeth. Even on this balmy evening, a freezing miasma surrounded them wherever they parleyed with a ghost. Extra clothes were not enough. Soon they were chilled to the bone, huddling close together—somewhat self-consciously—as each ghost told his or her sad story and enveloped them in freezing air.
Arriving at San Marco, they found that the water had receded. The Baja-Menta ice-cream trolley lay on its side empty and defaced with angry scribbling. Renzo averted his eyes from the pile of rubble that had so recently been the Campanile.
A new map had opened in The Key to the Secret City. It was guiding them towards Marin Falier, a Doge who had once plotted to seize absolute power. Marin Falier had more reason than any ghost in Venice to redeem himself. For he had been decapitated and buried with his head between his knees so that he would never be able to find it again—or threaten the Republic of Venice.
Teo fretted, “If he’s mutilated, then he’s not in-the-Cold, wanting redemption. He’s in-the-Slaughterhouse—he’s not sorry for what he did.”
Renzo grimaced. “At least he’s not a convicted child-eater.”
They found the old Doge’s ghost near Santi Giovanni e Paolo, just as The Key to the Secret City advised them. Lussa’s face on the cover had a warning look.
Teo’s first petrified thought was that the headless figure who blocked their path was the Butcher Biasio. But instead of a stinking, bloodstained apron, this ghost wore glorious damask robes lined with ermine. His head nestled between his velvet-covered knees.
“What do you want?” he shouted at them. “A human child and another one between-the-Linings? Why seek me out now? No one has wanted me, no one has thought of me, except with disgust, for all these centuries. I smell a trap!”
Renzo and Teo took turns with the speech, trying to remember all the tricks of oratory they’d learnt in the garden of the House of the Spirits.
The speech was received in brooding silence. Then the Doge demanded, “And exactly why should I help Venice after what Venice did to me? Anyway, I always was a little bit sorry for poor old Bajamonte. He’s really pulling back strongly now, from what I hear. Why, perhaps I should be on his side.”
Teo fought down a nervous desire to laugh. Here they were, talking to a head tucked between a pair of knees. The children explained it yet again: if Doge Falier helped he would be redeemed, and even get his head back in the right place.
“Of course, you have to be sorry for what you did too,” added Renzo reprovingly.
“If I … admit I was wrong … if I join you … shall you get my portrait put back in the Doges’ Palace too?” the crusty old man almost whimpered.
Renzo whispered to Teo that paintings of all the Doges lined the walls in the Great Council chamber. But where Marin Falier’s portrait should have hung, there was just a frame painted black inside.
“We can’t promise to fix that, Renzo!” Teo hissed back. Fortunately, the old Doge appeared to be rather hard of hearing, perhaps not surprising, given that his head was so far from its original position.
“I am sure the mayor will be extremely grateful,” affirmed Renzo aloud. “He would be absolutely insane if he did not have a famous artist just standing by for the honor of painting your portrait, sir.”
Teo added, “Quite off his head.”
Renzo kicked her shin. Meanwhile Marin Falier puffed himself up and started posing in anticipation. “Very well. You’ve won me over.”
“But are you really sorry?” demanded Teo sternly. The Doge’s conversion had seemed rather glib.
In answer Marin Falier burst into tears like a baby. “Of course I’m sorry. I’ve been ashamed of myself for five hundred and forty-four years. I was just too proud to admit it before.”
Teo knelt and wiped his tears with a corner of her pinafore. The Doge hiccupped and sniffed. “But I was never a warrior. I’m more comfortable behind a desk, pushing a quill. The gentleman you need is Enrico Dandolo, even though he’s blind and a little eccentric, if you ask me.”
“A little eccentric? He’s one to talk!” muttered Teo as the children left Marin Falier practicing noble facial expressions for his portrait.
“That went well. Enrico Dandolo next, then!” said Teo cheerfully, wondering why Renzo looked so frightened. The Key to the Secret City soon showed her why.
The ghost of Enrico Dandolo had burning brands for eyes, and his restless spirit walked the streets cutting its fingers with a sharp blade. This was a reminder of all the innocent blood he had sh
ed during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. In Constantinople, Ottoman women, children and slaves had fallen before the callous swords of his men.
The burning brands were the first parts of Enrico Dandolo that showed themselves in the gloom of the Barbaria delle Tole. The children made out a stooped, knotty figure, and then the flash of the sword with which he constantly slashed at his own hands. Two servants trailed behind him, remonstrating in groveling voices. They were both much scarred.
“Try to be sorry for him,” advised Teo in a trembling voice. “That’s what it says in The Best Ways with Wayward Ghosts. And if we’re feeling sorry for him then maybe we won’t be so scared. Er, excuse me … Doge Dandolo … sir …,” she called.
“Who’s that?” thundered Dandolo. “Come here and have your throat cut!”
Teo swallowed hard. Dandolo had not scrupled to send children to slaughter before.
“What do you want with me?” he bellowed, charging past the children, sword aloft. Fortunately the burning brands did not serve as working eyes. He missed them by a yard. The servants dodged wearily, clearly used to the Doge’s irascible temper.
“Make it good, whatever you’ve got to tell,” he ordered, returning for another attack. “May be the last thing you say.”
This time he passed so close that Teo felt the heat of his burning eyes on her face and Renzo heard the whir of the sword near his ear.
“Oh, I’m really sorry for him,” muttered Renzo.
“Sorry for me?” shouted Enrico Dandolo. “A mere wretch of a boy?”
The ferocious old Doge stood dumbstruck for a moment, and then he dissolved into noisy tears.
“No one was ever sorry for me before,” he sobbed in a broken voice.
The children seized their chance. They spoke soothingly of redemption, and of the glory of saving Venice. Enrico Dandolo snuffled and sneezed, but listened attentively. Renzo spoke economically. Teo practiced the dramatic pause. It was one of their better performances. At the end of the speech, he commanded, “Again!”
At the second rendition, he implored, “Mercy!”
By the end of the third performance, he had drawn himself up into a manful posture, and spoke with a voice firm with resolve. “Enough! The Ottomans, you say? Attacking Venice? Kill the Ottoman enemy? That’s what I do best! It’ll be like old times again,” he sighed sentimentally.
Teo dared, “But you’re supposed to show remorse for what you did before.”
“Don’t push your luck, girlie! Would you rather have me with you or against you?” Dandolo drew himself up, and spun around in a perfect circle with three murderously graceful slashes of his sword.
“With us,” admitted Teo.
“And what do you care if I get redeemed or not? I’ll do it, but only if you fetch the Rioba brothers!”
Renzo whispered to Teo, “The statues on the Campo dei Mori.”
“I know.”
The Doge growled, “They were with me in Constantinople. Signor Rioba’s an indispensable lieutenant! Though he would curse the bladder out of a weasel.”
Dandolo had a copy of Signor Rioba’s latest missive poking out of a sleeve of his tunic. He dragged it out and waved it at them. “Now my minions have been reading this stuff to me, and they say there’s a lot of fancy doings going on with the lettering. Tell Rioba to desist immediately. Plain soldier style’s what’s wanted here.”
The thought of explaining the mermaids and the Seldom Seen Press was too daunting to contemplate. Renzo murmured placatingly, “Certainly, Your Greatness.”
As the children rushed off towards the Campo dei Mori, Enrico Dandolo shouted to them, “And tell ’em to bring the camel who’s carved on the wall of the Palazzo Mastelli. That is one wily beast to have on your side.”
After just ten words of their speech, Signor Rioba creaked to life and jumped off his column full of energy, his chin and nose jutting forward. He smoothed out the pleats in his tunic. Then he spat on his hand and polished his iron nose with his fingers. The chalky dust of centuries flew off him when he flexed his sword arm while listening to the children tell their story.
“My brothers, Sandi! Afani!” he shouted at the other Moors, who were already climbing down from their pedestals. “Prepare yourselves for war!”
Signor Rioba had the same gravel-in-honey voice Teo remembered from her first encounter with him all those days—those lifetimes—ago, when she had woken on a tombstone, wandered through the city, come across his silent statue and felt his heart beating under the stone. And Signor Rioba was no more serene than when she’d seen him before. He snarled, “Typical of this wimbling woman of a town! Leaves it to the last lingering minute to summon the folk who can save her!”
Renzo mumbled an apology.
“She’s a beauty, but this giddy city has never known what was good for her,” Signor Rioba grumbled. “Anyway, yes, let me have at him, that Traditore! I’ll fry his kidneys in a pan!”
He tossed imaginary kidneys in an invisible frying pan in his left hand.
“And as for that scullion-brain the mayor … Where is he? I’ve a craving to crack his napper and let out his puddings!”
Between violent parries with a jeweled dagger he’d drawn out of his belt, Signor Rioba demanded, “So where are the saints, then?”
“What saints?” asked Renzo nervously.
Signor Rioba thundered, “Didn’t that dunderhead Dandolo tell ye that we’d need the saints?”
Renzo and Teo shook their heads mutely.
“Well then, I’ll be off to remind the Old Heathen myself. What are ye staring at? Get on with it! Saints! I tell ye! Donato, Nicolo, Onofolo, Taraise, Zaccaria, Anathasios, Marco, Stefano, Damiano and Cosmo. But above all Saint Lucia. Most of her’s in one piece! I’ll go and get the ghost horses myself.”
“Horses?”
“The nobles’ horses from the Cavallerizza, ye lunar fools!”
“Horses in Venice? With all the canals?” Teo asked.
Renzo mumbled, “Once there were seventy stallions near the Mendicanti. Horse riding was forbidden at the end of the thirteenth century. I don’t think we’ll mention that to him, though.”
Teo remembered Pedro-the-Crimp with his horse. That daguerreotype had been taken by the Mendicanti!
Signor Rioba was looking under his tunic. “The old underwear has stood up well,” he remarked. “Get one more battle out of that, I believe. And good work with the Press,” he added in a friendlier tone. “Tell the Mermaids that I am liking the new fonts. They have captured me to a tee.”
“You know about the handbills?” Renzo asked. “You don’t mind that they use your name?”
“Proud as a galleon, actually,” Signor Rioba almost purred.
“But how are we going to find the saints?” called Teo. “Where are they?”
Signor Rioba was at war again in an instant. “Have ye not got a book to guide ye, ye whey-faced girlie?”
“Sorry,” agreed Teo hastily. “Of course I do.”
all through the hours of darkness,
June 12–June 13, 1899
On the cover of The Key to the Secret City Lussa waved what looked like a little white wishbone at them. The book opened to a most peculiar and rather morbid map—tiny images of the organs, fingers and limbs of saints glowed above churches all over Venice: the leg of Saint Tryphon, the foot of Saint Catherine of Siena, the kneecap of someone else.
“There must be seventy of them. Where do we start?” worried Renzo.
The Church of San Geremia lit up on the page, showing a miniature mummy of Saint Lucy.
“Oh dear!” Teo wrinkled her nose. “Must we? I feel like a body snatcher!”
The church doors groaned open as they approached. They hesitated on the doorstep until The Key to the Secret City literally tugged Teo over the threshold. At the back of the church, light streamed from a chapel where the remains of Saint Lucia lay in her glass casket. Above her bloomed trees fashioned from gold, bearing round red lanterns like apples.
“Oh!” gasped Teo. Saint Lucy lay with bare feet and hands, dressed in a red robe stiff with gold braid. Her face was covered with a silver mask, as if she’d just been dancing at a Carnevale ball.
“Now what are we supposed to do? How do we wake her up?”
The Key to the Secret City spread itself open to a sheet of music with words. A pair of painted eyes danced over the first notes, encouragingly.
“We’ve got to sing?” asked Teo. Of all the embarrassing things she’d been forced to do since this adventure began—this was surely the worst. Her singing had been compared to a sick toad mourning his mother by a boy at her school in Naples. The most pitiful thing was that the comparison was undeniably apt.
Renzo lifted the book and raised his eyes to the rafters. Heavenly music poured out of his mouth, pure and perfectly pitched.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” breathed Teo.
Renzo paused to say modestly, “Weak swimmer, but I can sing a little, yes. Gondoliers need to, you know.” He returned to his song.
Inside her casket, the skin and bones of Saint Lucy rustled like dry leaves. The saint raised one skeletal foot—with the merest papery covering of transparent skin—and then the other. As Renzo continued to sing, she sat up and hit her head, from which tatters of hair still hung, against the roof of the casket. The mask dropped off, showing the surprised remains of a face with the eyes sewn shut. She lay down again, looking dazed. Then she raised herself more carefully and scrabbled at the glass with her frail, leathery fingers. But the casket was sealed tight.
“Help me!” mouthed the saint. She didn’t really have much of a mouth—it was more like a leathery gash in her face. Renzo, still singing, gestured frantically to Teo. “What are you waiting for?” he hissed, taking breath for another burst of melody.
With the greatest reluctance, Teo approached the rim of the casket.
There were no hinges, no loose seals and no concealed mechanisms to Saint Lucy’s enclosure. The saint tapped impatiently on her window. Then she mimed a hammer crashing down on the glass.
The Undrowned Child Page 22