There was a quivering silence, and then a small voice said crankily, “It’s Tiphaine. Who else?”
Johanna realized she was still holding on to the girl’s hair and let go. “I didn’t hear you come in.” In fact, she distinctly remembered the girl taking her leave of them after dinner. She felt for the pouch beneath her pillow. The hard shapes of her father’s book and bao reassured her through the soft leather. “We locked the door behind you. How did you get back in?”
The girl snorted. “You call that a lock?” There was an ostentatious rustle as she flounced in place on the floor and began to breathe heavily through her nose.
The next morning Johanna found Tiphaine curled up in bed next to her, her face looking younger than ever beneath its layer of grime.
Everyone was poker-faced as they broke their fast the next morning, but Johanna noticed that no one left before they saw what happened next.
“How long have you lived in Venice, Tiphaine?”
The girl crammed another fistful of last night’s bread into her mouth and spoke indistinctly around it. “All my life. I was born here.”
“So you know it well?”
The dark eyes flashed. “There is no one who knows it better!”
“And the people who live here?”
The small but defiant chin raised. “Point to anyone on any street and I will tell you their name and the names of their parents and where they live and where their parents live and what house they look to and what they had for dinner.” She met Johanna’s mild look with a challenging stare.
Johanna held her gaze for a long moment, and then turned to look at Shasha, who sighed but was not entirely successful at hiding the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Does the child have a home? Parents?”
“She claims a father.” Johanna looked back at Tiphaine. “Well?”
The small face looked mutinous.
“If we’re going to take you on as—” Johanna cast about in her mind for an appropriate job title “—courier, your father will naturally want to see that all the appropriate requirements are met.”
The small brow wrinkled. “Courier?”
“Dragoman. Messenger.” Tiphaine’s face remained blank and Johanna said, “Page?” Although she was not entirely certain pages existed outside royal courts.
But Tiphaine’s face cleared. “Page,” she said. “I could be your page.”
“But we cannot offer you employment without your father’s permission,” Johanna said.
It was one of the darker, dirtier dwellings in one of the darker, dirtier sections of Venice, near a defunct foundry off the Rio della Misericordia. Leftover slag from the foundry’s workings was piled everywhere and it was impossible to walk there without collecting soot to your knees.
Tiphaine’s father worked out of a storefront that made Jaufre’s look palatial by comparison, located beneath the surface of the street, reached by steep, narrow steps that looked hand-hewn and which were difficult to negotiate because of the jumble of what might have been merchandise and what might have been trash piled everywhere. The one window was boarded over. The wooden door was so warped it was hard to see how it could close.
There was a front room for business and a back room for living, if you could call it that, as it consisted of a single pallet, a brazier with one broken leg propped on a cobblestone, and a saucepan that looked as if it hadn’t been washed since the birth of Christ. The piles of goods continued inside, some stacked so haphazardly that they stepped warily in case of an accidental avalanche. There were bales of faded and tattered clothes, pots and pans strung together by their handles, dull knives and a box of wooden, bronze, and silver spoons thinned from years of use. One corner was devoted to remnants of what might once have been books, loose stacks of pages in a higgledy-piggledy heap. Jaufre could smell the mold coming off them from three feet away, and kept his distance. Other items were less identifiable.
Some attempt had been made to lighten the dark interior with lamps, but they were so few in number and like the saucepan had not been recently—if ever—cleaned that Johanna could barely make out the gentleman who stood inside. He said something brusquely in a language previously unknown to her, and Tiphaine answered in kind, indicating Johanna with the wave of a hand. “This is Mordecai the Jew, my father,” she said, and stepped back, Jaufre thought not coincidentally out of the reach of her father’s arm.
The old man, bearded and filthy and who simply could not be as old as he looked and have fathered a child Tiphaine’s age, looked at Jaufre and said in roughly accented Italian, “My daughter says you wish to take her as your servant.”
“I do,” Johanna said.
“She is healthy and strong and not uncomely,” the man said to Jaufre. “How much will you pay?”
Johanna felt Jaufre go rigid next to her and dropped a warning hand to his arm. “She is very small to be so strong,” she said mildly, and named a price. This provoked the usual outrage. Fierce bidding culminated in coins exchanged, Johanna somewhat hampered with producing them by the restraining hand she must at all costs keep on Jaufre’s arm. She produced a document that laid out the terms of Tiphaine’s employment, on which Mordecai would not place his mark until she produced another coin, and they were done.
“Get your things,” Johanna told Tiphaine.
“There is nothing here I want or need,” Tiphaine said, and led the way out the door and up the stairs, as careful to kick everything off the steps on the way up as she had been careful not to kick anything off on the way down. At no time during the meeting had Mordecai looked directly at his daughter. He made no farewell to her now, nor she to him.
Halfway home she said suddenly, apparently to no one, “It would have been better if my mother had lived.”
Another bridge, another canal, and she said, “It would have been different if I’d been a boy.”
And that was the last word Tiphaine ever said about her family.
Scrubbed (a process Tiphaine vociferously resisted, right up until the moment Shasha picked her up bodily and deposited her into the tub), her hair ruthlessly combed (her eyes were watering by the time Shasha had judged her curls were in as much order as was possible), and clad in new skirt, tunic and belt, with a new cloak overall and sturdy, made-to-order boots on her feet, Tiphaine looked like a new and far more respectable person, but she was still dissatisfied, apparently. She fussed at the shoulder of her tunic, and looked at all their tunics one by one with a gathering frown.
“What?” Johanna said, inclined to be amused rather than annoyed. Certainly the girl’s spirit had not been broken by her unfortunate beginnings. “What are we missing here?”
Tiphaine pressed her lips together but couldn’t hold it back. “You—we have no badge.”
“Badge?” Johanna said, repressing a smile at the girl’s quick correction.
“House badge. A—an emblem that signifies what house or company we belong to.”
There was a brief silence. “She’s right,” Jaufre said slowly. He looked at Johanna. “Almost everyone who comes to my stall and certainly every male wears a badge of some sort sewn to their clothing.”
“The Venetians only?”
He thought about it, and shook his head. “Sometimes it signifies what ship’s company the wearer belongs to. The Doge’s guards have uniforms, of course. A few of the nobles’ servants have livery, but not all.”
“It’s customary,” Félicien said. “Everywhere, for soldiers’ companies, craft guilds, city officials.”
“An identifier,” Shasha said, nodding. “Something that will show the authorities we have friends, should one of us get into trouble.”
Jaufre didn’t look at Alaric, who would have been voted most likely of their group to get into trouble. Alaric, as usual looking a little hungover, was hunched over his morning tea as if it were his last hope of survival and was not thus far contributing to the conversation. “And it’ll help us fit in,” Jaufre said. “If everyone wears a bad
ge, we should wear a badge, too.”
Johanna looked at Tiphaine and smiled. “Well, you’ve started something now. What kind of a badge should we have?”
“Bright colors,” the girl said instantly. “That you can see from across the street.”
“Just colors?”
“No,” she said. “There should be a shape, an animal or a—a tool.”
The discussion which followed lasted over three days and was the subject of vigorous debate. Everyone had an opinion. Alaric surfaced long enough to say it should be a sword crossed on a shield. No, Félicien said, everyone would think they were a mercenary company, arms for sale. A lyre, he said, that was the thing, or a harp. Or perhaps both. Or maybe a flute, everyone recognized a flute. So they were a troupe of jongleurs now, Alaric said. He’d brush up on his tumbling.
They decided on red and yellow for colors since they were the imperial colors of Cambaluc, the pigments were easily obtained and they were bright enough to satisfy Tiphaine, who seemed to be in charge. Images suggested for the figure ranged from Alaric’s sword to Félicien’s harp to Shasha’s suggestion of a willow leaf. “You’ve all been dosed with it enough times,” she said. Alma suggested a quill pen, Hayat a dagger, and Johanna, of course, held out for a white horse at full gallop. Which would be fine if they were a guild of ostlers, Alaric said.
“Why not a sun?” Hari said one evening. “It shines down upon us all.”
“Not in Venice,” Jaufre and Johanna said in the same moment. They smiled at each other.
“Ordinary,” Alma said, without much feeling one way or the other.
“Universal,” Hari said.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Félicien said, frowning.
“Inoffensive,” Hari said.
“Simple to draw,” Hayat said.
“Easy to recognize at a distance,” Alma said.
“And leaves the center free for any additions we might like to add later on,” Shasha said thoughtfully.
“Um,” Tiphaine said.
They looked at her and she flushed. “Oftentimes we are made to wear a gold star on our clothing,” she said.
“A gold star?”
“Who’s we?”
“Jews,” Tiphaine said.
It took a moment for everyone’s ideas to readjust. “And that would be bad,” Jaufre said slowly.
“Jews are held to be…”
“Unclean,” Alaric said, almost with relish. “They killed Christ our Lord.”
Tiphaine glared at him.
Alaric bristled. “They did crucify him. It says so in the Bible, which is the word of God made manifest on this earth.”
“‘Away with him: Away with him: Crucify him. Pilate saith to them: shall I crucify your king?’” Félicien’s voice was soft. “‘The chief priests answered: We have no king but Caesar.’”
“And that makes Jews the whipping boy wherever Christ is worshipped?” Johanna said.
Félicien glanced at Tiphaine and nodded.
“Sunnis and Shias,” Hayat said with a sigh. Tiphaine looked up, surprised, and Alma said, “Both of Islam, but they follow different prophets descended from Mohammed.”
“Which means they can and do kill each other for any reason,” Alma said.
“Or none at all,” Hayat said.
“All heathens,” Alaric said, but without heat.
“Does that mean—” Tiphaine hesitated. Her face was pale and she looked strained.
“What?”
The girl said up straight and firmed an already firm jaw and glared at Johanna. “Does that mean I can’t stay?”
Johanna smiled at her. “Do I not hold your contract?”
Everyone looked away as the girl collected herself. She spoke first. “Very well,” she said, very businesslike. “Not a sun, because it looks too much like a star. What, then?”
Johanna looked at Shasha and then at Jaufre, and they knew before she said it. “This,” she said, and opened the leather purse that was always at her waist. She produced a rectangular rod half a handspan long and a small round pot, both carved from dark green jade. Alma found a scrap of vellum and Johanna uncapped the pot, revealing a red paste, a little dry and flaking after two years of disuse. She touched the end of the cylinder into the paste and pressed it against the vellum. She held up the result for everyone to see. “Three Chinese characters,” she said. “My family name, and the character for trader, and the character for honest. It was my father’s bao. You would say, seal.” She frowned down at the imprint. Mandarin characters were not known for their simplicity or lack of flourish. “Perhaps one of the characters would be enough. ‘Honest,’ or ‘trader.’”
“Trader,” Jaufre said.
It felt right to all of them, even Alaric, and Alma was put in charge of construction with Tiphaine supervising. The resulting badges were of calfskin scraped thin, cut into circles and dyed red. Alma embroidered each badge with their device in gold silk, and sewed them to everyone’s outer garments. They looked good, distinctive and professional, and very shiny.
“When someone asks us who we look to, what do we say?” Tiphaine said. When no one answered she said, spacing the words out as if speaking to the very slow of wit, “What is our name? The name of our compagnia? Someone is bound to ask.”
Johanna looked at her and said, “Sometimes I think I might have made a mistake, hiring you on.”
The girl gave an impudent grin. “You know I’m right.”
She did, unfortunately, and dreaded more days of wrangling.
“Wu Company,” Jaufre said. He looked at Johanna and raised an eyebrow.
She looked at Shasha, who smiled. Johanna blinked away unexpected tears. “Wu Company it is.”
Tiphaine wasn’t finished. “And what does our compagnia do?”
Johanna’s eyes roamed over the members of the company. Two traders, a healer and cook, an assassin, a knight, a monk, a goliard, an amateur astronomer and her, what. Assistant? Guard? Companion? Lover? All of the above. And now, a page. “Anything anyone will pay us for,” she said, and smiled. “Short of robbery and murder.”
4
Venice, Winter, 1323–1324
Tiphaine’s first task in her official capacity as Wu Company’s page was to carry messages between Johanna and Moreta. She and Peter would meet as they browsed the goods in Jaufre’s shop, or when Ca’ Polo sent for medicinal herbs which Moreta now purchased from Shasha and had delivered by Tiphaine.
Shasha was beginning to make a modest name for herself as an herbalist, to the point that the line of people trailing down the street from their lodgings provoked a complaint from their landlord. Jaufre found her a space one canal down where she set up shop and where the line became even longer. Firas unilaterally dedicated himself Shasha’s deputy and took on the task of assessing injuries and disease in order of necessity. There was a boy with a broken arm, accompanied by his mother. There was a young woman who wouldn’t meet anyone’s eye and who wouldn’t talk to anyone except Shasha and who would only talk to her alone. There was a leper swathed in bandages and a blue robe, which failed to hide that he was in the last stages of that dread disease. There was a tall man with a wispy beard, an angry boil on his left buttock and the melancholy air of one to whom disaster and disappointment were boon companions. “He reminds me of Alaric,” Shasha said to Firas.
There were also the usual tittering girls looking for love potions and the men looking for spells to curse their neighbors’ crops. One woman was so insistent that Firas finally said solemnly, “They say that if a woman spits three times into the face of a frog, that she will never conceive again,” and watched with some satisfaction as the woman immediately adjourned, presumably to the nearest swamp. He wished he could have followed her, just to watch.
The rest Firas purged from the line of prospective patients with smart dispatch and a pithy reminder that Shasha was a healer, not a sorcerer. The last thing they needed in Venice was a reputation for witchcraft.
He
dealt with the leper more gently. “Then you cannot help me?” the leper said, his mouth hidden by the stained cloth wrapped around his face.
“No,” Firas said. “Allah will decide when to call you to him, my friend. Leave that decision to Him.”
“He has had little enough time to spare for me so far,” the leper replied, and left on what remained of his heavily wrapped feet.
For a man with a runny nose and a cough Shasha prescribed sage leaves, rubbed and placed inside the nostrils. A housewife had cut her hand on a knife, and Shasha stopped the bleeding with an application of cobwebs.
The boy’s injury was more serious. Both bones in his lower left arm were protruding through the skin, the ends fractured. The skin around them was already dark red and hot to the touch. He was in great pain, although he bore it better than his mother did. Shasha soaked a sponge in a distillation of herbs and placed it over the boy’s nose. A few moments later, the strain eased from his face and he slid into unconsciousness.
His mother tried for the sponge for herself. Shasha slapped her hand away without looking up, manipulated the bones back into place, splinted the arm and bound it firmly. She measured out ground willow bark. “He will have a fever,” she told his mother. She placed a hand on the boy’s forehead, which already felt too warm. “Make him a clear broth and put a pinch of this into the bowl, morning, noon and night. Do not give him solid food, no meat, no bread, until the fever goes away. Only liquids, watered wine, small beer, broth. A little warmed mead in the evening, if your purse runs to it. Do you understand?” The mother nodded, but Shasha repeated her instructions once more to be sure. “If the wound begins to smell bad, if the skin of his arm turns dark, you must bring him back at once.”
She and Firas stood watching the woman walk away, packet clutched in one sweaty hand and all her anxious attention on the face of the boy in her arms. “The wound is already infected,” Shasha said. “That arm will very probably have to come off.”
There were cripples who begged in every market place, using their lost sight or lost limbs to fill their bowls with alms. It was not a future either of them would wish on anyone, let alone the brave little boy who had just left them.
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