by Anne Lyle
The Merchant of Dreams
Anne Lyle
Night's Masque Volume II
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
The Merchant of Venice
CONTENTS
Title
Table of Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Epilogue
CHAPTER I
Mal leant over the ship’s rail, scanning the shore for any sign of a wreck. The mistral had swept the sky bare, leaving the coast etched in hard lines by the cold clear light of a January morn.
“There,” he said at last, pointing to a dark shape on the beach.
Coby joined him at the rail. “Are you sure it’s the skrayling carrack, sir? Those timbers could belong to any ship.”
“You still don’t believe me.”
“I…” Her head drooped, expression hidden by the hood of her cloak. “It’s been more than a year, sir. I thought… I thought all that was over.”
It’ll never be over, he wanted to tell her. Not whilst I have this thing inside me.
The ship tacked westwards, closer to the pale sands. A rocky headland loomed to their left, the prevailing winds threatening to dash them onto its rocks as it had the ship they sought. Ahead, the northernmost tip of Corsica rose in low hills seared to colourlessness by the mistral. As they drew nearer, pieces of flotsam dashed themselves against the bow, as if clamouring to board a sound vessel. A scrap of dull red sailcloth tangled in rigging confirmed Mal’s suspicion. This was the skrayling ship from his dream.
“I don’t see any bodies,” Coby said after a while.
“No, thank the Lord.” He made the sign of the cross, then addressed their captain in French. “Set us ashore here.”
“Is that wise?” the Moor replied in the same language, his native accent heavy. “Just the two of you?”
“Would you rather come with us, and be mistaken for a corsair raiding party?”
Captain Youssef waved to two of his men to lower the jolly-boat. Mal glanced at his companion. Dressed in masculine attire, she easily passed for a boy of fifteen or so, and a hard life had given her a toughness beyond that of most young women. Still, he worried every time he took her into peril.
As if guessing his thoughts, she grinned at him and patted the knife at her belt.
“If any are left alive, we’ll find them,” she said. “Ambassador Kiiren would never forgive us if we did not.”
They poked amongst the wreckage on the beach, but found no one either dead or alive, nor any sign of the ship’s cargo.
“You think the islanders already picked it clean?” Coby asked, straightening up and brushing sand from her breeches.
“They’ve had a good couple of days,” Mal replied. “I doubt this is the first vessel to fetch up here, nor will it be the last.”
“No footprints besides our own.”
Mal shrugged. “Erased by the mistral’s dying breath, perhaps.”
They found a narrow track leading up from the beach and followed it over the ridge. A village, little more than a hamlet, lay in a sheltered hollow of the hills, surrounded by the chestnut trees for which the island was famous. No smoke rose from its chimneys, no cry of children or bark of dogs disturbed the morning air. Coby glanced at Mal but said nothing. He drew his rapier and continued down the track, scanning the buildings for any sign of life.
As they came closer they realised the houses were falling into ruin, their silvery thatch half gone, interiors standing open to the sky. Doors hung askew on their hinges or lay on the threshold in splinters.
“Corsairs?” Coby whispered.
“Long gone, by the looks of it.” Mal sheathed his sword. “We should search the houses. If there are survivors of the wreck, they could have taken shelter here.”
It did not take long to search the entire hamlet, but they found no sign of the skraylings, only half a human skeleton well-gnawed by dogs. An old man or woman, judging by the shrunken, toothless jaw. Mal pointed out the blade-marks on the ribs.
“They take the able-bodied villagers for slaves,” he said, “and kill everyone else.”
Coby stared at the pathetic remains, hand on her throat where a small wooden cross hung on a cord. He wondered if she was remembering other deaths, of those far closer to her than this unknown Corsican.
They followed the track out of the other side of the village until they came to a fork. One path wound southwards through a chestnut wood carpeted in golden leaves, the other led back northeast, towards the coast.
“Where now, sir?” Coby asked.
Mal searched the ground for a short way along each road, though he was not hopeful. The earth was too dry and hard to take prints. He was about to give up when a dull gleam caught his eye: a bead about the size of a pea, made of dark grey metal. Hardly daring to trust his luck, he drew his dagger and touched it to the bead. When he lifted the blade away, the little sphere clung to it like a burr.
“Lodestone,” he said with a smile. “The skraylings came this way, and left us a clue.”
He gathered up all the beads he could find, and they set off down the coastal path. A chill northerly breeze, no more than a faint memory of the mistral, tugged at their cloaks and ruffled their hair. They had still not seen a living creature apart from the ever-present gulls.
“Youssef told me the citadel of Calvi lies not far from here,” Mal said. “If the skraylings were taken by the islanders, my money is on Calvi. The Genoese would pay handsomely for intelligence of the New World.”
“You think Youssef will wait for us?”
“Until noon tomorrow, at least. So he swore.” He looked at her sidelong. “You do not trust him?”
“No more than I trust any man in our line of work.”
Mal grinned. “Very wise. But he has not failed us so far. I think he has earned such trust as we can spare.”
His hand closed around the beads in his pocket. They were already starting to take on some warmth from his flesh, and there was something comfortingly familiar about the way they clung together as he rolled them over one another. Perhaps it was only an echo of a memory, of playing with his mother’s rosary as a child. Though her beads were of amber, not cold steel.
“There,” he said a few moments later. “The citadel of Calvi.”
The broad promontory stretched northeastwards away from them, covered in more of the bare-branched chestnut trees. At its farthest point it rose to a hill encased in walls of pale stone, rising sheer and impregnable from the
cliffs. Within, tall red-roofed buildings clustered about a domed church. It made the Tower of London look like a child’s toy.
“If they are in there,” Coby said, “how in the name of all that’s holy do we get them out?”
Above the open gates of the citadel was carved a motto: Civitas Calvis Semper Fidelis. Faithful to whom? Mal wondered. Their Genoese overlords, or their own self-interest?
A lone guard, slouching in the meagre warmth of the noonday sun, detached himself from the wall as they approached and looked them up and down. He was a good six inches shorter than Mal, with greasy black hair and a gap between his front teeth.
“Who are you?” he asked. “And what is your business in Calvi?”
Mal hesitated. His Italian was a little rusty, and the man’s accent was not easy to understand.
“Our ship is damaged,” he said, pointing back northwards. “We need to buy nails and rope for repairs.” Just enough truth to give his story verisimilitude, that was the trick of it.
“You are English,” the guard said, his eyes narrowing.
“I was born in England,” Mal replied, “but I have family in Provence. We were sailing to Marseille–”
“Not a good time of year to be sailing anywhere.”
“My father is dying,” Mal said with a shrug. In truth his father was some years dead.
“There is a chandlery down by the quay.” The guard gestured over his shoulder.
“Thank you. But first I would light a candle for my father’s soul, and give thanks for our own safe landing. There is a church in the citadel?”
“The Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist,” the guard said, drawing himself up to his full height. “Go to the top of the hill; you cannot miss it.”
Mal thanked him again, and they went through the gate. A steep cobbled street wound upwards, turning into a broad flight of steps that led past the ochre-and-white stucco façade of the little cathedral.
“Now what?” Coby asked in a whisper.
Passers-by were eyeing them suspiciously. Mal might be taken easily enough for a local, apart from his height, but Coby’s blond hair and pale skin made her stand out in any crowd south of Antwerp.
“We do as we said, and go inside,” Mal replied.
Coby halted and stared around as they stepped through the cathedral doors. Perhaps the plain exterior of the cathedral had led her to expect a similarly austere interior. Instead, the light of hundreds of votive candles gleamed on the pale curves of alabaster carvings and reflected off the gilding of a hundred statues and icons of saints. The elegantly vaulted ceiling overhead was punctuated by oval panels painted with scenes from scripture, as fine as any work Mal had seen in Italy. An enormous crucifix, taller than himself, stood on the altar.
Mal genuflected, dropped a handful of sou into the collection box for the ransoming of Christian slaves, and lit a candle, placing it before a statue of Michael, his own patron saint. Coby remained near the door, looking uncomfortable in the opulent and, no doubt in her eyes, all-too-Papist surroundings. Mal turned back to the alabaster saint and murmured a prayer. For her soul, his own, and most of all that of the brother lost to him.
A chill of unease ran over him as he thought of Sandy. Touching his finger to his forehead in a hurried gesture, he returned to the cathedral door.
“Let’s get out of here,” he told Coby.
“What’s wrong, sir?”
“I don’t know. Something…” He shook his head to dispel the uncomfortable feeling. “Let’s go down to the harbour. We might be able to pick up some gossip at the chandler’s.”
A long flight of stone steps led down from the citadel to the quayside, where housewives haggled with fishermen over baskets of the morning’s catch. Flocks of gulls screamed overhead; their more cunning fellows sidled around the stalls, yellow eyes fixed on the fishermen’s baskets. Mal looked around for the chandlery, but his eye was caught instead by a squat stone watchtower at the end of the quay, connected to the citadel above by a length of wall that ran up at a sharp angle. No entrance was visible from this side, nor any windows, and yet the islanders were giving the building a wide berth.
Mal looked out to sea, shading his eyes as if looking for a ship, and drummed his fingers thrice on his dagger hilt. Coby halted at the signal and waited expectantly.
“There,” he said, glancing sidelong towards the tower.
She nodded, following his gaze discreetly.
“The skraylings?” she whispered.
“I’m sure of it.” He could not say how, but he was as certain as if someone had just told him. “Where better to lock up a score or two of unexpected prisoners?”
“How are we to get them out?”
“Our only hope lies in stealth. We’ll return tonight, after dark; a few hours will make little difference.”
Youssef’s ship, the Hayreddin, was a sleek galleass of the sort popular with both Turks and Christians. As well as its three triangular sails, it had two dozen oars on each side, the better to manoeuvre in battle – or sneak into a harbour against the wind. However it was too large to go unnoticed on a moonlit night, so they dropped anchor and went the rest of the way in the ship’s boat.
Though they rowed as slowly and carefully as possible, the splashing of the oars sounded over-loud in the night air. Their course was not easy, hugging the foot of the citadel’s hill as close as possible so that anyone on the walls above would have to look over and down to see them, instead of out across the water. The darkness that concealed them came at a price, however; it also concealed the rocks near the shore, and one of Youssef’s keenest-eyed men was obliged to crouch in the bow, raising a hand now and then to steer them away from destruction. On several occasions Mal thought they were about to be dashed against the rocky shore, but the sailors’ skilled rowing thrust them back out to sea. He wondered how often they had done this kind of work before. Best to be grateful they had, and not ask questions.
The harbour was not unguarded, of course. Torches burned in cressets at intervals along the waterfront, and a sentry paced back and forth. Not, Mal noted, too close to the little tower. His conviction that the skraylings were held within deepened.
Their little craft slipped from one fishing boat’s shadow to the next and into an empty berth. Mal scrambled ashore, signalling for the rest of them to stay put. He waited until the sentry was nearing the far end of his course, then slipped silently across the quay and hid in the alley between two warehouses. Long moments passed, punctuated only by the sentry’s receding footsteps and the occasional hawk-and-spit. Then the feet turned and began to approach. Mal edged closer to the alley mouth and drew his dagger.
As the sentry drew level, Mal stepped out behind him, clamped his left hand over the man’s mouth and slammed the dagger up under his ribs towards his heart. The sentry writhed in his grasp, stubble grating against Mal’s palm, then sagged to the ground. Mal wiped his blade on the man’s clothing, sheathed it and hurried back to the waiting boat.
At his signal, Coby clambered ashore, followed by Youssef and two of his men. The sailors scattered to keep watch, whilst Mal and Coby ran towards the tower. A large arch pierced the connecting wall. Mal paused in its shadow, scanning the shrub-covered slopes between the waterfront and the base of the citadel, but could see nothing moving. He beckoned to Coby and slipped round the far side of the tower.
To his relief there was a double door at ground level on this side, its rusty handles secured with a new steel chain and padlock. Any doubts that they might have the wrong place vanished. Why lock up a watch tower so securely, unless you were afraid of what was inside?
Coby uncovered a small lantern as she neared the door. Handing it to Mal, she rummaged in her satchel and produced a canvas roll. Mal positioned the lantern so that its beam fell on the enormous padlock, and Coby began probing the workings with the largest of her skeleton keys. Mal kept watch as she worked; they were well hidden from view here, but also cut off from their allies if things went wrong
.
Coby muttered under her breath and blew on her fingers to warm them. Mal glanced back down at her and she made an apologetic face. Biting her lip, she twisted the key again – and the padlock gave a satisfying click and sprang open. Mal took hold of one end of the chain with his free hand whilst Coby gently unwound the rest from the rough, flaking handles of the tower doors and lowered it to the ground. Mal seized the handles, and a shudder of unaccountable dread swept over him. He took a deep breath and hauled the doors open.
A rush of warm air swept their faces, an ancient maritime scent of salt and seaweed, laced with a familiar musky scent: skraylings. Mal gestured for Coby to raise the lantern and stepped forward, expecting to see chained captives blinking back at him. He was partly right. At his side, Coby whimpered and clapped a hand to her mouth.
“Dear God in Heaven,” he murmured, making the sign of the cross.
The bodies of about two dozen skraylings lay on the floor of the tower in a pool of dark blood, still roped together. Their wrists and fanged mouths were bloody, as though they had torn open their own veins – or one another’s. He began methodically examining the bodies in case any of the victims had survived, but they were already beginning to stiffen. This must have happened hours ago. Was that the cause of the unease he had felt back at the cathedral: the skrayling soul trapped within him, mourning for the snuffing out of its fellows? He shuddered, not liking that line of thought.
At that moment he caught sight of a dark head amongst the white-streaked hair of the other skraylings. Short black hair. He frantically pulled the dead bodies aside until he had uncovered the dark-haired one and turned him over.