The fallen blade at-1

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Hunger hit.

  So hard Tycho rocked on his heels.

  Narrowing his eyes against the moon's flaring brightness he closed the gap in a blur, ending on his knees in front of her. All thoughts of being able to control his hunger forgotten. His dog teeth sharp as he bit into the wound and her body went rigid with shock. Grabbing her hips, he held her in place. She moaned and he fed, blood dripping down his face until the red mist faded and the ruined courtyard around them lost its hard edges and the sky paled to a watery pink.

  Lifting his head, Tycho took another look at Rosalyn and discovered her mouth wasn't twisted in misery. It was sewn shut.

  Scrambling up, he slashed it open. His fingernail growing from nothing. The action leaving her lips untouched.

  "Behind you," Rosalyn whispered. Every strand of the net burnt, searing his skin as silver weights fixed to its corners wrapped round his body, trapping him in its agonising embrace. His scream made rats scatter and sleeping pigeons swirl into the air from their roosts on the ledges. He fought the mesh, burning himself with every move he made, as he searched for the net's edges and tried to free himself from pain. He might have made it too. So desperate he was to escape. But the blood in his mouth soured, and the pink sky swirled and he felt himself fall, wrapped in fire and still screaming.

  Within a minute his screams had turned to whimpers, turning to silence shortly afterwards. No Nicoletti came to see what was happening. The campo was ruined and unsafe, and no one they knew lived there. Some of them had seen a veiled chair being carried by guards from their windows. The rest simply had more sense. "Wash him well," Duchess Alexa said.

  A'rial scowled.

  As the red-haired little witch broke the seal on a bottle and splashed purple liquid over weeping burns that stopped oozing and began healing before she had time to find a stopper, Duchess Alexa unwound a strand of horsehair and threaded a needle, the one she'd used to guarantee the beggar girl's silence.

  "Stand up," she barked crossly.

  The beggar girl continued to crouch, in blood and piss, swaying backwards and forwards, until the duchess grabbed her hair and dragged her up.

  "It's not deep," she said. "At least you got that right. But it'll heal faster if you stand still yourself and we do this properly. What's your name?"

  "Rosalyn, lady…"

  "Jewish?" Duchess Alexa sighed. "Not sure why I'd expect you to know. It's like expecting you to know your age or your father's name. Your mother's too, probably."

  "She was called Maria."

  "Of course she was," Alexa said. "Mother of God. The inviolate. Amazing how many whores have her name in this city."

  "She wasn't a whore."

  A'rial looked round, grinning.

  Then hastily went back to dressing Tycho's wounds when her mistress raised her veil to give her a look anyone watching would have thought mild.

  "And you," Alexa said. "Are you a whore?"

  Rosalyn shook her head indignantly.

  "So, little not-a-whore, what are you?"

  "I'm Rosalyn," she said, trying not to cry as the duchess dug a needle into her shoulder, hooked it through flesh and tied off the knot with the ease of someone who'd done the job before. The pain from the stitching was worse than the pain when Rosalyn cut herself, unless one had simply caught up with the other.

  She looked to where the red-haired child had Tycho laid out like a corpse, stripped of his clothes as she finished wiping his face and moved on to cleaning the rest of his body. "He's dead?" Rosalyn asked, her bottom lip quivering.

  A'rial grinned.

  "He's drunk," the duchess said. "On blood and opium, moonshine, a little antinomy, some henbane." She sounded amused. "And mandrake, obviously. To muddle his wits. Not that his wits needed muddling. Sadly…"

  "Lady?"

  "You're not the one."

  "I'm not the one what?" asked Rosalyn, unconsciously mirroring the thoughtful tilt of Duchess Alexa's head.

  Tying off the final knot, the duchess leant back to examine her handiwork. Her nod was satisfied. She was happy with the result. Pulling a tiny jar from her pocket, Duchess Alexa prised off its lid and stopper.

  Rosalyn was staring at it transfixed.

  "Would you like a look?"

  "Please, lady."

  The duchess scooped up a little ointment, then replaced the lid and handed the jar to Rosalyn, while she smoothed the odd-smelling mix along the stitches. "Camphor," she told Rosalyn. "That's what you can smell."

  But Rosalyn was turning the jar in her hand. Her fear, the pain and her stitches forgotten as she traced the path of a twisting, seven-toed dragon that chased itself around the rim. "It's beautiful."

  "From my grandfather's grandfather's days. It belonged to a Ming empress. And was found in the ruined gardens at Chang gan…"

  That was when Rosalyn realised she should know who this woman was. She was rich, obviously. Rich enough to be carried in a chair and have guards. Powerful enough to talk openly about her witch when witches were to be executed. And foreign enough to go veiled and talk with an accent Rosalyn didn't recognise.

  "Lady. Who are you? Can I ask?"

  The woman smiled beneath her veil. "I am the weeds in the rubble. The bricks in that…" She nodded at a ruined warehouse. "The women bedded and children born in those broken tenements behind you. I am the hammering in Cannaregio's forges. The sweat of artisans boiling hides for cheap armour."

  "Lady?"

  "Call me my lady," she said, almost kindly.

  The woman traced the stitching down Rosalyn's chest and sighed. Then she pulled back her veil to show her face in the moonlight. "I am Alexa di Millioni, and my son should be those things, not me. Be faithful and my favour is yours. Betray me and you will wish you died here tonight."

  Looking into her cold eyes, Rosalyn believed her. In the days when Venetians wore rags and Venice was a collection of fishermen's huts on stilts in the middle of a muddy lagoon, where inhabitants worried more about staying alive than building palaces, invaders threatened and the last imperial fragments of Western Rome broke up around them, salt and fish were what they traded. Back then, salt was scraped from the rocks. Now the sprawl of low-walled tidal pools beyond Cannaregio produced salt for export in industrial quantities. Which was just as well, as a month's production of a single pool seemed to have been used to redraw the oval around the edge of Giulietta's attic.

  If she hadn't been upset enough to kick it away to see what happened-the answer being nothing-she would never have seen tonight's gruesome little moonlit masque. And her dull despair at imprisonment, and her fear of what might happen, if she stepped over the salt circle would never have been burnt away in her anger that the silver-haired boy had come so close to finding her. Only to be stopped by the very aunt who had promised to protect Giulietta after her mother died.

  It look Lady Giulietta forty minutes to climb down from the roof. And before she could do that, she had to cut her way through bottle glass. The house she was in was a ruin, but once it had been rich enough to have glazed windows.

  The actors in that night's masque were gone.

  She was grateful for that.

  Using the stairs at first, she navigated in darkness, feeling her way from rotten step to rotten step, each slimy with frost and wood canker. She'd believed exiting her attic window was hard, as was crawling over tiles and tumbling through a skylight to hit the floor below. That was not the hard part.

  Finding the second set of stairs broken and the floor so soft one heel tore wood as if it was paper was not the hard part. Not even doing this while shaking with fear and struggling to stop her teeth chattering in case anyone heard. (Since her bucket had still to be emptied and her platter refilled.) The hard part, she realised, was what came after she escaped.

  Her uncle had betrayed her and so had her aunt. Even if her aunt had not, what could Giulietta say? Nothing, since she could barely form the words in her head to describe what Dr. Crow had done to her and forcing them from her mouth was
impossible. Giulietta knew. She'd tried…

  I can't go to a physician, she realised in horror. He'd examine her, find her maidenhead intact, and proclaim a miracle, or damn her as bewitched. A wise woman? Mistress Scarlet was one of those. What if wise women talked to each other? They were out, priests were out, Dr. Crow was definitely out. Uncle Alonzo would kill her before she could betray him.

  And the woman she'd always turned to…?

  On whose lap she'd rested her head and poured out childish woes. Giulietta barely recognised Aunt Alexa in the terrifying being who stalked after that naked girl, and later sewed the girl's wounds shut. Her face, when she pulled back her veil. So beautiful lit by moonlight. So unbelievably cold.

  It took Giulietta twenty minutes to crawl through a jagged hole in the floor, hang by her hands from splintery boards and drop on to rubble, twisting her ankle in the fall. Nineteen of those were spent summoning her courage. Unless, she thought bitterly, it was desperation that finally forced her through.

  The blood on the campo where the girl cut herself had frosted like expensive icing. A scuff showed where the silver-haired boy had fallen to his knees, and buried his face in the naked girl's stomach. Of all the things she should be thinking, Giulietta was certain jealousy shouldn't top the list.

  31

  A thousand events happened next morning. Fishing boats docked on Venice's northern edge, their nets safely reset. That day's catch would go to feed the city, since it was Friday and eating meat that day invited the fires of hell.

  Since none of the three corpses caught in the nets belonged to anyone who mattered, no fisherman was dragged to the leads, made to confess sins belonging to someone else and executed.

  Master shipwrights scrambled from their mattresses, having bedded their wives for warmth in the minutes before the Arzanale bell rang. Apprentices and journeymen tumbled their women and left them with half promises of marriage, and a newly made brat to widen their wombs, as like as not.

  The rope walkways, dry docks and shipyards of Arzanale were the source of Venice's power. The older men still called it Darsina, from the Arabic Dar-al-sina, and a few even called it that. Across the city, foreigners-including those from the countries that gave the city that word-finished their prayers and rose to stock their stalls or unload boats or carry goods through alleys more complex than any minotaur's maze. White men, black men, yellow men. A dozen face shapes and twice as many languages. Their laws did not require Friday fish but most ate it out of expediency. Although they called it politeness.

  Night soil men carried waste to barges bound for the mainland. Butchers slaughtered pigs, working under canvas to protect them from the drizzle. The Church might forbid eating pork on Friday, but it allowed the butchering of swine and the preparation of tomorrow's meat. Awnings or not, the dirt beneath the butchers' feet still turned to slop from the blood, guts and excrement that spilled from the swine, along with their lives.

  Whores swore, splashing water between sore thighs as brothels closed or shifts changed. Losers staggered from gaming houses, having mortgaged already mortgaged houses, as card sharps shook aces from their sleeves, and rolled loaded dice for that day's luck, knowing that it was already secure.

  Hearths were swept. Kindling chopped.

  In the hours either side of the black thread moment Venice changed her masks like a gambler hoping to avoid his creditors as he heads for a new casa chiusa.

  The sun rose cold and pale over the lagoon's edge, where the first villages stood. A starving memory of the previous summer's sun, which had glowed like slowly falling iron shot. And along the Riva degli Schiavoni, fighting memories of that summer sun, walked a young woman in a half-mask of her own.

  The mask was cracked, found in the mud a minute earlier. Her shoes were filthy. Her velvet houppelande gown squalid enough to suggest she earned her living on her back. Lady Giulietta di Millioni was used to seeing Venice from the canals. Her Venice was ornamental and gilded, and glimpsed through the fringes of her gondola's scarlet curtains. The rare times she'd left Ca' Ducale, it was to walk Piazza San Marco. This Venice was unknown to her.

  Stinking and strange and badly dressed. It didn't help that her gown, as well as being filthy, was cut lower than it need be. A dozen men mistook her for a whore between the Rialto and the start of Riva degli Schiavoni. And Moorish sailors leered openly as she dodged between carts, calling out offers for her service she wouldn't toss to a beggar. The sailors guarded women chained at the ankle. Criminals, Giulietta decided, then noticed their cheekbones and dark hair. Captured on the wild plains beyond Dalmatia, they were headed for slave markets in the Levant.

  Fifteen ships lay close to shore between Ponte della Paglia, just beyond Ca' Ducale and the bridge before Arzanale. French, Tedeschi, Byzantine, Andalusian and English… Lady Giulietta identified as many of the eagles, lions, fleur-de-lys and leopards as she could. Maybe, if she'd been looking where she was going, instead of playing herald, she wouldn't have walked into a French officer, negotiating for a dozen large barrels of fresh water.

  He swung round, hand on his sword hilt.

  The Schiavoni laughed as Giulietta jumped back. And the French officer's face darkened, thinking she mocked him. There was little doubt the merchant was. The Schiavoni were the largest group in the city after the Venetians. When Serenissima claimed the Dalmatian coast it gave the inhabitants trading rights. The new stone quay along the city's southern edge became home to Slav traders. They built churches, scuole and hospitals, founded charities and supported monasteries with their tithes. They also built the largest water cistern in the city. It gave them, their competitors claimed, unfair advantage. But then Venetians widely believed anyone who came between them and a greater profit had to have an unfair advantage one way or another.

  "Look where you're going…"

  Lady Giulietta glared back. When the young Frenchman scowled deeper, she made to walk round him and froze in shock when he thrust his arm out to stop her. He caught her wrist just ahead of her slapping him. Gripping it, he slapped her arse hard. "Sauce for the goose," he said.

  "How dare you?"

  "Dare I what?" he asked, grinning. "Object to you slapping me. Or object to you trying to walk off without apologising?" He realised he still held her wrist when she did. Stepping back, he let his eyes flick to the Schiavoni, and Giulietta realised, belatedly, he was simply trying to regain his pride.

  Men was her first thought. Her second was to say sorry. So she did, realising that was probably the first time she'd said it. Do I mean it? Giulietta ran back through not looking where she was going, running into him, and being cross. "Yes," she added. "I mean it."

  Uncertain how to answer, the Frenchman turned to the Schiavoni merchant instead. "We have a deal, right?" Taking five grosso and two ducats from his belt pocket, he double-counted them, tipping the gold and silver into the man's hand. "Deliver them there." He pointed to a tired-looking lugger.

  Surely he knew enough to make sure the casks were full? And was he really going to walk away without checking his supplier delivered the number of casks just paid for? How did she, who'd never paid for anything in her life, know he should do when the Frenchmen didn't? Because she was Venetian, and he wasn't, obviously enough. Nor was the water seller, but a hundred years of Venetian rule rubbed off on people. There was a joke about Schiavoni men. How can you profit from one? Buy him for what he's actually worth. Sell him for what he says he's worth. Buy a house with the difference…

  "You," she said.

  The Schiavoni looked at her strangely.

  "Deliver the right number of barrels. And make sure they're full." His scowl said he'd been planning to do neither.

  She walked on. Head up, shoulders back. Doing her best to hold her misery at arm's length. Squeezing between carts carrying swine, Giulietta stepped under a hoist lifting pigs into a boat, and only just missed being showered with the terrified animal's excrement. Someone laughed. Laughing louder when Giulietta turned her head aside
to hide her tears.

  Beyond the Riva degli Schiavoni and Arzanale gates was San Pietro di Castello, the island housing Venice's main cathedral. It was here Giulietta was headed, because when she'd summoned her courage to try the Patriarch's little palace by San Marco, announcing she was a friend of his, she'd been sworn at, called a grasping little whore and damned for her impiety. When she insisted she needed to see him, she'd been told with a sneer to try San Pietro.

  Despite taking her two hours to walk there, this being further than she'd ever walked before-certainly alone-and discovering an unknown city in the space occupied by one she knew; even though she crossed a rickety bridge to discover her confessor was dead, his body having lain in state in San Pietro, before being buried under the nave; and a sour-faced, wimpled nun, looking too much like another sour-face wimpled nun, had rolled her eyes at Giulietta's sudden sobs, and sent her packing, with threats of a whipping, this was not the important part of Giulietta's story that day.

  This came shortly afterwards.

  Her return from San Pietro di Castello was quicker, in the way such walks always are. On a mudbank before Arzanale two vessels rested on their sides; one was being caulked with twists of rope dipped in tar. The other had a hole in its side large enough to ride a horse through. Two men stood beneath, arguing.

  By skirting the shipyard's gate, Giulietta avoided being whistled at a second time. She avoided hoists lifting hog-tied swine, although excrement still splattered her as she waded, ankle-deep, through Judas-soft mud.

  "My lady…"

  She turned, surprised.

  Her admirer was broad, high-cheeked and darkly bearded. Dressed in a scarlet doublet, tight black hose and a floppy hat. His codpiece was more prominent and more highly decorated than she'd seen. Eyeing the sailors watching her, he smiled lazily. "Eggs," he said. "Have no business dancing with stones."

  "You know me?"

  "I know quality."

  Her eyes tightened at his mockery.

  "Believe me," he said. "I mean no insult."

  And then, strangely, he leant close and inhaled her scent, as if smelling new-mown grass or some expensive perfume. And taking her hand, he opened her fingers to reveal a ring turned so its stone was hidden from view. The stone was priceless. The setting so old that much of its decoration had worn away.