Jacopo said, ‘The boatman can’t row faster than the ship. If you want to hoard it, you’ll have to go now.’
As the boat was pushed out, and the boatman unshipped his oars, Pelashil called out across the widening watery gap, ‘Send your first picture back, Pasquale, so that I know you are alive! Piero won’t live for ever!’
And then she turned away, Jacopo following, and Pasquale saw them no more. The ship was moving slowly into the lock at the entrance to the Grand Canal, and Pasquale saw that his was not the only boat going out to meet her. She had undocked hours early, it turned out, to make open sea before the Spanish blockaded the canal. Many had no dockets, and Pasquale had to hold his up and call out Lisa Giocondo’s name over and over until at last a knotted rope was dropped and he climbed aboard.
It was morning, and the ship was already being towed through the wide channel beyond Livorno, amid a flotilla of small craft bearing merchants who were doing good business selling fresh fruit, clothing, mirrors, beads and other trinkets (for bargaining with the Savages), guns (which must at once be handed in to the armourer) and much else, when Pasquale was finally given a berth. It was no more than a chalked space two braccia by four, with a little locker at its head where Pasquale could stow away the necessaries he had bought from the floating merchants and from the quartermaster, a dour fat man who had his office in the black bowels of the ship. The passenger hold was marked out with half a hundred such spaces, but no one was asleep. Along with everyone else, Pasquale leaned at the rail of the ship’s promenade, at her waist beneath the raised platform where the captain stood beside the steersman. Pasquale felt a strange thrilling excitement, looking amongst his fellow passengers and wondering which would be his friends, whether any enemies would be made, or lovers found amongst them on the long voyage to the New World.
The merchants’ craft fell behind. The paddle-wheeled tug cast off its lines and slowed, so that the ship drew abreast of it, and then it too fell astern. Ahead was a widening line, the hard blue sea under a clear sky.
Pasquale carried under his arm a board with a cover of oiled cloth, and two bands to hold paper down against the wind. He had kept his silverpoint pen through all his adventures, and his little knife, and blocks of chalk. Paper and more chalk was to be had from the quartermaster at a price. But he was not ready. Not yet. He was sure that there was money to be made from sketching portraits of his fellow voyagers, but not yet. He was still filled with tumbling images from his adventures. There was the burning gate and the trees caught afire, the burning bridge and the luminous stained-glass window shivered to pieces around him, the puzzled fading gaze of the dying ape and Lisa Giocondo’s smile, the wry wise face of his friend and Pelashil’s fierce, scornful independence…And gathering form from all this, although he would not yet admit it, were the lineaments of something more than human and less, something that, poised between the world of thought and the world of things, between Word and Act, might possibly be (for how could he ever again be certain of anything?) the fierce luminous wondering face of his angel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A biologist by training, PAUL McAULEY is now a full-time writer of stunning hard SF and alternate reality novels. His first novel, 400 Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award, while Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel. Pasquale’s Angel won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.
He lives and works in London. Visit his blog at http://unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com.
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