by S. D. Sykes
City
of
Masks
A SOMERSHILL MANOR NOVEL
S. D. Sykes
For Dad
The great galleys of Venice and Florence
Be well laden with things of complacence,
All spicery and of grocer’s ware,
With sweet wines, all manner of chaffer,
Apes, and japes, and marmosettes tailed,
Nifles, trifles, that little have availed,
And things with which they cleverly blear our eye,
With things not enduring that we buy,
For much of this chaffer that is wastable,
Might be forborne for dear and deceivable.
“The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye,”
medieval poem
Prologue
It was the carnival of Giovedì Grasso, the last Thursday before the Lent of 1358, and I had spent the afternoon in the Piazza San Marco, watching the many spectacles of the day. A group of young men chased a herd of bewildered pigs about one corner, while, in another corner, a different group of young men balanced acrobatically upon one another’s shoulders to make a swaying tower of humanity. And then there was no missing the third group—those fops who simply strode about the square in order that everybody else might admire their fine brocade cloaks, feathered hats, and colored hose. Oh yes, it was no wonder that I soon lost interest in these sights, and wandered away to seek the less innocent pleasures of Venice.
By the time I returned to the Piazza it was early evening, and the sun was shedding its last rays upon the arches and domes of the Basilica. Now that the night was drawing in, the carnival no longer wore the good-humored, smiling face of earlier. Instead a sea of masks leered at me at every turn. Sewn from polished leather, and decorated with long noses, beaded edges, and feathered brows, each mask was more grotesque than the last.
I dropped my eyes to the beaten earth and tried to leave, but soon I was caught up in a band of men playing lutes and bladder pipes—their droning, repetitive tune cutting through my head like a long saw. I forced my way into a side street, but my progress became no easier. Horses might be banned in the Piazza itself, but there were plenty of the beasts here, tied to posts while their owners drank away their last few coins in the nearby taverns.
And it wasn’t just horses that impeded my progress. Soon I was ducking my head to avoid a shower of perfumed eggs that had been thrown from an upper window. Lanterns were shone in my face, and a terrified pig ran over my foot—no doubt an escapee from the earlier game. I kept moving, as I was drawing the attention of people around me. They were surprised, even suspicious, that I wasn’t wearing a mask, so I raised my hood and then kept to the thinnest, darkest alleys of Venice in an attempt to go unnoticed and find my way back.
But this city is a labyrinth. Away from the vast, regimented quadrangle of the great Piazza, it is a bewildering maze of winding alleys and silent canals. A wide street promises to lead to another wide street, but instead it tapers away to nothing more important than a courtyard of washing or an unannounced drop into stagnant water. To the untutored eye, each path looks exactly like the next.
So it was that I spent an hour or more walking these dimly lit paths, and crossing the low bridges of San Marco, until I finally pushed my way into the deserted courtyard of my lodgings to hear the bell of a nearby convent ring for Nocturnes. The distant screams and screeches from the carnival still reached my ears, and the repetitive drone of the band still cut through my head. When I looked down at my clothes, I saw that my boots were covered in mud, and my cloak was peppered with the fragments of broken eggshells. Such were my mementos of the carnival!
I closed my eyes in an attempt to shut out the world, but now my ears fixed themselves upon the sounds of the house. The bang of an unfastened shutter. The lapping of the canal against the courtyard wall. The sudden rush of a bat that had woken early from its winter torpor. And then a different sound caught my attention. It was a faint, muffled dragging, and at first I dismissed it as another ordinary noise in this busy household until it came again, from the direction of the water gate, and I could ignore it no longer. There was something too stealthy and furtive in its quality—as if somebody were deliberately leaving a gap between each sound to see if they attracted attention.
Creeping from the courtyard, I was still expecting to find a simple explanation for the noise. A servant working late. A delivery of goods from the canal, or even my mother’s dog looking for scraps of meat. I had not imagined that I would find somebody lying facedown across the marble steps of the water gate, with the cold and dirty water of the canal lapping across their boots.
There was no response when I addressed them, so I prodded their back, thinking this might be somebody who had stumbled home from the carnival, before falling asleep on this very spot in a drunken stupor. But this person was not drunk, they were dead, and my fingers had touched a body that was stiff and heavy.
I took a deep breath, pushed both hands beneath the chest, and then forced the body to roll over, expecting to see a face. Instead I was confronted by the ugliest carnival mask I had ever seen—sewn from red leather and scored with a knife. I had to look a second time before I realized that the light had tricked me, and this was no mask. It was a person’s face, with skin as raw and shredded as a butchered carcass. Their lips were swollen, and their hair was matted and blackened with blood. And then, as I looked closer again, somebody familiar looked back at me. Their eyes were dead. Their skin was torn and battered. But this was the face of somebody I knew.
It was somebody I knew very well.
City of Masks
Chapter One
The Venetians call their city La Serenissima—the “most serene” republic, and so she had seemed as we sailed toward her from the port of Fusina in the June of 1357. From a distance she appeared to float upon the water of the lagoon, a thin line of dark green between the blue of the sea and the sky. But with each stroke of the oar, Venice came more and more into focus, her campaniles pointing up toward the heavens like the ascenders of letters; her houses and palaces the color of crab shells or blanched almonds; her boats gathered about her jetties in a joyous, bobbing profusion.
Then, as we drew even nearer, the sounds of the city reached our ears—the loud, feverish roar of the place. We were no longer adrift in the silence of the lagoon, where lonely fishermen stood in the shallow waters and sifted for clams, or where the egrets poked about on uninhabited outcrops of mud and sand. Now we could see and hear the crowds as they thronged along the wide quay of the Molo, making their way to and from the many ships that were moored here. They were people of all races, many dressed in the finest clothes I had ever seen. The fur collars and sweeping capes of the men; the extravagant headdresses and embroidered gowns of the women. Even the lowliest manservants wore tailored tunics and colored hose.
Venice might have started her life as a marshy refuge from invading barbarians, but now she was the largest and richest city in Europe. The hinge of two continents. The funnel of trade from the East to the West. She had once been a haven from the outside world, but now she found herself at the very heart of it.
I was dawdling in the Piazza San Marco on a warm September morning, three months after our arrival, while Mother pushed her way through the crowds to witness an execution. Today a tall pyre had been stacked at the water’s edge between the two Columns of Justice, upon which a man was to be burned to death. His crime, I learned from an old woman in the crowd, was to have been caught in bed with another man by the Signori di Notte—the Lords of the Night—a group of odious noblemen who sent their spies about the city in their fight against anything they deemed to be immoral.
I was alone in my corner, for unlike most Venetians it seemed, I di
sliked executions. In fact, I would never have agreed to come here in the first place, had I known the true reason for our outing, but Mother had fooled me with some story about wanting to visit a merchant who sold lapis lazuli. Upon realizing the truth I had quickly made my way to the other side of the Piazza, hoping to avoid all contact with this atrocity, but, as luck would have it, I passed the Signori di Notte’s latest victim as I beat my retreat. He was a pitiful, quaking man who knew what torture awaited him before death. The poor fellow screamed for mercy, though there was no chance for his redemption, since the doge had now appeared on the raised loggia of his palace to watch the execution, and the man’s fate was sealed.
While the crowds roared in the distance, I leaned against the stone pillar of a portico and pretended to read my small Psalter in the hope of some distraction from the pyre. I had seen a person burn to death once before, and I had no wish to witness such inhumanity again; but as I studied the text, trying to distract myself by wondering what had inspired the scribe to draw such an array of strange beasts in the margins, I felt a nudge at my elbow. At first I ignored this, for the burning had attracted an army of beggars into the Piazza—gangs of men, women, and children who were now working their way methodically through the crowd, pulling at the onlookers’ cloaks and pleading for alms. When the nudge turned into a prod, however, I could ignore my pest no longer.
I looked up from my Psalter to find that it was not a beggar at my elbow, instead it was a man in a polished helmet. He was flanked by two more men, dressed in the same uniform, so I stood aside, thinking that I might be blocking their path. Unfortunately, this gesture only appeared to rile them. They wanted to know my name, so I gave a shrug and told them in my loudest English that I didn’t understand a word of what they were saying. This wasn’t true, of course. In fact, after three months in this city I could converse quite adequately in their tongue, for Venetian is a soup whose main ingredients are Latin and Greek—two languages that I had studied in great detail at the monastery where I had been sent as a child.
They asked my name again, and now I realized that these men were wearing the helmets and tabards of the doge’s guard. The winged lion of St. Mark looked out at me from their breastplates, its mane flowing and its feathers splayed. As the people about me withdrew fearfully, I knew that I should be polite and deferential to these men—but somehow I was not in the mood. The Piazza was filling with the fumes of the pyre, as the man they were burning shrieked with pain—his prayers no longer able to douse down his agony. These soldiers were part of this barbaric justice, so they did not deserve my politeness, nor my deference.
In retrospect, this was a mistake.
I had wanted to see inside the doge’s palace ever since we had arrived in Venice, but not in this way. Not as a prisoner. As the guards pushed me around the portico of the central courtyard, we passed scribes, monks, magistrates, soldiers, serving women, even finely dressed child-slaves from Africa in this city within a city.
Our journey ended in a chamber with a heavy door, but thankfully this was not the dungeon I had feared. Instead, this room reminded me more of the scriptorium at my old monastery, where the monks of the abbey had copied and illuminated their manuscripts. As the door opened, I saw a gray-faced man of middle age sitting alone at a long table and hunched over a large roll of parchment. He looked up at my entrance, squinted to see my face, and then indicated roughly for me to sit down opposite him. Once I had settled myself into the chair, he dismissed the guards and then offered me a bowl of wine.
“I demand to know why I’m here,” I said in Venetian. “I’m an Englishman. Known to the King of England himself.” This lie had proved useful on our long journey south to Venice, when my declaration of a connection to the king was enough to rattle an awkward innkeeper, or to silence a quarrelsome pilgrim. On this occasion, however, the lie had little effect, other than to cause the man to scribble on the parchment that lay in front of him. “Who do you represent?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “The Consiglio dei Dieci?” I suggested, thinking of the Council of Ten, who were the true rulers of this city. The man did not react. “Then is it the Signori di Notte?” I asked, unable to prevent a short gulp when I said their name.
My interrogator curled his lips in a wry smile, but said nothing and returned to his writing. As he leaned over his parchment, I studied the great pile of wrinkled black velvet that was balanced on his head, and the chain of silver and gold that hung over his collar of weasel fur—but there was something unconvincing about all this ostentation, as if this man were not as important as he liked others to believe.
He looked up at me at length, sighed, and then reclined against the carved spindles of his chair. “What are you doing here, Oswald de Lacy, Lord Somershill?”
“I thought you might tell me,” I said. “I was reading a prayer book in the Piazza, and your soldiers arrested me. And might I ask how you know my name?” I said, with exaggerated affront.
He ignored this comment and began to write again, his quill scratching and squeaking as he applied pressure to the parchment. “My question is this,” he said at length, without looking up, “what are you doing in Venice?”
“If you know my name already, then you must know my purpose.”
He raised an eyebrow, before taking up the quill again. I have keen eyesight and have always been able to read upside down, so I could see that he was transcribing my words verbatim. “Do you need some time in the Pozzi to consider my question?” he asked. “You seem a little unsure.”
“I’m on a pilgrimage from England,” I said quickly, for the Pozzi were reputedly the worst dungeons in the whole of Europe. “I’m waiting for a galley to Jerusalem.”
He continued to write and didn’t look up. “But you’re an unusual pilgrim,” he said at length. “Most pilgrims have avoided Venice in the last few months. You have noticed perhaps that we are at war?”
I ignored his sarcasm. “Of course,” I said, thinking of the Jaffa galleys that were moored, one against the other in the Molo, like pigs squeezed into a pen—while their crews loitered in gangs about the city like children who would not go to bed. The pilgrims’ hospices were empty, and the holy shrines of Venice were selling off their relics and indulgences at vastly reduced prices. So yes, I had noticed the war.
My interrogator lay his quill down upon the table. “Where is the rest of your party?” he asked. “Pilgrims always travel in large groups.” He ran his finger along a line of text. “Yet I see you arrived in Venice with your mother. And nobody else. Not even a servant.”
“Have you been following me?” I asked in reply.
“Please answer my question.”
How could I tell the truth? That we had set off in an adequately cordial mood with a party from England, formed mainly from members of my mother’s family, only to quarrel with them until we could not bear each other’s company for another day. These arguments, caused mainly by my black moods or Mother’s ancient and odorous dog, Hector, had meant that we parted on such bad terms that they would not even provide a servant to accompany us on the last leg of our journey to Venice.
“Our party split in Bergamo,” I said. “The others continued to Bari.”
The man gave a short, disgruntled snort. Since the Hungarians had blockaded the lagoon, the Venetians had lost most of their lucrative pilgrimage trade to the port of Bari in the far south of Italy. “Why didn’t you join them?” he asked. “You must have heard that Venice was under attack.”
“My mother was too ill to continue by road,” I said. “We hoped that Venice would quickly make peace.”
His eyes flashed. “You think that Venice should surrender her ports in Dalmatia?” he said, as a bubble of foam formed on his lips. “To such savages as the Hungarians?”
“No, not at all,” I said quickly—though it seemed to me that Venice had no particular claim to Dalmatian land on the other side of the Adriatic. These ports might have been vital to the transport of goods from Constantinople, but
Venice had hardly made herself popular with her Dalmatian subjects, having stripped their forests of timber and refused to pay dockage at their ports. I didn’t find it difficult to understand why the Dalmatians had turned to King Louis of Hungary, in hope of a deliverance from Venice—but this was not an opinion I decided to share.
My interrogator wiped his lips with a square of white linen, which he then folded neatly and placed beside the parchment on the table. He dipped the nib of his quill into the well of ink, tapped it against the side of the glass pot, and then began to scratch his way once again across the page. When he had finished his long sentence, he blew on the writing and watched the ink dry. “Why don’t you wear the cloak and red cross of a pilgrim?” he said at length.
“I’m a nobleman. I’ve no need to rely upon charity to pay for my passage to Jerusalem.”
My boast only elicited a short huff. “You’re staying at the house of an Englishman, John Bearpark? Is that correct?” he said. “A house that Bearpark calls Casa Bearpark?” He followed this comment with a farther, scornful snort. It was usually only the palaces of Venice that carried such a name, and though Ca’ Bearpark was grand, it was certainly not a palazzo.
“I am.”
“Why?” he asked. “There are many inns and hospices in Venice. Even ones suitable for a nobleman such as yourself.”
“John Bearpark is an old friend of the de Lacy family,” I said, choosing not to mention that this so-called friend was also charging us to stay at his home.
“Bearpark has a beautiful young wife, doesn’t he?” he said suddenly, taking me by surprise. I looked up to see that, for the first time in this interview, the man had smiled, cracking the skin at the corners of his mouth and revealing a set of irregular, pointed teeth.