“I disapprove of the Regent’s decision.”
Everyone looked up, openly shocked. Bribanzo was Alonzo’s man, his banker. The idea that Lord Bribanzo would publicly disapprove of anything Alonzo wanted was absurd. Lapdogs had more will.
“Y-you d-do?”
“Yes,” Bribanzo said fiercely. “It’s a waste. Our greatest general retiring to dig his own fields.” He sounded as if he really thought Alonzo would dig ditches, tend vines and build drystone walls. He must know Alonzo’s bucolic vision was for public consumption – like most of the things Alonzo said.
“Politics bores me, Bribanzo.” The Regent’s voice was warm and convincingly honest. The qualities that made him loved by his troops and so dangerous to Alexa. Drunk, Alonzo was dangerous. Sober, he was more dangerous still. It had always been thus – to use one of his own expressions.
“My lord, reconsider. For Venice’s sake.”
“My mind is made up.”
“If you’re bored with the city . . .”
“Bribanzo. I was born here, the canals are my home. I spoke Venetian before I could speak Latin or mainland Italian. Listen to the crowd . . .” The Regent paused, a little too theatrically, to let the Council hear the rumble of carts, the singing of gondoliers and the shouts of stallholders on the Riva degli Schiavoni. “That is the sound of my heart beating. This city is my heart. The canals my blood. How could I ever be bored of Venice? The thought is absurd.”
Staged, Tycho thought. Both men had rehearsed their lines before the meeting began. If not, then they’d certainly discussed how this should be played.
“Then why . . .?” Bribanzo began.
Alonzo risked a glance at Alexa. A quick, slight glance that suggested complications and things he couldn’t say. Questions that only she could answer, not that he expected she ever would.
“I-is this g-going anywhere?” Marco demanded.
“Highness. We have Barbary pirates in the Adriatic. The governor of Paxos has declared himself king. Then there are the Red Crucifers . . .”
Marco looked at his mother, who bent to whisper. “Ahh,” he said. “The renegades. I thought I’d lost t-track of a c-colour . . .” He smiled as the Council laughed dutifully. The recognised Priories were the White, who protected pilgrims, and the Black, who extracted sin with torture and oversaw executions. When the local Prior of the White in Montenegro proclaimed himself High Prior of the Red, and announced he and his followers would drive heretics from Montenegro, most regarded that as heresy itself. The man might be dead but his knights remained, holding to their new name, their supposed religious mission and the land they should be protecting from Serbian bandits. The Duchy of Montenegro was one of Venice’s newer colonies. Not large, but its position across the Adriatic from Sicily made it key to protecting Venetian trade.
“My friend . . . What are you suggesting?” Alonzo asked.
Bribanzo glanced at the other councillors. One of them nodded slightly, and from the sudden stiffening of Alexa’s shoulders Tycho knew she’d caught the glance. Alonzo’s plot spread wider than both of them thought. She’s worried. Alexa worried is me worried. Tycho loosened his dagger and Alexa shook her head.
“If you won’t stay here, my lord, serve Venice in another capacity. Don’t simply retire to your estates. The city can’t afford to lose its greatest general.”
The Regent shrugged.
“I mean it, my lord.” Bribanzo’s voice was stronger.
Here it comes.
“So,” said Alonzo. “Sail against the Barbary pirates . . . Retake Paxos . . . Defeat the Red Crucifers . . . Which do you want from me?”
“Any of them, my lord.” Bribanzo looked to the Council for agreement and received half a dozen nods. Alexa would note who agreed and who kept their counsel. She glanced at her son but Marco seemed too lost in his thoughts to notice a split was appearing.
“Alonzo,” she said.
“Yes, my lady?” The Regent sounded innocent.
“I thought you were determined to retire to your estates?”
“That is my dearest wish. But if the Council of Ten still want me to serve my city . . .” There was enough ambiguity in his tone to leave it unclear whether he meant he served the city, or he regarded the city as his. He’d made it clear to everyone over the years that he didn’t consider it hers. “If the Council want me to serve, how can I refuse? No matter what my enemies say about me . . .” He looked at Tycho this time. “My devotion to Venice is unchanging. My friends already know my friendship is for life. My enemies would be fools to underestimate me . . .”
“Alonzo.”
“A man may say goodbye to his friends. Especially when he goes to risk his life for his city. Any Venetian knows this.”
“And I’m not Venetian?” Alexa’s voice was tight.
Alonzo smiled. “As you say . . .”
“S-s-snow.” Marco said suddenly. The room stilled as he unfolded spidery legs, abandoned his throne and wandered to the window. He opened an inner shutter, peered through a small circle of bottle glass and sucked his teeth at the darkness beyond. “It’s going to s-snow. Look . . .”
Stars that had been high and bright when the meeting began were now shrouded by cloud, and the moon a sullen glow on the far side of a slab of grey. It was cold enough in the chamber to need a brazier in the fireplace, but snow? Snow was rare in Venice. At least flakes that lasted beyond a few days.
“Isn’t it, T-Tycho? Y-you’ve seen snow. D-doesn’t it feel like snow to you?”
What’s behind that smile?
“M-my uncle will need a big b-blanket, and an army for when he g-goes to M-Montenegro. Well, g-gold to buy an army but in such a good cause. And a n-nice thick coat for M-Maria for when he’s not k-keeping her warm in b-bed.”
“Montenegro?” Alexa asked.
“He can fight the Red C-Crucifers. He’ll l-like that.” With this, Marco abandoned his window, wandered to the door, which he opened for himself, and ambled away whistling “Touch Her Teats First”, a song usually heard at peasant weddings on the mainland. The meeting broke up immediately. Marco was duke; without him there was no meeting to be had.
“My lord . . .” Bribanzo bowed to Alonzo. “May I offer you my congratulations on your forthcoming marriage? This is unexpected, but welcome.”
“Not so much forthcoming, Bribanzo, as immediate. I go to the basilica now. Come with me and be my witness.”
Lord Bribanzo looked flattered.
The Regent owed him several thousand gold ducats, and undoubtedly hoped to put off repaying the loan for some while yet. Tycho watched Prince Alonzo and Bribanzo leave together and saw three Council members follow after. Turning, he found Alexa beside him.
“Find my niece,” she said, “escort her to the basilica.” Seeing Tycho’s expression, she added, “Alonzo is a prince of Serenissima, the late duke’s brother and the new duke’s uncle. She will be there to see him marry, so will Marco, whether they want to or not. We will all be there.”
We will all be there . . . Tycho took the words out of the chamber and along a servants’ corridor he used to pass discreetly through Ca’ Ducale, the Millioni’s palace overlooking Piazza San Marco. He’d been born an orphan, and the discovery of that had been a relief, since he hated the bitch he’d believed his mother. Now he had a girl who loved him, who had a baby who loved her. While Alexa, who had every reason to hate him, since he had arrived in Venice with the sole purpose of killing her, included him when she spoke of we.
He was still smiling when he reached Lady Giulietta’s door. If they were a few minutes late in arriving and Giulietta seemed a little breathless . . . Well, they were young and what could anyone expect?
3
When the patriarch called San Marco “Europe’s most beautiful basilica”, he wasn’t simply pandering to Venetian pride. By the year of Our Lord 1408 there had been a church on the site of San Marco for six hundred years; admittedly not the same church, and the basilica had been rebuilt,
extended, had new domes and new frescos until few could imagine what the original must have looked like, but there had been a church and it had been famously beautiful even back then. Now the wedding congregation stood before a flamboyantly jewelled rood screen, beneath a stern-faced Christ, while a fretted brass censor swung overhead beneath the largest of the five domes. Venice was once a colony of Constantinople, and it showed in the basilica’s Eastern architecture.
Lady Giulietta had never doubted it was beautiful, for all it was from here she’d been abducted the night before she left to marry King Janus of Cyprus, a marriage that never happened. Since Janus had been a Black Crucifer and his previous marriage had been complicated, she was glad.
“You’re safe,” Tycho whispered.
“What?”
“You shivered.”
Folding her fingers into his, she gripped tight and smiled when he turned to watch her, nodding at the couple before the rood screen to say he should be watching them instead. For once her uncle had discarded his breastplate. His bride huddled inside a huge fur coat against the cold. The coat was made from the pelt of a brown bear, and legend had it that Alonzo stabbed the bear himself. Legend also said he gutted the animal, ate its heart and skinned its carcase, washing its bloody pelt in a stream as clear and cold as ice.
The problem with Uncle Alonzo was that it could be true.
His bravery in battle was renowned and his skills as a general had brought him fame before she was born. Had Uncle Marco not died and his idiot son become duke, Uncle Alonzo would be happily besieging a castle somewhere. It was Aunt Alexa who said Alonzo fought the bear hand to hard. That he hadn’t claimed it himself only made Giulietta believe it more. Still, the bearskin made a weird wedding dress. So large and bulky, almost as if Maria was trying to hide something.
Lady Giulietta nudged Tycho. “Don’t you think Maria looks . . .”
“Like a girl who needs to get married in a hurry?”
She shushed him. Maria was a few years older than them, so somewhere in her early twenties; the ideal of beauty, heavy breasted and full-hipped, with long hair dyed Venetian-red as tradition demanded. Giulietta’s own hair was naturally red, her body slighter and her figure much less arresting. Her aunt always said Giulietta would grow into her looks and she had; although she’d never believed Aunt Alexa back then. For the first time Giulietta could remember she felt like her skin fitted as it was meant to fit. Maria, however, looked bulkier than Giulietta recalled.
If she was pregnant then Alonzo leaving for his estates on Corfu made perfect sense. Taking her on campaign less so, but even that was safer than leaving her in Venice for Aunt Alexa to poison.
The rumour of a Grand Canal full of dead fish came from her aunt’s earliest years in the city. Whispers said she dropped a single glass vial of poison, barely larger than a child’s finger, and every fish in the Canalasso died. Like the story of Alonzo and the bear, Alexa and her vial had gone beyond rumour into legend.
“But what does Uncle Alonzo get out of this?” When Tycho looked round, Giulietta realised she’d said the words aloud. It was obvious what Maria got. She got to be a princess of Serenissima and live in the ducal palace. Well, she would have done if Alonzo weren’t being quietly banished. But Maria . . .?
“He gets that,” Tycho whispered.
Maria’s father dripped gold. As rich as a Dolphini, the cittadini said. And as vulgar, the nobles added under their breath. He was dressed in the gaudy grandeur Giulietta expected. A doublet of scarlet velvet glistened wine-dark in the shadows. His matching cloak was yellow-lined. The gold chain around his neck was thick enough to moor a barge. He stood next to Lord Bribanzo, equally rich if less gaudily dressed. Between them they were richer than the Millioni, and Giulietta’s family was the richest in Europe. If Maria produced a son there would be no stopping Lord Dolphini’s ambitions. The old man would lavish gold on his princely grandchild and Dolphini money would strengthen Alonzo’s position.
“I bet Aunt Alexa asks you to kill her.”
“She can’t,” Tycho said. “It’s not allowed.” The rules governing his position as Duke’s Blade, head of Venice’s cadre of assassins, prevented the duchess using the Assassini against any member of the Millioni family, just as they prevented the Regent from doing the same. Once married, Maria was untouchable.
“Really?” Giulietta asked. She sighed.
It was not that she wanted Maria dead . . . But she’d always hoped her aunt would one day kill her uncle. Had Venice always been this dark and twisted, this complicated and divided? Was it like this in Milan, Paris and Vienna? Lady Giulietta sucked her teeth, running through the dark reputations of those cities, and decided it probably was. The whole world was like this and Giulietta wished it was better. If she was ruler of Venice it would be different. She’d insist on it.
Up ahead, the patriarch was asking Maria if she married freely. Having been assured she did, he asked Alonzo if he would be faithful to death. His booming boast that he would be faithful to death and beyond was not in the order of service but heads nodded approvingly in the small party around him. Rings were exchanged, the blessing was given and the marriage was done.
This was the shorter service. Without a Mass, without a choir, and without much by way of guests or congregation; but it was done and it was legal. Alonzo il Millioni was married and the young woman beside him was now a Millioni princess and looking slightly stunned by the turn of events.
4
“No, I don’t want Alonzo killed.” Duchess Alexa, Mongol wife of the late duke and mother to Marco the Simpleton, who seemed daily less simple, looked at the restless young man in front of her desk and smiled sympathetically. She’d known his suggestion before he suggested it. This was not magic. She’d want the same if she was Tycho; young, full of life and in love with her niece.
“My lady. Let me do this.”
Alexa shook her head.
“Please . . .”
“Tycho!” Now her hated brother-in-law was headed for exile she was sole Regent and intended to use the power. Mostly she liked her life; albeit in someone else’s city, ruling someone else’s people, and having taken a name not her own. But she was dying of old age and a disease ate her insides. She had no time for new complexities. “You will not mention this again.”
The boy smouldered like phosphorus dropped into water, his anger so palpable that she sighed. It wasn’t that Alexa even objected to him killing her brother-in-law, she simply knew it to be unwise. Pulling a stiletto from his belt, the boy absent-mindedly reached for a sharpening stone.
“Put those away . . .”
He looked up in surprise. “It relaxes me.”
The boy’s hair was wolf-grey, his cheekbones high and his amber-flecked eyes the most arresting she’d ever seen. He could see perfectly in darkness but the daylight terrified him. Beautiful but flawed, with a hint of danger. What young girl looked for more? Alexa didn’t blame her niece for being infatuated, for all she wished it otherwise. “It must be sharp surely?”
Dropping the whetstone into his pocket, Tycho drew the blade across his thumb and watched blood bead in a dark line. Almost as quickly, the cut began to heal. “Sharp enough to solve your problem.”
Alexa sighed. Above her city the black sky held faint traces of purple. The canals were quiet, the Venetian crowd still subdued following the recent departure of a Byzantine fleet that had blockaded the lagoon. There was a chill to the night air that had been missing a week earlier. “You know the rules.”
“Ignore them. No one will suspect you.”
“Of course they will.” Her voice was dry. “Everyone will suspect me. What you mean is they won’t be able to prove it.”
“You aren’t worried about letting him go into exile?”
She started to deny it and decided not to bother. Somehow she always ended up telling Tycho the truth. Well, mostly. But then Tycho had found her with a map on her desk, outlining Montenegro’s territories in red ink. “It’s
complicated.”
The boy ginned. Everything in Venice was.
“I ordered him to take exile. I can hardly complain if he offers to rid the Adriatic of pirates, protect our Schiavoni colonies and defeat a ravening horde of renegade Crucifers, can I? Any one of those would have brought half the Council back to his side, and there’s always a chance . . .”
“One of the three might kill him?”
Alexa nodded.
“Don’t leave it to chance,” Tycho said seriously. “We can make it look natural if you want. Give me the right poison and he can die in his sleep. Think of the solemn service, his weeping new widow, the whole family dressed in black and saying prayers for his soul. You can have sculptors carve a beautiful marble tomb.”
“This is about Giulietta, isn’t it?”
Of course it was. Her brother-in-law had treated Giulietta abominably. Fathering a son on her as Saracens bred horses, with a goose quill of his own seed, so she could bear an heir for Janus of Cyprus, a king she never married. If she was Tycho she’d want Alonzo dead, too.
“It’s not the rules governing the Assassini. I gave my husband my word I’d let his brother live. Marco made me swear this on his deathbed. You think for one minute that if I hadn’t . . .?” He’d be dead a hundred times. Dead within the first week. Not killing Alonzo was the hardest thing she’d done. I took him to my bed, she thought bitterly. To protect my child I took him to my bed, and he tried to poison my son anyway.
How can I break my word now? “Alonzo will leave for Montenegro the day after tomorrow. You will not kill him. Understand me?”
Tycho bowed.
“Good,” Alexa said. “You may go . . .”
She’d considered having Tycho killed and still wondered if it would be the sensible thing for her to do. He was brilliant, beautiful and dangerous. All the things that attracted her niece worried her. But how could she hold his exotic looks against him. Over the years she’d suffered the stares and glances of her late husband’s subjects, who’d apparently expected her to have golden eyes or scales. As if the docks at Arzanale and the quay-sides on the Canalasso hadn’t already been full of Mongols and every other race beside. On her husband’s death she adopted the widow’s veil, finding relief in the fact that the people she ruled could no longer see her clearly. Her son, however, with his sallow skin and almond eyes they saw clearly enough, and blamed her for his foreignness.
The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini Page 2