Anna needed no second invitation. She moved to the nearest shoulder and watched the woman’s hand weave back and forth, threading the needle in a buttonhole stitch between the lines of a pattern on a piece of parchment that was pinned to the sewing pillow in her lap.
Giovanna Dandolo came across to Anna’s side and nodded her approval at the work before them. ‘They must work together in teams of five. Each has a step to perform. The first sets out the design. The next makes the stitch of the ghipur, then the sbarri, then the punto rete before the relief is made to emphasize the trim size. Then the final step, to cut the seams and remove the unnecessary yarn without ruining all that has gone before. It is work for disciplined minds and delicate hands.’ She glanced at Nikolaos disapprovingly. ‘That is why it is not a task suited for a man. Women create, men destroy. That is God’s wisdom and we cannot question it.’
‘It looks as perfect as a spider’s web beaded with dew,’ said Anna. ‘How magical that something as unpretentious as a needle and thread should be transformed by a woman’s hand into a work of the most intricate, delicate beauty.’
‘I say it is as if they stitch it from the air,’ said Giovanna Dandolo, taking a seat. ‘This is not like that bibila stitching you see from the Cretans. This is much more complicated. It is an ensemble of manifold stitches. The old fabulists will tell you a legend of how lace making first came to Burano. Would you like to hear it?’
‘I would love to,’ said Anna, sitting down beside her.
‘They say that there was once a local fisherman who hauled up his net and found a siren caught in it. Have you heard of those creatures that are fish below the waist and woman above? Their voices are enchanting, and their hearts are black. This one tried to beguile the fisherman with her song, but his own heart was so pure that her spell could not make him forget his betrothed. Instead, he cut the net and set the siren free. In admiration of his faithfulness, the siren slapped her tail against the side of his boat and foamed the water into a magical wedding veil. When the women of Burano saw his bride in it, they all took up their needles and began to try and emulate its beauty with lace wedding dresses of their own.’
‘A delightful story,’ said Anna, ‘but really it has been your patronage that has done most to cultivate the lace making here. It is a noble craft and a fitting means for a lady to pass her time. After all, the sisters of Latin convents are not alone in needing tasks of contemplation. To that end I would like to establish a Greek school of lace. There are many women among my displaced community who might benefit from this skill. I came here to ask for your blessing and assistance.’
‘Greek did you say?’ Giovanna Dandolo seemed to recoil. ‘Oh no. Oh no, no, no. This is not something for the unrefined. This is not something any old hand can conjure. It would be beyond the less patrician members of Venetian society, much less a Greek!’
Slowly, Anna rose from her seat. An unnatural silence fell across the room. Several of the women had halted mid-stitch.
‘You have had a bereavement,’ Anna said, looking down on the old defiant face of the dogaressa, ‘so perhaps your words are not as well chosen as they might otherwise be. Or perhaps I give you too much credit and you find sport in parading what you consider beyond lesser mortals. If that is the case, then I pity you for your miscalculation. Set your lace beside our Greek statues, our temples, our mosaics and listen to the heavens mock your hubris.’
The dogaressa gave an uncomfortable laugh and looked about her sewing women as if to say, ‘See, look at this graceless display!’
Anna’s scorn continued to echo around the rafters. ‘Secretly, Mona Dandolo, you must recognise this. It is revealed in the way your former ducal residence is festooned with treasures pillaged from my city by your ancestor. It is good that the Dandolo have at last learned to make something for themselves. Perhaps now you will abstain from thievery. I wish you good day.’
Without waiting for a reply, Anna turned on her heel and marched across the flag stones and out through the open archway with Nikolaos hobbling in her wake.
It was a cruel blow, to find the real person did not live up to the paragon. By the time Nikolaos caught up with her at the mooring she had made up her mind. ‘Take me to Torsello,’ she said and heard how thick with feeling her voice had grown.
‘Are you sure, Basilissa?’ Nikolaos glanced warily up at the sky. ‘It’s in the wrong direction for home.’
‘I know where it is!’ she snapped and immediately regretted taking her anger out on him. She thought his limp seemed aggravated as he moved about the boatmen trying to arrange matters. Perhaps he had damaged the crippled leg further in hurrying after her. She would feel dreadful if that were the case.
There was a stall near the quayside with the items she needed. She had them all bought and packed in a basket by the time Nikolaos had found them a boat.
‘Are you certain you want to go to Torsello?’ the Buranelli fisherman asked a few minutes later as he poled them in his sanpierota away from the land.
Calmer now, Anna said, ‘Quite certain.’
‘But Madonna, it’s in the dead lagoon. The mosquitos, the swamp rot…it’s why no one lives there now.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We won’t stay long. You can take us to Murano afterwards. It will gain you a week’s earnings in fare.’
Beyond Burano, the sand flats and waters known as the laguna morta stretched away as far as the eye could see. It was a place of absolute solitude. Mile upon mile of nature’s softer face, voiceful with birdsong and little else: just the reaches of the lagoon, with its brown rills and broad water avenues; just the low undergrowth of the channel banks bursting into bud as summer took root, unsullied by all but one fingerprint of human design. At the far end of Torcello, the skeletal digit of a campanile glowed gently as the sunshine caught its brickwork, picking it out against the distant, snow-capped mountains.
As Anna stared into the distance, she could hear Nikolaos castigating the boatman. ‘She’s not a mere madonna, you know, she’s the Byzantine Empress.’
Anna cringed. He took such pride in the title, as if its glory was a fire and his own warmth increased by proximity. If he ever learned the truth it would crush him.
The fisherman chuckled. ‘Oh really? In that case, what’s she doing here?’
‘The Basilissa wishes to visit the old cathedral.’
‘I thought she might, the moment I saw her,’ said the fisherman. ‘We shall have to keep a close eye on the tide to get back.’
Later, when the sea called and the waters dutifully retreated back through the breach of the Lido, the low tide would reveal a world of salt marshes; a thigh-deep silt carpet patterned by treacherous shallows, marinated in the clammy, sickly-sweet concoction of dank mud and rotting vegetation; a dinner table for stilt-limbed birds to inspect and peck at. And among the shallows would lie the staves and strakes of scuttled boats, poking up like blackened rib-bones, marking the folly of past men who had come and not kept a close enough eye on the tide.
From down in the marshes the rock wall of the Dolomites appeared to rise suddenly from the plain. The wind came from that direction, stroking Anna’s brow with its cooling touch as the sail filled and the boat began to make headway towards the bell tower. From the boat’s crossbench Anna gazed at the mountain range. She felt a kinship with those far off peaks; cold, silent, rigidly defined, like petrified souls, shut out from heaven and hopeless.
With a splash of oars, the fisherman sculled his sanpierota between a continent of reeds and into a deeper channel. Long streamers of water plants and lilies tangled around the blades, forcing him to slap and shake them away. He sculled the boat through the spider’s web of wetlands and found the solid bank of the island he was looking for.
Nikolaos gamely slid over the bow and secured the boat while the fisherman helped Anna out. She had expected the boatman to wait there – and half feared he would then abandon them – but instead he led them through the thorn bushes and shoulder-high grass
towards the lonely Basilica.
Torcello. The island, like others in the lagoon, took its name from one of the six gates of Altinum. A thousand years before, when that Roman city had been sacked, its populace had sought refuge from the barbaric invaders in this misty lagoon. They had settled first on Torcello and from that wilderness, Venice’s long rise to glory began.
For Anna, a refugee herself from another destroyed city, the story of Torcello held totemic appeal. It gave her hope that her own people might one day make from their cataclysm something greater, just as Venice now outshone anything the citizens of Altinum could have ever dreamed of.
‘From Constantinople, are you?’ asked the fisherman. ‘I remember hearing the news.’
‘The Basilissa’s husband was Emperor Constantine,’ said Nikolaos. ‘He died fighting the Turk invaders to the last. From time to time she comes here to say prayers and light a candle for his soul.’
‘There are plenty of churches in Burano and Venice,’ the fisherman complained as he swatted a mosquito from his arm.
‘Not like this one,’ said Nikolaos. ‘This one is Greek.’
They had emerged into what had once been the quadrangle of a large cathedral complex. Seemingly as old as those first lagoon refugees, it lay completely abandoned. It’s brickwork slowly mouldering to dust, its outbuildings invaded by weeds.
‘You can both wait here,’ said Anna. With her basket over her arm she left them standing in the sunlight and slipped between the broken doors of the basilica.
Inside, the daylight had found enough empty window sockets to come pouring in and kindle the mosaics to life. A placid Theotokos watched from the bowl of the main apse at the far end but it was the towering mosaic on the counter facade, around the doorway she had passed through that was Anna’s quarry. This was the spot she returned to year after year. The Last Judgement, with its Christ figure separating the souls of the blessed and the damned. The white haired, dark Satan sat on his beast-head throne in a fiery hell, receiving the condemned. They floated about him, dismembered heads carried in the arms of his devils and every face was unmistakably Byzantine. Some were bearded sages, some women, some warriors and one had the crown of an emperor. It was at once a chilling and beautiful wall and at its foot, standing in the hardened pool of their own wax, were the stumps of candles she had lit on previous visits.
Anna put down her basket and took out the six fresh candles and firesteel she had bought in Burano. She lit no candles for the dead Emperor Constantine. In all the years she had never lit one for him.
Instead, the first candle was for her father, Loukas Notaras, the last Megas Doux of Constantinople. He had surrendered the city once the Emperor had fallen but the Turks executed him all the same a few days later.
The second candle was for her mother, Theodosia, who had died on the road to the slave market of Adrianople. The third for her brother, Jacob, who had been too young then to fight. He had not been seen since her father’s execution. The fourth for her handmaid, Zenobia, murdered during the three-day pillage which followed the breaking of the walls. The fifth for her tutor, Plethon, who had chosen death to the indignity of captivity and jumped from a library rooftop.
The last candle she lit for John; the Latin soldier she had loved; the man who had saved her three times over. Firstly, from an unwanted engagement, later from abduction by a murderous priest and finally, with the Turks inside the walls, her saviour had used up the last of his strength to get her aboard an escaping ship. What would Nikolaos think, to say nothing of those other Greek exiles who looked to her for leadership, if they knew how many candles she had lit these past years for a common Latin and none for the Emperor they thought she mourned.
Kneeling before the six flickering flames, Anna bent her head and prayed for each of their souls. ‘I failed today,’ she said. ‘I must not fail tomorrow.’
She got to her feet and used the fabric of her giornea to dry her eyes.
The long ride back across the lagoon to Murano was spent in silence. Thankfully they had beaten the tide and found George and the gondola where they had left him. He skulled them back across to Castello without trouble – he really was getting better, Anna decided.
When they turned into the Grand Canal, they found it crowded with boats. The air was full of chatter and Anna felt suddenly a world away from Torcello’s loneliness. She sensed an extra excitement on the waters. The wooden Rialto bridge was unusually busy with people watching the water like the crowds on a regatta day. Another gondola was coming towards theirs, beset on all sides by a cloud of other boats. There were cheers and shouts; carnival in May. The air around the oncoming craft suddenly sparkled like a cloud of firecrackers. A gale of laughter drifted across and more boats shot out from the sides of the canal.
Nikolaos turned an inquiring glance back from the prow. ‘The forty must have chosen,’ George said. ‘This will be the newly elected doge being taken home to settle his affairs.’
The gondola was now meandering under the rialto and a shower of red and white petals was tossed by an onlooker onto the breeze. They fell, like sugared almond confetti, to form their own pretty flotilla across the water.
Anna was close enough now to make out the figure waving to all sides from the gondola. An elderly man with the wide-eyed smile of a child. A life of service to the Republic reaching its apotheosis; an office of riches, opening like a treasure cave. George recognised him. ‘It is Cristoforo Moro,’ he said and pointed a thumb downwards to show his opinion of the result.
‘A war hawk, Basilissa,’ Nikolaos said in a low voice. ‘Strong in his Catholic faith.’
With some effort, George hove the gondola aside so the procession might pass. A voice sang out from the bridge, ‘All your possessions are now ours!’
‘I know that well,’ Moro called back, ‘but I beseech you to accept between you one hundred ducats, and that will content you.’ He stood up and flung from a purse another handful of coins up into the air. They caught the sunlight as they fell around the boats. Some plopped into the waters to be followed by those exuberant members of the crowd who fancied themselves pearl divers. The floating carnival slowly bobbed beyond the canal turn and Anna’s gondola could continue.
Back at Ca Notaras she found her niece Eudokia sitting quietly sewing with Helena.
‘How was the Dogaressa?’ Helena asked.
‘A disappointment,’ said Anna flinging herself down onto another of the room’s chairs. ‘It’s clear we can’t rely on Venetians for anything. Not even good soap.’
‘Soap?’ said Helena.
‘Nikolaos wants us to start a Greek soap business and employ every displaced Laconian goat herd or Galata porter.’
‘What!’ said Eudokia. ‘It’s not his money!’
Anna shared a look with Helena. ‘It’s not yours either,’ she said to her niece.
‘If they’re too lazy or too stupid to get work here, what care of ours is that?’
‘Because they’re Greeks like us,’ said Anna.
‘And? Am I my brother’s keeper?’’
‘I don’t think quoting Cain wins many arguments, dear,’ said Helena.
‘You will be happy to learn, Eudokia, that I’m not going into the soap trade,’ said Anna. ‘Or the lace trade, or any trade.’
‘Well while you were out, a messenger came,’ said Helena.
‘From Messer Schiavi of the bank? Have you bankrupted us with your Ascension Day dress?’
Helena gave an indulgent smile. ‘I have not, and neither have you with your frivolous charity. The delightful messenger boy was not from the bank. He was from the church. Cardinal Bessarion has arrived in Venice. You will be pleased to know he says he will be able to join you tomorrow at the Senate. Really Anna, out two days in a row. What has come over you!’
Anna pulled a face. ‘It’s for the petition.’
‘Well you will be pleased to know he has brought someone with him to add to your little flock of petitioners. An old friend.’
>
The way Helena said the word friend made Anna wary. She sat up. ‘Who?’
‘George Sphrantzes.’
Eudokia saw the impact that name had on her aunt. ‘Who is that?’
Anna remained dumbstruck, so it was Helena who replied, ‘He was your grandfather’s bitter court rival.’
The answer appeared to satisfy Eudokia but it did not begin to describe what George Sphrantzes was to Anna. She stood, her skin warming with agitation. ‘He was that,’ she conceded. ‘And he was the minister who persuaded Emperor Constantine not to marry me.’
‘So he knows you’re a fraud,’ said Eudokia bluntly.
There was a look of undisguised entertainment on Helena’s face. Their father had wed his eldest daughter to the Genoese heir of Ainos and his second to a middle-rank Byzantine courtier. As for his youngest and undisguised favourite daughter, Loukas Notaras had tried for the ultimate marriage match. Even though Anna’s candidacy had ultimately been rejected, it was inevitable, she supposed, that Helena begrudge her a little for it.
IX.
Wallachia, June 1462
Twilight had set in beyond the entrance to the medical tent as the Zağarcibasi strolled under the wide canopy. With the appearance of a senior officer, Hekim Yakub felt the young invalid on his treatment table become suddenly tense. The broad smile vanished and an endearing shyness, entirely absent a moment before, pinned the soldier’s gaze to the floor. If the boy’s like this around Radu, thought Yakub, Hashem yishmor! He’d empty his bowels were the Sultan to appear.
‘I’m looking for dinner company, Hekim Yakub,’ Radu announced. ‘Care for some pilav, or do too few of my men know the correct end to hold a sabre?’
The patient on the treatment table looked mournfully down at the bandage being wrapped about his palm. Although they were yet to find open battle since crossing the Danube, the doctors had still been kept busy. Soldiers always found ways to injure themselves and the Vlachs had left enough traps and hazards to whittle the army of its less vigilant troops.
Porphyry and Blood Page 3