It was the end of the day and Feyra was alone in the boat. She supposed that just as many workers at dusk crossed from Constantinople to their homes in Pera, so did the people did here, from Venice to her satellite islands. There were no seats in the boat as there were in the punts on the Bosphorus, so when the boatman pushed off from the shore she nearly fell and was obliged to take his hand again. She was freezing despite the coverlet, nauseated by the motion of the water, and exhausted by having to keep her balance. The boatman steered the boat expertly with one long oar, whistling as he went, and it was with relief that she watched the city she had dreaded coming closer. For the moment she wanted nothing more that to be off this boat.
They were to land, it seemed, far from the place where Death had disembarked. Although she could still see the tower that was the North in her compass, it was distant and hidden in part by tall buildings. From her time in Constantinople she knew that the greatest men lived in the greatest buildings. To find the Doge she needed to find the great court where Il Cavaliere had dropped anchor two days ago.
When the boat reached the dock, the boatman leapt to shore to hand her out of the vessel. She nodded her thanks, and he looked at her kindly again. When she took her hand away from his her coin was back in her palm. She turned to protest, but he’d already pushed off again, whistling once more.
Calling down blessings on him, she tucked the coin away and plunged into the darkening streets feeling much more optimistic. Her feet were on solid ground and there was still kindness in the world, even among strangers.
But her optimism faded with the light. This was a hellish place. She would walk for what seemed like hours, only to fetch up in the same spot. Dreadful ghoulish noises bounced from the stone walls, lamplight was refracted by the water and sent back a warped glow to cast dreadful shadows. Mists swirled about her, making it even harder for her to find her bearings. Augmenting the natural sea-mists were man-made fires that belched acrid yellow smoke on every corner that made her cough. Already feeling breathless and trapped by the choking smoke, Feyra felt enclosed by the tall skinny houses and tiny alleyways, unlike Constantinople where the dwellings were low. And here the infidel was ever present: shrines of the baby prophet and his mother were lit by candles at every corner and ragged red crosses were painted randomly on the doorways. And yet, godless trollops lolled in those same doorways; twice she saw women with their breasts bared, leering at the passers-by. Shocked, she averted her eyes only to be met by some more dreadful sight as pairs of figures embraced in the shadow of an archway. Feyra, raised in the Harem, was no prude; she knew what she was watching. At least the Sultan took his pleasures behind closed doors – in Constantinople one would be stoned for public fornication.
Worse than the human inhabitants were the grotesque half-creatures she saw; birds, beasts and demons seemed to loom from the sickly mists. It took Feyra some time to realize that she was not delirious: the citizens were wearing painted masks. From childhood she had heard the legends that the Venetians were half human, half beast. She knew that this could not be true, but in the swirling fog of this hellish city she almost believed it. The creatures seemed to stare at her down their warped noses, from their blank and hollow eyes. And overlord of all was the winged lion – he was everywhere, watching from every plaque or pennant, ubiquitous and threatening.
Feyra did not know whether she shivered with fear or with cold, for her clothes were still not fully dry from their earlier dousing, and the briny splashes that she’d endured in the strange black boat had soaked her further. As she stumbled from alley to alley, she would, more often than not, fetch up at a dead end, facing another glassy canal, lapping at her feet, mocking her. She’d crossed a thousand tiny bridges until she crossed the mother of them all – a great wooden structure crowded with the malign citizens. It did, however, seem to bring her, at last, closer to her goal. In the twilight she could see the great needle tower once again, and determinedly set her course.
Feyra decided to stay, as far as she could, next to the great channel she’d just crossed, a broad silver canal that snaked through the centre of the city. Once she’d crossed the bridge she appreciated the futility of the last hour she’d wasted. She could have wandered until dawn in the place she’d disembarked and never found the tower, for it was on an entirely different island, separated by the great watercourse. But with the waterway as her guide, in short measure she fetched up in a vast square. She could see the great tower once again, and the crouching gold church she remembered.
As Feyra crossed the crowded great square, unnoticed, there was another tribulation – the horrid grey birds clustering about her feet, hampering her steps. When startled they took to the wing and flew in her face ruffling her veil with their filthy feathers. She had to steel herself not to run.
At length she reached the tower, thinking perhaps that the Doge might dwell here, for the Topkapi palace boasted the tallest tower in her home city, and the Sultan dwelt just beneath it. But the walls of the tower rose blank and windowless into the mists, topped by booming, unseen bells. The golden church seemed grand enough with all the gilding and the paintings, but it was clearly a temple. That left the great white palace, topped with delicate snowy pediments of stone.
She ventured into the stone courts where a crowd gathered about a giant staircase topped by twin white statues, and she joined the throng. Presently the great doors at the top opened and a stream of servants came out carrying flaming torches and platters piled high with bread. The crowd snatched at the loaves and she could smell the delicious yeasty aroma – her stomach twisted, her mouth filled with saliva. The Doge must be a merciful man to give alms to his people, she thought. A morsel fell to the floor and she snatched at it, stuffing the sweet warmth into her mouth. The bread was so good it brought tears to her eyes. With renewed strength she saw her chance, and ran up the steps to the very top, where she was met with the crossed pikes of two ducal guards. She said, as clearly as she could. ‘I wish to see the Doge.’
One of the guards looked her up and down. ‘Certainly, signorina. I will just fetch him. And would you like a goblet of wine while you wait?’
Feyra was about to decline graciously, when the two men began to guffaw with laughter. Through their still closed pikes she saw a stone lion’s head set into the wall, with a black slit of a letterbox for a mouth. It seemed to be laughing at her too. Desperately, she redoubled her efforts. ‘Please, I must see him, now.’
They only laughed harder. Then, into the sudden interested silence that had fallen across the crowd below, she cried, in desperation, ‘I have a message from Valide Sultan of Constantinople!’
They guards stopped chuckling as if struck, and she realized her mistake.
She should have used her mother’s Venetian name.
The word Sultan was enough.
Suddenly afraid, she began to back down the stairs, slowly, carefully, as if to flee would be to break the spell. ‘Are you …?’ one of the guards began, realization dawning.
‘She is!’ exclaimed the other, across him.
‘Are you a Turk?’
Feyra shook her head, retreating further, the crowd below suddenly still, watching the drama play out on the stone stair. She tripped and tumbled backwards, losing one of her yellow slippers, falling down four more stairs. Her side stabbed and she gasped with the sudden pain and the sight of the shoe left in the middle of the steps, brightly lit in the torchlight, the yellow shoe of the muslim, with its unmistakably upturned toe.
‘See, the yellow shoe!’ shouted a voice from the crowd.
‘She is a Muselmana!’
Feyra picked herself up and ran.
The crowd tore off her coverlet, snatched at her veils and ripped her breeches, trying to catch her for the guards. She pulled away desperately, trying to close her ears to the epithets and insults about her people; such vitriol and hatred against the Turks as she had never heard before. Her veils were soaked with spit, her side bleeding where one of the
glass vials from her medicine belt had cracked in the fall. But like an animal pursued, she threw off the grabbing hands and pulled free.
She raced across the square, chancing a look upward as she ran. There she saw a sight to terrify her – emerging from the gallery of the temple were four vast bronze horses, their mouths agape and foaming, their forelegs flailing.
The four horses were already here.
Almost more afraid of them than the mob, she redoubled her speed. The dark alleys and ways she’d feared were now her friends, as she darted away, pursued by the crowds. The two guards behind were hampered by their heavy half-armour, which clattered helpfully to give them away. Not knowing where she went Feyra ran through the night, over a dozen, a hundred bridges. Once or twice she heard the clash of the armour far away or close, fooled by the echoing waters and the treacherous whispering stones. Once, at a deserted canal, pursuer and pursued found themselves on parallel bridges, and for a heart-stopping moment Feyra and the guards were eye to eye. Now she was at a disadvantage, for they knew the route to her, and she did not know how to evade them.
Holding her bleeding side she chose her direction; and chose wrong. She found herself, once again, at a dead end; a waterway too deep to ford and too wide to leap. She turned, in despair and ducked into a dark little square and here the malign city bested her at last. The square had three blind sides and only one exit, the one from which she had come. Behind her in the alley, the armour clattered closer.
She could run no more. Exhausted, she collapsed and waited for the guards to catch up with her. She shut her eyes, panting, a warm moist patch of her veil pulling in and puffing out of her open mouth with her ragged breath. She prayed, briefly, thinking she had come to the end.
When she opened her eyes she saw an answering gleam of gilt across the square. An inverted V shone out above a doorway, a shape that was both familiar and dear to her. Feyra rose and walked across the square, peering through the swirling mists. She stopped at the threshold of a pair of double oak doors. She had not been mistaken. Above the door, etched in stone and gilded in, were a pair of callipers.
A house with gold callipers over the door.
Suddenly she heard the cries of her pursuers and the clatter of their weapons. She hammered desperately on the door to match their rhythm, for the alchemy of the streets meant she did not know whether they were a few alleys away or hard by. The door opened, and a man stood there. His greying hair was ruffled skywards in wayward spikes, his thin mouth had fallen open, and a pair of newfangled spectacles dangled from his ink-stained hand.
‘A man called Saturday,’ she gasped. ‘I seek a man called Saturday.’
‘I am he,’ said the man, ‘but you may not beg here.’
He began to close the door but she wedged her one remaining yellow slipper painfully in the gap. ‘Please,’ she said. She wrenched the horse ring from her finger, searching for the words in Venetian; ‘For this ring. In the name of Cecilia Baffo, your friend.’
The terrible pressure on her foot eased. The curious man looked at the ring, then at her, then past her into the street, right and left, with quick, bird-like movements. Then he grabbed her forearm and pulled her through the doorway.
Feyra could see nothing in the dim candlelight, but she heard the clunk as the oak doors close behind her.
She was safe.
Chapter 16
‘Cecilia Baffo,’ said the man called Saturday. ‘Forgive me. I have not heard that name in years.’
Feyra stopped eating and looked at him. He had a faraway look in his eyes, magnified hugely by the spectacles. He turned to look at her, and the candlelight turned the glass circles to flat gold coins, and she could no longer see his eyes. His thin lips, though, curled into a smile. ‘It’s good?’
She nodded, her mouth so full she was unable to speak. He had brought her a plate ‘stolen from the kitchen’. There was a small loaf, a lump of cheese and some shreds of dried fish, and she stuffed it all down as fast as she could. Feyra knew that she should eat slowly and chew well after her long fast, but she did not care. She had been raised in a palace and yet this was the best meal she had ever tasted.
They were in a small plain bedchamber, with a truckle bed, a chair and a cross hanging on the wall. On the cross the little prophet she’d seen on the coin hung, twisted and dying, with a crown of thorns about his head. She’d deliberately sat on the bed with her back to him to eat her meal, but she was so exhausted, so hungry, so cold, she would have closeted with the Devil himself.
Now warm with food and relief, she studied this curious man. He wore a waistcoat and shirtsleeves, knee breeches, stockings and soft leather slippers. The reason that his hair stood out from his head in such a peculiar fashion was because he rubbed and ruffled it constantly. His cheeks were sunken and sprinkled with ashy stubble. His long, sensitive hands were stained with ink, but also flaking with scaly, dry skin and red raw where he scratched them nervously. He took off and put on his spectacles constantly, sat and rose again, as if he could not be still. When he spoke it was in a rush of words that twittered forth from him with nervous energy and the manner of his speech and his twitchy demeanour added to the bird-like impression.
‘I knew Cecilia Baffo, ’ he said. ‘Once, long ago when she was a young woman, I was her drawing master. I was in the employ of Duke Nicolò Venier, on the island of Giudecca.’ He stopped his pacing. ‘You know it?’
Giudecca. ‘I do,’ said Feyra quietly.
‘Duke Nicolò wanted to raise his only child in possession of all the arts becoming to young ladies, so that she would one day marry so well as to fulfil all his hopes. I was a young draughtsman with a precocious talent. We were the same age. I was captivated by her; I never thought she would look at one such as I, but for a time her attention was caught by me.’
Feyra looked at him anew. She imagined him when the skyward grey hair had been black and the features taut and shaven of the stubble. She could believe that he had been handsome once.
‘She was just coming into her inheritance.’ He cocked his head at her. ‘Not her wealth, but her beauty. I had never seen a creature so beautiful; so gold of hair and blue of eye, with a waist as tiny as a greyhound’s.’ While he spoke he fidgeted and twitched before the little window, looking out to another place and time as a thousand stars pricked through the sickly fog. ‘I was born on a Saturday, and in Venice if you are born on that day you are considered to be blessed by God, and named after the day. My father was born and named likewise, so I was doubly blessed with the name Zabato Zabatini. All my life, I had been waiting for this wondrous luck to manifest itself – we were not especially rich, nor noted. But I remember thinking, in those moments with Cecilia, that my namesake luck had come to roost at last.’ He turned back to Feyra. ‘I was powerless in the face of her beauty; and one day, in the schoolroom, we were caught in an embrace.’
Feyra’s eyes widened. For the first time she thought about her mother as a young woman, the Cecilia Baffo that she had never known: headstrong, beautiful and playing with her power, a woman who could seduce a young drawing master for sport, then run away with a sea captain after knowing him for an hour. For the first time, too, she questioned her mother’s lightness of conduct. Had she given herself to this man, before her father, before Sultan Selim? She did not know how to ask Zabato the question; she did not wish to.
But he answered it. ‘It was just a kiss. But Nicolò Venier was furious – terrified that I would take her maidenhead and would destroy his marriage prize and all his hopes of alliance. He dismissed me and moved Cecilia at once to their summer palace at Paros, where he began marriage negotiations at once. It was there, I suppose, that she was taken by the Turks.’
Feyra knew the sequel to this story very well; and knew too that the fire that had been lit in her mother by this strange, skinny man had not been easily put out.
‘And now she is dead.’
‘Two weeks ago. In Constantinople.’
Zabato sat
again. ‘So it was all true,’ he breathed. ‘I heard that she had been taken by corsairs.’
She nodded. ‘My father. He was a sea captain. He brought her to Turkey.’
His eyebrows, black as his hair had once been, shot up. ‘And gave her to the Sultan?’
‘Yes.’
Zabato looked directly at her. ‘Was she happy?’
Feyra considered. ‘Yes.’ And she believed it. With the Sultan Cecilia had found both conjugal contentment and an outlet for her fierce intelligence in Byzantine politicking. She had probably been happier as Nur Banu than she would have been as Cecilia, the wife of a penniless draughtsman, or even Cecilia, the wife of a Turkish sea captain.
The thought of her father reminded her of what else she had to tell. ‘I am her daughter.’
Zabato was still for the first time that evening. He looked at her face, peering at her features through the thin yemine veil. ‘Yes,’ he said, slower than his accustomed speech. ‘Yes, you are.’
She told him then, haltingly, the rest of her history; of her mother’s end, and her father’s, of the disappearance of the ship and Takat Turan too. She showed him the crystal ring and she saw that he recognized it.
Zabato shook his head, as if blinking the tears away, and rose again, pacing at once. ‘I wrote to her at Paros. I even wrote to her at the Sultan’s court, sending my letters with our merchants, even with our ambassador. I wrote last to tell her of my situation here in this house, I told her I was ever her devoted servant, but I never knew if she received my notes.’
Feyra was in no doubt. ‘She must have.’
He nodded quickly, once, twice, three times. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. And now that you are here, you will have all the help that Zabato Zabatini can afford you. What must I call you?’ He held out his hand.
She looked at it, not sure what to do. She touched it briefly with her fingers, then pointed to her chest. ‘My name is Feyra Adalet bint Timurhan Murad.’
The Venetian Contract Page 13