The Venetian Contract

by Fiorato, Marina

  Retribution was coming.

  Her pursuer was behind her, close.

  Terrified, she turned at last and saw a black figure standing at the end of the alley, tall as a hanging tree and faceless under a black cowl.

  He walked towards her, slowly now, confident that she was trapped. His cloak lifted in the breeze and fear clutched at her throat. Was this Death, then, still stalking the alleys, come to collect her new-forged debt to the Christians’ god?

  He came close. ‘Feyra Adalet bint Timurhan Murad,’ he said, in her own language. ‘I have been seeking you for a long time.’

  He threw back his hood.

  It was Takat Turan.

  Chapter 35

  ‘I was the one who denounced you.’

  The words dangled around them both like corpses on a gibbet.

  Feyra’s eyes widened. She looked into Takat Turan’s face. He was thinner than she remembered, but still neatly groomed, his beard trimmed and his hair oiled. It was the eyes she remembered most clearly, dark as chips of jet and glittering with a nameless fire. She remembered how he had saved her from the crew of Il Cavaliere. ‘Why?’

  ‘For seven days I was sick unto death. I could not return to you or your father in the infidels’ ruin. When I was well enough to go back to the temple where I’d left you, there was nothing but a gang of masons building there and you were gone. I feared you dead, yet a boatman remembered you but not your father.’ Takat Turan bent his head, and his respectful pause was strangely at odds with what he’d revealed. ‘From then on I watched and waited and found you eventually in the house of the architect.’

  Feyra felt suddenly angry. She turned on him. ‘Why did you do it? Why would you place me in danger? You who defended me, you who served my father until his last hours?’

  Takat Turan spread his hands as if he were surprised. ‘I thought to get you nearer to the Doge. Is that not what you wanted? If you were arrested you would be taken to the belly of his palace, where the dungeons are.’

  ‘To be tried and tortured?’ She was aghast.

  ‘If that is what our master requires, we must bear it as we may.’

  Feyra began, suddenly, to feel afraid. His utterings sounded reasonable, but their meaning was insanity. Now she could put a name to the fire in his glittering eyes. He was a true fanatic.

  ‘How would that help me to meet the Doge?’

  ‘Meet him?’ Takat Turan laughed. The incongruous sound echoed down the alley and back. ‘You mean kill him! Is that not why we are here?’

  Feyra took a step back, her shoulder blades pressed against the cold stones of the palazzo behind her. She willed herself to be silent.

  ‘But then you slipped away, and I did not see you again. I gathered together everything necessary and as the day drew near, was about to act alone.’

  He opened his cloak and took out a small, muddy ball. She noticed again his missing fingers.

  ‘Persian naphtha,’ he said, ‘beloved of the Crusaders, the most incendiary substance known to man. You see, all is ready bar the details.’ He took hold of her shoulders in an iron grip. ‘And then God decreed that I should see you again, in heretic weeds, telling heathen lies to gather money for our enterprise. I commend you. I knew you would not run, I knew you would finish your father’s mission, once he had told you the whole of the design of the Sultan – the delight of my eyes and the light of my heart.’

  ‘My father?’ Was it possible that Timurhan had been complicit in this second crime, to burn the Duke of Venice in his own palace and fire his city? Or had her father known only of the Plague? Feyra forced herself to remain calm. She could not afford to reveal how little she knew. ‘And now?’

  ‘The second stage of the Great Tribulation,’ he whispered, the sibilants in his voice hissing in competition with the votive candle. ‘It is time to purify with fire.’

  Feyra looked into his eyes, burning with tiny reflected flames, and began to shake. ‘When?’ she choked out.

  ‘Tomorrow night. There is a feast among the infidels – the great square will be crowded with the filthy citizens. They have been visited by the pestilence but some survived. The unquenchable fire shall harvest them. The Doge will burn, his palace will burn, and all the city too. And now you have been sent to aid me.’

  Feyra’s head beat with her pulses, but she kept her voice steady. ‘How will we gain entry?’

  ‘That is the easiest of the matter. We get ourselves taken by the guards.’ He took hold of her arm in a vice-like grasp.

  She pulled back. ‘And what will become of us? The Sultan’s faithful?’

  ‘We shall burn too. But we shall be saved, and transported to Jannah, according to the will of God. Come –’ he clapped his hands. ‘There is much to do and only a day to do it. I will take you to my dwelling place; it is safe, and no one will find us there, for it is close by a church.’ He smiled at the irony, as if they spoke of inclement weather.

  He is mad, Feyra thought.

  ‘Your infidel coin will buy the kindling that we need for the oil and the fuses; yes …’ He turned to look at her once again, and she saw that he was bent on one purpose alone, the service of his earthly and his heavenly master. ‘And your disguise and mastery of their filthy tongue will aid me – for I have not their language, nor your innocent looks.’

  He marched her to the mouth of the alley, and on to a larger thoroughfare, over a bridge and by the side of a canal flat and still as a smoked mirror. She was close to Palladio’s ward but she knew that to run to the architect would avail her nothing – Takat already knew the house and would find her there at once. She must get back to the Lazzaretto and to Annibale and pray that Takat did not know of the island’s existence. She knew these streets and must pray that he did not. She tried to walk steadily, but as they passed a tiny sotoportego Feyra twisted away from his grip and ran.

  She was reminded of the first time she had fled through this city, but this time she ran from an even greater danger than the guards. The great skirt of the green dress hampered her legs, her ribs pained her, but finally she reached the waterfront. She ran across the last bridge in the direction of a knot of friendly boatmen.

  Takat Turan loomed out of the dark and barred her way. She screamed before she could stop herself, and the boatmen turned to watch the struggle. As Takat put his hand over her mouth she bit it as hard as she could and shouted, in her best Venetian, ‘Help me! He is a Turk! Muselmano! Muselmano!’

  The boatmen, seeing a Venetian woman attacked in the dark, hurled themselves across the bridge, and fell upon Takat Turan. Thrown clear, Feyra clung to the balustrade of the bridge and watched as Takat was pinned to the other side. His head was punched repeatedly until it lolled back on his shoulders, his lips and eyes swelling and oozing gore. Stray curs came and twined around his feet to lick the pooling blood. Feyra’s hands flew to her mouth.

  ‘Say something,’ bawled one of the burly men, his great oar arms crushing Takat’s neck, his spittle falling on Takat’s swollen face. ‘Say something so I can be sure, before I turn you in.’

  Takat spoke then, venomously. ‘I curse you and your Devil’s city. All of you will burn.’

  Only Feyra understood the words, but the boatmen understood the accent well enough. ‘Take him to the constables,’ said one. Takat Turan went suddenly limp. As he was dragged away, he looked back at Feyra, a little smile playing about his lips. She could feel his eyes on her long after he had passed round the corner, the flame still burning there.

  Feyra waited until he was out of sight before she gave a loitering boatman her directions to the island, low-voiced, confident that no one but he could hear the name of her destination. Once she was seated in the coracle she began to shake. She had put Takat Turan exactly where he wanted to be: in the gaols, right in the belly of the Doge’s palace. But she also knew he would not act until tomorrow; he would not deviate from his plan. He needed the citizens to be gathered for their festival, so he could inflict as much damage as p
ossible.

  At the Lazzaretto Novo Feyra barely paused to pay the boatman. She ran through the gatehouse with scarcely a greeting to Salve, running only for the square of light that was Annibale’s window. She knew he would be waiting up for her, as he did every day, to count their sequins, guilty as usurers, before the fire.

  Feyra burst through the door and found him just as she had the first time she laid eyes on him, sitting hunched, staring into the fire, his curls tumbled forward. Her heart failed for a second but there was no time for nostalgia.

  ‘I need you to help me,’ she gasped. ‘Your Doge is in danger.’

  He stood at once. ‘What do you mean? What has happened?’

  ‘The Red Horse is coming.’

  Feyra’s boatman rowed back to Venice with the speed and satisfaction of someone who had been paid twice for his labour. He went straight back to the Fondamenta Nuove and from there walked the short distance to Dottore Valnetti’s house, there to give up the whereabouts of the woman in the green dress.

  PART IV

  The Red Horse

  Chapter 36

  Doctor Annibale Cason walked through San Marco at sundown.

  His beak mask went almost unnoticed among the revellers preparing for tonight’s celebration for the feast of Saint Mark. By his side was his assistant, a young man of exactly the doctor’s height, carrying his master’s bag. He was dressed simply in a dark frock coat and breeches and a cambric shirt with no cravat, and he wore no hat on his curls, but women still turned to look at him, for in these times he was a sight for sore eyes.

  Today, Saint Mark’s day, was also known as the Festa del Bocolo, the feast of the rose buds, for on this day men gave long-stemmed red roses to the maids who caught their fancy. It seemed that the tradition had not halted for the Plague, but the Venetian maids and wives too, even the ones who had already been given a tribute, looked at Annibale with the coquettish glances of the young or the hungry eyes of the more experienced. It reminded him of why he’d donned the beak in the first place. As he passed, the roses they had been given were dropped and trodden, unnoticed, underfoot.

  They’d been up late into the night, and Feyra had told him everything, from the day her mother and father met at Paros, to her mother’s deathbed confession, to the day that she’d buried her father. She told him of the ring of the four horses and her mission to see the Doge. She told him of Takat Turan, who had vanished from Giudecca and reappeared like a spectre earlier that night. He’d been stunned by the story, humbled by the burden she had carried alone. She had told him of her father’s part in the tale shamefacedly, and he had wanted, very much, to take her in his arms and tell her that her father’s crime, and the blight upon the city, was not her fault. She had done nothing but try to atone since she had come to Venice, and now, when she appealed to him to prevent further bloodshed, he could do nothing but aid her.

  Feyra trod carefully, disorientated by the doctor’s beak and her view of the world through the eyepieces. She was seeing the city as Annibale saw it, and it was unsettling. The distance that the beak placed between a doctor and the outside world seemed a very great gulf indeed; little wonder that compassion rarely passed beyond the mask.

  They neared the campanile. At the foot of the great red bell tower was a gilded cage as big as a barge. Within the cage, pacing back and forth, was a huge lion, the emblem of Venice made real. Feyra stopped and looked closer at the monster. The fur was patchy brindle, not burnished gold, and the shaggy mane looked fleabitten and bald in patches. Only the dull eyes had lustre, lent by the dying sun which turned them as amber as her own, but nothing could disguise the animal’s misery.

  ‘It is the Lion of Saint Mark; the real one,’ said Annibale. ‘The Consiglio keeps a live beast caged here in perpetuity. When this one dies they will get another. He is supposed,’ he said with heavy irony, ‘to be the luck of the city.’

  Feyra had not expected to feel sorry for her nemesis, but she had not known a lion could look like this. He already looked defeated. She left him pacing, and they crossed the broad thoroughfare to the Doge’s palace.

  Together Annibale and Feyra reached the broad white stairs, with the great alabaster giants standing sentinel and gazing down at them from blank marble eyes. As they ascended, Feyra’s knees shook a little as she remembered the first time she had climbed these stairs, and recognized the same two guards who had chased her that night.

  At the head of the stairs Annibale touched his forelock and addressed the two impassive guards who crossed their pikes in his face. ‘Dottore Annibale Cason,’ he said humbly, ‘to see the Doge’.

  The guards looked not at him, but at Feyra in the beak mask. ‘Your token, Signor Dottore?’ asked one.

  Feyra held out the Doge’s seal, shining on the palm of her black glove. The guard reached out and turned it over. She examined the metal roundel with him; the Doge and Saint Mark on one side and the shepherd prophet alone on the other. Just like the design of the ducat she wore in her banded bosom beneath her doctor’s cloak.

  She waited. She couldn’t believe that she was finally going to see the Doge. Sebastiano Venier, Admiral of Lepanto and Duke of Venice: her great-uncle.

  To Feyra’s surprise the token was enough, the halberds parted and they were ushered through. One of the guards beckoned a servant liveried in wine and gold to lead them. She felt a nudge at her back and walked forward, remembering that Annibale, as her servant, would follow at her heels. As she walked she rehearsed the story of her mother’s death, the sarcophagus on the ship, her father and Takat Turan, and the coming of the fire.

  The servant took them through a palatial stone passageway, which opened out into an enormous chamber. Feyra had seen many wonders in the Topkapi palace but never been in a room as vast as this: the single chamber was as massive as the belly of the Hagia Sophia. Every inch of the walls was covered with paintings of pastoral scenes and the ceiling had been transformed likewise to a cerulean heaven powdered with stars and studded with chubby angels. High in the clouds, roosting like starlings, nested a line of dozens of Doges with their dates of birth and death written on scrolls about their throats. Feyra shivered. If she could not get her message across to the Doge he might be depicted there with his date of death written down as today.

  Footsteps sounded from an unseen inner chamber, the door opened and her heart leapt. Then hope flickered and died, as the Camerlengo entered the room.

  ‘Dottore Cason?’ he said. Feyra remembered his well-modulated tones from his inquisition of her in Palladio’s house: the man who spoke in questions. Her blood froze in her veins. She nodded, the beak slicing down in front of her face like an executioner’s axe.

  ‘Is it the architect? Is something amiss?’

  She was silent, and Annibale could not speak either, for then the Camerlengo would know him for the true doctor. She shook her head, the beak sweeping from side to side this time, her heart beating so hard she could hear it within the mask. There was an awful moment of silence, as the Camerlengo shifted his feet impatiently. ‘As you know, I act as a conduit, shall we say, between the larger world and His Excellency himself. My Lord Doge follows me hard upon, but first may I know of your purpose here?’

  Feyra felt Annibale pull at her arm. She was torn between removing the beak and pushing past the Camerlengo, and running towards the footsteps she now heard approaching. But just then a commotion erupted from the left.

  A small doorway, which led on to a tiny stone arch of a bridge, was suddenly filled with the bulk of a guard. He was pulling a prisoner who was shackled to him, followed by another guard behind. The Camerlengo turned his blond head in irritation. ‘Will you forgive me?’ he asked Feyra. ‘A prisoner for questioning. Take him to The Room and await me there,’ he ordered the guard, nothing in his voice suggesting what would lie ahead for the prisoner. ‘Is it not clear to you that my Lord Doge will have conference here? Do you think we have need of such a distraction?’

  Feyra turned too. Annibale
was tugging her arm again, desperate to take advantage of the diversion to make their escape.

  The Doge’s footsteps came closer.

  The prisoner came into view, his eyes aflame, and she knew.

  As she watched, horrified, the fire in his eyes seemed to ignite at his heart and his jerkin exploded. The fire spread down his arms and the guard to whom he was shackled screamed as the naphtha consumed his body. The hapless man ran to the voluminous draperies at the window, dragging his burning captive behind him, tearing the velvet down and wrapping them both in it as the flames engulfed them. But the draperies caught too and the flame leapt from them up to the painted ceiling, where the pigments ignited and burned merrily, crackling as they rained droplets of fire on those below.

  As Annibale dragged her away, Feyra saw the Camerlengo run to the inner chamber and saw, beyond the door, a shadowy figure in a tall white hat before the billowing smoke hid them from view.

  As they ran from the chamber, Feyra and Annibale forgot their pretence and shouted to all in their path to clear the palace. Annibale shoved her towards the great white stairway and they clattered down the stairs, matching each other step for step. Just as she reached the bottom, Feyra remembered the last time she’d been on this stair and the kitcheners bringing bread for the poor.

  She grabbed Annibale’s arm. ‘The servants!’ she cried above the screams and the smoke. They doubled back into the palace’s cellars and kitchens, giving the alarm and clearing the legions of servants out into the square. Pigs and chickens reprieved from the chopping block scuttled out into the air between their legs. Outside they were met by a cacophony of screams and cries, the ringing of bells, the babble of prayers, all overlaid by the nightmarish roaring of Saint Mark’s Lion.