The Venetian Contract

by Fiorato, Marina

  Salve turned, but too late for her to miss the hurt in his eyes, and left her house, still clutching the little bottle of Teriaca.

  As Salve passed the well of the lion and the book he dropped the Teriaca down the shaft. Then he strode to the Tezon as fast as his short legs would carry him.

  If he thought about the words Feyra had spoken to him, they would curl about his heart like a serpent and squeeze it till it burst; and then he would bleed to death. He must concentrate on his purpose. He wanted the one man who had ever been a constant to him, because despite his father’s blaming and belittling of him, Bocca had cared for his freakish son, he had put meat in the misshapen mouth and clothes on the warped back. He had not left as Salve’s mother had left.

  Salve had to stand on tiptoe to reach the door of the hospital. There were only three patients left in the long room, lit by a brazier burning cinnabar and myrrh. The second curtain he drew revealed Bocca.

  Salve stood over the body, and it was only then that he let the tears fall. Bocca could not hear him now so he might as well speak. He uttered the first word he had ever said to his father. ‘Papa,’ he said, listening to the word unfurling in the darkness.

  Then he lay down beside the still-warm corpse, holding his father close, waiting for death.

  Chapter 38

  Feyra wept bitterly over Salve as she had never wept for a patient before.

  She had neglected and belittled Salve more than anyone else in his life, by befriending him and then taking her friendship away when she’d replaced it with another. It would have been much better to have let him alone, to have never forged a friendship she had not the care to keep. She said his name over and over. She cried until her veil was soaked, and then prepared him herself for his laying out beside his father. She kissed his misshapen cheek, and the rigor of death relaxed and unfurled his hand. In it was her ducat. She kissed the coin too, and slipped it back into her bodice, where it had lain so long.

  Having slain the gatekeeper and his son, the Plague seemed to abruptly quit the island.

  News from Venice had it that four of the six sestieri were now clear of Plague. Feyra suspected that the purifying fire that Takat had spoken of had turned against his purpose, purifying the miasma left by the dead.

  As the Tezon emptied as the last cases died or healed, Feyra began to wonder what the future held for her and Annibale. He did not once renew his proposals to her, but she thought she could be happy if she was just here as his colleague and friend. But a hospital could not run without patients. Nowadays she was more often prescribing bark for toothache, or borage for moon-cramps, than her Teriaca.

  One spring day when she climbed the Murada, she saw a tall ship pass, cleaving the sunlit waters. She identified it as a Cypriot vessel. A cloud came over her sun, and fear settled in her stomach like a stone. Trade was recommencing between Venice and the wide world. She craned into the far distance and imagined Palladio’s church, on its distant island, growing into the sky. She knew that, one day soon, the church would be completed, the Doge would have no further need of Annibale, and the Republic would want their island back.

  The following day the Badessa came to them in the herb garden, where Feyra and Annibale were reseeding the botanical beds; a task that they had created for the Tezon was all but empty. Feyra straightened up, hand on her lower back, as the Badessa, followed by her nuns, circled the beds.

  Annibale stuck his spade savagely into the ground and did not look at the Badessa. ‘You’re going back,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied gently. ‘Sister Immaculata went back to the Miracoli yesterday. The sestiere is clear of contagion. They are appointing a new priest to replace Father Orlando. A good man, I believe.’

  Annibale sniffed. ‘I’ll arrange a dory for you. Bocca …’ he let his voice trail off.

  The Badessa nodded. ‘We said masses for his soul, and that of his son. And Sister Ana has already lit the brazier for a boat.’

  Annibale nodded in turn, curtly. ‘We’ll see you off.’

  Feyra hesitated, unsure of whether to follow, but found herself invited by the Badessa’s beckoning hand.

  She walked with the older woman, arm in arm across the sunny green to the gatehouse, and at the gate the Badessa stood back to watch the sisters file though. She reached into her sleeve and handed Feyra a heavy book wrapped in canvas. ‘In case you need it,’ she said, and walked through the gate before Feyra could refuse. Feyra did not unwrap the book; there was no need. She knew what it was.

  At the jetty the nuns got into the strong-bottomed dory one by one, the Badessa too. She turned in the boat.

  ‘Before I go, Dottore Cason, there is one more thing. Sister Immaculata visited some of the houses of our island families. Some are empty still, and sound, but some are rotting, and some being taken over by vagrant villeins. If your little community does not go home soon, the Republic will billet families on the dwellings. Many people have lost their houses in the fire.’

  Annibale’s expression, even without his mask, was unreadable. ‘And you have told the families so?

  The Abbess’s brows nearly vanished into her wimple. ‘Of course. They cannot live here always. Even if you can part the waters, you cannot hold back the sea for ever,’ she said gently. ‘One day it will rush back in.’

  Feyra understood. Their strange, infected paradise was coming to an end.

  Chapter 39

  Dottore Valnetti’s anger kept him going, for he had little else to give him succour.

  His sestiere of the Miracoli was a ghost town. Half the houses were empty, the others stuffed with the dying. He had not been able to shift any more of his Four Thieves Vinegar, and began to drink it in the evening for its alcoholic content alone, for he could no longer afford wine. The tun of Gascon wine which he might have won for having the least Plague deaths in his sestiere seemed as remote as a rainbow, for he seemed to scribble Bills of Mortality every day – it was now his sole function as the physician of this ward.

  Perhaps because of the other ingredients in his linctus he’d begun to have strange, hallucinatory dreams, all filled with a mysterious dark lady in a green dress, swirling about like a sprite or a jinn. He would wake with a gnawing hunger but no money for bread and no servants to get him any. He’d spent his last coins on the greedy boatman whom he’d paid to take the lady in the green dress to the Quarantine island now known as the Lazzaretto Novo.

  Annibale Cason’s island.

  He had known that Cason was behind it. He was as convinced as he could be that the sorceress was Cason’s creature, and that she was somehow funding his lunatic enterprise with her ‘Teriaca’. Having Cason and his green witch dragged before the Consiglio was now Valnetti’s one mission in life. Hatred was his driving force, but he could not eat his hatred.

  So when he was offered a strange commission for gold, he took it willingly.

  ‘The Salamander? Who is the Salamander?’

  Valnetti had had to open his door himself, for his manservant was long gone, taking the doctor’s silver tableware in lieu of wages. He looked down at the small and grubby boy.

  ‘The Salamander,’ the boy said, tasting the word, ‘is a legend in Cannaregio. He survived the fire, so they call him the Salamander for this and for other of his lizardy properties, signor.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Well, there’s his scaly skin, and he lives in a bath of oil of olives like a lizard in an olive grove, his tongue is forked like a lizard and he—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ interrupted Valnetti testily. ‘And have you seen him?’

  ‘No. But my friend Luca has. He saw him through the window. Terrible he was, all burned skin and dreadful eyes, black as sin. Luca said he hissed at him like a demon. For he cannot speak our language.’

  ‘He cannot speak Venetian?’

  ‘Only a few words, signor.’

  ‘Then how am I meant to treat him? You’re wasting my time,’ Valnetti said loudly.

  ‘No signor, I�
��m not,’ protested the boy. ‘He pays to buy him bread and fishes. Only us young ’uns, though; he won’t have a grown-up near him. The oil for his bath took days to collect: bottles and bottles he needed, sent an army of us out to all the markets. And he has local children running in and out to teach him Venetian, the ones that can bear to look at ’im, that is. He’s looking for somebody, and he wants to know enough words to find them. Some of the lads come out fair jingling with coin.’

  Valnetti had been about to shut the door. ‘Coin?’ he said, loudly enough to drown the sound of his own rumbling stomach.

  ‘Foreign coin it is, but bites like gold. See?’

  The doctor took the coin from the boy’s dirty palm and held it up in the spring sunlight. Currency was one of the doctor’s favourite things and he fancied himself quite the expert. The coin was a sultani, an Ottoman coin, with a turban-headed caliph stamped on one side in gold relief. Round the turban were little toothmarks where someone had bitten the Sultan.

  The boy held out his grubby hand, and Valnetti surrendered the coin reluctantly. ‘And he gave you this, did he, this … Salamander?’

  ‘Yes, signor,’ came the reply. ‘One for going, and one for coming back again, with a doctor.’

  ‘And where does he reside?’

  ‘One of those empty houses, signor, the ones the families left when they went to that island. Next to the church of the Miracles.’

  Valnetti considered. Infidel coin it might be, but gold was gold. He fetched his cane and hat. ‘Show me,’ he said.

  Even without his guide Valnetti would have found the house without difficulty. A small army of Venetian children circled it like seagulls, afraid and curious all at once. It sat in the shadow of the Church of Santa Maria degli Miracoli, a church he passed every day. But today something was different.

  Valnetti lifted his beaked mask as if he smelt the sound.

  Singing.

  The sweet singing of the sisters of the Miracoli was issuing from the lofty windows of the adjoining convent for the first time in a year. The sisters were back.

  Valnetti remembered well that Cason had spirited the sisters away to people his island and run his hospital. Did this mean, then, that Cason’s hospital was now closed? The song sounded in his head like a victory hymn.

  One of the taller urchins seemed to be guarding the door of the house, his back as straight as a fire iron. At the sight of Valnetti and his little guide he opened the door with an ominous creak to reveal a rectangle of pure blackness. For a moment there was stillness and silence, then a gold coin spun out of the darkness past Valnetti’s beak. The boy that had summoned him caught it, and ran. Valnetti, encouraged by the gold, walked into the black.

  For some moments he could see nothing at all. He walked further into the pitch, foetid odours rising to his nose and nameless vermin crunching beneath his feet. Somewhere in the room something was breathing in a rapid, laboured way.

  Then Valnetti saw a flat reflection as if from a pool, and saw a rippling surface broken by something that resolved, as his eyes adjusted, into a figure. The doctor fumbled in his coat for his tinderbox and struck a light, his heart beating painfully. What he saw almost made him drop the taper.

  There was a man in a hip bath, a man who at first glance seemed to have been skinned. His hair and brows were gone, his nose melted away to two black holes. His peeled flesh was the scarlet of the demons that frolicked on the frescoes of next-door’s church, and yet here and there was scaled in white where his hopeless flesh had attempted to heal itself. His chest and groin were the most burned, his torso ridged with dunes of arid flesh. The place where his man’s parts had been was, mercifully, immersed in the oil, for Valnetti, who had seen many sights in his years of physic, could bear no more horror. The burned limbs stuck out of the bath like monstrous claws, the fingers and toes nibbled and merged by fire into unnatural numbers never meant by God. But the black eyes still burned from the bald red head, eyes so dark they seemed to have an infinite blackness that sucked Valnetti into a soul so murky he could not look upon what dwelt there.

  The Salamander’s tongue flicked out continually to moisten the aperture where the lips had once been, a tongue not thick and pink but black and pointed like a poker’s end, giving him an even more reptilian appearance. Here and there black hairs protruded from the desert flesh as if a fowl had been carelessly plucked.

  This man had been badly burned, so badly it was a miracle he lived.

  The flame seemed to agitate the creature in some way, so Valnetti, with relief, put the light out. Instantly he felt reprieve, but he could still see the dreadful creature before his eyes, stamped before him on the darkness.

  ‘Help,’ it said, in an awful growl, the word corrupted by the warped tongue, the lack of lips and something else, buried deep below in the man he must once have been: an accent.

  ‘Well … that is to say,’ Valnetti stammered, ‘you are taking the correct measures’. As always when afraid, he took refuge in flattery. ‘Oil of olives is most efficacious for burns.’ To his own ears his voice sounded as thin and high as a bat’s squeak. He began to back away. He would forgo his fee willingly if he could just get away from this hellish place.

  ‘Must find green lady.’ The creature from the dark spoke haltingly, but clearly enough.

  Valnetti stopped.

  ‘Bring … death.’

  A light leapt in Valnetti’s little eyes. Was it possible the Salamander and he were of the same purpose? ‘She is the one you seek?’

  ‘Journey.’

  Valnetti needed to be clear. ‘You are looking for the green lady, you bring death and you need to be well enough to make the journey to her.’

  The thing in the hip bath nodded.

  ‘You tell, I kill you.’

  Valnetti snorted, for the Salamander could barely rise from his oily sump, but the creature hissed at him from the pitch, and there was something in the dreadful sound that made the laugh die on his tongue.

  ‘I can help you,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I know where she is. I will bring a vial of the juice of the poppy, which will manage your pain upon your journey. I can arrange for a litter to take you a little way to the canal hereby, and have a boat wating to take you thence. But it will cost you –’ he wondered how far he could push it ‘– thirty sultani.’

  The thing gave another nod.

  Valnetti eagerly bent as close as he dared to tell the Salamander where the green lady dwelt. How much more satisfying to let this creature solve his problems. How much more convenient to let the Salamander take care of the green witch and bring her her death. How much less bother than to wade through the painstaking processes of indicting Cason through the Consiglio della Sanita. Despite the Salamander’s physical infirmities Valnetti had absolutely no doubt that the creature would complete his task before he allowed himself to die. It was the only thing keeping this cinder of a body alive.

  As Valnetti left the dank house to make the necessary arrangements, he had a spring in his step. The Salamander had offered him an opportunity to vanquish Cason and his sorceress without getting his hands dirty, and with refreshingly little bureaucracy.

  Bureaucracy was, really, one of the most tiresome things about Venice.

  Chapter 40

  The sisters’ departure was the first of many leavetakings from the Lazzaretto Novo.

  One by one the families returned to their homes to pick up the thread of their lives in Venice and the quartiere of the Miracoli. Only the Trianni family was still in the almshouses, and that for a very peculiar reason.

  The Badessa had sent word that there was a little local difficulty. The Trianni house, the one right next to the church of the Miracoli, was currently occupied. Feyra questioned Sister Benedetta, the nun who had brought the message, as the burly sister tied up her boat to the jetty. ‘I suppose it is to be expected?’ she asked. ‘Many have been made homeless by the fire, and you cannot blame a family for seeking shelter.’

  ‘Except
it is not a family,’ rejoined the sister matter-of-factly. ‘It is a demon; reportedly a fire demon that has assumed the form of a lizard.’

  Feyra stepped back, looking at the nun for signs of a jest, but Sister Benedetta’s expression was completely serious. She shrugged her broad shoulders. Demons were her business.

  ‘We will watch and wait and pray, and send word when the lizard demon is exorcized from the house. But the Triannis should wait, for a week at least.’

  Feyra received the news of her friends’ stay of departure with relief, but it was tempered by a small and secret disappointment. She did sometimes wonder what would happen when she and Annibale were alone on the island.

  That night she dreamed of him, of the heat of him, the weight of him, suffocating, sensuous. She woke gasping, as if someone had laid a hand across her mouth and stopped her breath. The shame poured from her with the sweat. Feyra rose from her bed and crept downstairs to where the fire still burned. She saw the Bible the Badessa had given her, propped on the mantel. She did not want the book in her house, but could not bring herself to burn a gift given in kindness.

  In Constantinople the name of God was sacred. If inscribed on paper the paper itself, even the merest scrap, became a thing of great value. Because people wore such scraps about their person, they were often found dropped upon the ground and the citizens of Constantinople would pick up the sacred shreds and tuck them into the walls. Some walls on the busier thoroughfares were saturated with the name of God. Feyra did not want to burn the Bible; although the god named there was not her own, she feared the sacrilege.

  Too hot suddenly, Feyra stepped out into the night, just as she was, in her long shift. The ground was cold beneath her feet and she felt a welcome shiver cross her burning skin. A fat spring moon shone to equal the sun, the firmament was baubled with stars and she could see every silver blade of grass as if it were day.