The Venetian Contract

by Fiorato, Marina

  She walked the square of green to the Tezon, her skirt trailing in the dew, soaking and dragging as she went. Inside the empty hospital, the moon lit the atrium of the cavernous space and the ghosts of those she had treated there fled to the shadows. Around the door she could see, as she had seen every day, the scrawled graffiti on the walls. The markings seemed to glow faintly in the moonlight; and she saw again the Ottoman ship and the calligraphy that had once been such a comfort to her.

  The graffiti on the walls spoke of a past tolerance towards the many peoples who had come to trade here, of a relationship of mutual benefit, of the give and take of commerce. This Venice had been a crucible of nationalities and races and religions with as many colours as a prism and she could only hope that, as the Plague faded, this Venice would return. She couldn’t help thinking that along with the four horses, the Sultan had sent a fifth: with the cessation of trade he had cut off the city’s very lifeblood.

  Feyra reached up and touched the word that was clearest to her: Constantinople. Once it had meant home. Now this island was her home.

  On the way back, Feyra looked up at Annibale’s house. The lights were out. In the Trianni house too; all was dark. She decided to walk on and went to the gatehouse. There, the door was standing open; she saw Salve’s chair in the chimney corner next to the empty hearth.

  She walked right through the gates and out on to the jetty where she had, only this afternoon, waved off Sister Benedetta. She looked out to the lagoon, to the silver pathway of water paved in moonlight, leading to the horizon where the sea met the night. As she watched, the pathway was broken into numberless radiating ripples of light.

  A boat.

  Feyra watched, suddenly absolutely still, her pulses thudding in her throat as she realized the boat was rowing away from the island, not towards it. She peered into the moonlight. There was a boatman in the craft, but no passenger. What was the meaning of it?

  Feyra took a step forward, and saw in front of her a pair of footprints shining on the jetty. They were prints that no human could have made. One was cloven like a two-toed foot or hoof, and the other had three.

  Like a lizard.

  She crouched down and put her hand to the print. It was still wet and gave off a familiar smell. She dipped a finger in the print, raised it to the moonlight and rubbed it together with the thumb. Then she held finger and thumb to her nose and sniffed once. It was oil of olives.

  Swivelling right round, still in her crouching position, she looked back to the gateway. The strange footprints continued to the gatehouse and beyond. She stood too suddenly, and swayed for a minute. Someone had disembarked here. She was standing in their footsteps.

  Feyra followed the footprints through the gatehouse and lost the trail on the grass. She shook her head. Sister Benedetta’s talk of lizard demons had infected her mind: what she needed to do was to sleep.

  The first thing she saw as she opened the door of her house was the pages of the Bible scattered all over the room. Then she saw a pile of clothes on the floorboards, a voluminous cloak and a shirt and breeches.

  Then she saw the demon himself, stretched out and skinless before the fire, as if the flames had birthed him.

  Feyra collapsed, falling into a chair. When she opened her eyes she wished them closed again.

  She could see now, that the thing on the floor was a man, but he had been skinned of all flesh. He spoke, a strange strangled sound, for his lips were gone.

  ‘Forgive me. I cannot bear clothes upon my skin, nor shoes on my feet.’

  Feyra recalled the forbidden etchings of Andreas Vesalius, declared diabolical by the Christian Church, that she and Annibale used to pore over in the evenings. She recalled the corpses stripped of their skin to show the workings of muscle and sinew, but animate, standing and walking with waking eyes in their heads. This monster had stepped from a book of science, but in his warped hand he held a book of faith, the remnants of the Bible the Badessa had given her.

  Feyra knew herself then to be in a nightmare for she understood the demon’s tongue. She looked away from him at the pages of Latin scripture scattered around the room.

  ‘Did you do this?’ she whispered.

  The thing seemed agitated, and rocked its scarlet head. ‘I cannot find it. I tried, but I cannot.’

  ‘What can’t you find?’

  ‘The white horse. Janissaries are raised Christian. My father was a tower commander in Iskenderun, and a follower of the shepherd prophet. So I knew this infidel book well before I was brought to Constantinople and the light of the true God.’

  The familiar name penetrated the fog of Feyra’s nightmare. ‘Who are you?’

  He turned his terrible, lashless, browless eyes upon her, burning from their skinned sockets with a fire she had seen before. ‘Don’t you know me?’ he asked.

  She nodded, slowly. ‘I know you,’ she said. ‘You are Takat Turan.’ In the Doge’s palace, she had seen, with her own eyes, the fire spreading across his chest. How could he possibly have survived? ‘But – the fire … I thought you had died in the fire.’

  ‘I did.’

  She knelt then, appalled by his suffering. ‘What will give you ease?’ She remembered the prints on the jetty suddenly. ‘Oil of olives?’

  The thing nodded. ‘And a physician gave me juice of the poppy.’

  Feyra reached for the medicine cabinet, holding her breath, for his exposed flesh stank of putrefaction. She poured the black linctus directly into his mouth, and though it ran down his scorched cheeks, he swallowed some of it. It seemed to give him a little renewed strength.

  ‘I wish to ask a boon of you.’

  ‘Of me?’

  ‘I’m dying.’

  This was not the time for lies. ‘I know.’ Suddenly everything fell into place like a tile of mosaic. ‘The fourth horse,’ she said, ‘is Death.’

  ‘Yes. And now I will greet him face to face.’

  She pressed him further. ‘But it is not just your death, is it? There is more to come before that. The first horse, the black horse, was Pestilence. My father brought that here on his ship. The second horse, the red one, was Fire. Death is the fourth, the pale horse. What is the third?’

  He was silent, his eyes closed.

  She repeated, urgently, ‘What is the white horse?’

  ‘There is no time. The die is cast. But I must ask my final request of you. I need you to send my bones back to Constantinople. I must be buried among the faithful, and collect my reward in Paradise. Will you promise?’

  Feyra stood, her pity gone. ‘Tell me of the white horse.’ Her voice was cold as stone. ‘Tell me first or I will bury you beneath the stones of the church. Here, hard by, there is a temple of Saint Bartholomew.’ She leaned close over his dreadful face. ‘I will lift the pavings of the very altar and inter you there, I swear it. Tell me. The white horse. What else is coming to Venice?’

  ‘And if I tell?’ he croaked, fading.

  She forced herself to speak gently. ‘You will be placed in a casket and sent to –’ she thought again. Not the Sultan, for he would not do honour to this man who had given his life for him ‘– to Haji Musa, the physician of Topkapi. He will give you to the priests and have them pray for you and do honour to your grave. Now tell me.’

  ‘There is a room in the Topkapi palace,’ mouthed the dreadful lips. ‘The Sultan’s own chamber. I saw it once when I received my orders. There is a marble floor, set with the designs of the seven seas and all the lands.’

  Feyra grew impatient. Takat’s mind had begun to wander, as she had often seen at the end.

  ‘He has fleets of ships, my master, cast in many metals,’ went on the terrible whisper. ‘The ships are as high as his knee. He can move them, just like Allah can move mortals with his hand.’

  Feyra set her teeth; he did not have much time left. The crossing of the lagoon must have cost him, and she could hardly bear to think of the pain of every splash of the salt spray on the flayed flesh. She took him
by his greasy shoulders, and gave him a little shake, her fingers penetrating the soft tissues.

  ‘Never mind the metal ships. Tell me, quick and plain.’

  He swivelled his eyes to her. ‘The white horse is War.’

  Her flesh froze. ‘Say on.’

  ‘The Sultan’s design was to weaken the city with Plague and Fire. The first horses were just the forerunners. Now, with the spring tides, he is sending an armada to take Venice. It will be the biggest sea battle ever seen. Lepanto will be nothing to it.’

  Feyra could see how much it hurt him to talk, the remains of his lips drawn back against the blackened and broken teeth in a permanent snarl, but she had to persist. ‘When?’

  ‘The attack will begin on the twenty-ninth day of mayis. The day has significance for the Sultan because of the events of 1453.’

  Feyra frowned. ‘1453?’

  ‘You may know the date better in our own reckoning. 857.’

  Feyra breathed out slowly. All Ottoman children learned this date in the schoolroom, as the greatest triumph of the Empire over the Western world. ‘The Fall of Constantinople,’ she breathed.

  By now, the thing could only nod.

  By the Christian calendar this fateful date was two weeks away. She must act, once again, if she was to save the city from the final Tribulation.

  But there was to be no saving Takat Turan. She gave him more poppy, but he was sinking fast and no longer had the strength to keep the decoction between his lipless mouth. She anointed his scaly body once more, but as the fire died in the hearth, so did he, as if the Salamander could not live without his sustaining flame.

  Feyra took a shovel and went to the well where the ground was soft, and dug the grave herself. She rolled Takat in his own cloak and dragged him on the cloth to the well, rolling him into the hole. While she was covering the body with the earth, the peaty smell of the loam masking the stench of the cooked flesh, her mother’s ring fell from her bodice and swung free on its ribbon.

  In the grey of dawn she turned it until the third horse was uppermost, looking at the little prancing white shape set in the crystal.

  She felt eyes upon her. The stone lion on the well was watching her from above his book. Feyra dropped the ring and spoke to him. ‘Did you know this was going to happen?’ she asked. ‘Did you foresee this?’

  The lion was silent.

  ‘Well, you had better keep this secret too.’

  And, suddenly angry, she shoved the spade into the earth until it bit deep and stood, wavering and upright, where she’d left it.

  Back at the house she did not look at the oily floorboards as she picked up the scattered pages of the Bible, leafing through until she found the Book of Revelation that she had marked before. ‘I heard the second living creature say, “Come and see!” Then another horse came out, a snow white one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other. To him was given a large sword.’

  She went to throw the pages on top of the smouldering ashes in the hearth, but stopped herself and tucked them instead in a crack over the mantel. Then she walked to the blanket chest below the window. She’d put away the green dress, with a sprinkling of camphor in the folds against the moth’s tooth. She had thought she would never again wear it, but she’d been wrong about that, just as she’d been wrong, so many times, when she thought the charge of the Sultan’s horses was over.

  Feyra dressed carefully in the predawn, smoothing the green dress over her hips one more time and winding her hair around her fingers and pinning it up in the Venetian style. For when the sun was fully up she must go to Venice to visit Palladio.

  It was time, at last, to see the Doge.

  PART V

  The White Horse

  Chapter 41

  Feyra was back from the city in good time to say farewell to the Trianni family.

  Mamma, who had sewn Feyra’s green gown, and Papa, who had been snatched from the jaws of the Plague in the Tezon, were helped into their boat first, kissing the hands that had helped them in gratitude. Valentina got in next, now with two babes, little Annibale and a girl she’d named Cecilia at Feyra’s suggestion. She kissed Feyra on her cheek just above her veil. ‘I won’t forget,’ she said, as her husband wrung Annibale’s hand in thanks.

  Now is the time, Feyra thought, as they watched the Triannis’ boat sail away. Tomorrow, Sunday, Palladio’s plan was to bring her to the consecration of his church. The Doge himself would be in attendance. There was no knowing if the Doge would hear her; would believe her story or would clap her in chains. She and Annibale only had the certainty of tonight.

  She unhooked her veil and turned to him.

  They were face to face. Here was Feyra, there was Annibale.

  He looked at her, half questioning, half smiling, as if he knew exactly what she wanted, as if he’d been expecting it. She was so close to him she could almost feel her flesh against his. Wondering at her courage, she took him in her arms, and he did not protest. She lifted her lips to his mouth. She was about to close in for the kiss when she felt the heat from his face, a sickly heat that she had felt on her cheek a dozen, a hundred times, when she leaned into her dying patients to determine if they still breathed.

  The heat she felt from Annibale was not passion, but pestilence.

  Chapter 42

  Andrea Palladio stood at the back of the congregation and listened to the consecration of La Chiesa del Santissimo del Redentore: his church.

  The service was already in progress, but Palladio had not truly heard a word of it.

  There was a constellation of richly dressed clergy and nobility crowded at the front in their stifling velvets. There below the altar was the Doge in his golden chair, wearing his corno hat and looking every one of his eighty-one years. Below him, on a gilded stool, his cropped head as golden as an archangel’s, sat the Camerlengo. Standing in his scarlet robes before them both was Bishop Giovanni Trevisano, Patriarch of Venice, his voice so sonorous and monotonous that Palladio wondered that he did not send the congregation to sleep. He had built the Patriarch a house once in Vicenza, and the man was an utter bore.

  It was a warm spring day and the church was packed. The smell of human sweat was overlaid by the choking sweetness of incense belching in white clouds from the silver censers. Palladio was rammed shoulder to shoulder with his neighbour on his left and his right, and his irritation was only slightly offset by the little shiver of pleasure that neither the stout dame on his right nor the fellow on his left – who must, by his reek, be a fisherman – knew that he was the architect of this wondrous place.

  Palladio lifted his eyes up to the heavens, away from the crowded pews.

  Not interested in the service, he just looked at his church. It was magnificent, and his pride was so great that he felt it literally swell his chest.

  The projection of the spaces and masses within the church corresponded beautifully to the exterior façade. The tripartite scheme was reflected in the sequence of the nave, sanctuary and choir. And their separation was reflected not just in changes in floor height but variations in ceiling type, with the paired half-columns giving unity to the magnificent space, soaring from floor to ceiling. There were no frescoes, few paintings and little statuary. Unlike every other Venetian church, the beauty lay not in the decoration but in the building itself. It was not just beautiful, it was clever, so clever in its geometry. Palladio hoped that even if the common herd did not see it then God would understand – for were not the heavens and all things in nature constructed along geometrical lines? The golden section itself was exemplified by the curl of a fern, the spiral of a snail, the shell of the humble nautilus. He shifted his feet and looked down.

  There he was. The nautilus.

  Palladio had had the church paved in red and white terrazzo marble and in one of the tiles that the masons had brought him the architect had found a perfect nautilus. The head mason had asked him if they should discard the tile, as it was imperfect
, but Palladio insisted that the fossil should stay. It was there now, beneath his feet, and he had set the nautilus tile in pride of place, not hidden, but in the aisle where it could be seen.

  When he had first been given this commission he had thought himself trapped in Venice like the nautilus in stone. He had wanted to run from the Plague, to turn his back on the only commission the Republic had ever given him, his greatest work and the start, he hoped, of many. It seemed perfect to him that the nautilus sat at the very heart of the church; it was a jest that he was sure the Almighty would understand.

  Above all, Palladio felt enormous relief. The church was not his any more; it belonged to the people and now it was up to the citizens of Venice to make it their own, Sunday by Sunday, week by week, year by year. He might never step into it again, for he never revisited his buildings. They were like a book, once written, closed by the author and never picked up again. His legacy was now out of his hands.

  But he was satisfied that this church was good enough for God, for as the church neared its completion the Plague had lessened its hold on the city. He had heard it said on the streets that the Plague had been defeated by the fire that had purified the miasma of the city and that the new miracle linctus of Teriaca had prevented any new cases. But Palladio knew the truth: it was the dome. Feyra’s dome, Sinan’s dome, his dome. He had captured a cerulean orb of heaven and bound it in a sphere to rival the infidel builders of the East. He had completed his contract with the Lord: a church in exchange for Venice.

  He knew too, that after this commission, he alone would be entrusted with the rebuilding of the city, so that Venice could emerge from the flames like a Salamander, peeled of her old skin, cleansed and new. There would be so much to build, he thought with excitement. Palladio put his hand to his forehead as if he could shield his thoughts from God, as he recalled the indecent relish with which he had pulled down the old Rialto Bridge. His dearest dream now was to build the bridge anew. He could see it in his mind, a white stone rainbow arcing over the Grand Canal, another keystone in his legacy. And who was more likely to get the contract than Palladio, friend to the Doge?