I watched the torchlit workers, hundreds and thousands of them. The sailmakers swarmed over the great ships like ants, the smelters and welders were as busy and hot with their hammerings as blacksmiths in hell. The smell of cedarwood was strong in my nose, the tar for the ropes, and the canvas of the sails. Then Brother Guido tapped my shoulder; I turned to look and there, beyond the fortress where the river was dark, was the dusky shape of another ship, and another beyond that, and another beyond that, as far as my eyes could strain into the night. Had the torches progressed farther down the river they might have fired the whole armada and reduced them to charcoal. These ships were complete, ready, and finished right to the last detail. The closest ship’s crow’s nest was next to the tower where we stood, and nearly as high. The flag of Pisa, emblazoned with the city’s cross, fluttered so close I could have caught it in my hand. Madonna. What was going on?
My gasp was a little too loud. Shouts were given from below and the shipbuilders began to point. Half a dozen ran to the stair.
“The river!” cried Brother Guido, and took my hand, as if to jump into the dark deeps.
I yanked his arm nearly from its socket. “You’re crazy! It’s too high!” I hissed, for we were a good forty feet from the inky water. “Here.” With a great leap I jumped riverward but made it to the crow’s nest of the nearest ship and held out my hand to Brother Guido. “Jump!”
He leaped, became tangled in his habit, and scrabbled at the edge of the crow’s nest platform. I grabbed both his hands. “Don’t panic!” I looked into terrified eyes. “I have you.” Although in truth my poor shoulder tendons screamed from the strain of his weight. “Find the rigging with your feet!” I gulped as his sandals scrabbled on the newly tarred ropes and found a foothold, but no sooner was he stable than I was down and past him, swarming down the rigging like a monkey. If we could reach the bank before they reached us . . . if we could reach the bank before they reached us . . . I was down on the deck, but footsteps sounded on the gangplank. “We’re trapped,” I mouthed at the following brother. “The hold, quick!” I swiftly located the entrance, lifted a grille behind the mainsail, and dropped below, with Brother Guido following so hard behind that he almost squashed me. We rolled behind a pile of sacks and lay still, breathing as low as we could. We could feel footsteps above, see planks buckling under men’s weight, and hear voices questioning. The flare of a torch flooded through the grille, as the watchmen searched the hold from above. I knew if they came below, we would be discovered; but after a cursory wave of the torch, footsteps sounded on the gangplank again, as the searchers moved to the next ship.
After a long moment, Brother Guido made as if to rise, but I held him back—we must wait till they were well clear. I resolved to count a thousand heartbeats, but had only got to three hundred before I felt a jolt, and an odd sensation in my stomach. I sat bolt upright. “We’re moving!” Brother Guido leaped to his feet. “Quick!”
We scrambled to the deck, but by the time we reached the ship’s side rail, there was already a stretch of black water between us and the bank too wide for any mortal to jump. We turned slowly, both knowing what we would see. A half-circle of torches surrounded us, each one illuminating the ugly countenance of the sailor that held it. Tanned, scarred, and practically toothless to a man, wrinkled and knobbled with muscle as a bag of walnuts, they did not look welcoming. Fuck.
The tallest and ugliest of the collection approached, clearly the captain. He shone a torch in Brother Guido’s face, while his mate did the same service for me. Except the first mate’s greeting was to grin and fondle my tits. I spat neatly in his face, an instant before his captain fetched him a ringing slap. The first mate turned to spit out a tooth, shrugged, and resumed his torch-holding duties, seeming to hold his captain no ill will. Madonna. They were roughnecks indeed.
Brother Guido, bristling at the insult to my person, obviously decided to begin on the offensive. “I am the nephew of Lord Silvio della Torre,” he announced, as if he had just stepped before the pope himself.
The Capitano did not seem impressed, and said with great economy, “So?”
“And I demand that you let us go in peace.”
The Capitano sucked on a hollow tooth, and rubbed his dry beard till the lice ran, their little pewter bodies visible in the torchlight. If ever an apothecary strayed aboard, he’d have his work cut out. “Can’t do that,” was the reply, not noticeably hostile, merely matter-of-fact. “Once you’re here, you’re here.”
“And where is here,” spat Brother Guido, gaining courage from the captain’s indifference.
“Here is the fleet of the Muda.”
I saw Brother Guido’s eyes flare open with surprise, then close instantly as the Capitano hit him with the butt of his torch.
Just an instant before the first mate did the same to me, and all went black.
15
I was aware of three things.
Cosa Uno: somebody had a headache.
Cosa Due: someone was groaning like a doomed steer at a butcher’s yard.
Cosa Tre: when I opened my eyes I thought that I had not, for it was so dark at first. I lay still for a moment, long enough to know that the headache was mine, and I was the one doing the groaning. I remembered the blow to my head, and knew from the rolling motion that we were on board ship. We? Yes, Brother Guido was there. I rolled against his soft bulk when the ship pitched, but he lay still, unconscious.
Dead?
The notion pulled me to my elbow as my head beat time with my heart. I nudged and shook the monk till his head rolled on his neck, but the black eyelashes fluttered and the blue eyes flew open. “Luciana,” he said. A statement, as if he had dreamed of me and woken to the reality seamlessly, with no surprise. “Where are we?”
I had only woken a moment ahead of him, but I’d already had time to work this out.
“Back down in the hold.”
He rose, too, at that, groaned, looked about him. Typically, his first concern was for me. Also typically, he couched his kind inquiries in a manner that even the most knowledgeable apothecary would find hard to follow.
“Do you have any abrasions about your cranium? Is your vision tolerably intact?”
“I don’t know what you just asked, but I’m fine,” I replied, as cheerfully as I could. “I have a headache that bangs like an African’s drum and a mouth as dry as a ship’s biscuit. But other than that, still alive. You?”
He rubbed the back of his head, and then scrutinized his pale hand for blood. “Fine too. For now.”
“For now?” His words chilled. “Do you think they’ll kill us?”
I heard, rather than saw, him shake his head. “Not at once. I think they have a job to do, and this fleet—the Muda—has to reach its destination on time, and we are merely an inconve nience.”
“Do you think they know about the picture?”
“No. I think all this is connected to the Primavera, but they do not know that we are connected to it. Let us hope they will take us where they are going and set us free.”
A wan hope indeed.
“Our first course of action would be to conceal our consciousness from our captors.”
“Eh?”
Dimly I saw him raise a moon-pale finger to his lips.
“Not let them know we are awake. We may hear something of our fate.”
It seemed as good a notion as any, and my pounding head invited me to lie down again anyway. So we resumed our lifeless postures and waited. And waited. All seemed silent above, no footfalls, no conversation. I began to wonder if the Capitano and his hideous mates had set us adrift and then abandoned ship, to leave us alone on a ghost ship. I had heard of such phantom vessels that sail the Spanish straits with no earthly crew. Eventually, I was so tired and worn-out with fear that I was nearly asleep in truth when we saw a torch flare through the grille of the hold and heard voices.
“. . . would just be throwing good money after bad, and you know how I hate to do that.”<
br />
It was the voice of the Capitano—a man that had once been cultured, perhaps wellborn, but his voice sounded as if it had been choked with weed and barnacles, like the hull of a ship, and cracked with sea air.
“Looks like we killed them anyway.” A younger voice, un-schooled, ignorant, not the first mate who had hit me.
“No. Berello has been hitting people over the head for years—if I want him to kill someone, he’ll kill them.”
“So now what?”
“Keep ‘em. If the lad is a noble, we’ll take him to Don Ferrente, might be a ransom there. And the lass is so comely that she’ll sell for good money in the market.”
“Might make the trip a bit more fun. Haven’t had a fuck since Famagusta. Dirty little Turk who gave me lice.”
I held my breath for the Capitano’s answer. Now I’m a jolly girl who likes a good time, but being worked over by a crew of ugly, lice-ridden seamen for no money is not my idea of one.
“No. If she’s a virgin we’ll get much more. Don Ferrente himself might take her, but not if she’s been poked by the likes of you. Keep your prick in your pants or I’ll chop it off and feed it to the sharks, and tell the other lads the same.”
The crewman sounded chastened. “Aye, aye. Will we feed ‘em?”
“Why not? Not the good rations. But we don’t want her starved. Keep her tits juicy. And if he’s somebody—Della Torry, was it? Might be a bit awkward if he dies before we reach . . .”
At this the footsteps faded and we were left both relieved and frustrated. We waited for silence, then began to whisper, Brother Guido’s voice warm in my ear.
“Well, at least we know we will be fed, and that we are in no present danger.”
I found his ear in turn. “Wonder where they’re taking us though. Shame we just missed it. If it’s not one of the cities in the picture, we’ll be off our course.”
“It must be one of them.” Brother Guido spoke with certainty. “The fleet, my uncle, they’re connected. Something has been set in train, and we are to be carried along. I assure you in the name of Mary and all the saints that we will be going to Naples or Genoa, and as soon as we see some sunlight, I will know which.”
I was impressed but too tired to ask how he could possibly divine our direction from the sun. Everyone knows that the sun is a great fiery ball that moves around the earth—it is never still, so how could it be any kind of marker? Presently we began to move around, in the hope that food would come if the crew knew that we were awake. But after long hours of walking from one end to t’other of our pitchy prison, feeling wooded walls and naught else, we observed a gray dawnlight begin to seep through the iron grille above. We could now see our jail, ten feet square of space, with the grille set so high above that we could never escape without a rope or ladder. They knew we were safe down here, trapped like lobsters in a pot. We sat down again, regarding the hole we were in, considering our options, realizing we had none. We were at the mercy of the brigands that walked above us. Ignorant of our fate, we were too afraid to plan, and fell to bickering the morning away. At length we subsided into a sulky silence, and this was how we greeted a new phenomenon: bright sunlight suddenly flooded through the grille trapdoor of the hold, and a square of golden light began to crawl down the wooden wall of our prison, gradually, gradually sinking to the floor as the ship sailed its course. Brother Guido was up, swift as a fox, craning below the grille to see the sun’s position. I stood beside him but could see little—after a night in the dark the sky was too bright for me to behold. Brother Guido looked about him, frustrated.
“What do you need?” said I.
“I need a marker of sorts—a stylus, pen, charcoal. We are nearing the middle of the day and I must take a measurement.”
I raised a brow. “I don’t think you’re in luck.”
“Hmm.”
He lurched to the larboard side—the left—and began to prise a glob of tar from between the clinkered planks of the hold. The ship was new, so the tar was tacky and the monk rolled the mass into a long stylus and spat on the end. He gazed at the floor, and where the light hit the board at the extreme southern edge of the grille he made a neat cross with the black tar marker.
“What the fuck . . .?”
He held up one long palm in my face, to silence me, and held the other hand to his heart. He was counting. Long moments passed, then he suddenly made another mark, where the light from the same point now fell in a new position. He then connected the two points with a line, drew a third, seemingly random point, and connected the three to make a triangle. Then he drew a circle neatly within the fattest part of the triangle and began to write numbers against the adjoining points in his cramped and wiggly hand. I got bored and stared up, hoping for provisions to be sent down, but my daydreams of salt beef and ship’s rum were soon interrupted—Brother Guido sat back on his haunches, face flushed with his calculations in the light of the new day.
He had his answer.
3
Naples
Naples, June 1482
16
“It’s Naples.” He spoke with great confidence. “We’re going to Naples.”
I groaned inwardly. I’d hoped never to have to go to the savage south. “Are you sure?”
“Positive. We’re sailing at seven degrees of latitude, in a southerly direction, at twelve knots. A goodly rate. The wind is favorable.” He scribbled more numbers. “We’ll travel ninety leagues a day at the least. With a following breeze, we could reach up to one hundred seventy leagues.” He scribbled still, and muttered some calculations under his breath. “We should be there in three days.”
“What!” I could not countenance three days in this hole, but Brother Guido seemed fairly cheerful, damn him. “Take heart. They will not harm us. They spoke of taking us to some southern potentate—’Don Ferrente’ they named him. We must just hope he is a man of honor and will treat us with kindness.” I thought of remarking at this point that all I had heard of the south was that it was full of criminals and vagabonds, who fucked monkeys when women were in short supply. But Brother Guido was in full flow. “We know my uncle meant me to be aboard this fleet, for he told me to follow the light to the Muda, which I did. Perhaps he meant all along for me to go to see Don Ferrente. And at least we have now, surely, left behind the assassins that pursued us from Florence to Pisa.” He looked confident and almost happy. “In any case, we have already passed one night aboard. We must simply resolve to use our faculties and prepare an investigative mentality for what we might find in Naples.”
I raised my brow at him.
“I meant only that we should peruse the Primavera further and concentrate on the third Grace for any signs of how this southern kingdom might be connected to this plot.”
I hated him at that moment.
“But we should wait till they have fed and watered us. For then we may be sure that they will leave us alone for a while, for us to begin our conference.”
I was slightly cheered by the thought of food, for I am a girl who thinks of my stomach more than almost any other part of my body. But the feast that eventually arrived was never going to satisfy my greedy organ—an unseen hand threw down a couple of ship’s biscuits and a quart of water in a goatskin, which tasted more of goat than water. Even this mean repast revived us a little, though, and we retired to a bright corner of the hold to examine the painting, which was thankfully unaffected by our adventures.
“All right,” said Brother Guido. “Let us consider the three Graces together, since they are so intimately connected, and then we must learn all that we may about the one we identify as ‘Naples.’ “ He glanced at me fondly. “Why don’t we begin with your observations, signorina, as that methodology seemed to work last time?”
I registered swiftly that he had begun to name me formally again. Clearly he only called me by my given name when he was off guard. I sighed. “Fine,” I said. “But try not to be so fucking rude if I say one of them looks like a tree goblin thi
s time.”
He suppressed a smile despite my profanity. “Very well.”
“I suppose I am to give you the benefit of my layman’s opinion, then you steam in with your academic bullshit.”
Now he definitely smiled. “As you say.”
I looked closely at the three graceful maidens with their hands entwined. “Well,” I began. “I don’t know if it’s because we are aboard ship, or because we already know that they’re maritime states, but they look like their dresses are, well, watery. You know, sort of see-through, and swirly, and glistening.”
“Diaphanous.”
I shot him a look. “The right-hand Grace has her sleeve blown back by the breeze and it looks sort of like an angel wing.” I stole a glance at the monk, lest he deride me for my fantasy, as he had for my tree goblin pronouncement.
He peered, doubtful “All riiight.” He dragged the word out like a strand of hot glass.
“And their hair too. It looks sort of windblown, as if by a sea breeze.”
“Good. What else?”
“As we said before, they’re dancing. They’re sort of stepping in toward each other, not pulling away. Their weight is on their forward foot, like this.”
I got up to demonstrate, and knew that I cut a graceful figure in the bright hold as he watched me. Then the effect was ruined by a sudden lurch of the ship, which sent me tumbling to my arse. Gentleman that he was, Brother Guido got up to right me, but I had already taken my seat, and covered my shame by carrying on. “I guess that could mean they are banding together in a huddle.”
“An alliance! A maritime alliance!” He almost shouted it. “They are completely linked together and absorbed in each other. Except, no.”
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