River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “Idiot,” said the second. “Hey, there. Be a good Turk and toss it back to us, will you?”

  “Is it really a Turk?” the third mask asked suddenly. He sounded even more drunk than the first two.

  “No,” Paul said forcefully, since they didn’t seem to like Turks, then decided to gamble. “I’m an Englishman.”

  “English!” The first laughed. “But you speak like a real Venetian. I thought English couldn’t speak anything but that log-sawing tongue of theirs.”

  “You said the promenade is just ahead?” he called as he pushed himself back from the vast hull. His thoughts were fizzing. “Thank you for your kindness.”

  “Hey, English!” one of them shouted as Paul paddled away. “Where’s our bottle?”

  The Dalmatian Bank was a great quay thronged with hundreds of boats of all sizes, moored so closely together that their sides scraped. This night, at least, the bankside was blindingly ablaze with torches and lanterns; the tall, many-arched facades of the buildings seemed lit for some extravagant film premiere. Paul tied his small boat to a mooring post at the shadowy end of one of the piers. It was a poor thing in comparison to the boats bumping against the dock all around it. He doubted anyone would bother to steal it.

  So it’s Venice, he thought as he made his way through the jostling crowds, a fabulous array of masks and swirling robes in full drunken celebration. He was pleased. His art historian background would actually be of some use. Can’t tell when exactly, especially with everyone in costume, but it looks Renaissance-ish, he decided. La Serenissima, didn’t they call it?—the Most Serene Republic.

  He was himself dressed in dark hose and something he dimly remembered was called a doublet—neither of best quality, but not embarrassingly ragged either. Across his shoulders lay a cape heavy as an overcoat, whose hem swept just above the muddy ground. A slender, scabbarded sword with a fairly simple basket-hilt rattled by his side, which should have completed the ensemble, but something was bumping at the back of his neck as well. When he tugged the object around so he could see it properly, he found it was a mask, an expressionless face with a cool finish like porcelain, its chief feature a huge beak of a nose. He stared at it for a moment, wondering if he should recognize the character it portrayed, then—remembering that he seemed to have more than a few enemies in this still-strange virtual life of his—he pulled it over his own features and retied it at the back of his head. He immediately felt less conspicuous, and moved forward with no immediate plan except to be part of the crowd for at least a little while.

  A woman in a dress whose bodice revealed most of her breasts stumbled and snatched at his arm for support; he held her steady until she had her feet beneath her. She, too, wore a mask, a face of exaggerated maidenhood with pink cheeks and red, full lips. Her male consort tugged her away roughly, but as she turned she brushed her front against Paul’s and gave him a wink through the eyehole of her mask, a feathery, slow-motion bat of the lashes, as subtle as a failing piano. Despite the smell of slightly sour wine that lingered after her, he found himself suddenly aroused, a reflex that terror and confusion had for a long time almost completely subsumed.

  But what is she? he thought suddenly. A Puppet, chances are good. And what would that be like?

  He had seen an inflatable sex doll once, part of a twentieth century cultural exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He and Niles and the others had laughed at the crudeness of the thing, at the sad emptiness of putting it to its intended purpose, of being face-to-face with that astonished stare and lamprey mouth. But how would making love to an imaginary Venetian party girl be any different, really?

  “Look here, Signor, hey, look here.” He glanced down to see a small, unmasked boy tugging at his cloak. “You looking for women? I can take you to a nice house, a beautiful house, only the finest flesh. Cypriots? Or maybe you like yellow-hairs from the Danube, huh?” The boy, despite being no more than seven or eight and very dirty around the edges, had the hard professional smile of an estate agent. “Black girls? Arab boys?”

  “No.” Paul was about to ask the urchin where he could find a place to sit down and have a drink, but realized if he did he would be hiring a guide for the rest of the evening, whether he wanted one or not, and he didn’t even know yet if he had any money in his pockets. “No,” he repeated, a little louder this time, and dislodged the boy’s hand from his cloak. “I don’t want any. Be a good lad, go away.”

  The boy regarded him judiciously for a moment, then kicked him in the shins and slipped into the crowd. A moment later, Paul could hear his piping voice as he doorstepped another potential client.

  Paul was solicited by several more small boys, of varying degrees of griminess and determination, by a few men, and by a dozen or so women, the oldest of whom, despite her bare shoulders and rouged cleavage, reminded Paul uncomfortably of his own Grammer Jonas. But rather than depressing him, the parade of those who would separate him from his ducats (he discovered he had a few, in a purse on his belt) merely added to the spectacle, part of the same show as the jugglers, fire-eaters and acrobats, the potion-peddling mountebanks, the musicians in grades from dismal to sublime (who nevertheless still muddled each other into a general din), the flags, the wavering lights, and the Venetian citizens themselves out for a good time, a never-ending swarm of masked figures in gowns of glittering, jewel-dotted brocade or multicolored velvets.

  He had made his way down the length of the Dalmatian Bank—named, he vaguely remembered, for the ships from the Adriatic that docked there—and was just about to cross the famous Ponte della Paglia, the Straw Bridge, when he again felt someone plucking at his sleeve.

  “Looking for a nice place, Signor?” asked a small dark figure who had just appeared at Paul’s side. “Women?”

  Paul scarcely looked at him—he had learned that it was a waste of time even to respond—but as a quartet of wine-addled soldiers stumbled down the bridge and Paul was pushed to one side, he felt something tugging at his purse. He turned and flung his hand down to his side, imprisoning the boy’s wrist with his own arm. The would-be pickpocket struggled, but Paul caught at his other arm as well; having learned from his earlier lesson, he held the thrashing boy just out of shin-kicking range.

  “Let me go!” His prisoner contorted, trying to bite his wrist. “I wasn’t doing nothing!”

  He dragged the boy out in front of him and gave him a good shaking; when he had finished, the criminal slumped in his grip, sullen but sniffling.

  Paul was just about to let him go—with perhaps a boot up the arse for the sake of education—when something in the face caught his attention. A moment passed. More people jostled by, clambering up the arched back of the bridge.

  “Gally . . . ?” Paul dragged the resisting boy into the glare of one of the street lanterns, The clothes were different, but the face was exactly the same. “Gally, is that you?”

  The boy’s returned glance combined fear and ferretlike calculation: his eyes darted back and forth as he looked for a distraction suitable to aid his escape. “Don’t know who you’re talking about. Let me go, Signor—please? My mother’s sick.”

  “Gally, don’t you recognize me?” Paul remembered his mask. As he pulled it off, the boy took advantage of the release of one wrist to make another attempt to bolt. Paul let the mask fall to the mud and caught the tail of the boy’s shirt, then reeled him back like a game fish. “Goddamn it, hold still! It’s me—Paul! Gally, don’t you remember?”

  For a moment, as his prisoner stared at him in terrified fury, Paul’s heart turned heavy. It was a mistake. Or worse, as with the winged woman, it was only a phantom, a confusion, a deepening of the mystery. But then something in the child’s expression changed.

  “Who are you?” the boy asked slowly. “Do I know you?” His dreamy tone was that of a sleepwalker describing sights he alone could see.

  “Paul.
I’m Paul Jonas!” He realized he was almost shouting and darted a worried, shamefaced look around, but the swirling festival crowd seemed oblivious to the miniature drama at the base of the Straw Bridge. “I found you in the Eight Squared. You and the other Oysterhouse Boys—don’t you remember?”

  “I think . . . I have seen you. Somewhere.” Gally squinted at him. “But I don’t remember the things you say—well, maybe a little. And my name’s not what you said.” He pulled experimentally at Paul’s prisoning grip, which still held him. “They call me ‘Gypsy’ here, because I’m from Corfu.” This assertion was followed by another pause. “You said, ‘Oysterhouse’. . . ?”

  “Yes,” said Paul, heartened by the boy’s troubled, thoughtful expression. “You said you and the others had traveled across the Black Ocean. And you worked in that inn, what was it called, The Red King’s Dream?” Paul felt suddenly vulnerable—too many names that might mean something to someone else as well, spoken in the midst of a crowd. “Look, take me to the place you mentioned—I don’t care if it is a whorehouse. Somewhere we can talk. I’m not going to hurt you, Gally.”

  “It’s Gypsy.” But the boy did not run away, even when Paul released his hand. “Come on, then.” He turned and trotted away from the bridge, scuttling through the crowds on the Dalmatian Bank like a rabbit through tall grass. Paul hurried to follow him.

  They had traveled for some minutes away from the quayside, following the path of one of Venice’s many rivers deeper into the Castello district, through narrow streets and narrower alleyways, some scarcely wider than Paul’s shoulders, and across small stone bridges when the path dead-ended on one side of the water. The noise and lights of the Dalmatian Bank quickly fell away behind them; soon the boy was little more than a shadow, except when he passed through light pooled below windows or open doorways, and for a moment regained color and three solid dimensions.

  “Is it Carnival, then?” Paul asked breathlessly at one point. Gally, or Gypsy, was sitting on the abutment of a delicate bridge, waiting for Paul to catch up; a stone lion’s face peered from between his shins.

  “Of course!” The boy cocked his head. “Where are you from, that you don’t know that?”

  “Not from around here. But neither are you, if you’d only remember.”

  The boy shook his head, but slowly, as though troubled. A moment later he brightened. “It’s mad tonight. But you should have been here when the news came in about the Turks. That was a real ruckus! Made this look tame.”

  “About the Turks?” Paul was more interested in filling his lungs.

  “Half a year ago. Don’t you even know about that? There was a tremendous huge battle on the ocean, somewhere with a funny name—’Lepanto,’ I think. The biggest sea battle that ever was! And we won it. I think the Spaniards and some others may have helped a bit. Captain-General Venier and the rest blew the Turkish navy to pieces. They say there were so many bodies in the water you could have walked from ship to ship without getting your feet wet.” He went round-eyed at the wonder of it all. “They took the Turkish pasha’s head off and stuck it on a pike, then the fleet came back into the Lagoon with the Mussulmen’s flag and all their turbans trailing in the water behind them, and they were firing their cannons until everyone thought the whole city would fall into the water!” The urchin kicked his heels against the lion’s stony chest, chortling with pleasure. “And there was the grandest festival you can imagine, with everyone singing and dancing. Even the cutpurses took the night off—but only that one night. The festival went on for weeks and weeks!”

  Paul’s amusement at the boy’s bloodthirsty recitation suddenly soured. “Half a year ago? But you can’t have been here more than a few days, Gally. Even if I’ve lost track of time, it couldn’t be more than a couple of weeks. I was with you in the Looking Glass place—with the knights and the queens and Bishop Humphrey, remember? And then on Mars, with Brummond and the rest of them. Just a short while ago.”

  His guide jumped down from the stone lion. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Signor. The names you say, I don’t know, maybe.” He began to walk again, more slowly this time. Paul followed.

  “But we were friends, boy. Don’t you remember that either?”

  The small, shadowy figure broke into a trot, as though Paul’s words flicked at him like a whip. Then he slowed and stopped.

  “You’d better go away, Signor,” he said as Paul approached. “Go on back.”

  “What do you mean? Why?”

  “Because there aren’t any women.” He would not meet Paul’s eye. “I was taking you to some men I know, down near the Rialto Bridge. Robbers. Bad men. But I don’t want to any more. So you should go back.”

  Paul shook his head, surprised. “But you said you thought you remembered. About when we were together before.”

  “I don’t want to know about it! Just go away.”

  Paul crouched and again took the child’s wrist, but gently this time. “I’m not making this up. We were friends—still are friends, I hope. I don’t care about any robbers.”

  The boy finally looked up. “I don’t like those things you said. They . . . it’s like a dream. Scares me.” He mumbled this last. “How could you be my friend when I don’t know you?”

  Paul stood, still holding onto the boy’s wrist. “I can’t understand it all myself. But it’s true, and when I lost you before, I felt terrible. Like . . . like I should have taken better care of you. So I’m not going to let it happen again.” He released the boy’s arm. It was true—he didn’t understand much himself. If the boy was a Puppet, he should never have been able to leave his original simulation, but he had traveled with Paul from the Looking Glass World to Mars—and here he was in Venice. But if he was a real person, like Paul, a . . . what was the buzzword? If he was a Citizen, then he should know who he was. He hadn’t forgotten everything during the transition to Mars, so why now? Like Paul, the boy seemed to have lost an entire piece of his past.

  Another lost soul, he thought. Another ghost in the machine. The image sent a chill through him.

  He considered explaining everything that he knew, but one look at the child’s frightened face defeated the idea. It would be too much, and far too quickly. “I don’t know the answers,” he said out loud. “But I’m going to try to find out.”

  For the first time since their meeting by the bridge, Gally regained his street-urchin cockiness. “You? How are you going to find anything out? You didn’t even know it was Carnival.” He frowned and sucked his lip. “We could ask the lady in the church. She knows lots of things.”

  “What lady?” Paul wondered if he was going to be taken to pray to the Madonna. That would be a pretty logical fifteenth or sixteenth century Venetian solution to a problem.

  “The Mistress,” said Gally/Gypsy, then turned and started back in roughly the direction they had come.

  “Who?”

  The boy looked back. “Cardinal Zen’s Mistress. Now come on.”

  To Paul’s surprise, his guide led him all the way back to the Ponte della Paglia and then over it, toward the famous fretwork arches of the Doge’s Palace and St. Mark’s Square. The Carnival crowds were still thick along the waterfront and even thicker in the square itself.

  Paul was surprised by how it all affected him: the Piazza San Marco was so familiar from the holidays he had spent here, including a week at the Biennale with a girlfriend just after university (when he had for the first time in his life thought that he, too, might actually get to have the kind of romantic adventures that others always seemed to be having) that now he found himself abruptly falling out of the illusion of Venice-as-it-was. It was almost impossible to look at the palace, the campanile, and the onion-shaped domes of St. Mark’s—all the subjects of a thousand calendars and postcards, and which he had photographed exhaustively himself on his first visit—and not feel connected back
to his own century, when Venice was a tourist haven, beloved but inconsequential, something more like a theme park than a once-imperial city.

  The boy clearly had no such conflicts. Paul had to race to keep up with him as he glided through the revelers, and almost lost him when he zigzagged suddenly to avoid walking between the two great pillars at the entrance to the square.

  The body of a hanged man dangling on a gibbet between the pillars—the recipient of a public execution, still serving as an edifying spectacle for the masses—helped to restore Paul’s focus on this version of the Serene Republic. Even the bright lights of the waterfront could not illumine the man’s face, which had gone swollen and black. Paul remembered his holiday tour, and how things like the Bridge of Sighs, a covered bridge high above the canal, where criminals were conveyed back and forth from the cells to the inquisitorial chambers, had seemed so quaint. This Venice was not quaint; it was real and rough. He decided it would be a good idea to remember that.

  “Where are we going, Gally?” he asked when he had caught up.

  “Don’t call me that—I don’t like it. My name’s Gypsy.” The boy screwed up his face, pondering. “This time of night, it shouldn’t be too hard to get in.” He trotted ahead, forcing Paul to furl his flapping cape and hurry after him again.

  Armed guards with pikes and peaked helmets stood outside the main entrance to the Doge’s Palace. Despite the freewheeling celebration all around them, Paul thought they looked very intent, not the least bit uninterested in their jobs. The boy sailed by them and into the shadows of the Basilica, then disappeared behind a pillar. When Paul walked past, a small hand snatched at him and pulled him into the darkness.

  “This is the tricky part,” the boy whispered. “Follow me close, and don’t make any noise.”

  It was only as his small guide slunk away down the colonnade that Paul realized he was planning to break into St. Mark’s Basilica, the most important religious building in Venice.