by Mindy Klasky
“But we have allies,” he told Gracia. “I have appealed to the Sultan of Turkey, describing your plight, the harshness of your treatment here, and the fate of Reyna and la Chica.”
Gracia paused, considering. With her trading empire in decline, Venice lived on sufferance from her powerful Eastern neighbor. The Sultan was well-known for his religious tolerance.
“He has already dispatched his chaus to negotiate terms,” Joseph said. “I suggested in turn that Reyna might make a fitting match for the son of the Jewish court physician.”
Gracia's eyes widened minutely.
A muscle in his jaw leapt to hardness beneath his clipped beard. “Reyna and I have discussed matters before. She understands that certain”—his eyes went dark, hidden—“sacrifices must be made for the sake of the family.”
“That may be.” Gracia rose to her feet. “But they will not be made by my daughter.”
He bowed his head. Something in the movement reminded Gracia of the earnest young man she had taken into her Antwerp house, taught and nurtured, the boy he'd been before Maximilian and all the scheming that had come since then. She touched his hand.
“We will speak no more of it. Besides, I know the Doge. He is no fool. He will take the hint the first time.”
Gracia sat up in her narrow prison cot, gasping from a dream of half-glimpsed spectral figures. Beneath the fine lawn of her night dress, her heart hammered against her ribs. She slid her feet to the floor, shivering in the humid air. From the lagoon came the tolling of the marker buoys. Only the faintest moonlight penetrated the window bars, yet the crucifix cast a blurred shadow, its arms no longer quite straight, as if melting under its own weight. As she watched, the dim light took on a greenish hue.
Moving by feel instead of sight, she circled the rooms. The peephole in the outer door was shut, the hallway beyond, silent. Shadows pressed in on her from every corner.
Gracia strode back into the bedroom and pulled the embroidered silk screen across the doorway. Cupping her hands in front of her, she whispered the ancient words, “Blessed be thou, O Creator of the Universe, Sustainer…”
The air between her fingers glowed. For a moment, she saw nothing in the flickering light and she wondered if her vision, never as great as Reyna's, had failed her. Then a shape of white and gold wavered into clarity. The flames darkened, streaked now with ashen tones of burnt gold and umber. Once again she caught the outline of a man in a short tabarro cloak, moving toward her, one hand outstretched, grasping—
“Dell'Sarto!”
The light flared up, filling half the room. The figure swelled also, to stand within it as large as life. The bright mist fell away and she saw his face.
Gracia raised one hand and smothered a cry. Surely such a creature had never walked the earth. The eyes that met hers were white and bulging, without pupils, blind as if from staring too long into the lightless depths. Skin stretched tight as a drumhead across bones like convoluted shells. There were no lashes, no brows, the ears mere dimples, the nose a doubled slit. The lipless mouth covered rows of serrated teeth, and along the sinuous neck, blood-red gills pulsated.
A stench rose up to gag her, of rotten sea-creature and something else, a perfume seductive and ancient.
Gracia spied the band of gold encircling the neck like a slave's collar, half-hidden by the gills. Above it, the mouth twisted once, twice, then a sound issued forth, rusty as sea-chains or boats creaking in the night.
“Free me, I beg of you!” The creature raised limbs trailing glabrous seaweed to paw at the golden ring. “Free me from this Earth that holds me fast. Use your Fire to melt it away!”
In the echoes, Gracia caught a hint of familiar resonance. Her skin crawled. She'd felt a presence from the moment she'd set foot in Venice, lurking in the fluid dark beneath the canals. Now she understood. Chained to the sea by the ancient Festa ceremony, it needed a balancing power of Fire to free itself. Reyna, strong and clear…and inexperienced, malleable. Reyna, now hidden behind the convent walls.
It could not reach Reyna. Now it wanted her.
It's what you really want to do, whispered through Gracia's mind. Peace, find peace in the sea. Give in…
“No!” Gracia pressed her lips together and lifted her chin. The brightness surged in response, white and brilliant purples in kaleidoscoping patterns. Sparks leapt and a smell like burned kelp seared the air, a puff of greasy blue smoke.
“Let us discuss this reasonably, madonna,” the creature said. “I mean you no harm.”
Gracia could not tell if it were pleading or threatening, so subtle and shifting were its tones.
“And I can be a loyal friend. What can you do alone, here in man's prison, your gold in the hands of your enemies, your daughter locked away with the she-priests? Could you not benefit from a powerful ally?”
She felt an inner tug, an aching desire to agree to those suave words. Oh, Brianda, is this what happened to you?
“Consider the scope of my dominion,” the sea creature continued in its soft, beguiling voice. “The oceans run deep and far, even unto the ends of the earth. With a word, I can drown your enemies, flood their fields, destroy their mighty navies. Consider what we might accomplish together once you have freed me…”
Gracia shook her head. She would bargain her wealth for safety or freedom; she would not bargain with Miriam's Gift.
“You cannot win, O woman. For a time your strength will hold, but then, ah then! it will fail you. Mortal flesh always fails. Only the sea never tires.”
Gracia felt a strange fluttering, then a tightness in her chest, a cramping in her belly as if the illnesses that she pretended over the years had come to pass in reality. Her breath caught in her throat. Her vision blurred.
Suddenly the creature made a quick, lunging thrust toward her. She brought her hands up and flames shot from her fingers. It screamed, writhing its long, scaled tail.
“Mortal!” The syllables distorted, merged into a sound like the roar of a sea storm. The creature reared up, claws reaching for her. “Defy me at your peril! I will take—”
“You will take nothing!” Gracia's temper flared up like a sword, whetted and ready to her hand. Fire raged though her. She quivered with its power. “I have had enough with taking, enough with bargaining! Unclean beast, begone! Take yourself from my sight! Rot in hell or the bowels of the sea, I care not—but come not to me or mine ever again!”
The air between her hands, ignited by her fury, shimmered, incandescent. Its brightness pierced her, filled her. The ring around the creature's neck glowed as if molten.
The sea creature shuddered, wavering. For an instant, it seemed to bow down before her, and she thought it might be summoning what powers it possessed against her. But it could not wrest the Light from her; only she could choose to wield it.
And I choose! For my Reyna and for my people, I choose!
“S-s-sooner or later,” came its fading whisper, “your power will be mine!”
Gracia blinked, startled. Then she laughed aloud. “O creature of the deep, do you think this power comes from me? Do you think it mine?”
O Shekhinah, Mystery of Mysteries!
She dropped her hands, surrendering the Light to its source. As the brightness faded, so did the image within it.
“Go where you will, to the very ends of the earth,” creaked the rusted-iron voice, growing thinner with each syllable. “I will be waiting…”
The voice failed. For a long moment Gracia stood listening to the silence.
The creature was right. There was no corner of the earth, not Lisbon, not Antwerp, not the Sublime Porte of Constantinople, no human kingdom that could shelter her, nowhere she could hide.
Hide… echoed through her mind.
Gradually her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness. A pale illumination cast twisted shadows from the crucifix. Gracia walked over to it. It was not fastened to the wall, but hung from a row of nails. It was heavier than she expected. She took hold of the bars
of the cross with both hands and turned it away from her, toward the wall.
“Let this be an end to lies.” Her voice, at first a whisper, grew stronger and more triumphant. “From this moment onward, I will no longer hide what I am.”
As if touched by prophetic vision, she saw her people huddled on the Lisbon pier, in il gheto, in a thousand darkened prisons. She saw them lift their heads, arise, follow. Like Miriam of old, she would go forth. Her dreams would become a bridge, her Light a beacon. And never again would she wear a mask.
The old woman stood at her balcony, looking out over the water. Warm and clear in the Turkish sun, the bay sparkled on the surface and turned blue as sapphires below. Yet always she felt the darkness in the shadows, the brooding hunger. She felt it here in Constantinople and she felt it in Tiberias, in Palestine beside the Sea of Galilee, where even now her agents were building the settlement that was the first step toward a Jewish homeland. She would not live to see the completion of that work; the years held her too tightly in their grasp, even as the sea creature had warned. Yet she smiled as she turned away from the water, wandered through the rooms filled with books printed in Hebrew under her patronage, watched Reyna play with her young daughter. The shadow might be ever with them, but now the Light burned bright and free.
Alea Iacta Est
Marissa Doyle
June, 1818
London, England
* * *
Miss Jane Wetherby took a deep breath. “Nos morituri, te salutamus,” she murmured, and stepped out of Papa’s barouche after her aunt. If she was indeed about to die, the least she could do was be on time for her execution.
“There you are.” Aunt Aspasia was waiting for her on the pavement. “Cold feet, my dear?” she asked in a quieter voice.
Jane grimaced. “Positively icy. You don’t know how close I came to asking Mr. Cording to turn the carriage around and take me home.”
Aunt Aspasia nodded. “What stopped you?”
“Sheer mulishness, most likely.”
“Good. Hold on to that. It’ll serve you well.”
St. James’s was not a part of London ladies usually visited in daylight hours, so Jane looked about her with interest. At the bottom of the street squatted St. James’s Palace, gloomy in soot-stained red brick; marching up the hill toward her were hatters and haberdashers, boot-makers and vintners, all frequented by gentlemen of fashion or those who pretended to be. And of course, there were the clubs: White’s, with its bow window once occupied by Beau Brummell and his friends; Brooks’s, stronghold of the Whigs…and here before her, with its distinctive blue door and polished bronze knocker in the shape of a Corinthian helmet, its aura of intellectual masculinity honed to somewhere between brilliance and insufferability, was Hatton’s.
Today, instead of being guarded against desecration by the step of a female slipper upon its marble threshold, the door of London’s most scholarly club was being held open by a smiling—yes, smiling!—doorman in blue livery to match the door he defended. “The misses Wetherby!” he declared, bowing. “Welcome to Game Day.”
Aunt Aspasia took Jane’s arm—lest she run away?—and nodded her thanks to the doorman as they swept through the door. And Jane wondered, as they passed him, how much longer he'd be wearing that smile.
It had all started yesterday, when Jane’s favorite brother, Jonathan, went shopping for a new hunter at Tattersall’s and came home instead with a broken collar bone, dislocated shoulder, and at least two broken ribs after being thrown against a mounting block by a skittish four-year-old bay.
“He was a beauty, though,” Jonathan sighed yet again, while Jane tried to coax him to swallow the willow bark decoction Aunt Aspasia had brewed after the surgeon finished bandaging him up. “Would have bought the beast if he hadn’t been so resty.”
Jane almost managed to corner him with the glass but he turned his head just in time. “Oh, drink it, do, Jonathan! It’s a good thing you didn’t buy him—since you won’t be on a horse for the next six months, you’d just have been paying for him to get fat in Papa’s stable.”
He sat up in indignation. “Nonsense! I’ll be on horseback in another month or—” His sentence ended in a hiss of pain, and he laid himself back against the pillows with much more care than he’d used in rising from them.
“You’ll not be doing anything of the sort if you don’t keep still and let those bones knit, young man,” Aunt Aspasia said, coming into his room just then. “Have you drunk my decoction yet?”
Jonathan scowled at the tumbler Jane still held out to him, three-quarters full of a brownish liquid. “No.”
“That’s a pity, since it mostly consists of the Armagnac your grandfather put down back in the ’70s. It helps cover the willow bark taste.” Aunt Aspasia shrugged. “But if you’d rather not…”
Without another word of protest, he let Jane help him sit up more carefully and hold the tumbler while he drank. When it was empty, he lay back with a sigh and smiled weakly up at her. “Thanks, little sis. You’re a brick for not weeping at me like most females would.”
“That wouldn’t have been very helpful,” Jane said. It didn’t seem politic to mention that she had wept a little, when he was first brought in. She was fond of all three of her older brothers, but Jonathan had always treated her as his special pet. Even now he was punctilious about accompanying her to parties and balls and all the other activities of Jane’s first London season.
But he wouldn’t be politely asking her friends to dance at Almack’s or anywhere for the next several weeks, poor thing. She set the empty glass on his bedside table and helped Aunt fluff and adjust his pillows so that he could rest more easily. “Now, is there anything else you need?” she asked softly. “You really ought to sleep if you can.”
He made a wry face. “Yes—a secretary. Could you scribble a note to send round to Ned Billings that I won’t be joining him for dinner at Hatton’s toni—oh, damnation!” Jonathan slapped the coverlet with his good hand.
“What?”
“Hatton’s. Tomorrow’s Game Day!”
“Oh, no!” Aunt Aspasia stopped, halfway to the window to draw the curtains.
“Oh, no!” Jane echoed.
If each club in St. James’s could be characterized by one particular feature, Hatton’s would be known for its preponderance of members who’d actually paid attention to their tutors at school and at university—and for the Game.
The Game had been born at Hatton’s on a rainy March evening in 1780, when two members got into a heated argument over glasses of Madeira as to which side more deserved to win the Battle of Plataea, the Greek or the Persian. Rather than challenging Lord Tunstall to pistols on Putney Heath, as might have happened in a less intellectual setting, Sir Andrew Roll suggested they re-fight the battle—on a map hastily abstracted from an edition of Herodotus from the club library, using liqueur glasses to stand in for the opposing armies. The second Battle of Plataea (this time the Persians won) drew such a large audience of members betting on the outcome—and such large receipts for food and beverages—that the club’s manager, Mr. Martindale, resolved to encourage more such events. Eventually, the Game replaced the more conventional pastime of card-playing at Hatton’s; instead, members would drop by of an evening to dine and re-fight engagements from Marathon to Agincourt to Ciudad Rodrigo. Only Waterloo had never been refought, its memory both too recent and too sacred.
In time the Game trickled backward to be played in the colleges and public schools from whence Hatton’s members were sprung, fathers teaching sons, older brothers teaching younger ones. Jonathan had learned at Harrow and taught his two younger brothers—hardly surprising, since their father was Sir Henry Wetherby, noted scholar of antiquities. Marcus and Godfrey were now at Cambridge, destined for donhood. Jonathan, though his inclinations were less purely academic, was still an enthusiastic amateur scholar and one of the best players of the Game at Hatton’s. And tomorrow was Game Day, the one day in the year when members’
family and friends were invited to watch exhibition matches—and where Jonathan was expected to compete in the Battles of Antiquity form.
Aunt Aspasia had brought Jane to watch her brother on Game Day ever since he’d become a member of Hatton’s. It was one of the highlights of her year—even this one, when she was making her come-out and attending any number of delicious parties and balls. Because Jonathan had not taught only his brothers to play the Game.
“We shan’t go.” Jane thought she was covering her disappointment quite well, really. “Someone has to stay here to mop your fevered brow.”
Jonathan shook his head. “No, go. I know how much you enjoy it. I’ll keep very well here with Mrs. Broom to look after me.”
“But we wouldn’t enjoy it. A Game Day without you would be sadly flat. Wouldn’t it, aunt?”
Aunt Aspasia nodded, her gray curls bouncing under her cap. “Indeed it would.” She sighed. “A pity there’s no time to send for Marcus to come down from Cambridge to uphold the family honor.”
“No, Marcus is too pedantic. He gets caught up thinking about verb forms and forgets strategy,” Jonathan said. “If anyone could uphold the family honor, it’s Jane.” He winked at her. “You should go in my place, little sis. You’re just as good as I am.”
Jane caught her breath. “Do you really think so?”
“Of course you are. You beat me often enough.”
“Ohh.” She sat back in her chair and allowed herself, just for a minute, to dream.
She had been immersed in Latin and Greek as soon as she’d entered the schoolroom; how else would her father’s daughter be educated? Aunt Aspasia, as learned as her brother, had seized on the Game as an excellent way to teach ancient history, and Jane had taken to it like a duck to water. She’d lived for her brothers’ school holidays so that she would have opponents other than her aunt and the vicar, who’d forever damned himself in her eyes by once intentionally losing to her. Playing the Game at Hatton’s on Game Day, then, with the best of the best…it would be heaven.