River of Blue Fire (66 page)

“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.

“Oh, Christ,” he said quietly to himself, a helpless blasphemy.

In the end, it was not as bad as he feared. The boy led him to a staircase set below street level, at a corner of the church away from the piazza and the crowds. With a boost from Paul, Gally then clambered up the wall beside the stairs to a window, which he pried open; a few minutes later he was back at Paul's level, appearing like a magician's helper through a door under the stairs that Paul had not even noticed.

Despite his acute awareness of danger, Paul still retained enough of his tourist sensibility to be disappointed by the dark interior of the basilica. Gally led him on a long and roundabout but still hurried route through the tapestried nooks and crannies of the great church. There was enough candlelight to lend a small golden gleam to the mosaics on the floors and walls, but otherwise they might have been in a warehouse or hangar where a lot of dim, oddly-shaped objects were being stored.

At last they reached a particular archway hung with an arras. The boy signaled to him to be quiet, then poked his head through for a brisk reconnaissance. Satisfied, he signaled to Paul that it was safe.

The shadowy chapel was a good size, but after the vast, echoing spaces outside, it seemed quite intimate. The altar, which stood beneath a monumental statue of the Madonna, was almost completely covered in flowers and votive candles. In front of the altar another robed and hooded effigy, this one slightly smaller than lifesize, was silhouetted against the flickering candleglow.

“Hello, Signorina,” the boy called softly. The smaller statue turned to look at them; Paul jumped.

“Gypsy!” The figure made its way down from the altar steps. When she stood before them and threw back her hood, the top of her head barely reached Paul's breastbone. She wore her white hair knotted close at the back of her neck, and her nose was as hooked and prominent as a bird's beak; as far as Paul could tell, she could have been anything from sixty to ninety years old. “What good wind?” she asked, which seemed to be a Venetian greeting which required no answer, for she immediately added, “Who is your friend, Gypsy?”

Paul introduced himself, using his first name only. The woman did not return the confidence, but smiled and said: “I have done my duty by the Cardinal for the day. Let us go and drink some wine—lots of water in yours, boy—and talk.”