After the young commander and merchants disappeared into the crowd, Paolo Santini caught Clarinda's attention with a measuring gaze.
“That was well done,
Signorina
,
” Paolo commented. “Your father would be proud.”
“Oh?” Clarinda asked, raising her eyes from the whetstone she was sharpening her dagger with. “You've had dealings with my father? Enough to know that?”
“The Trevisans are certainly a well-known family,” Paolo observed, “but I've only met your father a couple times. I've given most of my business leads to your Uncle Verrocchio. But, enough of that. Let's just remain with a compliment from me to you: that business was well done. My services were almost completely unnecessary.”
Clarinda glanced at Pasquale, who proffered to the handsome young man a small leather pouch that jingled with many coins.
“Oh, no, Signore Santini,” Clarinda said, nodding at the bag, “your services are just beginning. We'd be grateful if you brought copies of the promissory notes back to the bank in Venice. You're now a witness of record for the courts here in Constantinople⦔
“...so if I don't fulfill that obligation, I can't work in this city ever again,” Santini finished. “That's why I complimented you, my dear. Very neat.” Paolo took the leather pouch without looking inside it and tucked it into a soft black bag at his waist.
Clarinda sheathed her dagger and let the ensuing pause linger long enough to change the subject. Her mind had returned to a vision of a subterranean pool and a black-robed Hospitaller knight who bore a striking resemblance to the man before her. An impulse struck her to ask the young man questions in a certain way, with a particular objective in mind.
It's the Norn Voice that you'll use here.
The words whispered in her mind sounded like Urd's. Clarinda started talking, trusting to this new, strange intuition.
“Please,
listen to me
,
Signore Santini. You mentioned your father â”
“Signorina, I think we know each other well enough for you to call me Paolo.”
“
Grazi
,
Paolo. Your family, it's not one of the older Venetian houses, is it?”
“No, no â we're from Sicily, out of a town near Syracuse.”
“A large family?”
“
Si, si.
Well, two sisters and four brothers.”
“That's respectable,” Clarinda commented. “Are all the brothers in the same business as you?”
“Of course. That's part of the reason we relocated to Venice. Father and I found the climate better for our...kind of brokering than was possible in Sicily.”
“Where do you fall, age-wise, among the siblings?”
“I'm the youngest â well, I'm the youngest, now.” Paolo stopped, seemingly surprised at himself and looking curiously at Clarinda. Pasquale gave her a strange look, too, and the girl ignored both men for the sake of pressing on with the questions.
“What do you mean, âyoungest now?'” Clarinda asked.
“My...
our
younger brother, Servius...he was among the fallen at the Battle of Mecina.”
“Really?” Pasquale asked. “You don't mean
the
Servius Aurelius Santini? Even if you're in your twenties, he'd still have been too young five years ago for that kind of acclaim, let alone swordsmanship. The Santini at that battle was a seasoned warrior.”
“Yes,” Paolo murmured, his voice distant and full of sadness. “That man was my uncle, Servius's namesake. To tell the truth, when the reports came back about their deaths, we were saddened, but also very surprised at how fiercely old Uncle Servius fought.”
“It was more than a fight,” Pasquale corrected. “We know some Genoese friends who heard from some traders that Santini and his Hospitallers killed more Saracens in a few days of fighting than Saladin lost the rest of that year.”
“
Si, si
â my uncle did our family proud that day. I only wish that I could've been there to fight with him.”
“Really? You've skill with the sword?” Clarinda asked.
“Certainly more than Servius did at thirteen,” Paolo said, unable to hide a strange competitive fire that lit in his eyes. “He must have been slain in one of the first assaults.”
“Perhaps not,” Clarinda said thoughtfully, “but I'd heard there were survivors? Part of Santini's legend lies in the fact that so many pilgrims and innocents survived Mecina.”
“No,” Paolo said, his voice urgent. “You heard wrongly. They burned all the dead and we got notified of my uncle and brother's deaths by way of some merchants coming back to Venice.”
“Were you close with your uncle and brother?” Clarinda asked.
Paolo's head snapped upward from his reverie, and his eyes widened.
“You've got an interesting way of asking questions,” Paolo said. “I feel that I can't help but answer.”
“Your uncle and younger brother?” Clarinda repeated.
Paolo took a deep breath and continued. “I think, if truth be told, I was closer to my uncle than Servius. We usually agreed about many things. Even the decision to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem was one that we developed together. It was only when Uncle Servius opted to go before the ship set sail that...my brother went in my place.”
“My goodness,” Clarinda said sympathetically, but her face momentarily seemed to pale, and she leaned back in her chair.
“Clarinda?” Pasquale asked, not liking what he saw in her ashen aspect.
“What?” Paolo asked, his voice strangely panicked. “What did I say?”
Clarinda refocused on him and shook her head. “No...
niente
,
nothing. I'm sorry, both of you. Perhaps it was that clam chowder.” She recovered herself. “Then, Paolo. Then, what you're saying is it might've been you at Mecina, instead of Servius?”
It was Paolo's turn to lean back in his chair, and he nodded regretfully with grimaced lips. “To my shame, yes. He was so devout, though, that our family's great hope is that he's earned his eternal rest in Heaven.”
Kenezki was at the table again.
“Your friend, Hoplitarch Stratioticus, is efficient
and
well connected. If you're all ready, we can sign the contracts upstairs in a private room.” Clarinda looked past the pirate and saw Alex standing at the base of the inn's wide stairwell.
Paolo Santini burst upward from his seat, like one awakening from a trance. He raised a hand to his forehead, looked briefly in confusion at Clarinda, and then clasped a hand onto Kenezki's shoulder.
“Si â
grazie
,
Friend Kenezki. Let's go and be done with this.”
The man grabbed his cloak and hastened with Kenezki across the room.
Clarinda and Pasquale rose, too, but the girl tugged at the navigator's arm to hold him back.
“
Pesci
,
” she whispered, “quickly. When Paolo talked about his uncle and brother, what did you hear?”
“That they were lost at Mecina? Died?”
“No, no. When he talked about being close to his uncle and Jerusalem?”
“Oh, that. The uncle and boy were going on a pilgrimage to the Holy City.”
“Ah. Thank you. My mind drifted for a moment, and I couldn't recall who was going where to do what.”
“I'm tired, too,
Bambina
.
Let's finish this and get back to the ship for some sleep.”
Clarinda retained a grip on the hilt of her blade as she followed Pasquale up the stairs at the back of the tavern, a flush rising in her cheeks and the hairs on the nape of her neck standing on end.
When she'd been speaking to Paolo Santini, a story completely at odds with the one he uttered had reached her ears. Clarinda had heard the pilgrimage story of the uncle and nephew getting trapped and killed at the ill-fated Crusader castle of Mecina, but, underlying those words, like a riptide beneath gentle surface swells, she'd also heard Paolo give another version of the story:
I think, if truth be told, we all needed to be rid of Servius. I still don't know where he made friends with Alexios and Nicolo, but potential alliances with the Byzantine and Venetian princes weren't in our interest. The future lay with the other Italian city-states, the papacy, and the Holy Roman Empire. For my own soul's sake, I'm relieved that Uncle Servius's plan worked. Dying at Mecina saved Servius from a life of slavery in a Persian palace where he was headed before Saladin's forces attacked.
What was happening to her, that she could hear a lie being told at the same time as the truth that underlay the lie? Clarinda frowned as she thought about the duality of Santini's words. She wondered at the horrific possibility of a family selling its youngest son as chattel into the Asiatic slave markets.
The girl's innate pragmatism asserted control as she rose to go sign the documents. As they passed into the stairwell leading up to the inn's private rooms, the Venetian girl wondered if the Paolo Santini's younger brother had died all those years ago at Mecina, or if, possibly, he still lived and waited for her in a dreamscape world near a rainbow-fired subterranean pool.
Of course, even if Aurelius was alive, could she even bring herself to care? The madman of Mecina would never be for her. Yet, perhaps, she thought angrily, maybe there
was
more to the story than she'd previously believed.
Logic and order
,
she thought fiercely.
Primo, get our goods sold and underway.
Secondo, find Padre in Caesarea.
Terzo, deal with Servius Aurelius Santini if I ever meet him.
Chapter 7
The Labyrinth and the Ravens
A month after Clarinda's meeting in the
Wayfarer â
and within moments of his entry into the Krak â Jacob hesitated. He'd neared the last of the three hallways on this latest attempt to follow Ibn-Khaldun's instructions, but he was confused.
The interior of the Krak des Chevaliers seemed a labyrinth!
Ibn-Khaldun had told him that the scriptorium wasn't far from the medical ward, but in his eagerness to explore the castle in his search for the scholar's apprentice, RÃg, Jacob knew that he must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.
The boy had already passed through many wrong doorways, and ducked past fast-moving Hospitaller knights moving this way and that through the halls in preparation for war. He got shooed out of what looked like an armory by a couple of irritated looking knights, and stepped into a chapel during a morning mass. Now, by process of elimination and retraced steps, he was back by the infirmary and trying the third door.
He found himself in yet another, shorter, corridor. The door facing him was closed, and another opened into a room whose light flooded the semi-shadowed stones with yellowish illumination. “
Entrez, jeune homme,
” a voice said from somewhere beyond. “Don't be afraid.”
Jacob flushed, not completely understanding the words of the unseen
franj
,
but trusting in the friendly tone. His curiosity got the better of him and he peered into the room.
The morning sunlight shone strongly through a large, open window upon a brown-robed man who sat at an immense, grey-stone table. A feather quill was poised in the man's right hand, and the table was cluttered with a variety of writing implements and reading material: a silver inkwell, scrolls of vellum and parchment, and ornately decorated books.
Jacob quelled a rush of excitement when he saw the shelves behind the man that contained books and rolled tubes. The boy had been learning to read for over nine years now, but even at thirteen he long ago ran through (and reread) all the texts in his family's meager collection. He felt a burning curiosity to see the wall of literature behind the man, in spite of his need for haste since two armies were coming!
Then Jacob realized that the man was speaking to him.
“I'm looking for RÃg,” he replied.
The monk seemed to recognize the squire's name because he smiled thinly and waved toward the doorway in the far wall.
Jacob bowed slightly and moved forward, keeping his hands crossed politely in front of him as he glanced at the books and parchments along the way. It took everything in him to ignore the impulse to shelf browse and he gasped when he realized that the room was but an antechamber to a couple vast chambers beyond.
What a library! Jacob was transfixed at the sight, taking in everything at once. Robed monks and priests sat at long oaken tables or stood at oversized lecterns, peering closely at texts as they all seemed to be busily scribbling on parchment sheets unrolled everywhere. The silence in which they worked was cavernous, and the scritching and scratching of the men reminded Jacob of animals' claws scraping upon stone.