The Venetian Contract (47 page)

She looked at the ring on her fourth finger, just as her mother had worn it.

‘Where is your home?’ asked the Doge gently.

‘On the Lazzaretto Novo.’

‘On the hospital island?’

‘Yes.’ She pushed open the great door to the outside world.

The Doge shouted after her. ‘With the doctor?’

Feyra stopped.
Of course
. The Doge had appointed Annibale in the first place. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I live alone.’

Chapter 45

F
eyra did not know how long she sat and held Annibale’s blackened hand.

On her return from the Redentore the sun had been high in the sky. Now it was low enough to gild his dead face like a reliquary.

She had lived, in those hours, their life together as it might have been – living and healing together, perhaps travelling to the teaching hospitals of London, Bologna, Damascus; perhaps opening a hospital together. She did not, in that imagined span of years, speculate upon how their features might have combined in their daughters and sons. She did not want children, never had, she just wanted Annibale. To be with him, wed to him in whatever way their faiths allowed.

She took the Venier ring from her finger, suddenly obsessed by the notion that they should be betrothed before Annibale was interred. It was a lady’s ring so she had to place it on his smallest finger and the crystal shone against the blackened skin. Black bile, red blood, white bile and pale phlegm. All had drained from him now; all humours equalized, all temperaments quieted, all balance gone. The spinning top had fallen.

Even this did not bring tears to her dry eyes. Grimly she
saw that the pale horse was uppermost on his finger, and then she understood. Now she knew that the final horse, the pale horse of Death, had not foretold Takat’s death or even the death of Venice, but the death of Annibale.

The lowering sun shone directly in her face and the light brought tears to her dry eyes. She roused herself – the light was fading – she must wash the body and lay him out. Tonight she would watch him in vigil, and tomorrow she would bury him.

She collected a batch of new white tallow candles from her cabinet and laid them by the bed. Then she went downstairs and out to the cemetery, the gnarled roots tripping her and the winding thorns tearing at her robes. She trod carefully around the graves, imagining the skeletons beneath.

The ones she hadn’t saved.

At the newest pile of earth swaddling Takat Turan’s grave, she stopped and planted her foot squarely in the fresh soil. She remembered her promise to him to send his bones home. She had no intention of keeping it. She regarded the mound of earth. ‘Rot there,’ she spat, and walked on.

She collected the lime barrow from where it rested against the
murada
, and wheeled it to Annibale’s doorway. In the morning she would fold his body into it.

Then she went to the well to draw water to cleanse Annibale’s body. The stone face of the lion watched her with his knowing glance. She was tired of him. ‘Is this what you meant all along?’ she asked the lion. ‘Was this your great secret? Well, well done, your prophecy has come to pass.’

She sent down the bucket with a rattle. When she pulled
it up again she saw in the last of the sun that something sparkled at the bottom of the pail. She put her wet hand to the silver gleam and drew out a little tin cross, set on a pin. It was the cross Corona Cucina had given her to pin her jabot across her chest, the brooch she had cast into the well on the first day on the island. She closed her fist round it, squeezing the metal. Hundreds, thousands of buckets had been drawn from here in the last year, yet the cross had chosen to surface for her, on
this
Sunday.

Feyra opened her hand and looked down at the pathetic shepherd prophet hanging from his tin cross. What good could he do her now? He was just a mortal man who had died like Annibale. Then slowly, slowly she remembered his legend.

He had been dead and risen again. The shepherd had risen.

It was a miracle.

Feyra dropped the bucket, spilling the water and cross over Takat Turan’s grave. She began to run, past the almshouses where she’d birthed the Trianni babies, past the Tezon where Salve had been the last to die, past the gatehouse where Bocca had once lived, past the church where the Badessa had given her a Bible and back to Annibale’s house. She dashed upstairs, her breath bursting in her chest, and stopped, winded, in the doorway.

He had moved.

Feyra rushed to the bedside and dropped to her knees. The hand that she had held, the hand that wore the ring, that she had placed upon his chest with the other, had now fallen to his side. She took it up again, and held it so hard that the ring of the four horses she’d given him broke cleanly in two.

She climbed on top of him and opened his shirt, pressing her ear to his chest. There below the layers of muscle and bone and sinew, she felt a flutter, a tiny thing, like the first few beats of a new-birthed butterfly’s wings.

Somehow those vessels and chambers that Annibale had told her of, those valves and atria had come to life. But there was no science to this; this was a miracle of God. Now the tears came as she pressed her lips to the fluttering place, then moved up to his lips.

And as she kissed him for the first time, pressing her mouth to his, he opened his eyes.

PART VI

The Pale Horse

Chapter 46

S
aint Mark’s Square had never been so filled with such a press of people, not even at Carnevale. This was the biggest naval muster the city had seen since the days of the Fourth Crusade, when the righteous and the ravenous went to feed on Constantinople. Even the preparations for Lepanto, a mere six years ago, had been nothing to this; but the machineries of war had sprung readily into wakefulness. ‘Heigh-ho, poor Venice,’ said Palladio aloud. ‘Here we go again.’

The Doge’s palace formed an apocalyptic background. The beautiful white frontage was now a charred ruin. Last week’s fire had turned it from the most beautiful smile of white teeth in the world to the blackened snaggletoothed grin of a pedlar.

Palladio shoved his way through whores taking sailors for a last jump before shipboard and wives pleading with their husbands not to go to war. On makeshift stages the players of the
commedia dell’arte
staged dramas featuring the evil Turk as antagonist, each infidel represented by a walnut-stained actor, with an outsize turban, hideous hooked nose and flowing beard.

Hundreds of citizens queued to go inside the Basilica. The fact that the church and the Saint and his sentinel
horses had been untouched by the fire seemed nothing short of miraculous. Inside, in the incensed dark, they would pray to the Madonna of Nicopeia, an icon snatched from the Turks themselves, and ask her to keep the infidel from their door. Venice was a cauldron of gossip at the best of times, but in this past week it had boiled over with seething rumour; word that the Turks were poised to take the city had spread faster than the fire.

Palladio ignored the human drama; he was bound to see the Doge. He turned into the Palazzo Sansoviniano, which was, for the moment, serving as the ruler’s headquarters. The great painted chamber hummed like a hive, as powder monkeys and naval cadets with barely a whisker between them ran messages. The frescoed walls were obscured by great maps that had been torn from the
Salle delle Mappa
in the palace, some with pieces missing, some with charred edges, some with great cinder-edged bites taken out of them by the fire. And in the midst of it all, like the long silver needle in a compass, was the Doge.

If it were not for the Doge’s commanding tones Palladio would scarcely have recognized him. The long scarlet and white robes and the
corno
hat that he’d worn to the Redentore were gone. He wore the blue cloak and garter of a Sea Lord over silver half-armour; the white hair and beard had been closely trimmed since the consecration and he looked thirty years younger.

Today he was not Sebastiano Venier, ageing Doge of Venice, but Sebastiano Venier,
Capitano Generale da Mar
and Chief Admiral of the Venetian fleet in the new war against the Ottoman Turks.

When he tapped Venier on the arm and the Doge turned,
he stared at Palladio blankly for an instant. Then the moment broke. ‘Palladio,’ he said. ‘What do you here?’

‘I would like to buy you a cup of wine, for luck.’

‘
Now
?’ The admiral opened his arms to indicate the mayhem around him.

‘It will take one quarter of the bells,’ said Palladio evenly, ‘and it may make all the difference to you succeeding in this onward action against the Turk.’ Palladio held the blue gaze long enough for the Doge to remember that it was Palladio who had brought Feyra to him. If the architect had something to say, perhaps it had better be listened to.

Sebastiano Venier sighed. ‘Very well.’

Outside in the melee, Palladio found the
ombra
cart, the wooden truck that hugged the shadow of the campanile as it moved around the square all day. The cart was doing a roaring trade today as the sailors spent their last few sequins on grog. Palladio exchanged two coins for two brimming cups and joined Venier on the dock. The two men sat on a gun carriage and watched the galleasses gather.

Sebastiano Venier looked out into the infinite blue with his weather-eye, as if he could see what lay ahead for him on those foreign seas. He shook his head a little. ‘I had not thought to go back out there,’ he said quietly. ‘After Lepanto, I thought I had done with the Turks. But, as it turns out, they had not done with me. Plague, Fire and now War and Death.’ He took a swallow of his wine. ‘What have you to tell me?’

Palladio took out a small quill box. ‘Have you parchment?’

Venier unfurled a map of the Straits of Patras and turned it over.

‘Good.’ The architect drew quickly and fluidly. ‘Combat, even at sea, is a matter of geometry. What I am drawing here is the architecture of battle, if you will. Now look. If you entice their galleys into
this
formation –’ he drew several small ovals ‘– then you have the advantage. Your new galleasses have superior firepower but greater bulk and move more slowly. Since they have side-mounted cannon, your best bet is to position
two
of them, in front of each main division –’ he drew fast to illustrate his point ‘– to prevent the Turks from sneaking in small boats and sapping, sabotaging or boarding our vessels. If you let the Ottomans make all the movement, then you are master of the game. Hold the line of the Christian ships at all costs.’