Queen's Gambit

by Karen Chance

  “Wow,” Ray said again, sounding awed.

  “You were never here?” I asked.

  “No, and I kinda think I missed out.”

  I smiled, glad to be able to show him this.

  “What is this, exactly?” he asked.

  “We are on the way to one of the battagliola, one of the street battles fought with sticks,” I informed him. “There were few chivalric tournaments in Venice, there being little room for the horses, so street fights took their place. Even better, you did not have to be a knight or some wealthy man’s son to take part. There was no armor to buy, just wooden weapons and leather shields, which almost anyone could afford. Whole neighborhoods used to join in, or all the members of a single guild. It was like a sport, you see?”

  Ray nodded, perhaps because he was seeing it, through my eyes.

  “We found a spot with a good view,” I continued, taking him to where I’d been that day, high above the teeming street.

  We suddenly reappeared on a rooftop—perhaps a little too close to the edge. He abruptly stepped back. “Hey! A little warning next time!”

  “Sorry.” I grinned at him, and he shook his head.

  “Everybody in this damn family is crazy,” he muttered, but he did return to the edge after a moment, to gaze downward.

  “There are so many people,” he said, sounding surprised. “There’s gotta be half the city down there!”

  “Not quite. But some of the bigger fights could draw thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. It was free entertainment.”

  “But with so many fighting at once, it looks like a battle down there!”

  “Most of those are onlookers,” I said, amused, because the battle hadn’t even started yet. “They were merely jostling for a good spot.”

  I peered down alongside him for a while, at people crowding the streets and balconies, at hawkers selling sweet fritters and sausages and veal liver fried in olive oil, at old ladies clutching handkerchiefs, ready to wave them furiously at their favorites, and at men holding rotten vegetables and rooftiles, with which to pelt the cowardly.

  “You did have a good spot,” Ray said, watching Coletta come up alongside us, to toss scraps to the pigeons. It caused a mini battle in the skies, with the faster birds catching her offerings mid-air, swooping and diving at fantastic speeds, and making her laugh delightedly.

  Then the main event began, while the birds still cawed and circled overhead. The teams were from different neighborhoods: ours, who were mostly fishermen, and one from close by the Arsenal shipyard, who were mostly shipwrights. There were only fifty or sixty combatants per group, unlike the hundreds who sometimes participated in later centuries. But their taunting cries filled the air nonetheless, stirring up the crowd, who were already rowdy enough.

  “The locals are missing out,” Ray said.

  “How so?”

  “Everybody’s getting buffeted around down there, and the fight hasn’t even started. I bet it gets worse later.”

  “Frequently,” I agreed.

  “Well, if it had been me, I’da set up a stall selling wooden shields with the different faction’s symbols on ‘em. Protect yourself on the day and keep them as a souvenir for later.” He shook his head. “These people got no idea how to merchandise.”

  I grinned. “They became better at it in later years. They started holding the battles on bridges, allowing spectators to watch from their gondolas, which was marginally safer.”

  “Marginally?”

  “People did tend to get tossed off the bridges.”

  Ray laughed. “Godddamn!”

  “The gondolas were so closely packed that vendors could walk from boat to boat, hawking their wares. But we always watched from the top of a local church.”

  “Wasn’t that considered sacrilegious?”

  “Of course.” I smiled. “That’s why no one else was up here.”

  I turned around to show him our little group. We’d spread out a blanket on the flat roof of the church to hold our feast. Zilio’s father was a fisherman so he’d provided the spiced anchovies; Gerita and her little sister Maria had brought cheese stuffed eggs; Rigi had not been there, having come down with the pox, but his brother Gallo had brought a custard tart. Luysio and I had arrived last, having stolen some honey spiced walnuts from a vendor. We’d shown up breathless and pink cheeked, just before the fighting started.

  There was a shout on the street, and we turned back to the fight, with Ray batting at long dead pigeons in order to see better, and me laughing when it didn’t work.

  The captains gave the command and the two sides rushed together, each group running from a different end of the street, waving canes and cudgels and knocking over any observers who got in the way.

  “Shit!” Ray yelled, as the two groups came together, with a clash of arms and a roar of approval from the crowd. An all-out melee immediately resulted.

  The weapons being used were wood, but they still struck a good blow, and so did fists and feet and sheer momentum. One man duel wielded a couple of pointed canes, clearing a space all around him; another had a shield that he was using less for protection and more as a cudgel to batter his enemies; yet another lost his shield, but had stolen a cloak from a bystander to wrap around his arm instead. That gave him some protection, but also inadvertently brought another foe into the fight when the furious bystander waded in to the fray, determined to retrieve his outwear.

  Eyes were blackened, faces were bloodied, and tender areas received rough treatment. There weren’t a lot of rules to the fracas, and bystanders were not above tripping or even punching members of the opposing team, to help out their favorites. It was a crazy, sweaty, chaotic good time, unlike anything I’d seen in the modern world.

  “They fought for the honor of their neighborhoods,” I told Ray, as he laughed at a group who staggered off the main road and into a peddler, who saved his great dish of sardines in saor, a popular sweet and sour sauce, by holding it high above his head. “But they or their families often also had bets on the outcome.”

  “So bragging rights and money, same as today,” he said, grinning.

  I nodded, and we watched the fight for a while, because I found that I didn’t want to leave. I could feel that long-ago sun baking into my skin and see it sparkling on the distant water, could hear my friends’ laughter from behind us, could smell the food and the salt and the sweat and the blood. It had been a savage time, but I had loved it here, in this strange city in the sea.

  I had never thought to feel at home again, after father took me from the dense forests of Wallachia, the only world I’d ever known. But I had been wrong. I had grown attached to our little sagging house on stilts, where you could sit in the open back door off the kitchen and dabble your toes in the surf. Had enjoyed getting up early to help Horatio, our old servant, fix breakfast, and to greet my father when he came home from a long night of gambling, having tricked the humans into providing our bread. Had loved . . .

  Him.

  Ray yelled and slapped the edge of the roofline excitedly, probably because the blue shirts of the fishermen had regrouped and were charging again, their numbers reduced but their courage undaunted. The black shirted Arsenal cluster had been distracted, fighting with some local boys who had decided to throw rocks. They turned just in time to see a wall of blue descending on them.

  But I was no longer paying much attention, letting the memory play out for Ray while I toyed with another. It wasn’t one I usually allowed myself to see. There was no point anymore.

  But something about today was different, as if there was magic in the air. Or perhaps seeing Venice once more, another memory I rarely looked at, alive and bright with Ray’s shared joy, had triggered it. Either way, I was suddenly back there again, seeing my father coming home on a winter’s night, knocking snow off his great cloak.

  I knew immediately that he’d had success at the tables.

  It was in his step, light and joyful; in the way he picked me up and spu
n me around, as if I weighed nothing; in the smile on his face and the set of his shoulders, straight and unbowed, as if, for once, he had been able to lay down his burdens.

  He had so many of them, that it was a rare sight. Many vampires who came to Venice, seeking the minimal security it offered to the masterless, could not even manage to provide for themselves. They fell prey to dark mages, to charlatans, to unscrupulous masters who preyed on the weak and helpless, dangling the idea of a family in front of their noses to get them to do all manner of illegal deeds, while never intending to pay up.

  They found those poor unfortunates all the time, or what was left of them: bleached bones on the beaches, the only remains of so-called immortals, who had never even made it past a normal human life span. They could not handle the stress of facing the world alone, but Mircea had had to do that as well as to provide for two dependents: me, and his old tutor and friend Horatiu, who was aging and no longer able to earn his bread.

  If Mircea didn’t care for us, no one would, and the knowledge gnawed at him.

  Yet it had been nowhere that night.

  “Look what I brought you,” he said, sitting down on a stool by the fire, and pulling me into his lap.

  The firelight was kind to the rich, mahogany of his hair and to the dark eyes that were so much like mine. It was less so to the strained face, the features as handsome as always, but drawn and tired looking as well. Vampires were often seen as superhuman and invincible, but Mircea was a very new vampire with no family to draw on. And these nightly forays, into dangerous a city filled with vastly stronger predators than he, were draining.

  But his expression was nonetheless happy and even proud. He brought something out from under his cloak, and for a moment, I was afraid. Because it was a gift, a large, square box done up in brown paper with a string knotted into a bow on top.

  I sat with it in my hands for a moment, steeling myself, because Horatiu had gotten me a gift that day, as well. My birthday was coming up soon, only nobody really knew when, for there was no one to ask. But father had assigned me a day to celebrate, we’d had better food than usual for the last week, and Horatiu had surprised me this morning with . . . a doll.

  It had been exquisitely made; I had seen that at once. The body was carved out of bone and had articulated joints, moving almost like a real person. The hair was carved, too, but painted a glossy black, and the eyes were a deep, rich brown. It had carved shoes on its feet and a pretty, real cloth dress made out of a scrap of blue fabric. There was even a miniature necklace of tiny seed pearls around its long, aristocratic neck.

  I knew immediately that Horatiu had not bought it. Such things would have been far outside our means, no matter how much he had scrimped from the household budget. He had made it, perhaps getting a little help with the finer features from Mircea or the woodcarver down the street, as his old eyes were failing.

  But he had made it, nonetheless, for me, and I could not even imagine all the long hours that must have gone into it. I had seen him hiding something whenever I rose early or came home unexpectedly from play. I hadn’t thought much about it, but now I knew: all his spare time, for months and months, had gone into this.

  I’d had no choice but to love it.

  And I had, because I loved him, but I did not want a doll. They were the pretty playthings of the wealthy, for girls who did not have a whole city to explore. I did not want to sit inside and play with a doll when there were so many more interesting things to do. But I would; I knew that as soon as I saw Horatiu’s proud and happy face. He was so pleased that he’d managed to get me something that belonged to a girl of my station, as he insisted on calling it, despite the fact that none of us had a station anymore.

  We were exiles from a throne I’d never known, and which my father had never wanted. It was now occupied by someone else, who I wasn’t sure as it changed often, but not us. And it would never be us again.

  But Horatiu saw me as a little princess, and now his princess had a doll. I had hugged his neck and told him how much it meant to me. That, at least, had not been a lie. But I had been dismayed to think that I was to be stuck inside with it, while my friends stole candy and played pranks and watched ships come in at the docks, carrying untold wonders from faraway lands.

  And now I had two dolls.

  I smiled anyway and unwrapped my gift, and then just sat there for the longest time, staring.

  It was not a doll.

  “Do you like it?” Mircea asked, his face growing concerned. Probably because I had immediately thanked Horatiu this morning, whereas now, I couldn’t seem to speak.

  It was a small copy of Mircea’s own artist’s box, the one he used to paint the pictures that supplemented our income. It had a plain wooden cover concealing wonder after wonder. There was a sheaf of finely made brushes, half vair hair, from the squirrels whose bluish gray fur often lined gowns in winter, and half pig bristle; a wooden palette fitted for a small hand, and complete with a flask of linseed oil, already reduced in the sun and perfect for mixing paints; a bunch of willow twigs made into charcoal for sketching; some costly rag paper, which could also be used for sketching or could be coated in linseed oil and made semi-transparent, for tracing.

  But as astonishing as all of those were, they paled into comparison with the pigments, so wonderful and so many! There were the two mainstays of lead white and lamp black, the latter made from the soot collected from oil lamps. There were the arsenic-derived hues of orpiment and realgar, the first of which was a bright, lemon yellow, and the second a vivid orange, and which mixed together made a color reminiscent of gold. There were the clays: the beautiful reddish-brown of sienna, the softer, yellowish brown of umber, and the rich, dark brown of burnt umber. There were the blues: the deep sapphire of indigo, the sparkling, blue-green of azurite, and the purplish red of madder root. Even the rich crimson of vermilion had been included, and the costly but brilliant green of malachite.

  But they weren’t in solid form, as I’d expected. Instead, finely ground powders resided in small, square wooden cells that took up fully half of the larger box. I had never seen anything like it.

  “I ground them for you,” Mircea explained. “Some of the pigments can be dangerous. This way, you don’t have to touch them.”

  “No,” I whispered.

  “And no licking the end of your brush. We’ve talked about that.”

  “No,” I promised. It was all I could seem to say.

  I had wanted to paint for as long as could remember, and had watched him doing so longingly. But the most he would let me do was to sketch with charcoal on some of the cheap brown wrapping paper he brought home, the kind that sweets were sold in. He had said that I could paint when I was older, but I had thought to use a few of his scraps, not . . . not anything like this.

  “Do you like it?” Mircea asked, when I continued to sit there silently.

  I found that I still couldn’t say anything. I just looked up at him mutely. But when Horatiu, who had come in at some point, tried to take the paint box, my hands refused to let it go.

  “I think she likes it,” the old man said, and ruffled my hair.

  “Dorina. Dorina.”

  I blinked and the second memory faded, leaving me with just the first. Which I realized had stopped, like a movie that had run to its end. It had stalled around Ray, with Colette’s birds paused in the air above his head, reaching for the last scraps of bread; with the door to the bell tower opening behind him, and an angry priest halfway out, his black cassock looking hot and uncomfortable in the summer sun; and with a bunch of guilty appearing kids looking up, halfway through their feast.

  “I’m getting tired,” I explained. “It becomes harder to project.”

  “Then don’t,” Ray said. “That was incredible. I’ve seen stuff in other people’s heads before, but nothing like that.”

  I nodded absently, still half lost in memory. “There wasn’t much more. The priest came to run us off. I think he had promised the v
iew to some of his chief donors.”

  “Figures,” Ray said cynically. “Everything’s sacrilegious ‘till it involves moolah. By the way, who won? I got my money on the fishermen.”

  “You would lose. The shipwrights won. I had a bet with Luysio. He owed me pistachios and sweetened rice cakes . . .”

  “Did he ever pay up?” Ray asked, leaning over the roof for a final view of the fight, which he didn’t get because child-me had turned to look at the priest.

  “No.”

  “Welcher,” he said, smiling.

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t his fault. I had a fit that night, my third in a month. And father decided it was enough.”

  “Enough?”

  “He separated Dory and I, and after that, she was in control.” I looked around, feeling strangely lost suddenly. “This was my last memory as . . . me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Dorina, Faerie

  The sun-drenched scene of old Venice faded, to show me Ray’s face splashed by firelight. He looked confused, as people often did when surfacing from another’s mind, but also troubled. He didn’t look like he knew what to say, which was fair, I supposed.

  Neither did I.