“But they are three times as big as us, Renzo. If we move, any of them could kill us both with one hand.… They’re great clumsy creatures, though,” she speculated.
Renzo pointed to her pockets, and his own. The children were still carrying some bottles of Venetian Treacle.
“Oh! I see what you mean. Time for some of that famous Venetian charm?”
The children now stood smiling at the statues with as much cherubic innocence as they could paint onto their faces.
The Brustolons creaked their enormous heads to one side, bemused by these beams of girlish and boyish happiness. Meanwhile Teo and Renzo quietly emptied bottles onto the floor until the liquid spread in a pool on the polished marble. Those bottles were very small, yet infinite amounts of liquid kept coming out of them. The Brustolon statues, whose mystified eyes were fixed on the children’s inexplicable smiles, noticed nothing.
“Are you ready?” asked Renzo.
“No, but I’ll just have to pretend I am,” said Teo.
“Now! Jump!”
Teo and Renzo leapt over the puddle of liquid and sprinted for the doorway. They did not wait to look behind them but they could hear what was happening. The statues clattering after them had slipped in the sticky Treacle and were unable to get up. Again and again, they crashed heavily to the floor. There was the sound of wood cracking, and the smell of sawdust billowed through the air.
The children reached the corridor.
“Which way? We don’t want to run straight into Bajamonte Tiep—”
Renzo did not finish because one statue had slid out into the hall on its belly and grabbed his leg in an iron grip.
“Go on!” shouted Renzo, as Teo turned back to help him. “Don’t be an idiot! It doesn’t matter about me. We’ve got to get you out of here.… Oh!” Even as Renzo spoke, the statue was dragging him right back into the room of mirrors and torture instruments. The torso of another statue appeared in the doorway, and a mighty wooden hand reached out for Renzo’s other leg.
“I can’t leave you!” Teo sobbed.
“I’ll die anyway if you don’t. We’ll all die. Run!”
Teo ran blindly down the dark corridors of the Palazzo Tiepolo. She ran until she was out of breath. It seemed that she had been running for days, and yet still she had not seen a window or a door that looked familiar. She sprinted forward, and then paused, choking on the stale air. She was sure she had heard someone cry out nearby.
Another scream. And this time, unmistakably Renzo’s voice! Teo had run in a complete circle and was back near Bajamonte Tiepolo’s torture chamber.
“The Brustolons are torturing him, the monsters!” Teo saw a red glare behind her eyelids and felt a fiery pain in her heart.
Teo was too angry to pause and think up a safe or clever plan. She charged straight into the room. She glimpsed the backs of all the Brustolons gathered around Renzo, trying to force down on his head a strange donkey-eared helmet with a cruel lever for the tongue. Renzo’s arms were pinioned. He was kicking and biting ferociously. His teeth made no impression on the Brustolons’ wooden skin, but his violent wriggling stopped them from pushing the helmet down over his face.
That was all Teo had time to see. She had forgotten about the pool of sticky Venetian Treacle on the floor. First one leg jerked behind her and then she was hurtling flat on her stomach through the Treacle across the room towards the fireplace, straight at branding irons glowing white-hot in the fire.
The Brustolons, distracted by the squirming Renzo, had not noticed Teo’s arrival and lightning progress across the wet floor. Renzo, however, saw her. Their eyes met for the briefest moment. He did not give her away. He just inclined his head violently towards the fireplace. Above his head she saw the words written in his unmistakable writing. Wood burns.
“Wood burns,” thought Teo, “when you set fire to it.”
Half a second later Teo reached the fireplace. She threw her hands in front of her to grip the stone surround and stop herself from landing straight in the flames. Her face blazed with the white heat of the three branding irons. She gripped one of the glowing handles and flung it at the nearest Brustolon. Pain seared her hand, and she felt the flesh open up where the handle burnt into her skin. The statue immediately exploded into flames.
Teo plunged her other hand into the fire and grabbed the second branding iron, throwing that across the room at another cluster of Brustolons. And the third followed immediately after. Five of the Brustolons were now aflame, filling the room with thick black smoke. They lumbered around, crashing into their companions, and setting fire to them as well. The children were forgotten. Within seconds all the Brustolons were alight.
It was then that the agony of her burnt hands first came home to Teo. She held them up to her face. Blackened skin swelled over deep open cuts. But all she could think was, “Did I burn Renzo too? Is he on fire?”
Renzo appeared at her side, the donkey-eared helmet hanging off the side of his head. He took both of her hands and plunged them into the big puddle of Venetian Treacle. The relief was instantaneous. Renzo flung the helmet among the smoldering remains of the Brustolons.
Outside in the corridor, they leant against the wall, panting. Renzo’s face was suffused with shame. “Teo, it was horrible when they burned. They could not scream, but they writhed around in agony. I felt like a murderer.”
“They wanted to hurt you.”
“Teo, Venice misused them. You were right, what you said back there. They could only right their wrongs by violence. They can’t talk, so they can’t negotiate. Bajamonte Tiepolo only continued the tradition of exploiting them as if they were dumb beasts.”
“Could they have learnt to talk?” Teo mused. “Could we have taught them?”
“Now is not the time … we have to get out of here.”
Halls, stairwells, vast chambers stretched off in all directions. They hesitated on the threshold of a vaulted dining room. Teo groaned, “It’s a maze! We could run straight into Bajamonte Tiepolo! Or end up back with the Brustolons!”
“Teo!” Renzo tugged her hand. “Use your memory. Concentrate. Pretend each room is a page of a book! You can do it.”
Teo closed her eyes. For the first moment all she saw behind her eyelids was blackness. Then she forced her mind to walk calmly through Palazzo Tiepolo, corridor by corridor, retracing their steps from the moment they entered the building.
She opened her eyes. “This way.”
The barred gate that had dropped down behind them was open now, as Il Traditore must have made his way past it on his happy treasure hunt. Pausing at every doorway, looking fearfully over her shoulder, Teo led Renzo past the murderous kitchen and the ripped tapestries and out the open door to the Campiello del Remer. They skirted around the edge of the palace and crept down to the waterside.
“There’s nowhere to hide here!” observed Teo wretchedly.
“Yes, there is.” Renzo slipped into a crab basket tied to a boat at the edge of the water. He crouched down inside, pointing to another for Teo.
It smelt vilely of rotting fish inside the basket. The children were immersed in water to their laps. But at least they were invisible. From the baskets, they looked helplessly at all the gondolier children, the winged lions and the mermaids at the opposite side of the Grand Canal. All faces—angry, frightened and horrified—were raised up to the window where Bajamonte Tiepolo had appeared to them.
Some of the mermaids were busy pulling the chains and scraping the seaweed off the plain wooden poles that were bunched in threes with chains.
“The bricole,” explained Renzo. “They mark the navigable canals.”
“Why are the mermaids doing that?” whispered Teo. “It’s as if they’re grooming them.”
“I’ve no idea. The main thing is, how do we get you and the Almanac over to Lussa?” Renzo parted the slats of his basket and whispered across to Teo, “We can’t draw her attention to us, or Il Traditore will realize we’ve escaped. At least the B
rustolons have stopped burning. There’s only a bit of smoke coming out of the window now.”
“I can get to the mermaids,” said Teo. “I can swim underwater.”
“No one could hold their breath that long.”
“No one except me. I’m the Undrowned Child, remember. I did it when I was a baby. I can do it again.”
“I hate to mention it, but … the sharks …”
Teo blockaded a memory of the gray killers closing in on them at the Bone Orchard by demanding, “Tell me the plan. That plan you were so confident about.”
Renzo did not look so confident now. Shyly, he whispered for a minute.
“That’s it?” she asked. “So simple?”
“So simple, it’s the only thing that can work.”
Teo nodded. Through the slats of his crab basket, Renzo handed her his penknife and motioned her to cut a hole for herself. “Below the surface. So they won’t see you. I’ll distract the sharks if they come.”
The knife slid easily through the straw sides of the basket. Teo slipped out into the water. At first, she tangled herself among the green weeds at the edge of the canal. Kicking off from the canal wall, she freed her legs and arms. She opened her eyes, saw barnacled hulls of boats and the tall poles that held up the palaces.
Almost immediately a dark shadow passed in front of her and circled back. It was joined by two others. Three pairs of ugly gray fins sliced through the water, making ripples around Teo. From their twitching noses, it was clear that the sharks had picked up her scent. They ignored Renzo’s splashing from his crab basket.
She stopped swimming, hoping they would lose interest if there was no movement to detect. Her heart pounded and her lungs felt as if they would burst. The sharks foraged yards from her, tugging up an old fishbone from the bottom of the canal, and then squabbling over it. Teo waited. The seconds passed slowly as hours. Her cheeks puffed up like a chipmunk’s. Her eyes were straining, her ears roaring.
“Water-baby,” she thought.
She had two choices, neither of them attractive. She could quietly drown down here, or she could swim up for air, drawing the sharks straight to her. She wouldn’t even make it to the surface. Teo swayed under the water. Her head swirled. Starved of oxygen, she felt light-headed and vague. She was beginning not to care what happened to her.
beneath the waves of the Grand Canal, June 15, 1899
It was then that the first fish arrived: a young branzino, slender and graceful. He hovered in front of her bulging eyes, and nudged her tightly sealed lips. That was all she needed! Teo tried weakly to swat him away. But the fish persisted. Suddenly he lunged at her, opened her lips gently with his thorny little beak and tipped a mouthful of air down Teo’s throat. Then he darted back to the surface for more air.
More fish came, each feeding Teo a mouthful of air. Each time she breathed it in, pushing the life-giving bubbles down through her lungs.
Lussa had once said, “Fish are the kindest-hearted Things in the Sea.”
Teo’s bursting head was flooded by a dreamy memory. She was a tiny baby, and it was the night of the shipwreck, when her real parents had died. In this dream-memory, little fish with bloated cheeks fluttered up to her baby mouth with their gifts of air. Others rushed off in the direction of the House of the Spirits, to tell the mermaids of the undrowned child under the sea.
“This is why I could never make myself eat fish,” Teo realized. “Part of my mind must have always remembered.”
And now, eleven years later, the fish were coming to her aid again—the fish of Venice, the delicate branzini, the sparrow-colored passere and the little anchovies shooting through the water like silver bullets. They were careful not to scratch her with their fins: the trail of her blood would lead the sharks straight to where she hid.
Meanwhile, the fight over the fishbone had taken the sharks a few feet further away. One of the monsters had taken a bite out of its rival’s fin. The water filled with cloudy shark blood. More long forms darted out of the shadows. The wounded shark was jostled onto its back, and its brothers began to lunge at it. The little branzino who first found Teo, now on his fifth trip portering bubbles, was caught up in the melée. One of the sharks snapped him in half. Teo’s tears joined the water.
A cluster of fish hovered by her shoulder, pointing their round eyes and jabbing their fins towards the opposite shore. She took her chance, crawling on hands and knees in the mud at the bottom of the canal. Every two or three minutes another fish arrived with a delivery of air. She glimpsed the silvery tails of the mermaids, making little churning motions to keep their owners afloat.
Quietly she swam among them until she spotted Lussa’s unmistakably jewel-like tail. She emerged. She knew she could count on Lussa’s queenly composure.
“Teodora!” whispered Lussa. “But How …?”
Between gasping for breaths, Teo whispered, “Shhhh. He mustn’t know I’ve escaped! Don’t show surprise, in case he’s watching with the telescope. Just listen.”
Lussa nodded tightly. She summoned a rank of mermaids to make a shield between Teo and the other side of the water. Then she ran a cool damp hand over Teo’s flushed face. “The Spell Almanac? How?”
“There isn’t time to explain now,” Teo said urgently.
The color drained out of Lussa’s face. “This means our Friend the Gray Lady is Dead?”
“Yes, it happened before the battle. Please, Lussa, I have to tell you …”
“Poor Creature. How Humanfolk can say that Felines are Faithless Beasts is quite beyond my Comprehension. There never was a more Staunch Animal than our Gray Lady. I regret that I never had the Honor of knowing Her personally.”
Teo said thickly, “The thing is, Renzo has an idea. First, someone fast, who can dig, must go to the Bone Orchard and find the skeleton of a man drowned long ago. The bones must be the same size as Il Traditore’s. They must be brought here.”
Lussa nodded, realization dawning over her face. She motioned to the circus-master Signor Alicamoussa. He leant over the water so she could whisper in his ear. He bowed to his lions, who drew in, exhaling their hot, meaty breath over Teo’s cold face. They looked curiously at the spells tattooed on her skin. One leant in close enough to tickle her with his whiskers. Signor Alicamoussa explained the plan to them in gestures and soft growls.
A small group of winged lions peeled away from the others, flexed their paws and flew off. Very quickly, they were back with dirty paws and carrying a second skeleton. The clean bleached bones were of identical size to those of Il Traditore. The mermaids deftly disentangled the chains from the bones of Bajamonte Tiepolo and wrapped them around the new ones, first snapping off the left hand, and breaking the neck. They laid the new skeleton in the gondola, in the same position, legs crossed, in which Bajamonte Tiepolo had inspected them with such fury from the palace window.
Lussa looked at Teo. “Yar, tolerably convincing, methinks. What next?”
Teo pointed to the real skeleton of Bajamonte Tiepolo, laid out on the stones beside them. “We must break up these bones and each stazio of gondolier children must take a separate part of Bajamonte Tiepolo as far as they can, and as fast. We have twenty minutes left now. At the end of the twenty minutes, the children must find a piece of earth, and bury their part of the bones as deep as they can, leaving no trace on the surface. No member of any stazio must ever tell anyone from the other stazioni where their piece is buried. Ever.”
Lussa nodded respectfully. “This could work. But the Children are scattered widely among our Troops. How are We to summon the Leaders of the Stazioni, without attracting the Attention of the Guards inside the Tiepolo Palace?”
Teo was silent. Then she unbuttoned one sleeve and raised it above her wrist. “Can you use me to help, Lussa?”
“The Spell Almanac? Yar.” A smile started to flower on the mermaid’s face.
Lussa took Teo’s arm and started to rub it with her finger, kneading the skin until the lettering of the spells sto
od out in sharp contrast. Teo could feel the letters growing fiery hot. The mermaid searched the spells with her fingers until she found one, near Teo’s wrist, that made her exclaim out loud.
“This is a Telepathic Spell,” explained Lussa. “It helps You put Notions into the Minds of Others. Teodora, my Vedeparole, You were Born to do This.”
Then Lussa placed her other hand on Teo’s forehead, where the old bruise still throbbed faintly. “Teodora, think what You desire for these Children to do. Think it in Words, as if It were a List of Written Instructions that They might read upon a Sheet of Paper. Think Slowly & Clearly. In Venetian, if possible.”
Lussa rubbed Teo’s forehead in gentle circular motions. Teo struggled to marshal her thoughts like soldiers. She tried to recall every word that Renzo had whispered before her underwater swim. “Please,” she begged, “let me remember it all.”
She made her memory work photographically, the way it worked best. In her head, she formed a picture of Renzo’s words, as if they were visible in the air, the way words appeared to her. Then she read them aloud to herself.
Lussa pointed behind them to the gondolier children standing in the crowd of Incogniti and animals. Teo saw the faces of the children looking up, rapt, towards the palace of Bajamonte Tiepolo. And there were her thoughts, translated into perfect Venetian, written in her own handwriting on the wall of the palace … the one place where Bajamonte Tiepolo and the Brustolons inside could not see it! Teo had never seen her own words in writing before. It was a strange experience. Her thought-writing was not the tidiest, but it had a flowing style to it. Most importantly at this moment, it was fast as running water.
The gondolier children read. Their faces changed, as they realized the horror of what they had to do, and the urgency. If Bajamonte Tiepolo guessed what was happening, their lives would be worth nothing.
Finally, Teo thought to them, “Do you swear, on the life of this city? That you shall never tell another soul where your part of the bones is buried?”
The children looked dubious. Teo felt fury rising within her. Would these children not help to save Venice? Did they not guess the consequences if they did not?
The Undrowned Child Page 30
