He looked up and saw her expression and snarled, “Say ‘I’m sorry’ one more time, do!” He yanked his trousers up and stormed out.
She gaped after him. “Jaufre,” she said. “Jaufre!”
He did not return.
She stood up and stared around the room as if she’d never seen it before. And then she got dressed and went out into the common room, where Peter sat, his face ravaged with grief.
He looked up at her and said, “He’s dead. Early this morning.” He swallowed. “He wasn’t in pain and he wasn’t alone. He just—left.”
5
Venice, Spring, 1324
The effects were barely noticeable, at first. Through January and February custom at Jaufre’s stall began to fall, but no more than his fellow stallholders on the street. At first he thought it was due to the usual drop-off of business after the Christian festivities in December, during which a great deal of money had been spent by the citizens of Venice not only at his stall but at every vendor in the city, large and small. By March, when the rise in temperature and increase in daylight brought more custom to the stalls around him and less and less to him, he began to wonder.
When he mentioned it at dinner that night Firas and Alaric exchanged glances. “What?”
“Master Roland told us he’s been having trouble selling tickets to the next exhibition,” Alaric said.
Jaufre frowned. “The last time I was there for practice, he told me that the salle was too full during the afternoon to accommodate non-paying guests. He told me morning hours would be best.”
“Morning hours being when there are fewest people there.”
Firas looked at Shasha. “And Shasha has had little call on her for potions and tinctures of late.”
“Custom has been falling off since late January,” she said, troubled.
“Well,” Félicien said lightly, setting aside a bowl of stew he had barely touched, “not to chime in on this tale of woe, but I have been—uninvited—from performing at the Inn of the Four Horses.”
“What!”
“Why?”
“You draw more of a crowd than any other performer in Venice!”
“That’s not all, I’m sorry to say,” he said, glancing at Shasha. “I’m afraid Father Amadeo has been inveigling against the devil again.”
“In Shasha’s name?” Firas said, his voice hard.
“No,” Félicien said. “Not yet. Just generally expounding on the notion that man is born to suffer, and that anything that interferes with that suffering is the work of Satan himself and should be shunned by all true faithful.” He glanced at Hari and added, a little mockingly, “However much we stand in the favor of the abbott at the monastery of San Giorgio, it appears we shall not, after all, be impervious to the scourge of Father Amadeo’s tongue.”
“I have heard nothing of this during my visits there,” Hari said, looking troubled.
“January,” Jaufre said, looking at Johanna. “I don’t know. What happened in January?”
No one except Shasha knew for sure why Johanna blushed to the roots of her hair, although they all had their suspicions. “My grandfather died in January,” she said, willing her color to subside. Her eyes widened and she looked at Shasha. “And Peter came to tell us so.” She thought for a moment, and looked at Tiphaine. “Will you take a message to Ca’ Polo for me?”
The girl bounced up. Between the new clothes and the regular food, she looked a handspan taller than when Johanna had first brought her home. “Of course,” she said briskly.
“Delivered directly into Moreta’s hands if possible, and if not, Peter’s. No one else.”
“Certainly.”
It took three days for a reply. “She will meet you at the taverna at none.”
Alas, perhaps blinded by his grief, it appeared that Peter had not been as careful as Johanna had been in seeing that she was not followed when she left Ca’ Polo. “My mother,” Moreta said, and grimaced. “My mother,” she said again, and stopped again.
Johanna thought of the frighteningly enraged woman standing at the top of the stairs at the end of the corridor when they had come out of Ser Polo’s room. “It’s all right,” she said.
Moreta’s head came up and she said hotly, “No. It isn’t. She had Paolo follow Peter to your lodgings when I sent him to you with news of Father’s passing. Then she wouldn’t rest until she knew everything about you.”
“Does she know—”
“Yes,” Moreta said. “I don’t know how, because Peter didn’t tell her, and she hasn’t said a word to me about you, and I’m the only other one who knows.” Her brow creased. “I can’t understand why.”
“Can’t you?” a voice said, and startled, both of them turned to see Donata Polo standing there in her luxurious dark robes with not a fold out of place. She was attended on her right by a serving woman who looked every bit as censorious as her mistress and on her left by the man who had shut the door so decisively in Johanna’s face on the day of her arrival in Venice. He looked very pleased with himself.
The three of them bore a distinct resemblance to the statues on the temple walls she had seen in Mien as a child, glaring of eye, thunderous of brow, prepared to smite the unworthy. Although with fewer arms.
The taverna’s keeper, yet again proving her worth, became absorbed in the examination of her stock of pitchers and mugs, one at a time, inspecting them for flaws.
“Can’t you?” Moreta’s mother repeated, looking from her daughter’s face to Johanna’s and back again. “I see. I see, indeed. A bastard of your father’s, looking for largesse. Well, we know how to deal with your kind.”
The temple statues of Mien had frightened her. This woman did not, perhaps because she had known another woman very like her in a prior life. Johanna rose to her feet, shaking Moreta’s hand from her sleeve. “A granddaughter, certainly,” she said, stepping forward and perforce causing Serra Polo to step back, which didn’t please her. Unfortunately, Johanna was taller than she was and she couldn’t glare down her nose at the younger woman. “I ask nothing of you, Serra Polo. I want nothing from you. I came a long way to meet my grandfather, and I merely wished—”
Serra Polo looked at her daughter. “I had not thought to suffer such disloyalty in my own house.”
Moreta closed her eyes for a moment. “He was pleased to see her, Mother.”
“Pleased! Pleased! I will say what pleased your father and what did not! You thought to bring this stranger, this—this adventurer, this pretender to the house of Ca’ Polo, and make your father’s last days on this earth a living misery!”
“He was pleased to see her, Mother, and to hear news of the—” she hesitated and cast Johanna a quick look of apology “—friends he had left behind.”
“Friends,” Serra Polo said with awful sarcasm, and swept Johanna with a look from head to toe that was far from complimentary. “Friends, indeed.”
Johanna allowed a smile to cross her face. She ignored another desperate tug at her sleeve and said, “Obviously a great deal more than friends.”
Serra Polo was quick to hear the deliberate mockery in Johanna’s voice, and anger stiffened into outrage. Before she could say anything else, Moreta got to her feet. “It’s time we went home, Mother.”
“But before you do,” Johanna said, “call off your dogs. I am no threat to you.” She raised an eyebrow. “Or to your inheritance.”
“I know nothing of dogs,” Donata Polo said inaccurately, and swept out of the establishment, followed by her minions, everyone satisfied at having the last word.
Tomorrow, Moreta mouthed at Johanna, pointing at their table, and followed.
Johanna turned to look at Peter, who had had sat still and unperturbed through the encounter. “Well?”
His eyes held the hint of a smile. “My master left me well provided for in his will. I dance to no one’s tune but my own, now.”
She sat back down and gestured at the taverna keeper, who miraculously remembered she ha
d customers. She bustled over with a new pitcher of small beer and whisked away Moreta’s mug so there was no sad remembrance of absent friends. “What will you do now?” she said.
His shoulders lifted in the merest shrug. “It depends on what she does next.” She remained unidentified but not unknown. “Moreta was the only member of that household who had any value for my master. If she needs me, I will stay.”
If he was allowed to, Johanna thought. “Will you go home, otherwise? Do you miss the wind on the steppes so much?”
She couldn’t be sure but she thought he might almost have smiled, if he didn’t have a racial reputation for stoicism to live up to. “What is home to me now,” he said with a sigh.
It wasn’t a question, so she didn’t try to answer. “Lacking other options…” She hesitated. “You could join Wu Company.”
He surprised her with a laugh, a deep, rumbling sound pleasant to the ears. His eyes positively twinkled and he said, “I don’t know that I have it in me to chase another Polo halfway around the world, mistress.”
She grinned at him. “All I can promise is that it won’t be dull.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “I will think on it.”
“Your very existence is an affront to her,” Moreta said the next day. They had met at the taverna and Moreta had said that since there were no more secrets left from the Grand Canal to the Rialto Bridge they might as well go to Johanna’s lodgings. Shasha made them comfortable with hot tea and sweet biscuits and settled down in a corner with mortar and pestle, there to grind ingredients and eavesdrop.
“Your mother appears to be harboring what seems to us to be a disproportionate amount of rage,” Johanna said. “And is occupying herself in venting it all on us.”
“My mother is a very angry woman. She’s been an angry woman all my life, and she is better at holding a grudge than anyone I’ve ever met. Paolo spends all his time ferreting out information for her, I believe just to fuel more slights and grievances. It is a way of life for them both, now.” Moreta sipped her tea. “This is wonderful,” she told Shasha.
She bit into one of the biscuits, and Shasha held up a hand. “Not as wonderful, I know,” she said ruefully. “My friend the baker turned me from his door before he taught me all his secrets.”
“It’s simple,” Moreta said, “double the butter.”
Shasha was pleased. “Thank you, lady.”
“Moreta, please.”
“But we have given her no call to hold a grudge,” Johanna said.
Félicien was teaching Tiphaine how to finger chords on his lute, with Hayat and Alma interested auditors. Jaufre and Firas were attending to the ongoing conversation, thus far taking no part in it. Hari was as yet persona grata at the monastery and Alaric was out, probably drinking somewhere in a taverna. He wasn’t going to be able to afford it for very much longer if Donata Polo did not soon relent. One of the potential benefits of her enmity, Johanna thought.
“She needs no reason,” Moreta said. “My father offended her by spending her dowry the first year of their marriage.” She paused, and added meditatively, “I really think she might have killed all three of her children in the womb in revenge, could she have found a way.”
A discordant jangle of lute strings, and Johanna looked around to see that Tiphaine was realizing that there were worse things in the world to be than a motherless child.
“My sisters married as soon as my father could arrange dowries for them. I…” She sighed. “I didn’t want to leave him.”
“Will you have to live with your mother now?” Alma said, exchanging an appalled look with Hayat. The harem was looking better to them all the time, Johanna saw.
Moreta’s smile was grim. “Yes, but in his will my father settled my dowry upon me, for my own use. I have already an apartment set aside at Ca’ Polo, and I have my own friends. I shouldn’t have to see more of her than I can bear.” She drank tea. “But you.”
“Yes?”
Moreta looked around the room. “You must leave Venice. All of you.”
“We always meant to,” Johanna said. “It was never our intent to settle here.”
“Yes, but—” Jaufre said.
“What?”
He spoke to Shasha. “I’m having difficulties acquiring an agent for us, and even more difficulty in acquiring sales goods. Not to mention which…” He looked at Firas.
“No one will sell us pack animals,” Firas said. “I’ve been down to the livestock market and the merchants are all very pleasant, some even cordial, but all of their stock is spoken for.” He stroked his beard. “They say they can sell us none for fear that this year’s gray cloaks will go unprovisioned.”
Translating “gray cloaks” to “pilgrims,” Johanna said, “But that’s nonsense! There are all the donkeys in the world at Gaza, and Jerusalem.” Moreta was shaking her head. “Is your mother’s influence so strong in Venice, then? She doesn’t sound like a friend who would be that welcome on anyone’s doorstep.”
Jaufre snorted out a laugh but his head was turned away when Johanna looked at him. She knew a flicker of temper, then. She hadn’t meant she was sorry, she couldn’t ever make love with him. She’d only meant she was sorry they’d been interrupted (and she had been, teeth-grindingly sorry, ready to kill Shasha sorry). But try as she would she had been unable to corner him alone anytime these past two months to say so. He seemed to positively enjoy nursing his grudge and feeding its flame wherever possible. Donata Polo could take lessons.
The thought made an involuntary smile cross her face, which of course he turned his head at the last moment to see. He looked suspicious immediately, because of course she had to be laughing at him, didn’t she, even if he was sitting there doing nothing. She hid a sigh and turned back to Moreta.
“She doesn’t have to be friends with anyone to have influence, Johanna,” Moreta said. “She just needs to be born into the right family, one that has lived here forever and is related by blood and marriage to all the other right families. Since the day Paolo reported back to her, she has been spreading the word, palazzo by palazzo, canal by canal. Your morals are suspect, your faith nonexistent—”
“I go to Mass every Sunday!” Jaufre said, sounding aggrieved. His regular attendance to Father Amadeo’s services certainly wasn’t for pleasure.
“—and worst of all, your coin is not to be trusted. Venetians will do well to neither sell to nor buy from you, to avoid socializing with you, indeed, better they should turn aside rather than touch shoulders if they meet you on the street.” She nodded at the badge on Johanna’s shoulder. “You made yourselves so easily identifiable with your compagnia insignia, too. She didn’t even have to describe you individually. No member of Wu Company may trade in Venice.”
There was an edge to Johanna’s voice. “And because Donata Polo says it, it must be so?”
“Well.” Moreta drank tea. “It’s not quite the law.” She looked up from her cup. “Yet.”
It was silent in the room as Moreta held out her cup for a refill. “That really is marvelous tea, Shasha. Where did you get it?”
“We brought it with us,” Shasha said. “I have seen none for sale here in Venice.”
“What a pity.”
“We have our living to make,” Johanna said. “We are traders by profession. Where else can we buy goods to sell, if not in Venice?”
“And how do we get those goods anywhere,” Firas said, “if we can buy no pack animals?”
“Especially if they decide to burn us at the stake first,” Félicien said.
Moreta sat back, her cup filled. She did not look as downcast as the rest of them did, Johanna noted, or as indignant as Johanna felt. “You have an idea,” she said.
Moreta sipped her tea. “Perhaps.” She looked at Johanna. “What you said to my father that day.” She hesitated, looking at the others. “About the pearl fishers of Cipangu.”
“Yes?” Johanna said, mystified.
“Is it true, what yo
u told me? That you dove with the pearl fishers?”
“Yes,” Johanna said.
“You dove, and brought back oysters, with pearls in them? So you have the knack of finding small objects at depth?”
“Moreta—”
“The Wedding to the Sea!”
Moreta nodded at Tiphaine. “That is my thought.”
Everyone in the room who was not Venetian looked askance at one another. Tiphaine bounced to her feet, black curls flying, all eagerness to explain, and Moreta waved a hand for her to be about it. “It’s an annual holiday, the Feast of the Ascension! The Patriarch blesses a golden ring, and then there is a grand procession of boats from the Basilica of St. Mark to the Church of San Nicolò on the Lido, with the Doge and the Patriarch and all the nobles dressed in their finest silks and velvets. And there is music, and jugglers, and stilt walkers, and dancers, and acrobats—”
“Any horse racing?” Johanna said, sitting up straight.
“Horse racing?” Tiphaine frowned. “No. I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of any.”
“Oh.” Johanna slumped, losing interest. She had a large bruise on her right hip from the expression of North Wind’s continuing displeasure the previous day. If horses could talk, he would have heartily endorsed any idea that got them back on the Road as soon as possible.
“But oh, it is such a fine sight to see, the costumes are so beautiful, and they throw coins—” She caught herself, and added haughtily, “For the street urchins to catch, you understand. Not for respectable citizens.”
“Of course not,” Johanna said, to an accompanying murmur around the room.
“Then the Doge on el Bucintoro—”
“El Bucintoro?”
“His barge, oh, wait till you see it, it is the most magnificent boat ever built, all gilded with gold! It is from el Bucintoro’s deck that the Doge throws the blessed ring into the sea, so that La Serenissima renews her vows once again to the sea that gives us our livelihood.” She clasped her hands and stood in rapt silence.
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