Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  “Yes, well,” Johanna said, a little at sea herself, “that sounds most romantic, and, ah, a spectacle to behold. But I don’t quite see what—”

  “The instant the ring goes into the sea, Johanna,” Moreta said, “Venetians strip off their clothes and dive after it.”

  “What?” Johanna thought of the filth she saw every day in the canals, of the opaque green of the waters. “By all the Mongol gods, why?”

  Moreta smiled. “Because whoever recovers the ring lives tax free in Venice for the next year.”

  The silence that followed this statement was profound.

  “I dove with the pearl fishers, too,” Jaufre said.

  “I dove deeper and brought back more pearls,” Johanna said.

  “That is true,” Shasha said, a little reluctantly, and later Johanna would take her to task for that.

  “Shasha, that was Cipangu, where all the ama are women.”

  “Because they’re better at it than the men!”

  “But this,” Jaufre said, glaring at Johanna, “is Venice, where women doing anything but having babies and minding their homes and going to church is frowned on. You think Serra Donata has them whipped up against us now! I can only imagine what they’re going to say when you strip down on the side of the Grand Canal to dive in!”

  “But with two divers, our odds of recovering the ring increase,” Shasha said, stepping in neatly to avert the imminent conflagration. She looked at Jaufre. “The waters of Venice are not exactly the waters of Izu, which I remember as clear right down to the bottom. I doubt the bottom of a Venetian canal has been seen in a thousand years.”

  Johanna and Jaufre subsided, seeing the sense of this. “When is this feast day?” Johanna said.

  “May,” Moreta and Tiphaine said together.

  “Two months,” Johanna said. “Can your mother starve us out by then?”

  Moreta smiled. “Probably not. And you can always take the ferry to the mainland to buy foodstuffs, if you have to. But you have to stay in Venice, because only those resident in Venice on the day itself may dive for the ring.” She set down her cup. “And you will need a sponsor, someone from one of the first families, because only such are eligible to dive. That I cannot help you with.” She grimaced. “In fact, if my mother got wind of it, she would make it her new mission in life to see that you never acquired such a sponsor.”

  Johanna and Jaufre looked at each other, animosity forgotten, for the moment. “Gradenigo,” they said at the same time.

  “Which one?” Moreta said.

  “Giovanni Gradenigo,” Jaufre said. “He was the captain of the ship that brought us here from Gaza. He told us, very grandly, that he was a great-nephew of a doge of the same name.”

  “Gradenigo,” Moreta said thoughtfully. “I haven’t met this Giovanni, but a Gradenigo was our last doge but one, memorable chiefly because he got Venice excommunicated again.”

  “Again?”

  “Unfortunately. The family’s influence lessened somewhat after his death, but there is a younger one of the house named Bartolomeo who is known as a coming man. Yes, the Gradenigos might do, so long as there is no association between our families of which I am unaware. Will he do it?”

  “From his conversation I think he would welcome the opportunity.” Jaufre grinned, and Johanna watched, fascinated, as the dimples creased his cheeks. It seemed like years since she’d seen them. “So long as he gets to wet his snout.”

  “Ask him,” Moreta said. “And soon.”

  6

  Venice, May, 1324

  “Are you all right?” Shasha said in a low voice.

  “I’m fine. I just wish they’d get on with it.”

  It was late May, forty days after Easter Sunday. The air was warmed by a sun in a pale blue sky for a change unobscured by clouds, but Johanna couldn’t stop shivering.

  From the size of the crowds on the quay and the amount of boats in the Grand Canal there wasn’t a Venetian left at home that morning. The cathedral of St. Mark’s held a crowd whose overflow packed the piazza in front of it. From the loggia above the portico the four great bronze horses that Venice had looted from Byzantium a hundred years before reminded everyone of Venice’s might and reach. Johanna never saw them but she was reminded of Uncle Cheng’s observation that everything worth looking at in Byzantium was now in Venice.

  She sighed, and shivered again. Almost two years and so many leagues away, that infinitely warmer evening in Kashgar. Where was Uncle Cheng now? En route somewhere, no doubt. If the rumors about Ogodei settling west of Terak were true, if the renegade Mongol general had decided himself satisfied with the territory he had overrun to date, Uncle Cheng could be arriving in Kashgar itself, selling silk and buying bronze. Mongols, however acquisitive of territory, never underestimated the necessity and profitability of trade, and whatever else Ogodei did to gather territory beneath his banner, he would do nothing to obstruct the free passage of goods and merchants. Uncle Chang and his livelihood would be safe.

  The sound of thousands of Venetians on holiday forcibly returned her attention back to the present. Impossibly the great buzz of shouts and laughter increased in volume when the massive doors of the cathedral finally opened wide to disgorge the Patriarch, the Doge, the Senate, the heads of all the guilds, the legate from Avignon and the ambassador from Paris walking together as if joined at the hip, any noble with rank enough to squeeze themselves inside for the service. Everyone was wearing every necklace, tiara, and ring they possessed. The cumulative glitter was painful to behold.

  In contrast, Johanna and Jaufre wore belted robes of brown fustian that muffled them from head to toe. They looked, she thought, like something you might find down the privy hole after a harsh winter on short rations.

  Fortunately, no one was paying them any attention. “The cloth of gold times the nobili in this procession would provide enough sail for five sea-going vessels,” Giovanni Gradenigo said irreverently.

  “There’s a song in that,” Félicien said promptly, and for all Johanna knew set about writing one in his head that minute. He’d been on the nearest street corner earlier, playing his lute and singing songs about farting peasants, lovelorn knights and cuckolded husbands, to the sniggering delight of a gathering crowd. His smooth soprano was as mellow as ever, a voice that never broke or missed a note, to which the growing pile of coins in the hat on the cobblestones in front of him could attest.

  Hymns sung loud if untunefully, accompanied by drums and trumpets, were drowned out by the bells of St. Mark’s, which by themselves were loud enough to jar the teeth from your head. The procession from the church was preceded by banners and crosses and the teeth and toe bones of saints in gilt boxes held high on elaborately decorated litters, and was followed by a crush of Venetian citizens following behind, all determined to miss no detail of this day when Venice once again tied the very sea herself to the city in holy matrimony.

  “Impressive,” Jaufre said, sounding amused, and Johanna knew he was remembering the processions of Cambaluc, which for richness of regalia and self-importance of its dignitaries outshone this one by a mile.

  Tiphaine snorted. “This is nothing,” she said grandly. “You should see Corpus Christi Day. All the reliquaries are out on Corpus Christi Day.”

  The procession made its stately way across the piazza to the Grand Canal, where el Bucintoro waited, heavy with paint and gilt and silken hangings and golden figurehead. Unconsciously Johanna held her breath as the highest were shown tenderly on board and settled themselves into luxurious seats, and the gilt ship sank in the water beneath the accumulated weight of all that might and majesty. When they were all aboard if the water did not quite overlap the gunnels it certainly nibbled at them. If it hadn’t been flat calm, if there had been even the slightest chop, Johanna would have had every expectation that el Bucintoro would have swamped before they were an arm’s length from the dock.

  The sailing master barked orders, lines were loosed and the golden vessel sep
arated from the quay in the stately fashion befitting its august cargo. Both lines of oars sliced into the water at precisely the same moment. A mighty shout went up from the quayside and from boats large and small crowding the waterway, whose number Johanna estimated in the hundreds.

  “All right, it’s time, get in,” Gradenigo said, and Johanna turned to scramble into the nimble craft tied next to them, Jaufre right behind her. Shasha and Firas were left on the wharf, Shasha anxious and Firas as enigmatic as ever. Alaric, looking painfully sober, stood next to them, with Alma and Hayat, hands clasped and looking concerned. Even Hari had deemed this occasion worthy of an absence from the monastery. He smiled benignly, to see their comrades set forth on a mission as foolhardy as it was unquestionably futile. Certainly no one cheered as Gradenigo pushed them off. Their new badges flashed in the sunlight, bearing the flamboyant, full-sailed ship of the Gradenigo Azienda. Tiphaine had objected most vehemently to Wu Company’s badge being removed, however temporarily, for the remainder of their stay in Venice. Johanna suspected that the girl wanted any glory to be reflected back to its proper source. If any glory there was to be had.

  “Where’s Tiphaine?” Johanna said suddenly. A movement caused her to look around. “Tiphaine! I told you to stay on the quay!”

  A small face with a mutinous expression looked back at her from the stern and said nothing. A muffled sound was heard and Johanna said dangerously, “Jaufre, don’t you dare laugh.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it.” Jaufre stared off in the middle distance with a bland expression on his face.

  Gradenigo and a short, wiry man Johanna recognized from the voyage from Gaza wielded an oar each as they joined the grand procession of what looked like anything that had a reasonable chance of floating, from a bathtub on up to a cog. Most of them were oar-driven but Johanna saw a few small skiffs rigged with jibs darting recklessly before, between and behind the much larger vessels that made up the bulk of this unwieldy fleet, and giving rise to not a few curses bellowed as only sailors can, especially when the big ships stole the wind and the sailboats became momentarily becalmed between two fast-approaching and much larger hulls.

  Their own vessel was made of cedar planed suicidally thin and formed into an open, narrow shell with two thwarts inside to sit on and two oar-locks in which to rest the oars, and that was all. The draft was so shallow that with all five of them inside it rode low enough to sink if anyone so much as inhaled. The three passengers were enveloped in a fine spray raised by the oars but she had to admit that the little boat skimmed over the water like a bird in flight, overtaking and passing laboring craft as if they had been frozen in place, passing so close to others that you couldn’t have inserted a feather between them, shifting course so rapidly that they shipped water over first the port side and then the starboard and then the port side again, until they were close, too close if the shouts from above were any indication, on el Bucintoro’s stern. There Gradenigo laid off a few lengths and used his oar only enough to maintain their position.

  “There,” he said with evident satisfaction. He saw Johanna’s expression, mistook it for admiration, and sent her a cocky grin.

  Johanna blew out a breath and looked at Jaufre, who was also grinning. Over her shoulder she heard Tiphaine laugh out loud. She wiped her face on her sleeve and forbore to comment.

  “Don’t do that,” Jaufre said, catching her hand. “You’ll wipe it off.”

  The procession came to a halt, or as much of a halt as the tides and currents would allow. The flotilla came together in a cluster about the Doge’s barge. Gradenigo fended off a couple of pretenders to their position, vigorously enough to cause said pretenders to hastily right their craft before they went under. A larger craft tried to muscle its way in but Gradenigo held his ground, Johanna thought by sheer force of will, because this wooden leaf they were barely floating in certainly had no tonnage capable of offering any threat. The current hymn, rising from the ships at sea and the crowds on shore, came to a ragged, triumphant crescendo and broke off, and in the following breathless silence the Doge rose to his feet and made his way to the side. They weren’t more than a couple of arms-lengths from the hull of el Bucintoro and she could see his lined face clearly. He was smiling.

  “Get ready,” Gradenigo said.

  “Are we too close?” Jaufre said in a low voice, rising to his feet, hands at the tie of his robe.

  “He’s an old man, how far can he throw?” Gradenigo said.

  The old man’s arm raised and Johanna saw the tiny gold ring in his hand, illuminated for just an instant by the rays of the morning sun. She stood, the little craft rocking beneath her feet, and shed her robe next to Jaufre. Everywhere she looked men were tearing at their clothes, on boats, on shore.

  Her robe fell next to Jaufre’s in the bottom of their boat. They were attired in tunic and trousers and slippers, white for better visibility underwater and wound close to their bodies in strips more white cloth covered with a thick layer of grease. Johanna’s hair was caught back in a long braid and it too was slicked over with a layer of grease, as was every exposed bit of her skin. Shasha had rendered the fat of two sheep for enough to encase her and Jaufre both during their dive.

  A tiny gold object sailed over the gathered flotilla, actually bouncing off the grasping hand of a young grandee attired in velvet, who leaned too far out of his boat and toppled into the water a moment after the ring hit the surface.

  “Go, go, go!” Gradenigo said, a moment before a mighty shout went up from the assemblage.

  Johanna, who had been taking deep, whistling breaths from the moment they had stopped moving, brought her hands over her head and dove over the side, conscious of Jaufre’s slicing into the water next to her only a second later. Even with all the practice dives they had made over the past month, it was gaspingly cold. Johanna blinked her eyes to clear them, pulled her head down and kicked hard and pulled harder with her arms, heading for her best guess as to where she might find the ring.

  Something grabbed at her foot and she kicked hard, half-turning to see a bearded man in shirtwaist and hose hanging off her ankle. He was grinning, or he was until Jaufre took a handful of his hair and yanked, hard. An explosion of bubbles from his mouth and Johanna’s ankle was free. She felt someone else take hold of her braid and yank and she was momentarily arrested in her dive, until a moment later Jaufre was on him. Her attacker’s fingers were already slipping from the greased braid but Jaufre shoved two brutal fingers up his nose and a cloud of blood obscured his face. He screamed and air bubbled out of his mouth and he struck for the surface.

  Jaufre pointed, and she followed the direction of his hand and took a precious second to reorient herself. Was that a flash of gold? She pulled herself down with all of the strength in her shoulders and arms, putting all the muscle in her hips and legs behind her kick. The deeper the water, the darker it was. If the ring fell below a certain level she’d never see it. If it reached the bottom she would never find it. The pressure was building on her ears and in her lungs and she began to let out air, one tiny bubble at a time, in measured beats. The water became colder still, almost paralyzingly cold the further down she dove, the farther behind she left the weak spring sun.

  There! A flash, and she kicked and reached out, and, disbelieving it even as it happened, her hand closed around something hard and tiny and round. She pulled up and someone grabbed her braid but again, Jaufre was there and this time he didn’t bother with nostrils, he grabbed between the man’s legs. The man tried to scream, there another explosion of bubbles, and Johanna was free. She kicked for the surface, her lungs burning now, it was too long since she’d done this, she was out of practice, but she could not inhale, who knew the filth that she would bring into her body, and then there was the drowning, no, and then yes! She broke the surface, the force of her kick propelling her out of the water as far as her waist, and Gradenigo was there and he had her arm, the one with the fist clenched tight around the ring that would make all thei
r fortunes.

  Another shout went up, this one loud enough to be heard at the doors of Everything Under the Heavens itself, although this might have been partly due to the fact that Venice realized that a woman had retrieved the ring this year.

  She collapsed on the bottom of their tiny eggshell of a boat and used the rest of the air in her lungs to blow out her nose and gasp, “Jaufre?”

  There was a splash and a gasp and a sleek head surfaced. Gradenigo and his crew grabbed him by the hair and the seat of his trousers and lifted him on board, although Tiphaine went over in the process. Gradenigo grabbed the back of her tunic, lifted her out of the water, shook her vigorously and tossed her into the stern.

  “Did you get it?” Gradenigo said to Johanna.

  “Did you get it?” Jaufre said.

  “Did you get it?” Tiphaine said, pushing her soaking curls out of her eyes.

  “Did you get it!” the crowd bellowed.

  “Quick,” Gradenigo said, “your robes.”

  When they were decently swathed once again in brown fustian, Johanna’s braid tucked inside, Gradenigo helped her to her feet. She kept her knees loose so as to keep her balance in the rocking boat. She did not want to go back into that cold, dirty water, not ever again. Above her, a row of heads crowded the side of el Bucintoro, one of them, she saw fleetingly, belonging to the Doge himself.

  She rolled the ring forward to hold it between thumb and forefinger, and then, her fingers cold and numb she almost dropped it, to the accompanying, deliciously horrified gasp of everyone watching. But the grease on her hands was so thick the ring stuck to her fingers. She raised her hand over her head, and the sun, which seemed to have increased in strength and brightness in the moments she had been gone from it made the golden hoop glitter like the finest diamond ever pulled from the sands of Nubia.

  This time the shriek was loud enough to be heard at the door of Heaven itself.

  There was some grumbling about the winning diver’s sex and nationality, not to mention the unfair advantage of the grease. Gradenigo, backed by his family’s name and especially by the vocal and public support of his cousin Bartolomeo, his family’s coming man, overbore it. He could indeed conduct business in Venice tax free, for a year beginning from the day of the Wedding to the Sea. “He wants to meet you, by the way.”