The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “That’s it?” Giulietta’s lady-in-waiting sounded surprised.

  “Paid harbour dues, bought fresh water. They didn’t even try to bribe their way out of quarantine…”

  Lady Giulietta snorted. That was suspicious indeed.

  5

  Inside the customs house, Venice’s famous Dogana fortress, men had been gathering since sunset. Roderigo was the last to arrive.

  “Hey, chief…”

  The man who spoke was shorter than his commander and half as broad again. He had the wide face, Mongol eyes and tallow skin of his father. After fifty years on God’s earth, he still spoke like his mother, a Rialto fishwife.

  “What?”

  “Guess that answers that.”

  “Answers what?”

  “I was going to ask if you were all right.”

  Roderigo had found Temujin drunk in the street begging for alms. In two years he’d gone from mopping floors to sergeant. He fought dirty, drank hard and paid his debts; and the troop respected him for it, or had the sense to keep any doubts to themselves.

  “Everyone here?”

  “One’s ill. I’ve borrowed him instead.”

  Temujin pointed to a rat-faced man in a Castellani smock, overlaid with a leather jerkin so filthy he could pass unseen on a moonless night. The composite bow over his shoulder fired arrows of a kind the captain hadn’t seen in years. Taking another look, he noted the shape of the man’s eyes.

  “I can find someone else.”

  “No need.” The Mongols kept a fontego in the city. A trading post where Mongol law applied. Like every other race, they left their bastards.

  Taking another salted fish, Roderigo chewed it until it was just about soft enough to swallow. He wanted wine to remove the aftertaste, but once ordered the temptation to drink would be impossible to bear.

  Atilo il Mauros had to be sixty-five at the least. His name wasn’t in the Golden Book, the list of noble families with a right to sit in Council. Worse, he wasn’t even from Serenissima. He spoke Italian with an Andalusian accent.

  “Find me wine,” Roderigo demanded.

  Temujin looked at him, but sent a trooper for a fresh jug and a squat tumbler on which fading saints stared ghost-like. Having filled his glass, Roderigo returned the jug. “Tip the rest away.”

  “Chief…”

  “All right. All right. Share it around. But if one man gets drunk I’ll have him whipped. If someone dies through his folly I’ll have him hanged. Make sure they know that.”

  The men filled their mugs anyway.

  “The boats are ready?”

  Of course the boats were ready. The boats were always ready. But Temujin made do with a brief nod before asking if there was anything else his captain wanted.

  Other than the head of Atilo on a spit?

  The upstairs office to which the Captain of the Dogana took himself had a fire laid, and a stout woman knelt before it. Who, Roderigo suspected, could be laid with little enough trouble herself. Maria was Temujin’s woman and the customs house’s unofficial maid.

  She had an almost full set of teeth, wide hips and low breasts that shifted as she moved to light his fire. Still crouching, she turned and he saw darkness between her thighs. “Is there anything, my lord…?”

  “No,” Roderigo said.

  He wanted Desdaio. Who didn’t?

  In the corner stood a pair of grinding wheels.

  One was coarse, the other so fine he’d never seen another like it. Their combined weight was hard to start rolling but they kept revolving longer than a single stone. Sharpening his sword with casual competence, Roderigo honed edge and point until both could slice leather, this being what most sailors wore as armour.

  Temujin knocked as midnight struck.

  “Ready when you are, chief.”

  The sergeant had checked his men’s weapons but Captain Roderigo rechecked them anyway. Temujin would be disappointed otherwise. After the fug inside the fortress, the night felt colder than it was. Drizzle coming in sheets on the wind. With luck, it would turn to sleet and fling itself in Mamluk faces, providing cover and allowing Roderigo’s men to approach less carefully.

  Staring into that wind, Roderigo felt tears fill his angry eyes and cursed himself for stupidity, glad of the darkness. He’d watched Desdaio grow from pampered child to a young woman desperate for the freedom her young cousins still had.

  Of course, her fortune would have helped his. His own house was a ruin, his salary from the Dogana less than he spent. All the same, Roderigo hadn’t lied when he told Desdaio he loved her. For her to sneak into another man’s house…

  Into another man’s bed.

  “Chief…”

  “What?”

  His two boats had drawn together in the swell, and Sergeant Temujin was gripping the sides of both to keep them steady. At his anger everyone froze. Now was the time Roderigo was meant to say some words. Choose who boarded first. Tell them what he expected to find.

  “Any special orders, chief?”

  He and Temujin had searched a hundred ships before. Everything from visiting Moorish galleys and trade ships from Byzantium to Rus boats and even a felucca that sailed all the way from the mouth of the Nile. Why should this one be any different? Roderigo felt he owed his sergeant some explanation.

  “A girl I know is getting married.”

  “That’s it?” Temujin looked disgusted.

  “There’s red gold,” Roderigo replied. As if his last words were unspoken. “Also Mamluk silver. They’re on the manifest. Three leopard skins, sky stone for hardening steel and a box of rubies. All declared. It’s what they’re hiding that worries me. I mean, for a Mamluk not to try to barter…”

  “Chief, can I say something?”

  “I don’t have to like it.”

  “You won’t. Whoever she is. Forget it. She’s just a slit, pretty or not. You can’t go into a possible battle moping. It’s the quickest way to die.”

  He hated it when Temujin was right.

  As the boats separated and one headed into the wind bound for the far side of the Quaja, which was the Mamluk vessel’s name, Sergeant Temujin kept up a count as steady as the Watch’s steps on Piazza San Marco at midnight.

  “Fifty,” he said.

  Pulling a wide sash from his pocket, Roderigo draped it over his shoulder and adjusted the weight that kept it at his hip. A Venetian officer boarding a foreign vessel had to wear a city sash. It made an insult to the officer an insult to the city. An insult to the city was an insult to the duke.

  This simplified matters.

  “One hundred,” Temujin said.

  “Take us in.”

  A swirl of oars carried them close, the Quaja’s side looming so large it threatened to crush their lugger in the swell. An anchor rope hummed with tension above them. That was where they would board.

  “I’ll go first.”

  “Chief…”

  “You heard me.”

  Even Temujin, sworn to protect Roderigo, knew better than to query an order given in the field. When the captain reached deck, he found a man from his other lugger already standing over a dead Mamluk.

  “Sweetly done,” Roderigo said.

  At his gesture, others climbed aboard.

  “Right,” Temujin said, keeping his voice low. “You and you by that cargo hatch, and you by that door… And you, why isn’t your crossbow loaded?” This last hiss because a string wasn’t ratcheted back.

  “Give me a…”

  One second the sergeant was glaring, the next shock replaced anger in the hiss of an arrow from high overhead. Temujin stared at the shaft in his chest.

  “Rigging,” Roderigo said.

  As Temujin fell to his knees, blood running between his fingers, the troop’s newcomer planted his feet, raised his own half bow and hesitated.

  “Dead or alive?”

  “Kill him.”

  The man put an arrow between crows nest’s boards, through the Mamluk archer’s foot
and into his groin. The lookout fell with a thud. He should have fired the moment they appeared or held his element of surprise.

  “Alive was better.” Temujin’s words came from between blood-frothed lips. “So any bastards we leave living could kill him for being useless. Good job he was, though. We’d be fucked otherwise.”

  “Help Temujin up.”

  Two soldiers did as ordered. The arrow was a yard long, with its point exiting from Temujin’s lower back. Sighing with relief, Roderigo confirmed the point was unpoisoned and snapped the feathered end without saying what he intended to do.

  “Bind the arrow in place,” he told a guard.

  “Sir…”

  “Seen it.” A door was opening. As half a dozen crossbows shifted in that direction, Roderigo said, “Wait on my order.”

  Opening a little more, the door suddenly started closing and then stopped. The man behind must know it offered minimal protection. Steel-tipped quarrels would rip straight through.

  “In the name of Marco IV,” Roderigo said. “Show yourself. We search for a missing glass-blower. And have reason to suspect he may have come aboard. Any attempt to hinder us will be regarded as an act of war.”

  The door shut with a bang.

  “My God,” one of the men muttered. “We’ve found him.”

  It looked that way. Roderigo hoped it was true. Although the glass-blower would die horribly, his children and grandchildren—those left living—would be spared a similar fate.

  Strange words came from behind the door.

  Guttural and impassioned, the man speaking sounded young to captain a ship, never mind a vessel as large as the Quaja. When Roderigo didn’t reply, the sentence was repeated, as far as Roderigo could tell word for word. Problem was, Roderigo had no idea if it was a question, a statement or a boast that the Quaja’s crew would fight to the death. “Anyone understand that?”

  The newcomer nodded.

  “What are you called?”

  Bato sounded like a nickname.

  “Tell him I’m looking for a glass blower. We think he might have been smuggled aboard this ship.”

  “They haven’t got him,” Bato said eventually.

  “What’s the language?”

  “It’s Turkic. Good Turkic. Formal. Very proper.”

  “Tell him I’m Dogana chief and I will search his ship. If what he says is true, he can wait out his quarantine, or sail on tomorrow’s tide. We will count his dead and my sergeant’s injury as the cost of a misunderstanding.”

  The answer when it came was calmer.

  No glass-blower was aboard the ship. The manifest of goods given to the Dogana was accurate. All the same, they would let the Venetians search where they liked. Since they had nothing to hide.

  “Tell him, if it was up to me I’d take his word and leave now.”

  Untrue, of course, but any honeyed words that helped get this over with, and Temujin to Dr. Crow, were fine with Roderigo. As he watched, the door opened and a fine-featured Mamluk stood blinking in the moon’s rays. His robe was rich with silver thread and a scarlet turban wrapped his skull.

  He looked little more than a boy.

  Identifying Roderigo by his sash, the Mamluk touched his hand to his heart, mouth and forehead in formal greeting and gestured the Dogana captain inside.

  The vessel’s layout was like dozens of others he’d searched before. A captain’s cabin at the stern and quarters for crew below deck. Half of that area being put aside for cargo. Below this was a crawl space where the hull curved towards the keel. Under that, a stinking slop hole filled with stones for ballast.

  Roderigo checked the lot. All the time carrying the weight of Desdaio’s betrayal like stones in his own heart. Two of his troop were helping Sergeant Temujin towards the upper deck when Roderigo stopped. At a growled order, his men did likewise and a flicker of blind panic filled the Mamluk’s face.

  The crawl space was twenty-one steps long. The cargo deck nineteen. Had it been reversed Roderigo could have dismissed the difference as loss for the curve of the prow. But that way round?

  “Tell the man we’re going to break this down.”

  Roderigo pointed at the bulkhead of the stern. A torrent of impassioned Turkic greeted this news. And the Mamluk went to stand in front of it.

  “He says his ship will sink and we’ll die. It will be your fault and his country will go to war with Serenissima. A thousand ships will sail up the Adriatic sacking every Venetian colony on the way.”

  “Tell him it’s a risk I’ll take.”

  It took five minutes to find a large enough axe. In which time the Mamluk’s crew gathered, silent ghosts watching uneasily. Only the loaded crossbows of Roderigo’s men kept them from attacking.

  “Now,” he ordered.

  Bato swung the axe.

  “And again.”

  A second blow widened the crack.

  “No water yet,” Temujin growled.

  The planks were too thin to be the Quaja’s outer skin and their timber too green. Venice’s own shipwrights used wood from trees stored for at least two years before cutting planks that had to dry in their turn.

  “Hack the lot down.”

  Planting his feet, Bato swung a blow to behead a horse. His next opened darkness. And a tanner’s stink of shit and stale piss hissed through the gap. Not waiting for more orders, Bato gripped one edge of the planking and tugged. Wood split and a plank creaked free from battens behind.

  Another plank followed just as noisily.

  “Light,” Roderigo demanded.

  Stepping between the wreckage of Bato’s handiwork, he entered a fetid compartment behind the wall. A moment later, the Mamluk followed.

  Roderigo was thirty years old. He’d fought his first battle at fourteen and taken his first girl a year earlier. He’d lived through cities sacked, and seen a Florentine spy torn apart by wild horses. He expected the missing glass blower. He got…

  The captain crossed himself.

  A naked boy hung in chains, his wrists raw from fighting shackles. In life, the boy must have been about seventeen. Nineteen at the most. Long silver-grey hair half hid a face so beautiful it belonged to an angel. The corpse had the sheen of wet marble. Almost alabaster in its translucence.

  Black earth strewed the deck beneath him.

  Lurching past his commander, Sergeant Temujin lifted the boy’s head to the light.

  Amber-flecked eyes snapped open.

  As the foreign captain shouted a warning, the sergeant drew his dagger, and turned to slash the Mamluk’s throat, drenching himself in blood.

  “Temujin…”

  “Kill them all,” Temujin shouted.

  Outside, his troop obeyed without question. Crossbows snapped, arrows flew, daggers found hearts. Fifteen seconds of hellish slaughter ended in the stink of blood, Mamluk corpses, and Bato leaving, bow in hand, to hunt down stragglers.

  “Burn this boat.”

  Roderigo stared at his sergeant.

  “Chief… Steal what you need to keep the Regent and duchess sweet and burn everything else. Him included. Because I know what that is and it cannot be tamed. The Khan owned one in my grandfather’s time. It killed him.”

  “Sergeant.”

  Temujin stopped talking.

  His eyes were bright with the onset of fever, and the crude bandage around his ribs dark with blood. Only willpower and his need to convince Roderigo kept him conscious.

  “You want to tell me why you killed that man?”

  It hurt Temujin, probably more than it hurt to drop to a crouch, but he did it anyway. Opening buttons at the dead Mamluk’s neck he revealed the swell of breasts, and said, “She’s got to be someone, chief. To command this ship and carry that.”

  Temujin meant her prisoner.

  “We can’t let anyone find her. And, believe me, you don’t want anyone to find that. Kill it, fire this damn ship and get us out of here.”

  “I wish it was that simple.”

  “It is.
”

  Roderigo shook his head.

  Halfway across the lagoon, while the Dogana troop concentrated on getting their badly wounded sergeant to Dr. Crow for treatment, the boy made his move. He simply stood, and tipped backwards into the water with a splash.

  “Kill him,” Roderigo shouted.

  Not a single man had his crossbow cocked.

  By the time Bato slotted an arrow, his target was being swept away by the cross-currents that made Venice’s lagoon so unpredictable. Had the burning Mamluk ship been close enough to light the scene Bato might have had a better chance. He fired anyway.

  6

  The shock of an arrow striking blew breath from the boy’s body. And the pain in his shoulder opened the boy’s mind to a vision that swept in like smoke.

  In the smoke a veiled woman smiled, then scowled and began to protest as her image blew away, leaving him spitting water. When she reappeared, she was sitting on a squat throne with a thin young man in black clutching her knees.

  “Join us.”

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  She looked puzzled, as if this was not what he was meant to say.

  But already he was thinking other things. Clutching at passing fragments of memory, he tried to recall why he’d been locked behind the false bulkhead of a ship. Fire and ice, earth and air. Fire started this. A blaze swept through some building. A man killed another. A sour-faced woman hated him worse than ever. He fought to remember who she was.

  Who he was.

  But the foul-tasting lagoon swallowed the boy before he could remember more than a single word: Bjornvin. The word made no more sense to him than his vision of the veiled woman. Since the men who hacked him free were heading in one direction, the boy let cross-currents sweep him in the other.

  He wondered what would happen. He’d die, he supposed. Perhaps he should stop swimming to see how sinking felt?

  Stopping kicking, the boy let his shackles pull him under.

  And, tasting salt, let himself sink further. Opaque above, darkness below. His toes squelched on soft mud in a channel. Minor canals in Venice were cleared every ten years, waterways and large canals whenever necessary. He knew nothing of this. He simply felt softness beneath his toes.