The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  The actors in that night’s masque were gone.

  She was grateful for that.

  Using the stairs at first, she navigated in darkness, feeling her way from rotten step to rotten step, each slimy with frost and wood canker. She’d believed exiting her attic window was hard, as was crawling over tiles and tumbling through a skylight to hit the floor below. That was not the hard part.

  Finding the second set of stairs broken and the floor so soft one heel tore wood as if it was paper was not the hard part. Not even doing this while shaking with fear and struggling to stop her teeth chattering in case anyone heard. (Since her bucket had still to be emptied and her platter refilled.) The hard part, she realised, was what came after she escaped.

  Her uncle had betrayed her and so had her aunt. Even if her aunt had not, what could Giulietta say? Nothing, since she could barely form the words in her head to describe what Dr. Crow had done to her and forcing them from her mouth was impossible. Giulietta knew. She’d tried…

  I can’t go to a physician, she realised in horror. He’d examine her, find her maidenhead intact, and proclaim a miracle, or damn her as bewitched. A wise woman? Mistress Scarlet was one of those. What if wise women talked to each other? They were out, priests were out, Dr. Crow was definitely out. Uncle Alonzo would kill her before she could betray him.

  And the woman she’d always turned to…?

  On whose lap she’d rested her head and poured out childish woes. Giulietta barely recognised Aunt Alexa in the terrifying being who stalked after that naked girl, and later sewed the girl’s wounds shut. Her face, when she pulled back her veil. So beautiful lit by moonlight. So unbelievably cold.

  It took Giulietta twenty minutes to crawl through a jagged hole in the floor, hang by her hands from splintery boards and drop on to rubble, twisting her ankle in the fall. Nineteen of those were spent summoning her courage. Unless, she thought bitterly, it was desperation that finally forced her through.

  The blood on the campo where the girl cut herself had frosted like expensive icing. A scuff showed where the silver-haired boy had fallen to his knees, and buried his face in the naked girl’s stomach. Of all the things she should be thinking, Giulietta was certain jealousy shouldn’t top the list.

  31

  A thousand events happened next morning. Fishing boats docked on Venice’s northern edge, their nets safely reset. That day’s catch would go to feed the city, since it was Friday and eating meat that day invited the fires of hell.

  Since none of the three corpses caught in the nets belonged to anyone who mattered, no fisherman was dragged to the leads, made to confess sins belonging to someone else and executed.

  Master shipwrights scrambled from their mattresses, having bedded their wives for warmth in the minutes before the Arzanale bell rang. Apprentices and journeymen tumbled their women and left them with half promises of marriage, and a newly made brat to widen their wombs, as like as not.

  The rope walkways, dry docks and shipyards of Arzanale were the source of Venice’s power. The older men still called it Darsina, from the Arabic Dar-al-sina, and a few even called it that. Across the city, foreigners—including those from the countries that gave the city that word—finished their prayers and rose to stock their stalls or unload boats or carry goods through alleys more complex than any minotaur’s maze. White men, black men, yellow men. A dozen face shapes and twice as many languages. Their laws did not require Friday fish but most ate it out of expediency. Although they called it politeness.

  Night soil men carried waste to barges bound for the mainland. Butchers slaughtered pigs, working under canvas to protect them from the drizzle. The Church might forbid eating pork on Friday, but it allowed the butchering of swine and the preparation of tomorrow’s meat. Awnings or not, the dirt beneath the butchers’ feet still turned to slop from the blood, guts and excrement that spilled from the swine, along with their lives.

  Whores swore, splashing water between sore thighs as brothels closed or shifts changed. Losers staggered from gaming houses, having mortgaged already mortgaged houses, as card sharps shook aces from their sleeves, and rolled loaded dice for that day’s luck, knowing that it was already secure.

  Hearths were swept. Kindling chopped.

  In the hours either side of the black thread moment Venice changed her masks like a gambler hoping to avoid his creditors as he heads for a new casa chiusa.

  The sun rose cold and pale over the lagoon’s edge, where the first villages stood. A starving memory of the previous summer’s sun, which had glowed like slowly falling iron shot. And along the Riva degli Schiavoni, fighting memories of that summer sun, walked a young woman in a half-mask of her own.

  The mask was cracked, found in the mud a minute earlier. Her shoes were filthy. Her velvet houppelande gown squalid enough to suggest she earned her living on her back. Lady Giulietta di Millioni was used to seeing Venice from the canals. Her Venice was ornamental and gilded, and glimpsed through the fringes of her gondola’s scarlet curtains. The rare times she’d left Ca’ Ducale, it was to walk Piazza San Marco. This Venice was unknown to her.

  Stinking and strange and badly dressed. It didn’t help that her gown, as well as being filthy, was cut lower than it need be. A dozen men mistook her for a whore between the Rialto and the start of Riva degli Schiavoni. And Moorish sailors leered openly as she dodged between carts, calling out offers for her service she wouldn’t toss to a beggar. The sailors guarded women chained at the ankle. Criminals, Giulietta decided, then noticed their cheekbones and dark hair. Captured on the wild plains beyond Dalmatia, they were headed for slave markets in the Levant.

  Fifteen ships lay close to shore between Ponte della Paglia, just beyond Ca’ Ducale and the bridge before Arzanale. French, Tedeschi, Byzantine, Andalusian and English… Lady Giulietta identified as many of the eagles, lions, fleur-de-lys and leopards as she could. Maybe, if she’d been looking where she was going, instead of playing herald, she wouldn’t have walked into a French officer, negotiating for a dozen large barrels of fresh water.

  He swung round, hand on his sword hilt.

  The Schiavoni laughed as Giulietta jumped back. And the French officer’s face darkened, thinking she mocked him. There was little doubt the merchant was. The Schiavoni were the largest group in the city after the Venetians. When Serenissima claimed the Dalmatian coast it gave the inhabitants trading rights. The new stone quay along the city’s southern edge became home to Slav traders. They built churches, scuole and hospitals, founded charities and supported monasteries with their tithes. They also built the largest water cistern in the city. It gave them, their competitors claimed, unfair advantage. But then Venetians widely believed anyone who came between them and a greater profit had to have an unfair advantage one way or another.

  “Look where you’re going…”

  Lady Giulietta glared back. When the young Frenchman scowled deeper, she made to walk round him and froze in shock when he thrust his arm out to stop her. He caught her wrist just ahead of her slapping him. Gripping it, he slapped her arse hard. “Sauce for the goose,” he said.

  “How dare you?”

  “Dare I what?” he asked, grinning. “Object to you slapping me. Or object to you trying to walk off without apologising?” He realised he still held her wrist when she did. Stepping back, he let his eyes flick to the Schiavoni, and Giulietta realised, belatedly, he was simply trying to regain his pride.

  Men was her first thought. Her second was to say sorry. So she did, realising that was probably the first time she’d said it. Do I mean it? Giulietta ran back through not looking where she was going, running into him, and being cross. “Yes,” she added. “I mean it.”

  Uncertain how to answer, the Frenchman turned to the Schiavoni merchant instead. “We have a deal, right?” Taking five grosso and two ducats from his belt pocket, he double-counted them, tipping the gold and silver into the man’s hand. “Deliver them there.” He pointed to a tired-looking lugger.

&nb
sp; Surely he knew enough to make sure the casks were full? And was he really going to walk away without checking his supplier delivered the number of casks just paid for? How did she, who’d never paid for anything in her life, know he should do when the Frenchmen didn’t? Because she was Venetian, and he wasn’t, obviously enough. Nor was the water seller, but a hundred years of Venetian rule rubbed off on people. There was a joke about Schiavoni men. How can you profit from one? Buy him for what he’s actually worth. Sell him for what he says he’s worth. Buy a house with the difference…

  “You,” she said.

  The Schiavoni looked at her strangely.

  “Deliver the right number of barrels. And make sure they’re full.” His scowl said he’d been planning to do neither.

  She walked on. Head up, shoulders back. Doing her best to hold her misery at arm’s length. Squeezing between carts carrying swine, Giulietta stepped under a hoist lifting pigs into a boat, and only just missed being showered with the terrified animal’s excrement. Someone laughed. Laughing louder when Giulietta turned her head aside to hide her tears.

  Beyond the Riva degli Schiavoni and Arzanale gates was San Pietro di Castello, the island housing Venice’s main cathedral. It was here Giulietta was headed, because when she’d summoned her courage to try the Patriarch’s little palace by San Marco, announcing she was a friend of his, she’d been sworn at, called a grasping little whore and damned for her impiety. When she insisted she needed to see him, she’d been told with a sneer to try San Pietro.

  Despite taking her two hours to walk there, this being further than she’d ever walked before—certainly alone—and discovering an unknown city in the space occupied by one she knew; even though she crossed a rickety bridge to discover her confessor was dead, his body having lain in state in San Pietro, before being buried under the nave; and a sour-faced, wimpled nun, looking too much like another sour-face wimpled nun, had rolled her eyes at Giulietta’s sudden sobs, and sent her packing, with threats of a whipping, this was not the important part of Giulietta’s story that day.

  This came shortly afterwards.

  Her return from San Pietro di Castello was quicker, in the way such walks always are. On a mudbank before Arzanale two vessels rested on their sides; one was being caulked with twists of rope dipped in tar. The other had a hole in its side large enough to ride a horse through. Two men stood beneath, arguing.

  By skirting the shipyard’s gate, Giulietta avoided being whistled at a second time. She avoided hoists lifting hog-tied swine, although excrement still splattered her as she waded, ankle-deep, through Judas-soft mud.

  “My lady…”

  She turned, surprised.

  Her admirer was broad, high-cheeked and darkly bearded. Dressed in a scarlet doublet, tight black hose and a floppy hat. His codpiece was more prominent and more highly decorated than she’d seen. Eyeing the sailors watching her, he smiled lazily. “Eggs,” he said. “Have no business dancing with stones.”

  “You know me?”

  “I know quality.”

  Her eyes tightened at his mockery.

  “Believe me,” he said. “I mean no insult.”

  And then, strangely, he leant close and inhaled her scent, as if smelling new-mown grass or some expensive perfume. And taking her hand, he opened her fingers to reveal a ring turned so its stone was hidden from view. The stone was priceless. The setting so old that much of its decoration had worn away.

  He smiled and shrugged. His smile was easy and the shrug elegant. “I have… a certain facility for reading situations. And you, being beautiful, caught my eye. A second glance and I knew…”

  “What?” she demanded.

  He pointed to the chaos of the quayside. The penned pigs and sullen slaves. The whores stumbling from doors and blinking at the sunlight. The Schiavoni, the Mamluks, the Greeks. “That you don’t belong here. You belong in a palace.”

  Maybe bursting into tears wasn’t her wisest reaction. Alternatively, it was exactly what was needed. Either way, she found herself in his arms, held tightly until the crying fit passed.

  “Prince Leopold zum Bas Friedland,” he said, introducing himself. “The German emperor’s envoy to Serenissima.”

  “Sigismund’s…?”

  “Yes,” he said. “The emperor’s bastard.” Leaning forward, he kissed her carefully on the brow and she felt herself shiver. A part of her did more than shiver. It began to melt.

  “I’m Lady Giulietta San Felice di Millioni.”

  “I know,” he said. “All things come to those who wait.”

  It was later, walking north, through alleys that Giulietta barely knew existed but which Prince Leopold seemed to navigate as if he’d lived his entire life in the city rather than it being the other way round, that she vomited. She did it guiltily. Turning aside and spewing against a wall, kicking dirt over her mess.

  “Are you sick?” Prince Leopold asked.

  She shook her head, face miserable and mouth turned down. Tears began to back up behind her eyes and she turned away again, unable to stop their fall and not wanting him to see her cry twice.

  “What is it then?”

  Maybe he read the answer in her silence, because he stepped forward to put his hand softly on her lower gut, feeling Giulietta freeze at his touch. And then, she felt a flutter beneath his fingers and his face turned white.

  32

  Situated in Dorsoduro, between the Grand canal to the north and the wide expanse of the Giudecca Canal to the south, Atilo’s palace occupied half of what was once a small mudflat before it was reclaimed from the lagoon. The ankle-deep channel between it and the next mudflat had been dug out to make a usable canal. The edges staked with oak pilings, lined with stone and turned into fondamente, those inland quays that ran along many canals. Although the house was brick it was faced in stone. Elegantly open galleries overlooked a red marble fountain dominating its central cortile, the private courtyard beloved by patrician families. Fretted boxwork balconies hid its public windows from the world.

  Marble columns, supporting arches carved with flowers and plants and animal faces, ran around the cortile. A narrower row supported the trefoil windows of the floor above. The whole effect was of an elegant lace knit from stone.

  There were two porte d’acqua. An ornate one on the Grand Canal and a slightly less grand, but more often used, one on Rio della Fornace. While the land door was close enough to Dogana to be walked in minutes. Of course, everywhere in the city was within walking distance of everywhere else.

  Since Atilo didn’t trade, which made him rare in Venice, his colonnaded cortile was empty and his servants few. He entertained in the piano nobile, a wood-panelled first-floor reception room with alternating black and white tiles, huge fireplace and long windows stretching from floor to high ceiling. Furniture was sparse but the walls had Murano mirrors. And a painting of Atilo as a young admiral, by Gentile da Fabriano, held pride of place among round-faced madonnas and anguished saints.

  A huge Persian carpet covered much of the tiling.

  Directly above one corner of the piano nobile were the separate chambers where Atilo and Desdaio slept. A strongroom and chambers for guests took up the rest of that floor. In one of these, Desdaio’s possessions waited to be unboxed.

  On the floor above was the kitchen, with an iron range venting to the sky. That floor also had servants’ quarters, additional storage rooms and attic space never used by anything other than pigeons, mice and rats. When Atilo summoned labourers to dig a cellar in the weeks before Tycho joined his household, Desdaio was puzzled. No one had cellars. In a city like Venice they were an absurdity.

  But the labourers arrived towards the end of spring.

  They dug where Atilo ordered, and an intense young Sicilian with greasy hair, sucked his teeth and talked to himself, before sketching plans that he scrawled over and crossed out and scrawled over again. And though the men mocked his twitch and his accent behind his back, and sometimes to his face, they dug where
he told them, dug as deep as he demanded, and built a double-skinned cellar without windows. The underfloor and the cavity between the first wall of brick and the second had to be filled with fiercely puddled clay to keep water from flooding the room.

  In the Griffin and the Winged Lion and the Whore’s Thighs, which is what the labourers called the Aphrodite, men drank and squabbled and talked of the strange strongroom Atilo il Mauros was building. It was agreed it must be to house Lady Desdaio’s fortune. Since he’d never bothered with such a room to protect his own treasure. Had they looked closely, they might have noticed the clay they puddled with bare feet contained finely powdered silver. Enough of it to pay them all several times over. And they left before a door was installed at the bottom of a short run of steps leading from the cortile. Its handles, hinges and locks were also silver.

  “Why keep him in a cellar?” Desdaio asked.

  “For his own good.”

  “In the darkness?” she said. “Locked in.”

  Atilo took a deep breath, wondering what reason would convince her. He could say his new slave was so dangerous it was for her own good. But then she’d want to know why he’d brought Tycho into his household.

  “It’s only temporary. Until he gets over his fear of daylight.”

  Desdaio looked doubtful. “You’re not punishing him?”

  “I’m helping him,” Atilo promised. And he was, in his way. The alternative to Atilo’s training was death. Duchess Alexa had made her position clear. Atilo had wanted this boy, not just as his apprentice but as his heir. It was up to Atilo to make him fit for both positions.

  He had a year.

  Atilo suspected the time limit was arbitrary. A way of reminding him he might share her bed but she still held his life in her hands. With Alexa it was almost impossible to know. “What are you thinking,” Desdaio suddenly demanded.

  “Nothing,” Atilo assured her, wishing his thoughts had been about something else. She’d heard the rumours. The whole city had heard the rumours.