Lionboy: the Chase

by Zizou Corder

  It was impossible to believe, on the Italian side of the Alps, that there had ever been a snowstorm at all. The sun was shining bright and golden, the blue sky was clear and clean and hot, birds sang, and olive trees rustled their silvery leaves in the light breeze. The plains of northern Italy spread out on all sides around the train, wide and fertile, with broad rivers meandering across, and fields of maize and tomatoes and vines sprouting under the sun. King Boris opened his windows, and a smell of warm dust and cool water washed in. He took off his jacket, and smiled, and said, ‘A Campari Soda, please, Edward! And a granita for the Lionboy.’

  Edward brought a tall pink drink for the King and a small strawberry ice in a glass for Charlie. Then he stood behind Charlie’s chair and raised his eyebrows at the King, who put his feet on the stool in front of him and, leaning back, said, ‘So, Charlie. Unfortunately, I have important business in Sofia and I cannot come with you to Venice. But you will be met by a boat, and taken to my little place, and Edward will help you. All right?’

  All right? Charlie wondered if it was all right. But he realized that it really made no difference if he thought it was all right or not – it was what was going to happen.

  Rafi thought he felt a little better. The ache in his shoulder was still heavy and deep, but when he opened his eyes he could see more clearly, and his head seemed a little clearer. He was still in the same room.

  ‘Nurse!’ he called. He thought he was shouting but his voice came out cracked and small. ‘Nurse!’ He was thirsty, and hungry.

  ‘NURSE!’ he yelled. Owww. His throat hurt. Wincing from the pain of the shout made his shoulder hurt. The natural physical reaction was to hunch his shoulders against the pain, but that of course made it worse. He couldn’t get comfortable. His sheet was knotted up beneath him.

  ‘That sniking graspole,’ he murmured. It was all Charlie’s fault. Rafi flung his head back as best he could and tried to breathe. He felt dreadful.

  When the nurse came in, his face looked green and clammy, his neck was ringed with bruising and, to be honest, she thought for a moment he was dead. She was sorry – he had appalling manners but he was very handsome, with his gorgeous eyelashes, and too young to die. She started to wipe his forehead with a cool cloth.

  Rafi came to suddenly, his arms flailing and his eyes wide. He walloped her – not on purpose, but quite hard.

  ‘Get off!’ he rasped. Ow – his throat.

  The nurse held her face where he had slapped her. ‘Ouf,’ she said.

  ‘Well, leave me alone, then, you stupid cow,’ he said, in the sandpapery voice which was all that could creep through his swollen throat.

  ‘You look like you’ve been strangled,’ said the nurse. ‘It wasn’t me – though frankly I’d understand anyone getting the urge. Oooh –’

  She poked the dark marks that had appeared at the base of Rafi’s pale neck. ‘Deep bruising,’ she said. ‘Nasty.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ whispered Rafi coldly. ‘Bring me food.’

  She looked at him. He threw up. It hurt a lot.

  She cleaned him up, treating him as if he were a small baby who had dirtied his nappy, and telling him that he would be given nothing to eat for twenty-four hours because he’d been sick. After she’d gone, he decided to cheer himself up by ringing Charlie.

  He left a message. In his delicate, painful voice, it sounded even worse.

  ‘Hello, Charlie. Rafi here. I’m in pain. Did you know? I’ve been bitten, Charlie, by some dirty wild animal that will be put down the moment it’s caught – which won’t be long. The police are on the case. I caught a nasty fever and I keep throwing up. I’ve nothing much to do here except get better – and wonder, of course, how you will take the pain I’m going to inflict on you as soon as I’m up and about. Wondering who I’ll get to bite you. I’ve been thinking about snakes … And what freezing water I’m going to push you into. How long I’ll keep you there. Under the surface. What poxy doctor I’ll get to look after you – if you survive … What I’ll feed you, to make you throw up. Interesting subjects. It’s making me feel a lot better, to tell the truth.

  ‘Anyway, just thought I’d catch up. I know where your train is going, I know where your parents are, I know you’re a really stupid kid … oh, and I know you won’t be able to hide all those Lions for very long … Do you honestly think no one’s going to notice? Do you think Maccomo’s going to just let you stroll off with his Lions? … So, anyway, the police’ll be doing all my legwork while I’m in here, and I’ll catch up with you later. OK? Bye, then!’

  He was pleased with himself for ending in that cheerful tone. That’d scare the kid more than his shouting and ranting on previous messages. He thought it sounded quite sinister and mature. Then he couldn’t think any more because his temperature went up and he started retching again, even though there was nothing left to come up.

  Outside, Troy lay silently. He’d been catching rats to eat in the hospital grounds, and lying low, and waiting. His houndish nose told him that Rafi was still there, and his houndish nature told him to stay until his master wanted him.

  The road and the traintrack across the lagoon to Venice were long and thin, like a piece of cobweb stretched over a puddle. At the station there were crowds of people, busy and hurrying. Charlie saw them by peeking through the curtains of King Boris’s windows as the train pulled in.

  ‘Get back,’ said the King. ‘We don’t want anyone to see you.’ He had arranged for his section of the platform to be cordoned off, but even so they had to be careful.

  They were met by four men with a large shiny black covered cart. The Lions – including Primo – slunk into it, pouring off the train straight into the cart like long dollops of golden syrup. They curled up on the floor and waited patiently, as if to say, ‘We’ll do this for now, but don’t push us.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ said the King. ‘I wish I could come with you. I hope to see you again. Good luck.’

  His black-olive eyes had a sadness in them, which looked almost peculiar in such a cheerful man. He went back into the train and Charlie’s heart felt a pang: their kind, funny protector was gone. But then – they had never expected to have a protector in the first place, and they were still under his protection anyway, because Edward was with them.

  They came out of the station. There, down the wide steps and across the pavement, where the road should be, was water.

  Even though he was expecting it, it made Charlie blink. Water! There was no street – no cars, no traffic lights, no horses, no tarmac … just swishy green water. And boats. The city was riding on the sea. The city was the sea. The sea was part of the city. Across the water was a pink hotel, the Hotel Carlton Executive, and a green dome covered with a web of scaffolding. And somewhere out there were his parents. His heart lifted.

  A long low black boat was waiting for them round the corner on a quiet canalside. Charlie knew what it was – a gondola. Its high curved metal prow rose way up in the air. It was much bigger than he’d expected. Getting on, and looking up, Charlie nearly fell over backwards. It was so high at the ends, and so low in the middle.

  The Lions poured from the cart to the gondola. There was no one there in that out-of-the-way corner and in the dusk they seemed invisible – even to the gondolier, a blond, broad-shouldered, snaky-backed young man in sunglasses who needed a shave. Charlie looked at Edward and realized that people working for King Boris – or for Edward – would make a point of not noticing anything they weren’t meant to. The boatman gazed serenely ahead into the evening sun, which was burnishing the surface of the water till it looked like liquid gold. Charlie and Edward sat back on low black leather seats; the Lions lay in a pool of darkness on the floor. How easy life must be when you are rich, Charlie thought. How kind of the King to give us the benefit of his wealth. How glad I am not to be skulking through the back streets of this strange and crowded city, looking for a quiet place.

  ‘To the Doge’s Palace, Claudio,’ said Edward in his quiet
way. ‘A delivery before we go home.’

  Claudio, when Edward wasn’t looking, raised an eyebrow that suggested he didn’t think much of the Doge, didn’t much care for going to his palace and thought delivering him a letter was a particularly tasteless idea.

  Charlie, however, was impressed. The Doge was the ruler of Venice! They were certainly not skulking now – far from it. They were swanning down the Grand Canal in a beautiful lacquer-black gondola, pushed along seemingly without effort by the gondolier’s twisting oar. The smooth waters dimpled and eddied beneath them and the great city of Venice crowded up on either side. Charlie, for one, was goggling.

  There was no pavement here: just old old palaces built of white, grey and pink marble, rising directly from the golden waters, with great striped poles set in front of them, blue and white and gold, for boats to moor at. Each building seemed soggy to the knees, like a hem that has trailed in a puddle. A great many had scaffolding around them; some were completely covered with enormous cloth hangings, bearing a picture of what the palace beneath was meant to look like, and would look like again when the builders had finished restoring it. And all around them, around their balconies and gardens, their tall walls, and rows of arches, was the water.

  Charlie had known, of course, that Venice had canals instead of streets, and that it was built in the middle of a broad, shallow, muddy lagoon, and was made up of islands. But he had expected it to look more like islands (with beaches and trees and fields) and less like a city. It was as if the city swamped the islands, spilling over the edges, encrusted over the top like icing on a cake. He liked the image: lots of fantastically iced cakes crammed with grand icing buildings, set in a shallow sea and joined by bridges.

  Just as he thought it they came to what he could only call an iced bridge: the Rialto. It rose up in an arch over the canal, and it was covered, all over, with buildings – little shops, on both sides, full of pretty stuff to buy, and busy people buying it.

  Charlie knew that hundred of years ago Venice had been one of the greatest cities in the world, with art and wealth and architecture beyond compare. Every merchant who came was required by law to bring something beautiful for the Doge’s personal chapel, the massive five-domed Cathedral of St Mark, so the city was full to the brim with statues and paintings and ancient wonders, jewels and mosaics, marbles and gold, jasper and alabaster, bronze horses and stone dragons, columns and arches, silver lamps and roofs of gold. As well, there were the works of Venice’s own artists and musicians, and of all the artists who came to see and experience Venice’s beauty.

  Brother Jerome had explained to Charlie how the first buildings of Venice had been built like seabirds’ nests, half on islets and half on wooden platforms over the muddy waters of the wide lagoon. Later brick houses and marble palaces had been built on top. Eleven rivers gushed into the lagoon from the north, and the sea swept up into it from the south, stirring up the mud and rotting the wooden foundations. Charlie had learned how, as the world had got warmer, the water levels had got higher, swamping the thick, tufty salt marshes which used to protect the city from the sea’s big waves. After that, the winter storms had rushed in unchecked to hurl huge waves at the old buildings, battering their delicate carvings, scouring their balconies and washing them away, bit by bit. Men had taken natural gas from mines beneath the city, which made the city itself sink down further into the mud. A greedy businessman had been allowed to build a huge oil refinery by the lagoon, which attracted immense dirty ships and spat all its filth out into the waters.

  Gradually the great buildings of Venice had started to tip and totter, to subside and sink. The bell tower of St Mark’s had fallen down – they’d rebuilt it. Rats and sea salt and mankind’s pollution had eaten away at the buildings. At high tide beautiful white churches sat helpless in filthy water, the grey-green dampness creeping up them till they looked like rotten teeth. Arched stone-stepped bridges rose directly from the surface of the water, leading from nowhere to nowhere. Ornate doorways that used to lead on to white marble quaysides now led straight into the water, and the water stank and overflowed into marble-tiled courtyards, and grew strange and revolting algae. Charlie had seen photographs of St Mark’s Cathedral standing at the end of its long, wide piazza, with a great flat mirror of water in front where usually there was paving. The venditori who sold pigeon food and postcards and ice cream now sold wellington boots and inflatable boats as well. The Venetians put out long wooden walkways to get across the floodwaters. They had to be careful to see where shallow flooded pavement ended and deep canal began. The surface of the water looked the same and a person could easily fall if they didn’t watch out.

  He’d learned about the Great Wall that had been built in the twenty-first century: a floating wall with seventy-nine gates that could open or close when a ferocious tide was coming in, to divert the worst waves away from the canals and buildings. He’d heard about the floating artificial islands which, though they would not stop the tide or the great waves, would calm them a little before they unloosed themselves on the beautiful, sinking, drowning city.

  And he knew what everybody knew: that this hadn’t worked. Venice had finally fallen, tumbled into the mucky lagoon. Most of the island called the Giudecca, and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, lay in piles of white rubble in the greenish depths, and the Venetians and art historians and engineers and musicians and architects and tourists had stood in rows and wept.

  Charlie knew about all this, but he had never seen Venice and, as the boat brought him down the Grand Canal in the low golden light of that spring evening, he gasped.

  The buildings became fancier and fancier, carved into rows of arches, cut-out circles and flowers, vines running along between columns, balustrades and peacocks, balconies and exquisite doorways, niches and inset panels and birds on the corners, buttresses and windows, angels and spandrels, traceries and pinnacles, lions – lots of lions – but all very flat, as if made of plywood. Or carved from ice cream … These beautiful buildings rose straight out of the water like teeth from a gum.

  It all looked so clean. How could it be being destroyed by dirt and pollution? (The answer, of course, was that it was being scoured away bit by bit, by polluted wind and rain, and the scouring made it clean as it destroyed it.) Small, dark canals led mysteriously off the big one, between tall buildings. Clean washing flapped gently from lines strung across them. Gondolas rode high and shiny in the water; the striped mooring poles stood proudly. Charlie caught a glimpse of the great Cathedral of St Mark as they passed by, and the two tall columns on the waterfront. On one stood a statue of a noble, ancient lion, holding an open book, great wings on his back.

  ‘Look,’ he hissed to the Young Lion, who was gazing up from the depths of the gondola in uncomprehending wonder. ‘A lion!’

  The Young Lion smiled and nudged the others, who all looked up, saw their relative, and twitched their whiskers.

  The gondolier, Claudio, without looking at Charlie, began to speak.

  ‘The Winged Lion of Venice is the Lion of San Marco, whom you call St Mark,’ he announced. ‘He holds a book which read: “Pax tibi, Marce, evangelista meus. Hic requiescat corpus tuum.” In English this mean, “Peace be with you, Mark, my evangelist. Here shall your body rest.” ’ He peered suddenly at Charlie. ‘Evangelist means person who goes out and about to say the words of God to people who don’t know about it,’ he said. Then he continued: ‘A long long time ago San Marco, who was the friend of Jesus and wrote one book of the Bible, was returning to Rome. He sheltered for the night on the Venetian lagoon because there was all enemies everywhere for him, and an angel appeared to him and greeted him with these words, “Peace be with you” etcetera, which was very nice for San Marco because, you know, he was pretty tired and hungry.

  ‘Then a long time later after San Marco was dead and buried in Egypt, in year 828, two good Venetian men went in there to that tomb and stole the body. To smuggle it past the guards they hide it in with a lot of pork
, which they knew the guards don’t touch because they are Muslim and for them pork is very dirty.

  ‘So. They brought San Marco back to Venice and presented him to the Doge, and the Doge builds the church for the body of San Marco, and Venice is very happy because we have a real saint, a big saint, all for ourself, and Venetians start to put lions everywhere, for San Marco. You will see them! But then, when they rebuild the church in year 1063, they hide the body because they think maybe somebody will come to steal it, because in those days they think a saint’s body can make miracles, and so they hide it very well. In the end too well – it is lost, and no one knows where it is. So when the new church is ready and they give a service in the church for dedicating the church to God, and – OH! – in the middle of the service – BOUF! – out of a column burst the arm of San Marco! Break right out of the column, with a golden ring on his finger.’

  ‘Good timing!’ said Charlie.

  ‘Yeah!’ said the gondolier. He was manoeuvring his boat up to one of the mooring posts in front of an immense pink palazzo. ‘Some people say it was all planned on purpose to look like a miracle.’

  Charlie smiled. Faking a miracle! ‘But why a lion for St Mark?’ he asked.

  ‘Is in the Bible,’ said the gondolier. ‘Is a winged lion, six wings and all covered with eyes. Is because Mark says always how God is magnifico like lions.’ He gestured up to the Lion on the column. ‘This one here he is bronze, his eyes agate, he weigh 3,000 kilos, has been there 1,200 years. Probably he come from the Middle East like Jesus, but he is older than Jesus. Or maybe he is Chinese. Maybe his wings don’t belong to him at first but arrive later. No matter. In time of war the Lion is shown with his book shut – no “Peace be with you” then. You see him like that at the Arsenale, where the ships are made. Napoleon – you know Napoleon? French guy, short, invaded everywhere? – he changed the words on the book. He wrote: “The Rights of Men and Citizens”. You see, the Lion of San Marco is everywhere in Venice. We like lions.’