Talina in the Tower

by Michelle Lovric

‘“To lie and steal!”’ called one of the rats. ‘Very clever! And what about “to wound and kill”?’

  Grignan lowered his eyes.

  ‘If these simple words defeat you, ’ow about the expression commonly used in French to signify …’ Mademoiselle Chouette busied herself with the chalk again.

  ‘Umm. Ahh,’ stuttered Grignan.

  ‘Really? Then ze French dictionary must be wrong,’ laughed the French mistress.

  Grignan recovered himself enough to snarl, ‘Why should I answer to you?’

  ‘The Chamber will observe that zis defendant cannot answer the most basic questions on la grammaire française,’ announced Mademoiselle Chouette. ‘A truly French creature would not need even to think about zese words. Zey would be on the tip of Monsieur Frenchman’s tongue, like the name of ’is own sister.’ She turned back to Grignan, ‘I ’ave listened to you. Your pronunciation is a disgrace. Your grammar is a massacre. Your phrasing is a shipwreck. That goes for all your kind! You are imposters, poor imposters at that. You attempt to disgrace the French nation with these appalling accents, unforgiveable grammar and unspeakable deeds. Your reputation, mes amis, is de l’histoire.’

  Mademoiselle Chouette stared straight into Grignan’s eyes across the room.

  ‘She doesn’t flinch!’ marvelled Talina. But she felt suddenly afraid for the French mistress.

  ‘Well said, sister!’ enthused a witch.

  ‘Brava!’ called the mounted heads.

  ‘Hear, hear,’ called the Righteous Wraiths.

  Mademoiselle Chouette turned to face the Doge and Have-a-Voices with a magnificent sweep of her silk glacé skirt. ‘I leave the next interrogator to shed more light.’

  It was now Giuseppe Tassini’s turn to cross-examine Grignan. Waving a roll of parchment, the historian explained how – in the middle of the preceding night – he’d finally succeeded in tracing the true ancestry of the Ravageurs.

  ‘And it turns out,’ Tassini told the Chamber, ‘that these creatures are nothing more than humble – if ravening – wolves from the Siberian wastes, who fled south from an exceptionally cold winter in around AD 400. They arrived in Venice just a few years before the humans. There were no heroic Lupine Wars. There are no ancestral lands.’

  ‘I just knew it!’ squeaked a mink. ‘But why don’t they look zackly like wolves any more?’

  Tassini smiled. ‘Passing through France, they were joined by a band of African hyenas who’d escaped from a circus in Marseilles. The resultant interbreeding explains the sloping backs and teeth formation of the Ravageur.’

  ‘So what about the French food?’ asked a plump squirrel. ‘The tournedos, the jus-es, the sauces? They picked that up on their travels too?’

  ‘Just so!’ Tassini flourished a large, dusty tome. ‘The pretensions of the Ravageurs are unmasked: their desire for fancy French food is revealed as another travesty!’

  The Righteous Wraiths stroked their chins and then nodded emphatically.

  A dignified zebra accused Grignan, ‘You are not even animals any more, you Ravageurs. Proper animals don’t carry on as you do. They do not have lords. Or slaves. They do not make plots. They just get on with—’

  Tassini explained, ‘The Ravageurs are afflicted with mange and may well be rabid now, poor creatures. Which would explain their recent aggression.’

  ‘Ugh! Can you get rabies from particles in the air?’ cried a squirrel. ‘Are we breathing it now? Oh! Oh! Oh!’

  ‘A little self-control, please!’ The small Doge rapped his crystal gavel, causing the goldfish inside it to swish around in a worried manner. The squirrel clapped a paw over his mouth with embarrassment.

  Tassini concluded, ‘But the hard fact remains – the Ravageurs’ so-called ancient claims to Venice are just as false as their French accents!’ Tassini turned to Grignan. ‘Do you deny it, sir?’

  The Ravageur Lord growled deep in his throat.

  ‘Call Counsel Ambrogio Gasperin once more,’ Tassini requested, ‘to finally settle our case.’

  Ambrogio stood up smartly with a thick file under his arm. He looked terrible, with dark circles under his eyes, as if he’d been up all night: which, of course, he had.

  Grignan’s brooding silence now had a definite smoulder of brimstone about it. He rose menacingly on his back legs, causing all the mounted animal heads to suck in their breath. Ambrogio kept his eyes fixed on the terrified Have-a-Voices. ‘Now I ask the Chamber to re-examine the primary evidence.’

  From his file, he produced copies of the document that he had made outside the tower.

  ‘No no no no no!’ hissed Talina. She wanted to run over to him and rip it out of his hands. Why was Ambrogio reminding the Chamber of the Ravageurs’ best case again? Was this what he spent all night preparing? She saw the professor and the historian exchange worried glances.

  Grignan leant forward in his cage.

  Ambrogio began, ‘My Lords, we do absolutely acknowledge that the Venetian Uberto Flangini bought the land from the Ravageurs at an exceedingly low price.’

  The mounted heads chattered and twittered excitedly.

  ‘What are you up to, Ambrogio?’ whispered Talina.

  Ambrogio winked at her, continuing, ‘But let us now consider exactly what old Verpillion Grignanne sold the Venetians in this contract. What was here in AD 421? Not a single house, let alone a palace. Not a church, nor a tower. No bridges. Nothing but isolated islands, barren marshes – a humid wasteland that flooded with every tide. Nothing but that dark and smelly substance so uniquely suited to the Ravageur tribe – mud.’

  The Ravageur Lord battered his head against the bars of his cage.

  ‘Grignan, I refute your claim that you ever owned Venice. Even if the Ravageurs were here first, just slightly ahead of the humans, your so-called Kingdom of Luprio was a fiction. In the time you spent as “lords” of this land, you Ravageurs cared for nothing, built nothing, made nothing, planted nothing.’

  ‘Not a carrot, not a cabbage!’ blurted a mounted rabbit head, only to be shushed by its companions.

  Ambrogio continued, ‘And who has the right to a city anyway – those who dishonestly claim ancient land rights … or those who actually build its wonders?’

  Ambrogio gestured expansively at the beautiful city below the floating room. ‘Wonders that reach up into the sky! Lovelier than any other city’s, past or present! Famed throughout the world! Who built these exquisite palaces, these graceful bridges, these lofty churches? Who brought trade here from all over the Mediterranean? Who created all the beautiful paintings and wrote all the learned books? And then made the elegant galleries and libraries to house them?’

  The small Doge commented, ‘Yes, I suppose a lived-in landscape has its biography, like a family. It is a point well made, Counsel.’

  Ambrogio blushed with pleasure. Talina clapped her hands.

  The mounted heads all swivelled approvingly in Ambrogio’s direction. A rabbit chittered excitedly, ‘Tell us more, little sir!’

  ‘It is the Venetians who made Venice what it is now. They dredged the canals and reclaimed the land. They put down the waterproof Istrian stone. They dug the wells for sweet water. They brought the railway right into the city—’

  Grignan muttered under his breath, ‘Wonders? The Venetians starved the natural canals. They stole the fish. They drove stakes into the heart of the soft mud—’

  ‘Since when did the Ravageurs care about the natural world?’ Ambrogio demanded. ‘I put it to you that the Ravageurs have a right only to the crude piles of mud that they sold Uberto Flangini.’

  ‘They were not crude,’ interrupted Grignan. ‘The detailing of our architecture is … ambiguous.’

  ‘Ambiguous! Murky, more like!’ Ambrogio’s voice rose. His stature seemed to grow. There was a strange angular cast to his shadow as he strode across the Chamber and his curly hair seemed even bushier than usual. ‘I put it to you that mud is all you Ravageurs are entitled to. May you live on, and in mud! M
ud, dark and dirty, is all you deserve. And who are you, you Ravageurs? Were you in Noah’s Ark? Are you noble beasts? You are not creatures who have made your way in the world, except by exploiting and killing others. You, with your mange and tapeworms, are just mange and tapeworms yourselves.’

  Professor Marìn muttered, ‘Ambrogio, this is not good law. This isn’t even good argument.’

  Tassini whispered, ‘The boy damages our case with these crude insults.’

  Grignan sat in his cage, his mane growing bigger and bigger, his eyes glinting.

  Ambrogio’s voice became unnaturally deep and he tugged at his cravat which seemed to have grown suddenly too tight. A few black hairs sprouted on the backs of his palms. ‘You Ravageurs are offensive wild animals. Ravening beasts, stenchy savages, creatures of murder. Venice is a great civilization. What right have you to even approach it?’

  ‘Ambrogio!’ protested Tassini. ‘One can go too far!’

  Talina cried, ‘You’re letting yourself down, Ambrogio. You mustn’t lose your temper like this. And remember, you absorbed the Spell Steam from the If in doubt too. If you get angry – well, you start to look like what’s making you angry. I told you this would happen. Open your collar, or you’ll choke.’

  As Ambrogio struggled with his cravat, a blush descended like a red velvet curtain. His Ravageurish features subsided quickly back to those of a spectacularly embarrassed boy.

  ‘I rest my case,’ he muttered, sitting down hard. ‘Talina, your turn.’

  By the time Talina had forced Grignan to admit to the Chamber how he’d kidnapped and enslaved the humans in the Ravageur kitchens, and had moved the Chamber to tears with her account of how he’d left her parents to starve to death on a remote island of worms, Grignan’s mane had inflated alarmingly.

  The Righteous Wraiths were convulsed with outrage. The witches had taken several turns around the room on their brooms, just to relieve their tension. Proceedings had briefly halted while the Doge had lectured them on their indiscipline. And the Penitent Hags had almost dissolved in tears of pity for the poor mistreated humans.

  Then Talina started on the Ravageur treatment of their own kind.

  ‘You have enfeebled your females with sugar and darkness …’

  ‘Oh no!’ wept the Penitent Hags. ‘Oh, ’tis too bad, too bad!’

  The witches listened stony-faced. But the drumming of their long black fingernails on the benches revealed their anger.

  Outside, dusk was falling. The Chamber of Conversation darkened. Winged cats flew about with tapers in their mouths, lighting the sconces on the walls, each fitted with a little bottle of Manitoba Gargling Oil with a wick inside.

  As the full moon began to rise in the sky, Grignan made low baying noises. His head swayed from side to side. His growls took on the rhythm of an incantation. His pitch rose higher to a screech painful on the ear.

  ‘What’s happening down there in the city?’ shrieked a mink.

  Below them, all the wooden poles along the Grand Canal burst into blue flame as if they were gigantic matches struck by an invisible hand.

  ‘It’s baddened magic!’ Talina’s voice was thin with horror.

  Grignan broke his chains and rolled round and round in a blur until he upturned his cage. He smashed his way through the wooden planks of its floor, and bounded to the centre of the Chamber, where he shouted, ‘Let’s save this court the travesty of a deliberation, and a false judgement. If the city is destroyed, then that’s the end of all controversy. If all the things built by the Venetians are gone … then the empty, wasted land will belong once more to the Ravageurs. Even the boy Ambrogio cannot deny that.

  ‘And lest anyone say that Luprio was but a single island, while Venice is a city sewn together by her three hundred bridges … well, I shall destroy every one of them. All two hundred and twenty-two arches of your railway bridge too! Without her bridges, Venice will no longer be a city. Just a clutch of smoking outcrops in the lagoon!’

  Laughing and roaring, Grignan leapt against the glass bubble, creating a clean circular opening. As the air rushed into the Chamber, he flew out into a soft starless night illuminated only by the fire-swept poles burning down to stumps in the dark, tumultuous water.

  the broken Chamber, the night of May 17th, 1867

  ‘THIS IS WHAT the Dark Snow Dome meant!’ cried Talina. ‘The Dark Snow Dome at the Sad Event!’

  She ran to the fractured edge of the bubble, pointing down. ‘They were ashes, those black flakes in the snow dome at the funeral procession. The ashes are real now. Grignan never meant for this case to be decided in a proper court. He planned to burn the city to the ground, right from the start.’

  Below them, the city was succumbing to the blue flames. Like a curtain caught by a careless candle, old palaces swiftly lit up with garlands of azure fire. Shimmering in the infernal heat, bridges were crumbling, buildings smouldering. The flames devoured all before them with a greedy relish, mumbling and growling as if with delight. The gloating of the fire was accompanied by triumphant howls echoing nightmarishly through the city.

  Ambrogio shouted, ‘Look at the gas-lamps! They’re exploding! And the wind’s a scirocco. That’ll just fan the flames.’

  ‘If the town heats up enough,’ Talina said, ‘then the gunpowder in all the chimneys will explode too.’

  The Penitent Hags laid themselves down on the floor and wept hysterically until the tears flowed into their shaggy ears. The witches screamed curses. The mounted heads whistled and shouted.

  ‘Order! Order!’ shouted the small Doge. ‘This is a Chamber of Civilized Conversation, not a Chamber of Chittering, Weeping and Screaming. You are Have-a-Voices, not Have-a-Fits or Have-a-Yowls!’

  The Doge banged his gavel so hard that the crystal smashed. Liberated, the goldfish made a heroic leap through the hole Grignan had made and plunged towards the Grand Canal below.

  From the Chamber, they could see Venetians fleeing as fast as they could in boats, looking over their shoulders to see the strange blue flames against which their fire pumps were utterly useless. Their faces were blue with the reflections of the fire. Old Rialto fishermen pushed wheelbarrows with their fishwives in them; women hurried children through the smoke to jetties where men loaded them into workboats. Soon the streets were all but empty.

  ‘The cats!’ Ambrogio cried. ‘The cats at the ostello can’t flee. They’re locked in.’

  ‘And what about the grannies of Quintavalle?’ Talina moaned. Then she thought, ‘At least Maggot Island must be far enough that the fire won’t spread there.’

  The small Doge raised his hand. ‘Professor and colleagues, I wish you where you need most to be, which is not presently in this place.’

  Talina felt a milky haze envelop her. Ambrogio and the others shimmered in her sight. When she opened her eyes again, they were standing, or swaying, in front of the Ostello delle Gattemiagole. Flames were creeping all around her. Perhaps Talina was imagining it, but each of those flames seemed to have its own vicious little face hissing and spitting with malice.

  Signorina Tiozzo was at the door, bent over the lock.

  ‘You had the same idea, young man?’ she smiled weakly at Ambrogio, her eyes streaming with smoky tears as she struggled with the key. She looked sharply at Talina. ‘Do I know you, girl?’

  The lock surrendered. Inside, the Contessa, Albicocco, Bestard-Belou and their companions lay panting on the ground.

  ‘My pretties are poisoned by smoke!’ wailed Signorina Tiozzo, rushing to administer teaspoons of water. ‘Look at them! Dying!’

  ‘Yer not wrong, missis,’ croaked Albicocco. ‘Get our pulses took. Yew’ll find none.’

  ‘Make wid da wreaths and weeping,’ gasped Bestard-Belou. ‘Reckon it’s all up with us.’

  The Contessa lay with her kittens around her. She opened her green eyes and uttered one piteous miaow.

  Professor Marìn put one arm around Signorina Tiozzo and started picking up limp cats with the other. He
said, ‘I’m taking you all to my house. I’ve put an Incombustible Incantation around it to fend off the flames. And I’ve got a portable one to get us there.’

  ‘What about the prisoners in the jails?’ Ambrogio said. ‘Who’s saving them?’

  ‘I’ll send the cats to pick the locks when they are revived,’ said Professor Marìn. ‘They can run faster than fire when they are fit.’

  Albicocco opened one eye. ‘We’ll want feeding up proper before you send us to work.’

  ‘In my present state I couldn’t eat a butterfly,’ moaned Bestard.

  The professor turned to Talina and Ambrogio. ‘You two – to Quintavalle! The fire will not have reached it yet. I hope.’

  ‘How can we get there?’ asked Talina, looking out of the window at the flames leaping from roof to roof.

  ‘You’ll have to “liberate” a boat, I’m afraid. Surely the most impudent girl in Venice can untie someone’s rope?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘Race the wind! You’ll get there before the fire if you turn off the Grand Canal at the Rio di San Giovanni Crisostomo. Make for the Rio di San Giovanni in Laterano and wiggle your way south and east down the small canals till you cross the pools of the Arsenale.’

  Ambrogio nodded. ‘And then out and right to San Pietro.’

  ‘And when we get to Quintavalle?’ asked Talina.

  ‘First, put the grannies into boats. And then make for the tower. It is where you’ll find Grignan. You must stop whatever murderous plans he has. Delay him, distract him. Just for a short while, I hope. I’ll join you as soon as the cats and humans are safe.’

  Professor Marìn began to chant his Incombustible Incantation. He, Tassini, Mademoiselle Chouette and Signorina Tiozzo wove a clear path through the flames, their silhouettes – black against the glowing blue of fire – distorted by the armfuls of cats they carried.

  Ambrogio and Talina ran to the Grand Canal and selected a sleek little topo. Each seized an oar, splashing themselves thoroughly in their enthusiasm. The coldness of the water was a relief amid the painful heat. They set off at a great pace, dodging falling debris and showers of sparks, and the tongues of flame that kept thrusting out at them from the alleys that they passed.