The Venetian (2 page)

Unaccustomed to the absence of fear in those he challenged, the worker tried to salvage the encounter. “Just see to it,” he sneered with counterfeit authority, but the moment for intimidation was past and both men knew it. The worker turned on his heel, a little too quickly, attempting to escape with the last menacing word before Paolo could snub him again. He departed, still puffed out in all the right places, playing at disdain but oozing humiliation. Paolo’s assistants were well acquainted with such daily displays, the thirsty workers invariably leaving the wine cellar in the same state—baffled as to how they could be so dismissed when they had honed their skills of intimidation to the finest of points.

Paolo’s enjoyment of playing with the workers had waned over the years, but he still practiced his craft; it was what he knew. It wasn’t that he didn’t respect the workers, quite the contrary. But when one does not care, one does not care to please.

Paolo sighed. The man from the rope shed would only be the first in a line of irate workers, each more arrogant than the last, although his hubris may have been well-placed. The State laid a permanent requisition on all crops of hemp grown in its considerable territories. Only after the government appropriated sufficient quantities for the Arsenale did it make the rest available for sale at a price regulated by law. As a result, Venetian cordage was superior to that of any other navy. Of course, workers building ship frames, developing powder, or designing artillery could all claim the same thing. And they would all be correct. Each area of the Arsenale produced a different prefabricated ship part, from rigging to munitions, and by outfitting a newly built galley with such standardized parts, the shipyard could conjure up a new vessel in just a few days’ time as though by magic.

This mastery of invention inexorably drew Paolo away from Murano. It was the opposite of what had awaited him there. It was the future and the glassworks was the past. And while his talents had been well suited to his father’s craft, he was forever attempting things that hadn’t yet been done rather than simply follow his father’s instruction. Always something new, Tomaso would lament. Always something else. And in the end, his father never forgave him.

That had been seven years ago. Although he and Ciro still saw one another, he hadn’t seen either of his parents. At his mother’s request, Ciro had tried to arrange a reunion five years before, and it had gone disastrously wrong. The two-year interval had not been long enough. Two years after that, Paolo’s mother was dead and Tomaso cursed his second son all over again. She had taken such joy from her family, and with her family broken, Paolo knew she had simply relinquished her hold on life. His father chose to bear no responsibility, laying the blame at Paolo’s feet. It was a charge no worse than the one Paolo leveled at himself and could do no more damage than a man’s own mind forever accusing itself.

“Canever!” Paolo turned to see Francesco’s plump body filling the doorway, arms outstretched to either apologize, embrace, or both. The crooked smile was firmly in place, the cheeks appropriately hued.

Two

Cairo

A
bramo Lanzi lifted his face to the cerulean sky and breathed deeply, filling his lungs with torrid desert air. Was there ever such a place as Cairo? The month long journey from Venice to Alexandria and onto the Egyptian capital was finally behind him, and he couldn’t wait to stretch a body that felt as though it had been folded like a napkin in a drawer since the last
Sensa
.

Fifteen hundred miles in a cramped cabin had taxed his long limbs, but in the end it would be worth it. With a thousand ducats to buy pepper and a forty percent profit from its sale, Abramo would have happily endured far worse. Because the Venetian merchant fleet was militarized, he could not make the journey in anything resembling luxury, the bulk of the massive galley being given over to cargo space and fighting men. He didn’t mind, indeed he loved the notion—waging war and doing business in the same breath. He had learned very early in life that he could have been nothing other than a Venetian.

He had sensed the African coast before it had come into view. Miles out, the sea became muddied by the outflow of Nile silt, Alexandria rising from the morning haze, a shimmering vision that swayed with the coastal breeze. Below, a frantic and disoriented hippopotamus struggled to stay afloat, wondering how it had been washed out to sea.

***

AWAITING THE ARRIVAL
of the spice caravans in the
fondaco
proved too taxing for Abramo. Sleeping quarters, warehouses, kitchens, a bakery, a bathhouse, a chapel, and a garden made it the most pleasant of prisons, but he longed to escape the melancholy of the once-great trading center, now little more than a tired port town.

Abramo had been taught the life of a trader at his uncle’s knee. A tender image when he took the time to think of it, but he had plans his uncle would never have dared. He would be a great trader, but he would do it his way. He had endured too many lectures on the fruits of hard work—pride, accomplishment, on and on.
Some people—his uncle, his friend Ciro
.
Afraid of their own shadows.
His uncle had even admonished him for associating with Signore Gambare, Abramo’s sponsor. The old man didn’t trust him.
If he only did business with those he trusted implicitly, he’d never make a single ducat.
Plodding away like a plow horse may work for some, but Abramo was smarter than that.

He booked passage on the next barge headed up the Nile to Cairo, planning a return to Alexandria in a few days. It was a pleasant trip, the scorching sun mellowed by the refreshing river breezes, the tall reeds on the Nile’s banks lazily waving him on toward promised riches.

***

NOW, STANDING HERE
amidst the jarring tumult of Cairo, Abramo knew the few ducats less he would have to spend on pepper once back in Alexandria were well worth the adventures he would have in such a city, one to easily rival even Venice. Silk, spice, gold, slaves: no matter which way he turned his head, a new wonder. Having left Venice in late August, he had only just missed the Festival of the Nile, which began on the day in late summer when Isis wept and the great river rose to its annual flood stage. He would have liked to have seen the festival, the spectacle of the city’s religious leaders rupturing the dike, flooding the city’s canals in water and ritual. Illuminated boats would sail the canals nightly as celebrants tossed candy and coins to children and the poor on shore.

***

AFTER HOURS OF
wandering, Abramo found himself in the capital’s outlying districts, although he couldn’t be sure where, dizzy as he was from the day’s carnival, the mournful calls to prayer from the Muezzins sounding like a keening lover. Little light found him here, the buildings like some ancient forest with limbs and leaves blotting out the sky. The odor of grime and urine pulled the bile from his stomach while the scent of onion and garlic, stuffed pigeon and roasted lamb made his mouth water.

The twisting maze of Cairo’s alleyways was even more baffling in the purple twilight. While every street near the city’s center was illuminated, filled with residents dining and shopping, light was mostly absent here, as were people. Abramo looked about for a friendly face.

“Thank heaven,” he murmured when he saw a man turn the nearest corner.
Il mio dio
but he was huge! A head taller than Abramo’s considerable height, he looked twice as wide. Piercing blue eyes sat above a great blond beard. He was covered in at least three layers of silk shirts with an outer cloak of scarlet satin embroidered in gold. Beneath the yards of vibrant fabric, he wore voluminous pantaloons of the finest Venetian cloth. An opulently jeweled scimitar hung at his waist. Had Abramo seen him in daylight, he would have been blinded by the sight.

A Mamluk. Abramo was well acquainted with the Mamluks, as was every Venetian merchant.
A very strange people
he reflected as the giant marched toward him with enormous strides, his pantaloons billowing.

The Mamluks had ruled Egypt for nearly three centuries and had been Islam’s elite fighting force for seven hundred years. A slave caste, they were white Eurasian men kidnapped or purchased as children and sold at markets in Damascus, Cairo, and Constantinople to be trained in equestrian fighting and rigorous Islam. Rather than reproduce with their women, they replenished their ranks with Caucasian boys purchased from slavers.

No wonder the brute is such a physical specimen.
They were specially selected as boys, he knew, by experts who examined their limbs, eyes, and teeth. In order to maintain control of the spice trade, it was crucial for Venice to cultivate its relationship with them.

“Ah, thank goodness signore,” Abramo breathed with obvious relief as he strode forward, extending a grateful hand to the stranger. “In all the excitement of the day, I seem to have…”

Abramo stopped suddenly as the scimitar entered his abdomen, piercing his back. Eyes wide in disbelief, his hand still extended in greeting, he looked down at the ruin of his body. Thick blood oozed from his mouth, salty and metallic. He could feel its warmth as he tried in vain to stagger backward, the blade still embedded in his torso.

The Mamluk’s blue eyes were impassive as he held the scimitar in place, patiently waiting for the Venetian to die. Abramo tried to speak.
What was happening?
He opened his mouth, bubbles of dark blood coating his chin. Finally he slumped, eyes frozen in bewilderment. The Mamluk dipped his blade and gently pulled, sliding the scimitar from Abramo’s chest. The body crumpled to the ground, its blood slowly mingling with the city’s dust like the ritual waters of the Nile Abramo had arrived too late to see.

Three

T
omaso Avesari shuffled slowly along the Fondamenta dei Vetrai in the small morning hours just before dawn. A chill wind blew off the canal. Pulling his light coat tight, he huddled, trying to lessen the surface area exposed to the sting of the swirling air.

He was getting too old for such early morning excursions, but his pre-dawn stroll had become a routine. He needn’t go out at all with the workshop attached to the house. But it helped clear his head of the fog from sleep and prepared him for the day. Besides, he had little choice until Ciro took over the daily running of the shop. His elder son had made great strides in his technique over the last few months he mused, ducking further into the coat like a badger into his burrow.

One of Europe’s most respected glass blowing houses, Avesari e Figli had become known for its expertise in the latest trends in decorative glass, particularly the
filigrana a retortoli
; vases, goblets and bowls infused with threadlike patterns of colored glass, as though lace were made from light itself. Tomaso was close to handing over the reins of the business to his son. He was tired yes, but still not ready. While Ciro had demonstrated a natural affinity for producing the clear
cristallo
glass and a firm grasp of the complexity of
lattimo
, the white glass mimicking porcelain currently in fashion with the Venetian nobility, he had yet to master the intricate composition of the
filigrana a retortoli
.

And then there was Paolo. Tomaso shook his head sadly in the unconscious reflex that always attended thoughts of Ciro’s younger brother. His disappointment in his second son was something he had never been able to conceal. Paolo had shown such tremendous promise, far more than his older brother, his talent nothing short of a revelation, and Tomaso had been convinced of his continuing legacy and the survival of Murano’s most revered family of glassmakers. But Paolo rejected his family’s art, choosing to waste his talents on shipbuilding in the Arsenale, Venice’s tribute to greed and the wars waged to protect it. Tomaso was devastated, taking Paolo’s decision as a betrayal. The relationship, once so loving, had become nothing more than two men with a shared name.

Merda!
But it was cold. His old bones were as peevish as the rest of him now. The flickering lamplight reflected in the canal’s restless water brought to mind the fireflies and warmer days of his youth. The squat buildings, shuttered against the damp, leaned forward, straining for a glimpse of the light play on the water.

The scraping of his soles rang loudly in his ears without the competing sounds of day. The skiffs and gondolas of the canal chafed against their mooring poles, protruding from the black water at awkward angles as though placed there by chance.

Finally the twin doors of the workshop emerged from the gloom, two enormous oaken tablets, gracefully curved at the top, embracing their reinforcing strips of iron, making the shop’s entrance look more like a fortress than the seat of gifted artisans.

While early mornings at the workshop were necessary to ensure a full day’s productivity, Tomaso knew that he was unique in his habit of commencing
this
early. And he attributed his success to that practice. Talent and technique were surely the lynchpins of his art, but many a talented
and
starving artist littered the streets of Venice. Desire and discipline, a strong work ethic, these were the things that kept his family from peddling his wares, beautiful though they might be, in dank alleys swimming with the stink of the canals.

The moment he undid the lock and pushed open the doors Tomaso knew something was terribly wrong. The smell blotted out everything else like a cloud covering the sun. It ravaged his nose, and his other senses along with it. It didn’t drift or linger, it attacked, and before even crossing the threshold, he was overcome. He turned, his limbs wheeling without direction, and opened his mouth to the canal.

He lay crumpled at the water’s edge, sobbing though he’d seen nothing. Between his violent heaves, when nothing more would come, he scratched at his eyes with the edges of his coat. Something horrible lay within. He knew that should he enter, he wouldn’t survive the sight.