The Undrowned Child (16 page)

“I don’t imagine Lussa has made a mistake in a thousand years,” remarked Teo. “Hold this.”

She handed Renzo her brand and used both hands to stretch apart the branches of the bushes in front of them. Renzo shone the light through the parting. A small gravestone glowed eerily white among the green foliage.

Teo ripped at the branches, snapping off leaves and clumps of flowers until she’d cleared a space big enough to kneel down. “Now give me the brand, Renzo.”

It was a small, fairly new grave, just eleven years old—the first thing Teo noticed was the date carved on the top of the stone: JUNE 15, 1888.

Then Renzo, leaning over her shoulder to read the mossy writing, whispered, “No! I simply don’t believe it!”

Teo forced herself to read the rest of the tombstone. Carved into the flecked granite were the following words:

JUNE 15, 1888

MARTA AND DANIELE GASPERIN

DROWNED IN THE WATERS OF THE LAGOON. SURVIVED ONLY BY THEIR INFANT DAUGHTER, TEODORA. MAY THEIR LOVING SOULS

REST IN PEACE.

Renzo noted, “June Fifteenth! The anniversary of Bajamonte Tiepolo’s conspiracy!” Then his face changed. “But, the thing is …”

“Their infant daughter, Teodora,” repeated Teo. “I was a baby in June 1888.”

Teodora-of-Sad-Memory, that was how the book had first greeted her. Teo suddenly remembered the expression on her adoptive mother’s face when she called her “my water-baby”—it had always been sad, not joking. She felt sick and yet unbearably excited at the same time. Renzo’s incredulous eyes showed her that his thoughts were hurtling in the same direction.

“That seems to be what the mermaids are trying to tell you,” he said.

“How could Marta and Daniele Gasperin have drowned? Renzo, I know it’s not exactly historical, but do you know anything about it? Of course, you were a baby then too.…”

From Renzo’s waxen face, Teo understood that he did indeed know something, and that something was going to hurt, very badly.

“June Fifteenth, 1888,” said Renzo gently. “All Venetians know that date, Teo. That was the night of a terrible ferry accident in this very part of the lagoon. A vaporetto rammed a gondola accidentally in the fog. Ten people died. The captain of the vaporetto didn’t see a thing—he was set upon and murdered by a flock of seagulls that had gone mad in the mist. None of his passengers saw a thing either. So the accident was not reported straightaway. It was too long before anyone realized what had happened. It was also odd because the gondola sank to the bottom of the water—normally the wreckage would float. The fog didn’t lift for ages. And then it was a day before the bodies were washed ashore. They were all Venetians. It was one of the worst accidents of modern times.”

He spoke again, after a few seconds. “From what I remember about it, an entire family, several generations, died in that accident.”

He parted the nearby bushes, shining the brand on graves to the left and the right—more Gasperins, all with different ages but the same date of death. “The infant daughter, Teodora,” had lost her grandparents, her aunt, her uncle and two cousins.

“I am not an orphan. I come from a large family!” whispered Teo, with a sudden exhilaration. But that little flame of happiness was directly extinguished by a rush of sadness.

“No,” she thought. “My family lives in the Bone Orchard! I am still an orphan, just lots of times over. Maybe even just the ghost of an orphan. Nothing. Less than nothing.”

She had to ask, “So what happened to me, Renzo? How did I survive?”

Renzo’s lips were set in a tight line. There was something he did not want to tell her. “The thing is, Teo, nobody thought that the baby did survive. They found all the bodies except hers. For days people said that she was so small that … that …”

“Why do you keep saying ‘the baby’ and ‘her’? Why don’t you say ‘you’?” demanded Teo. “It’s perfectly obvious that I am that child.”

“It’s difficult, Teo. You see, the thing is … they said that the bab—you … had been eaten by fishes.”

“Eaten by fishes?”

“I’m sorry, Teo, that’s what people always said. If that baby was you, I don’t know how you survived or how you ended up in Naples. I don’t remember anyone ever talking about it. Look at how this gravestone is tucked away in a far corner of the graveyard. Hidden in the thick bushes. It looks as if someone planted them deliberately, if you ask me. No one comes here. I don’t know.…”

Reading his thoughtful face, Teo urged, “But I think you have an idea?”

“Well, I can take a guess. Say, you were so little and light—after the shipwreck you floated away to safety and someone found you. Perhaps whoever found you didn’t know who you were. Or, if they did, well, I’d lay money on it that the mayor rushed through your adoption to get you out of the city.… He wouldn’t want you here in Venice, attracting the attention of the papers, with anniversary stories every year to remind his beloved tourists of the tragedy. That’s not the type of publicity he likes. If my guess is right, then no one in Venice even knew that you survived.”

Given what Teo had read in the papers, and in the absence of any other theory, Renzo’s sounded all too plausible. The mayor was ruthless with the truth. He would do anything to keep the image of Venice bright and shiny. Teo imagined herself passed from hand to hand and out of Venice, her birthplace. Her life had been decided on the whim of the mayor. She’d been inconvenient, and for that reason he had sent her away. A little baby, she’d had no rights.

A hot red haze descended over Teo’s brain.

Renzo did not see the dangerous look in Teo’s eyes. He was musing, “And it’s probably why your adoptive parents didn’t want to bring you here. Didn’t you tell me that it took years to persuade them? They must have been afraid you would find out.”

Teo tried to breathe more slowly, but her blood was raging around her body. So many questions—including questions she’d not even asked—were answered by this sorrowful little gravestone. Teo remembered the poem in The Key to the Secret City, the one that had written itself on the page when she saw Maria together with the perfect young man who had turned out to be none other than Bajamonte Tiepolo.

“Renzo! There was something the book told me, before I met you. It was a poem about this place, about a secret hidden in the old Bone Orchard.”

“Can’t you remember it? Aren’t you supposed to be able to remember everything?” Renzo challenged. “You know, like a camera.”

Teo knelt down and closed her eyes. She focused all her thoughts on the poem that had printed itself inside The Key to the Secret City. Single words and lines tugged at her memory. Then her photographic memory framed the whole page, and she could read it as if it was written out in front of her. With her eyes still closed, she recited the poem to Renzo, faultlessly, including all the rats, the wells, the lions, the plague spores, the Butcher, concluding triumphantly:

Where’s our Studious Son? Who’s our Lost Daughter,

Our Undrowned Child plucked from the water,

Who shall save us from a Traitor’s tortures?

That secret’s hidden in the old Bone Orchard.

Teo repeated the lines: “Who’s our Lost Daughter, our Undrowned Child plucked from the water?”

Renzo whispered with a stunned expression, “Where’s our Studious Son?”

There was a new softness in his voice. Renzo knelt down beside Teo and awkwardly put his wet arm around her. Instead of his usual lemony, soapy scent, he smelt of the sea and of smoke from the brands. He said quietly, “Poor Teo, you’ve had the most enormous shock.”

Teo pushed his arm away. “I see, now that you know I am a Venetian like you, it’s fine to be nice to me. Before, I wasn’t good enough to tie your shoelaces! Is that it? I suppose now you think it’s all right for me to have the book?”

Renzo stared at her, frozen with confusion and embarrassment. Teo stormed off towards the far end of the cemetery. Her heart was pounding, full of a thousand emotions, about her unknown dead parents, about the crafty mayor. And about Renzo, who suddenly liked her, just because she was a Venetian!

She pulled up short, sobbing, at the end of the cemetery garden, by the edge of the lagoon. She saw Venice just a little way off, and suddenly she just wanted to be alone, to walk the streets of this city that did indeed belong to her. No matter that she was dripping wet, crying and furious.

“Teo Gasperin. That’s who I am,” she thought. “Or was.”

Gasperin: she was sure she’d seen that name on doorbells. She was going to run around Venice, ringing the doorbells of any Gasperins, to ask if they were distantly related to her. She would find her real parents’ house! She could not be totally forgotten in Venice! She’d show that smug mustachioed mayor! And his minister for tourism and decorum! She would not let the city forget her or her dead parents! The mermaids were waiting for her and Renzo at the main entrance to the cemetery, but she wasn’t accountable to them! Really, she couldn’t start too soon!

She stared at the restless water that lay between her and Venice. As a baby she must have been able to breathe underwater to survive when everyone else around her drowned.

“I think I’ll try that again!” she said to herself wildly, and dived into the black waves of the lagoon.

The warm water embraced her body. It was easy to hold her breath. Under the waves, she didn’t hear Renzo running and shouting after her. At the edge of the cemetery, he hesitated a moment, and then threw himself into the water. Renzo’s swimming was even weaker than he’d admitted. He trailed far behind Teo, who was still skimming under the surface at a furious pace. When she finally came up for air, the first thing she saw was Renzo, flailing his arms, fifty yards away. The sound of the waves drowned out his voice, but the moonlight fell starkly on his terrified face.

He mouthed the word “SHARK!”

Behind him, and cutting through the waves much faster than Renzo, the tip of a shark’s jagged fin appeared in dark silhouette.

Too late, Teo remembered the sharks. Absurdly, it flashed through her mind—Crafty as Cuttles! She had been not crafty but just about as stupid as she could be. As Renzo panted to her side, the sharks surrounded the two children, milling in circles.

A long gray form pushed between them, gashing their legs with its serrated hide. It was the most agonizing pain Teo had ever felt, as if her skin was being branded by hot tongs. And the sharks had not even used their teeth yet—teeth that curved visibly backwards inside their open jaws, ready to tear. From those jaws came an overpowering stench of rotten meat. Teo thought of the tourists gone missing since the lights went out in Venice.

One shark tugged experimentally at the sash of Teo’s pinafore and then ripped it right off. Immediately other sharks challenged it: in seconds the white sash was reduced to fragments of thread churning in the water. The same shark closed in on the cuff of Teo’s sleeve. She snatched it back and wrapped her arms around herself, frantically treading water. Another shark was butting Renzo’s shoulder, pushing him under the water. A third wrenched the caul off his neck.…

“Does it prove that I am not a ghost—if I am edible?” wondered Teo. And then, “But even if I’m alive I soon shall be a ghost, a mangled, eaten one.”

“I’m sorry, Teo,” sobbed Renzo. “I was horrible to you. A snob. So uncivil! Forgive me.… You deserve better.…”

“No,” gasped Teo. “I am sorry I lost my temper. You were my good friend. I would have loved to have seen the Archives with you. It would have been a pleasure.”

Were. Would have been.

The sharks jostled around the children, nudging them further away from the meeting point where the waiting mermaids might see them. One of the sharks ripped the seaweed bandage off Teo’s knee. Her wound was bleeding again. The smell of her blood seemed to rouse the sharks to an even more terrifying level of excitement. A gray monster snapped the caul off Teo’s neck and tossed it down its gaping throat. It appeared to find the caul appetizing, for it immediately loomed in closer again.

“I am meeting the same Fate as my parents,” thought Teo. “I shall die in the water of the Venetian lagoon. Though in a different way. A worse way.”

A shudder ran through her whole body, like an electric shock. What were the sharks waiting for? Why had they fallen so still? She almost wished they would just get on with it, so that it could be over. She turned to give one last look to Renzo, too numb to cry, just wanting a familiar human face to be the last thing she ever saw.

just before dawn, June 8, 1899

It was another face Teo saw. Not Renzo’s, and not the gray snout and cold eyes of a shark. No, a beautiful face. Ten foaming, crashing, screaming minutes later, Teo and Renzo were back in the underwater cave in the House of the Spirits. Teo was bleeding profusely from the shark scratches. Renzo was holding his shoulder, and grimacing with pain. Neither of them could quite bear to look at the other, remembering what they had said out there in the water, when they had believed they were about to die.

In moments Chissa was applying fermented chili jelly to their wounds with a gentle hand, while Lussa explained what had happened. “I grew Suspicious when You did not return after Twenty of your Human Minutes. So I sent out a Patrol. My Scouts sighted the Dog-Fish gliding towards Teodora and summoned Reinforcements from the Cavern.”

“What happened then?” asked Teo.

“A Hundred of my best Warrior-Mermaids closed around the Sharks, even as the Sharks were closing around You. They sang at the Tops of their Voices to stun the Beasts into a deep Trance.”

Chissa continued, “That’s when we moved in amongst them to take ye in our arms. I myself had the honor of reaching ye first, Undrowned Child, ye’ll remember.”

“The sharks didn’t wake when you swam among them?”

Lussa laughed. “Contrariwise, They were dreaming. Indeed, Some of Them were snoring in a most Unattractive & Chortling Manner.”

“But I remember splashing. And shouting.”

“Unfortunately, Some of the Hungrier Sharks lurched back to Life just as Their Supper was being taken away from Them.”

Chissa described how it had come to blows between the mermaids and the monstrous fish. The mermaids had thrashed with their vast tails, making a great white wedding cake of waves in the lagoon. Under cover of this she and Lussa had carried the children back to the secret submarine tunnel under the House of the Spirits.