The Undrowned Child (38 page)

“There’s nowhere to hide here!” observed Teo wretchedly.

“Yes, there is.” Renzo slipped into a crab basket tied to a boat at the edge of the water. He crouched down inside, pointing to another for Teo.

It smelt vilely of rotting fish inside the basket. The children were immersed in water to their laps. But at least they were invisible. From the baskets, they looked helplessly at all the gondolier children, the winged lions and the mermaids at the opposite side of the Grand Canal. All faces—angry, frightened and horrified—were raised up to the window where Bajamonte Tiepolo had appeared to them.

Some of the mermaids were busy pulling the chains and scraping the seaweed off the plain wooden poles that were bunched in threes with chains.

“The bricole,” explained Renzo. “They mark the navigable canals.”

“Why are the mermaids doing that?” whispered Teo. “It’s as if they’re grooming them.”

“I’ve no idea. The main thing is, how do we get you and the Almanac over to Lussa?” Renzo parted the slats of his basket and whispered across to Teo, “We can’t draw her attention to us, or Il Traditore will realize we’ve escaped. At least the Brustolons have stopped burning. There’s only a bit of smoke coming out of the window now.”

“I can get to the mermaids,” said Teo. “I can swim underwater.”

“No one could hold their breath that long.”

“No one except me. I’m the Undrowned Child, remember. I did it when I was a baby. I can do it again.”

“I hate to mention it, but … the sharks …”

Teo blockaded a memory of the gray killers closing in on them at the Bone Orchard by demanding, “Tell me the plan. That plan you were so confident about.”

Renzo did not look so confident now. Shyly, he whispered for a minute.

“That’s it?” she asked. “So simple?”

“So simple, it’s the only thing that can work.”

Teo nodded. Through the slats of his crab basket, Renzo handed her his penknife and motioned her to cut a hole for herself. “Below the surface. So they won’t see you. I’ll distract the sharks if they come.”

The knife slid easily through the straw sides of the basket. Teo slipped out into the water. At first, she tangled herself among the green weeds at the edge of the canal. Kicking off from the canal wall, she freed her legs and arms. She opened her eyes, saw barnacled hulls of boats and the tall poles that held up the palaces.

Almost immediately a dark shadow passed in front of her and circled back. It was joined by two others. Three pairs of ugly gray fins sliced through the water, making ripples around Teo. From their twitching noses, it was clear that the sharks had picked up her scent. They ignored Renzo’s splashing from his crab basket.

She stopped swimming, hoping they would lose interest if there was no movement to detect. Her heart pounded and her lungs felt as if they would burst. The sharks foraged yards from her, tugging up an old fishbone from the bottom of the canal, and then squabbling over it. Teo waited. The seconds passed slowly as hours. Her cheeks puffed up like a chipmunk’s. Her eyes were straining, her ears roaring.

“Water-baby,” she thought.

She had two choices, neither of them attractive. She could quietly drown down here, or she could swim up for air, drawing the sharks straight to her. She wouldn’t even make it to the surface. Teo swayed under the water. Her head swirled. Starved of oxygen, she felt light-headed and vague. She was beginning not to care what happened to her.

beneath the waves of the Grand Canal, June 15, 1899

It was then that the first fish arrived: a young branzino, slender and graceful. He hovered in front of her bulging eyes, and nudged her tightly sealed lips. That was all she needed! Teo tried weakly to swat him away. But the fish persisted. Suddenly he lunged at her, opened her lips gently with his thorny little beak and tipped a mouthful of air down Teo’s throat. Then he darted back to the surface for more air.

More fish came, each feeding Teo a mouthful of air. Each time she breathed it in, pushing the life-giving bubbles down through her lungs.

Lussa had once said, “Fish are the kindest-hearted Things in the Sea.”

Teo’s bursting head was flooded by a dreamy memory. She was a tiny baby, and it was the night of the shipwreck, when her real parents had died. In this dream-memory, little fish with bloated cheeks fluttered up to her baby mouth with their gifts of air. Others rushed off in the direction of the House of the Spirits, to tell the mermaids of the undrowned child under the sea.

“This is why I could never make myself eat fish,” Teo realized. “Part of my mind must have always remembered.”

And now, eleven years later, the fish were coming to her aid again—the fish of Venice, the delicate branzini, the sparrow-colored passere and the little anchovies shooting through the water like silver bullets. They were careful not to scratch her with their fins: the trail of her blood would lead the sharks straight to where she hid.

Meanwhile, the fight over the fishbone had taken the sharks a few feet further away. One of the monsters had taken a bite out of its rival’s fin. The water filled with cloudy shark blood. More long forms darted out of the shadows. The wounded shark was jostled onto its back, and its brothers began to lunge at it. The little branzino who first found Teo, now on his fifth trip portering bubbles, was caught up in the melée. One of the sharks snapped him in half. Teo’s tears joined the water.

A cluster of fish hovered by her shoulder, pointing their round eyes and jabbing their fins towards the opposite shore. She took her chance, crawling on hands and knees in the mud at the bottom of the canal. Every two or three minutes another fish arrived with a delivery of air. She glimpsed the silvery tails of the mermaids, making little churning motions to keep their owners afloat.

Quietly she swam among them until she spotted Lussa’s unmistakably jewel-like tail. She emerged. She knew she could count on Lussa’s queenly composure.

“Teodora!” whispered Lussa. “But How …?”

Between gasping for breaths, Teo whispered, “Shhhh. He mustn’t know I’ve escaped! Don’t show surprise, in case he’s watching with the telescope. Just listen.”

Lussa nodded tightly. She summoned a rank of mermaids to make a shield between Teo and the other side of the water. Then she ran a cool damp hand over Teo’s flushed face. “The Spell Almanac? How?”

“There isn’t time to explain now,” Teo said urgently.

The color drained out of Lussa’s face. “This means our Friend the Gray Lady is Dead?”

“Yes, it happened before the battle. Please, Lussa, I have to tell you …”

“Poor Creature. How Humanfolk can say that Felines are Faithless Beasts is quite beyond my Comprehension. There never was a more Staunch Animal than our Gray Lady. I regret that I never had the Honor of knowing Her personally.”

Teo said thickly, “The thing is, Renzo has an idea. First, someone fast, who can dig, must go to the Bone Orchard and find the skeleton of a man drowned long ago. The bones must be the same size as Il Traditore’s. They must be brought here.”

Lussa nodded, realization dawning over her face. She motioned to the circus-master Signor Alicamoussa. He leant over the water so she could whisper in his ear. He bowed to his lions, who drew in, exhaling their hot, meaty breath over Teo’s cold face. They looked curiously at the spells tattooed on her skin. One leant in close enough to tickle her with his whiskers. Signor Alicamoussa explained the plan to them in gestures and soft growls.

A small group of winged lions peeled away from the others, flexed their paws and flew off. Very quickly, they were back with dirty paws and carrying a second skeleton. The clean bleached bones were of identical size to those of Il Traditore. The mermaids deftly disentangled the chains from the bones of Bajamonte Tiepolo and wrapped them around the new ones, first snapping off the left hand, and breaking the neck. They laid the new skeleton in the gondola, in the same position, legs crossed, in which Bajamonte Tiepolo had inspected them with such fury from the palace window.

Lussa looked at Teo. “Yar, tolerably convincing, methinks. What next?”

Teo pointed to the real skeleton of Bajamonte Tiepolo, laid out on the stones beside them. “We must break up these bones and each stazio of gondolier children must take a separate part of Bajamonte Tiepolo as far as they can, and as fast. We have twenty minutes left now. At the end of the twenty minutes, the children must find a piece of earth, and bury their part of the bones as deep as they can, leaving no trace on the surface. No member of any stazio must ever tell anyone from the other stazioni where their piece is buried. Ever.”

Lussa nodded respectfully. “This could work. But the Children are scattered widely among our Troops. How are We to summon the Leaders of the Stazioni, without attracting the Attention of the Guards inside the Tiepolo Palace?”

Teo was silent. Then she unbuttoned one sleeve and raised it above her wrist. “Can you use me to help, Lussa?”

“The Spell Almanac? Yar.” A smile started to flower on the mermaid’s face.

Lussa took Teo’s arm and started to rub it with her finger, kneading the skin until the lettering of the spells stood out in sharp contrast. Teo could feel the letters growing fiery hot. The mermaid searched the spells with her fingers until she found one, near Teo’s wrist, that made her exclaim out loud.

“This is a Telepathic Spell,” explained Lussa. “It helps You put Notions into the Minds of Others. Teodora, my Vedeparole, You were Born to do This.”

Then Lussa placed her other hand on Teo’s forehead, where the old bruise still throbbed faintly. “Teodora, think what You desire for these Children to do. Think it in Words, as if It were a List of Written Instructions that They might read upon a Sheet of Paper. Think Slowly & Clearly. In Venetian, if possible.”

Lussa rubbed Teo’s forehead in gentle circular motions. Teo struggled to marshal her thoughts like soldiers. She tried to recall every word that Renzo had whispered before her underwater swim. “Please,” she begged, “let me remember it all.”

She made her memory work photographically, the way it worked best. In her head, she formed a picture of Renzo’s words, as if they were visible in the air, the way words appeared to her. Then she read them aloud to herself.

Lussa pointed behind them to the gondolier children standing in the crowd of Incogniti and animals. Teo saw the faces of the children looking up, rapt, towards the palace of Bajamonte Tiepolo. And there were her thoughts, translated into perfect Venetian, written in her own handwriting on the wall of the palace … the one place where Bajamonte Tiepolo and the Brustolons inside could not see it! Teo had never seen her own words in writing before. It was a strange experience. Her thought-writing was not the tidiest, but it had a flowing style to it. Most importantly at this moment, it was fast as running water.

The gondolier children read. Their faces changed, as they realized the horror of what they had to do, and the urgency. If Bajamonte Tiepolo guessed what was happening, their lives would be worth nothing.

Finally, Teo thought to them, “Do you swear, on the life of this city? That you shall never tell another soul where your part of the bones is buried?”

The children looked dubious. Teo felt fury rising within her. Would these children not help to save Venice? Did they not guess the consequences if they did not?

“Don’t you love your city?” she wrote furiously with her thoughts.

Suddenly, Teo saw the weak point in the plan. It was all very well for Renzo to envision it like a piece of history, like moving a chess piece. But how could she persuade these children to risk their lives, just for a faint hope of a sliver of an idea? They were only children, after all, children like herself.

But then Teo realized why the gondolier children looked so mutinous. It was not that they lacked courage or didn’t want to help. For them, the problem was in taking orders from a Napoletana, and an undersized one at that. Teo projected, “You don’t understand. I am really a Venetian! I am Your Lost Daughter! Your Undrowned Child! And this wonderful plan is your friend Renzo’s idea. I’m just the messenger.”

She looked over at Renzo’s crab basket on the other side of the canal. The back of his head was visible as he too read the writing on the wall. Right on cue, he turned around, stood up in the basket, and nodded vigorously back at her, and the children.

“Renzo’s plan!” whooped the children. “There he is! We shall carry out our Renzo’s plan!”

The children held up their hands and solemnly swore.

A chef-mermaid used a jeweled meat-cleaver to segment the real skeleton of Bajamonte Tiepolo into head and neck, torso, two arms and two legs. The crunch and splinter of bones echoed through the silent throngs waiting on the shore. One arm was of course missing its hand, for that was with the original owner. Teo shuddered to think what damage Bajamonte Tiepolo had effected with just that one hand—what would he do if he had his whole body back?

The bones were distributed in sacks. From their different sides of the canal, Teo and Renzo watched the gondolas streaking away, all the children grim-faced and leaning forward into their oars. A winged lion accompanied each boat, ready to dig the necessary holes.

the countdown, June 15, 1899

The young gondoliers were barely out of sight when the water gate of the palace burst open and Bajamonte Tiepolo strode out onto the jetty. He had changed his white bat-fur cape for one of emerald-green silk, so shiny that when it caught the light, it sent off vicious sparks that hurt Teo’s eyes. His hideous face, with a few sparse hairs growing from it now, was clearly visible. His nose had continued to grow, and now jutted out like the snout of one of his sharks.

The mermaids could be heard shouting, “Figure of a rat!” and “A disgrace to spaghetti!”

For once Lussa did not chide them. She murmured, “Indeed, Time has been rather Spiteful to our Enemy.”

Under his arm, Il Traditore held a roll of richly colored cloth and a weeping Maria. Behind him creaked the suit of armor, struggling with the bulging treasure-chest. Bajamonte Tiepolo whistled. A school of gray fins appeared in the water beneath him. He dangled Maria over the edge, letting the sharks get the scent of her. He remarked, “The trouble with a shark is that it does not make a clean kill. It will tear its supper to pieces, wasting much.”