The Venetian Contract (12 page)

As the seamen heaved it inside Feyra let herself go limp. To fight further would only be to hurt herself. She did not, at first glance, know any of these men. They were not her father’s regular crew and were dressed in the inky livery of the Janissaries, topped with black turbans.

As the sarcophagus was dragged to safety Feyra found
herself in its place, forced forward until she faced the silver wall of sea. Knowing she was now to suffer the fate she had planned for the casket, she waited for the shove that would send her into the deep, but heard a cry: ‘No!’

She wrenched around to see the man who had shouted. It was the one who had flung himself at the coffin, and he now stood as soaking as she. His turban had been snatched by the waves and his dark hair blew about his face.

‘You cannot kill her,’ he told the men that held her, his dark eyes stern and commanding. ‘She is the Captain’s daughter.’

Now she recognized him. She knew him a little – his name was Takat Turan, and he’d sailed with her father often. Closer to her in age than Timurhan, she recalled that Lepanto had been his first battle, and that her father had saved his life. If it was this that had made him save her from the brink, she could use his obligation to her advantage.

She scarcely knew what she must look like – dashed by sea-spray, her shift and breeches bespattered with filth, and now soaked and clinging. She had watched the Concubines practising their alluring glances and the Odalisques simpering before the looking-glass. She had no such arts, but she used all the power she had ever hidden beneath her veils, and put every pleading effort into her gaze. ‘Please,’ she said, looking only at Takat Turan. ‘Take me to my father.’

Takat looked above her head at the man who held her. ‘Do it,’ he said sharply.

The fellow shrugged. ‘Very well. I’ll take her to him. It comes to the same thing in the end.’

Behind her, Feyra heard the gantry doors being closed and secured. She willingly let herself be hauled up on deck and into the blinding light once again. She was
frogmarched to the aft end of the maindeck, astern of the great citadel doors, given over to the captain’s quarters.

As she was led to the night cabin on the starboard side, she wondered what her father would say when he saw her. As the door to the cabin was unlocked she was so eager to see him again that she did not even stop to wonder why he was under lock and key. But when the door was opened and she was propelled into the little room the reason became very clear.

Timurhan lay pale and sweating on his cot, and the fingers that clasped his heart as she entered were black.

Chapter 10

A
s the door closed behind her Feyra sank to her knees in front of the bed. She did not even hear the turn of the key in the lock.

The captain’s cot, suspended by ropes from a swinging bar attached to the deckhead beams, nearly knocked her over as she knelt. The bed was a symbol of status, a larger version of the common seamen’s hammock with wooden sides to maintain its shape and draped curtains to provide additional shade and privacy. But the rocking bed made her father seem as if he were a child in a cradle. Timurhan seemed diminished in her eyes as he lay twisted on the fine lawn coverlet; for a moment she was the mother and he the babe.

Feyra took the blackened hand and forced herself to regard her father with a professional eye. He was pale, and hot to the touch, his breathing laboured. She slipped a hand under his chemise and found the telltale swelling in each armpit. He knew her at her touch, for his eyes widened at once and he smiled weakly, trying to mouth her name with parched and cracked lips. Then the smile turned to distress as he realized what her presence might mean. The flicker of pain rent her heart and she embraced him hard and kissed his hectic cheek. ‘Do not fret,’ she said. ‘I have had the sickness and it left me. You will heal too.’

Feyra forced herself to believe it.
This
was why she was not cast into the waves,
this
was why ‘it comes to the same thing in the end’: it did not matter to the Janissaries whether she perished at sea or in this septic cabin. Well, she would defeat the pestilence once more, this time on her father’s behalf.

She stood, with difficulty, against the lurch of the ship and surveyed the cabin. There was a canvas drugget on the floor, painted to give the appearance of tiles, and carpets. There were paintings and pictures on the bulkheads and even a coalfired stove to provide heating in winter. But the aroma of woodruff and frankincense that sweetened the air was underlaid by a scent of putrefaction and decay. All this luxury served no purpose to her father now.

On the desk at the forward end of the cabin, Feyra found a crystal jug of water and a pewter one of wine. She swiftly poured a little wine into the water to cleanse it of any impurities, watching the grape must cloud like blood in the crystal. Then she took an ink sponge from the desk topper, tore off the stained blotter and dunked the sponge into the water. She carried it to her father and used the sponge to moisten his lips, squeezing it until a trickle fell into his half-open mouth, which made him cough a little – a good sign. Lastly she wiped the sponge around his face and his brow. Her ministrations seemed to give Timurhan ease, and it seemed to Feyra that his colour was better.

In contrast to her former prison, this room had lots of natural illumination – from portholes on the port side, through gratings in the quarterdeck above and from the portholes to starboard. The windows were so well glazed she could barely hear the screaming tempest outside, but the rain drummed at the portholes, each roundel of glass turned
tabor. She glanced at her father – oblivious to the external storm and locked in his own feverish battle, he had fallen into a fitful sleep. There was little she could do but wait.

At the captain’s desk a wooden globe spun on its axis as if all celestial forces had been puffed away and the four winds had dominion this day. An empty wine bottle rolled back and forth over the wood floor with the pitch of the waters. After a moment Feyra could not bear it and set the thing on its end on the desk.

She sat in the captain’s chair and peered through the porthole, wiping away the smoke of her breath. What she saw there made her wonder, for the second time today, whether she had died and passed into the beyond, for there, rising from the filigree of drifting mists before her, was a shining citadel set upon the water; with hoary spires reaching to the sky and ivory palaces crowding the waterfront. Even the driving rain could not diminish the strange beauty. The scale of the place was vast, and the harbour opened out into a wide square walled around by stone arches and pillars. A lofty tower stood tall over all, and a humped golden church, its painted colours varnished to jewels by the slick of rain, crouched in the corner of the square.

As she watched, the ship drew alongside two enormous marble pillars that rose high into the sky and Feyra felt the rattle and run of the rode chain as the anchor was dropped once more. She peered upwards, squinting through the deluge. One pillar was topped by some infidel saint, the other by a creature that she’d been taught to fear since childhood: a winged lion with a book.

She was in Venice.

A sound came from the cot behind her, and she turned to see her father shuffle to his elbows. A seaman to the bone,
even
in extremis
, he had heard the anchor too, and knew the hour had come. ‘Feyra,’ he said, with a gasping effort, ‘
Death is coming
…’

She understood his ravings better than he knew. She nodded and turned back to the window, and watched the gangplank lowered. Her view was restricted, but she looked beyond it, through the twin pillars, to where the great square lay, mirrored with water. Despite the flood of the vast space plenty of citizens were still abroad, stamping through their own reflections matter-of-factly as if such floodings were commonplace.

She changed places to the next porthole, peering down deckside as she heard the scrape and boom of the sarcophagus being dragged to the head of the gangplank and set down. Feyra watched with dread as the rivets were loosened, and the myrtle leaves cast aside to be snatched by the jealous wind. The Janissaries stood back in a semicircle, their heads now bare of their turbans, their livery hidden under wine-coloured cloaks. They were transfixed but afraid, as the thing inside lifted itself with a painful effort, trembling like a new-birthed foal.

First he sat, than prised himself out of the coffin with shaking arms braced at each side. He was a dreadful thing to behold. His shrouds were shredded and flapped like bandages – a swaddled charnel-corpse come to life. Someone tossed him a cape which unfurled in the air and cast a dark shadow over him like a cloud. He fumbled it on, drawing the black hood over his swathed head. Across the back was emblazoned a winged lion stitched in gold. The beast seemed to move with the ragged gasps of his wearer, the bony notches of his wasted back seeming to animate the lion’s wings as he struggled to breathe.

Now Death was clad, as was fitting, in black.

He stood for one instant at the top the gangplank, before stumbling down it, aided by the gradient and the winds at his back. On the dockside, Death fell to his knees, tried to pick himself up; couldn’t.

Feyra watched, wishing she could turn from the pitiful sight but unable to tear her eyes away. She was torn by pity for the fellow and a fervent hope that he would drown now, face down in the waters, or be dragged back into the sea by the ebbing flood that silvered and soaked his heavy cloak.

With superhuman will, he raised himself up and staggered between those sentinel pillars. By some strange fall of the cloak’s fabric it seemed that he was the only soul in that vast square without reflection or shadow. That and the voluminous black cloak, snatched and rippled by the winds, conferred on the dying man a malevolent, otherworldly appearance; he was the Reaper personified.

Feyra knew then that the galleas itself, and the cape with that dreadful chimera of the winged lion and the book, had been all part of the design. The citizens would see a Venetian ship, and an infirm man in an Admiral’s cloak, and run to help him. Already, some people were wading across.

She hammered on the porthole, shouting, but the glass was sealed shut. Proof to storms and battle, the pane did not even crack. Her knuckles were raw and her voice hoarse but it did no good. She ran to the door and rattled the clasp, but knew already it would be no use. She looked up, desperately rattling the gratings in the quarterdeck, trying to force them open. Despairing now, Feyra picked up the wine bottle and smashed it against the porthole, but the bottle shattered in her hand, the green shards slicing her flesh.

As she sucked at the bitter blood on her fingers, Feyra
saw a woman with her son in her skirts. The mother set the child down, tipping his little tricorn hat over his nose against the rain. The boy clung to her skirts though, refusing to be left, so they went to the cloaked figure together.

Feyra no longer shouted, but spoke to the woman in a desperate undertone: ‘
Please, please please turn back. Take your child. Be on your way
’. But the woman, with her son trailing along behind, came right up to Death and offered a hand. As if time had slowed Feyra watched Death’s black hand extend from his cloak, and close around the woman’s white one.

It was done.

She saw the woman recoil from the face she saw beneath the hood, saw the white hand snatched away and wrapped around the little boy, pressing the little face into her robes with the hand that had touched Death’s. A little knot of people came running, half wading, half running through the knee-high water to see what was amiss.

Feyra turned back to her father. She did not need to see the sequel to these events, nor tell him what had happened. He read all in her face, and fell back on his cot, defeated. The ship lurched again as the anchor was weighed and the galleass turned, the winds swelling the sails above, and the dock receding swiftly.

Framed by the porthole, Feyra watched the scene getting smaller and smaller. They diminished with the distance, that doomed little crowd of people clustering around Death, and she watched them till she could hardly see, until they were no bigger than the black spores of the Bartholomew tree.

Chapter 11

F
eyra returned to her father’s side – he was her only concern now.

She put away her other feelings. She’d been raised to hate the people of Venice, but she felt nothing but pity for that young mother and her child, and the others who had come to aid Death. And she had let
her
mother down; she had failed to warn the Doge of what was to come. But there would be time enough to repent at leisure. Her task now was to heal her father and get him home.

Having delivered its terrible cargo, the ship had now turned about and was sailing away from the city as fast as the canvases could carry it. Feyra knelt by her father’s cot to comfort him with this news. For a moment she thought he had already gone from her, but as she took his hand he woke, and coughed a little again. She was heartened – coughing was the body’s way of clearing foul ether from the lungs – and smiled at him. ‘Be cheered, Father. We are going home. Soon we will see the Bosphorus again and Seraglio point, and the dome of the Sophia gold in the sun.’

Very slightly, he shook his head. ‘
Giudecca
,’ he whispered, his voice a raven’s rasp.

It was a word she did not know, but she knew that the
Plague could produce ravings. She patted his hand, but he grasped it and held it fast. ‘Safe house,’ he went on. ‘Sultan promised.’