The Venetian Contract (16 page)

What if the citizens were not bottled together to die? What if they could breathe
this
air, not the choking smoke of burning myrtle? If he could just take them away, treat them as he wanted, not with witchcraft and superstition but with the sound medical precepts to which he’d dedicated his academic life.

He breathed out the horrors of the day in one long, defeated breath and looked right out to sea. On the distant horizon, through the sickly yellow mists from the plague fires which were rolling into the lagoon, there where the air was clear, he saw where the silver line of the sea clotted into a collection of islands. The glass island, the lace island. And beyond, the lazarets.

In the distant horizons of his mind, a vague notion clotted into an idea.

Chapter 13

W
hen Feyra woke that first morning in Venice, she thought her father was already dead.

Heart thumping, she lay still for a moment by his side, suspended in the moment, afraid to look. But while the front of her body was warm, pressed next to his fevered form, her back was cold and stiff. The warmth gave her hope.

She rose from the litter and stretched. The starlings in the broken eaves were already awake and saluting the day. She went outside and saw a world transformed; a kindly sun shone, the rain and storm clouds were gone. The stones themselves revealed the crystals and fossils trapped in the wall and fairly sparkled, while the grass glowed and glittered with dew. Feyra’s spirits lifted a fraction. Her father might yet live.

She went to the well in the middle of the ruin, and today had the time to work out the pulley system. Since the bucket was long gone she lowered a strip of her father’s coverlet, baiting the chain like a fisherman. She lowered the hook to the distant depths and hauled it back up, dripping. She sucked the cloth dry, the water tasting surprisingly fresh and clean, thanks to yesterday’s deluge. Feyra soaked the cloth again, returned to her father’s side, and squeezed
the water into his mouth, closing the rigid jaw with her fingertips so that he swallowed.

Then she sat in a sunny archway and removed her medicine belt, rubbing her waist where it had chafed and blistered her for days. She spread the knobbly leather belt on her knee and examined it. The vials in the holsters seemed intact – one of the little corks was gone, and she’d lost her supply of rue, not such a loss, for it was a common enough herb. The thought pulled her up sharp. It had been common enough in Constantinople. She was in a different terrain here.

The dried herbs in the little pockets had been soaked by seawater and rolled to a damp mulch, like the herbs the caliphs rolled and smoked in their
narghiles
. Feyra had several wondrous compounds here, from humblest lemon balm to powdered jewels. There was even, wrapped in a vine leaf, a greasy little knuckle of ambergris. Taking the vials and pockets and folds in all, she had about a hundred medicines collected painstakingly over months and years.

Feyra decided to make a last concerted effort to save her father. She rejected the notion of compound medicine –
murekebbat
– as she did not know enough about her adversary to tailor a cure. She decided instead to employ the practice of
mufradet
, the simple pharmacy of single plants. She would dose Timurhan with each medicine in turn, spaced by the sound of the bells which struck every hour, leaving aside the compounds that she knew to be strongly toxic. She began her regime with cinnabar – red mercury, which she knew in small amounts to be an excellent purifier of the blood. She took from a leather fold a fan of silver medicine spoons that she’d had made in a back street silversmith’s in Sultanamet, of varying sizes connected by the handles to a
hinged ring. She spread the spoons like a fan and selecting the tiniest, tapped out a minute heap of powder from the selected vial, and poured it though Timurhan’s cracked lips.

With nothing to do now but wait, she knew she must take care of her own body. She broke off a small hunk of the bread Takat had left behind and forced herself to eat it slowly. Then, her growling hunger barely sated, she wandered the ruin, seeking the rue she had lost. She dropped to her knees and combed the damp grass with her fingers – the dew was refreshing and cleansed her grimed nails. She peered carefully at the grasses that grew around the old stones, the hardy flowers that squeezed between the masonry cracks and the herbs that fringed what seemed to be foundations for some ancient garden.

Feyra breathed in the myriad of scents as the sun rose and coaxed the leaves to unfurl and the petals to open. A skilled herbalist, she looked carefully at the shapes of those leaves and the colour and number of those petals. Some plants she could identify, some she couldn’t. She did find more common rue for her belt, though, growing near the well.

She gave a little cry of triumph and knelt to examine the familiar feathery plant, with its glaucous blue-green leaves and yellow flowers. Her knees soaked and chilled in the waterlogged ground as she tilted the leaves to pick off the precious fruits, lobed capsules containing numerous seeds. Heartened, she searched further, and in one stony corner beneath a fallen corbel, found a real prize: a bush of wood betony, growing in its beloved shade. Here, as her searching fingers grasped and snatched at the tough roots, she found a more tangible treasure, a round, metal disc.

She rubbed the coin on her filthy breeches until she saw
a dull gleam of gilt. She carried it to her mouth and bit down.

Gold.

She examined the coin in the dappled light winking through the arched windows. On one side was a man with a beard and arms outstretched – she knew this man, he was the prophet called Jesus, and his sign was the cross. On the other side there was a man kneeling to another man. The kneeling man wore a strangely shaped hat, and the standing one had circle about his head. The circlet-wearer resembled the statue she had seen on one of the great twin pillars between which Death had walked. But the kneeling man’s identity was a mystery.

For a moment Feyra held the cold metal as if it burned her; but then she tucked the alien coin firmly in the bandeau which bound her breasts. She had no idea of the value of the thing but it would surely buy a loaf for her father, perhaps some wine and flesh too. The thought made her mouth water.

The bell brought her to herself and she returned for her father. It was time for his next dose, and she blessed her luck. She would try a decoction of betony, which was proven to be most efficacious for sores, boils and pushes.

Perhaps it was the rising light, but her father looked a little better to her eyes after his treatment. She bowed her head and prayed over him, trying to remember the exact wording of the priests.

One of the main precepts of Ottoman medicine was the concept of
Mizan
– Balance. The balance was crucial to health, the duality and equity between body and spirit. One could not be well without the other, and the body had to be treated as a whole. With this in mind, when she rose from
prayer, Feyra turned her attention back to her own well-being. Her own odours offended her and her hair was crackling with lice. She contemplated climbing into the well, but the salts of the sea would better cleanse her body and her clothes.

Taking her father’s coverlet from his motionless body, she took it down to the deserted seashore. There she stripped beneath the blanket and lowered herself into the water, gasping at the cold of it despite the hot sun. Holding on to the little pier with one hand she scrubbed at her body with the other with a handful of salt and sand until the minerals stung her skin. Then, leaning forward, she dipped her whole head, scrubbing at her scalp with leaves of the tea tree from her belt to combat the lice, and wringing out the wet rope. Shivering, she combed the dark mass as best she could with her fingers, cracking any lice she found between her nails. Then she plaited it, like the Odalisques did, folding the strands in on themselves like a mackerel’s bone.

That done, she dipped and scrubbed her clothes and veils and wrung them out, sprinting back to the protection of the buildings with her damp bundle. Once there, the coverlet wrapped around her like a dress, she hung the breeches, the bandeau and the shift around the wellhead, and draped the veils over the rusting wrought iron arch.

In the gatehouse she returned the coverlet to her father, thinking it might cool his fever, and sat shivering on the ground beside his bed, curled up as small as she could, clasping her legs to her, chattering chin on knees. For the next hour she shivered by her father, waiting as long as she dared before dressing again, almost weeping as she pulled on the still-damp clothes. Then, as her head emerged from her shift she was startled by the sound of bells: first one church
on the island, then another, began to ring – to be answered by the churches across the water in the city, one, two and then all of them together. Had the alarm been raised? Were they about to be discovered?

Terrified by the bawling of the bells, Feyra lost all track of time and the rest of the day passed in a muddle and jumble of herbs and a muddle and jumble of prayers, until at last the light began to fail again. Feyra knew her father was growing steadily worse. Panicked, she contemplated what was, to her, a last resort.

Before the light faded and her courage too, she selected from her belt a scalpel sharp as a razor, fashioned by the same smith who had made her spoons. Then she slit her father’s shirt up the middle with the knife, and removing the poultices from his swellings, pricked the left bubo. Seized with a sudden notion, she lanced the second swelling and collected the black blood cleanly in one of her vials. Then she laid some lemon balm from her belt over the cleaned wounds.

She leaned in close to her father’s face in the dying light to look for signs of his reaction to the surgery. The bitter citrus of the lemon balm met her nostrils, and evidently his too, for, miraculously, he opened his eyes.

‘She wore a mask,’ he said, quite distinctly. He spoke as if he were picking up the thread of a previous conversation.

Feyra crouched by him in delight and took his forearm, kneading the frail flesh like dough. ‘Who did, my dear,
dear
father?’

‘She had a mask on a stick, it was a beautiful thing, wrought in silver and pearls. It was the head of a horse, I recall; she looked like a unicorn from the sagas. I had a little Venetian but mostly we spoke in mime like the shadow
puppets – do you remember the shadow puppets?’ His amber eyes were dulled now, but he knew her as he asked her the question.

Feyra nodded and squeezed his hand. Timurhan had taken her once to see a
Karagoz
shadow play in Beyoglu, spindly, curlicued silhouettes of a caliph and a concubine who moved and danced in perpetual profile as if they lived and breathed.

‘I asked her if she liked riding and she held her heart and told me it was her passion. She showed me the ring she wore, a subtlety made of glass. Her fond uncle had given it to her – she pointed him out, he was the Doge. Then when we rode, there were lemon trees; they whispered their approval as we rushed by. The horses crushed the fruits under our hooves. I can still smell them, Feyra. I can smell them now.’

She smiled at him, knowing he could smell the lemon balm, hopeful now, knowing he would mend, that her surgery had worked.

Then he died.

Once again Feyra had to choose between well and sea, this time for a much darker purpose. She did not want to bury her father on ground consecrated to another god, and could not risk breaking ground in another place. She did not want, either, her father to rest in this sea. Although the ocean had been his home, she did not want him to be bloated by enemy waters and washed up on enemy shores. She chose the well because there he would be speedily interred underground as instructed by the Prophet, but insulated by stone from the unholy place around him. This ruin was abandoned
– there seemed no danger that anyone would draw water from this forsaken shaft. And one day she might, God willing, be able to return and recover his bones, take him home and do him full honour.

It was impossible for her to drag the bed by its ropes so she rolled Timurhan from the cot in his coverlet, grateful that the counterpane encased him like a shroud and she did not have to look at his dear, dead face.

Still, it took her, in her weakened state, more than an hour to get him to the well. She took a last drink then hooked her father with his robes like a great fish, tipping him with an effort over the stone bowl, holding him in a last, terrible embrace, before letting him drop. Feyra shut her eyes, only hearing the chain paying out and the crash and splash as Timurhan hit the water. Then she looked down. The shrouded corpse looked for a moment almost as if it were standing, then the well waters, swollen by the rains, claimed the figure.