The Venetian Contract (45 page)

‘The attack will begin on the twenty-ninth day of
mayis
. The day has significance for the Sultan because of the events of 1453.’

Feyra frowned. ‘1453?’

‘You may know the date better in our own reckoning. 857.’

Feyra breathed out slowly. All Ottoman children learned this date in the schoolroom, as the greatest triumph of the Empire over the Western world. ‘The Fall of Constantinople,’ she breathed.

By now, the thing could only nod.

By the Christian calendar this fateful date was two weeks away. She must act, once again, if she was to save the city from the final Tribulation.

But there was to be no saving Takat Turan. She gave him more poppy, but he was sinking fast and no longer had the strength to keep the decoction between his lipless mouth. She anointed his scaly body once more, but as the fire died in the hearth, so did he, as if the Salamander could not live without his sustaining flame.

Feyra took a shovel and went to the well where the ground was soft, and dug the grave herself. She rolled Takat in his own cloak and dragged him on the cloth to the well, rolling him into the hole. While she was covering the body with the earth, the peaty smell of the loam masking the stench of the cooked flesh, her mother’s ring fell from her bodice and swung free on its ribbon.

In the grey of dawn she turned it until the third horse was uppermost, looking at the little prancing white shape set in the crystal.

She felt eyes upon her. The stone lion on the well was watching her from above his book. Feyra dropped the ring and spoke to him. ‘Did you know this was going to happen?’ she asked. ‘Did you foresee this?’

The lion was silent.

‘Well, you had better keep this secret too.’

And, suddenly angry, she shoved the spade into the earth until it bit deep and stood, wavering and upright, where she’d left it.

Back at the house she did not look at the oily floorboards as she picked up the scattered pages of the Bible, leafing through until she found the Book of Revelation that she had
marked before. ‘
I heard the second living creature say, “Come and see!” Then another horse came out, a snow white one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other. To him was given a large sword
.’

She went to throw the pages on top of the smouldering ashes in the hearth, but stopped herself and tucked them instead in a crack over the mantel. Then she walked to the blanket chest below the window. She’d put away the green dress, with a sprinkling of camphor in the folds against the moth’s tooth. She had thought she would never again wear it, but she’d been wrong about that, just as she’d been wrong, so many times, when she thought the charge of the Sultan’s horses was over.

Feyra dressed carefully in the predawn, smoothing the green dress over her hips one more time and winding her hair around her fingers and pinning it up in the Venetian style. For when the sun was fully up she must go to Venice to visit Palladio.

It was time, at last, to see the Doge.

PART V

The White Horse

Chapter 41

F
eyra was back from the city in good time to say farewell to the Trianni family.

Mamma, who had sewn Feyra’s green gown, and Papa, who had been snatched from the jaws of the Plague in the Tezon, were helped into their boat first, kissing the hands that had helped them in gratitude. Valentina got in next, now with two babes, little Annibale and a girl she’d named Cecilia at Feyra’s suggestion. She kissed Feyra on her cheek just above her veil. ‘I won’t forget,’ she said, as her husband wrung Annibale’s hand in thanks.

Now is the time, Feyra thought, as they watched the Triannis’ boat sail away. Tomorrow, Sunday, Palladio’s plan was to bring her to the consecration of his church. The Doge himself would be in attendance. There was no knowing if the Doge would hear her; would believe her story or would clap her in chains. She and Annibale only had the certainty of tonight.

She unhooked her veil and turned to him.

They were face to face. Here was Feyra, there was Annibale.

He looked at her, half questioning, half smiling, as if he knew exactly what she wanted, as if he’d been expecting it. She was so close to him she could almost feel her flesh
against his. Wondering at her courage, she took him in her arms, and he did not protest. She lifted her lips to his mouth. She was about to close in for the kiss when she felt the heat from his face, a sickly heat that she had felt on her cheek a dozen, a hundred times, when she leaned into her dying patients to determine if they still breathed.

The heat she felt from Annibale was not passion, but pestilence.

Chapter 42

A
ndrea Palladio stood at the back of the congregation and listened to the consecration of La Chiesa del Santissimo del Redentore: his church.

The service was already in progress, but Palladio had not truly heard a word of it.

There was a constellation of richly dressed clergy and nobility crowded at the front in their stifling velvets. There below the altar was the Doge in his golden chair, wearing his
corno
hat and looking every one of his eighty-one years. Below him, on a gilded stool, his cropped head as golden as an archangel’s, sat the Camerlengo. Standing in his scarlet robes before them both was Bishop Giovanni Trevisano, Patriarch of Venice, his voice so sonorous and monotonous that Palladio wondered that he did not send the congregation to sleep. He had built the Patriarch a house once in Vicenza, and the man was an utter bore.

It was a warm spring day and the church was packed. The smell of human sweat was overlaid by the choking sweetness of incense belching in white clouds from the silver censers. Palladio was rammed shoulder to shoulder with his neighbour on his left and his right, and his irritation was only slightly offset by the little shiver of pleasure that neither the stout dame on his right nor the fellow on his left
– who must, by his reek, be a fisherman – knew that
he
was the architect of this wondrous place.

Palladio lifted his eyes up to the heavens, away from the crowded pews.

Not interested in the service, he just looked at his church. It was magnificent, and his pride was so great that he felt it literally swell his chest.

The projection of the spaces and masses within the church corresponded beautifully to the exterior façade. The tripartite scheme was reflected in the sequence of the nave, sanctuary and choir. And their separation was reflected not just in changes in floor height but variations in ceiling type, with the paired half-columns giving unity to the magnificent space, soaring from floor to ceiling. There were no frescoes, few paintings and little statuary. Unlike every other Venetian church, the beauty lay not in the decoration but in the building itself. It was not just beautiful, it was
clever
, so clever in its geometry. Palladio hoped that even if the common herd did not see it then God would understand – for were not the heavens and all things in nature constructed along geometrical lines? The golden section itself was exemplified by the curl of a fern, the spiral of a snail, the shell of the humble nautilus. He shifted his feet and looked down.

There he was. The nautilus.

Palladio had had the church paved in red and white
terrazzo
marble and in one of the tiles that the masons had brought him the architect had found a perfect nautilus. The head mason had asked him if they should discard the tile, as it was imperfect, but Palladio insisted that the fossil should stay. It was there now, beneath his feet, and he had set the nautilus tile in pride of place, not hidden, but in the aisle where it could be seen.

When he had first been given this commission he had thought himself trapped in Venice like the nautilus in stone. He had wanted to run from the Plague, to turn his back on the only commission the Republic had ever given him, his greatest work and the start, he hoped, of many. It seemed perfect to him that the nautilus sat at the very heart of the church; it was a jest that he was sure the Almighty would understand.

Above all, Palladio felt enormous relief. The church was not his any more; it belonged to the people and now it was up to the citizens of Venice to make it their own, Sunday by Sunday, week by week, year by year. He might never step into it again, for he never revisited his buildings. They were like a book, once written, closed by the author and never picked up again. His legacy was now out of his hands.

But he was satisfied that this church was good enough for God, for as the church neared its completion the Plague had lessened its hold on the city. He had heard it said on the streets that the Plague had been defeated by the fire that had purified the miasma of the city and that the new miracle linctus of Teriaca had prevented any new cases. But Palladio knew the truth: it was the dome. Feyra’s dome, Sinan’s dome,
his
dome. He had captured a cerulean orb of heaven and bound it in a sphere to rival the infidel builders of the East. He had completed his contract with the Lord: a church in exchange for Venice.

He knew too, that after this commission, he alone would be entrusted with the rebuilding of the city, so that Venice could emerge from the flames like a Salamander, peeled of her old skin, cleansed and new. There would be so much to build, he thought with excitement. Palladio put his hand
to his forehead as if he could shield his thoughts from God, as he recalled the indecent relish with which he had pulled down the old Rialto Bridge. His dearest dream now was to build the bridge anew. He could see it in his mind, a white stone rainbow arcing over the Grand Canal, another keystone in his legacy. And who was more likely to get the contract than Palladio, friend to the Doge?