6

The shock of an arrow striking blew breath from the boy’s body. And the pain in his shoulder opened the boy’s mind to a vision that swept in like smoke.

In the smoke a veiled woman smiled, then scowled and began to protest as her image blew away, leaving him spitting water. When she reappeared, she was sitting on a squat throne with a thin young man in black clutching her knees.

“Join us.”

“Where am I?” he asked.

She looked puzzled, as if this was not what he was meant to say.

But already he was thinking other things. Clutching at passing fragments of memory, he tried to recall why he’d been locked behind the false bulkhead of a ship. Fire and ice, earth and air. Fire started this. A blaze swept through some building. A man killed another. A sour-faced woman hated him worse than ever. He fought to remember who she was.

Who he was.

But the foul-tasting lagoon swallowed the boy before he could remember more than a single word: Bjornvin. The word made no more sense to him than his vision of the veiled woman. Since the men who hacked him free were heading in one direction, the boy let cross-currents sweep him in the other.

He wondered what would happen. He’d die, he supposed. Perhaps he should stop swimming to see how sinking felt?

Stopping kicking, the boy let his shackles pull him under.

And, tasting salt, let himself sink further. Opaque above, darkness below. His toes squelched on soft mud in a channel. Minor canals in Venice were cleared every ten years, waterways and large canals whenever necessary. He knew nothing of this. He simply felt softness beneath his toes.

Sinking deeper, he felt gravel.

His lungs pulled life from the water rushing into them.

Flickers of lightning twitched his limbs as fire lit behind his eyes and he felt his body fight itself, without understanding how it won the battle for life. Slamming into an ancient wreck, which crumbled as he snatched for it, he let a brutal undercurrent sweep him sideways before kicking for the surface.

The burning ship was far behind and buildings lined the horizon ahead of him. Above, in gaps between the clouds, was a bowl of stars. More stars than any man could count. Should he be able to count beyond his fingers.

The boy had reached the Grand Canal without knowing where it was, what it was or anything about it. As his eyes struggled to focus and his body shivered, and his guts retched filthy water, he accepted the embrace of an incoming tide. Then a spasm locked his stomach, and the sky became purple, the moon hurt his eyes, and bitterness filled his throat.

“There you are…”

The words were not his.

They came uninvited into his mind. With them an image of the woman he’d seen in his head earlier, when he was drowning. An old woman with a young woman’s smile. A young woman with an old woman’s eyes. Thin wisps of smoke across her face like a veil, which blew away as he stared harder.

“Alexa?” he said.

“Who told you my name?”

Having no answer, he felt her try to pull clues from his ruined memories. All she found were the names others had once called him.

“White hair is descriptive. You is a pronoun. Tadsi is an Old Norse pun on shit, and Tychet means idiot. Here we’ve Latinised it to Tycho.” She sounded darkly amused. “Keep the last. It suits you.”

Tycho forced her voice away.