8
Street children. She should feel sorry for them, Maria knew that. Instead, they simply made her nervous. Listening carefully, she heard them arguing as they moved further away from her towards a warren of alleys.
Ahead was another shrine. This was not good. Five shrines in the last few minutes meant this parish was dangerous and the patriarch wanted to remind everyone that God watched everywhere. In Serenissima, he’d probably gone beyond shocked by what he saw. That naked body by the water steps for a start.
Just another murder the Watch would ignore.
Stranglings and suffocations were rare in Venice. Because Venetians believed a curse passed to the murderer if flesh touched flesh. Knifings were common, however. Why risk throttling someone when a dagger could keep their ghost at bay? So many in Venice believed this, that to beat someone to the edge of death and then knife them was regarded as simple common sense.
Pausing at a statue of the Madonna, Maria the cordwainer’s wife muttered a prayer for the dead boy she’d just seen. And finishing, turned to find him standing behind her, water still dripping into the dirt at his feet.
Although her yelp ended as he spun her round, fixed one hand over her mouth and dragged her to a doorway. One second, she stood at the Virgin’s shrine, the next she and the youth she’d thought dead watched a drunk wander from a tavern, stare around him and disappear the way he’d come.
The strange-looking youth didn’t have Mongol eyes. He was far too pale for a Moor, and he wasn’t Jewish, although she’d be embarrassed to admit how she knew. If Maria had to describe him, she’d say his cheekbones were Schiavoni, those incomers from Dalmatia colonising her city. Reaching out, he took her face and turned it to the shrine’s light. Amber-flecked eyes gazed into hers.
“Doesn’t that hurt? she asked, touching her finger to the wound in his shoulder. And suddenly she was held from behind, his face nuzzled her neck. He removed his hand from her breast the moment she burst into tears.
“Don’t hurt me.”
“… hurt me.” His voice echoed her plea.
Maria—who had no last name, because people like her didn’t—was fifteen and a half, being born in high summer. She was in a parish she barely knew, long after she should be home, in an alley with more shrines than a single street should need. As she registered this, Maria finally realised where she was.
Rio Terra dei Assassini.
I should concentrate, she decided.
Not least because the strange youth now stood in front of her again. She was a married woman out after dark and he was obviously foreign. When she tried to step around him, his face tightened, and she remembered his nakedness, the speed at which he moved, and how her father scowled before he lost his temper.
“You should let me go now.”
Releasing her, he watched her hurry away.
She kept her panic in check until she believed herself safe. Then her sobbing began, so loud and so open, the boy almost missed the point at which other steps began to follow her. Since most of those crowding the alley around him seemed to be ghosts—hollow-eyed and helpless, waiting to see what he would do—and this woman was undoubtedly alive, he decided to follow her too.