19

News of Bribanzo’s feud with Atilo was overshadowed by rumours that the Mamluks had abducted Lady Giulietta il Millioni to prevent her marrying King Janus, because an alliance with Cyprus would have given Venice the mouth of the Nile. Rumours that grew from abducting, to abducting and probably raping, and then to abducting undoubtedly, raping and probably murdering, as days turned into weeks.

The Cypriot ambassador said goodbye.

Regretful but implacable, Sir Richard Glanville boarded his ship and hoisted his king’s colours, and the colours of his Priory, and slipped through the sandbanks at the mouth of the lagoon into the Adriatic beyond.

His was the only vessel allowed to leave.

The ship that had sneaked from the lagoon was chased, stopped and boarded. It turned out to be Mamluk, but Lady Giulietta was not aboard. And its crew swore they had not put ashore since leaving Venice. Their captain died under questioning, still protesting he knew nothing about an abduction. He was a simple smuggler.

Trade ceased on the lagoon for the first time since Marco the Cruel overthrew the Rebel Republic fifty years earlier. Gulls still swept the waves, cormorants dived from posts holding fishing nets. They were the only movement. Food piled up on the mainland. Night soil was not collected. Cittadini made deputations citing loss of profits. Leaving shocked by Prince Alonzo’s contempt for their worries.

The city’s fishing nets, as famous as San Marco itself, hung from crossed poles, dry and unused. The small boats that should have collected the dawn catch remained beached on Venice’s mudflats. Ships at anchor remained there. Those waiting to enter stayed beyond the lagoon or found another port. Salt barges were refused leave to set out for the mainland. New barges, loaded with dried fish, salted beef and wizened fruit stored the previous summer remained on their mainland moorings, their produce slowly rotting.

“You must show yourself,” Duchess Alexa told the Regent. “Let the people see you. Reassure them.”

“You show yourself.”

“I’m in mourning.”

“It’s three years,” he said crossly. “Enough of the hiding in darkened rooms and refusing to appear in public. Take Marco and let the city see you.”

“Impossible,” the duchess said. “You know…”

“He can’t be let out in public?”

“Alonzo…”

“It’s the truth. And, speaking of truth, are you behind this?”

“Behind what?”

“Giulietta’s abduction?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Answer me.”

“If you remember,” Alexa said tightly, “I suggested her marriage to Janus. We need Cyprus to secure our trade routes. In fact, our future wealth depends on it. You seem over-friendly with the sultan’s ambassador. Should I be asking you the same?”

“Believe me, that’s changing.”

Stamping to the balcony, Alonzo glared through fretted shutters at a crowd on the Molo, the palace’s water terrace. Beyond them, to his left, the Riva degli Schiavoni was equally thronged. Most of those gathering were Arsenalotti. “Venice needs a duke who can control it,” he said.

“You, you mean?”

“It can’t be you.”

“Because I’m a woman?”

“And a Mongol. You know how they feel about that.”

The deal Marco Polo had struck with Kublai Khan to import goods from China made the city richer than ever before. Gratitude from the richer merchants had secured Marco the throne. The doge became a duke in power as well as name. The Council became the duke’s servant and not his master.

The price Kublai extracted was twofold. A fontego di khan near the Rialto from which to trade. And a guarantee that Khanic law would apply to all Mongols in Venice, whatever their crime and wherever that crime was committed. Marco III’s marriage had sweetened the deal on both sides. But Marco’s grip had been iron for all he claimed it velvet.

“They need a real duke,” Alonzo said.

“They have one.”

“Whom they see once a year. Heavily sedated. Painted white like some whore, drugged with opium, with his hands twitching like broken wings.”

“My son will never abdicate.”

“You mean,” Alonzo said, “you will never let him…”

It was what his niece’s absence represented, not the abduction itself, which drove the Regent to fury. All his plans, all his brilliance, simply wasted. He wouldn’t put it past the little bitch to get abducted on purpose…