31

A thousand events happened next morning. Fishing boats docked on Venice’s northern edge, their nets safely reset. That day’s catch would go to feed the city, since it was Friday and eating meat that day invited the fires of hell.

Since none of the three corpses caught in the nets belonged to anyone who mattered, no fisherman was dragged to the leads, made to confess sins belonging to someone else and executed.

Master shipwrights scrambled from their mattresses, having bedded their wives for warmth in the minutes before the Arzanale bell rang. Apprentices and journeymen tumbled their women and left them with half promises of marriage, and a newly made brat to widen their wombs, as like as not.

The rope walkways, dry docks and shipyards of Arzanale were the source of Venice’s power. The older men still called it Darsina, from the Arabic Dar-al-sina, and a few even called it that. Across the city, foreigners—including those from the countries that gave the city that word—finished their prayers and rose to stock their stalls or unload boats or carry goods through alleys more complex than any minotaur’s maze. White men, black men, yellow men. A dozen face shapes and twice as many languages. Their laws did not require Friday fish but most ate it out of expediency. Although they called it politeness.

Night soil men carried waste to barges bound for the mainland. Butchers slaughtered pigs, working under canvas to protect them from the drizzle. The Church might forbid eating pork on Friday, but it allowed the butchering of swine and the preparation of tomorrow’s meat. Awnings or not, the dirt beneath the butchers’ feet still turned to slop from the blood, guts and excrement that spilled from the swine, along with their lives.

Whores swore, splashing water between sore thighs as brothels closed or shifts changed. Losers staggered from gaming houses, having mortgaged already mortgaged houses, as card sharps shook aces from their sleeves, and rolled loaded dice for that day’s luck, knowing that it was already secure.

Hearths were swept. Kindling chopped.

In the hours either side of the black thread moment Venice changed her masks like a gambler hoping to avoid his creditors as he heads for a new casa chiusa.

The sun rose cold and pale over the lagoon’s edge, where the first villages stood. A starving memory of the previous summer’s sun, which had glowed like slowly falling iron shot. And along the Riva degli Schiavoni, fighting memories of that summer sun, walked a young woman in a half-mask of her own.

The mask was cracked, found in the mud a minute earlier. Her shoes were filthy. Her velvet houppelande gown squalid enough to suggest she earned her living on her back. Lady Giulietta di Millioni was used to seeing Venice from the canals. Her Venice was ornamental and gilded, and glimpsed through the fringes of her gondola’s scarlet curtains. The rare times she’d left Ca’ Ducale, it was to walk Piazza San Marco. This Venice was unknown to her.

Stinking and strange and badly dressed. It didn’t help that her gown, as well as being filthy, was cut lower than it need be. A dozen men mistook her for a whore between the Rialto and the start of Riva degli Schiavoni. And Moorish sailors leered openly as she dodged between carts, calling out offers for her service she wouldn’t toss to a beggar. The sailors guarded women chained at the ankle. Criminals, Giulietta decided, then noticed their cheekbones and dark hair. Captured on the wild plains beyond Dalmatia, they were headed for slave markets in the Levant.

Fifteen ships lay close to shore between Ponte della Paglia, just beyond Ca’ Ducale and the bridge before Arzanale. French, Tedeschi, Byzantine, Andalusian and English… Lady Giulietta identified as many of the eagles, lions, fleur-de-lys and leopards as she could. Maybe, if she’d been looking where she was going, instead of playing herald, she wouldn’t have walked into a French officer, negotiating for a dozen large barrels of fresh water.

He swung round, hand on his sword hilt.

The Schiavoni laughed as Giulietta jumped back. And the French officer’s face darkened, thinking she mocked him. There was little doubt the merchant was. The Schiavoni were the largest group in the city after the Venetians. When Serenissima claimed the Dalmatian coast it gave the inhabitants trading rights. The new stone quay along the city’s southern edge became home to Slav traders. They built churches, scuole and hospitals, founded charities and supported monasteries with their tithes. They also built the largest water cistern in the city. It gave them, their competitors claimed, unfair advantage. But then Venetians widely believed anyone who came between them and a greater profit had to have an unfair advantage one way or another.

“Look where you’re going…”

Lady Giulietta glared back. When the young Frenchman scowled deeper, she made to walk round him and froze in shock when he thrust his arm out to stop her. He caught her wrist just ahead of her slapping him. Gripping it, he slapped her arse hard. “Sauce for the goose,” he said.

“How dare you?”

“Dare I what?” he asked, grinning. “Object to you slapping me. Or object to you trying to walk off without apologising?” He realised he still held her wrist when she did. Stepping back, he let his eyes flick to the Schiavoni, and Giulietta realised, belatedly, he was simply trying to regain his pride.

Men was her first thought. Her second was to say sorry. So she did, realising that was probably the first time she’d said it. Do I mean it? Giulietta ran back through not looking where she was going, running into him, and being cross. “Yes,” she added. “I mean it.”

Uncertain how to answer, the Frenchman turned to the Schiavoni merchant instead. “We have a deal, right?” Taking five grosso and two ducats from his belt pocket, he double-counted them, tipping the gold and silver into the man’s hand. “Deliver them there.” He pointed to a tired-looking lugger.

Surely he knew enough to make sure the casks were full? And was he really going to walk away without checking his supplier delivered the number of casks just paid for? How did she, who’d never paid for anything in her life, know he should do when the Frenchmen didn’t? Because she was Venetian, and he wasn’t, obviously enough. Nor was the water seller, but a hundred years of Venetian rule rubbed off on people. There was a joke about Schiavoni men. How can you profit from one? Buy him for what he’s actually worth. Sell him for what he says he’s worth. Buy a house with the difference…

“You,” she said.

The Schiavoni looked at her strangely.

“Deliver the right number of barrels. And make sure they’re full.” His scowl said he’d been planning to do neither.

She walked on. Head up, shoulders back. Doing her best to hold her misery at arm’s length. Squeezing between carts carrying swine, Giulietta stepped under a hoist lifting pigs into a boat, and only just missed being showered with the terrified animal’s excrement. Someone laughed. Laughing louder when Giulietta turned her head aside to hide her tears.

Beyond the Riva degli Schiavoni and Arzanale gates was San Pietro di Castello, the island housing Venice’s main cathedral. It was here Giulietta was headed, because when she’d summoned her courage to try the Patriarch’s little palace by San Marco, announcing she was a friend of his, she’d been sworn at, called a grasping little whore and damned for her impiety. When she insisted she needed to see him, she’d been told with a sneer to try San Pietro.

Despite taking her two hours to walk there, this being further than she’d ever walked before—certainly alone—and discovering an unknown city in the space occupied by one she knew; even though she crossed a rickety bridge to discover her confessor was dead, his body having lain in state in San Pietro, before being buried under the nave; and a sour-faced, wimpled nun, looking too much like another sour-face wimpled nun, had rolled her eyes at Giulietta’s sudden sobs, and sent her packing, with threats of a whipping, this was not the important part of Giulietta’s story that day.

This came shortly afterwards.

Her return from San Pietro di Castello was quicker, in the way such walks always are. On a mudbank before Arzanale two vessels rested on their sides; one was being caulked with twists of rope dipped in tar. The other had a hole in its side large enough to ride a horse through. Two men stood beneath, arguing.

By skirting the shipyard’s gate, Giulietta avoided being whistled at a second time. She avoided hoists lifting hog-tied swine, although excrement still splattered her as she waded, ankle-deep, through Judas-soft mud.

“My lady…”

She turned, surprised.

Her admirer was broad, high-cheeked and darkly bearded. Dressed in a scarlet doublet, tight black hose and a floppy hat. His codpiece was more prominent and more highly decorated than she’d seen. Eyeing the sailors watching her, he smiled lazily. “Eggs,” he said. “Have no business dancing with stones.”

“You know me?”

“I know quality.”

Her eyes tightened at his mockery.

“Believe me,” he said. “I mean no insult.”

And then, strangely, he leant close and inhaled her scent, as if smelling new-mown grass or some expensive perfume. And taking her hand, he opened her fingers to reveal a ring turned so its stone was hidden from view. The stone was priceless. The setting so old that much of its decoration had worn away.

He smiled and shrugged. His smile was easy and the shrug elegant. “I have… a certain facility for reading situations. And you, being beautiful, caught my eye. A second glance and I knew…”

“What?” she demanded.

He pointed to the chaos of the quayside. The penned pigs and sullen slaves. The whores stumbling from doors and blinking at the sunlight. The Schiavoni, the Mamluks, the Greeks. “That you don’t belong here. You belong in a palace.”

Maybe bursting into tears wasn’t her wisest reaction. Alternatively, it was exactly what was needed. Either way, she found herself in his arms, held tightly until the crying fit passed.

“Prince Leopold zum Bas Friedland,” he said, introducing himself. “The German emperor’s envoy to Serenissima.”

“Sigismund’s…?”

“Yes,” he said. “The emperor’s bastard.” Leaning forward, he kissed her carefully on the brow and she felt herself shiver. A part of her did more than shiver. It began to melt.

“I’m Lady Giulietta San Felice di Millioni.”

“I know,” he said. “All things come to those who wait.”

It was later, walking north, through alleys that Giulietta barely knew existed but which Prince Leopold seemed to navigate as if he’d lived his entire life in the city rather than it being the other way round, that she vomited. She did it guiltily. Turning aside and spewing against a wall, kicking dirt over her mess.

“Are you sick?” Prince Leopold asked.

She shook her head, face miserable and mouth turned down. Tears began to back up behind her eyes and she turned away again, unable to stop their fall and not wanting him to see her cry twice.

“What is it then?”

Maybe he read the answer in her silence, because he stepped forward to put his hand softly on her lower gut, feeling Giulietta freeze at his touch. And then, she felt a flutter beneath his fingers and his face turned white.