37

There were a dozen pig shambles in Venice. The one Tycho was delivered to by Amelia on a hot summer night was on the city’s northern edge; ten minutes west of della Misericordia and almost opposite the island of San Michele. Like all slaughterhouses it was as far away from human habitation as possible. Which translated as far away as possible from anyone rich.

So it stood on the lagoon’s edge, with a gently sloping floor that let the bricks be sluiced and the filth be washed into the sea. Although little was left after butchering. Outside, in a stinking pen, pigs milled and snuffled and slopped up to their knees in their own dirt, or the dirt of meat before them. They were jointed according to Guild rules; not to be sold within twenty-four hours of slaughter or longer than ten days after. Their blood, guts and viscera made sausages. The skin became leather, and the hooves and long bones, once split for their marrow, boiled down to glue.

Even individual vertebra provided soup. The method used by Master Robusta involving two cuts, one either side of the backbone, instead of the more common single cut that split the spine down the middle.

Most of the pork was salted and sold to ships moored in the Bacino di San Marco, since they needed to revictua for their journeys south. The better cuts ended up on stalls in the Rialto market, and pork sausages fed the poor across the city. Master Robusta’s place stank. It was a shambles after all. But it stank no worse than other slaughterhouses and smelt far better than the tanneries. And, unlike the iron foundries to the west, it was unlikely to kill you with air poison while you slept.

“What brings you back here…?”

Amelia jerked her thumb at Tycho, scowling as Master Robusta grinned at his silvery braids and white skin. “Don’t say it.”

“You have a letter?”

She gave him Atilo’s note, waiting while he broke its seal, read the contents and held the single sheet of paper over a flame, letting it burn to his fingers before letting go and watching embers dance away.

“Every month?”

Amelia shrugged. “I don’t read. Anyway, it wasn’t shown me.” Glancing at Master Robusta, she added, “I’ll be accompanying him.” Her tone said how much she liked that idea.

“We kill, gut and joint every minute of every day, except those forbidden by the Church. These days we use cleavers. Your master has asked you be taught the old ways first.” Walking to the back, Master Robusta chose a knife from a rack. “Use this,” he said. “It’s too old to damage.”

It might be old but it was sharp. The edge so honed it curved like a sickle moon. That upset the balance.

“Good enough for you?” Master Roberto and Amelia were watching him. The butcher’s look was half amused. Amelia’s harder to read.

“May I?” Tycho nodded to a sharpening wheel.

“It’s sharp already.”

That was when Tycho knew he was expected. The business with the sealed letter was play-acting. At least on the butcher’s part. Amelia had probably been told after Tycho, which was less than an hour before. Walking to the wheel, he set it spinning and ground wood and slivers of tang from the handle, until the knife balanced properly.

“Where did you learn to do that?” The first words Amelia had spoken to him since they left Ca’ il Mauros. Since he could hardly say, Watching Lord Eric’s armourer, he shrugged her question away, watching her mouth tighten.

“Through here,” Master Robusta said.

A dozen men looked up but it was Amelia they watched as she moved among them like a black lynx jostling a herd of something too stupid to know just how dangerous the newcomer was.

“Take a bench each.”

Amelia shook her head. “I’m just here to watch.”

The master butcher looked as if he might disagree. Instead he shrugged and told her to keep out of the way if she couldn’t be useful. Point made, he nodded to an oak frame hung with two pulleys. “I’ll show you once only.”

A small boy dragged in a pig, which he trapped between his knees, before fixing two slipknots round its hind legs and yanking on a rope that ran between three pulleys. In no time at all he had his victim hanging upside down.

Kicking a tub into place, Master Robusta took the knife, yanked back the squealing pig’s head and slit its throat. He began cutting immediately, ripping down the animal’s belly to drop pulsing guts into the tub. They landed with a splash he ignored. The butchering was brief and brutal, two slashes down the spine, forelegs, shoulders, flanks, saddle… He stripped meat from bone and severed joints with a ruthless efficiency that spoke of thousands and thousands of animals before this one. When he looked up, he found Tycho watching with a fierce intensity.

“Think you can do that?”

Tycho nodded.

“Then show me.”

A boy dragged in a second pig and looped its legs, hoisting the shrieking beast into the air and wrapping its rope briskly around a hook. Then he vanished, one of a dozen junior apprentices, to do the same for another butcher.

Gripping the animal’s snout, Tycho slashed.

He expected red mist and shifting shadows. A fear his dog teeth would descend had travelled with him across the Rialto bridge to the doors of the shambles. He felt nothing. Without considering, he dipped his hand into the blood flowing from the animal’s slit throat and drank. It tasted mud-like and flat. The fierce flame that heightened every sense was missing.

In the moments following he repeated Master Robusta’s movements exactly. Splashing viscera in the blood-filled tub, slashing parallel lines either side of the spine, and butchering the animal with cold efficiency that left him time to think about the slaughterhouse around him.

Amelia was scowling. Master Robusta’s gaze was keen.

Other butchers stopped to watch until Master Robusta’s glare returned them to their duties. Fresh pigs were dragged in and hoisted, gutted and killed, often in that order. The shrieking was hideous, sometimes unbearable. And the iron stink of blood, and the smell of shit, and the heat released from the butchered pigs, joined to that of the summer night outside, filled Tycho’s hairline with sweat.

“You’ve done this before.”

Tycho shook his head.

“But you’ve killed?”

“Wolves,” Tycho said. “People.” He looked at the one-sided battle around him, the slick of spilt blood and the twitching bodies. “Although killing pigs doesn’t seem that different.”