The Serpent of Venice Read online

  “To the republic,” said the senator, raising his glass.

  “To the Assumption,” said the merchant. “To Carnival!”

  “To Venice,” said the soldier.

  “To the delicious Desdemona,” said the fool.

  And the merchant nearly choked as he looked to the senator, who calmly drank, then lowered his glass to the table, never looking from the fool.

  “Well?”

  The fool swished the liquid in his cheeks, rolled his eyes at the ceiling in consideration, then swallowed as if enduring an especially noxious medicine. He shuddered and looked over the rim of his glass at the senator. “I’m not sure,” he said.

  “Well, sit, try a bit more,” said the merchant. “Sometimes the first drink only clears the dust of the day off a man’s palate.”

  The fool sat, as did the others. They all drank again. The glasses clunked down. The three looked to the fool.

  “Well?” asked Iago.

  “Montressor, you’ve been had,” said the fool. “This is not amontillado.”

  “It’s not?” said the senator.

  “Tastes perfect to me,” said the merchant.

  “No, it’s not amontillado,” said the fool. “And I can see from your face that you are neither surprised nor disappointed. So while we quaff this imposter—which tastes a bit of pitch, if you ask me—shall we turn to your darker purpose? The real reason we are all here.” The fool drained his glass, leaned on the table, and rolled his eyes coyly at the senator in the manner of a flirting teenage girl. “Shall we?”

  The soldier and the merchant looked to the senator, who smiled.

  “Our darker purpose?” asked the senator.

  “Tastes of pitch?” asked the merchant.

  “Not to me,” said the soldier, now looking at his glass.

  “Do you think me a fool?” said the fool. “Don’t answer that. I mean, do you think me foolish? An ill-formed question as well.” He looked at his hand and seemed surprised to find it at the end of his wrist, then looked back to the senator. “You brought me here to convince me to rally the doge for you, to back another holy war.”

  “No,” said the senator.

  “No? You don’t want a bloody war?”

  “Well, yes,” said the soldier. “But that’s not why we’ve brought you here.”

  “Then you wish me to entreat my friend Othello to back you in a Crusade, from which you all may profit. I knew it when I got the invitation.”

  “Hadn’t thought about it,” said the senator. “More sherry?”

  The fool adjusted his hat, and when the bells jingled he followed one around with his eyes and nearly went over backward in his chair.

  Antonio, the merchant, steadied the fool, and patted his back to reassure him.

  The fool pulled away, and regarded the merchant, looking him not just in the eye, but around the eyes, as if they were windows to a dark house and he was looking for someone hiding inside.

  “Then you don’t want me to use my influence in France and England to back a war?”

  The merchant shook his head and smiled.

  “Oh balls, it’s simple revenge then?”

  Antonio and Iago nodded.

  The fool regarded the senator, and seemed to have difficulty focusing on the graybeard. “Everyone knows I’m here. Many saw me board the gondola to come here.”

  “And they will see a fool return,” said the senator.

  “I am a favorite of the doge,” slurred the fool. “He adores me.”

  “That is the problem,” said the senator.

  In a single motion the fool leapt from his chair to the middle of the table, reached into the small of his back, and came up with a wickedly pointed throwing dagger, which caught his eye as it flashed in his hand before him. He wobbled and shook his head as if to clear his vision.

  “Poison?” he said, somewhat wistfully. “Oh, fuckstockings, I am slain—”

  His eyes rolled back in his head, his knees buckled, and he fell face-forward on the table with a thump and a rattle of his blade across the floor.

  The three looked from the prostrate Fortunato to each other.

  The soldier felt the fool’s neck for a pulse. “He’s alive, but I can remedy that.” He reached for his dagger.

  “No,” said the senator. “Help me get him out of his clothes and to a deeper section of the cellar, then take your leave. You last saw him alive, and you can swear on your soul that is all you know.”

  Antonio the merchant sighed. “It’s sad we must kill the little fool, who, while wildly annoying, does seem to bring mirth and merriment to those around him. Yet I suppose if there is a ducat to be made, it must be made. If a profit blossoms, so must a merchant pluck it.”

  “Duty to God, profit, and the republic!” said the senator.

  “Many a fool has found his end trying to resist the wind of war,” said Iago. “So shall this one.”

  TWO

  The Dark

  What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m walling you up in the dungeon,” said the senator, who crouched in the arched doorway to the chamber in which I was chained to the wall.

  “No you’re not,” said I.

  Indeed, it appeared that he was walling me up, but I wasn’t going to concede that simply because I was chained, naked, and water was rising about my feet. Cautious, I was, not to instill a sense of confidence in my enemy.

  “I am,” said he. “Brick by brick. The first masonry I’ve done since I was a lad, but it comes back. I was ten, I think, when I helped the mason who was building my father’s house. Not this one, of course. This house has been in the family for centuries. And I think I was less help than in his way, but alas, I learned.”

  “Well, you couldn’t possibly have been more annoying then than you are now, so do get on with it.”

  The senator stabbed his trowel into a bucket of mortar with such enthusiasm that he might have been spearing my liver. Then he held his lamp through the doorway into my little chamber, which he had already bricked up to just above his knees. By the lamplight I saw I was in a passageway barely two yards wide, that sloped downward into the dark water, which was now washing about my ankles. There was a high-tide line on the wall, about the level of my chest.

  “You know you’re going to die here, Fortunato?”

  “Pocket,” I corrected. “You’re mad, Brabantio. Deluded, paranoid, and irritatingly grandiose.”

  “You’ll die. Alone. In the dark.” He tamped down a brick with the butt of his trowel.

  “Senile, probably. It comes early to the inbred or the syphilitic.”

  “The crabs won’t even wait for you to stop moving before they begin to clean your bones.”

  “Ha!” said I.

  “What do you mean, Ha?” said Brabantio.

  “You’ve played right into my hands!”

  I shrugged, as best I could, at the owl-horking obviousness of his folly. (Shrugging comprised my entire repertoire of gesture, as my hands were chained through a heavy ring in the wall above my head. I did not hang, but neither could I sit. If I pulled the chain to its exact balance point, I suppose I could have flapped my hands at the end of their shackles, but I had no story to go with the flapping.)

  The senator chuckled and resumed troweling mortar for the next row of bricks. “We’re below the level of the lagoon. I could torture you to death and no one would hear you scream. But I prefer to go to my bed and fall into slumber wrapped in the sweet dream of your suffering in the dark, dying slowly.”

  “Ha! See there. I thought myself dead when I drank your poison, so for my money, I’m ahead of the game.”

  “You weren’t poisoned. It was a potion from farthest China—brought overland at great expense. It was already in your glass.” He reached into his robe and held up a small red-lacquered box.

  “Not poisoned?” said I. “A shame. I was enjoying my resurrection. I had hoped to come back taller, but then tall as well as roguishly handsome would
be gilding the lily, wouldn’t it.”

  “Would you like to wager on how long you might last? Two—three days, perhaps? Oh, that’s right, you can’t wager, can you? You have nothing.”

  “True,” said I. “Yet you see a victory in what is a simple truth for all of us, is it not? We have nothing, we are nothing.” The truth was, I had been nothing, felt nothing but longing and grief, since news of my sweet Cordelia’s death from fever had reached me three months ago. I did not fear death, nor even pain. I’d never have come to Brabantio’s palazzo if I had. That last moment, when I thought myself poisoned, I’d been relieved.

  “Well, you are nothing. Would that you realized that before you brought ruin upon my daughter.”

  “Portia? Oh, she’s not ruined. Bit sore, perhaps—might be walking a bit gingerly for a day or two from the rug burns, but she’s far from ruined. Think of her not as ruined, but simply as well used.”

  Brabantio growled, then, red faced, he thrashed his head in the portal like a dirt-eating loony. (I thought he might burst a vein in his ancient forehead.) He seemed unable to form any retort but steam and spittle, which I took as cue to continue.

  “Like a new pair of boots,” I said, Brabantio’s potion having made me especially chatty. “Like new boots you might wear into the water, so that even while enduring the squish and slop of them for a while, they cure to a perfect fit, molded, as it were, by experience, to receive you and only you. At which point you have to throw them over a chair and have raucously up the bum!”

  “No!” barked the senator, at which point he flung a brick at me that would have taken a kneecap had I not quickly pulled myself up by the chains. The brick thudded off the wall and splashed somewhere in the dark.

  “The strained-boot metaphor what sent you round the bend, then?” said I, a jolly jingle of my chains for levity. “You’re short a brick now, you know? You’ve bollixed up the whole bloody edifice over a smidge o’ literary license, thou thin-skinned old knob-gobbler.”

  “Tis my eldest, Desdemona, that’s ruined,” said the senator, pressing his point by placing a brick atop the wall.

  “Oh, well, yes, but I can’t take credit for that,” said I. And I was, of course, lying about his younger daughter. I’d never so much as been alone in a room with Portia. “No, Desdemona’s downfall is all Othello’s doing.”

  Another brick joined its red brothers in line. Only the senator’s face was visible above them now.

  “And but for your interference, he would be gone—or condemned, if I’d had my way. But no, you were in the ear of the doge like a gnat, making a case for your precious Moor, talking of Venice’s debt to him, spouting rhymes of how he was some noble hero instead of a sooty slave reaching beyond his station.”

  “Nobility and courage being frightening and foreign qualities to you—you piss-ant merchant, twat.” The senator was sensitive about his nobility, or lack thereof. Venice was the only city-state in Italy, nay, the only state on the continent where there were no landed nobles, largely because there was no land. Venice was a republic, all authorities duly elected, and it rankled him. Only in the last few months had he convinced the doge and the council to allow senate seats to be inherited. And because he had no sons, Brabantio’s seat would go to the husband of his eldest daughter. Yes, the Moor.

  “Strictly speaking, he didn’t really ruin her. I mean, she’s married to a general who will someday be a senator of Venice, so really, a step up from her bloodline, which I think you’d have to agree is as common as cat piss.”

  He growled and flung another brick through the portal. This one took me on the front of one thigh, which should have been more painful than it was. Considering it, I suppose I should have been more concerned for my fate. Perhaps the Oriental powder had made me giddy.

  “That’s going to leave a mark, Montressor.”

  “Damn you, fool. I will silence you.” He went back to his masonry with a fury that was making him breathless. Soon he was down to the last brick, just a square of yellow light from the port.

  “Beg for mercy, fool,” he said.

  “I will not.”

  “You won’t be able to drown yourself, I’ve made certain of that. You shall suffer, as you have made me suffer.”

  “I care not. I care for nothing. Finish your bloody business and be off. I’m tired of listening to your whingeing. Give me my oblivion so I may join my heart, my love, my queen.” I bowed my head, closed my eyes, waited for the dark and what dreams may come. I don’t suppose it occurred to me that I could be both heartbroken and dead.

  “Your queen did not die of fever, fool,” said Brabantio, a whisper now in the dark.

  “What?”

  “Poison, Fortunato. Formulated by one of Rome’s best apothecaries to mimic a fever, slow and deadly. Put into place soon after you arrived as emissary and spoke your queen’s strong opposition to our Crusade. Sent to Normandy on one of Antonio’s ships, and delivered by a spy recruited from her guard by Iago. We may not have landed nobles, but he who rules the sea, rules trade, and he who rules trade, rules the world.”

  “No,” said I, the truth of it burning through the haze of the potion and grief like a fire across my soul. Hate had awakened me. “No, Montressor!”

  “Oh, yes. Go join your queen, Fortunato, and when you see her, tell her ’twas your words that killed her.” He scraped the trowel around the opening, then fit the last brick and tamped it into place, plunging me into darkness as the water rose around my knees.

  “For the love of God, Montressor! For the love of God!”

  But the tapping had ceased and my last call on the senator’s conscience was drowned by his laughter, which faded, and was gone.

  THREE

  A Spot of Bother

  A spot of bother, innit: walled up and chained in the lightless, lonesome cold, seawater rising to my ribs, silence except for my own breath and a steady drip somewhere above my head. Then a slight scraping from the other side of the new wall. Perhaps Brabantio gathering his tools.

  “Brabantio, thou treacherous coal-souled wank-weasel!” said I.

  Was that cackling I heard beyond the wall, or just the fading echo of my own voice? The chamber had to be connected to the lagoon, somehow, but I could not hear even a distant lapping of waves. The darkness was so complete that I could see only the phantoms that populate the back of the eyelid, like oil on black water—“cracks in the soul,” Mother Basil used to tell me before she would lock me in the cupboard at the abbey at Dog Snogging, where I was raised. “In the dark may you contemplate the cracks in your soul wherein leaks wickedness, Pocket.” Sometimes I would pass days contemplating the cracks in my soul until the dark and I made peace. Friends.

  Recently I had thought I might make a friend of Death as well, meet its feathery oblivion with a soft embrace. My sweet Cordelia’s death had cleansed me of fear, of self-regard, and after weeks of drinking, of anger and control over most of my fluids. But now I was wide awake with both anger and anguish that my actions might have brought an end to my queen.

  “Thou wretched pillar of syphilitic pheasant-fuck!” said I, in case the Montressor was still listening.

  At least the water was warm. It being August, the lagoon had saved summer’s heat, yet I shivered. A drip of cold water tapped my left hand with the regularity of a ticking clock, and as soon as I would think of it, it would sting like a needle of ice. I found that if I stood straight, took my full weight upon my feet, I could rest my arms on a ledge of brick at the level of my shoulders, where the wall met the rounded vault of the ceiling. In that posture I could take the weight of my arms off my shackles, and the cold drip of water would splash harmlessly on the chains. But if I fell to a position where I might rest, put my weight on my back against the wall, let my hands go slack in the chains in the manner of a praying saint, the cold drip would again vex me like a tiny frost-pricked fairy, humping away at my joints, jolting me awake when I would drowse. I could not know then that the cruel sprite would h
old the key to my very life.

  But I did drowse, after a while, hanging in the warm water, dreams washing over me both pleasing and horrific, wrenched from the company of my loving Cordelia by the claws of a voracious beast, waking breathless in the dark chamber, wishing it had been real, relieved that it was not, until the full weight of the darkness would descend on me again.

  “Pocket,” she had said, “I think I shall send you to Venice, to speak to them my mind on this Crusade they propose.”

  “But, lamb, they know your mind. You’ve sent them a bundle of letters, royal seal, Queen of Britain, Wales, Normandy, Scotland, Spain—do we still rule Spain?”

  “No, and we do not rule any of them. I rule.”

  “I was using the royal we, wasn’t I, love? Bit of the old God-in-your-pocket plural fucking we you royals use when being just a singular enormous twat will not suffice.” I tilted my head and grinned, jingled a bell on my coxcomb in a manner most charming.

  “You see, that’s why I must send you.”

  “To convince them that you’re an enormous twat? I was speaking figuratively, love. You know I adore you, including and especially your specific lady bits, but I respect the awesome twattiness with which you wield dominion over the realm. No, I say send them another pound of royal seals and wax, with a resounding ‘Fuck off’ to the pope, in Latin. Signed Queen Cordelia, Britain, France, et cetera, et cetera, and after lunch I can try to impregnate you with a royal heir.”

  “No,” she said, her delicate jaw quite set.

  “Well, fine then,” said I. “We’ll send the letter, skip lunch, and go right to siring the heir. I’m feeling full of tiny princes, bustling to get out into the world and start plotting against one another.” I thrust my cod at her to show the palpable urgency of our progeny.

  “No, that’s why I must send you,” she said, ignoring my eloquent gesture of prince pumpage. “No letter, dispatch, or herald can be even remotely as annoying as you. Only you can shame them for just how badly they bollixed up the last bloody Crusade. Only you, my darling fool, can convey just how ridiculous—and bloody inconvenient—I find their call to battle.”