‘Aha, and so how do they get the stone for building?’ Freize demanded, as if he was finally about to catch Brother Peter in a travellers’ tale.
‘They have great barges that bring in the stone,’ Brother Peter replied. ‘Everything comes by boat, I tell you. They even have great barges that bring in the drinking water.’
This was too much for Freize. ‘Now I know you are deceiving me,’ he said. ‘The one thing this city does not lack is water! They must be born with webbed feet, these Venetians.’
‘They are a strange and unique people,’ Brother Peter conceded. ‘They govern themselves without a king, they have no roads, no highways, they are the wealthiest city in Christendom, they live on the sea and by the sea. They are expanding constantly, and their only god is trade; but they have built the most beautiful churches on every canal and decorated them with the most inspiring holy pictures. Every church is a treasure house of sacred art. Yet they act as if they are as far from God as they are from the mainland and there is no way to get to Him but a voyage.’
Now they were approaching the heart of the city. The broad canal on either side was walled with white Istrian stone to make a continuous quay, occasionally pierced by a tributary canal winding deeper inside the city. Many of the smaller inner canals were crossed by little wooden bridges, a few were crossed by steeply stepped bridges of white stone. The ferry was losing the cold breeze and so the boatman took down the sails and set to row, he took an oar on one side, and his lad heaved on the other. They wound their way through the constant river traffic of gondolas going swiftly through the water with loud warning cries from the gondoliers in the sterns of ‘Gondola! Gondola! Gondola!’
The canal was crowded with fishing ships, the flat-bottomed barges for carrying heavy goods, the ferry boats heaving with poorer people, and criss-crossing through the traffic going from one side to the other were public gondolas for hire. To the two young women who had been raised in a small country castle it was impossibly busy and glamorous, they looked from right to left and could not believe what they were seeing. Every gondola carried passengers, heavily cloaked with their faces hidden by carnival masks. The women wore masks adorned with dyed plumes of feathers, the eyeholes slit like the eyes of a cat, a brightly coloured hood covering their hair, a bejewelled fan hiding their smiling lips. Even more intriguing were the gondolas where the little cabin in the middle of the slim ship had the doors resolutely shut on hidden lovers, and the gondolier was rowing slowly, impassive in the stern. Sometimes a second gondola followed the first with musicians playing lingering love songs, for the entertainment of the secret couple.
‘Sin, everywhere,’ Brother Peter said, averting his gaze.
‘There’s only one bridge across the Grand Canal,’ the boatman told them. ‘Everywhere else you have to take a boat to cross. It’s a good city to be a ferryman. And this is it, the only bridge: the Rialto.’
It was a high wooden bridge, many feet above the canal, arching up so steeply that even masted ships could pass easily beneath it, rising up from both sides of the canal almost like a pinnacle, crowded with people, laden with little stalls and shops. There was a constant stream of pedestrians walking up the stairs on one side and down the other, pausing to shop, stopping to buy, leaning on the high parapet to watch the ships go underneath, arguing the prices, changing their money. The whole bridge was a shimmer of colour and noise.
The square of San Giacomo, just beside the bridge, was lined with the tall houses of the merchants. All the nations of Christendom, and many of the infidel, were shown by their own flag and the national costume of the men doing business at the windows and doorway. Next to them stood the great houses of the Venetian banking families, the front doors standing open for business, absurdly costumed people coming and going, trading and buying in all seriousness, though dressed as if they were strolling players, with great plumed hats on their heads and bright jewelled masks on their faces.
In the square itself the bankers and gold merchants had their tables laid out all around the colonnade, one to every arch, and were trading in coin, promises and precious metals. When money was changing hands the masks were laid aside, as each client wanted to look his banker in the eye. Among them were Ottoman traders, their brightly coloured turbans and gorgeous robes as beautiful as any costume. Venice had all but captured the trade of the Ottoman Empire and the wealth of the East flowed into Europe across the Venice traders’ tables. There was no other route to the East, there was no easy navigable way to Russia. Venice was at the very centre of world trade and the riches of east and west, north and south poured into it from every side.
‘The Rialto,’ Luca reminded Freize. ‘This is where that infidel, Radu Bey, said that there was a priest, Father Pietro, who ransoms Christian slaves from the galleys of the Ottomans. This is it, this is the bridge, this is where he said. Perhaps Father Pietro is here now, perhaps I will be able to ransom my father and mother.’
‘We’ll come out as soon as we are settled in our house,’ Freize promised him. ‘But Sparrow, you will remember that the Ottoman gentleman, Radu Bey, seems to be the sworn enemy of the lord who commands your Order, and he, himself, did not exactly inspire me with trust.’
Luca laughed. ‘I know. You do right to warn me. But Freize, you know I would take advice from the devil himself if I thought I could get my father and mother back home. Just to see them again! Just to know they were alive.’
Freize put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘And they will have missed you too – they have missed your growing up. If we can find them and buy them out of slavery it will be a great thing. I am just saying – don’t get your hopes up too high. They were captured by the Ottoman slavers and it was an Ottoman general who told us that we might buy them back. Just because he was well-read and spoke fair to you does not make him a friend.’
‘Ishraq liked him too, and she’s a good judge of character,’ Luca objected.
A shadow crossed Freize’s honest face. ‘Ishraq liked him better than she liked the lord of your Order,’ he told Luca. ‘I wouldn’t trust her judgement with the foreign lord myself. I don’t know what game he was playing with her when he spoke to her in Arabic that only she could understand. Come to that, I don’t know what game she was playing when she swore to me that he said nothing.’
‘And here is your palazzo,’ the boatman remarked. ‘Ca’ de Longhi, just west of the Piazza San Marco, very nice.’
‘A palace?’ Isolde exclaimed. ‘We have hired a palace?’
‘All the grand houses on the canal are palaces, though they are all called Casa – only the Doge’s house is called a palace,’ the boatman explained. ‘And the reason for that, is that they are each and every one of them, the most beautiful palaces ever built in the world.’
‘And do princes live here?’ Ishraq asked. ‘In all these palaces?’
‘Better than princes,’ he smiled at her. ‘Richer than princes, and greater than kings. The merchants of Venice live here and you will find no greater power in this city or in all of Italy!’
He steered towards the little quayside at the side of the house, leaned hard on the rudder and brought the boat alongside with a gentle bump. He looked up at the beautiful frescoes on either side of the great water door, and all around the house, and then at Luca with a new level of respect. ‘You are welcome, your grace,’ he said, suddenly adjusting his view of the handsome young merchant who must surely command the fortune of a prince if he could afford such a palace to rent.
Freize saw the calculating look and nudged the boatman gently. ‘We’ll pay double for the trouble and danger,’ he said shortly. ‘And you’ll oblige us by keeping the story of the galley to yourself.’
‘Of course, sir,’ the boatman said, accepting a heavy purse of coins. He jumped nimbly onto the broad steps, tied the boat fore and aft and put out his hand to help the ladies on shore.
Glancing at each other, very conscious that they were playing a part, Ishr
aq and Isolde, Luca and Brother Peter stepped onto the stone pavement before their house. The door for pedestrians was at the side of the house, overlooking the smaller tributary canal. It stood open and the housekeeper bobbed a curtsey and led the way into the cool shaded hall.
First, as always, before they did anything else, Brother Peter, Luca and Isolde had to go to church and give thanks for their safe arrival. Ishraq and Freize, as an infidel and a servant, were excused.
‘Go to the Rialto,’ Luca ordered Freize. ‘See if they have heard of Father Pietro. I will come myself to speak with him later.’
Luca, Brother Peter and Isolde, with her hood pulled modestly forward, left the house by the little door onto the paved way beside the narrow canal and turned to their right to walk through the narrow alley to the Piazza San Marco where the great church bells echoed out, ringing for Terce, sending the pigeons soaring up into the cold blue sky, and the gorgeously costumed Venetians posed and paraded up to the very doors of the church itself.
Ishraq and Freize closed the side door on their companions and stood for a moment in the quiet hall.
‘May I show you the rooms?’ the housekeeper asked them, and led them up the wide flight of marble stairs to the first floor of the building where a large reception room overlooked the canal with huge double-height windows leading to a little balcony. The grand room was warm, a small fire burned in the grate and the sunshine poured in through the window. Leading off were three smaller rooms.
The housekeeper led them up again to the same layout of rooms on the upper floor. ‘We’ll take the top floor,’ Ishraq said. ‘You can have the first.’
‘And above you are the kitchens and the servants’ rooms,’ the housekeeper said, gesturing to the smaller stairs that went on up.
‘Kitchens in the attic?’ Freize asked.
‘To keep the house safe in case of fire,’ she said. ‘We Venetians are so afraid of fire, and we have no space to put the kitchens at a distance from the house on the ground floor. All the space on the ground floor is the courtyard and the garden, and at the front of the house the quay and the watergate.’
‘And are you the cook?’ Freize asked, thinking that he would be glad of a good lunch when the others came back from church.
She nodded.
‘We’ll go and run our errands and perhaps return to a large lunch?’ Freize hinted. ‘For we had a long cold night with nothing but some bread and a few eggs, and I, for one, would be glad to try the Venice specialities and your cooking.’
She smiled. ‘I shall have it ready for you. Will you take the gondola?’
Freize and Ishraq exchanged a delighted grin. ‘Can we?’ Ishraq asked.
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘It’s the only way to get around this city.’ She led the way down the marble stairs to the ground floor, to the waterside front of the house, and their own private quay, where their gondola rocked at its moorings. The housekeeper waved them down the final flight of stairs and indicated the manservant who came out of a doorway, wiping his mouth and pulling on his bright feathered cap.
‘Giuseppe,’ she said by way of introduction. ‘He will take you wherever you want to go, and wait and bring you home.’
The man pulled the boat close to the quay, and held out his hand to help Ishraq aboard. Freize stepped heavily after her and Ishraq cried out and then laughed as the boat rocked.
‘This is going to take some getting used to,’ Freize said. ‘I am missing Rufino already; how ever will he manage without me?’ He turned to the gondolier, Giuseppe. ‘Can you take us to the Rialto?’
‘Of course,’ the boatman said and loosened the tasselled tie that held the gondola prow against the wall of the house. He stepped onto the platform in the stern and with one skilful push of the single oar thrust them out of the house and into the teeming water traffic of the Grand Canal.
Freize and Ishraq sat in the middle of the boat and looked around, as their boat nosed through the crowded canal. Hucksters and merchants were on little ships, coming close to every craft and offering their wares, wherries and rowing boats for hire were threading their way through the traffic, great barges carrying beams and stone took the centre of the canal and rowed to the beat of the drum. Freize and Ishraq, the fair, square-faced young man and the brown-skinned, dark-haired girl in their expensive private gondola, drew glances as the gondolier drew up at the Rialto Bridge with a flourish, leaped ashore, and offered his hand to Ishraq.
She drew her hood over her head and her veil across her face as she stepped on the shore. She noticed that there were serving women, and working women, beggars and store keepers, and women in gaudy yellow with heavily painted faces, tottering along on absurdly tall shoes; but there were no gentlewomen or noblewomen on the wide stone square before the bridge, and at all the windows of the trading houses there were severe-looking men in dark suits who seemed to disapprove of a young woman in the square among the businessmen.
‘Where d’you think Father Pietro might be?’ Freize asked, staring around him.
The square was so filled with people, so noisy and so bustling, that Ishraq could only shake her head in wonderment. Someone was charming a snake for a handful of onlookers, the basket rocking from one side to another as he played his pipe, the straw lid starting to lift, only a dark eye showing, and a questing forked tongue. A row of merchants had their table under the shelter of the broad colonnade, and were changing money from one foreign currency to another, the beads on the abacus rattling like castanets as the men calculated the value. Beside the river, a belated fisherman was landing his catch and selling it fresh to a couple of servants. The huge fish market had opened at dawn and already sold out a few hours later. There was a constant swirl of men coming and going from the great trading houses which surrounded the square on all sides. Errand boys with baskets on their heads and under their arms dashed about their business, shoppers crowded the little stores on either side of the high Rialto bridge, traders shouted their wares from the rocking boats at the quayside; every nationality was there, buying, selling, arguing, making money, from the dark-suited German bankers to the gloriously robed traders from the Ottoman Empire, and even beyond.
‘We’ll have to ask someone,’ Ishraq said, quite dazzled by this, the busiest trading centre in the world. ‘He could be next to us, and we wouldn’t know it. He could be two steps away and we would hardly spot him. I’ve never been in such a crowd, I’ve never seen so many people all at once. Not even in Spain!’
‘Like Hell,’ Freize said matter-of-fact. ‘Bound to be crowded.’
Ishraq laughed and turned away from the river to look for someone, a priest or a monk or a friar that she could ask, when she saw the gambler.
The girl had laid out her game on the stone floor of the square, covering one of the white marble slabs with sand, to make a little area where the play could take place. The crowd had gathered around her, three deep. It was the ancient game of cups and ball: Ishraq had seen it played in Spain, and had been told it came from ancient Egypt; she had even seen it at Lucretili Castle when she was a little girl and a troubadour had taken her pocket money off her with the simple trick.
It was three downturned cups with a little ball hidden underneath one of them. The game player moved the cups at dazzling speed, then sat back and invited the onlookers to put down their coins before the cup where they had last seen the ball.
It was the simplest game in the world since everyone knew where the ball was, everyone had watched as the cup was moved. Then the player lifted the cups and voila! The ball was not under the one that the crowd had picked. The player lifted another cup and it was under the second one. The player picked up the pennies of the bet, showed the empty cups, showed the little ball – but in this case it was a most beautiful translucent glass marble – put the ball under the cup again, bade the onlookers to watch carefully, and moved the cups around, two or three times, at first very slowly, and then a dozen moves, very fast.
What attracted Ishraq t
o this game was the game player. She was a girl of about eighteen years old, dressed in a brown gown with a modest hood; her pale intent face was downturned to her work but when she looked up she had dark eyes and a bright smile. She sat back on her heels when she had moved the cups and looked up at the crowd around her with an air of absolute trustworthiness. ‘My lords, ladies, gentlemen . . .’ she said sweetly. ‘Will you bet?’
Nobody looking at her could think for one moment that she had managed some sleight of hand. Not while they were all watching, not in broad daylight. The ball must be where she put it first: under the cup on the right which she had slid to the left, swirled to the centre, back to the right, then there had been some moving of the other cups as a rather obvious diversion, before she had finally moved it again to the centre.
‘It’s in the middle,’ Freize whispered in Ishraq’s ear.
‘I’ll bet you that it isn’t,’ Ishraq said. ‘I was following it, but I lost it.’
‘I watched it all the while! It’s plumb in the middle!’ Freize fumbled with coins and put down a piccoli – a silver penny.
The girl waited for a moment until everyone had put down their bets, most of them, like Freize, favouring the central cup. Then she upturned the cup and showed it: empty. She scooped up all the coins that the gamblers had put down on the stone before the empty cup, and put them in the pocket of her apron, and then showed them the empty cup on the left, and then finally the glass marble beneath the right-hand cup. Nobody had guessed correctly. With a merry smile which encouraged them to try their luck again, she smoothed the sand with her hand, placed the marble under the left-hand cup and swirled the cups around once more.
Ishraq was not watching the cups this time, but observing an older man who was moving among the crowd, standing close to the group of gamblers. He looked like a betting man himself, his gaze was bright and avid, his hat pulled low over his face, his smile pleasant. But he was watching the crowd, not the fast-moving hands of the girl.