Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (43 page)

When the roar had backed off, King John stood up again.

“We've got a treat for you tonight Daaaaarwin. A treat from the Olden Days.”

He tried to damp down the reaction, but the crowd needed a full minute to quiet themselves. Treats from the Olden Days were a King John specialty.

“But first,” roared the monarch to his adoring, if rowdy, subjects, “you gotta put your paws together for the mad bastards who made it all possible.”

Jules reared back as flash pots went up in front of their box and long royal banners unfurled to draw the crowd's attention to them. Pete was already on his feet, waving his jug of Saltie Bites at the crowd. Fifi stumbled drunkenly when she tried to join him and Jules was forced to help her up.

“Thanksh, Juleshy,” she slurred. “Will you hold me hair back if I vomit later?”

“Oh for fuck's sake,” muttered the Englishwoman.

They all waved, but Jules was sure the loudest cheers were for Pete with his jugs. Until Fifi flashed hers. Her ears actually hurt, the crowd noise was so loud.

Darwin,
she sighed.

The king was back at the giant speaking horns.

“Give it up for Cap'n Peeeete,” he bellowed. “The Lady Jules and Fifi Lamont.”

He drew out the last syllable of Fifi's name until the entire stadium was cheering and roaring it along with him.

Julianne dragged her shipmates, who were a lot deeper into the drink than her, back down to their chairs.

“The crew of the
Diamantina
have voyaged long and far . . .” shouted the king.

“Long and far?” said Jules skeptically.

“He's a fucking king,” said Pete. “Cut him some slack.”

“Yeah, bitch,” Fifi agreed. “Nobody died and made you the sheriff of Nott . . . what . . . to doingham.”

They both collapsed into giggles as the King of Darwin recounted the details of their adventures in Sydney, which were already more exaggerated than Julianne recalled. And that was truly saying something.

“And they did it all for you, Darwin,” the king informed the crowd.

No, we didn't,
she thought.

More cheering.

“And for me, because I fucking dig this album.”

And with that, the showman monarch gestured to more flash pots that popped and flared in front of the Royal Symphony Orchestra.

A giant bell rang out. The horns and drums fired up. And the strings did the best they could to re-create the crunching whine of long-dead electric guitars.

“To fortune and fucking glory,” said Jules, tipping her gin and tonic gently against Pete's lager jug.

“To fortune and fucking glory,” Pete and Fifi returned, raising their drinks as the orchestra launched into “Hells Bells,” the first track on AC/DC's
Back in Black
, and a ghostly echo of the Olden Days rolled out into the night.

They played from long-lost sheet music, recovered from a shop in the dead city of Sydney, by the fearless and legendary crew of the
Diamantina
, for fortune and fucking glory.

by
Walter Jon Williams

Walter Jon Williams is a bestselling, award-winning author of twenty-seven novels and three collections of short fiction. Among his works are
Hardwired
,
Metropolitan
,
The Praxis
, and a series of alternative histories about writers: Edgar Allan Poe (“No Spot of Ground”), Mary Shelley (“Wall, Stone, Craft”), and Mark Twain (“The Boolean Gate”).

“The Venetian Dialectic” was inspired by a trip to the Arsenale, the world's first industrial complex. Says Williams, “I realized that the Arsenale could be retrofitted to resume its original role as a factory for ships and other objects necessary for survival in the late Middle Ages, and that this could give Venice a crucial edge in surviving a catastrophe such as the Change.”

T
he
fleet swept round the northernmost point of the island, and there the harbor of Rhodes lay plain before them, jetties of brilliant white embracing the bay like the loving arms of a mother. Giustinian Foscari had raised flags and banners as soon as the island had come into sight, so that the lookouts on the watchtowers, powerful binoculars pressed to their eyes, would recognize his squadron as Venetian, and allied to the Rhodian citizens who now swarmed the great ramparts.

For the sheer style of the thing he paraded his line of eight ships and two fast dispatch boats past the headland, lateen sails cutting fine arcs in the brisk southeasterly wind, and then he had the helm of the
Agostino Barbarigo
put up, and the galley crossed the wind's eye with the luffing sails booming thunder. As the galley hesitated in the face of the wind, the sail handlers ran the big bowed yards across the ship, the sails filled with a pair of cracks, one after the other, and the
Barbarigo
surged ahead, water singing under its counter. Foscari's heart sang at the sheer perfection of it.

Each galley in the fleet followed, tacking in succession across the wind's eye, each maneuver performed flawlessly under the critical eye of the Rhodians watching from the city's walls.

“Hoist the signal for a pilot,” Foscari said. “And blow the trumpet to tell the fleet to furl sail and proceed under oars.”

Foscari was a few centimeters below average height, with a compact body, a small mustache, and the sun-browned face of a sailor. He wore a cap with the lion badge of Unione Venezia, and prowled his quarterdeck like a young, restless lion, seeing everything, making sure there wasn't a line out of place.

The sails were brailed up to the yards, and the oarsmen were sent to their work.
Barbarigo
had twenty-four sweeps per side, though one was unused at present to leave room for the cook's station. Each sweep had a crew of three—an arrangement known as
di scaloccio
—who stood at their stations and pushed the sweep ahead of them rather than sitting at benches and pulling. The benches themselves—actually low platforms with hinged lids that turned them into storage chests—were used to brace each oarsman's foot when he shoved himself forward. The system was easier for untrained oarsmen, which had been a problem a generation before, when the Arsenale began building galleys for the first time in four hundred years.

In addition to the hundred forty-four oarsmen—each of whom could fight at need—
Barbarigo
carried sixty marines, which along with the bowman, steersman, bosun, quartermaster, cook, carpenter, surgeon, their assistants, ten sail handlers, the eight
sifoni
who worked the mechanism for the Greek fire, and the
ammiraglio
himself, raised the complement to two hundred and forty. All on a hull only twenty-four meters long. The deck was packed, a sea of rhythmic motion as the oarsmen chopped at the water with their long sweeps.

The pilot boat, moored to the outside of the southern mole, came dashing out under its six oars, and the Venetian ships hovered in the water while the pilot came aboard. The pilot was a weathered woman in her forties named Soteria, and Foscari had met her before.

“Good thing you're here, Admiral,” she said. “It's bad news we've been hearing from Cyprus.”

“Tell me.” Foscari turned to the percussionist who called time for the rowers. “Slow ahead.”

The percussionist rapped out three fast bangs on his sounding boards—with a pair of simple tuned boards and a pair of mallets, there was no need to bring anything so bulky as a drum on board—and the rowers responded by readying their sweeps over the water. Then both mallets came down together, one on the bass, the other on the treble, and the great sweeps dipped, then rose.

Soteria stationed herself right forward, on the forecastle where she had a clear view ahead, and while she guided the steersman by flipping her hands left or right, gave Foscari the news as she'd heard it.

“King Spiridon sent another ultimatum,” she said. “He's sent one every year for four years, and nothing's happened, but one of these days, maybe after we've let our guard down, he'll come. And this year he's gathering an army and navy at Episkopi, so it's pretty clear he's going somewhere.”

“What does the Afentiko think?”

“The Afentiko doesn't confide his thoughts to the likes of me, Admiral. Though everyone else does, as they come in and out of the port.”

“What does everyone else say?”

“That Spiridon deflowers a virgin every day before strangling her with a silken cord, and that he worships Satan, and sacrifices children down at the old temple in Paphos. They say he got djinn from the Turks, and that the djinn fight for him, and that they can't be killed.”

“I thought Spiridon killed all the Turks. Why would they give him djinn?”

“The djinn don't share their secrets with me either, Admiral. But fortunately some boy down in Archangelikos had a vision of the Virgin saying we'd all be safe, so nobody's afraid anymore.”

“Ah,” said Foscari. “We've been getting Virgins, too. And every saint in the catalog.”

Since the Change, the number of people experiencing religious visions had grown—or maybe they hadn't, but instead the credulity of the population had increased.

Some of these people,
Foscari thought,
it's as if the Mother of Christ stopped by every afternoon for tea.

Foscari was a skeptic where the spiritual claims of the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church were concerned, particularly under the new Pope, who as head of the Umbrian League was a rival of Venice for supremacy in North Italy.

Still, Foscari supposed that religion helped to maintain public order, which was to the benefit of the State. Visions of the Virgin could have their uses, if they were the right visions.

Over the sound of the percussionist, Foscari heard the clack-clack-clack of the enormous capstan at Fort St. Nicholas as it lowered the great chain that blocked the harbor entrance. Had the chain been made recently, with hand-forged iron links, it would have been a vast enterprise consuming much time and capital, but instead the Afentiko had secured his harbor with the anchor chain of a cruise ship stranded in the commercial harbor during the Change. The ship itself was still there, looming over the old Custom House, where it served as a giant, and nearly unscalable, fort.

As the galley passed by Fort St. Nicholas, Soteria with a flip of her fingers directed the galley to the left, and
Agostino Barbarigo
swept in slow grandeur between the two jetties that marked the harbor entrance. The wondrous bronze Colossus had stood there in ages past, but now the entrance was marked by two ancient pillars topped by statues, one of a hind, the other of a stag.

Mandraki Harbor opened up on either side, supernaturally blue water and quays lined with shipping, fishermen, and merchants. At the south end of the harbor were the sheds where the Afentiko's four war galleys rested, drawn up on the shore. They weren't like the Venetian ships, built to a single pattern, but were all experiments, with different hull designs and arrangements of oars. One was surrounded by scaffolding, undergoing a refit. Behind them loomed the decayed superstructure of the old cruise ship.

A band on the shore began to play with a flourish of trumpets and snares. The odors of the land floated on the breeze: fish and lamb being grilled over hardwood or charcoal, bubbling stews and baking bread, all mixed in the breeze with the outpourings of the sewers.

Soteria took the Venetian squadron to a series of buoys laid on in a line near the southern end of the harbor. The bowman lassoed the buoy with a mooring line, the sweeps dipped one final time and rose dripping from the water, and
Barbarigo
checked and swung at its mooring.

As soon as the other ships moored, Foscari ordered the trumpeter to blow “captains report aboard,” and sent the crew to lower the ship's boat, which hung from the stern. In the heyday of the Venetian Republic, deck space—and rowers—would have had to be sacrificed to give the boat a place, but in the intervening centuries someone had invented davits, and now boats could be carried outboard.

The boats were lowered briskly, but still the Afentiko beat Foscari into the water. As his barge swept up to the
Barbarigo
, Foscari heard the foghornlike voice of the Rhodian asking permission to come aboard.

“Of course, my friend!” Foscari answered.

The trumpeter knew to blow a flourish as the Afentiko's shaggy gray head appeared in the entry port just forward of the poop, and the percussionist embellished the music by banging a quick taradiddle on his sounding boards. Foscari stepped forward to grasp his friend's hand, and instead found himself wrapped in a great bearlike embrace.

“Blessed is your arrival!” the Rhodian cried. “For war comes soon!”

Foscari was skeptical—war had been on the brink of arriving for years now and had not yet turned up—but perhaps the Afentiko knew something he didn't.

Loukas Kanellis had been a young lawyer in the City of Rhodes when the world was struck by the Change, and in the years since he had been a lot of things: a judge, a military leader, a mayor, and a prime minister. At the moment his official title was nothing more than the Vice Chairman of the Peace and Liberty Party, but all the threads of power on Rhodes ran to his fingers, and those with grander titles, the Council and the Ministers and the President and the Prime Minister, were all his creatures.

Unlike King Spiridon the First of Cyprus, who gave himself royal airs and wore a crown and purple robe, Loukas Kanellis sought no grand titles, but was known simply as the Afentiko, which meant nothing more or less than “boss.” He was so completely the man in charge that a throne and a purple robe would have been redundant, if not ridiculous.

He was the reason Rhodes had survived and prospered after the Change.

But by now,
Foscari thought,
Loukas Kanellis had probably served his purpose. Perhaps there would have to be a change of power.

*   *   *

After the Change, Foscari knew, Venice and Rhodes had each been refounded on a great crime. In Venice it was called the Black Annunciation, when the visitors who thronged the city were driven across the bridge, through Mestre, and out into the countryside, where almost all had died of starvation, exposure, or murder. There had been nearly fifteen thousand tourists in Venice at the Change, and it had been impossible for the city of sixty thousand to support them. There had been attempts to sort out visitors with useful skills and occupations, but there hadn't been time to do it properly, and in the end the Feast of the Annunciation, 1998, was a feast of death, desperation, and despair.

Foscari had been a boy at the time, and he remembered watching from his father's fishing boat as the long line of visitors trudged across the railroad bridge—white-haired tourists out of the luxury hotels, students with backpacks, families with children and babes in arms. Foscari had been more puzzled than frightened.

“Did they do something wrong?” he asked his father.

The older Foscari's answer was simple. “They wanted to take our food.”

The answer satisfied the boy, and he watched with complacency at the long line of people being marched to their deaths, all told that they must follow the railroad tracks until they found someone to feed them.

The cynical remarked that Venice had given up tourists for Lent. The devout had made the anniversary a day of repentance and expiation, with homemade altars and belated offerings of food to the restless spirits of the dead.

A few weeks later there was another exodus, as citizens of Venice and Mestre were marched out into the countryside to help the farmers plant and bring in the year's harvest. The city survived, just barely, on the harvest of its lagoon and the agricultural area surrounding Mestre. Foscari's father had died a few years later, of a case of diabetes that had been minor on the day of the Change, but had subsequently run out of control. His mother survived her husband by only a few months, and died of one of the infections that had become so common after the city had consumed its stock of antibiotics.

Foscari had become a ward of the Republic, and it was the Republic that raised him to be a sailor like his father. The State had fed him, housed him, trained him, and trusted him with offices, with commissions, with command of a squadron of warships.

Foscari hadn't forgotten that long, sorrowful trudging line of doomed visitors, but neither had he forgotten that from the day of the savage Annunciation the city had begun its revival, and subsequently its reconquest of the Veneto and its overseas empire. The Republic had required the sacrifice for its own survival, and events had proved the city council right.

The new, independent Rhodes, like Venice, was likewise reared on the bones of strangers. On the day of the Change, Rhodes had fewer tourists, the season not having started, but there was more disorder. The cruise ship alone held nearly three thousand souls, all of whom were blockaded aboard to starve. Others were put in boats and pushed out to sea, penned in buildings without food and water, or simply hacked down by citizens given sanction to kill strangers. And though he preferred not to speak of those bloody days, the young lawyer Loukas Kanellis had done his part to rid his island of foreigners, and begun his rise to power.

Now the Afentiko, leader of a prosperous, independent state, walked in procession alongside Foscari on the road leading past the New Market and through the colossal Gate of St. Paul, marked with the arms of the crusading Grand Master who had built it. Walking with the party were President and Prime Minister of the island, both loyal lieutenants of Kanellis, and Foscari's counterpart, Homer Georgallis, the commander of Rhodes' navy, who had been awarded the rather grand-sounding rank of Archiploiarchos. Following was the Autocephalous Archbishop of the Orthodox Church of Rhodes, a small, bespectacled, smiling man who sweated in his heavy black robes. The Afentiko towered over them all, a huge man with a shaggy gray head and the full beard that had become popular after the last of the safety razor blades had run out.