The Outcast Blade (11 page)

Having decided he was one of them, because nobody who wasn’t would be stupid enough to use the tavern, the Nicoletti returned to their whispered conversations. There was little of interest. A howling heard from an island where paupers were buried.

Ghosts, said one.

A lunatic cast adrift by her family, said another.

Talk touched on the Republican conspiracy that had twice tried to kill Lady Giulietta. To burn to death so many monks and then attack her in her own home proved the Republicans would stop at nothing. A street battle against the Castellani was planned for the following week…

The Nicoletti planned to arrive early.

Tycho was willing to bet the Castellani would try to arrive even earlier. It was the small talk of bad men in rough taverns everywhere. If that was the way you wanted to describe them.

And who
, he asked himself,
am I to judge?

Finishing his wine, he nodded to the tavern keeper and squeezed past the man’s daughter in the doorway. He took her scent, the brush of full breasts and her giggle with him. It was time to take his hunger home.

“You’re drunk,” said the woman who answered his door.

“If only it were that simple…”

The dark-haired Jewish girl who said Duke Marco sent her struggled as he pulled her close. She sounded so sure she wasn’t for the likes of him that he let her go again. “What’s your name?”

“Elizavet, sir. Same as yesterday.”

“I need you to hide me, Elizavet.”

“Who from, sir?”

“Myself – and the moon.”

Herding her in front of him into the small storeroom leading off the hall, he told her to wait while he shifted the back of the cupboard and slid it to one side to reveal night air, the ruined garden and the print works beyond.

“What’s through there? she asked.

“The truth.”

Elizavet had unlocked the little house to let him out after three days, as instructed, and neither of them had mentioned it in the weeks since. Although he’d noticed that Elizavet had taken to glancing at the ever-swelling moon. The girl was smart enough to make the connection. Mind you, she was smart all round. Which was more than he could say for the girl currently sharing his bed.

Rolling her over, Tycho said, “Kneel up.”

“Sir, first I need to…”

“The privy?”

Tonight’s girl blushed fetchingly. Given what he’d been doing a few minutes earlier it seemed an odd reaction. But, then, he wasn’t a sixteen-year-old Venetian of careful parents with known ambition.

“Through there,” he said. “I’ll join you.”

At that, she looked doubtful and blushed deeper. “My lord…”

“What?”

“I’m embarrassed.”

“You needn’t be. And I’m not
my lord
, the name’s Tycho and I’ve told you to use it.” The girl simpered, as if he somehow
flattered her. So Tycho pulled a curtain aside to reveal two holes in a plank and pissed through the nearest.

This was easy since he was naked. She had to pull up her shift before joining him, and then sat there looking awkward.

Tycho sighed. “I’ll see you in a moment.”

An hour to go before dawn, which left him time enough to enjoy her again. He’d be glad when winter came and the nights grew long. Summer nights were too short and the days too long for his comfort.

“I’m sorry,” she said, kissing him on the lips.

“For what?”

“For being childish.”

“You’re not. But I’d like you to lose this.”

Perhaps it was a trade-off. He’d let her use the privy alone and this was his reward. Perhaps she was simply more confident. Wrestling the undergown up to her waist she began to pull it over her head and hesitated.

“I’ll put out the lamp.”

Her body was lush without being overblown. The Venetian ideal was full breasts, soft hips and a gently curving stomach. The girl came close enough to be guaranteed her share of admirers.

“Where’s your father?”

She froze.

“I simply wondered.”

“With my mother in Pisa. Trading salt for olive oil and buying cloth to trade with the Germans this autumn. They make the trip every year.”

Trading had a special place in Venetian life. The great merchant houses were noble, the smaller houses like her father’s hoped to be. Trading was the only way a man could become rich. Unless he was a Jew. Christians were banned from lending money by the law of usury.

“And he left you alone?”

“With my cousins. They’re downstairs.”

Tycho had taken to sex like a fox to slaughter, it being as close as he’d come to finding something to sate his other hunger. He no longer bothered to count his conquests any more than he counted the ducats he won at cards.

Each night Tycho would wait to see which bank of the canal his latest lover favoured. That of ferocity, animal passion and raw excitement? Or of slowness, kindness and quiet restraint? Either was fine with him. The next night he would choose someone likely to head for the other.

So Tycho’s reputation as a fierce and kind, dark and gentle lover was confirmed. No one saw the contradiction and every woman thought they’d seen the real him. As if he dared show what that might be.

This time, though, he let his guard down and took her more brutally than he intended, surprising the merchant’s daughter into tearful protest. What Tycho really wanted was not what he took, but he took what he could.

When he was done, she hid her face from his kisses and he tasted salt and sadness. So he gentled her, muttering that he was sorry, her beauty had carried him away; and slowly, very carefully, brought her back to the side of the canal she favoured. How could he admit he’d been on the edge of ripping out her throat?

“You’re sweet,” she said.

Tycho sighed.

She was shocked when he said no husband would know what she’d done unless she chose to tell him. Men did not
know
. That was a lie mothers told daughters to keep them in their place. She was even more shocked when Tycho slid a diamond from his finger. “For your dowry.”

She was the last of his conquests.

Although Tycho didn’t know that as he closed the shutters half an hour later, drew his curtains against the coming day, remade the bed himself and tossed his soiled sheet outside for Elizavet to wash.

Waking to sadness, and the noise of friends gathering at his front door, he went downstairs to greet them. He was as surprised as they were when he sent them away. He could not afford to have them around in the next few days.

Think
, he told himself.
Either you come up with a solution or Elizavet locks you away again
. And the solution when it did come was so obvious that he was surprised he hadn’t thought of it earlier.

This was Venice:
everything
was for sale.

There were darker trades beyond the sale of wine barrels offloaded at Riva dei Vin, or iron ore from the German barges that docked on Riva del Ferro, beyond even the slave markets of Riva degli Schiavoni. Since he craved blood, and since he’d taken a decision not to kill to feed, though he doubted he’d keep that unbroken, what he needed to do was buy it.

In a city like Venice how hard could that be?

A single jump carried him from the
altana
of his house – a rooftop terrace – across the narrow
rio
beyond and on to a warehouse roof. A feral tom froze, pigeons woke noisily, a nightwatchman stumbled from his warehouse to stand blinking in the darkness. Tycho was already gone, rooftops beneath his feet as he raced towards the abject poverty of the slums on Venice’s western edge.

A hundred squalid streets where each day’s battle was simply to stay alive. He wore his drabbest clothes and discarded his sword, taking only a sharp knife. The money in his belt was copper, plus a few silver coins it hurt to handle. A single ducat coin was hidden in his mud-spattered boots.

He wore a stolen Nicoletti cap.

“My patch…”

The beggar girl reached for her crutch.

She moved too easily for someone who really needed it. A rancid blanket provided her bed. A filthy dog on a frayed string bared yellowing teeth as she reversed the crutch to use as a weapon. Tycho tossed her a coin.

“What’s that?”

“A coin,” Tycho said.

The girl looked him and then dropped to a crouch and snaked out her hand to grab the greasy copper grosso. Tycho waited. When she looked up, he tossed her another and then another after that.

“Flat, standing or bent over?”

“My tastes are more complicated than that.”

She scowled at the three copper coins as if working out how complicated she was prepared for his tastes to be. Tycho tossed her a fourth and a fifth and watched her decide they must be very complicated indeed.

“What exactly do you want?”

“I want you to fill that.” The pewter bowl he handed her once held ink in the print room beyond his house. It was cheap and anonymous, without monograms, crests, patera or family marks. The kind of bowl anybody might own.

“You want to watch me while I…?” She looked almost comically relieved as she decided she knew exactly what he wanted.

“I want blood.”

When Tycho slashed open her hand he got to see her piss anyway. Only by then she was shaking too much to notice.

“Too deep,” she said. “You cut too deep.”

Blood frothed from her palm into the bowl and Tycho could smell it and imagine it sliding down his throat. Turning away to hide the teeth that descended, he bit his own finger, drawing blood.

“Who did that?” he asked

A livid wound crossed half her face.

“Whip slash. Got in the way of a carter.”

Yes, he thought he recognised it. The wound was deep in the way of whip cuts, ragged at the ends, too. Leaning forward, he pulled the cut open, her sudden scream stopping footsteps in a
street behind. He ran his finger down the side of her face before she could pull free and smeared his blood on her palm.

“Both will heal cleanly.”

“They will?”

“Go now,” Tycho ordered, his voice hoarse.

The girl scrambled to her feet and her ragged dog hurtled after her.

Crouched in her deserted doorway in a squalid part of town, squatting on her rancid blanket, Tycho drank from the frothing bowl and felt the streets and night sky come into focus around him. Her blood carried fear and sadness, loneliness and hidden hopes but no memories. Maybe for memories he needed a death. Drinking her blood was like tasting his childhood, and he hoped, without expecting it to be true, that she could fight free from her misery, too.

The next night he let it be known his house was permanently closed to friends and guests and would remain so. He suggested everyone make other arrangements for losing their money.

Tycho dreamt of late afternoon daylight darkening with the arrival of high-banked cloud over the edge of the lagoon. An early July storm as fierce as a flash flood washing the island city and soaking its inhabitants, falling so hard that stalls closed in the Rialto market and those selling food from trays on the Riva degli Schiavoni took any shelter they could find to protect themselves and their wares.

The rain bounced on herringbone brick in Piazza San Marco, poured in pulsing streams from the stone arsehole of a gargoyle on San Pietro di Castello, splashed from the lead roof of the ducal palace, and ran like a glaze down the copper domes of the basilica. It fell fiercely and for longer than normal.

Until the sun began to set and the skies darkened and what should have been a summer shower still fell. What Tycho could see of Venice altered as the lagoon swivelled beneath him and he found himself above a small island to the north-east of the city. Wild roses bloomed in bloody abundance over grave pits. Without being told, he knew hundreds of bodies were buried in each.

As he watched, a girl half crawled from beneath the newly
sodden earth. She hesitated, then ducked down. A minute or so later, she emerged into the twilight, shielding her eyes against a last blood-red ribbon of sun.

For a moment, he thought it was the beggar girl he’d fed on the previous week. Dreams were such a rarity in the dreamless blackness he called sleep that this one had snapped him into a fugue state halfway between walking and not.

The girl’s hair was mud-slicked and filthy.

Her mouth was clogged with earth she scooped and spat free. An instantly sodden grave shroud stuck to her body. Standing unsteadily, she ripped at its cotton to stand thin and trembling in the rain. Her breasts were tiny and her ribs a row of sticks, her hips hollow enough to belong to a starved dog. Tycho recognised her immediately.

Rosalyn had been thirteen when they met and fourteen when Atilo ordered him to hit her and Tycho caused her death by refusing. He felt guilty about that, guilty enough it seemed for her death to haunt him.

She stared up at Tycho.

Her mouth opened in a snarl to reveal dog teeth, and Tycho shivered. The girl’s eyes were blood-red, glowing with a fire that faded. Whatever she thought she saw when she glared at the sky was forgotten.

Dropping to all fours, she hurled herself along the beach like an animal. Unsteady at first, then finding her stride and jumping broken boats, catching her heel and falling in a tumble. Her laughter lunatic-wild.

“
My lord…
”

The voice was at his door.

A knocking, hesitant. Becoming harder as the boy in the corridor found his courage. “My lord, are you
decent
?” What, Tycho wondered, was Atilo’s page doing here? And why would Pietro ask a question like that? First, he dreamt of the boy’s dead sister and then the boy himself appeared…?

“Pietro?”

“Yes, my lord…”

“It’s Sir Tycho,” Tycho said, rolling out of bed and reaching for a gown. Unlike most, he slept naked. If sleep was what you could call what happened when this world faded away. “What day is it?”

“Saturday, my lord. Late Saturday.”

Tycho sighed.

“My lady Desdaio wants to know if you’re awake and decent…” From the way the boy said it, Tycho knew he had no idea what that meant.

“Ask her to wait downstairs.”