The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart (33 page)

Gaining the opposite hallway, they let Rodrigo take the lead and unlock the captain’s door. Barousse stood before the fire,
his back to them while they took places across the table. Servants followed them in, cluttering the massive board with steaming
platters and bowls. Only when their lessers had retreated and Rodrigo latched the door did Barousse turn to face them.

Alexius Barousse’s eyes were rough, purple craters staring out of his craggy face but in their depths lurked no sorrow, only
a greedy glimmer to match that of the Grossbarts. He bade them eat and drink, which they did with gusto until heads reeled
and guts bulged. Rodrigo nodded in his chair but sobered up when the captain finally addressed them.

“I have sent word for my maiden to be repaired and taken out of dry dock, and as Rodrigo has prepared you, all we need do
is wait until she is ready and then we sail south.” The captain raised his glass. “We will retake what was lost, and gain
what never was!”

In better circumstances Rodrigo would have responded with something more solid than spraying wine from his nose.

“Glad you came around.” Manfried hoisted his glass, drunkenness nullifying any surprise he might otherwise have harbored.

“Sensible,” Hegel slurred, raising a bottle.

“What?” Rodrigo coughed.

“Too long have I sat mired by a tide that fills my boots but stirs not my soul.” Barousse stood and stalked along the table,
wagging a finger at the assembled. “Cowardice has haunted me alongside my family.”

“What’s that mean?” Hegel kicked his brother, who shrugged and repeated the question to the captain.

“Gone!” Barousse thundered. “Taken by Triton or God or whatever dark thing sought a price for my transgression! Gone! Swallowed
up, like it swallows up everything from boat to man to mountain! Gone!”

“Leave him alone,” Rodrigo hissed, then had wine splashed in his face by the raging captain.

“They will speak! And I will answer! Secrets are for thieves and the dead, and we are neither!”

“True words.” Manfried handed a fresh bottle to the captain.

“Over a decade I have cowered and been coward, thousands of nights tossing in my horrors, thousands of days begging forgiveness,
all in vain, in vain! I knew when I sent her away, I knew that first night my woes would not end through such a route! When
one spends their life on her back they cannot expect to ride off it. Not without price!”

The Grossbarts loved shouting, and Hegel fired back in turn, “How and why?!”

“My sons! Taken on a skiff not a league out, a day’s fishing turned black with their mother’s grief and red with their blood!
A wave out of nowhere, a maelstrom from the calm!”

“My father with them,” Rodrigo muttered, but no one cared.

“And your wife?!” Manfried bellowed.

“Slipped from a gondola into the lagoon, where sea-vines snatched and pulled! So they say, so they say! Not one body given
back for their last rites, not one spared an eternity crashing into each other and a million more of the damned, that coldest
Hell below the surface!”

“Except you!” exclaimed Hegel.

“Through and to my shame! Watching my fortunes dwindle, my name muddied, my ship eaten by dryrot, my nerve softened, all for
a song! Would that I could undo my error, would that I could send her back! But I will! Now, Grossbarts, I will!”

“Who?” Manfried asked, his suspicions cheating him of a forceful yell.

“The Nix! The Siren! She whom I caught! She whom I sent away, but not before she cursed us all! She whom you have brought
back! She who took Luchese and Umberto, and dearest Mathilde, who loved me even when I brought a succubus into our home! She
who took Italo, and a decade later his son, your brother, my godchild! Ennio, poor, honest Ennio!”

“Come on then!” Hegel toppled his chair gaining his feet. “Let’s put’er to the blade!”

“Never!” The captain’s cutlass appeared in his hand and sliced the air in front of Hegel. “I would sooner put it to your throat
or mine! I have failed enough! No masonry will blot out the sound, not stone nor wood nor crashing coast will silence her!
Over the peaks it haunted my dreams, and before I banished her I cut out her tongue with these ten finger bones of mine, all
for naught! No scars, no blemishes, just a fat red tongue! Even time fears her and touches her not! If only—” Barousse fell
back in his chair, sword clattering on the floor and face in his hands.

“We’s experienced in the ways a witches,” Manfried murmured after a brief lull.

“Got your paramour, er palomar, uh, best interest in mind,” agreed Hegel.

“Erp,” Rodrigo managed, every rumor he had heard growing up in the house of Barousse confirmed in a storm of shouting. In
his years of service to the captain he had become accustomed to the wild mood swings and tantrums but never had he seen any,
himself included, taken into Barousse’s confidence so fully. Perhaps the old man had finally cracked, he thought, the strain
of the woman’s reappearance too much for his injured soul.

“Leave me,” Barousse muttered through meshed fingers, and this time the Grossbarts departed without snatching the last word.

Al-Gassur received his payments on time, but that pittance was appropriately supplemented by the food brought to him from
the house and the birds he caught in the garden. Fate’s wheel had spun him into the yard of one of Venezia’s only estates
to boast even a tiny plot of land allowed to run so riot. Better still, on the rare days when the Brothers left the manse
to Grossbart upon the town he could creep out and spend an honest day begging without the worry of being absent when sought.
Confident his employers would not notice the discrepancy, he periodically unbound one leg and wrapped the other, lest his
limb atrophy from lack of use and truly become lost. A veteran of a vague crusade inspired more charity in the populace than
a simple Arab come to the city by Providence and his own two legs.

A sneak by nature as well as trade, Al-Gassur eventually overheard enough from the kitchen windows and the guards to ascertain
the destination of the Grossbarts. The years of rotten food, alcoholism, and exposure had not dulled his wits but sharpened
them, the mendicant well aware such an opportunity came to a man only once in his existence. Knowing his ruse could not last
forever, he struggled to tame his forgetful tongue, scouring the streets in vain for another Arab to teach him what everyone
assumed he knew.

One sun-broiled Mediterranean morning several months after the arrival of the Grossbarts the twins found themselves again
wandering the ill-kept gardens when they noticed Al-Gassur perched in the boughs of a lime tree. The fellow had shimmied out
along a high branch that stretched over the top of the garden’s wall, and here he sat conversing, presumably, with someone
on the other side of the wall. Cat-paw quiet, the Grossbarts crept underneath him to better eavesdrop but upon hearing the
incomprehensible tongue of Italia they resolved with a glance how to handle the situation. Hegel dropped to a knee and Manfried
sprang from his brother’s shoulder, seizing the Arab by his good leg and bringing them both crashing to the ground.

Hearing hurried footsteps fleeing over cobblestones on the other side of the wall confirmed their suspicions as to the duplicitous
nature of their servant, and Manfried held the stunned cripple while Hegel drew his knife.

“Time you’s clean a spirit,” said Hegel, showing Al-Gassur his own terrified expression reflected on the blade.

“Please! What?! No no no, let me explain!”

“Explain away, traitor,” said Manfried, tightening his grip around the Arab’s pinned arms.

“Traitor? Never!” Al-Gassur did not struggle, the panic leaving his face as he met his own reflection.

“Own up and we’ll make it quick for you,” said Manfried. “You was tellin your heathenish relations bout our plans, wasn’t
you?”

“Givin’em time to ready for our arrival,” Hegel clucked. “And after all we done for you. Shameful.”

“I would sooner cut the tongue from my own mouth and feed it to that Rodrigo before I would slander my benefactors!” Al-Gassur
said. “I merely sought to find the reason, for your mutual benefits, as to why the two of you, and by extension myself, have
been forbidden to leave the grounds these last weeks.”

“Forbidden?” Hegel laughed. “We ain’t forbidden from nuthin!”

“Bide, bide,” said Manfried, recalling the alcoholic distractions and bathy diversions placed before them whenever they had
intended an outing over the previous month.

“Bide what?” asked Hegel in their twinspeak. “He was talkin foreign!”

“True enough,” Manfried replied in kind. “But sounded right Italia-talk to me, not that Arab gibberish. Implies he mightn’t
be fibbin this once, least not completely. Hear’em out, and if I gives you the nod gut’em then.”

“Fair’s fair,” Hegel said, reverting to the common language. “Tell us quick and true who you was talkin to, and spare no details
if you want spared.”

“And every other applicable item to boot,” said Manfried, “bout what you been doin since we showed up and put your mecky Infidel
ass honest in this house.”

“Yes! Please! At once! Honest and without hesitation!” Al-Gassur may have carried on like this for some time had Hegel not
wiggled his knife at the Arab. “From the beginning then, and if I may presume to suppose you might be willing to sully your
nobly forested mouths with a bottle that my own corroded lips have blemished, I would be elated to share my unworthy beverage
as well as my tale.”

“Huh?” said Hegel.

“Ifing Master Manfried sees fit to release me, I would like to share my bottle of wine,” Al-Gassur clarified.

“See, our company’s makin you more honest by the moment,” said Manfried, giving the man a final squeeze before letting him
go.

Finding the bottle unbroken in his bag, Al-Gassur fished it out and took a swig before offering it to the Brothers.

“While the gutter has served as residence and employer for most of my time in Venezia, I have occasionally stooped to labor
in more, as you say, honest ventures. An especially upstanding and chivalrous youth of noble standing spied me in a crowd
and perceived I possessed all the graces required to be an ideal servant, and so I served in one of this fair city’s most
highly houses.”

Al-Gassur spoke a variety of truth, for the young man in question indeed found the Arab to possess certain graces—said graces
being an appearance and demeanor assured to raise the rancor of the youth’s father. While Al-Gassur was never caught in the
act of embezzling his master’s sugar and pepper, the lad had tragically been slain in a duel with an equally shallow coxcomb
and that very afternoon Al-Gassur found himself discharged.

“After I had done all I could for him, my original benefactor, and, dare I say, friend,” Al-Gassur continued, “I found cause
to advance myself. We are aware, are we not, that any worthwhile city, like any worthwhile pudding, holds a thick layer of
fat atop it?”

Hegel nodded at this while Manfried futilely tried to think of a way of applying the analogy to graveyards that was not distasteful
to his delicate sensibilities.

“So I found employment with our mutual and dearly departed friend and confidant, Ennio, in this very house,” Al-Gassur said,
omitting the detail that Ennio had hired him primarily to irritate his brother Rodrigo; a trend that, once established by
his first master, served Al-Gassur all the days of his pragmatic life. “The barn is therefore familiar to me upon this, my
second tenure in the House of Barousse. The matter of a missing cake from the kitchen’s windowsill undid my previous employment,
despite the obvious, blatant, and irrefutable proof that the guards set me up. Nestore, God bless and keep him, has found
work for me to perform down these days whenever I am not actively serving you.”

Nestore, the cook’s husband and supplier of groceries, had taken to Al-Gassur at once, their mutual dislike of honest labor
surpassed only by their affection for excessive drinking. Ennio and Nestore were the only ones who had stuck up for Al-Gassur
when he was found munching the cake intended for Barousse’s board. The first night the Arab spent back in the barn Nestore
and he had celebrated with the exquisite schnapps Al-Gassur had stolen from Hegel’s cask during the Grossbarts’ first, stormy
discourse with Rodrigo before being admitted to the grounds. The schnapps was supplemented with Nestore’s cheese, sausage,
and, of course, cake.

“Fascinatin,” Manfried yawned. “Much as I’d love nuthin more than to hear your whole fuckin life told from when you crawled
out your desert womb down to the present, with every time you copped a hot squat laid out in detail, time’s an essence where
savin lives is concerned.”

“Saving lives?” Al-Gassur blinked.

“Yours,” said Hegel. “You get on with who you was talkin to just now or you get cut, you loquacious piece a shit.”

“Naturally, of course, without pause! My advantageous placement in society allows me to catch the random rumor, the occasional
whisper, and a nightsoilman I keep company with often gathers gossip along with the excrement he dumps in the canals. A consequence
of our long-standing friendship is that he, on occasion, will pause underneath our esteemed host’s wall when he sees a rock
balanced on the ledge, as he did today. I have known, as all with wits who dwell in this city do, that the doge harbors a
strong disdain for Captain Barousse, although precisely why is all merely conjecture, and so I thought to enquire of him particular
details, details which may explain why Barousse feels the need to keep his beloved Grossbarts safe behind these walls.”