The Venetian (29 page)

Maffeo peered up the incline, shading his eyes against the sun now lower in the sky. He saw a jagged outcropping of rock and a solitary tree twisting as though trying to free itself from the clutches of the land. He would be able to see the entire stretch of the small valley from there he thought. And if he were lucky, some firewood.

He was perspiring heavily now as he climbed, but the sweat was drying quickly from the encroaching chill. He would have to find some wood soon. He didn’t relish the thought of Turri’s cold stare. Ever since the debacle at the harbor, he had been treated with disdain by the man. It had not been his doing, but he was the youngest, inexperience etched on his lineless face, and by default became the symbol of their failure. The other two
Provveditori
, Utino and Doro, seemed more agreeable but they mostly kept quiet around Turri. They seemed eager to be done here. Maffeo didn’t blame them. He was getting closer to the rocks now, the wind stronger here with little to buffer it. He wiped his forehead and stopped to take in the view. He scanned what he could see of the horizon. Yes, there would be an excellent vantage point from the rocks once he got there.

He stepped up onto the lowest rock of the formation, reached for the tree to steady himself, and turned back toward the opposite hillside. He could see the full extent of the basin, the twisting road entering and leaving the valley. The wildflowers were more prevalent then he had realized, stippling the grassy floor on either side of the road with yellow and violet so different from the dull brown and sparse green of the hills. The valley was half in shadow now with only the upper portion of the hill on the opposite side still illuminated by the sun. He could see the men in the camp, Turri in animated discussion with the other two officials, Bernardo and Nicolo standing nearby, silently observing the exchange.

The whistling of the wind off the promontory masked the hiss of the saddle axe as it plunged and split Maffeo’s head down to the bridge of his nose. There was no sound except for the thunk of the blade as it went through the skull and got stuck midway. Bits of brain and scalp and slivers of skull came loose as Qilij wrenched the axe out of Maffeo’s head. The body toppled over. Qilij cleaned the bloody blade on the dead man’s shirt.

It was a foolish thing to do. He should have waited until dark he knew, until they were asleep. One guard would have been easy to approach and silently dispatch. He could have then killed the rest while they slept. But his patience had come to an end. No, that wasn’t quite it. He wanted this fight, this way. He was no silent assassin. He was a warrior, and warriors fought in the light of day, under the watchful eye of Allah.

Qilij glanced at the sky. It would be dark soon. They would wonder what had become of their comrade. Attack now or wait for them to come to him? He could not take the chance of one of them getting away. He had been impatient once today already. He would not make that mistake again.

***

“WHERE IS THAT
fool?” Turri was pacing back and forth, already agitated from his discussion with Utino and Doro, the two of them bleating like sheep about how they should have brought more men. Not that it mattered now. Two days on the road and this dolt Maffeo taking too long to find firewood, and these men,
these noble men of the Republic
, are reduced to frightened children.

“Perhaps we should look for him,” said Doro.

“I am reluctant to send Bernardo alone,” replied Nicolo.

“Then don’t,” said Turri impatiently. “You go as well.”

“Someone should remain at the camp.”

“We will remain at the camp. Go.”

Nicolo hesitated. It was obvious what he was thinking.

“Ah,” said Turri. “Did the whimpering of my colleagues alarm you? We are quite safe, I assure you.” Nicolo didn’t move. Turri could see that the man’s duty as a soldier overcame any fear Turri may have inspired in him. That was good. It softened his attitude toward the soldier, and he spoke to him in a more amiable tone. “It is not yet dark. The bandits, if they are even about, would not think to approach a contingent of our size until much later. By then we will have Maffeo back with us and the watch will have been set. Please, I appreciate your concern. Go find your man.” Turri concluded the speech with a wry smile. “I have been known to do some soldiering myself,” he said. He was very aware of his own myth among the soldiers. He made it his business to be aware of such things. “I am certain that if we encounter any…difficulties, I can hold them off until you return.”

The man’s pride is going to get us killed one day
Doro thought.

Nicolo said nothing, only nodded. It was useless to argue with the man. He motioned for Bernardo to follow. They took their swords and moved off in the direction Maffeo had gone.

They were halfway up the hill before Nicolo spoke, breathing more heavily now. “Stay sharp. The shadows are lengthening and soon it will be difficult to see.” Bernardo grunted his assent. “I don’t like this,” Nicolo said, more to himself than Bernardo. “He should have returned by now.”

Ten minutes passed, the climbing becoming increasingly difficult, before Nicolo felt Bernardo’s hand on his elbow. He turned back to his companion. Bernardo was not looking at him but rather had fixed his stare up the hill. Nicolo followed his gaze. There was a jumble of jagged rocks at the crest of the hill topped by a contorted tree. The sun was almost below the hill now, the rocks and tree in dark silhouette. But there was another shape as well, what looked like a man leaning against the twisted trunk.

Nicolo felt his face flush with heat. “If that fool is admiring the view…” He didn’t need to finish for Bernardo to guess the rest.

“Perhaps he is looking for wood from a better vantage point. I saw none during our entire climb.” It was Nicolo’s turn to grunt, reluctant to give the younger man the benefit of the doubt.

They were within thirty feet now. “Maffeo!” called Nicolo. “What are you doing? It is cold and yet you amuse yourself with a pretty view.” Even if he was doing as Bernardo had suggested, the boy still lacked discipline and Nicolo didn’t feel bad about scolding him.

Nicolo had a difficult time comprehending what he saw next. One of the rocks broke away from the others, rose, and flew toward the two men. In the split second before Nicolo felt the crushing blow to his chest, there was no fear, only bewilderment. He landed on his back nearly ten feet away, the air punched from his lungs, his sword no longer in his hand.

Qilij knew that the two men would be looking into the sun as they approached, his huddled body just another black rock. He needed to separate them. The big one with the scar he would need to take more time with. Better to get him out of the way with a nicely placed kick so he could dispose of the other one quickly.

Nicolo had been ahead of Bernardo and was now behind him. What had just happened? He stared at his friend’s motionless body for an instant before turning back toward the top of the hill. He never got the chance to raise his sword arm. His head was gripped, as though in a vice, pressure behind his eyeballs pushing them out of his skull. The scene before him, the tree, the rocks, the sinking sun, all rushed by in a blurry torrent as his head was twisted with inhuman speed.

The crack of the neck was no louder than the splintering of a chicken bone. Qilij spread his hands, allowing the dead body to fall to the ground and advanced on the man with the scar. He was sitting up now, trying to fill his lungs with air, his chest heaving. He saw Qilij moving toward him and began scuttling backward on the ground, trying to put distance between them, frantically scanning the dirt and brush for his sword. Qilij stopped, retraced his steps back to the rocks, and returned with his axe. He tossed it at the man’s feet. Nicolo looked at it, eyes wide, and looked back at Qilij.

“Pick it up.”

“Who are you?” Nicolo whispered.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“We are here on official business,” he said, his voice shaking. Qilij smiled. “We are not interested in your group or their activities. We are seeking only a fugitive from Venetian justice.”

“My group?”

“Your group, your tribe, whatever it is you call yourselves. Bandits.”

Qilij laughed and saw the jumbled emotions on the man’s face, making his scar dance, anger at being mocked, fear at what it meant. “I do not seek your valuables or your horses. It is you I want. I am here to erase you from this place.”

Nicolo felt a surge of anger, banishing his fear. This was a direct challenge and he a soldier. He was slowly recovering from the shock of what he had witnessed. The man before him was large. He did not know how a man of such size had moved so quickly. Some sort of trick he expected. He had ambushed them and so had had time to arrange things just so to inflict the maximum amount of fear. But Nicolo was large as well, and it was time to avenge his friends. Large or not, the man was a peasant, dressed in rags. If he were foolish enough to offer him his axe, Nicolo would allow him to fully comprehend his error before ending his time on earth.

He reached for the axe with his right hand, never taking his eyes from his attacker, who simply nodded pleasantly, and rose to his feet. He was larger than Nicolo had thought. Everyone looks large when you are on the ground, but now standing himself, Nicolo realized that the man was still enormous. He felt his anger-fueled confidence waver. He glanced over the man’s shoulder at the figure leaning against the tree. It was indeed Maffeo as they had thought, but he wasn’t leaning at all. He had been crammed into the limbs of the tree so his limp body would remain upright. His right arm, he could see now, was bent at an obscene angle. He took it all in in an instant, his eyes coming to rest on Maffeo’s cloven head, a cloud of flies swarming around the bloody gash.

Qilij glanced back at the body and smiled. Nicolo realized now that he could never best this man in hand to hand combat. He seemed to have no weapon, but he did not trust that observation. He was sure to have a dagger at least hidden in his ragged clothing. His only chance would be to catch him off guard, keep him talking until he could strike.

“I do not understand,” Nicolo said. “Your accent is strange to me. I do not recognize it. If you are not a bandit, what business do you have with us?”

“What business I have with you is my business, and I choose not to discuss it. Now come, let us have this over with.”

Nicolo was edging imperceptibly closer and the man hadn’t moved. He would be close enough to strike in a few seconds if he could keep him distracted. “You fight like a soldier though you dress like a peasant. If you wish to erase me from this place as I believe you put it, it is a matter of honor, between fighting men, that you at least tell me why. Are you not a man of honor? From what I have seen…”

Nicolo lunged in midsentence bringing the axe arcing down toward Qilij’s broad chest. Qilij stepped to his left with astonishing speed as though he were expecting exactly that move at precisely that moment. He avoided the lunge, grabbing Nicolo’s right wrist, and broke it with a flick of his hand. Nicolo screamed and Qilij spun, still holding the wrist in one hand and plucking the axe from Nicolo’s ruined grasp with the other, burying it in his back between his shoulder blades at the base of his neck. Nicolo was dead before he hit the ground.

For the second time that day Qilij extracted his axe from a fallen enemy and cleaned its blade on a dead man’s shirt. He surveyed the scene before him. It had been easier than he had expected. He would leave them as they lay, soldiers or no. Let the land they had terrorized and exploited claim them. For the vaunted
Provveditori,
he would use the bow. They were below contempt, deserving no such honor as facing their enemy. Death would rain down from the sky and they would know that their robes of state could not protect them from Allah’s justice.

He walked back to his horse, tied to a tree and waiting patiently halfway down the far side of the hill. He pulled his bow and quiver from its holder on the saddle and returned to the rock formation. He extracted Maffeo’s body from the tree’s limbs and tossed it a good distance from the rocks. He didn’t want the flies to be a distraction. He looked down into the valley and spotted the camp. The light was nearly gone and he would have to be quick, especially since they would now have no fire to illuminate them. He moved along the top of the ridge, hiding himself among the trees, making sure his movements were even and fluid; nothing too jarring to catch the eye. He saw another rock formation on a narrow bluff, this one smaller than the other—enough to conceal his body but not so large as to be a hindrance—about a third of the way down the hill. It would be a good spot from which to shoot. He carefully made his way down the slope and knelt behind the rocks. He set his arrows down on the ground next to him, ran a loving hand along the smooth curve of his bow, and snapped the bowstring, testing the tension. The valley floor was in deep shadow now, not quite dark but close. Even his perfect vision would be tested.

Qilij loved the visceral charge of hand to hand combat, the axe and sword just another part of his body. It was the purest form of domination of one man over another, almost sacred in its practice. As hated as an enemy might be, in the end, if he had fought well, he became something close to a brother in his death. Even so, it was the bow he truly loved. He remembered the training now, how it had taken his anger and channeled it, given it purpose. Taybugha al-Yunani, in his treatise on archery, had enjoined every archer to enter the training yard in veneration, as though he were entering a mosque. It was to this place of reverence that Qilij went now.

He was at peace. Everything around him—the trees, rocks, wind, sky—they were all part of a whole, working in concert to help him accomplish his mission. He saw the
Provveditori
in the camp, saw them with impassive eyes. They seemed agitated as no doubt they were, wondering where the soldiers had gone and whether they would return. Were they angry? Afraid? If they were not fearful, they soon would be. Qilij closed his eyes, modulating his breath. In his mind each man below took the form of the
buttiyya
, the training target. When his arrows pierced their flesh however, it would not be cotton that emerged. He began to recite Taybugha’s poem in a low murmur, more than two hundred verses in all, containing all the instructions in archery—how to hold the bow, where to place the right leg and where the left, what distance to keep between them, when to stand and when to sit while taking aim, the grasp (
qabda
), the clench (
qafla
), the aim (
i’timed
), the nocking (
tafwiq
), the release (
iflat
). Qilij could loose five arrows in as many seconds with tremendous accuracy but he would not need to be so quick now. He caressed his bow once more, its smooth surface shimmering in the twilight. There had been only a handful of men back in Cairo that could even fully draw the bowstring back, let alone accurately shoot with it. The arrows were exactly as long as his arm, the bow as long as the arrows.