Reign of the Favored Women (4 page)

And my eyes were transfixed by the blue-flinted-with-green that was the eyes of Ghazanfer.

“Go! Run!” the great eunuch hissed over his shoulder at the young attaché.

Barbarigo seemed as immobilized as I was with the monstrous, crushed hands resting on my shoulders. His Venetian eyes blinked wider with fright than they had with my blade tickling his ribs.

“Go!” Ghazanfer’s Turkish rumbled again.

Then I found my voice and spoke in Italian. “Stay away from her, Barbarigo.” The hands came down heavier and inched towards the vulnerability of my throat. But as long as air was there, I kept on shouting. “Barbarigo, I swear to you on the graves of my family, extinguished in me. I swear Sofia Baffo wall destroy you as she does every man who cannot resist the lure of that hellborn hair.”

Finally, Barbarigo ran. He disappeared at the turn of a jeweler’s sultry display, my words in pursuit.

Then I turned and took a breath—might it be my last?—in order to meet those hard green eyes again. By God, that khadim was totally without expression, without feeling, so it seemed. But when he allowed me a second breath, I used it to give a cough of shame, of threat, deep in my throat. With more courage than I felt, I let him know what I knew—and that if he didn’t want me to use it, I dared him to kill me now.

The great conical turban that towered over mine shook in a slow negative.

No, you will not use this, he informed me wordlessly. Things will not go well for you—or for either of your precious ladies—if you do.

And did he really know this? This deepest, most damaging of our secrets? I did indeed read it in the laconic slits of his eyes.

You expose my lady, I read, I will expose yours. We both know full well that precious daughter of hers is no honest offspring of the Grand Vizier.

Overtones droned through the scented oleanders and roses like nocturnal bees after late summer blossom. The quartet of young ladies pursued the final chords of their madrigal and started another in the soft September Serenissima air.

Ah, Venice! Where one is duty-bound to feel romantic, no matter where his heart is.

Andrea hoped his circle of the company appeared to be the polite mingling of a bridegroom at his betrothal party and not a guilty son’s attempt to keep his father on the other side of the garden.

Now, which of the young singers was Andrea supposed to claim as his? Foscari. The remembrance of the family name, the ties the match would make, called the face to mind. The girl favored her father’s side—that unfortunate nose. There she was, second from the left, taking the descant part. Melissa Foscari.

Andrea took her hair to be the girl’s best feature. It had been brought up in a thick coil over her brow much too grown-up for the little face below. Ropes of pearls too precious, he thought, to be given so idly to one so young, had been pressed into service to make a crown of the coil, and they contrasted with the hair in an agreeable richness.

But this only emphasized the fact: Signorina Foscari’s hair was black, raven black. They’d given up even trying to give it blond highlights as any Venetian woman from the deepest brunette would do, under a wide-brimmed hat on her
altena
. They were all, in other words, trying to match Sofia Baffo’s perfection. In vain, in vain, Andrea sadly dismissed their efforts.

He struggled to keep the reaction on his face towards the upper side of the scale between disinterest and disgust as he greeted a few more guests. He who had held perfection in his trembling hands, how could he have patience with anything less?

Jesu, but the canals stank this time of year of lethargic tides. Andrea had forgotten how badly, and now the labor of breathing the foul air gripped his diaphragm like an iron manacle. He rubbed exhausted eyes against the sting of yellow-green decay and the sound of splashing rats. Typhus, he recalled, stalked the poorer sections of town in this unhealthy heat.

Wisteria reached towards the palace’s upper story like a lover towards his beloved’s balcony. A marble nymph flirted at him through the vine’s tendrils. The fortune in beeswax the Foscaris had spent to illuminate their assembly caught the statue’s perfect white curves with a sheen. This idealized beauty, so unself-conscious, luxuriating in her nakedness and its power over mankind, this was like his Sofia.

Andrea, very conscious that it was his first wine in over a year, took the glass a servant in sapphire livery offered him and let the fermentation fill his head. Over the tiny pool of red, Andrea continued to consort with the stone nymph.

“Well done, lad!”

Andrea looked helplessly down at the bloom of wine on his new lace ruff. A hurried abandonment of the Turkish in his costume upon his return to Venice had led to this ostentatious and brazen style. And now it was ruined with wine caused by a slap on the back and the hearty greeting of Messer Foscari, his future father-in-law.

I am not meant to be a Venetian fop, Andrea scolded himself.

The older man, who ignored the damage he had caused, was accompanied by Andrea’s father, Agostino Barbarigo, the Republic’s stern-faced proveditore.

Andrea shifted nervously under his father’s gaze, feeling like a child, his elopement with Sofia thwarted again in Ca’ Foscari. He felt the cut under his arm itch as it sloughed its scab. He remembered the eunuch.

It hardly seemed possible that the two beings were one and the same, the eunuch in Constantinople and the masked figure in Foscari’s hall. They were so disparate in time and space. And in Andrea’s mind, the masked destroyer of happiness had gained in stature over the years, haunting his hopes and dreams like something supernatural.

Well, Andrea was not about to let anyone, especially a ghost from the past—a demon from hell, rather—thwart him now.

Besides, it was too late. He’d tossed the dice amongst the uprooted cobbles of the Arsenal’s workyard. They must fall where they fell.

Andrea strained his attention over the rather rhythmless music of the madrigals, out into the sultry night, for one single thump that would change the evening’s rhythm all together.

By God, what time was it? Surely the bells had already rung midnight and he had missed them with all this revelry. But how could that be, when any such communal sound made him jump since his return to Christendom? He missed the muezzins.

“In truth, young messere, what do you think?” Foscari laid a confidential arm about Andrea’s shoulders.

What do I think about his daughter? The thought left Andrea at a loss for words.

“What do I think about what, sir?” he managed to get out before he said something more foolish.

“I mean, what do you think about Chios?” Foscari said.

“Chios?” Andrea repeated with a gulp.

“Do you think we can take it?”

Because his son failed to give an opinion, Agostino Barbarigo stepped into the breach. “This close to the end of the season, the Turk will not be expecting a new offensive.”

Sofia had all but promised that if he were successful—

Foscari said, “No. And if the Genoese cannot hold such a prize, gateway to the East, the Republic surely stands to inherit.”

“The chances of the success of our fleet seem fairly good, don’t you think?” Andrea’s father said.

Andrea tried desperately to determine where east might be, the direction of Chios, the island that was the hushed topic of conversation. East was the direction, too, of the Arsenal where, as he had seen that afternoon, the outfitting of the fleet for this enterprise was progressing apace. Because there was no telling east from west now in the dark, he feared his own plans, as opposed to the Republic’s, might have miscarried.

Suppose Giustiniani—that Genoese Chian who had no desire to see Venice take what he considered to be his own—suppose he were discovered. Suppose he were already taken by the night watch. Although rash enough, Giustiniani’s was not the sort of bravery that would stand up to the first hint of torture. He might be confessing his accomplice’s name even as they stood there chatting among the roses and oleanders.

Andrea thought he could hear the patrol’s gondola slipping down the rancid waters of the Grand Canal, over the madrigal, over the echoing night songs of the gondoliers. Any second now, any second, they’d be pounding for admittance at the Foscaris’.

“Andrea, answer our kind host,” his father hissed.

“A young man.” Foscari laughed. “His mind on my daughter.”

“You must have something to say on the subject of Chios rather than standing there like a total fool.”

Andrea swallowed the last of his wine and cleared his throat. “The Turks sets great store by Chios.”

His voice started high, reminding him of the eunuch again. “Sofia Baffo’s hellborn hair will destroy you.” The memory made Andrea’s words end in a squeak. He tried once more.

“The Turk will not be induced to give the island up so easily as we may hope.”

“Indeed?” said both older men together. The rigid constriction of two pairs of brows awaited more.

“The profit from the annual mastic harvest alone is worth a fortune.”

“All the more reason it should belong to the Republic,” Agostino Barbarigo said, the many hairs of his chest-length beard quivering as one.

“Indeed, sir.” Overcoming a Turkish hesitation to speak on such a subject, Andrea forged ahead. “But all these profits go to the support of the...of the imperial harem. The Turk will not easily endure such an insult to his womenfolk.”

His womenfolk will not endure it, Andrea thought, smelling jasmine mixed with almond paste, remembering the last time in the Jews’ shop. No, by God, say not “last time.”

“Our fleet shall teach the infidel to endure it, the lecherous old lout,” said the elder Barbarigo with a passion he usually reserved for redheads.

Involuntarily, Andrea said, “
Inshallah
.”

“And what is that heathen word supposed to mean?” his father asked.

“Forgive me, sir. No Turk would speak of the future without uttering it. The word means, ‘If Allah wills.’ “

Foscari laughed, the jovial host. “The Turk would then find anathema any festivity looking to the future such as we hold tonight?”

“I think Allah shall have very little will in the matter when he comes up against San Marco on Chios.” Agostino puffed out his beard like a bullfrog marking territory with his song.

Andrea could not suppress another “
Inshallah
.” But fortunately, no one heard it. Santa Sofia began to ring midnight, followed closely by San Felice, the more distant campanile of the Apostles, all the many bells of Venice that had stilled him to sleep as a child. Their notes were as liquid on the sultry night air as canal water.

Over the fading peals, Andrea heard a thud. Of course, he was listening for it. He only had time to think. That must be the patrol at the door, before he knew it was not.

The “
Mashallah
” of pure astonishment with which he followed the thought was also unheard by his scrupulous audience, for the syllables were blasted from their ears by a sound that rocked the very mud flats beneath their feet. Slivers of glass exploded from the upstairs windows of the palace and shivered through the wisteria’s leaves like a waterfall.

And suddenly there was no doubt which way was east, which way the Arsenal was, for the sky over that quarter of the palace’s roof glowed orange and coquelicot with soot and sulphur like the approach of daylight.

“She will not come to see me.”

Andrea heard the lifelessness in his own voice and knew he caught it from the great eunuch’s death mask of a face. The tones echoed around the tight confines of the jeweler’s back room like whispers in a tomb.

Around him were the familiar sounds of the Turkish bazaar muffled by walls. The sharp smell of gold mingled with the strong soap the Jewess used throughout the shop in a religious frenzy of cleanliness, yeasted by the little fresh-baked poppyseed buns she offered to every guest. All these things folded into the pleasant ambiance he had longed for throughout the past two months until the thought stung his eyes with tears. But these same things now all seemed bleached and faded of life.

Andrea struggled against passive acceptance of his own statement as a man struggles beneath a smothering pillow. He felt, in fact, more violently angry, more betrayed, more frightened than he’d ever been in his life.

“Sofia will not see me?” he repeated, more of his emotion wriggling free this time and gasping for air. “That lecherous prince must be in town.”

“Prince Murad—may Allah favor him—remains in Magnesia,” Ghazanfer stoically advised.

“Then—God forbid it—Sofia must be ill.” Andrea knew his feet were pacing under him, though there was no more than two steps they could go in any direction without running into walls—or into the eunuch’s great rigid green-draped knees.

“The lady is well, by the favor of Allah.”

“But she will not see me? No. I refuse to accept it. She cannot turn me away, not after what I’ve done for her.”

“She knows what you’ve done,” Ghazanfer said. God, the creature was a statue!

Only death would have kept Andrea away. Surely it must be the same with Sofia. “She doesn’t know. She can’t know.”

“About the Venetian Arsenal, yes, she knows. You, sir, must have been delayed by other matters, for word of the—calamity—reached us a week ago and my lady read your hand there at once.”

“She can’t know. She can’t know how we stood on the Foscaris’
altena
and watched—”

Andrea stopped the rehearsal surging through his brain. The memory had a demonic life of its own. So many times during the intervening weeks he’d attempted the same amputation of his thoughts. By promising himself, Sofia’s ears will hear it, he’d always managed what seemed a superhuman feat. I will tell her and only her. And her kiss will make it go away.

“More people would have died in an invasion, wouldn’t they? Even if Venice won.”

Why had he said that to this pathetic, ravaged, expressionless substitute for his beloved? To prevent more confessions, Andrea paced like a madman, his hands twenty places at once. He was aware of his actions, but couldn’t help himself.