The Outcast Blade (8 page)

Giulietta stared out of a window and across the Grand Canal to the buildings beyond. Anything but look at the young woman watching her. She couldn’t bear Eleanor to see the fear in her eyes.

Here I can keep Leo’s true nature hidden
.

She couldn’t say that, not even to Eleanor who was her cousin as well as her lady-in-waiting and the closest she’d had to a friend
before she met Leopold. Because then she’d have to admit that Leo was
krieghund
. And even Eleanor would find it hard to keep a secret like that.

Krieghund
were beasts, they lacked souls; full-grown
krieghund
turned into monsters under the full moon. Good Christians killed them on sight. That was her baby people were talking about.

“Who will prepare your bed and heat water for washing?” Lady Eleanor asked, changing the subject.

“I can do that myself.”

“And I suppose you’ll wash the floors too?”

Crossing black and white tiles, Eleanor threw open the shutters of a huge trefoil balcony that let on to the Canalasso. Then she folded back the shutters of a narrower window overlooking a side canal. The gondola that brought them was still tied to its post, the gondolier resting on his pole.

“How many rooms?” she demanded.

Giulietta had no idea. She avoided saying this was because the only rooms she knew were those Leopold had ringed with salt to keep her safe from Dr Crow’s magic. There were things Eleanor didn’t need to know about her life then. Things that nobody knew. Except
that boy
.

“We’ll need servants,” Eleanor said.

Giulietta recognised this as surrender. “No we won’t,” she said. “We can manage on our own.” Now was the point at which Eleanor should stick out her bottom lip, complain loudly, or announce in that case she wasn’t going to stay. All things Giulietta did at fourteen. Instead, she simply said, “We can’t.”

And before they could begin one of those
yes we can/no we can’t
spats so much a part of their childhood, Eleanor told Giulietta why. If she didn’t hire servants her aunt would. Servants provided by Alexa would be loyal to Alexa first and Giulietta second. Did Giulietta want that?

“You’ve changed.”

“I had no choice,” Lady Eleanor said tartly.

Giulietta had the grace to look ashamed. In the months she’d been gone she barely thought of her young cousin. “What do you think we’ll need?”

Lady Eleanor suggested a wet nurse for Leo, a cook, a gondolier, and an ex-soldier or two to guard the doors. A general maid to prepare the beds and carry water. If they found they needed anyone else, Giulietta could hire them later. “No one will stop you cleaning cobwebs if you want. No one would dare. But…”

“I agree,” said Giulietta, surprising them both.

Then she asked the question that had been bothering her all week. The one that helped provide the determination to face up to her aunt and leave the Ca’ Ducale while everyone was still worrying about poor Marco.

“Marco will recover, won’t he?” That wasn’t the question. Just what got in the way of the question she wanted to ask.

“Of course he will. Aunt Alexa says so.”

Giulietta swallowed hard. “This sounds strange… You don’t think Aunt Alexa had me abducted, do you? I mean, she’s never said anything?”

“
Giulietta…
”

“I’m serious.
Has she?
”

“No, of course not. She was really upset. She offered money, titles, patronage for news of you. No one’s seen her like it. It’s a ridiculous thought.”

Giulietta decided Eleanor was right.

Tycho had suggested it. That night on the
San Marco
when he made up his story about arriving in Venice to kill her aunt at her uncle’s orders. Just another thing he said to upset her.

“You have servants for your house?”

Giulietta made herself pick up a tiny cup of fermented tea and sip it before answering. “Yes, thank you. A cook, a wet nurse, a porter, a guard. I’ve been hiring staff for days.”

“Because if you haven’t…”

“That’s kind. But my household is hired.”

She sat with her back to the fretted screen of a marble balcony overlooking the small gardens at the back of Ca’ Ducale. The beginning of June was the perfect time for flowers in Venice: bocca di leone, gloriosa and bouvardia filled tubs and fell over the edges of stone urns older than the city itself.

Giulietta could swear her aunt was smiling.

“How’s Marco now?” The question wasn’t intended to deflect attention from whether she’d accept one of Aunt Alexa’s spies. It managed it all the same.

“Better than yesterday, which was better than the day before…”

“I’m glad.”

“Yes,” said the duchess dryly. “So am I.” Leaning back, she added, “You know my favourite memory of the boy?”

“No, my lady.”

“Sigismund sent him a toy wolf made from real fur.” Seeing Giulietta’s surprise, she added, “We weren’t always enemies. And he is Marco’s godfather, for what that’s worth. Back then I thought the toy sweet. Now, of course…”

Since the emperor turned his
krieghunds
’ attention on Venice anyone could recognise the toy for the double-edged offering it was. What lesson was she meant to take from this, Giulietta wondered, before discovering her aunt hadn’t finished.

“One day I went to Marco’s nursery. You know what he was doing?”

Giulietta shook her head.

“He was playing chess with the wolf. Making moves for both of them. Good moves, real moves… A week later the fever took him. It turned a bright boy of six into a stumbling idiot who needs help dressing or washing.”

“A fever like this fever?”

Alexa stared through her wretched veil. If Alexa hadn’t been her aunt, Giulietta would have been scared of her. Well, more scared.

“You’re calling this a slight fever, aren’t you? I assume so because that’s what the common people are saying on the streets.”

“And you know this how?”

“Because I’ve been there.”

It was hard to explain the excitement that sparked. Simply mixing with women in the market, walking through half-deserted
campi
, visiting out-of-the-way and unimportant churches to light candles for Leopold in front of Madonnas who’d gone ungilded and unpainted for years.

Aunt Alexa had never known such freedom.

Would never know it. Her marriage swapped one captivity for another. The death of her husband tying her to different responsibilities. Being Leopold’s widow freed Giulietta. Baby Leo might be a prince but no throne awaited him. The death of a man who’d loved her, albeit strangely, had given Giulietta a house and
added the power of his name to hers. Reducing her own family’s hold.

“You’re thinking…”

“About how the world works.”

“And how does it work?”

“Subtly,” said Giulietta, and Alexa laughed so loudly a boy pruning roses in the garden glanced up, then looked away and kept working, hoping his indiscretion had gone unnoticed. It hadn’t, of course. Nothing in Ca’ Ducale ever did.

“Do you know…?”

“Who poisoned him?” Her aunt hesitated on the edge of saying something and decided against it. When Giulietta swallowed her disappointment at being treated like a child, Aunt Alexa nodded her approval and Giulietta then wondered if she was wrong about being treated like a child. Life in the palace was complicated.

Leopold had told her that life in all palaces was complicated.

It should be thought of as being like trying to play chess when you could only see the board in a mirror and half the pieces you did have were invisible.

“I’ll have my guards see you home.”

Giulietta understood what calling Ca’ Friedland
home
must cost her aunt, so she smiled, shook her head gently, and said, “I have two of my own.”

“Well, take care of yourself. After Marco…”

Giulietta scowled. She wanted her aunt to finish the sentence.
After Marco I love you most. After Marco I couldn’t bear if something happened to you
. Or simply,
After Marco we need to take care…

She wished she knew which.

Did her aunt love her? If she did, why didn’t she ever say it? Giulietta needed the comfort of knowing someone other than her baby loved her. Her husband had. And Tycho…

But being loved by someone you hated was no use to anyone.

“Aunt.” Kissing Alexa’s cheek, Giulietta bobbed a curtsy as
befitted a niece bidding a duchess goodbye and left, taking with her thoughts of how hard being Aunt Alexa must be. When she’d arrived in the city, Alexa was the daughter of a minor khan and called something else entirely.

She found herself, a Mongol girl, in a strange city that still had nightmares about the Golden Horde. Now Prince Tamburlaine – who was a distant cousin, for all he addressed Alexa as
aunt
in his letters – had conquered China and ruled an empire stretching from the Yellow Sea to the edges of Byzantium.

Silks flooded into Alexa’s adopted city from Cathay, spices from northern India and silverwork from Samarkand; while Western goods went east, carried by Venetian caravans, and the profits returned to Venice’s coffers.

Venice
needed
Aunt Alexa for her kinship with the khan of khans. It made Giulietta thankful to be herself.

As she walked home accompanied by her guards, Lady Giulietta spotted Dr Crow on some jetty steps near San Giovanni in conversation with two men shabby enough to be beggars. “Fresh, this time,” she heard him say. “I’m not paying for…”

“No, sir. Of course not. I promise you that the… That tonight’s catch will be better.”

She hurried on, glad the alchemist hadn’t seen her and suspecting his blindness was simply because he didn’t expect to see her. Well brought up Venetian women used gondolas, one of the reasons Giulietta liked walking. It was only later she wondered what Dr Crow was doing talking to fishermen and why he didn’t buy from the market like everyone else.

Burning the dead was forbidden by tradition and religion. Of course, religion tended to be given short shrift in Venice unless it agreed with the city’s own views. (Even excommunication, and the threat of an eternity in hell, wasn’t enough to make the city obey the Pope.) Tradition was another matter.

Venice liked tradition.

And then there was
resurrection
. Which wasn’t really religion or tradition. More a matter of common sense. How could you come back from the grave at the last trump if your body had no skeleton to hang its flesh on?

The sexton at San Giacomo, a parish in the slums between Cannaregio and the dockyards of Arzanale, didn’t worry about such niceties. He’d have happily burnt bodies if the city paid him. Unfortunately the city wanted its dead buried.

Still, there was money in burying the bodies. And for the sexton’s cousin, if not for the sexton himself, even more money in digging them up again.

“This one,” the sexton’s cousin said.

“You’re sure?” His half-brother glanced between moonlit pits.
Both had roots trapped in their recently turned soil. A sprinkling of grass covered the tops.

“That one’s smallpox.”

The words silenced his helper.

A wave of smallpox had swept the Orseolo hospital. As ever, most of the patients died within ten days and their bodies had needed dousing with quicklime before burial. Smallpox meant the graves couldn’t be used again.

“Besides,” the sexton’s cousin admitted, “I left Giorgio’s spade as a marker.” An old spade jutted from one of the mounds on the grave island, its cracked blade and splintery handle making it barely worth stealing. “Dig.”

“You dig. I dug last time.”

The half-brother headed for a small boat pulled up on the mud flats. It was a fishing boat but then he’d trained as a fisherman. It was just that stealing corpses produced more profit. Pulling free a wicker sledge, he dragged it up the slight hill.

The sexton’s cousin had found a corpse. The grave pit was old, had been in use for years and was already overfull. There was barely a skin of baked earth over the hand he uncovered.

“Too rotted,” his half-brother said.

Their employer didn’t accept old or rotten. He demanded young, fresh and recent. What he really wanted was for these two to cream off the best of the bodies before they were buried. So far they’d resisted his threats and bribes.

Tonight’s moon was half full, and half hidden by cloud, which made conditions just about perfect. Any fisherman on the lagoon who noticed two shadows moving across Pauper Island would cross himself, mutter a hasty
Ave Maria
and row in the opposite direction.

Sinking his spade into the mound, the sexton’s cousin started again. He had to dig for a full minute before hitting something.

“Careful…”

“You do it then.”

His half-brother shook his head.

Both men were married, both in their thirties and both about to become grandfathers. They’d apprenticed as fishermen under the same uncle and begun to dig graves in their spare time ten years before. Both had been happy to discover there was more money to be made digging up corpses than burying them.

Dropping to his knees, the sexton’s cousin put down his spade and reached into the hole, brushing damp earth from a face. “This one looks good.”

She came up slowly, the earth releasing her with a soft sucking sound. Everywhere in Venice was near water. Few understood that as well as its gravediggers. As she came free, the hole she’d been pulled from began to fill with foul liquid. Thorn bushes and wild roses blossomed richly around them. It wasn’t hard to work out why.

“Check her then.”

Turning her head, his half-brother made sure her ears hadn’t been cropped for thievery and opened her mouth to check she hadn’t lost her tongue to treason, then lifted each eyelid in turn. She’d lived and died without seeing something she shouldn’t.

“And the rest…”

Arms unbroken, legs the same. Skin surprisingly unmottled for someone buried three days; although neither could remember this one. She had to be from the last batch given how near the surface she was.

“Told you they’d be all right.”