The Serpent of Venice (40 page)

“My daughter cannot marry a Christian,” said Shylock.

“I’m not a Christian,” said I. “Heretic of convenience at worst.”

“I’m not marrying him,” said Jessica. “We are simply sailing off to do dread deeds and have drunken debauchery beneath the mizzenmast. I’d not marry such a small and irritating pest of a man.”

“Despite my puckish charm and enormous knob?” said I.

“Both soundly imaginary,” said Jessica.

“You agreed yourself, in front of this very father of yours, that I had an enormous knob.”

Shylock moaned and cradled his head in his hands as if it might explode any moment.

“I thought I was agreeing that you
were
an enormous knob,” she said.

“Oh, well then, now you’ve hurt my feelings,” said I. “I’ll be in the longboat, sulking, when you are ready. Farewell, Shylock. I will take good care of her, despite her sour disposition.”

“This is a punch to my heart,” said Shylock, by way of a good-bye.

“Well, don’t blame me, you’re the one that raised her. Might have added a soupçon of human kindness to all the guilt and kvetching if you didn’t want her to run off to be a pirate.”

“You, you, you, you, you—you do not talk this way of my daughter. You give me my ducats, but you take my daughter.”

“I am
not
taking your daughter. Your daughter is seeking her own adventure.”

“Pocket,” said Jessica. “Please, wait in the boat. I’ll be along in a bit.”

“
Adieu,
Shylock,” said I. I took my duffel, went to the end of the dock, and handed it down to the sailors.

There was much embracing and many tears and when Jessica finally joined me in the longboat, Shylock stood and watched us until we were all the way out into the harbor, and his dark figure, topped by his yellow hat, was still there, even as we raised anchor and set sail.

Drool was standing at the bow, letting the wind wash the stink off his hulking frame, and Jeff was cavorting in the rigging, chattering and shrieking with glee that he had been so sly as to have tricked us into building all this smashing monkey-climbing equipment for him. Nerissa had decided to join us on our travels, and she stood by the helm with Montano, whom Othello had appointed as our captain and pilot.

After he took his seat on the council, the Moor had given us the ship and crew in thanks for our service to him and Venice. Desdemona, as mistress of the estate, had rescinded her father’s instructions and saw that half of Brabantio’s fortune, along with the villa at Belmont, went to her sister, Portia, on the one condition that she never let her handsome, yet terribly thick husband, Bassanio, manage the money.

In Corsica, after an appropriate half-hour of mourning upon finding out she had been widowed, Emilia married Michael Cassio, and was now installed, quite comfortably, in the Citadel at Bastia, the new Baroness of Corsica.

“I worry about Papa,” Jessica said.

“He will be fine. He has his spectacles, so he can do his own accounts, and that widow Esther is taking care of him at the house. She has a healthy laugh and won’t put up with his bollocks. Shylock had nearly smiled when he met her. The possibilities are as dazzling as they are disgusting.” Tubal had hired the woman to look after his friend. It turned out that it had been Iago who had hired the two huge Jews to kill us, not Tubal, and the two old moneylenders had resumed their friendship with new frontiers of resentment and envy to help it along.

“Can you even get to China by sea?” asked Jessica, as we stood at the rail at the rear of the ship, watching Venice recede into the horizon, and the shadow of the black dragon following behind just below the surface of the water.

“No idea. I thought we agreed when we decided to go pirating that you will learn the nautical bits and I will compose bawdy songs of our legendary adventures. Marco Polo says it may be possible, but he also said that we may have to take her overland to get her home.”

“Montano thinks there may be a river to China from the Black Sea.”

“If not, we can sail back the other way.”

“South,” she provided.

“If you say so. We will get her back to her own kind, if there are any left, even if we have to sail the
Serpent of Venice
o’er all the seven seas together. There are
seven
seas, right?”

“It’s a shit name for a ship,” she said.

I’d had the name of our ship emblazoned on her stern in great gilt letters, and an effigy of Vivian carved in ebony graced her bow.

“Well, we aren’t going to call the ship the
Dread Pirate Jessica
. That, my dear, is a shit name for a ship.”

“Arrrrr,” she arrrrrred.

AFTERWORD

I
’m sure, by now, you’ve thought, “I’ve read
Othello
and
The Merchant of Venice,
and try as I may, I do not remember the part about a fool knobbing a dragon; perhaps I should give them another look.” If you decide to go in that direction, and there are certainly worse ways to spend your time, you may be somewhat disappointed to find that Shakespeare left that part out.
The Serpent of Venice
was inspired by and draws upon three works of literature:
The Cask of Amontillado,
a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, and
The Merchant of Venice
and
Othello: The Moor of Venice,
by William Shakespeare. Also, there is no little contribution from Shakespeare’s
King Lear,
which was the inspiration for my previous novel
Fool,
in which Pocket, Drool, and Jeff first appear. I’ve also quoted or paraphrased lines from about another dozen or so of Shakespeare’s plays; right now I couldn’t tell you from which. Trying to reconcile a story built from so many diverse sources, while also trying to accommodate history, can lead, I’m sure, to some confusion, so I hope I can clear up a few details about history, characters, and attitudes here . . .

HISTORY

As the preface states,
The Serpent of Venice
is set in a mythical late thirteenth century. This was necessary to continue Pocket’s story, which ends in the same period in
Fool,
so I set
Serpent
several hundred years earlier than the source materials.
Othello
is set during the time when the Venetian Empire is at war with the Ottoman Empire, which was throughout much of the sixteenth century. In the play, Othello is sent to Cyprus to thwart an invasion by the Turks (Ottomans). The Turks took Cyprus from the Venetians in 1570, so I assume that Shakespeare is working in a time contemporary to his own. It’s estimated that
Othello
was written around 1600–1601.
The Merchant of Venice
(approximately 1596–1598) is also set in a time contemporary to Shakespeare’s, and one assumes that the conventions and mores of his time would at least resonate with his London audiences. (More about that later.)

The
Serpent of Venice
is set around 1299, when Venice’s dominance of trade in the Mediterranean was still being established, and the city-state had, indeed, been at war with Genoa for most of the last part of the century, a war over maritime superiority that would continue through most of the fourteenth century as well. I moved the action taken from
Othello,
from the island of Cyprus, which was strategically valuable to the Turks in the 1500s, to the island of Corsica, which is almost literally in Genoa’s backyard, in order to facilitate the travel to Genoa and back in a time frame that would fit the story. Here the story was driven by history, as much as by the influence of plays or stories.
The Cask of Amontillado
specifies no particular time, but one infers that it takes place sometime in the eighteenth century, easy enough to reconcile, since Carnival time in Venice seems to have remained constant for hundreds of years.

Venice had been established on an archipelago of islands in a salt marsh in the Adriatic Sea by refugees from Tuscany who were fleeing the invading forces of the Lombards and later Attila the Hun. Protected by a natural moat on the land side, and barrier islands, called the Lido, on the sea side, Venice grew into a powerful trading city with a representative republic as its government. The senators were elected by the neighborhoods, and a doge, or duke, was elected by the senators, and was advised by a council of six senators who ascended by seniority and election of their peers. (Different sources I found said the number of the council varied from six to twelve at different times, so I chose six for the story to give the position more power.) This representative republic was maintained in various forms until 1287, when Doge Giovanni Dandalo proposed that eligibility for the council be limited only to those whose fathers had been on the council. By 1299 it had become law and the republic became more of an inheritable oligarchy. This is the law that Iago and Antonio attempt to exploit by trying to arrange the marriage of Bassanio to Portia and eliminate Othello, who, by the circumstances I have created in the story, has been awarded Brabantio’s seat on the council. Venice, despite the attempt in the thirteenth century to turn it into an oligarchy, did remain, in some form, an independent city-state until it was overthrown by Napoleon in 1797.

It should probably be noted that Venice had, indeed, profited greatly by being the transport hub for soldiers and supplies during the Crusades, particularly the Fourth Crusade, when they were paid a hundred thousand ducats to build ships and transport knights, horses, and supplies to the Holy Land to take the city of Acre, and eventually, Jerusalem, from the Mameluke Saladin, who had beat nine shades of shit out of the occupying Crusaders a few years before, basically expelling them from the holy city. The Venetians would use their influence, and the Crusader soldiers, to attack their trade competitors on the Dalmatian coast (Croatia now) and take the Christian city of Constantinople, for which the pope would eventually threaten to excommunicate the entire city. (Venice also maintained some trading relationship with the Mamelukes, a practice forbidden by the pope—as with Antonio in
Serpent,
Venice sold materials to build war machines.) In all cases, Venice built the ships that were paid for by the crusading nobles of Europe, but were also able to keep the ships, as well as the fees they contracted for the transport. The Crusades, despite the war with Genoa, were the glory days for the Venetians, and established them as a world power, despite the carnage, suffering, death, and destruction their actions facilitated.

To the specific 1298 battle of Curzola, all but twelve of Venice’s ninety-five galleys were lost to Genoa. The admiral, Dandolo (who was the son of a doge), committed suicide in shame. Among the prisoners taken was a Venetian merchant called Marco Polo, who was imprisoned in Genoa. In
Serpent,
this is the battle from which Venice barely recovered, which puts Othello, a mercenary, in the position of saving the city.

While in prison, Marco Polo would dictate the tales of his travels to another prisoner, called Rusticello. It was easy enough to make this prisoner a beef-brained ninny with the gift of perfect recall, thus Drool becomes the author of
The Travels of Marco Polo
. In Polo’s book, he describes vicious, man-eating reptiles that live in the Chinese rivers. It’s fairly obvious to us now that he is talking about crocodiles, but at that time he does not use the term, and he also describes a bird large enough to “seize an elephant with its talons, and lift it into the air.” So who is to say he didn’t smuggle out a baby dragon in his rucksack?

CHARACTERS

More than thirty-four named characters appear in
The Merchant of Venice
and
Othello,
as well as the four characters I carried over from
Fool,
and the two characters from
The Cask of Amontillado.
Most have Italian-sounding names and some of the characters even have identical names (i.e., there is a Gratiano in both plays). There are far too many characters to include them all in a single comic novel and not lose the thread of the story, already made somewhat complex by marrying the three source works. Further, it was an annoying reality that Shakespeare named two of Antonio’s associates Salarino and Salanio. A modern novelist would never do this, as the eye confuses the two similar names almost by habit. (They teach that on the first day in author school.) And in
The Merchant of Venice,
the two serve exactly the same function and appear to share a personality. One transcription of the play I found even added a third, Solanio, because it just wasn’t confusing enough, I suppose. Thus, I tried to kill off one of the Sals as soon as possible. It should be noted, however, that Shakespeare wrote the plays to be performed and not read, and each of the Sals would have been distinguished by the actor who played him, so having like-sounding names wouldn’t have presented as much of a problem in the theater.

I chose
Merchant
and
Othello,
obviously, because they are set in Venice. Early on, as I dissected them to see what parts I could stitch back together to make the abomination that became
The Serpent of Venice,
I started noting that characters in each of the plays perform similar functions, and although I did not research it, I suspect the parts were written for the same actors. Portia and Desdemona are obviously similar, both smart and beautiful, by the descriptions from the other characters, of high birth, and each with a controlling father (Portia’s, however, deceased). Bassanio and Cassio could be the same character, as could Rodrigo and Gratiano, Lancelot Gobbo and the Clown in
Othello,
although Gobbo has a much larger part. The Duke of Venice appears in both plays, as well as members of the council; Shylock and Othello, although very different in disposition, are both outsiders to Venetian society. Iago and Antonio are both antagonists to the outsiders. Emilia and Nerissa are both lady’s maids, and Nerissa is more of an attending “lady in waiting,” but they serve similar functions; Emilia helps facilitate the mechanism of the tragedy of
Othello,
Nerissa the comedy of
Merchant.
Both have hungry ears for the troubles and plots of their mistresses, the female leads.