The Sheen on the Silk (17 page)

GIULIANO DANDOLO WALKED OUT INTO THE LIGHT, almost unaware of the heat of the sun on the stones or the glare. This was only the second time he had been inside the Hagia Sophia. Around the base of the vast central dome was a ring of high windows, and the light poured in, making the whole interior like the heart of some great jewel burning with its own fire.

He was used to the veneration of the Virgin Mary, but this was a different kind of femininity; holy wisdom as a woman was a strange concept to him. Surely wisdom was unwavering light, anything but feminine?

Then he had seen the tomb of Enrico Dandolo, soiled with spittle, and stood in front of it confused by loyalty and shame, both tearing at him in the same moment. Since coming here, he had learned far more about the looting of the city on the last crusade. It was the doge Enrico Dandolo who had been personally responsible for taking the four great bronze horses that now adorned St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice. He also had taken first choice among the holiest of the relics stolen, including the vial of Christ’s blood, one of the nails from the Cross, the gold-encased cross that Constantine the Great had carried into battle with him, and much more besides. Yet Enrico had been his great-grandfather. He was part of Giuliano’s history, good or bad.

As he had stood by the tomb, another person had walked past and spat on the plaque inlaid on the floor. This time Giuliano had come determined to clean it, even if only for a few moments, until the next violation.

The person who had watched him today had awoken a different feeling in him. He had seen eunuchs before, but they still made him uncomfortable. He had recognized without question what he was. It was nothing of the man’s gender that disturbed him; it was the pain in his eyes and in the lines of his mouth. For a moment Giuliano, a complete stranger, had looked inside him at a raw and terrible wound.

Why did Giuliano clean the plaque over the tomb? He had never known his great-grandfather; there were no memories, no personal stories. It was only because the name on it was Dandolo. It was someone to whom he could belong, a tie to the past that had nothing to do with the Byzantine mother who had not wanted him.

He left the church and walked rapidly, as if following a known path, yet he had no distinct idea except to climb upward to where he could look out over the sea. Always he went toward light on the water and the limitless horizon, as if in looking at it, he might free his mind.

What had he expected to find when he came here to Constantinople at last? A city alien to him, too Eastern, too decadent, so he could hate it and return to Venice having exorcised it from his heart. That was it. So he could think of his mother with indifference and recognize nothing of her in himself.

He came to a small place, a side turning off the path, just large enough for two or three people to stand and stare at the shifting patterns of current and wind as the tide swept through the narrows between Europe and Asia. It looked like the brushstrokes of an artist, except that it moved. It was a living thing, as though it had a pulse. The air was a breath on his skin, warm and clean, a little salt.

The city below him was like Venice and yet so unlike. The architecture was lighter in Venice, yet there were echoes in it of this. There was the same teeming vitality and trade, always trade, the eye for a bargain, the weighing of value, buying and selling. And there was the same knowledge of the sea in all its moods: subtle, dangerous, beautiful, boundless with chance and possibility.

Yet the similarities were superficial. He did not belong here. No one really knew him except in brief friendship, such as Andrea Mocenigo, who had allowed him to become so much a part of his family. But that was kindness. They would have done the same for anyone. Being a stranger in Constantinople gave Giuliano a freedom to grow, to change if he wished to, to embrace new ideas, no matter how wild or foolish.

Belonging was safety, but it was also constriction. Not belonging was boundless, as if his feet knew no weight and his horizons were endless. But he had no roots, either, and at unexpected moments there was a loneliness that was almost unbearable.

He could not clear from his mind the passion and grief on the face of the eunuch who had watched him in the Hagia Sophia. There was a tenderness in it that haunted him.

He must finish collecting and assessing his information for the doge and return home.

When finally his first officer returned, Giuliano was ready to leave. He had all the information he needed. At least he thought so, although even as he said good-bye to Mocenigo and his family and carried his chest out to the waiting cart, a doubt stirred in him that again he was escaping. Did the feeling of completion come from his finishing his task here for the doge? Or was it that he had satisfied his own thirst for knowledge-and rejected Byzantium?

He put it from his mind. He was returning home.

The voyage was swift, and by mid-August he stood on the deck gazing at the skyline of the city that seemed to float on the face of the lagoon. Byzantium was a bright memory like the colors of a mosaic in someone else’s ceiling: touched with gold, but too far away to see clearly. Only an impression remained on his mind in a multitude of facets, tiny and beautiful-and beyond his reach.

It was 1275. In Rome, Pope Gregory X arranged a one-year-long truce between Emperor Michael Palaeologus of Byzantium and Charles of Anjou, king of the Two Sicilies. Anna never learned how much the papal legate in Constantinople had had to do with that.

GIULIANO DOCKED IN THE OUTER HARBOR, INTENDING to make his way to his own home just off the Grand Canal. First he would wash and change his clothes, rest a little, then eat a good meal in one of the cafés-something different from shipboard fare. After that he would report to the doge. He would probably have to wait some time for an audience.

However, he had barely stepped beyond the dock when he overheard hushed voices speculating as to who the next doge would be.

“Is the doge ill?” he demanded, pulling at the man’s shoulder to gain his attention.

The man turned, regarding his travel-stained seaman’s britches with pity. “Just landed?” he asked. “Yes, friend, it is feared he will not last long. If you have news for him, you’d better give it now.”

Giuliano thanked him and, with a hollow sense of loss gnawing at him, made his way as quickly as he could to the Doge’s Palace. Received by somber servants, he was told in a quiet voice to wait until he was called.

He paced back and forth from sunlight to shadow under the long windows, his feet whispering on the marble, the sound of muted voices beyond the door. Finally he was called in and told by a grim-faced, elderly man in black doublet and stockings that he must be brief.

The doge’s bedroom had the stale, sharp smell of illness and the watchful gloom of those who have urgent tasks to perform but want to seem as if they have all the time in the world.

Tiepolo lay propped against pillows, his cheeks sunken, his eyes hollow.

“Giuliano!” he said hoarsely. “Come! Tell me about Charles of Anjou, and the Sicilians. Will they rise, do you think? How is Byzantium? What of the Venetians there? Whose side will they be on if there is another invasion? Tell me the truth, good or bad.”

Giuliano smiled at him and put his hand over the old man’s frail fingers where they rested on the sheet. “I wasn’t going to lie,” he said so quietly that he hoped the others in the room would not hear him. This last conversation between them should have the dignity of not being overheard, so it could include all that either of them wished to say.

“Well?” Tiepolo asked.

As briefly as he could, Giuliano told him his opinion of Charles of Anjou and the differences he could see between his rule in Naples and that in Sicily and the corresponding reactions of the subject peoples.

“Good.” Tiepolo smiled faintly. “So you think Sicily could be made to rise against him, if the circumstances were right?”

“Certainly they hate him, but that will be a long way from rebellion.”

“Possibly.” Tiepolo’s voice was weak. “Now tell me about Constantinople.”

“I loved it and hated it,” Giuliano answered, remembering the soaring thoughts, the turmoil of ideas, the drowning pain of rejection.

“Of course,” Tiepolo said with a faint smile. “What did you love, Giuliano?”

“The freedom of ideas,” he replied. “The sense of being at the crossroads of East and West. The adventure of the mind.”

Tiepolo nodded. “And you loved the parts that were like Venice, and hated them because of your mother.” His eyes were gentle in spite of his own pain.

Giuliano picked up the thread of his mission. “None of them want war,” he said urgently. “Not the Byzantines and not the Venetians there-or the Genoese or the Jews or the Muslims. They’ll never hold off a crusader army, but I fear that most will fight to protect their own, and die with it.”

Tiepolo sighed. “Never trust the pope, Giuliano, not this pope or any other. They have no love for Venice, not as you and I do. There are turbulent times ahead. Charles of Anjou wants to be king of Jerusalem, and he will bathe the Holy Land in blood to do it.” His blue-veined hand tightened on the sheet. “Venice must keep its freedom, never forget that. Never give it up, to anyone, emperor or pope. We stand alone.” His voice sank a little lower, and Giuliano had to lean forward to hear him. “Promise me that.”

There was no choice. The hand on the sheet was cold when he placed his own over it. The pull of Byzantium was strong, the world was full of danger, enticement, and promise, but this man had nurtured him after his own father had died. A man who forsook his debts was worth nothing. Venice was the cradle of his heart. “Of course I promise,” Giuliano answered.

Tiepolo smiled for an instant, then the light faded from his eyes and he did not blink again.

Giuliano felt a prickling in his throat and a tightness inside him so he could barely breathe. It was like his father’s death repeated, the beginning of a new loneliness that would go on forever. He slipped his hand off the old man’s and stood up slowly, turning to face the shadowed room.

The physician looked at him and understood. Giuliano found his throat too tight to speak, and he refused to embarrass himself. He nodded his thanks and walked past them, outside into the cool, marble-floored anteroom and then into the hall.

Tiepolo’s funeral was a magnificent occasion, too profound for the clatter of words to intrude on. The day was misty and suffocatingly hot, with a fine summer rain drifting like streamers of silk as the black-ribboned barge moved slowly and almost soundlessly along the Grand Canal, seeming already a ghost ship.

The way was lined with people, either on balconies above the water or in small boats tucked in well to the sides to allow the procession and the mourners to pass on their way from the Doge’s Palace through the city, then back again as far as the Rialto Bridge, then through the smaller canals more directly to the Cathedral of Saint Mark, almost where they began.

Giuliano came in the first boat behind it, not in the prow-he was not family-but toward the stern. He stood watching the high facades of the buildings and the pale, rain-dappled light on the water, blurring the images. He was intensely alone, in spite of Pietro only a few yards away. In the death of a leader was the passing of an age, and they were both indissolubly bound in something unique and as deep as blood or bone.

They moved through silver bars of weak sunlight that struck the canal’s face into luminescence and made the barge ahead momentarily stark, oars shining. Then the shadows closed over again, and colors faded. There was no sound but the swirl and dip of water.

A week later, he sat over wine again with Pietro. They had spent the day out in the lagoon talking, remembering, watching the sunset colors touch the facades of the palaces opposite, making them seem to float on the face of the water, insubstantial as a dream. Now they were sitting, wet-footed, a little cold, in one of their favorite taverns off a small canal five hundred yards from the Church of San Zamipolo.

Giuliano stared moodily into his glass. He liked red wine, and this one was good. He was quite aware that he was drinking too much. The heat clung like damp cloth, and his thirst was never quenched.

“I imagine they are choosing the inquisori to go through all his acts and pass judgment,” he said angrily.

“They always do,” Pietro responded, taking more wine himself. “They’ll have to find something to complain about. Or people will say they aren’t doing their jobs. You can’t win.”

“What could he do wrong, for God’s sake?” Giuliano demanded angrily. “They kept him under surveillance all the time! He couldn’t open dispatches from foreign powers without them peering over his shoulder and reading behind him.”

Pietro laughed. “It’s human nature. Venetians will always be pulling someone apart. Be glad he wasn’t a pope.” He grinned suddenly. “They dug one of them up and hanged the poor sod. Ambrosius the Second, I think. Twice! Buried him, then a flood in the river uncovered the grave and washed him away, or something of the sort. All after a proper trial, of course. Didn’t matter the accused was a corpse, God rest his soul.”

Pietro put his empty glass on the table. “Do you want to go down to the canal near the arsenal tomorrow night? I know a great café where the wine is excellent and the women are young, rounded in all the right places, and smooth-skinned.”

“You make them sound like something to eat,” Giuliano said, but the idea appealed to him. Easy pleasure, music, a little anonymous kindness with no obligation, no one to hurt or be hurt by. And Pietro was good company, kind and funny, and he never complained. “Yes,” he agreed. “Why not?”

The process for electing a new doge was vastly complicated. It had been instituted by Tiepolo himself, in the year of his accession. It was intended to reduce the power of the great families who had led the city from the reign of the first doge five hundred years before. Giuliano wondered if Tiepolo had had the Dandolo in mind specifically.

In the end, when all the due process had been filled to the letter, a new doge was duly elected. He was Jacopo Contarini, an octogenarian cousin of Pietro’s.

A week later, he sent for Giuliano.

He was uncomfortable going to the Doge’s Palace and finding someone else in Tiepolo’s place. The halls and corridors were just the same, the marble columns, the pattern of sunlight streaming through the windows onto the floor. Even the servants had not changed except for a few of the most personal. It was probably right that the sense of continuity be so powerful, but it made him painfully aware that Venice was so much larger than the individual men who were its life.

“Come in, Dandolo,” Contarini said formally, still unused to his office, although he may well have coveted it most of his life.

“My lord,” Giuliano replied, bowing and waiting until he was told to relax. This was not Tiepolo. To this new doge he meant nothing.

“You have recently returned from Constantinople,” Contarini said with interest. “Tell me what you learned. I know Doge Tiepolo sent you, God rest him. What is your judgment of the emperor Michael, and of the king of the Two Sicilies?”

“The emperor Michael is a clever and subtle man,” Giuliano answered. “A strong soldier, but without the navy he needs to defend from a sea attack. The city is recovering slowly. They are still poor, and it will be a long time before trade brings in the kind of wealth they need to rebuild the sea defenses sufficiently to withstand another assault.”

“And the king of the Two Sicilies?” Contarini pressed.

Giuliano remembered Charles of Anjou with sharp clarity and told the doge how as king he lacked the loyalty of his people.

Contarini nodded. “Indeed. And did Doge Tiepolo tell you his reasons for seeking this information?”

“A crusade by Charles would require a vast fleet, and either we or the Genoese will build it. If the crusade should succeed, the spoils will be enormous. Not as rich as in 1204, because there are not so many treasures left, but still well worth the taking. We should make a contract now, and secure the wood we will need. It will be far beyond our usual purchase.”

Contarini smiled. “Tell me, did Tiepolo assume that a contract made with Charles of Anjou would be kept?”

“It would be to his advantage to do so. Charles would not wish to make an enemy of Venice until after he has conquered Byzantium, Jerusalem, and possibly Antioch. And we have long memories for an injury,” Giuliano answered.

The smile reached Contarini’s eyes. “Very good. And your time in Constantinople?”

“To consider the mood and the loyalties of the Venetians and Genoese there, Excellency. There are many of them, mostly in the harbor areas.”

Contarini nodded. “And would they be with us or against us?”

“Those who are now married to Byzantines might find their loyalties torn. And there are surprisingly many.”

“To be expected.” Contarini nodded. “In time I will send you to look again, to keep me informed. First I would like you to go to France and secure wood for us. You will need to make careful bargains. We do not wish to be committed, and then learn that the crusade is delayed, or worse, canceled. The situation is lightly balanced.” His smile lost its warmth. “I need you to be very precise, Dandolo. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Excellency.” He did understand, but oddly the sense of excitement had died away. It was a good task, necessary. It could not be given to a man whose skill or whose loyalty was not absolute. Yet it was also impersonal. There was none of the fire he had shared with Tiepolo.

Giuliano took his leave and went out into the sun in the piazza. The light off the water was as clean and bright as always, but it was cold.