Fair Verona

The Court of a Million Lies

Antonio arrived in Venice by boat, one of the small lateen-rigged craft that ply the lagoon, with their strange hooked masts and old-fashioned side rudders. A crude, ungainly means of transport, utterly beneath his station—but the easiest way to enter the island republic, unless you had wings, or were willing to swim.

Braced against the curved prow, he watched “Byzantium’s Favorite Daughter” draw closer, seeming to rise up out of the low gleaming lagoon chop. At first, all he could see were roofs and upper floors, topped by bell towers, cupolas, oriental battlements, fancifully colored domes, and the lace-like stone facades that gave the city her Eastern cast. A vision built on mudflats. Then came the jumble of walkways, bridges, streets, canals, and the great mass of pilings that kept Venice from washing out to sea. Venice had no city gates, no rich or poor quarters. Lines of wash hung over side canals and small alleys. Ships’ masts moved among the steeples.

At the Cannaregio docks, Antonio sent Proteus prowling into the city for news of his quarry, while he changed to a black gondola, setting out down the “Canal Regio.” Cats prowled near the Campo San Giobbe—but the nearby church stood empty. Bells were gone from the church towers, packed away in straw. Venice lay under a papal interdict. A theological calamity that meant no masses, no communion, no Holy Mother Church to stand between the people of Venice and the fires of Hell. Worse yet, God-fearing merchants were free to renounce their debts to Venice and plunder her cargoes.

Uncorking a bottle of bardolino, Antonio offered it to the gondolier, asking what he thought of the ban. The man stopped poling, took a swig, and thought it through. He was a blunt broad-shouldered brute who made his living with his back, and clearly cared little for mainland nobility. He admitted in thick Venetian, “I miss the bells. But interdict also means no marriage and no confession. Twin blessings there!”

Antonio laughed and called him a scoundrel.

He took a second swig. “And no Holy Inquisition.”

Antonio ventured that Venice was coming out well ahead.

“So it would be, were it not for the dead.”

“Death undoes us all,” Antonio agreed, eyeing the houses piled one atop the other. No church burials badly burdened a city that saw deaths every day but lacked fields to take the bodies. Dig too deeply and they’d be burying folks at sea.

“What is your lordship’s religion?” the gondolier asked.

“I don’t speak French.” Antonio’s stock reply. It was what some Flemish burgher said to Robert of Artois, brother-in-law to King Philip of France, before braining the Count with a club at the battle of Courtrai.

The gondolier laughed, handed back the bottle, and began poling again. The French had managed to put religion to shame, beating one Pope to death and poisoning the next. Clement V was their creature, afraid to set foot in Rome, keeping the Papacy in Babylonian Captivity at Avignon—which the French claimed to be part of Italy since Avignon was a fief of the Two Sicilies, making a farce of both faith and geography. Clement V and Philip the Fair had gone on to commit the crime of the century, looting the treasury of the Knights Templars, burning and torturing innocent knights—including the aged Grand Master, who was godfather to Philip’s children. It was hard to fear a church that put faith and justice up for sale.

The Canal Regio ran right into the Canalazzo, the Grand Canal, a magnificent S-shaped waterway that cut sweeping backward curves through the heart of Venice, following the bed of an ancient river now buried beneath wharves, palazzi, and granaries. Barges and pleasure boats crowded the city’s greatest thoroughfare, grand showpiece, and primary sewer. Merchant princes could walk out of their doors onto a gangway and not step ashore again until they were in Marseilles or Alexandria.

Antonio got off at the Rialto, in the city center, beside the only bridge spanning the Grand Canal. Cogs and trading galleys unloaded in the shadow of the silent and empty San Giacomo, disgorging wares from around the world—wheat, figs, frankincense, almonds, Byzantine glass, and slaves from the East. Proteus caught up with him at a stall selling perfumed lace and dyed wax. “Tonight she’ll be at the Court of a Million Lies, attending a fête in her honor.”

Antonio nodded. He knew this type of commercial soiree stocked with overfed ignoramuses and flirtatious women. Ordinarily, he found them as inviting as the plague.

“And on the morrow,” Proteus added, “she will be gone.”

“Gone? Where?” Would she ever stop running?

“A merchant galley is waiting at San Marco to take her to the East.”

“In God’s name, why?”

“She is heiress to Visconti lands in the Levant worth millions of ducats. Word is she wants a new life.”

What woman did not? Antonio aimed to give her one.

“If you are to succeed with her, it must be tonight, at the Court of a Million Lies.”

“Of course I’ll succeed.” Antonio never failed.

“Naturally.” His manservant made a mocking bow. If Proteus weren’t irreplaceable, Antonio would have booted him into a canal.

The Court of a Million Lies, just north of the Rialto on the outskirts of Cannaregio, was really two courts: the Court of the First Million Lies, and the Court of the Second Million Lies. Both were owned by the Polo family, Venice’s most notorious merchant adventurers. A villainous-looking Tartar, with dark slanted eyes and a devil’s leer, greeted guests at the door. He wore Polo livery and had been christened “Peter” after the doorman to Heaven.

Inside, the crowd was equally mixed. Antonio saw brown, black, and tan faces, beneath fur hats, damask turbans, and scented peacock feathers. He heard Greek, Spanish, Arabic, and every type of Italian—mostly in male tones. Venice took after the East, where good wives stayed at home and only whores walked the streets. But Silvia was there, attended by old Marco Polo’s own daughters, acting the gracious guest of honor. (A Visconti Pope had blessed the Polo mission to Kublai Khan.) She had exchanged her mask for a gold half-veil. Blue eyes flashed Antonio a greeting as he came in.

He hastened to present himself to Master Marco, who was busy spinning tales of the East to drunken skeptics. An Italian scoffer waved a wine cup, asking if the holy yogis of India really went about buck-naked, “With their members hanging out. They sound as shameless as Dominicans.”

“So they do,” Marco assured him. “But by living in abstinence, they do not use the male member for sin. They say it is no more sinful to show it than your hand or your face.”

Someone snickered, “And what about those who sin with hand and face?” The skeptic still looked doubtful, “With all this abstinence, how can there be so many of them?”

Marco shrugged. “The East is vast, with multitudes of people and customs. In some provinces in Cathay, they care so little for chastity that wives take in strangers off the road. If a husband finds a traveler’s cloak hanging by the door, he stays away, even for days at a time.”

Men laughed. Stories like this had earned him the name Marco of the Million Lies. “Sounds like France,” someone suggested. “The poor sods. Our wives at least have the Christian decency to do it behind our backs!”

“That’s not the way they see it,” Polo protested. “The traveler leaves the wife some token payment, a trinket, or bit of cloth. Both husband and wife see him off, waving the token. ‘This was yours,’ they say. ‘Now it is ours. What are you taking away with you? Nothing at all!’ ”

A woman’s favors might well be nothing, but Antonio had ridden halfway across Italy for one particular woman. Thanking his host, he strode across the court to where Silvia waited alongside a fountain whose demi-god faces spit wine into a silver basin. He could see her lively eyes above the veil. The same eyes that laughed at him in Verona at Carnival. He bowed. “Silvia Lucetta Visconti.”

“Bold Antonio, you have caught me at last.”

“Not without effort,” he admitted. It was the first time he had heard her voice, but already it sounded famihar—as familiar as the form he had been chasing for days.

“Are you ready to lift my veil, and claim your reward?”

“More than ready.” Antonio had never seen a minx so secure in her mystery. He reached out, seizing her veil, triumphantly drawing it aside. When he saw her face, his hand froze. He stared speechless. Beneath the gold veil and blonde wig was the face of Pandora—Gracchus’ junior wife—last seen at the site of the Wyvyrn attack. Her lips parted. “Save me,” she whispered. “Save me, bold Antonio.”