What planet rules the boy's birth?”
Niccolo answered, “His planet is Mercury.”
With a sandglass drawn from his bag, the doctor took the boy's pulse and nodded. He swished about a glass beaker of urine collected earlier and stared at it importantly. Marco's aunt held her breath as she watched the glass held loosely in the large hairy hand. If a doctor dropped the urine glass, the patient would die. “Have a servant bring me a sample of the boy's stool as soon as one is available. I would like to inspect it. What has he been eating of late?”
The aunt glanced at Marco's father who nodded for her to reply. “The usual. Eel with rice yesterday eve. And rice again at the noonday meal, with a few greens.”
“Hmmm. You must understand that ague is the heat from the cauldron of the stomach rising up and enflaming the liver and heart. If one eats the wrong foods, under the influence of the wrong stars, and if one has a guilty conscience, the liver will boil, thus overheating the blood. You understand, I am sure. It is most important that the humours be kept in balance.
“Listen closely now. If the fever changes from a hectic one, which it is now, to a tertian or quartan one, occurring every three or four days, you will send your servant to inform me. Tomorrow there is a new moon, whose phase might improve things, depending on the severity of the sin he has committed. In any case, if he will eat tomorrow, feed him nothing but the milk of pulverized almonds. The day after that, if there is no improvement, give him barley water mixed with honey, figs and root of licorice. I will leave some herbs you can give him as well. If after a week there is no improvement, I will bleed him to release the evil vapors and lessen the heat. We will bleed from the side opposite the scorched liver. If a week later, there is still no improvement, he will have to be trepanned– you understand? A small hole will be cut in his skull to release the pressure of the heat mounting in his brain. For the bloodletting and trepanning I will require the assistance of the barber.”
Aunt Graziela brought her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide. A grim look passed over Niccolo's face.
The doctor took Marco's hand in his. “Commend yourself to the will of God, my son, and I am sure your recovery will follow.”
“One more thing,” the doctor added as they were leaving the room. He looked seriously into Niccolo's thin face. “Tonight, while he sleeps, tie a red thread about his left wrist. In the morning remove it and take it to a distant tree where you will tie the thread about a branch. In this way the boy's fever will be transferred. I have no doubt that this approach is in all cases effective. Do not, and I stress, do not allow the boy to pass near the tree or the fever will leap from it again onto him. Do you understand?”
Signor Polo nodded. He then invited Dottore Alberi to dine with them and the physician quickly agreed.
Although the doctor's appetite was hearty, a severe look never left his face and, several times during the meal, he sent a servant to check on the boy. Meanwhile, the doctor regaled his hosts with tales of patients he had treated and the alarming array of ailments and diseases he had witnessed: lepers near Parma; diseases of the skin, the scalp, the ears; the blood-coughers; the blind; the writhings and wailings of the mad; the spastics; the scrofulous; the paralytic; the crippled. The list of diseases went on and on: St. Anthony's fire, fistula, mal des ardents, smallpox, pest.
“The varieties of Death are most intriguing.” The doctor downed his wine and motioned to the servant for more. “Death itself bothers me not in the least, but the very richness, the fertility of possible means to die, is most extraordinary. Do you not agree, Signor Polo?”
Early in the morning, two days later, Marco's fever drives him to the balcony. In the early light, he sees the distant column of the Lion of Venice latticed in a network of scaffolding, looking like a catafalque to bear and honour the dead. For the first time he realizes his city, this occluded jewel of streets and alleys and canals running with black waters turning in upon themselves, is a kind of prison whose only relief is the sea, the open waters beyond the lagoons. Returning to bed he falls into a measureless sleep.
Later, his rheumy eyes open on a flood of radiant light. He regards a scene of unfathomable and marvelous proportions. At first he does not know what to make of it, but with effort he is able to stitch together patches of shadow and light into a fantastical image.
“If this is dream,” he says, “then all men sleepwalk through their days.”
Straddling his bed is the Lion, its gargantuan head forced by the wall to turn aside, its tail curling high up into a corner of the ceiling like an eel caught in its pot. Straight above him, Marco sees the metal belly hatch of the beast hanging open and a brilliant light radiating from within. Marco heaves himself up and stands, peering inside the Lion to find the light's source. Placing his hand on the lip of the hatch he pulls himself up inside and gazes directly into the light. Its brilliance is painful to behold, but he can see that the Lion's eyes are the light's source. Its blank white eyes look both out on the world and in on the emptiness.
Inside the belly of the Lion, Marco runs his hand along the cold metal plate and feels the quivering of the beast's wings.
He works his way up the narrowing neck of the Lion, squeezing through the tight opening, until his head is entirely inside the Lion's head. As if donning a mask, he places his own face against the other's, aligns his eyes with the eyes of the Lion and gazes out over the city.
What he sees is Venice in its early days, an archipelago of islands, fishing boats, frail huts standing like terns in shallow water, the bountiful sea's skin stretching into the distance. Workers tend salt pans, push rollers back and forth to pack the bases of salt. Others around the dogado, the lagoon area, drive larch piles deep into the swamp, hundreds of thousands of posts to support stone houses, shops, churches, palaces. Men swarm everywhere with mallets and iron bars and instruments of calculation and measurement.
Shipwrights busy themselves with supplies of timber, iron and hemp to construct fleets of ships. Venetian traders set sail for far lands, their ships laden with lumber and salt and fish, as well as human cargo– pagan Angles, Saxons, Slavs and Greeks to be sold to the Saracen armies as slaves and eunuchs.
He spies a handful of Venetian merchant-adventurers stealing into Alexandria to loot the crypt of a cathedral, searching carved sarcophagi for the yellowed bones of the Apostle Mark. At last they find them and carry the sacred relics off to Venice where they are “translated,” with appropriate ceremony and vaulted pride, into the Church of San Marco.
He notices a man he takes to be a member of the physicians’ guild, walking next to a narrow canal in a determined fashion. The man is covered from head to toe in an outlandish costume, like a reveler at a masque. He wears a smooth linen gown, a waxed face-mask, a flat black hat with wide brim, glass spectacles, and a foot-long curved bird-beak over his nose. This last is stuffed with herbs and drugs as antidotes against infection and the stench of the dead. The physician stops at the peak of an arched stone bridge to watch a gondola floating past, stacked six deep with corpses crawling with rats. The boat drifts down the narrow canal on its own. On the Grand Canal and across the lagoon, hundreds of gondolas and other boats, also filled with corpses, drift about aimlessly. A long wail can be heard coming from the deep wells of the city's alleys.
Out of the sea-fog Marco sees a thousand ships of Venice return from the East with entire charnel-fields of sacred relics: the bones, hair, teeth and dried bloodied rags of holy men from the Levant, from Crete, from Cyprus; knucklebones, femurs, skin and tufts of hair to be mounted in gold monstrances, displayed like the war-booty of holy barbarians; the ear of St. Paul, the roasted flesh of St. Lawrence, St. George's arm; a wine jar from the miracle at Cana; the whispering skull of St. Cyprian.
A man with a death's-head sigil marked on his forehead shadows his father down an alley.
He wants to scream out to warn his father but cannot, nor can he remove his gaze from the darkening city.
Marco awakens. Jumping out of bed, he hurries to the balcony to check the pillar. The Lion is there, but the scaffolding is gone. The fever has broken.