this city. I love its danger. I love its stench. It is a museum of death and decay. I love its patches of half dried blood. I love it even more now that I know I am leaving– for the purple skies of Byzantium.
After winding through a maze of streets behind the Church of San Marco, Marco and Niccolo enter a great hall ablaze with light from dozens of smoky fish oil lamps, torches and thick tallow candles. In his long velvet coat and floppy velvet hat, Niccolo gazes about with a composure born of familiarity. Marco, standing close to him, regards the scene with excitement and alarm. Hundreds of men down flagons of wine and shout at the tops of their voices, in heated argument or carousing song. A group of German merchants shout, pounding the wooden table with their fists. The room resounds with the speech of Milanese, Greeks (some from Crete), and Serbians (from Zara and Ragusa). The groups of foreigners keep to themselves, knowing they are forbidden to discuss trade outside the great fondacos set aside for that purpose. Venetians of all classes and stripes shout and raise their jugs together. Marco's eye is caught by two dark-skinned Turks, who refrain from drink, conferring in soft conspiratorial whispers, their bulbous, onion-domed turbans touching as they incline their heads toward each other. He couldn't take his eyes off them, marvelling at their strange dress, wondering what they were saying to each other. Even with the noise of the crowded hall, he could easily distinguish their voices, intertwining in dialogue like delicate chimes of glass.
“Marco! Marco!” His father pulls him through the crowd. They stop at a table filled with faces Marco recognizes. His father's friends clap and stamp in unison by way of greeting. Father and son sit down next to each other on the bench, joining easily in the conversation.
Marco looks up as a space is cleared in the middle of the hall for a juggler and two dwarf tumblers, whose limbs seemed permanently entwined. When the dwarves roll about the room, Marco is unable to distinguish whose limbs were whose–it appears to be a single double–headed eight-limbed beast. The performance ends and the entertainers unravel from each other, tumbling into the thick crowd and disappearing. An enormously tall, thin negro walks to the edge of the open space, holding up a cask of wine at arm's length. He begins gulping its stiff red stream. As he drinks and drinks, drooling a thread of wine from the corner of his mouth and down his chin, the crowd claps and chants. Finishing the barrel, he falls to his knees and smashes the cask on the flagstones. The crowd laughs and cheers. Next comes a grotesquely fat man, his stomach hanging down to his knees as he raises his cloak and dances about, revelling in his obesity. The crowd shouts and throws coins.
The night wears on as drinkers fall under the tables and others stumble into the night. A vicious knife-fight between two old men is quickly halted, the combatants disarmed, three rosettes of blood on the flagstones at their feet. Marco falls asleep with his head on the table while Niccolo drinks and talks.
As Niccolo and Marco walk through the maze of alleys, arms across each other's shoulders, toward their own corte of San Giovanni Grisostomo, a voice close behind shocks them: “Stop! Do not turn around. Listen closely, Signor Polo.” Marco, with his head slightly turned, glimpses the flicker of a blade and notes a mask. “I come as a friend but on pain of death you must not see me. I bear an important message, so listen closely. A certain enemy is planning to accuse you of crimes against the Republic. You must leave Venice at once.”
“I have done nothing. Who accuses me?”
“You know that must remain a secret. You have made enemies. If you remain, you might well hang between the columns of the Lion and the Saint. You have a few days, but do not hesitate.” Marco turns and catches a ripple of cape as the messenger slides behind a column and disappears.
The next morning, a youth comes to the door of Ca'Polo and whispers in the ear of Marco's father. Niccolo hurries out and Marco follows, unseen. When they come to Piazza San Marco, they see a small crowd gazing at the latest victim of the Doge's purge hanging upside down on the Molo from a rope strung between the columns of St. Theodore and the Lion. The man's throat is slit, his intestines curl down, and blood is caking on the cobbles in the sun. Niccolo walks briskly from the piazza while Marco lingers, frozen in the shadows, staring.
“Marco, next week the spring caravan of ships heads east. Maffeo and I must leave with it.”
“And I. I too must leave.” Marco could see his father trying to decide.
“No. Not yet.”
“If not now, when? Please, father.”
Niccolo hesitated. “Stand up before me.”
Marco drew himself up before his father and righted his shoulders– no longer a boy, not yet a man.
He looked into his father's eyes. “If not now, when?”
Niccolo smiled. “Yes, if not now, when.”
Marco beamed. “Where will we go, father?”
“Byzantium. There is a large community of Venetians there. We should be safe. Come along now. Many preparations await us.”
I walk across the Piazza San Marco to the Molo by the lagoon, taking care not to walk between the columns of the Lion and St. Theodore. Between them I see cobbles coated with blood. A mangy orange cat sits there licking at it.
In the pre-dawn light I hear terrifying screams from inside the Doge's palace. They are old screams still trying to escape its warren of rooms, mingling with fresh cries from victims snatched from their beds moments before. A bilious taste rises in my throat.
I turn to the lagoon where the water is crossed with bands of yellow and pink. I hear a wind starting thousands of leagues behind me– it is already upon me, pushing from behind. I hear it throwing waves onto the shores of Byzantium where the sky is purple, scarlet, amethyst, where the rain falls in drops of gold, where desiccated saints’ bodies float like clouds in the cupolas of the basilicas, where a million voices chant in wondrous elegiac harmonies, their breath sighing through hanging gardens of glass.
A Jail Cell In Genoa (I)
Our failure to defeat the Genoese fleet has landed me in this damnable jail cell where Rusticello, dedicated and persistent as a maggot, thinks he will eat his way through to my dreams. But I have learned not only the delight to be found in listening, but the necessity for silence.
Rusticello places the bottle of ink before him on the upper left-hand corner of the slab of wood, pauses, his gaze held by the bottle, then shifts it a half-inch further to the left of the parchment. The thick glass inkpot is stoppered with a cork, its bottom singed. He removes the cork and places it on the slab before leaning forward to stab the ink with his quill.
“No, no, no– it wasn't like that at all, not at all.” Marco sits on his straw, forearms on knees. “It was a journey of revelations, a journey in which the names of those cities and lands rang on my ears with an indescribable strangeness–Soncara, Timochain, Vokhan, Kain-du, Zai-tun.
“We had no maps. Do you know what that means? We lived on the edge of the unknown– and I, a young man, grew into that unknown. How can I hope to relocate that tale? All would be lost in the telling because I know, I know what comes next…and that's not how it was.” Marco pauses to scratch at a flea.
Rusticello stops writing and looks up. “Yes?”
“The manuscript must repeat that journey, in its essence, and the essence of that journey was the unknown. Impossible. I tell you, it is impossible. The manuscript must be something new, illuminated from within–not a remembered map, a retracing of steps, a kind of stupidity embellished with lies and exaggerations…impossible…impossible I tell you!” His voice rises at the end as his shoulders arch forward, his head drooping. Leaping to his feet, Marco snatches the paper Rusticello holds, tears it to shreds and shoves the pieces into Rusticello's mouth. Rusticello lets him do this, watching in resigned silence and only turning his head in slight resistance when the Venetian grabs his chin with one hand and forces the bits of paper between