“Well, he was speaking to Messer Battista, the merchant on board.”
“Yes?”
“Only, instead of calling him Enrico, he called him Husayn.”
“Husayn?”
“Well, it sounded something like that, anyway. It was certainly no name I’d ever heard before. And we all know that Messer Battista’s Christian name is Enrico. Isn’t that strange?”
“Yes, it is,” said the Knight, but without her notes of puzzlement.
“But it wasn’t...”
“Madonna Baffo,” I said. I said it quickly, but with enough force that she could not ignore me. “Don’t say another word, Madonna, or I shall have to do something we may all regret.”
The Knight, the young lady, indeed, everyone on board turned in my direction. They saw me with my live coal only a hair away from our cannon’s fuse, and the cannon was trained dead center on the Knights’ carrack. At that range, the charge would easily split the little ship in two.
The Knights’ captain went for his pistols, but, “Throw them to the ground,” I told him. “And that goes for all your men, too.”
They did so.
“Now,” I continued, “very quietly and calmly, I would like you all to go back to your ship, cast off, and allow us to go peacefully on our way to Corfu.”
My uncle was by my side now. He did not physically try to stop me—I don’t think there was any way he could have done that. But he did speak in that very soft tone of his which could easily have stilled many another mutiny. “Giorgio,” he said. “What do you mean? Putting so many lives—Christian lives—in jeopardy? For what? For a single Turk and his few bolts of cloth?”
I have said, my uncle was the father of my material needs, but Husayn had provided the spirit. “Yes, for Husayn I will do this. But I will also make certain that this accursed daughter of Baffo gets where she belongs—in her father’s care on the island of Corfu. And I hope the peasant she marries has two wooden legs and a hunchback.”
At this Madonna Baffo burst out, “By Jesù, I will tell them what I heard last night, and you, Veniero, damn you, you will not stop me.”
“Madonna Baffo, I warned you...”
“They talked about Messer Battista having three or four wives. They talked about Messer Battista’s Turkish language. And then Messer Battista swore by his demon god. ‘By Allah,’ he swore, and the sea seemed to lurch with demons beneath me.”
She stood there on the hatch, her fists clenched and her eyes spitting fire. Her golden curls were spilling unchecked from the confines of her coif and her breast heaved with passion. It never occurred to me that my mere threat was already all the proof the Knights needed. I was too angry to think beyond a lunatic desire to teach that girl a lesson.
Before there was time to think, I touched the ember to the wick. At the same instant, or perhaps a moment earlier, the girl jumped down, picked up one of the Knight’s discarded pistols and, shouting his name like a war-cry, tossed it to him. He shot. My uncle took the bullet meant for me full in the chest and crumpled in agony at my feet.
The cannon went off with a roar. Concerned about my uncle, I took no precautions to cover my ears and the sound splintered my head and left me witless for several seconds. When I came to myself again, water was already rushing into the carrack’s gaping hole.
Now the Knights lost no time at all. Quickly they retrieved all their guns and complete control of our ship. They bound my friend Husayn and threw him onto the deck of the sinking carrack. My uncle, because he soon died in my arms, they threw onto the doomed ship, too. Then they cut the car-rack loose and hoisted up our sails to flee the scene with all possible haste.
As for myself, I was bound in chains and thrown in the hold. They meant, I soon learned, to bring me to trial for murder and mutiny at the next Venetian port. Instruments of torture would be more sophisticated on land. But I suffered torture enough in that dark hold from the echo of my dear uncle’s last words.
“Son of my brother,” he said. “What have you done? You will be the last Veniero ever to sail the sea. And this will be the last voyage you ever take.”
X
In the darkness of the hold, days passed of which I was ignorant, punctuated only by waves of agony threatening to drown me in grief over the loss of my uncle, my only close kin, and our friend Husayn. I could see some light through the boards of the deck and I knew night because the darkness was then as complete as that within my soul.
We ran into a storm of physical dimensions on the second day, however. I cannot say how long we tossed mercilessly about and seawater poured down on me through the holes in the deck I could no longer see. I suppose I should have been grateful the Knights did not set me among the rowers, for those poor men stood it out with only canvas awnings for shelter and few of them had even a change of shirt when they got soaked to the skin.
In the darkness I shared with rats and the stuffy cargo of fabric and glass crates, I got terribly seasick. Usually a brisk walk around the deck, a silent communion with the waves, and a few deep breaths of fresh air were enough to cure me of any symptoms, but I was allowed none of these. The food Piero was given to bring me was lousy, and lying there in my own mess did not help matters.
I might have felt more compassion for the nun and the others who must have been suffering, too, if every thought in that direction did not make me burn with regret over my dead friends and fury over Sofia Baffo’s betrayal.
