2
W hen he found the atelier door unlocked, the Maestro would know I had not left the apartment willingly; I repeated the message by leaving my sword and dagger in full view on the bed. My cloak was still damp, but a mere apprentice is lucky to own even one good cloak and mine is of finest kidskin, a gift from an admirer. As I went downstairs with my baleful guide, I asked leave to go and waken Luigi, so he could lock up behind us. The secretary sent one of his flunkies instead. The manner of my departure was to remain as secret as possible.
The two boatmen had been sheltering inside the loggia. I followed Sciara down the slimy watersteps to embark, and joined him on the cushioned bench in the felze, leaving the boatmen and fanti out in the rain. I spared a charitable thought for convicts sentenced to the galleys, chained to their oars and exposed to the weather day and night. We are never more than a few feet from seawater in Venice, but a galley bench would be too much close.
The city slept. Rain roared on the felze and painted golden haloes around the lantern on our prow and the little shrine lights that mark the corners of the canals. We passed no other boats and the only illuminated windows told of people sick, or dying, or giving birth. Oars creaked, ripples splashed sometimes, and one of the guards had a worrisome cough, but otherwise I could brood undisturbed.
Life as a galley slave is still life, and the punishment for sorcery is death by burning. Despite the weather that night, I had no desire to become toasty warm while chained to a post between the columns on the Piazzetta.
Like his celebrated uncle, the late Michel de Nostredame, the Maestro is both astrologer and physician. Those are honorable professions-the cardinal-patriarch himself employs an astrologer and the Pope has several. It is the Maestro’s dabbling in alchemy and other arcane lore that teeters on the brink of the forbidden. He had often been pestered with accusations of witchcraft and fraud, which obviously could not both be true, but so far his many clients in the nobility had always stood by him and none of the slanders had ever been taken seriously. If the Ten had decided to charge him with magic or demonology, then it would have sent Missier Grande to arrest him, not a glorified clerk like Sciara.
So I kept telling myself, anyway.
That did not explain why I was being abducted. Sciara flatly refused to answer my questions. The Council of Ten is notoriously secretive. Its judgments cannot be appealed. I had no right to counsel, or even to know who had accused me of what. I could expect to be tortured. There was a famous case once of a doge’s son being tortured to make him confess to a crime that, as it later turned out, he had not committed.
The Council of Ten is so named because it consists of seventeen men, except when it is increased to thirty- two. That is typical of the tangle of misnamed and interlocking committees that govern the Republic. All members of all committees are noblemen, those whose names are written in the Golden Book. Commoners cannot be elected to office, but the most senior citizens, whose names are recorded in the Silver Book, are eligible for appointment to bureaucratic posts. Sciara is one of those.
As a fanatical optimist, I tried to convince myself that things could be worse. I might have been arrested by the Three, the state inquisitors. “The Ten can send you to jail and the Three to the grave,” says the proverb. But the Ten can burn or bury you just as easily, and for all I knew I had been summoned by the Three. I could only wait and see.
We came at last to Rio di Palazzo, the narrow canyon between the towering walls of the Doges’ Palace on one side and those of the New Prisons on the other. The New Prisons are not yet in use, so the only lights visible were those marking the watergate to the palace. Our approach had been noted, and as the boat pulled up at the wide double arch, a pair of armed night guards appeared there to help us up the slippery steps. Sciara went first and I followed, aided by the grip of a powerful, calloused hand. The fanti from the boat joined us in a clatter of boots.
The Doges’ Palace is one of the wonders of the world, a huge building blending the most sublime with the utterly squalid. Although we were not in the sublime part, at least we were out of the rain, standing in a wide, pillared passage leading through from the canal to the central courtyard. On the left, light spilled out from a guardroom door and I had no doubt there would be a brazier and other comforts in there. A closed door in the opposite wall led, I knew, to the most squalid part of all.
Another fancy helmet saluted Circospetto and asked what he could do to help the lustrissimo. Alongside his sword hung a matchlock pistol, which is a useful weapon if you want to club someone to death.
“This,” Sciara said, “is Alfeo Zeno, apprentice to the philosopher Filippo Nostradamus. You should tuck him away somewhere safe where we can find him again when we need him. A charge sheet will be drawn up in due course.”
The captain regarded me with little interest. “In the Wells, lustrissimo?”
Sciara pretended to consider, watching me with amusement, his face more sepulchral than ever in that gloomy, lantern-lit crypt. “Well, despite his humble garb, he is NH Alfeo Zeno, so perhaps you should find him something more befitting his rank. As I recall, the Leads have been honored by his presence in the past.”
I ignored the mockery. It is true that I am entitled to put the letters NH before my name; they stand for nobile homo and mean that my birth is recorded in the Golden Book, as Sciara’s is not. Perhaps that rankled, but at least he had not publicly accused me of sorcery. The captain nodded to one of his men, who went into the guardroom and returned with a lantern and a jingling ring of keys. He crossed the passage and unlocked the door to the Wells.
“If messer would be so kind as to follow me?” The captain led the way.
The ground floor of the palace is put to mundane uses. The stables are there, the guardrooms, and two sets of prison cells. The Wells are by far the worst of the jails, small stone kennels without windows, damp and dark and airless. They stink most horribly.
That eastern wing is very old and the stairs that lead from the Wells all the way to the top of the palace are steep, narrow, and oddly haphazard, as if they have been reorganized many times over the centuries. They are not intended to impress, because they are never seen by anyone except the fanti and their prisoners. Winding back and forth in the near-darkness, I had to concentrate on where I was putting my feet and soon lost count of what floor we were on.
The second story is mostly occupied by the bureaucracy-the High Chancellor and his staff of secretaries and notaries. The Golden and Silver Books are maintained there, for instance, and another office will issue the permits you need to do anything more than breathe. The third floor belongs to government, for it includes the doge’s apartments and meeting rooms for magistrates and many councils, including the appeal courts and the Great Council itself. The fourth story is where the Collegio and the Senate meet, and also the Council of Ten.
Above those are attics containing the prison cells known as the Leads because they are directly under the great sheets of lead that cover the roof. It is not true, though, that the inmates bake in summer and freeze in winter. These cells are used for gentlemen prisoners, mostly political offenders, and they are not uncomfortable as prisons go. The room to which I was conducted was spacious enough, although utterly barren. I scanned it hastily by the light of the guards’ lanterns. The walls were of heavy planks and the only furnishings, if you could call them that, were a bucket in one corner and a crucifix hanging on the wall opposite the door. A small grilled window admitted sounds of rain. The lights were withdrawn, the door banged, the lock clattered, and I was alone in the dark.
Most inmates would be terrified at that point. I was merely furious. My tarot had warned me of Justice reversed. Deciding that the floor was the best place to sit, since I had no other choice, I huddled myself down in a corner, as small as possible. I hated to dirty my cloak, but I was shivering too much to think of removing it. The vermin that swarmed in summer were mercifully absent.
My next decision required more thought. I had two options-I could wait there in my cell until I was taken down to appear before the tribunal, taking the risk that it would send me straight back up to the torturers. If that happened, my ensuing experiences were likely to be both unpleasant and prolonged, since I had no idea where my master had gone and to confess to assisting him in the black arts would be suicide.
Or I could leave.
