The Lion of Venice. Mark Frutkin

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СКАЧАТЬ follows him up the ladder leading to the catwalk. As they move along, stopping now and then to survey the scene below, they suddenly hear angry shouts and curses from two men further along the parapet. Marco and his uncle come to a rigid halt. The men have not noticed them. Through the gloom, Marco notices a flash of metal. A moment later, one of the men is falling, the handle of a knife sticking from the side of his neck. He lands heavily in the cauldron of pitch.

      Marco stares at the scene below. A labourer runs for a rope, another for a plank, but…too late. The worker sinks backwards into the seething cauldron, sending out gentle black waves as he goes down.

      Uncle Maffeo hurries along the catwalk in an attempt to catch the murderer but he has vanished into the night like smoke disappearing into fog. Maffeo finds Marco and talks to the workers about the identity of the men.

      A rough old greybeard steps forward. “I recognized the murderer.”

      “Yes?” Maffeo nods.

      “One of the Doge's assassins. Roberto, our friend, must have been punished for some crime against the Republic. We don't know what it was. He never spoke of it.” The other labourers nod their heads in agreement.

      “The Doge's assassin? Then we can do nothing. Before the pitch cools, fish him out and take him to his family. Clean him up first.”

      Maffeo takes his young nephew home. Tadeo the gondolier merely shakes his head. On their return trip, Marco fears being alone with his thoughts, but dares not break his uncle's grim silence.

      Several days later, Marco woke in the middle of the night scorched with fever, his throat enflamed with catarrh. All that day he struggled in a world half-dream, half-waking nightmare, his sweat caustic to the touch.

      Marco's aunt treated him with odouriferous poultices and soothing words. His father watched from the doorway to the boy's room, his forehead etched with concern. A servant was sent to fetch the doctor.

      The arrival of Doctor Alberi demanded attentions similar to those surrounding the entrance of a highly placed priest or bishop. After the doctor had discussed the situation with Marco's father and aunt, he took a chair by the boy's bedside. The doctor, who had studied at the famous school of medicine at Salerno (and who let this salient point slip into his conversation with Signor Polo), was a prodigious man who exhibited extreme confidence and skill. Dressed in his fine velvet robes, he would expound upon his suggested diagnosis and its proper cure. Doubt and ambiguity neither entered his mind, nor his speech.

      “It is apparent the fever has been caused because he has committed a serious sin. The influence of Mars, often a culprit at this time of year is likely also to blame. 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.

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