License to Quill (11 page)

Unfortunately, this remarkable union between the British and the Ottomans never came to fruition. Murad III died in 1595 just before Elizabeth's greatest gift could be delivered: a jewel-encrusted clockwork organ, along with an entire convoy of ships. The sultana tried to repair the situation through her son Mehmed III, who was interested, but dark forces quickly descended upon Istanbul. The sultana's dragoman Esperanza Malchi, a woman whom Safiye Sultan had relied on for years, was brutally murdered in 1600. Three years later, Mehmed III mysteriously died on the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year. Cut off from the world and surrounded by enemies, the sultana was forced from power and banished by her son's successor, Ahmed I, who as a final insult destroyed the magnificent clock Elizabeth had gifted his predecessors. Any possibility of an alliance between England and the Ottoman Empire was shattered, and with the Virgin Queen dead, her dragoman had little choice but to join the multitude of undead in Venice.

This dragoman remained a man of great influence and access despite his background being a mystery. The only clue to his true heritage was a single scar on his shaved head, which though invisible to the world was long and painful to its wearer. This was why the tall man wore so many fine hats: he preferred keeping his greatest secret hidden in plain sight no differently than the Venetians with their masks. He was the dragoman who accompanied the English fleet when they delivered the queen's clockwork organ to the Ottomans. He was the man who accepted the sultana's letters from Esperanza Malchi before the woman was murdered. He was one of countless men and women with no true homeland, and among them, he was regarded as a master of exiles.

The dragoman's name was unimportant, although it did translate quite beautifully across tongues. Here in Venice, however, he was simply dragoman. Or, as the late poet liked to call him …

“Drago!”

“Cristoforo.” The dragoman bowed.

 

Chapter XII

The Exchange

Within the festive walls of one of the Carampane di Rialto's brothels, the late playwright known everywhere except in Venice as Christopher Marlowe appeared alive and well—endowed. He was sitting upright in a filthy, fluid-stained bed with both his hands behind his head and a tobacco pipe bouncing up and down in his mouth. A slush of white wine and pink vomit was dripping from his chin, mixing into a soup of several other liquids stuck to his chest. Beneath his nipples, a writhing blanket containing several young men and women was still moving after hours of competitive gambling. From the dragoman's perspective, everyone appeared to be winning.

“I see God has already bestowed his blessings upon you,” the tall figure said.

The dead poet smiled dreamily with drunken eyes at the dragoman. “My dear friend,
urrt
—” he slurred with a burp, “you have no idea how lucky I feel to be myself right now.”

“I understand. Cristo, I have some information that I need to share with you in private.”

“Do I have to get up already!” Marlowe protested.

The dragoman looked down at the bumping bodies beneath Marlowe's blanket. He then gestured with his head that the paramours needed to leave.

“As you wish, love.” The poet clapped his hands. “Go to sleep now!” the happy patron sang in Venetian.

The stirring beneath his covers stopped, but only briefly. “I think he wants us to leave,” a female voice whispered. “Are you sure?” replied another. “I thought he wants us to go to sleep.” “He does, but not here.” “What about us?” asked a male voice. “What about you? You're both leaving as well.” “Says who?”

The poet looked up at his tall friend and shook his head. “Can you believe these people?” Marlowe puffed his pipe and scratched his messy mane of brown hair as the quarrel continued, and it took nothing short of a well-timed fart for the poet to put the matter to rest. Once the prostitutes escaped with their clients, Marlowe wrapped himself in a bedsheet and threw open a window. “I apologize for the odor,” he acknowledged as the dragoman held a scented handkerchief to his nose. “So! How's Constantinople?”

“Istanbul,” the dragoman corrected. “We can discuss the situation there in due time. For now, I need the documents you are carrying.”

“You said you have information!”

“I do,” the figure sounded. “And you would like me to share it, but I will need those papers in order to do so.”

The poet furrowed his eyebrows, but then narrowed his eyes and grinned. “Oooh…” Marlowe reveled. “I love seeing you work! You could talk the Devil into giving you his pitchfork!”

The dragoman smiled softly, but then reminded: “The documents?”

“Of course.” Marlowe hopped into action. The poet took a red lamp from the window and searched the floor until he found a leather satchel filled with books and papers. He emptied the bag onto his bed and rooted through its contents until he pulled out a handful of parchment, which he handed to the dragoman. “Compliments of the Biblioteca Marciana!” the playwright offered with a theatrical bow.

The dragoman examined the pages against Marlowe's red lamplight. They were the original handwritten accounts of Marco Polo's travels into the Orient; the writing Rustichello da Pisa obtained and translated into Old French. These notes in particular covered Polo's encounter with Chinese astrologers at Khanbaliq, the Mongol capital of the Yuan dynasty.

The astrologers of each separate sect annually examine their respective tables, to ascertain thence the course of the heavenly bodies, and their relative positions for every lunation. From the paths and configurations of the planets in the several signs, they foretell the state of the weather and the peculiar phenomena which are to occur in each month. In one, for instance, there will be thunder and storms; in another earthquakes; in the third violent lightning and rain …

Their annual prophecies are written on small squares called takuini, which are sold at a moderate price to all persons anxious to search into futurity. Those whose announcements prove more generally correct are accounted the most perfect masters of their art, and consequently held in the highest honor.
*

Unlike the eventual printed work, Marco Polo's original manuscript contained hand-drawn illustrations of Chinese star charts and astronomical equipment.

The dragoman reached into his kaftan and handed Marlowe a leather purse filled with one hundred pounds in Venetian
zecchini
. It was as much as an English merchant made in a year—or an English spy. “You have done well. It looks like we'll be enjoying at least one more year in each other's company.”

“And a
buon anno
to you!” Marlowe clapped his tall friend on the shoulders and hopped up to kiss him on his cheeks.

The dragoman slipped the pages into a leather folio concealed within his coat. “Were you able to find any of these ‘prophecies' Polo mentioned? The
takuini
?”

Marlowe shook his head. “The library doesn't have any of them. I imagine people discarded them at the end of every year.”

“That was my assessment as well. I was unable to find any almanacs he described in Istanbul.”

“Constantinople,” Marlowe corrected.

The dragoman ignored this.

“So! How are all things Ottoman?”

“I do not think this is the best place to discuss that.” The dragoman ran his eyes over the room. “If you don't mind my asking, why are you here?”

Marlowe giggled and hiccupped. “One of the men beneath the blanket was the doge's nephew!”

The dragoman raised his eyebrows. “Did you learn anything from him?”

“Yes! I learned that he comes here!” Marlowe picked up an empty wine bottle and shook its last drops down his throat. “What's new in Constantinople?”

The dragoman carefully checked the door behind him and looked behind the paintings on the wall. After finding no peepholes or passages, he closed the room's window and pulled the only clean-looking chair he could find next to Marlowe. “The Ottomans are going to lose the war in Hungary.”

The poet squinted while gorging on fruits and cheeses from his bedside. “The Ottomans are in Hungary?”

The dragoman sighed. “The Ottomans have been in Hungary longer than you or I have been in Venice.”

Marlowe shrugged and continued stuffing his face with both hands like a baby. With wide eyes, the poet waited for the dragoman to continue his story.

“Several months before Sultan Mehmed's death, he beheaded his grand vizier, Yemişçi Hasan Pasha, and replaced him with a more capable man. That man, Yavuz Ali Pasha, died in Belgrade six months ago.”

“You are just learning this?” Marlowe snickered. “I heard that
five
months ago!”

“Yes. I know. From me.”

“Ah yes! That was you!” Marlowe spit some seeds onto the floor and wiped his mouth with his bedsheet. “Is that why you went to Constantinople? To make sure that the dead man was still dead?”

The dragoman moved closer to Marlowe. “I spoke with Safiye Sultan.”

His stupid-looking friend dropped his act and sobered up instantly. “How is that possible?”

The dragoman would not say. All he could do was continue. “She told me Yavuz Ali Pasha was murdered while planning a sweeping campaign in Belgrade that could have won the war for the Ottomans and severely cripple the Habsburgs.”

“Did she do this?”

“No. But she told me she suspects the vizier was killed by a female assassin.”

Marlowe's eyes widened. “Women still do that?”

The dragoman drew very close. “Safiye Sultan suspects that her son Mehmed was poisoned by one of his concubines, and that her husband Murad was poisoned by one of his wives as well. The sultana believes these same harem girls were responsible for her dragoman's murder before she could finalize an alliance with England.”

Marlowe scratched his chin and found a sticky piece of something on his stubble, which he flicked off. “Why does she suspect that?”

“She was head of the harem. No one knows what transpired within those walls better than she does.”

“But … has anything like this happened before?”

The dragoman sat back in his chair. “It is possible, but unlikely. One harem girl? Maybe. Perhaps motivated by religion or revenge. But several girls over the course of a decade? And none of them with sons to install as sultan? That is a tale I have never heard told.”

“Who were these women?” Marlowe asked. “Could they have been working together?”

“I cannot imagine how such a situation could be possible. These women were slaves purchased from all over Europe. They had neither family nor loyalty connecting one another. No sisterhood. If one concubine approached another to hatch a plot, that girl would have told the sultan to gain his trust and have the plotter killed. There is simply too much for these women to gain in betraying one another. It's a safeguard designed to prevent such conspiracies from happening.”

“And yet these women assassinated sultans and viziers? In bed, I imagine.” Marlowe grinned.

“Not necessarily. However, if these assassinations were carried out by harem girls over the course of several years, it is without precedent in history.”

“Well, either way, I like the sound of these lethal ladies! It's not every day you encounter a woman who could lay a man dead! Well, besides this fine establishment.”

The dragoman smirked and folded his hands. “Which brings me to why I am sharing this with you. Cristo, do you think such women might already be in this city? If what Safiye Sultan tells me is true, then these female assassins operate all the way to Belgrade. A lot of money could be made if we exposed who they are to their next targets.”

Marlowe made a silly face. “What makes you think there will be ‘next' targets? Let alone rich ones we could find.”

The dark figure stared straight into Marlowe's eyes. “My friend, whoever wanted the Ottomans to lose the long war in Hungary were likely the same people who sabotaged the alliance between England and Turkey. If they are all taking orders from whom I imagine they must be, then I will need your help to find these assassins. Here. In
La Serenìsima
.”

Marlowe stared blankly at his serious friend. “Well, you do have a knack for being right all the time. Sure! I can help. The only problem is, Drago, I have no idea where to start looking! There are too many whores in this city. Care to sleep on it, my handsome friend?” Marlowe drunkenly beckoned the dragoman to his bed.

The great man looked his filthy friend down and up. “Have you been exercising?”

Marlowe laughed. “For what! I'm little more than an illegal librarian these days!”

“You need to start exercising. For your own safety.”

The bashful poet looked away. “Drago, you know I don't do that kind of work anymore. I thought you just wanted me to poke around in some brothels.”

The dragoman once more leaned close to his friend. “If you are to help me with this, I need you to be fit. You're the only person in the city I can trust with this mission. I cannot afford to lose you.”

“Awww!” Marlowe moved in to kiss the dragoman—or at least try—but was distracted by a wine bottle at the foot of his bed. “I love when you talk to me like that. Tell me again why you trust me so much!” Marlowe reached for the bottle, but the dragoman seized it and placed it under his chair. The poet groaned.

“I trust you because if the Ottomans have been twice bested by carefully timed and planned murders, then it means your government had nothing to do with them.”

“
My
government!” Marlowe laughed. “Believe me, those wretched isles no longer bother my buttocks. The Protestants are hypocritical asses, and the Catholics just as rear-ended.”