The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction (28 page)

The metal smiths seem to have been family groups, travelling by sea rather than overland, as bronze is so heavy. To make bronze you need copper, and the most important copper mines were at the Great Orm (‘worm’) in North Wales. However, known metal smiths, whose graves have been found (like the Amesbury Archer), seem to come from abroad (as identified by their tooth enamel) and from as far away as Switzerland! At about the same time, bee-keeping seems to have started – and, as metal working in bronze and gold uses the lost wax method, there is thought to be a connection between the two activities (as, again, there is in the story of Icarus and Daedalus).

The story is set on the coast of north-east Britain, where Whitby now stands. The Sacred Howe and the headland mentioned at the start of the story would long since have fallen into the sea, but there are good reasons to suggest that it was near where St Hilda’s monastery at Whitby also once stood – sacred sites tend to stay sacred sites, and there is a surviving late Neolithic Howe slightly further along the coast towards Hartlepool. Aunt Grizzel’s hut would have been where Pannet Park is now located, under the Whitby museum and art gallery. In that excellent museum they have a very early bronze sword – or dagger – of the right sort of date, found out on the moors, that would have originated in Cyprus, but no one has any explanation of how it got to Whitby. The museum also has a facsimile of the sandstone picture panel that I refer to.

A Fiery Death

Ian Morson

Ian Morson became well known as the author of a series of novels featuring William Falconer, a Regent Master at Oxford University in the thirteenth century. The series began with
Falconer’s Crusade
(1994) and has currently reached eight books. Morson is also one of the group of writers known as the Medieval Murderers, who not only give talks on medieval mysteries but have collaborated on several books, such as
The Tainted Relic
(2005) and
King Arthur’s Bones
(2009). Recently, with
City of the Dead
(2009), Morson began a new series featuring Venetian “wheeler-dealer” Niccolo Zuliani who, having to leave Venice, serves as bodyguard to Friar Alberoni and finds himself at the court of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. The following story, however, takes place much later in Zuliani’s life, when he has eventually returned to Venice, but doesn’t find the peace and quiet he might have hoped for.

The conspirators slipped out of the house one by one. The moon was up, and it cast a silvery light across the canals of Venice. But the men leaving the house exited by the rear entrance, giving out on to a narrow alley between the house and the Church of San Giuliano. They dispersed silently into the night like fleeting shadows, some south towards the great Piazza San Marco, and some north towards the Rialto Bridge. The old man left behind in the big, damp house pulled his fur-trimmed cloak around him, and toiled up the stone staircase to the attic rooms at the top of the building. Here, he was furthest from the damp that crept inexorably up the walls of the old house from the basement, so the attic rooms were relatively dry. But it still felt cold, and the old man shivered, longing for the flames of a fire, and some heat. His bones ached terribly, and he longed for the warm sun of the East. Once, almost in another life, he had travelled to the ends of the Earth. But now his world was reduced to a few cold rooms in a crumbling palazzo squeezed between a church and a canal that bore the same names. In the Venetian dialect, they were both called San Zulian.

The old man had been born in the house, and had played in these very attic rooms as a child with his English mother. He sighed as he remembered her features – the dark hair hanging glossily around her pale face, and her blue-green eyes that he had inherited. His eyes were a little cloudier now, and his once red hair was less glossy. He tugged at his salt-and-pepper beard, wishing he could pull out the grey hairs and leave the burnished gold. He was approaching seventy. Disconsolately, he reached out for the Tartar bow that he had been fiddling with before the Tiepolo and Querini family members had arrived for their council of war. He had been trying to tension it, using the elastic properties of the horn and sinew strips fixed either side of the wooden core. But it had not been strung for more than thirty years, and he had been afraid the horn would crack if he tested it too far. He now dropped the bow on the floor, and pulled an arrow from the quiver at his side. It was a three-foot long arrow with a tip that had been plunged in salt water when red-hot, to render it armour-piercing. He twirled it in his fingers, and thought of the words that had been exchanged in the great hall below.

Francesco Tiepolo had lost his temper first.

“God damn Piero Gradenigo. He has got us all into this mess.”

Giovanni Querini had patted his arm to cool him off.

“Francesco, have patience. We will rid ourselves of this nuisance of a Doge, and consign him to Hell soon enough.”

The old man stroked his beard, and offered a wry comment from where he sat in the shadows.

“I think you will find the Pope has already ensured Doge Gradenigo will go there. Hasn’t he pronounced an excommunication and interdict on the whole of Venice?”

Francesco Tiepolo had been called on to lead the conspiracy against the Doge. But he was a poor stand-in for the main man, his cousin Bajamonte, who had not yet arrived from exile on the mainland. Francesco had a loud mouth and a fiery temper all the same.

“Shut up, Zuliani. This is a serious matter, and not a time for jests.”

Niccolo Zuliani, the old man in question, leaned back in his chair, and held his hands up in mock submission. The truth of the matter was that he agreed with Tiepolo. The papal interdict was very serious for trade. It had been invoked because Venice had tried to take control of Ferrara when Marquis Azzo had died two years earlier in 1308. The Pope was determined to prevent the takeover, and had declared all Venetian goods and possessions confiscate, all commercial treaties annulled, and all trade and traffic suspended. Anyone could grab Venetian goods and ships with impunity, and the Serene Republic’s enemies had done so with relish. Venice and its commercial lifelines were being stifled, and Zuliani stood to lose as much anyone. But, in his opinion, if you couldn’t see the funny side of a desperate situation, you might as well slit your own throat.

Still Tiepolo had ranted on, with Querini and one or two of the other once-rich merchants trying to pour oil on the waters to no effect. In disarray, they had all slipped away like ghosts, fearful of discovery. The heavy hand of the Signori di Notte – a bunch of nobles and their henchmen who ensured the safety of Venice’s six districts, but who chiefly worked for the benefit of the older-established families – were a sinister mob and to be avoided.

The old man dropped the arrow on the floor, and looked around him at the accumulation of years spent thousands of miles away from his family home. Hanging on a frame was a full suit of armour made of boiled leather. Its looming presence in the dark corner of the room struck fear into any visitor who had not seen it before, lurking like some monster on the edge of their vision. To the old man it was a comfortable friend, ageing along with him. He only hoped he would not get as mouldy as the leather was now. A large black stone lay on the rickety table. Sharp and angular, the old man had seen others like it being set fire to and burning with a fierce flame. He could not remember which part of Cathay he had got it from, and had always refrained from setting light to it himself. It was too precious a memento to him. However, now that the cold struck through him so, he was mightily tempted. Next to the rock on the table lay a large bound book. He had thumbed its pages regularly over the years, checking it against his view of the heavens. The Chinese almanack had always told the truth about the sky, and he marvelled at the magical, predictive skills of the sages who had written it. Thinking of the far distant place where he had acquired the tome, he rose from his chair, and hobbled over to the window.

He stared for an age at the dark, starry sky, wondering why he had embroiled himself in the plot to overthrow the Doge. He knew the conspiracy would fail, and that he would have to extricate himself somehow, even if, by doing so, he blew the whole plot. But as yet he didn’t know how. He sighed, and cast his gaze down to the canal. On the opposite bank he saw a figure standing boldly in the starlight staring back at him. It was the same slender youth whom he had seen the previous night and the night before. In fact, he had had the feeling the youth had been following him for days. He wondered if his part in the conspiracy was already known, and this youth was stalking him on behalf of the Signori di Notte. If so, his goose was cooked. Irritated, and not a little frightened, he called down to the figure on the canal-side.

“You, boy. Who are you? What are you up to?’

For a fleeting moment, the youth ignored his challenge. And then, only after he had shown he did not care whether Zuliani saw him or not, he pulled his cloak around him and slipped away into the darkness.

*

Zuliani spent a restless night, listening to the wind blowing a storm across the lagoon. He could hear the sea fret crashing against the quays along the edges of the man-made island that was Venice. He even fancied he could hear the creaking of the thousands of wooden posts that had been hammered into the mud banks to create the land on which his and hundreds of other houses stood. It was the very nature of the crazy enterprise that was Venice – a city built on pilings in mud flats in the middle of nowhere – that stirred his and other Venetians’ blood to madcap projects. But sometimes its precarious nature was driven home by foul weather. The chill air of an easterly wind blew through his sleeping chamber, and he could feel the salty spray on its gusts. He huddled beneath the warming lion skin that he had purchased in Kuiju. He had never seen the animal alive, but had grown fond of the skin and its gaping jaws. The head now lay somewhere round his feet, and the tail tickled his icy cheeks until he pushed it away.

The stormy weather would at least have driven the boy who stalked him back to his own home. Zuliani resolved to slip out early in the morning and take action to sever his connection with the plot to bring down the Doge. Why he had aligned himself with the Tiepolos and Querinis he was not sure. They were part of the
case vecchie –
the Venetian aristocracy, who had always done the likes of the lower class Zulianis down. On the other hand, their enemy, Gradenigo, had over the last few years effectively closed the doors of the Great Council to those whose fathers and other paternal ancestors had not been members in the past. It was a closed society that ran Venice, and Zuliani, the last of his family, stood outside it. So he had been flattered a few days earlier when Francesco Tiepolo, one of the old school, had called on him, ostensibly to view Zuliani’s collection of Eastern treasures. He had taken the overweight, red-faced Tiepolo up to his attic rooms, and brought out part of his collection. Tiepolo had at once picked up a heavy golden bar with swirling patterns on it, hefting it in his hand.

“What is this worth, Zuliani? It must weigh three hundred saggi at least.”

Niccolo smiled politely, seeing that the man only saw the surface value of the item he held.

“To those who possessed it, it was priceless. It was not just a bar of gold, it was a permit that gave the owner access to all corners of the Great Khan’s empire – and power over anyone in that empire. It is called a
paizah
, and the inscription reads ‘By the might of the Great God and the great grace he has given to our Emperor, blessed be the name of the Khan, and death and destruction to all who do not obey him.’”

Zuliani ran his fingers fondly over the curly writing.

“There were ones wrought in base-metal or silver, but the gold paizah carried the highest authority. It was given to me by Kubilai Khan himself.”

Tiepolo grunted, unimpressed by the old man’s story. He could only see the value of the gold. A Venetian saggio was about one sixth of an ounce, and that made the bar at least fifty ounces of gold. He laid the bar down reluctantly and peered at a pile of fancy clothes. Pushing aside a plain grey cloak of coarse material that lay atop the Chinese garb, his eyes once more lighted on the golden embroidery that covered the robes underneath.

“Who would wear those? The emperor?”

“Oh not these. They are the court dress of his Chinese subjects, and would be considered quite ordinary. That cloak is more interesting.”

Tiepolo listened politely as the old man explained the history of the cloak, though he hardly absorbed what he was being told. And then he even let Zuliani drone on about his collection a little more before broaching the subject of the conspiracy to overthrow the Doge. This was the subject he had really come here to discuss, because he knew that, if he could lure men like Zuliani into the plot, he could bring the ordinary
cittadini –
citizens, to his side. When he left, he fancied he had been completely successful, later even flattering Zuliani by holding one of his meetings in the man’s home.

Now Zuliani was left tossing in his bed thinking of a way of escaping the coils of the conspiracy. Restlessly, he rose from under the lion skin, and dragged his heavy fur-trimmed robe around him. The only thing to do was to go to the Doge and make it look as though he had only joined the plot in the first place to act as Gradenigo’s spy. Even so, such a betrayal stuck in his craw. Not that he had any worries about offending some sense of honour. God knows, he had served his own ends often enough in the past. No, he merely worried that Gradenigo and his cronies might only see him as untrustworthy in the future, and not give him the preferred status his betrayal should provide. He struck his brow with the flat of his hand, angered by his own indecision.

“Come on, Nick, boy, you would have not hesitated like this twenty years ago. Get it done, and worry about the consequences later.”