The Mourning Emporium (6 page)

A large gray tabby cat strolled across the deck just as Renzo’s head reached that level.

His eyes flew to the furry sides to check for wings. Some of Venice’s most beautiful and luxuriant cats were of the Syrian species, which not only grew to outrageous size but also kept discreet furry wings tucked up against their flanks. Syrian cats had in the past delivered Renzo from certain death at the beaks of a thousand seagulls. They had helped to save the lives of dozens of gondolier children during the final battle in the lagoon against Bajamonte Tiepolo.

“Or was it the final battle?” Renzo could not keep this dismal question out of his head any longer.

If the cat Sofonisba had wings, they were very well concealed. She stopped dead and looked Renzo straight in the eyes: “Oh, another dirty little boy. Worse luck!”

Renzo had come across several talking cats during the campaign to save Venice from Bajamonte Tiepolo. None were overly respectful. However, none had been quite as rude as this.

“I was promised something better,” lamented Sofonisba.

“I’m awfully sorry.” Renzo smiled.

“You will be,” said the cat.

When Teo awoke, it was to the sounds of water dripping and waves surging.

Hours must have passed since the sack was thrust over her head, for the first glimmerings of dawn were visible and her hair was stiff with frozen water. An intense and painful sensation of cold slid down her spine. She was still wearing the sack in which she’d been kidnapped. Its bottom end had torn so that her head stuck out. She tried to sit up, but found that her neck, arms and legs had been tied with sturdy cords. She was lashed to an iceberg the size of a small carriage.

There was not a soul in sight: not a fisherman, not even a bird. As the iceberg wallowed in the dark hollows of the heaving water, Teo felt like the last living creature on earth.

Above her was a strange apparatus consisting of a magnifying glass and a compass balanced on a tripod. Wires jerked the magnifying glass to follow the compass toward the strongest rays of the rising sun.

“That’s what’s causing the dripping,” Teo thought. “The magnifying glass focuses the sun’s heat on the ice, so it will melt.”

A slight tapping from below drew her attention. She swiveled her neck around to see what it could be.

“Uffa!” Teo shrieked. She was not alone after all. Frozen into her iceberg were two Vampire Eels, staring up at her hungrily. The tapping noise came from their powerful tails, impatiently beating against their increasingly fragile case of ice.

“That settles it,” moaned Teo. Whoever had done this to her was in some way connected to Bajamonte Tiepolo, for no one else had ever harnessed the savage appetites of the Vampire Eels to their purpose.

Teo wished she did not know quite so much about the lifestyle and feeding habits of the Vampire Eel. “So when the ice melts, the Eels will be free to eat me. First they’ll suck my blood. They prefer to do that while their victim is still alive. The blood is tastier that way. Oh!”

Teo was distracted from her dismal prospects by a sound like a cow lowing and a sudden stench of burning.

The source of the scorched smell was easily identified: the magnifying glass was now trained on a piece of the sack that swaddled her. Down by her feet, the heat had dried out the fabric, and it was starting to smolder.

“So.” Teo grimaced. “I may be the first person ever to burn to death on an iceberg.”

She jerked her sack-clad foot out of the beam of the magnifying glass. As she did so, the glass moved infinitesimally toward her again.

“I am not going to be able to do that for much longer,” she realized. “If only I had The Key to the Secret City, I could use a sharp corner of it to break the ice under my hands. Then I could untie these ropes. On second thoughts, no. It’s better that the book’s safe with Renzo.”

The mooing sound came again, quite close to her ear.

“A cow?” she asked. “In the middle of the lagoon?”

The noise came a third time, a definite cowlike sound. But now it was accompanied by a chorus of chirruping and quacking.

With an effort, Teo twisted her neck. To her left, a number of water birds had gathered in a semicircle, each with its head on one side and a concerned expression on its little pointed face.

“Good morning,” she offered politely. “How do you do?”

A merry clacking and quacking answered her.

Then Teo remembered the two Vampire Eels. “Go away!” she bellowed at the birds. “Look below me! Those Eels will eat you too! They’ll be absolutely famished after all this time trapped in the ice.”

The birds merely stared at Teo, and then at the Eels, and went back to chirruping, quacking and nodding among themselves. Some flew up to the iceberg, hopping along the cords that bound her, inspecting them with their blackcurrant eyes.

Teo ached, but was too polite, to say, “Shoo! The warmth of your bodies will melt the ice even quicker.”

A sandpiper lifted his beak in a sympathetic chirp.

“Oh,” groaned Teo, “I know you’d help me if you could. But someone stronger than you wants me dead.”

The magnifying glass had spun so that Teo’s foot was again feeling the heat. Her bonds were tight. This time she could move her foot only one inch away.

“An inch. That gives me how long?” she wondered. “Perhaps another fifteen minutes?”

Tiny sharp batterings vibrated through the iceberg. The birds were pecking at the cords on Teo’s sacking. Others flapped their wings against the magnifying glass so that it toppled and dangled at an angle from the tripod. The morning sun no longer beat through it. The sack had stopped smoldering.

The red-rimmed eyes of the Vampire Eels gazed through the ice at Teo and her feathered helpers with expressions of greed and longing.

Even as the birds frayed the ropes, Teo’s mind was leaping beyond hope and into the next abyss. From the jerky movements of the iceberg, she detected powerful currents below. The black water must be glacial. Even if she escaped the Eels, she’d not survive twenty minutes in its bitter embrace.

Between pecks, the birds appeared to be arguing among themselves. Finally, the whole flock of alzavole rose into the air and swept off across the lagoon. The rest of the birds resumed pecking at the cords, pausing to grumble occasionally.

A few minutes later, a sad honking ruffled the air. Led by the ducks, a dozen monk seals were swimming toward the iceberg.

To Teo, lying flat on her back, the seals looked fearsome, easily twice her length and ten times her girth. “And they eat living creatures,” she worried. “Fish. In their normal habitat. All the way up here, perhaps they can’t find any fish to suit them. Perhaps they are so starving, so desperate …”

The herd of seals surrounded the iceberg. Their faces were kind. She could have sworn that one of them nodded at her. They peered into the iceberg with their intelligent eyes.

At the sight of the Vampire Eels squirming inside, they snuffled with alarm.

But one female seal, with a pup in tow, placed her flippers on the ice. Her whiskers tickled Teo’s face. Teo was relieved to smell fresh fish on her breath.

The mother seal honked to her pup, who pulled itself up on to her back. The mother gave Teo a significant look. The pup slid off, and the mother seal arched her back invitingly. At the same moment, one of the tufted ducks nipped through the final filament of the bonds on Teo’s right hand. She reached out to stroke the seal’s damp fur. She could feel its heart pounding beneath the warm softness.

“Thank you,” she breathed.

By now Teo’s left hand and both her feet were also free. She sat up. The Eels, sensing that their meal was escaping, thrashed inside the ice. A cymbal-clash of shattering made all the seals and birds back away. A fissure forked through the center of the iceberg. One of the Eels was wriggling up inside.

Teo looked desperately at the mother seal. A tender baby monk seal would no doubt be a delicacy for Vampire Eels. If the mother seal helped Teo, her pup would be left vulnerable.

A black tongue flickered through the fissure. The whole iceberg shook.

The mother seal still hesitated, staring at the black tongue with an appalled expression. Then the tongue suddenly disappeared and a terrible rumpus broke out inside the iceberg. The second Eel was furious that the first one had broken through ahead of it. It had clamped its jaws around its companion’s tail, nearly separating it from the rest of the body. The first Eel retracted its head in order to deliver a savage bite to the lungs of its assailant.

The fissure was widening.

Teo made a gesture of cradling to the mother seal. The creature seemed to understand. She slid alongside the iceberg and nudged her pup toward Teo, who took it in her arms. Then Teo herself slid onto the mother seal’s back, using one arm to cling to her neck and the other to wrap around the pup.

The iceberg exploded into glassy arrows, white lumps and slush.

But Teo was already hurtling away from the Eels, who were fortunately intent on fighting each other to the death. The seal herd sped through the archipelago of tiny islands that made up the outer reaches of the Venetian lagoon. Teo bounced up and down on the mother seal’s back, occasionally submerging completely as the creature plunged below the waves. Her mouth and nose were burning with cold salt water. The rest of the seals kept pace, packed in tightly around the mother, and helpfully nudging Teo back up whenever she began to slide off her perch.

The baby seal wriggled, uttering its milky soft cries.

“I’m sorry,” murmured Teo, kissing the top of its head. “Thank you for sharing your mother with me.”

Finally, the herd of seals slowed. Teo, wiping her waterlogged eyes on the mother seal’s fur, saw the bell towers of Venice in the misty distance. By gripping, and pointing with her head, she guided the seals to the Zattere, where the masts of the Scilla stood ghostlike, her sails folded up like long loaves of unbaked bread.

“I’ll never forget this,” Teo told the seals, sliding off the mother’s back on to the seaweed-fronded stairs of the fondamenta. “If I can do anything for you in the future, you can be sure I shall.”

Teo sloughed off the ragged remains of the sack. Running toward the Scilla, she stopped dead. Fixed to a lamppost was a fresh list of victims of the ice storm. For the first time, she forced herself to look. Her eyes slid down to the “S”s, dreading to see the names of her parents. Instead of Leonora and Alberto Stampara, she read her own name: Teodora Stampara—missing, presumed drowned.

“That dandypratt the Mayor didn’t waste any time,” she growled. “Couldn’t wait to pronounce me dead as a nit again!”

Then she remembered—her papers! The ones that proved she was a boy! They must be ruined! Teo reached into her soaking pockets and pulled out the document that the Abbess had given her. The spidery writing had remained dry and safe inside the lambskin packet.

She pulled her sailor hat out of the pocket where she’d wedged it and set it, wet and cold as it was, at a jaunty angle on the side of her head.

Even half drowned and freezing, Teo had every intention of making the best possible impression upon her new shipmates.

“Halt! Who goes there?” demanded a boy’s voice as Teo laid her hands on the ladder. Even though she could not see the boy, Teo saw his writing in the air above—swift and cheeky.

“The way a monkey would write. If a monkey could,” she thought.

“Teodoro Ongania,” she answered, trying to keep her voice deep and confident, “reporting for duty on the Scilla.”

“You’re not on my list,” shouted the boy. “Get lost. No cake for you.”

“But I’m an orphan. Come to be a sailor.”

“Stop bothering me. You’re giving me a headache with that whining. If you don’t go, I’ve got some veg peelings for you and a slop-pail for afters.”

Teo was taken aback. But after all she’d just been through, she simply wasn’t having it. “Who are you to say that I am not an orphan and can’t come aboard?” she demanded. “I’m coming up now.”

“I’m the first watch, aren’t I? Go teach your granny to griddle goats! Now, I warned you.”

A pile of rotting carrot peelings landed on Teo’s head.

“Pooh!” she shouted, pushing them out of her eyes.

“You can have some of that next, if you don’t toddle off sharpish.”

Help came from an unexpected source.

“Ow! Ow! Ouch!” cried the first watch. “That hurts. Stop it, do!”

He was answered with angry yowling. His footsteps pattered hastily away.

Teo brightened. Of course there would be a ship’s cat. She adored cats.

A gray striped cat duly poked its head over the railing. “I’ve dealt with that little excrescence, otherwise known as Sebastiano dalla Mutta,” the cat announced graciously. “That’s the worst of boys. You give them a bit of a job and they think they’re God creating the universe. Sofonisba, the ship’s cat. Pleased to meet you. Do come aboard, Miss.”

“But I-I-I’m a boy,” stuttered Teo. “Teodoro … Ongania.”

“If you say so,” replied the cat, smirking.

“No, really,” Teo urged, “it’s got to be a secret. If they find out I’m a girl, I’m in big trouble.”

“Indeed. Well, I won’t betray you. I’m happy to have a civilized female on the boat. Not one of these young tykes has any talent for ailuromancy. How’s yours, by the way?”

“My ailuromancy?” Teo loved large words, the larger the better. But she’d not come across this one before.

“Predicting the weather by observing the behavior of the ship’s cat, particularly the motions of the tail, that being the most communicative part.”

Teo smiled diplomatically. “I can’t wait to learn it.”

“Takes a lifetime,” said Sofonisba ironically. “Excuse me, there’s a rat by the water barrel. Must attend to it. I’ll send the captain along to you. Ah, here he is, a good fellow. Knows his ailuromancy, anyway.”

A familiar voice greeted Teo joyfully. “Young Teodora! We’ve been worried to death about you. I had a message from the nuns. We expected you last night! Signor Alicamoussa has scoured the town, fruitlessly. Dear child, you’re soaking wet! Come to the mess: it’s warm there. We’ll get you some dry clothes and something hot to drink.”