The Undrowned Child

  “Renzo,” she said calmly, “this is what my family does.”

  “And they died for it, Teo.”

  “Hush, Renzo! Don’t talk about dying now.”

  Then Teo whispered tenderly into the cat’s delicate ear, “Can you transfer the Spell Almanac to my body, Signorina Grigiogatta?”

  The cat pushed her wet muzzle against Teo’s hand. “Yesss. You are right. Thisss is the only way now. You are a Gasperin. It is yourrr destiny to protect the Spell Almanac, even though you are ssso young … and now you may neverrr grow old.…” The Gray Lady’s voice had collapsed to a hoarse rattle. “None of the Gasperin Incogniti lived to an old age … but none of them … shirked theirrr duty. Neverrr grow old.…”

  “She’s fading away,” whispered Renzo. “It’s too late anyway.”

  “Never grow old?” thought Teo wildly.

  The cat groaned, a low rattling noise deep in her throat. But she raised her paw and opened her eyes to look directly at Teo. “Lie down next to me, child, and put your arms around me. Ohhh! No, more gently than that. Now close yourrr eyes.”

  Teo did as she was bid, sobbing as she felt the Gray Lady’s warm blood on her cheek. She held the Gray Lady as gently as she could, her arms circling the trembling, shattered rib cage. She felt the breath rasping out of the cat, all unevenly now.

  “Concccentrate, little girl,” whispered the cat.

  Teo felt her whole body tingle with pins and needles. It hurt a little but it tickled more. She wanted to squirm and scratch, but the cat cried out, “Be ssstill, young Teodora, or … the spells will … come out all wrong … last thing … with the Almanac on your skin … you shall come out … from between-the-Linings … Need to hide the spells … Don’t … forget … my cosmetic purse … in my office … good … bye.”

  Renzo stared at Teo in horror. She knew what he was thinking—if she came out from between-the-Linings then everyone would be able to see her. Including Bajamonte Tiepolo.

  The cat shuddered in her arms. The tickling sensation had gone. Now Teo felt as if her own body had become entirely liquid, and that tides were turning inside her. There was a breathy echo in her ears, and then a sensation as if cold pearls were rolling all over her skin.

  At last, mercifully, she fainted.

  Teo stirred. The first thing she felt was the Gray Lady lying still and cold in her arms. Teo kept her eyes shut. She could not bear to see the poor cat dead.

  Eventually she forced herself, opening her eyes slowly and letting the tears spill out at the same time. They stung her cheeks, which felt extremely tender and thin-skinned. Renzo was looking down at her, his hand poised over her head as if he was about to stroke her hair. When he saw that Teo had regained consciousness, he pulled his hand away smartly.

  “At last,” he said. “You’ve been unconscious for hours. Listen.”

  Birds were starting to sing outside.

  “Is it done?” asked Teo. “Is the Spell Almanac on me now?”

  Renzo gingerly raised her arm to show her—very faintly like Braille on her skin, the words that were once on the Gray Lady’s body were now imprinted on Teo’s.

  Carefully the children lifted up the limp body of the cat and carried her to a courtyard garden inside the Archives. With their bare hands they dug a grave for her, and tenderly covered her body with earth. Renzo plucked a rose to place on the mound. They stood over it, both of them weeping unashamedly. They were joined by a pair of the small, loyal cocai seagulls, who bowed their heads respectfully.

  “We should say some solemn words over her,” sobbed Teo. “She deserves a better funeral than this. She deserves the whole of Venice to mourn her.”

  Renzo, as she knew he would, rose to the occasion. “We consign our dear Gray Lady to the earth. A noble soul, a queen among cats.”

  Teo interrupted with a sob, “No, the cream of cats!”

  “Very well, the cream of cats, who protected Venice from Bajamonte Tiepolo, with the aid of just a handful of human friends. We commend her spirit forever.”

  The children bowed their heads. The birds chirruped mournfully and flew off.

  Teo’s body felt almost like her own again, but she was weak, as if she had been ill for a long time and had only just come back into the living world once more.

  As they reentered the main corridor of the Archives, an old lady with a smock and a broom bustled past them, sweeping frantically. Over her shoulder, she reproached the children, “These Archives are closed! Have you not seen the havoc in here? Anyway, you two bambini should not be out on your own! Don’t you know that the streets are dangerous now? And you’re not looking at all well, carissima,” she said to Teo. She disappeared down another corridor, still sweeping.

  Renzo had turned pale. “The old lady said ‘you two children.’ ”

  Teo was paler still. “She could see me. The Gray Lady was right. I have come out from between-the-Linings.” She did not say, as the Gray Lady had, “So Bajamonte Tiepolo can find me.”

  Renzo urged, “You need to put on some cosmetic paint now. Your face … I’ll get the cosmetic purse from her office. You”—he pointed to the door of the ladies’—“go in—there’ll be a mirror.”

  Teo gasped at the writing picked out in white on her face. The spells were inscribed back-to-front and upside down, like the letters on a printing plate. On Teo’s skin the Almanac looked like the worst and ugliest case of measles in the world.

  Renzo appeared at the door of the ladies’. “Here it is.” He handed her the beautiful purse. Teo burst into new tears touching the soft silk that she’d last seen in the hands of the poor Gray Lady.

  “Come in here, I’ll need your help,” she told Renzo.

  Renzo looked dubious on both fronts. He hesitated on the threshold. “Don’t you even know how to paint your face? I thought girls always knew how to do this sort of thing.”

  Renzo’s tone mixed irritation with embarrassment. But they both knew that it was not the cosmetics, or being inside a ladies’ lavatory, that were truly bothering him. Teo had shown herself so brave, and he was both worried for her and mortified that he had lagged behind her, merely watching as she took sole responsibility for the Spell Almanac. He mumbled, “It should have been me.”

  “You didn’t have a choice, Renzo,” Teo told him. “Remember the prophecy: the Studious Son shall have his role to play too, and no doubt it will be as dangerous as mine.”

  Renzo looked a little sick.

  “Though I hope not,” she added hastily.

  Teo looked like a clown when they had finished with the cosmetic creams.

  Renzo said, “It’ll have to do. Now we’ll go back to the hotel and find some clothes to cover the rest of you up, and then we must go to the mermaids and show them what has happened. They will know how best to … well, make use of you.”

  Warily, they walked back through streets that were almost empty. Teo kept looking behind her: it was strangely pleasant to have a shadow again. Ghosts flitted around excitedly, trailing their cold miasmas, and looting old weapons out of holes in walls, preparing themselves for the battle ahead. Every so often a ghost materialized in front of the children and saluted them, before rushing off.

  Flocks of magòghe swooped overhead. The dawn air was rent with the commotion of their wings and their hoarse caws. Their blood was roused—their cries were urgent. They flew in and out of windows, scattering papers from people’s abandoned desks and dragging books out of bookcases with their yellow beaks.

  “What are they looking for?” Teo asked.

  “The Spell Almanac, I suppose,” answered Renzo.

  Teo flinched. “You mean—me.”

  the morning of June 14, 1899

  Renzo and Teo stole past the hotel manager at his desk. It was easy to avoid his attention, for he was deep in a violent argument with Maria’s father, who had his back to them.

  “I warned you to keep an eye on my daughter!” shouted Signor Naccaro, sounding more like a gangster than a scien
tist. “You were uncommon quick to take the tip, my man. So where’s the foolish girl now? I can’t recall layin’ eyes on her in two days. If anythin’ has happened to her, I’ll hold you personally responsible. Got that?”

  “We have to save her,” puffed Teo, up in her room. Even though the sun had barely risen, the air steamed hot as ever. All the worse for poor Teo, pulling on shirts and jackets and petticoats in untidy layers, while Renzo managed the feat of glaring at her and averting his eyes almost at the same time.

  “You know finding Maria means finding Bajamonte Tiepolo,” he almost shouted at Teo. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes fiercely. “Are you ready for that? And you of all people should not go anywhere near him, now that you’re wearing what is potentially Il Traditore’s greatest weapon. Why should you save Maria, if it’s going to cost your own life, and the lives of everyone in Venice? Is she really worth that?”

  Then he looked at Teo’s set, silent face and sighed wearily, “Very well, very well, where’s the book? What does it say?”

  On the cover, Lussa looked fearful. When they opened The Key to the Secret City, the crest of Bajamonte Tiepolo swelled up in full color on the page.

  “That much we know already,” snapped Teo, discouraged and already miserably hot. “That’s no help.”

  But on the white page, the crest was slowly sliding apart into its separate elements, a crown, a star, three blue balls and a red horizontal stripe with diagonal blue and yellow ones below. The children stared at these random shapes and patterns in frustration.

  Renzo eventually suggested, “Could they be the signs to show us where to find Bajamonte Tiepolo’s headquarters?”

  “Well, obviously,” replied Teo grumpily. She pulled on a crimson jacket with a high neck and a loose front.

  In the book the outline of a wolf now appeared under the crown. It wrinkled up its jaws and snarled so ferociously that the children both took a step back.

  Teo exclaimed, “Remember the map of apothecaries? That’s the Wolf-in-a-Crown.”

  She stuffed The Key to the Secret City into a layer between two shirts, splashed some cold water from her ewer down the back of her neck and rammed a straw hat over her curls. “I’m ready,” she announced. “I hope you think I am sufficiently elegant for Venice, Renzo?”

  Renzo grinned. “I take your point. Any kind of alive, at this stage, is elegant enough for Venice. I daresay I have been a little bigoted.”

  “Just a little.”

  At the Wolf-in-a-Crown, by Santi Filippi e Giacomo, a terrible smell was leaking out of the cracks in the cobwebbed windows. The majolica jars in this apothecary bore the titles Deadly Nightshade, Arsenic and Poison Oleander. Peering over the sill, the children saw dwarves mixing huge vats of poison and dipping old iron arrows in them. This was the fate that awaited the ghosts and the lions and mermaids in battle!

  The children rushed to the Two Tousled Mermaids by the Ghetto, and helped themselves to all the Venetian Treacle they could find in a high shelf that fortunately held a dozen new jars of the precious medicine. The tank that had once held the vipers was empty. Renzo and Teo decanted the scented medicine into dozens of small glass specimen bottles with which they filled their pockets.

  “What next?” Teo asked The Key to the Secret City, which was busy churning out coins to lay on the counter to pay for the Treacle.

  On the page, Bajamonte Tiepolo’s crest glowered at them.

  Then the three balls from the crest began to bounce around the page. Renzo suggested, “Maybe it’s just this simple: it’s about a ball game. Let’s go to the Games Pavilion out at Sant’Elena. That’s on the northeast edge of the city.”

  Hurrying through Castello, the children passed dozens of fleeing Venetians. Others had decided to stay and defend their homes. The sound of hammering echoed through the streets as people boarded up their windows and doors.

  “So futile!” breathed Teo.

  The people seemed unaware that their door-knockers did not appreciate this treatment. Only Renzo and Teo could see that the miniature brass lions and Moors had suddenly become living things. The lions roared resentfully as the householders nailed crude boards against their doors. And the Moors, fierce as Signor Rioba, berated their homeowners as if each one of them was the mayor.

  “Desist, pin-heads!” they called out. “Lay down Your Foolish Hammer! Our Enemy is Sending water and plague against Venice! What use are Nails against that, Ye Unmitigated Noodles!”

  Twenty minutes later, the children were gazing through the slats of the pavilion wall, sick at heart. It was horribly clear why The Key to the Secret City had sent them all the way to Sant’Elena. Massing inside the Pavilion were all the forces of evil that Bajamonte Tiepolo had summoned for his war against Venice.

  There were Lombards and Franks in coarse tunics with hooded falcons on their wrists, the Serbs dressed in filthy red waistcoats with white sashes, the Genoans in their chain mail, the Ottomans with their turbans and scimitar swords, the Dalmatian pirates in lurid rags.

  Other enemies were not of this world: bad faeries in white dresses that did not quite hide their goats’ feet; Dark Elves with huge leaf-shaped ears; the Folletti hovering like human-headed dragonflies; dwarves still dusty from the gold mines of Tartary; malevolent sea sprites in robes of rotting seaweed; and a few ripe-smelling sea monsters left over from the earliest times, which had crawled out of the deep trailing barnacled fins and forked tails.

  These soldiers—humans, animals and supernatural creatures—had one thing in common: they had all been killed in battle with Venetians. All bore terrible wounds; some were missing limbs; others were slashed across the face or neck. The human faces were distorted with rage; the semihumans gibbered angrily. The animals were restive, prowling black metal cages and nipping each other in frustration.

  The heat was rising. A sickening stench forced itself out through the slats—of sweat, of old, stale rum, putrefying fish, dried blood, dirt, and of hate.

  “Look at them! All in-the-Slaughterhouse,” exclaimed Renzo. “They’re all mutilated. And they’re not exactly looking for redemption, are they?”

  “No. They want to kill Venetians all over again.”

  A hoarse cry echoed around the pavilion as Bajamonte Tiepolo himself strode onto a stage below the tiers of his ranked troops. He was shrouded in his dirty white fur cloak. Only his one white hand showed outside his robes.

  “He’s … taller than I expected.” Renzo’s voice wobbled. This was the first time, Teo realized, that Renzo had been in the presence of Il Traditore.

  Even without sight of that terrible milky face, Bajamonte Tiepolo exerted a powerful effect, and not just on Renzo. His minions huddled together. Some of those in the front rows scrambled backwards, trembling. Pirates and Ottomans alike cried out in fear. Dogs bayed, pointing their shaggy muzzles up to the sky. The most bloodcurdling howls came from a cage half covered with black sacking. Its denizens were heavily shackled inside.

  “Werewolves,” Teo realized, peering towards the gloomy interior of that cage.

  Bajamonte Tiepolo, meanwhile, stood impassively while his forces collected their wits again, and calmed to a low hubbub of growling and chattering teeth.

  His face was still covered, but from under the swaddling of cloth and fur, Il Traditore began to intone an awful oratory. The rasp of that voice, which had whispered in her dreams night by night, brought a bitter taste flooding into Teo’s mouth. Every spell on her body rose up in goose pimples. Renzo flinched visibly.

  His voice was deeper, but Bajamonte Tiepolo’s accent sounded the same as when he had presented himself as a young man—with an edge to it like sandpaper. It was the voice Teo had heard all those days ago in the church, ordering the deaths of the poor little gargoyles. And Teo saw the same Gothic script in the air, though the letters were thicker and stronger now. He was becoming himself.

  “Kill every Venetian who resists!” Bajamonte Tiepolo was telling his troops. “The stree
ts shall run with their arrogant blood! Did Venetians spit on you? Look down on you like worms? You shall have the joy of humbling them at last.”

  The emerald ring flashed on Il Traditore’s finger and the eyes of a thousand beings swiveled to follow his jabbing gestures of revenge, murder and triumph. The magòghe circled overhead, cawing with fierce joy.

  “Lussa must hear about this,” whispered Teo, chilled to the heart.

  “Do you think she doesn’t already know?” hissed Renzo. “The mermaids have been protecting Venice for thousands of years. They know all these villains. It’s just that they’ve never faced them all together at one time before.”

  “So what are we supposed to do now?”

  “We haven’t finished the puzzle of the crest yet, from The Key. If we can find Bajamonte’s headquarters, then we’ll find Maria. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “And while he’s here, perhaps we can do something there to disrupt his plans.”

  Teo opened the book. The crest appeared again. The balls had disappeared: that part of the riddle was solved. The two last pieces of the puzzle were the single star and the stripe of red with the blue and yellow diagonals underneath.

  The two children stared at it fiercely, as if their gaze alone could draw its secret out of it. A ripple passed through the diagonal stripes like a breeze.

  Teo whispered, “I know where I have seen that! It’s the fabric of those new curtains at the Bar Tiepolo in the Hotel degli Assassini.”

  “You mean we have to go back to exactly where we came from?”

  “Yes, but at least now we have the Venetian Treacle to help our soldiers against the poison arrows.”

  Outside the pavilion, a shadow passed over the children’s heads, and then passed again. One of the magòga seagulls had seen them. The bird circled around, cocking its head, and regarding them with an expression of vicious curiosity.

  “It looks like it’s sneering!” said Teo.

  Renzo giggled nervously, “Well, you are a bit of a sight in all those clothes!”