Chapter Two
"Would you like me to row for a while?" Vicki asked. "Or are you just resting for a moment?" Steven tried to detect some note of sarcasm in her voice, but she was too good for that. He tried to mutter a sarcastic rejoinder, but he was panting too hard to get the words out.
"Yes, put your back into it, my boy,' the Doctor said. 'I want to make landfall before breakfast, you know."
Steven had been rowing the inflatable dinghy for what seemed like hours, and he was tired. No, he was worse than tired: he was exhausted. Bone-wearingly, mind-achingly exhausted. His arms had progressed from fatigue through burning pain to a distant numbness, and his mind had become fixated on details like the texture of the material that the dinghy was made out of, and the way the Doctor's ring glowed in the darkness.
The sun had set some time ago, and the moon hung overhead like a tossed coin frozen at its apogee. The distant lights of Venice glimmering on the water had seemed to Steven to be receding just as fast as he rowed, but now, as he looked over his shoulder he saw a long stone embankment with low wooden piers projecting from it into the water. Flaming torches on poles lit up a large square, thronged with people. He was too tired to care.
"What is this place, Doctor?" Vicki asked. "A strange little republic," the Doctor replied, "that lasted for several thousand years with little more than superficial change. The city was originally founded by refugees from the Roman mainland who were fleeing the various and frequent invasions by Goths, Huns, Avars, Herulians and Lombards -"
"I didn't know that there were any attempted alien invasions this early in Earth's history," Vicki said, frowning.
"They weren't aliens, child," the Doctor said reprovingly, "they were tribes. Dear, dear; your knowledge of your own history is sadly lacking! They were savage, rapacious tribes. The refugees fled their depredations and settled here in the lagoon, on the many islands and sandbanks. They built houses on wooden piles driven deep into the mud of the lagoon. Gradually they linked those houses by paths and by bridges. That was over a thousand years ago. Now they have a city built on wood and mud. Just wood and mud. Imagine that!" he cackled.
Steven found that he could. Only too well, in fact. He had just spent a chunk of his life imprisoned in one city on stilts, and the last thing he wanted to do was visit another. He still had nightmares about the Mechanoid city crashing in flames to the jungle floor, the sound of its supporting struts snapping echoing like cannon fire through the night air. And what had the Doctor said earlier on about Venice sinking some time in the future? Just how far in the future? he wondered.
He glanced again over his shoulder, half-expecting to see the entire city slide beneath the waters of the lagoon, then he shrugged. If it happened, it happened. There was nothing he could do about it. Turning his back on the city, he continued rowing.
The Doctor was still telling Vicki about the history of Venice, and how the city had made itself into the most important trading centre in Europe, but Steven found his attention slipping. The island behind them had long since vanished into the mist and the darkness, and the moon glittered on their wake like a thousand watching eyes. The noise of shouting and laughter from Venice itself, somewhere just over Steven's shoulder, blended into a hypnotic murmur, and Steven realized that for several minutes his eyes had been fixed on a log, drifting along behind the dinghy. It was just a darker spot against the waves, but it was the only point of interest in the ever-changing, ever-similar backdrop of the waves. In his half-hypnotized state, he could almost imagine that it was the head of something swimming behind them, following them from island to island.
And then it vanished abruptly beneath the waves, almost as if it had realized Steven had seen it.
The hubbub in the Tavern of St Theodore and of the Crocodile almost deafened Galileo as he carried his flagon of Bardolino wine away from the bar and towards an unoccupied bench. The place was large and sprawled over several rooms connected by low doorways. It was popular with the local gondoliers, and he had to detour around large groups of them as they argued raucously, scuffled affably, fell over drunkenly and generally comported themselves in the ebullient Venetian manner that he had come to know well.
Venice, city of opposites: mystery and misery; excess and penury; hard marble and soft water. No matter how often he visited, he was never sure whether he loved it or hated it.
Galileo took a long swig from the flagon, and almost choked. The wine was sour and left a bitter aftertaste in his mouth; he kept forgetting how bad the wine was here compared to home. It was evidence of God's wit that when he was in Padua he wished he was in Venice, and when he was in Venice he wished he was in Padua. When he was in Rome, of course, he couldn't decide where he wanted to be, so long, of course, as he didn't have to be in Rome.
His thoughts turned to Marina. Fiery, lusty Marina. Although they had been together for ten years, and she had borne his children, they had never married. Even the notoriously easygoing Venetian authorities would have drawn the line at the Professor of Mathematics at Padua University marrying a common strumpet, and his mother would have died of shame! He hadn't been faithful to Marina - she had never expected him to be - but he loved her none the less. Most of the time. Wine could slake one kind of thirst, women another, but Marina satisfied some spiritual yearning in him to which he couldn't put a name. They argued - did they argue! - but he always returned to her. Eventually.
He spat on the tavern's sawdust-covered floor and wiped his sleeve across his mouth. Enough of this puerile thinking. He had a problem to solve. That bizarre apparition that he had seen through his spyglass still occupied his thoughts, crowding out all rational argument with its incontrovertible presence. He could formulate no theory to account for it. It had a man-made look, and it had moved in an unnaturally direct manner, like a cart on a road, but he had never before seen or heard about phenomena that travelled between the Moon and the Earth. And it had made that journey: he had observed its progress, swivelling his spyglass to track it as it moved and grew larger in his sight, until he lost it somewhere over the rooftops of Venice. It seemed to him that it had come to rest somewhere in the Adriatic, just off the Lido. Was it a delusion of celestial vapours, like the one Johannes Kepler had written to warn him of five years before, or was it some messenger of God - an Angel sent to walk the Earth?
He took another mouthful of wine and swallowed it before the taste could make him retch. Natural science was full of such puzzles, and God had set him the task of unravelling them. It was his curse and misfortune to be the greatest genius in Europe, if not the world.
As he was about to set his flagon down, a passing figure jogged his elbow. The base of the flagon hit the edge of the bench, spilling most of its contents in a crimson tide over the sawdust-strewn boards. To tell the truth, he wasn't sorry to see it go, but the figure looming over him said, in English-accented Italian, "My pardon, good sir. Please allow a clumsy foreigner to refill your flagon."
Before Galileo could argue, the man had gone. He watched the man shoulder his way through the crowd. Fine clothes, if old - a lace-collared shirt beneath a scuffed leather jerkin. An English noble, down on his luck perhaps? There were a thousand stories in the city. Nobody came to Venice without the baggage of their past.
As his thoughts drifted, he became aware that there were a lot of foreign voices in the Tavern of St Theodore and of the Crocodile that night. Most of them seemed to be speaking English. Venice attracted visitors from East and West, of course, but, as he thought about it, it seemed to him that there had been more Englishmen than usual since his arrival. Perhaps it had something to do with the accession of the Scottish King, James, to the English throne.
The crowd parted again as the Englishman returned, and Galileo was struck both by the width of his shoulders and the way he moved, cat-like and sure-footed, through the thronging mass. They seemed to part for him, as a shoal of fish would part for a shark, then seal up again behind him. "Your drink, kind sir," the man said, placing a fresh flagon before Galileo. "And my renewed apologies."
Galileo stared up into his weather-beaten face and his grey eyes, the same shade as his profusion of prematurely grey hair, and felt a chill of unease. A scar ran from the man's forehead across one eye and down his cheek, like a fissure in baked earth.
"My thanks," he said gruffly, but the man had gone, pushing past a group of young noblemen who were clad in silks and satins. The noblemen, disturbed and angered at his careless effrontery, gazed after him, then turned their attention to Galileo.
Galileo was about to take a swig of wine, hoping that it was of better quality than the last lot, when a voice said, "By my lights, it is the Florentine Galileo Galilei, is it not? The man who denies God pre-eminence in the heavens."
He sighed. "I am Galileo," he confirmed, glancing up. "What of it?"
The group of noble ruffians had moved to stand before him. One of them, a youth with long black hair and a sparse beard, was smiling cruelly. "Do you not repeat at Padua," he sneered, "the heresy taught by Giordano Bruno that our world revolves around the sun?"
"It is no heresy, but simple fact," Galileo growled. The youths were obviously spoiling for a fight, but he couldn't help himself. He had to respond. "God has arranged his heavens such that the sun provides light and warmth to all its children and, like a hearth fire, it is the centre around which everything is arranged."
"But that is plainly foolish," the young man replied, gazing around at his companions, who nodded their heads in agreement, "as everyone knows that all celestial bodies circle us. No other star is pre-eminent."
"Foolishness," Galileo snapped, "lies in denying the evidence of one's senses. If you saw a tortoise would you call it a rabbit? If you saw a ship, would you call it a cart? Why then should I see what I plainly see and call it something else?"
Some part of him noticed that the smiles on the faces of the youths had soured somewhat, and that their hands were hovering around the hilts of their swords, but he felt a wave of black anger pass across his thoughts, clouding him to all but the fact that he had been publicly doubted. "And are you an astronomer then," he continued, "that you can question my observations? If so you disguise your experience well under the mantle of a callow youth. Or better yet, are you a bishop that you can talk to me of heresy? Where are your robes and your cross?"
"Do you know who I am?" the youth snapped, his face suffused with blood.
"But that you are arrogant beyond good sense, I neither know nor care who you are," Galileo rejoined.
"I am Baldassarre Nicolotti!"
He said the name as if he expected Galileo to recognize it, and unfortunately Galileo did. He gritted his teeth. The Nicolottis were one of the more illustrious and widespread families in Venice. Their name appeared in the Golden Book - the list of Venetian aristocracy who were eligible for election to the various councils that ran the Serene Republic. He seemed to remember that they were involved in a long-running feud with the Castellani family. If the Doge got to hear that he was brawling in a tavern with one of them, Galileo's chances of gaining an audience would be about the same as his ever becoming Pope. He couldn't back down, though. Not once his professional expertise had been questioned. "Strange," he growled, "you look more to me like the arse of a horse, and your words match its excrement for consistency and usefulness." It wasn't elegant, but then again neither was cannon fire against a fortification, and that worked well enough.
"I'll have your liver on a plate!" Baldassarre hissed through clenched teeth. He pulled his sword from its scabbard. His friends cleared a space for the fight, pushing back the other patrons and knocking benches away to form a rough circle. The noise in the tavern dimmed slightly, then rose again to its previous level. Fights were nothing if not frequent in Venice.
Galileo stood slowly, tankard clenched in his hand. He'd been in situations like this too often not to know what the best course of action was. "Did your mother never wean you from her milk?' he said. 'You don't appear to be able to handle your drink like a man."
The tip of Baldassarre's sword waved back and forth in front of Galileo's nose. "I can handle any drink you throw at me," he sneered.
"Then let's put that to the test." Galileo suddenly threw the contents of his tankard at Baldassarre. The crimson liquid caught the youth full in the face. Spluttering, he tried to wipe his eyes with his sleeve, almost skewering one of his companions with his sword as he did so. The rest of the youths rushed forward to help.
Galileo took advantage of the distraction to take a couple of steps backwards, out of the nominal circle of the fight. Time to make his excuses and leave. He turned towards the door, but a choking noise from behind stopped him.
Baldassarre's body was twitching like a man in the grip of St Virus's Dance. Foam frothed from his lips and splattered the floor around his contused head. His eyes were starting from their sockets. One hand rose up, clenched as if to grasp something that only he could see, and then he slumped back lifelessly to the floor. It was all over in a handful of seconds.
Instinct took over, and Galileo was out of the door and halfway down the alley before anybody thought to turn around and look for him.
"Keep going. Only a few moments more," the Doctor encouraged. "Perhaps those people on the embankment are waiting to meet us." As Steven turned to glance at the approaching fire-lit scene he noticed the way the flames emphasized the cruel smile on the Doctor's face.
There was a sudden jar as the dinghy hit wood, and the Doctor and Vicki were scrambling past him and onto the nearest jetty.
"Don't mention it," he muttered as he levered himself up on paralysed arms. "Glad I could help."
Stone steps led up the side of the embankment to the promenade on top. Even Steven, tired as he was, felt something stir in his chest at the scene that greeted him. The travellers were standing between two stone pillars. Before them, the light from the flaming torches illuminated a square that was halfway between a market and a carnival. Women in long dresses and men in elaborately brocaded costumes paraded between stalls that sold food, clothes, animals, statues and all manner of other objects. The smells of wood smoke, cooked meat, overripe fruit and rotting vegetables made Steven's stomach rumble. The people and the stalls were set against a backdrop of elaborately arched and colonnaded stone buildings, each a masterpiece of architecture jostling with its neighbours for attention. To their left was a small building attached to a tall tower of red brick. Shouts and laughter echoed back and forth between the buildings, the individual words blending together to form a m
"St Mark's Square," the Doctor proclaimed. "Birthplace of my old friend Marco Polo, and the gateway for trade and travel between Europe and the mysterious Orient."
Vicki nudged Steven's arm. "Somebody's seen us," she whispered, pointing towards a knot of men who were approaching them.
"Don't worry," the Doctor said, "I'm sure they mean us no harm." He stepped forward as the men approached. "I am the Doctor," he proclaimed. "Perhaps you are expecting me."
One of the men stepped forward. He was small but broad-shouldered, and he was bald. His face held a cynical expression. "By the power invested in me by the Doge of Venice and by the Council of Ten," he growled, "I arrest you as Turkish spies."
"Wait!" the Doctor cried imperiously. He raised one hand in admonition. Behind his back he was making urgent gestures to his companions. "Is this how you treat visitors to this great city? Well, is it? I mean, what's the world coming to when travellers cannot come and go freely, as and when they wish?"
What did those gesticulations mean? Steven wondered. Run? Hide? Attack the guards? Perhaps the Doctor's earlier companions, Ian and Barbara, would have understood instantly, but Steven hadn't known the Doctor for long enough to be able to interpret him.
The bald guard frowned. "Step forward," he said, "into the light."
The Doctor did as he was instructed, and the frown on the guard's face was replaced by an expression of confusion, and embarrassment.
"Cardinal Bellarmine!" he cried, kneeling on the stone esplanade. "We didn't... I mean, we weren't... "
The Doctor's face froze for a moment. "Expecting us?" he said finally, smiling. "No, that is perfectly apparent, isn't it? Well, the journey from... the journey went quicker than we had expected. And this is how you greet us!"
"Who's Cardinal Bellarmine?" Vicki hissed from beside Steven.
"I've got no idea," he whispered. "And I don't think the Doctor has either. I just hope he knows what he's doing."
"And do you know why I'm here?" the Doctor continued, waving the guard to his feet. "What is your name, by the way?"
"Speroni, your eminence. Speroni Speroni. I am the Lord of the Night watch for St Mark's Square and the local area."
"Of course you are, of course you are." The Doctor turned and waved Steven and Vicki closer. At least, Steven reflected, that gesture was unambiguous. "And these are my travelling companions, Steven Taylor and Vicki... ah, yes... Vicki. Now, you were about to tell me what you were told about my mission."
"Indeed." Speroni looked dazed, like a man who had been suddenly overtaken by events and couldn't catch up. "I was informed that you would be arriving as representative of the Vatican to question Galileo Galilei on the invention he claims to have made, but I wasn't... I mean, I assumed - we all did - that you would be travelling in your robes and accompanied by a full retinue of guards -"
The Doctor gazed questioningly at him. "Galileo's invention?"
"The spyglass," Speroni prompted, frowning. "The device with which distant objects might be made closer."
"Vatican? Galileo? Spyglass?" A smile crossed his face, and he turned briefly to Steven and Vicki. "Ah, then this must be the year of our Lord, 1609," he said for their benefit, nodding as if he had known this all the time. He turned back to Speroni. "Perhaps you could escort us to our rooms. I presume that they are ready?"
Speroni caught the eye of one of his men, and jerked his head. The man ran off, his boots clattering on the stone. "They are," he confirmed, flushing slightly. "Perhaps we could aid you with your baggage, your eminence?"
"My... Oh. Ah, yes. We don't have any baggage. Lost at sea, dear chap, along with my robes and the rest of my retinue. Lost at sea." He smiled paternally at Speroni, who was scratching his head in puzzlement at these strangers and their antics.
"Aren't we all," Steven muttered.
Carlo Zeno tottered out of the Tavern of St Theodore and of the Crocodile and into the narrow alleyway. Turning left, he staggered towards his house. What an evening! Young Baldassarre, struck down in front of his eyes. Poison, they were saying. Judging by the way his eyeballs had protruded and the colour of his tongue, Zeno wasn't about to contradict them.
The alley was bisected after a few feet by a narrow canal. A stone bridge arced across to the other side, where the alley carried on. Zeno staggered up the steps to the top of the bridge, trying not to lose his balance and fall into the silted, foul-smelling liquid that flowed sluggishly beneath. Too often before he had arrived back at his lodgings soaking wet and covered in excrement. He couldn't afford to ruin any more clothes.
He paused for a moment at the top of the bridge, thinking. They were saying in the tavern that it was Galileo Galilei who had thrown the poisoned wine into Baldassarre's face. Zeno wasn't so sure. He didn't like his lodger, that much was certain, but Galileo's burly form was more suited to a bludgeon than to poison. And he wasn't Venetian, either. Poison came naturally to Venetians. When the Pope's agents had struck down Friar Sarpi and left a dagger sticking out of his cheekbone, the doctors had plunged it into a dog to test what type of poison had been used. So surprised were they when the dog showed no sign of poisoning that they plunged it into a chicken as well. When the chicken didn't die, they knew it couldn't have been a Venetian that carried out the attack. And what about that writer - the one who was fed a poisoned communion wafer by the priest of the church of the Misericordia? Poison was a Venetian weapon, for sure.
A sudden, urgent pressure in his bladder interrupted his thoughts. Damn that Grimani: his wine went through a man's guts faster than a stream down a hill, and probably didn't taste much worse going out than it had done going in. He wasn't sure that he could wait until he got home.
Taking a quick look either way along the canal for moving boats, he quickly tugged at the lacing on his breeches and began to urinate over the edge of the bridge and into the canal beneath. Within seconds a feeling of blessed relief spread through his body.
Something made a wet choking sound beneath the bridge. Zeno cursed to himself. Just his luck if a pair of lovers had parked their gondola beneath the bridge for privacy. "Your pardon!" he called out. "I didn't see you there!"
His hands fumbled with the laces of his breeches as he stumbled to the far side of the canal. He thought he could hear noises from the water line. Perhaps whoever had been on the receiving end of his emissions had taken offence, and wished to inflict punishment. Turning, he saw a dark shape rising from the water and onto the side of the canal. "I beg your pardon, sir," he said, extending his hands in supplication. "I didn't mean to give offence." His drink-befuddled brain wondered why the figure was so silent. And so thin. "Whatever is within my power to do to make amends, I will -"
The words died in his throat as the figure stepped forward into the pool of moonlight. As slender as a branch, its skin was blue and rough, and its head, no bigger than a knot of wood, tapered into a single horn that erupted from the centre of its forehead and swept up and back to a sharp point. It turned its knob-like head and gazed at Zeno from a tiny red eye.
"What manner of demon are you?' gasped Zeno. The demon said nothing. Zeno took a step backwards as its head lowered until the point of its horn was pointed directly at his chest. "Begone, spawn of the Devil!" he shouted, more in desperation than in hope, but the demon sprang forward. Zeno tried to dive to one side, but he was too slow. The demon's twig-like claws were grasping his shoulders, pushing him back against the brickwork of the nearest house. There was a terrible grinding, tearing sensation in his chest, and he felt the jar as its horn ground against the brick behind him. He was still trying to work out what had happened, where his life had suddenly turned off the path he thought it had been following and into the shadows, when he felt a pressure on his shoulders as the demon's claws pressed him back. The thin horn, slicked red with his blood, pulled free from his flesh, and the pain was sudden and terrible.
He fell to his knees, his life-blood splattering and steaming on the cobbles in front of him. As he looked up imploringly at the demon that stood before him, it shimmered for a moment, as if he was seeing it in a puddle of water, and then he was looking at a man, an ordinary man, of medium height and unremarkable appearance. And he died happy, knowing that his soul had not been taken by a demon, and that he had somehow mistaken an ordinary murderer for a monster.
