NOVELIST

The white veil clung to the curves of the woman’s head and shoulders, spilling onto the gentle swell of the Lagoon. Her sightless eyes faced down into the muddy, quiet waters.

A beam of wood floated beside her, its lines appearing and disappearing beneath the veil’s thin silk weave.

The yellow of her dress had caught Malin’s eye, just yards to starboard of the Seynte Marie. He stood motionless against the bulwark, unable to tear his eyes away. When the ship’s forward progress took the body from sight, he turned and ascended to the sterncastle deck.

The ship, a 130-ton cog from Dieppe, continued her journey north along the Lido shoreline.

He looked further out across the bay.

Beyond the city, framing the grey winter air, the snow-clad peaks of the mainland stood their usual guard. But something about the rise and fall of the Venice skyline, the dark blocked mass and splintered light of its roofs and towers, scraped at the edge of his mind.

What was it?

Thin plumes of smoke, perhaps half a dozen, rose from separate points on the main island. A thin stain of haze hung above and between them.

There was little movement on the water. Few if any of the small, two-masted fishing boats. No patrol boats searching for smuggling or import infringements. Seabirds, normally seeking food or temporary roosts, were nowhere to be seen. 

The scene appeared frozen. All sound, bar the gentle motion of the Lagoon waters on the hull of the ship, had been sucked from the world.

He looked to port. Wharf pontoons appeared wrenched and twisted, some just shapeless tangles of timber and rope. A line of detritus extended many feet above the waterline.

He turned again. A galere grosse lay broken on its side a hundred yards out from the wharf, its midship shelter smashed and misshapen, the top of its main mast gone. Its curved rudder rose from the water, broken and stranded.

The Seynte Marie continued on, between the wrecked ship and the quay.

Had there been an attack?

A mile from their expected berth, the crew came above deck.

Yet still no sign of the pilot boat.

A group of small figures stood on the quayside, perhaps half a mile ahead. They signalled for them to moor up by the Lido warehouses, rather than continue to the anchorages of the Grand Canal. 

Something was definitely wrong.

Malin’s thoughts turned to Lucia and the rest of her family. And to Symon, expecting him back home. Were they safe?

The ship moved in to berth. Splintered planks and concave bowls of earth pitted the raised moorings. The men on the dock stepped through large mounds of debris.

Malin stepped off the ship and approached a stevedore.

And then he learned. 

An earthquake had caused all this. Yesterday. A movement of the seas emptied the Canal and lowered the Lagoon, only to return as a single, enormous wave. 

Buildings continued to fall. Fires still burned. 

The number of dead and injured was high, and still rising.

The cattaveri completed their cargo checks. The captain’s papers, issued in Southampton, tallied with the searcher’s findings. 

Provisional calculations of taxes were completed. The ripalico for wharfage, and the teleneo to insure their goods before deed transfer to their buyers.

Malin returned the signed papers to his shoulder bag, and watched as the men prepared to unload his cargoes of wheat and linen. They would be stored under protection of the authorities until cleared for distribution.

The date, the twenty-sixth day of January, was written under each signature on all the papers required. The obligatory forty days’ storage, the Quarant, would expire on the sixth of March, a week into the Venetian New Year.

Until then, nothing could be moved. The Seynte Marie would remain in port as surety. The Extraodinarri, the commercial magistrates for whom the cattaveri worked, demanded it. Their regulations provided security and protection for all involved, at the cost, accepted by all, of considerable taxes.

For almost twenty years Malin and his partners had bent to the city’s requirements. The protections offered were worth it.

And now? Now, these constraints offered Malin the cover he needed. 

Forty days until the ship’s trade would be officially cleared. 

And forty days to finalise actions that would shake the Republic to its core.

He pulled out a small green phial from his jacket, removed the stopper, and took a long swig, sighing as he felt the burning in his chest ease.

No longer expecting Symon’s arrival at the dock, Malin secured a ferry to cross the Lagoon, to see if the people he most cared for, those he most depended on to leave this place alive, were in any fit state to greet him.

© Graham Bullen, June 2020