“Do you think he’ll trust me?”
“I’ll put a mark on your hand that he will trust.”
“And I must touch Haran-din’s hand?”
“You must clasp it, for the way is long and dim, and he is nigh blind. You may cover it with a cloth, but that will only assuage your horror of it, not reduce the danger of contagion.”
“I’ll defy the inner guard with a merry heart, as well as other perils of the way, but that danger chills me to the marrow of my bones.”
“I too am chilled to the dried hollow of my old bones, but take comfort in the belief—well-nigh the knowledge—that the dreadful chance is far less than most Christians believe, and for this one exposure would hardly be one in ten.”
As I heard the thrilling words there had been visions before my eyes, and these had half eclipsed my view of the speaker’s face. It came clear to me now, and suddenly my joy in him clutched at my heart like the deep-toned wondrous music of San Marco. He was very old, I thought, and his beard was as white as the snow that sometimes blows on the northeast wind off the Julian Alps. The bald spot on his crown was hidden under a black cap, but his head was like an old crag half covered with snowdrift. While the parchment of his face was rich with secret writing, its drawn look now, and the strange brilliance of his eyes, told me that he had just fought a grievous battle—and he had won. But I dared not speak of it yet.
“One in ten!” I cried. “Why, that’s nothing.”
He shook his head as though his voice had failed him, and tears stood in his eyes.
“Even if it turns out rainbow gold, I’ll not be sorry I chased it at that rate,” I said quickly.
“I don’t think it is. Unless his malady has deranged his mind—and one of its most awful attributes is enduring sanity to the very last—he wouldn’t lie to me who has broken bread with him, and eaten salt. He writes me that he has one jewel left. It was paid him on an old debt a year ago, and put in the charge of a certain Jew dwelling in Spinalunga. It is a pearl among pearls, he told me, and if it were shown to a connoisseur buying for a king, it should bring one thousand bezants, if not more.”
I thought for a time that I could get out of asking him my final question, since it would hurt his thin old throat to answer it. It was forced upon me because we loved each other.
“Mustapha Sheik, why do you tell me of this, knowing that if I win my prize or lose my life, we will be parted?”
“What choice do I have, Marco? Have you forgotten how you came on our ship? My mariners told you I was sick—you saw the terror in their faces, and for all you knew I was stricken with the Black Death—yet you went into my darkened cabin and ministered to me.”
“But I didn’t come for that. I wish I had, but I came only—I don’t know why I came!”
“I think I know what compulsion brought you there, and I wouldn’t have it changed. It’s the same that will help to bring you to the earth’s ends, if you live. Yet you ministered to an old and ailing Infidel. Now the wheel has turned full circle, and you must do so once more, and as a beginning, not an end. It is like the repetition, in reverse, of a figure in a wondrous weaving. And the weaver is Fate.”
2
Mustapha Sheik furnished me with a carefully drawn plan of the lazar house at Chioggia, showing its doors, stairways, guardrooms, and corridors, and approaches from both canals and alleys. Its legend contained instruction in the times and procedures of mounting and changing watch, the casting of food into the cells, the passage of the dung cart through the halls, and the midnight carry-out of corpses. It had been prepared by a Jewish architect before he died of jail fever, and I thought that if his ghost still haunted the fetid halls, he would be glad of its employment in this need.
Although Mustapha had doctored my fathers letter and tutored me in the wile, stratagems were foreign to his nature. His life had been one long honoring Truth, and he could not readily twist it even in good cause. My mind was far more devious, and in that way—although I was still too close to the woods to see the trees—typically Venetian. Venice was one great countinghouse. For a quick profit, we would sell a throne in Heaven or buy a gridiron in Hell. It was I, not he, who thought of the device that might earn the victory.
The odds in my favor might be two to one, good enough for an adventurer of my age. But not so for this desert man who had lived to be old. He made me go over the scheme piece by piece, forward and backward and inside out, to find its weaknesses. His quiet questions as to what I would do in such and such a case prepared me for the trial. At last it was as though I were clad in armor.
Two mornings later I was at the fish dock at sunrise, watching the smacks come in under gay-hued sails. Fisherfolk are happy folk wherever you find them, living exciting lives and dying quick deaths, daring and debonair; and these, being Venetians besides, could not endure a moment’s drabness even on a darkling sea in storm. When visitors remarked on the blazing red or burning orange of their sails, their gay reply was that they wished to be seen a bit farther than they could be smelled. When my head ached over the hardest problem of the whole venture—where to find a lieutenant equal to the challenge—this valiance caught my eyes like a beacon fire.
The sail cloth was no more gorgeous than the cargoes. Some of the decks were banked with shining tunny, opalescent dolphin, or rainbow-hued wrasse. Others, boarded high, held sardines as numberless as silver coins in the treasure vault of a Sultan. Herring, sea bream, and sole mixed with red mullet, and pop-eyed cod consorted with angelfish to catch the sun.
It was not long before the boat I was waiting for came in with a load of blue-silver mackerel, the finest in our waters. There was no finer boat in our fishing fleet than this, bravely named Grazia da San Pietro. Always she skipped along with a great air, partly to please the tall young man at the steering oar. He was brown-skinned, black-eyed, limber as a roebuck, quick as a chamois.
“God be with you, Felix!” I called.
Although we had not sailed together for a good while now, we retained kindly feelings toward each other. However, we had found these hard to express. Our occasional meetings brought forth the usual routine questions and stock answers, a lewd anecdote or two, promises to frolic soon, and a noisy, fast farewell. In truth our roads had forked sharply soon after Mustapha Sheik had become my guide and master.
“Good day to you, Marco, and what are you doing in this hell of smells? I thought you’d be in a countinghouse, sniffing frankincense and myrrh.”
“I want to talk to you, when you’ve the leisure.”
Leaving the slippery chores to his crew, he followed me into an ale booth. When we had drunk, I reminded him of our brave voyage to Mustapha’s zebec, five years before.
“Do you remember what booty we bore off?” I asked.
“As though it were yesterday. We had six grossi change from the gold piece after you’d brought the drug, and we spent it on sweetmeats.”
“How would you like to help another sick man and win one hundred lire for yourself and the same for your crew?”
So I told him of my plan, omitting only the amount of the prize that I hoped to win. Truly I need not have taken the latter precaution; one hundred lire loomed large in his sight, and he never questioned my right to a lion’s share. This was all the more surprising to me, considering that he seemed better fitted to lead the enterprise than I was.
I looked at him in sudden and sharp envy. Physical grace in man and perhaps in woman is not merely a matter of harmony with time and event; it is also an awareness of surplus strength. While I had been learning, he had been living. It was more true that he had learned by living, while I had lived to learn. He had discovered the secrets of the fish, whereby they could not escape his net. Very rarely could the weather take him by surprise; it could not help signaling its intentions to his trained eyes. These last had been keened by the daily sharpening of use. His ears were two sleepless watchdogs and the sea their sounding board. His nose was a wonderful thing, an ineffable gift of God, for thereby he found a thousand interests and excitements. Whether on land or on water he was poised, alert, cool, confident, and well oriented. Attacking or attacked, he was a formidable adversary, a trained fighter.