The street bends left, then right, and terminates in a cramped campiello. One end leads to a private bridge and a bolted palace gate. The other end abuts the Saint John Beheaded Canal. Crivano is trapped. He has trapped himself.
He can hear the deliberate approach of the sbirri: they call to one another and stamp their booted feet. They must know where he is, and that he’s cornered; they hope he’ll hear them and rush forward again, racing them to the bridge. They want to catch him with the canal at his back, to overwhelm him with their superior numbers.
Crivano opts not to disappoint them. He hides the bright blade of his sword in its scabbard and creeps through the darker shadows on the street’s right side, hunched like a subhuman, inching toward the canal. The sbirri have left their lanterns behind; he can barely see them on the opposite side: two in the vanguard, at least two more behind those. Preparing nervously to cross. When the first pair reaches the bridge — squinting through the mist, their shapes edged by moonlight — he springs.
They fall back immediately, intent on drawing him forward — opening space to flank him, forcing him to engage three or four abreast — but Crivano keeps a foot planted at all times on the bridge’s wooden planks, and fends them off with deep lunges. He counts five here, more on the way: torches by the base of the distant belltower, sparking and guttering as their bearers charge forward. Crivano’s stick and rapier make slow theatrical sweeps, beating the blades of the sbirri, offering them a simulacrum of real battle. Then, after clumsy parries and a brief stumble, he retreats onto the bridge.
No! Fall back! shouts a stern voice from farther up the street, but the sbirri don’t listen: the first one lurches after him, the second queues behind, and the three others who’d been shuffling eagerly in the background press forward as well, sensing weakness, smelling blood, covetous of the chance to do harm. Crivano scrambles backward, gasping in feigned distress, until three of the five have followed him onto the bridge, and he feels pavement beneath his heels again.
Then he starts killing them. The first man becomes an impromptu barricade, crumpled on the planks with wounded knees and punctured lungs; the second loses his footing as he steps over his comrade, falls into the canal when Crivano’s blade finds his femoral artery. The third jumps back in a panicked rout, collides with the man behind him, plunges uninjured into the water. The last two retreat to await their fellows’ arrival.
The clangor of clapped steel echoes in Crivano’s ears, but for a moment the air is stilclass="underline" he hears only the quick rough breathing of his adversaries, the gurgling wheeze of the dying man at his feet, the splashes of the fallen sbirro as he swims east in search of a quay, the approaching footfalls of the next wave. It has been a long time since Crivano last fought for his life. He is no longer young. Cold sweat soaks his shirt and streaks his face. The tibialis anterior of his right leg aches and burns from lunging.
Five more sbirri appear at the opposite end of the bridge. The clever one from the White Eagle, Lunardo, is among them. He dismisses two of the others immediately, sending them for reinforcements. Good evening, dottore! he calls, raising an arm. I’ve worn my gloves, you see! Just as you asked. Now, come across the bridge!
Lunardo wears a rapier and an offhand dagger, and two of his men — one is the scar-faced ruffian — wield cudgels. A defense against such variety will be difficult to maintain. Crivano floods his lungs with air, shakes out his legs. His wrists are trembling.
I should tell you, Lunardo shouts, that many more of us are on the way. Some will come on boats, and will moor in the campiello behind you, thus to envelop you. These men will not kill you, dottore. They will be armed with clubs, and they will beat you, and break your hands and feet, and they will deliver you to the Council of Ten. The Council will have you tortured, and strangled, and put in the lagoon. Much as you put that mirrormaker in the lagoon, isn’t that so? Hardly a death a man would choose, dottore. But you have other choices, don’t you? I think you do. So, then. Shall we wait? Or shall we pass the time by killing one another? Come across the bridge, dottore.
Crivano doesn’t reply. He measures the space he stands in, pacing the width of the planks between the smooth wooden cart-curbs, the distance from the fallen man to the pavement. The light dims suddenly in the west, then turns orange: a boat is passing the canal’s terminus, eclipsing the reflection of the moon on the water; someone aboard bears a blazing torch. After a moment the boat slips from view, and the light is as it was.
Lunardo squats on his haunches at the canal’s edge, smiling, bobbing to stretch his legs. Crivano cleans the gore from his blade, then steps onto the bridge, over the dying sbirro. He will go no farther. Lunardo salutes as he comes forward, but Crivano doesn’t reciprocate. Beneath their feet, the planks are daubed with dark medallions.
They begin. The walkingstick fouls Lunardo’s sword with semicircular parries; soon Crivano opens small cuts on the sbirro’s thighs and arms and cheek. Lunardo is an adequate swordsman, but no master, and although the stick grows heavy in Crivano’s weaker left hand, it gives him the advantage of reach. He presses his attacks, wanting to finish this man quickly.
Again and again Lunardo falls back to the pavement; Crivano takes these opportunities to catch his breath, measure his steps. He finds these attempts to lure him over the bridge insulting. Lunardo must know by now that he won’t prevail without bringing his men into the fight; Crivano can read calculation in his stoat-like eyes.
Just as Crivano’s decided that his opponent lacks the courage to make the charge, it comes: Lunardo hurls his main-gauche over the canal and lunges with a cry, sprawling forward, scrambling on his knees and emptied hand, slashing wildly with his rapier. Crivano glances the crown of the man’s skull with his stick, but he’s forced to fall back; he steps over the dying sbirro, onto the end of the bridge. Lunardo keeps coming, as he surely knows he must, accepting a hard blow to the right shoulder to block Crivano’s final desperate riposte: it opens a gash on his side, but his ribs turn the point away. The men collide with an ugly sound of jarred bone, and when they return to their feet, they’re both standing on the pavement.
Another sbirro is already across the bridge, swinging his cudgel; in the time it takes Crivano to parry him, Lunardo has retrieved his thrown dagger. Soon Crivano is fighting a third man as well, a wild-eyed Genoese with a rapier, and the faceless cyclops is not far behind, at the bridge’s midpoint, awaiting his opening. Crivano can do nothing but hold his ground, and that only poorly. The snaplock pistol still hangs in his belt, but he’ll have no chance to withdraw it. He tries to keep calm, to encourage their confidence. He fights like an automaton, distributing his attention to the periphery of his vision. Watching for a mistake. He needs to kill someone very soon.
But now he sees lights flicker in the glazed windows around him: torches coming at his back. The sbirri’s reinforcements have arrived. Crivano is beaten. He hopes he can fight hard enough to die here, to avoid capture. He gauges the approach of the sbirri behind him by the spread of the lupine grins on his adversaries’ faces. He keeps his stance forward, waiting until the last moment, hoping to gut at least one before their bludgeons pulverize him. He and his opponents have all grown shadows: the fires are close. Then, as Crivano readies himself to drop and pivot, he registers a flicker of confusion in Lunardo’s eyes, and stops.