La Serenissima (Continued)
by Catherynne M. Valente
IV: In the Year of Our Lord 846
Caorle did not burn. I stumbled out onto the sandy path, but the sea had come boiling up over the stairs and into two of the naves — pews and altar–clothes floated on the waves, and bobbing in the distance I could see the head of the green Mary with her roses, and the black Mary with her fish–fronds. Only the blue remained fixed in place. They drifted out over the breakers, their painted eyes smiling in infinite forgiveness at the swooping pelicans.
Caorle drowned. I was waist–deep in water, but I could see the pirates dancing up the shore, through the town, and at the heels of each of them came bubbling, hissing waves which seemed to grip their ankles like chains. The blue water swept into houses and hat–shops and the homes of butchers, carrying out feathered caps and calf–heads into the river which was now Caorle, which flowed behind the vodníci like a saint's day parade. Fountains spumed up on the hillside, showering mud onto tiled rooftops. Dragged up against the side of the Church of the Blessed Virgin of the Angel were seventeen long, black ships, their prows curled up into the shapes of snarling beasts, oars bundled together like arrows in their bellies. The Adriatic roared, and at the tip of each wave was a man in black, turning and twisting in a strange, jerking dance, their arms thrown up to heaven, seawater sheeting from their arms like blue and flashing wings.
"Where is the sun?" they cried in a window–shattering chorus. "Send her out to us!" Four or five of them ran through a flower market, sending a wave of daffodils and tightly–budded early roses cascading down to the wharfs. "We will smash the city with our sea–fists, and the sun will pop up like a child's ball from her hiding place!" They laughed, and cypress trees cracked, falling into the water.
The flood brushed my chin — I stood on tiptoe on a broken slab of stair, tilting my head. Among them all I could not spy Drušak, what black–capped man among the black–capped men he might be. I called out his name as the waves rolled under my feet, and my head bobbed along, spluttering, silver–blonde jetsam. A hand like a fisherman's net seized my hair and I was dragged up to the face of the prince of the sea, his algae–beard curling.
"Please," I gurgled weakly, water still trickling from my mouth, "let me read your arm."
He held it out, regarding the coil of my hair in his hand, wrapped wetly around his blank arm, in an interested fashion. From his bicep down across his forearm, spiraling around and around, I read:
Let me tell you about a girl I once knew. She was born a Doge's daughter with olives in her mouth and catgut strings wrapped around her hands like rings. When her hair had grown back and she had dusted her Madonnas exactly three thousand and seven times, men came to her town with black caps, and though first she was afraid, she soon befriended them, for she was very wise, having been once loved without hope by a scholar whom her father called his Fool, because though he was very clever, he never wrote a single monograph or historia to glorify the Doge. Instead he spent his days shaving mice and diving in the canals. And when this girl was sent away to that common fate of older daughters too wise to marry and too beautiful to waste, the scholar wept, and he knew he would not see her again in this world. So it was that when the black–capped pirates came from across the sea, and he saw their palms , and he saw their swords, he told them where he knew the sun to lie: in Caorle, in Caorle, where Uliva dwells.
The girl I once knew boarded a long, black ship, and the black–capped men looked at her hair and though they grumbled among themselves, were satisfied of the sun, satisfied of Venice, and she sat at the prow with such light in her hair. They are creatures who love impossible things, and if they bring the sun home today, it does not mean they will not go searching again for her tomorrow, in Rome, in Cathay, in the hair of a wife fanned out upon a black pillow. She went across the sea in the company of a man with scales on his palms, and when the moon was very high one night, that man showed her long sheaves of birch bark covered with tiny writing, for this was the way of his people's scriptures, and between the lines of the pirate's own hand, she recognized another which she knew as well as her own. Thus it was that the girl I knew was released from her nave, and though I could not go with her, though I became a very old man in the company of her father, by my hand she learned to dance on a floor of mushrooms, and drink the sweet–and–sad dolphin–liquor, and love a green–faced man who knew how to write very, very small.
She sailed away on her proud black ship, and the sun sat on her scalp like a crown.
Drušak smiled at me. I saw that the whites of his eyes were not white, but silver.
"What is there, across the sea?" I asked.
"Palaces built from shattered churches, feasts of swan and serpent, stolen silver scattered like stars. And books of birch bark, scrawled on every tree."
I put my hand in his.
V. The Oar
I sat at the prow with my hands in my lap, and the black–hooded Mary, dripping wet and half–eaten by a curious otter, lodged in the stern. Drušak grinned, his algae catching the evening light, and placed a black oar in my hands. As I pulled my first stroke, I saw long, sloping letters burned into the wood:
Nothing can be written in the book of the water.
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