Given that we were adventuring into Ottoman territory, my companions tolerated my weapon shopping by doing their own. We enjoyed the excuse to acquire manly accoutrements.
Cuvier, after a period of perplexity, settled on a pair of brass-and-silver dueling pistols in a rosewood box. They’d be deadly enough within ten paces.
Bluff and hearty Smith went for something entirely more formidable, a wicked blunderbuss—Dutch for “thunder gun”—which fired a spray of balls from a barrel just fifteen inches long. The piece was short enough to be concealed under a coat or cloak. When Smith tried it out from the quay at the harbor, its stunning report sent up clouds of pigeons at San Marco two hundred yards away. “It kicks like a mule but bites like a bear,” he reported. “Just the thing to make a boarding party think twice.”
I expected Fulton to pick out a similar firearm, perhaps an even more complex and mechanical-minded one like a nine-barreled musketoon, designed for fighting from a foretop and rarely used because it had the alarming habit of kicking so powerfully that it could knock its user out of the rigging. That seemed the kind of design problem that would challenge the inventor, and I pictured him fixing braces and pulleys to hold his torso against the recoil. But no, Fulton became intrigued with the unlikeliest of instruments, a scuffed and dusty Scottish bagpipe he found in a market stall.
“That will make our enemies run,” I said good-naturedly. “I’ve heard the pipes, and it sets dogs howling. Invaders stayed out of Scotland for a thousand years because they couldn’t stand the noise.”
“That fire-eater in the Palais gave me an idea,” Fulton replied. “I can’t play this, but I can play with it. What if it could spit fire? Something to tinker with as we sail south.” He pressed the bag and got a wail. “Or entertain us.”
I’m rather tolerant of lunatics, which is why I know so many of them.
We paid for our purchases, the inventor blowing a wheeze or two on his Scottish pipes while we winced, and then the savants said we must press on.
“We hurry so science can find more time,” Cuvier explained. “Thira is a depository of time. We need time to explain the mysteries of our planet because nothing makes sense without it. Time, time, time.”
“Most people don’t sensibly fill the time they have already, Ben Franklin would say.”
“I said science. The human mind is imprisoned by our brief concept of history, Ethan. The globe becomes ever more complicated and all our explanations have to be crammed into a few thousand years, like a sprouting boy with shoes three sizes too young. But if the earth is older than we think, then all kinds of new ideas become possible.”
“What kind of ideas?”
“That if the world wasn’t always as it is, then it mustn’t always remain this way, either,” Smith put in. “Perhaps we’re only a chapter in a longer tale. That we men are not the reason for existence, but just players in a bigger drama we don’t understand.”
“People won’t like that, William. We like to think history begins and stops with us.”
“Then why did God leave us clues that it didn’t?” the Englishman said.
“Well, surely if the rocks are that old, we’ve time enough for supper on the piazza before getting to them, eh?”
“Fouché and Napoleon told us to hurry. The Venetians are looking at us oddly. Looking at you oddly.”
“Fouché and Napoleon don’t have blisters on their backsides from hurrying hundreds of miles to one of the loveliest spots on earth. The thing to do when people look at you, gentlemen, is to look back, particularly at the pretty girls!”
It was also necessary to relax, I continued, because we hadn’t yet found a Venetian captain to take us where we needed to go. Venice had been at odds with the Turks for the better part of three hundred years, and Ottoman waters swarmed with pirates. The Greeks were under the thumb of Muslim masters who referred to their peasant subjects as rayah, or cattle. No Venetians were anxious to go to such an unpromising dot on the sea as Thira. The captains we’d talked to kept quoting fares more suitable for sailing to the moon. So we’d prowl the docks tomorrow, I promised, meanwhile finding a table in Campo di San Polo. My companions, as seduced by Venice as I was, finally assented. Stars came out, and piazza musicians, and jugs of wine. As we toasted our progress so far, my companions began to tipsily eye the parade of Italian lovelies in the same hungry way I was. Like Odysseus, we’d been sidetracked by sirens—and my own miscalculation that any enemies must be behind or ahead.
We were well in our cups when who should sashay by but one particularly delectable and tawny beauty, hair high as a tower, dress cut to the outermost precipice of her bosom, and skin as flawless as a flower petal. I hoped for a wink or even a word of invitation, but instead she reached tantalizingly to the hem of her dress, gave us a glimpse of ankle, and impishly plucked something from her skirts. Was it an apple? She held the thing to our tavern torch for a moment and it sparkled like a pixie’s wand, and then she rolled it in our direction with the sweetest of smiles.
“Is this Italian custom?” Smith said, belching from drink, as the object stopped between our chairs.
“If so, she bowls with the grace of Aphrodite,” Cuvier slurred.
“What is it, Ethan?” Fulton asked, looking in curiosity at smoke drifting up from the smoldering sphere. “A festival invitation?”
I bent to look under the table. “That, my friends, is a grenade.”
CHAPTER NINE
I don’t know why beauty disappoints so regularly, but I daresay women usually don’t pitch bombs in my direction until we’ve been acquainted for an hour or two. This one was galloping away before I could even say hello, and her sole purpose seemed to be to shred our lowest and most vital extremities. With the instinct that comes from being misunderstood so frequently in love, I scooped up the smoking grenade, looked wildly about, and pitched it into the only depository I could spot—our tavern’s brick oven.
The resulting explosion, which coughed out a spray of brick, bread dough, charcoal, and fragments of rotisserie duck, could still have lacerated our top halves if I hadn’t tackled my comrades into a heap, our table toppling over as a shield. We were enveloped in a cloud of brick dust, but fortunately the oven had absorbed the worst of the blast and the patrons we shared the place with escaped with just a fright.
“It’s the Egyptian Rite!” I cried, my ears ringing and my brain addled by the explosion. “To the horses!”