The Grand Canal broadened out as it merged with the wider Canal della Guidecca and, when the domes of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute were shifting massively past across the oceanic horizon on their right, Byron had the gondolier pull in at the left shore, among the ranks of gondolas moored in front of the Piazzetta. The gondola’s blade-shaped prow bumped the step, sending a cloud of startled pigeons swirling noisily up into the sunlight.
The Ducal Palace loomed at Shelley’s right, and its bottom two stories of Gothic pillars made it look to Shelley like a Venetian palace deprived of the sea, the once secret opulence of its supporting pilings exposed now to the air.
Byron told the gondolier to wait, and when they had got out and walked up the half-dozen steps, he led the way out across the warped mosaic pavement of the square. Shelley slowed to stare up at the white statues atop the pair of hundred-foot-tall columns fronting the water, but Byron only snarled and limped on ahead.
“I … thought we were going to the Lido,” Shelley ventured when they were halfway to the square tower that stood across the Piazza from the Basilica of St. Mark. “Isn’t that farther—”
“This whole enterprise is certainly foolish,” Byron snapped, “but I need to make sure it’s not absolutely impossible too. I lived near here when I first came to Venice—there’s a man we have to see.”
Despite Byron’s lameness, Shelley had to hurry to keep up with him. “Why should it be impossible? I mean, why lately? Surely the Austrians won’t—”
“Shut up!” Byron glared back the way they’d come; then he went on in a clipped whisper, “They will, and soon, according to what I’ve heard.”
Shelley knew his friend’s moods well enough to wait for him to speak at times like this. For most of a minute they walked together in silence past the pillars of the palace’s west face.
“For a couple of years now,” Byron said, more calmly, “a man has been … is … being moved south from Switzerland, laboriously and at huge expense … he’s Austrian, some kind of ancient patriarch who can pretty much command anything he likes. He’s incalculably old, and determined to become a good deal older.” He squinted sideways at Shelley. “I think I actually saw the wagon he was being carried in, during my tour of the Alps two years ago. There was a box in it like a coffin, leaking ice water.”
“Ice water,” Shelley repeated cautiously. “Why would—”
Byron made a quick motion with a jewelled hand. “That part’s not important. He needs to get here. The necessity of getting him here may be the main reason the Austrians took Italy, and why they put a stop to the annual ritual marriage of this city to the sea … in any case, we can’t discuss it now. Wait till we’re on the Lido, with the lagoon between us and this place.”
Several identical long banners had been hung vertically from the roof of the Libraria Vecchia on their left, and were curling and snapping in the breeze and throwing coiling shadows onto the sunlit pavement below; Shelley could make no sense of the trio of symbols painted on each of them—at the top was what seemed to be a downward-pointing crow’s-foot, then a vertical line, and then at the bottom an upward-pointing crow’s-foot with the middle toe missing, like a capital Y. Holes had been punched right through the thick paper at the ends of the lines, as if the marks were the footprints of something with claws.
“What does that symbol mean?” he asked Byron, pointing at the banners.
Byron glanced toward the library, then away. “I don’t know. I’m told it started showing up here and there during the last four years.”
“Since the Austrians took possession,” said Shelley, nodding. “Four points, then two, then three … and they look like footprints. What walks on four points, then two, then three?”
Byron stopped and looked at the banners, and his eyes were a little wild. He started to speak, then just shook his head and hurried on.
Shelley followed, wishing he could pause to look around at the structures ringing the broad square—he gaped up beyond the towering pillars at the vast gold-backed paintings in the highest arches of the basilica as the two of them hurried past, but Byron wouldn’t halt, or even slow down. Shelley got a quick look at the brightly blue-and-gold-faced clock-tower, and a glimpse of bronze statues on the top platform of it, before Byron had dragged him around the corner of the basilica.
A smaller square lay beyond the church, and Byron led them across it and into one of the narrow alleys between the buildings that were its north boundary.
Suddenly they had left all grandeur behind. The alley was scarcely six feet wide, and the overhead tangle of chimney flues and balconies and opened shutters kept it in deep shadow except where occasional lamps burned far back in the shops that occupied the ground-floor Gothic arches. It seemed to Shelley that anyone could find any shop here just by following his nose, so clear were the smells of fruit stalls, metal workers and wine shops, but the vendors nevertheless shouted the virtues of their wares up and down the alley, and Shelley could feel a headache coming on.
After a few moments he became aware of a regular metallic pinging amid the cacophony, and glancing to the side he saw that Byron was rhythmically bouncing a coin off the pillars he passed. Shelley was about to ask him to stop it when a ragged boy ran up and said something in hopelessly staccato Italian.
Byron gave him the coin and rattled out a reply, then turned around, retraced a few steps and limped through an arch into a tiny courtyard. Iron stairs curled away upward, and potted plants on the steps raised a jungle of leaves to block any stray rays of sunlight, but Shelley could see a crowd of ragged men standing by the far wall.
There was a metallic clinking here too—the men were lagging coins at the wall, each trying to land his coin closest to the wall, the winner taking all the coins.
After a moment one of them, a fat old man who was visibly drunk, scrambled over to the wall and began scraping up the accumulated money while the others swore and dug in their pockets for more.
Several of them noticed Shelley and Byron then, and began edging away, but the fat one looked up and then reminded his fellows sharply that gambling was legal “in questo fuoco”—Shelley was puzzled by the phrase, which seemed to mean “in this focus.”
Byron asked the man something that sounded like Is the eye restored yet?
The fat man waved broadly and shook his head. “No, no.”
Byron insisted that he needed to be sure, and that the man check right now.
The drunken man raised his arms and began protesting to various saints, but Byron crossed the tiny courtyard and handed him some money. The man relented, though with almost theatrical reluctance.
He waved at the other gamblers and they repocketed their coins and hurried away toward the arch. When they were gone he bit his finger—hard, to judge by his expression—shook a drop of blood onto the paving stones, and then walked to the far wall, tossing one of his coins and catching it.
“Stand back,” whispered Byron.
The man was facing the wall now, but squinting over his shoulder at the spot of blood and humming atonally as he repeatedly tossed and caught the coin; then he was looking straight at the wall in front of him and tossing several coins—juggling them, in fact—and the humming was echoing weirdly between the close walls. Shelley could feel the hair standing up on his arms, and the scar in his side began to throb.
Suddenly one of the coins was flung very hard straight up—Shelley watched it, and saw it glint for an instant in the sunlight high above, and then it fell back into the shadow and he could only hear it pinging as it tumbled down through the iron stairway; finally it spun off a flowerpot and clinked to the ground and rolled across the pavement, wobbled for a moment and fell over flat. It was several yards away from the spot of blood.