“Are you not afraid, Marco? It is no sin to admit you are afraid.”
“I am not afraid. I will follow my father. You can stay here and pray for us.”
“I will.”
They shared a piece of bread and spoke for a long while of other things. As the sound of plainchant drifted out of the nearby church, Marco, with a heavy heart, rowed back across the lagoon. He turned to look again at his friend who stood on the shore until Giorgio's still figure was lost in the mist.
I am a sailor. All Venetians are sailors. Our blood is thick with salt. I know better than most that sound travels easily over water. Tales drift to me on the wind and those same tales, same winds, drive my ship on its way.
In preparation for their voyage east, Marco helped Niccolo and Maffeo oversee the loading of goods on the ships, and watched the hiring of crews from the early morning crowds of sailors who gathered near the twin columns on the Molo, the small square by the lagoon.
After passing inspection for overloading in the San Marco Basin, the round ship on which Marco was to spend the next month joined the sea-going caravan of narrow tarettes and bireme galleys, their rows of oars sweeping smoothly through the waves.
Late in the morning under an open blue sky, the ships passed from the harbour along the deepest channel in the lagoon and out into open sea, lion pennants whipping in the brisk sea breeze. Marco thought that in all his seventeen years he had never seen anything so beautiful. He gazed back at the city of Venice disappearing on the horizon, fading like a few dusky lines on old parchment.
Two days out from the port of Rhodes Marco stood staring at the late-morning sea, the wind stretching the sails taut, a chop of waves scudding under high wisps of cloud and blue sky. Next to him leaned old Silvio, the ship's scribe, who had spent more years of his life in the Levant than in his home port of Venice. Marco broke the silence with a question that had been dogging him.
“Tell me, scribe, who is the Dominican friar travelling with us? He has spoken hardly a word since we left Venice. And when he looks at me, he seems to have anger in his eyes. Why should he be angry at me?”
The Dominican mendicant had never mentioned his purpose or his destination. Hardly spoke at all in fact. He doesn't look like a brother, Marco had thought, not with his stubble of beard and the black circles under his hard eyes. And then there are his hands.
Most mendicants that he knew had soft white hands. At worst, those who spent time in gardens might have a thread of dirt under the fingernails. But not this one– his hands were like gnarled roots, the backs covered in black stiff hair, the fingernails broken. The friar seemed the embodiment of lean toughness, his wrists, protruding from the cassock, were shockingly thin, making his hands appear huge. His face was gaunt, pointed, sharp, like leather stretched over the sticks of his cheekbones. Everything about him made Marco shiver. The friar would pace the ship in a restless fever, unable to rest for more than a moment, like a dog with worms.
Silvio, his lips dry and cracked, hair white with salt, looked about the deck, leaned close to Marco and whispered, “Beware of him. He is subtle, but dangerous. Beware the moment you step from this ship.”
I hear the voice of the scribe, Silvio, telling the shipmates a tale, a tale of the whispering skull of Cos. He heard the story from a sailor, who heard it from another whose father went with a Greek priest of the order of Lamanites to a cave on the isle of Cos. Inside the cave was a tiny church and inside the tabernacle of the church was a skull. It was said that the skull was that of a hermit, a saint who had not eaten for forty years and who, while still living, was borne like a feather up to Paradise. A few mendicants in nearby caves had claimed they heard his skull whispering of all it had seen in Heaven and beyond.
Silvio himself had been to the island to search for the cave, without success, although he had found the skulls of two anchorites.
Later, in the complete blackness of night at sea I listen to the creaking silence of the ship. My ears gather in the world, drinking in thousands of leagues of night. At the far edge, like dawn breathing, I hear, I am sure of it, the whispering skull of Cos. I am mad with joy and light. I long to explode into the dust of stars, to empty myself into the long tailing winds. Instead I float in the silence and tell no one.
It was a quiet month at sea, with little sound but the dulcet wind in the sails and the forlorn cry of gulls. After stops at two smaller Venetian colonies in the eastern Mediterranean they sailed to the crowded port of Byzantium, where their ship threaded through the multitude of exotic craft that plied the waters of the Bosphorous. Domes and minarets shone on the hills of the city and sent a thrill through Marco.
Niccolo and Maffeo oversaw the unloading of goods and supplies: Flemish wool from the fairs of Champagne; linen from Switzerland; caskets heavy with silver and copper from German mines. Marco headed off, determined to follow the friar.
He had no trouble trailing the mendicant through the contorted alleys and crowded streets in the wharf area. In the large black cloak and hood of a Dominican, he stuck out. The friar stopped to purchase a hunk of bread, which he gnawed as he stopped to speak to a man standing next to an enormous cauldron. Nearby were piles of white bones and skulls. By boiling the flesh off the bodies of Crusaders killed in the battles of the Holy Land, the bones could be shipped home to France and Italy for burial in a less unsanitary way. Marco raised his arm and held his sleeve over his nose. The Dominican started moving again.
Eventually the friar entered an area that felt more like home. Venetian merchants and families could be seen everywhere, the air rang with the Italian tongue. An old man on the street pointed in response to the friar's question, and then as a wooden-wheeled cart passed laden with straw, the friar jumped unseen on its back. One of the rules of the Dominican order, Marco knew, was to travel by foot only. No Dominican would ride on a cart, especially not in a public place. Marco had no trouble keeping up, the cart lumbering along at a sleepy pace. When the cart turned into a wider thoroughfare, the friar jumped off. He entered a warren of dusty workshops, where twisted alleys splayed off in all directions. The friar stopped again to ask the way of a woman who pointed down a nearby alley with the green-topped cluster of onions she held in her hand.
Marco could hear the sound of metal on metal nearby. A smithy, the hammer falling as regular as a church bell tolls the hour. Other workshops they passed stood empty, and few people were to be seen in the streets. The friar hurried as he closed on his destination. They entered a shadowed lane with no exit. Marco had to take greater care not to be seen, hiding in doorways, behind carts. Finally the Dominican stood at the alley's end, hesitated, turned around, looked back the way he had come, and slipped through the black shadow of a doorway before him.
Marco crept to a window cut in the wall near the door. Inside, a glassmaking works contained a large domed furnace at the center with two smaller furnaces beyond it. A heap of soda ash was piled in one corner, a pile of sand beneath a large low window, firewood stacked along a back wall. Objects of coloured glass rested on shelves on a side wall: red goblets with twisted stems, sea-green vases, pink bowls nested inside each other. Through the four mouths of the main furnace Marco could see the fire glowing, its light shining up into the faces of the friar and the only other person in the room, a stocky curly-haired glassworker.
Marco listened.
“You tell me my brother wishes me to return to Venice? And why in the name of the Lord should I do that? In Venice I was one glassmaker among hundreds. Here I am one among ten, and I am the richest, for I possess the secret knowledge of Venetian glass. In Venice I could barely afford to pay my workmen. Here I am a wealthy man.”
The Dominican spoke in fits and starts, teeth clenched. “The Doge