In Great Waters (7 page)

To the canals of Venice came Pepin, hastily prepared, unaware of the anger of the Venetians who awaited him. In defiance of their leaders, the citizens gathered, ready to battle the invaders. But as Pepin’s ships sailed into the bay, a sight met their eyes that struck them like a wonder. The deepsmen had gathered to fight.

The sea people did not share the landsmen’s view of nationhood.
More land people arriving in great ships were simply more people making claim on their canals. The sea people massed, called to each other across the miles of water and swam out to meet the fleet. With sharp rocks and strong hands, they breached hulls within minutes. The massive galleons of the enemy went down. The canals of Venice filled with floating spars, and the air filled with the crash of splitting wood and the shrieks of drowning men. And through the noise, the resonant song of the deepsmen sounded, a deep bass undertow:
Ours
.

Pepin’s surviving ships ploughed through. He had come too far to retreat in disgrace. The blood of the deepsmen darkened the waters as sailors lowered themselves on ropes to slash with swords at the lithe figures battering their hulls; as webbed fingers washed up upon the shores and shrieks rang through the water and echoed up the canals, Chioggia fell, then Pellestrina. The lagoon, Venice’s safeguard against the world, was giving way.

The Venetians had no love for the deepsmen patrolling their rivers, but they had less love for French princes called in to conquer by their treacherous leaders. And as the sailors’ swords flashed and the heads of deepsmen bobbed in the bay, black of eye and slack-jawed, tumbling over and over in the current, the people of Venice united.

It was one man who turned the battle around. Agnello Participazio was a long-established settler, a fierce Venetian who had organised men to block the channels, removing markers and leaving Venice an impassable maze for the invaders to founder in. The citizens followed him, damming their rivers as best they could, preparing to face Pepin with all their strength.

Then a naked woman walked out of the sea. Her legs were supple like a sea woman’s, jointed with vertebrae rather than shin bone and thigh bone, and her webbed feet spread like fans on the ground. Men crossed themselves and murmured of Venus, and she stared at them, lifted her head, and spoke to them in their own tongue, saying: “Give me something to wear.” Her teeth chattered in the cold wind, and drying salt sparkled on her rough skin.

Agnello looked up from his dam, laid down the spear in his hands,
and stepped forward to offer her his cloak. She took it with a swift gesture, and cast it around herself like a queen.

“We must turn back these ships,” she said.

And Agnello bowed to her, and she reached out and took him by the hand.

The cloak he had lent her barely covered her body, her twisting unnatural legs and beautiful breasts like a girl’s, her whiter than white skin with veins that darkened as the air of the land warmed her water-chilled flesh. But she would not give it up for a dress, not while Pepin was at the shore. She covered herself as she spoke to Agnello, then leaned down into the water, dipping her ragged head and releasing from her slim throat such heavy calls, louder and deeper than a bull’s bellow, that the landsmen stared at her, speechless.

At her call, a phalanx of deepsmen swam into view, twenty deep.

The woman turned to Agnello and said, “Where should they go to block them?”

Agnello was a level-headed, strong-willed man. He hesitated only a moment before remembering his plan. His instructions were clear and direct: block the Malamocco channel. And the woman lowered her head again, chattered and clicked and moaned into the water.

The deepsmen turned on the instant; their huge tails raised such a fountain that Agnello’s men found themselves soaked to the skin. The woman addressed herself to Agnello: “I will go with them. You must meet me there.” She stripped the cloak from her shoulders, standing naked as a fish on half-steady legs before his gaze. “Have this ready for me again,” she said, and passed it to him. Then she was gone, lost in the water.

Deepsmen and landsmen worked together. Mighty stakes barricaded the Malamocco channel, impassable to Pepin’s fleet, and between them the deepsmen slipped, silent as wolves, under the water. Within Venice, the canals were passable again; only to outsiders was the deepsmen’s fury turned. And everywhere, between land and sea, swam the two-tailed, bent-legged woman, white-faced and clear-spoken, turning from Agnello to the deepsmen and back again.

Pepin held out for six months, trying starvation and patience,
force and endurance, to no avail. Venice had become something new: a city that could not be taken by sea. Pepin struggled on, but in the end, he turned away.

After he had gone, and the banks of Venice were clear, the city turned within itself, united. Agnello, the hero of the city, was elected, the only possible Doge. And by his side was something utterly new, even to the name given her by the Venetians: Angelica. Dogaressa, lady of Venice, queen of the land and sea.

It was common to speak of a woman’s gentleness, but no one said that of Angelica. When an assassin tried to suffocate her in the night, Angelica lasted easily without air under the smothering pillow, wrapped her flexing legs around his hips and broke his spine with a single jerk of her strong, mobile back.

Venice thrived in her salty grip. Icons of the Virgin took on her features when artists decorated the churches. But it was more than that. Angelica and her children spread their tendrils through the royal houses, until the houses of Europe all grew intermixed, the dark-tinged blood of the sea people safely mingled in the veins of its rulers. For what nation with a vulnerable coastline could call itself strong if it could not defend itself from attacks by sea? The first time Angelica’s deepsmen struck at the Spanish navy, out on open water, miles away from Venice, not even plundering but dragging the boat down and its sailors with it, was the beginning of the end of landsmen kings. Let the Switzers be ruled by landsmen, let nations with no sea borders keep their old ways if they wished, but there were navies to maintain, and the deepsmen of the sea were no longer neutral, no longer sailors’ yarns, but an engaged force with loyalties of their own. Venice had a sword against the throat of the world. For against the wolves of the ocean—that implacable army Angelica could command without warning—there was no defence. Unless there were other deepsmen on other shores.

Angelica’s children by Agnello were strong and healthy, fast-growing, cloven infants that could chirrup and shrill their mother’s language, reproducing the deepsmen’s sounds as no landlocked throat ever could. For years, Venice grew in strength: a great empire,
unchallengeable ruler of the waves, the deepsmen riding the trade routes and salvaging lost sailors, protecting their nation, mauling unauthorised ships. The world took notice of the small city, even far-distant continents, Chinese and Arab merchants bartering their wealth for safe passage, Europe in thrall. Venice was growing to a second Rome.

Before Angelica’s first daughter was old enough to talk, she was being offered the hands of princes. That first generation, Angelica refused; instead, she favoured noblemen of her choosing, sending them out into the bay to find themselves brides in the water to bear husbands and wives of mixed-blood for her children. Before Angelica was an old woman, the spread across the courts of Europe had begun.

A monument was raised by the Doge’s palace after Angelica’s death, housing a golden reliquary containing only her right hand. The remains of her corpse were buried at sea, but the hand rested in its glass-fronted, pearl-studded tomb, its webs shrivelling and pulling the fingers tight, until all that could be seen was a corrugated mass, small as an egg, brown and pitted like a bundle of seaweed. Angelica had never acquired the habit of piety, but the Virgin in stone adorned her tomb, and gilt letters announced the sacred legend: Stella Maris. Star of the Sea.

This, Allard explained to his charge. The boy sat, black eyes wide open, his mind filled with the drifting corpses of deposed leaders, the jawless bodies of conquered dolphins and the broken limbs, crooked against the dark, vibrant emptiness of the deep that followed after a struggle for authority; of bodies falling through the empty, unresisting air. That was the lesson Allard had to teach. The words were hard for Henry to understand, but the images were not. There were others like him on the land. Not many, but others like him. Only they were not like his nurse, not like the men who obeyed Allard, nor even like Allard himself. They were kings.

“Henry king?” he asked Allard.

“Not yet, Henry,” Allard said.

“Kill king?” Henry said.

Allard looked at him again, fish hanging limp in his stilled hand.
His brow wrinkled, narrowing his white-rimmed eyes, as he stared at his charge. Henry leaned forward out and took the fish out of Allard’s grip. His chest was tighter than it had ever been, but his face was immobile. He said nothing as he filled his mouth with meat, readying himself for winter.

H
ENRY NEVER LEARNED
to speak Latin, the language of the courts. English was difficult enough for him, accustomed as he was to a simpler mother tongue. But he listened to his keepers’ voices, even when they were not addressing him. These people spoke to each other, they spoke and spoke, about things that had nothing to do with the circumstances at hand. Most of the words in his own language had been warnings or commands:
Dangerous tide; Move on; Give me that
, or else they had been lessons, navigation chants and hunting methods that everyone recited together. Discussion was far more limited. But Allard and his nurse—Jane Markeley, a name it took him weeks to understand fell into two parts, not a single one, Janemarkeley or Mistressmarkeley—spoke to each other endlessly. They spoke about him. Even when he was doing as he was told they talked and talked, and Henry strained his ears to understand them, though he kept his back averted and rocked to cover his eavesdropping. Jane Markeley and her king—no, her man, her
husband
, Thomas Markeley—spoke to each other of all sorts of things, people Henry didn’t know, ideas he didn’t understand, places he couldn’t picture. At first he attended mostly to the rhythm of their speech, trying to get the measure of it. Only after growing used to it did he begin to pick up the tone of anxiety in their voices.

He listened to their chatter, even when they were not addressing him. But Latin, he hated. Allard spoke English, Jane Markeley and
Thomas Markeley did, even the missing woman, Allard’s wife, who never came to look at him after those early days—could follow those words fine. With Latin came the repetition over and over of a new word, spoken by Allard: “Understand?” It was this word that irritated him beyond endurance. It was hard to say, to begin with: Henry wrestled with the syllables, but they clattered uncomfortably in his mouth. But it was the meaning that bothered him the most, though his grasp of English was still not good enough to explain this to Allard, even had he wished to. It was too hard to separate the two words out. Such a combination,
under
and
stand
, could bode nothing but ill. “Stand” was what Jane Markeley said over and over again as she forced the sticks into his reluctant hands, what Allard said as he hauled him to his feet and forced him to practise, risking so many tumbles against the hard floor. “Under” was bad, too; in the sea, hiding beneath a rock might have brought him some privacy to eat without being robbed, but the intractable ceiling of his room had soured his taste for such things.
Understand
, in Henry’s mind, was a word of imprisonment. To Allard, perhaps, it was a natural thing, accustomed as he was to these dark ceilings, and easy as he was on his straight, quick legs. But to Henry, “understand” meant to take up the posture of a landsman: impossible, and unwelcome. He could see the meanings of words Allard said to him, at least in English, but he didn’t want to understand.

As a result, he made a recalcitrant pupil. Latin was a language Allard insisted he learn, but he could not tell him who it was spoken by; Henry did not know what a court was, and if it was associated with no living tribe, not even a country, Henry refused to abandon English for it. To understand was to submit, and Henry, though dependent on Allard for food, was coming to think that he had less reason to fear than he had thought. Allard might look strange, but the twisted ear or tugged hair he would have expected from a stern deepsman adult never happened. The others obeyed Allard, but with his odd liking for books and his endless repetition of single words, he was, to Henry, eccentric, possibly even stupid. Henry listened when Allard addressed the others, listened to the tension in his voice, and ignored his attempts to teach Henry anything he did not choose to know.

One day Allard sat down with him once again to teach him Latin. Henry sat hunched on a chair, legs tucked under, angry and restless at being expected once again to struggle with the wretched, useless syllables. There was no need to have two words for everything, and Allard’s repeated, “Understand, Henry? Understand?” was almost as maddening as his tight clothes.

Determined to escape, he remembered a well-tried trick from his time in the sea, a quick way of driving off deepsmen when they bothered him too much to bear, when their attacks and harassments threatened to drag him under. Henry looked suddenly at the window, pointed, and shouted a word he had heard spoken with fear: “Soldiers! Soldiers!”

Allard did not flinch. He rose slowly, walked to the window and looked out over the green lawns. Then he turned back to Henry.

“I will not have you lie to me,” he said.

Henry looked at him in terror, understanding something new: his tricks for survival would not work, for these dry people were not stupid like his family. He was smaller than all of them. If they wanted to drag him down, they could do it.

Allard beat slowly, and picked up one of Henry’s sticks, lying abandoned on the floor. Sitting back down, he grabbed Henry by the collar and hauled him over his knee. The stick whistled impossibly fast through the thin air, and Henry shrieked and thrashed. The chair rocked, and Henry twisted under Allard’s hand, flailing his legs. He heard a grunt, and felt the strain in the arm holding him down. With a desperate effort, he pulled himself free and buried his pointed teeth in Allard’s hand.