This was the key to success: don’t get arrested. Paradise itself could be unlocked so long as Gontran kept his wrists away from the bite of Venetian shackles for just one more day. And so far as he knew, the Venetians had no idea that the Paralos crew was planning to escape that night. He just needed to act normal for a few more hours. This was, however, a real struggle, one so difficult it almost made him tremble, tense his body, and sweat like a strung-out madman. After all, how could a rogue like Gontran Koraki avoid attracting attention wherever he went? The poor man could barely take a step without bumping into twenty mafiosos, Roman soldiers, Venetian procuratores, and frighteningly beautiful femmes fatales tumbling out of the ether to chase after him, waving weapons, shouting for their money.
Act normal, he thought.
Gontran traded his hour with Bartolo, using the time to check Halevi—who, while shoveling filth, whispered that the crew was ready.
Gontran then went to the western portion of the Arsenale wall and paced its inner edge, eyeing the masonry as casually as possible as it rose above him, averting his eyes whenever a bored guard came into sight.
Just going for a stroll along your defensive armaments, he thought. Nothing to see here.
All he needed to mount the wall was a long rope with a strong hook. The metal would clang when it struck the brick, but then he would climb up and over. With a little luck, and an indulgent smile from god—and maybe a break from the devil—no one would notice.
Who am I kidding? There’s always a problem. Things never go right.
Gontran knew where to find what he needed. He returned to the huge warehouse packed with sails and rope, once more showed his note to the guards outside, and then—among all the different kinds of rope—found the thin sturdy kind used for boarding ships. It even very conveniently came with an iron hook attached to the end. Tugging the knot, Gontran was so impressed he thought, with a nervous chuckle, that he was ready to record a commercial for this place. Every tough guy knows: Venetian rope is the strongest, most durable rope around! One line is guaranteed to seize at least twenty ships, or your solidi back!
It was too bad he needed to leave Venice so soon—he was starting to get used to it. Almost. This place even felt a little like home. A tiny part of his mercantile self was tempted by the Venetian dream.
Work hard, save up, and you too can own slaves of your very own. Have a manor in the countryside. Towns packed with hardworking serfs laboring in the fields from sunup to sundown. Passive income. Entire fleets sailing the seven seas, buying and selling slaves, silk, and spice in your name.
Checking to ensure no one was watching, he hid as much rope as possible under his shirt. For the rest of the day he labored in the lumber yard, picking up timber, carrying it, and setting it down as coils of rope bumped against his bare belly, soaked up his sweat, weighed him down. This was their physical effect, though their spiritual one was more uplifting. His fatigue and misery combined with hope, to the extent that he almost felt like belting out a tune. A phrase like labor in the lumber yard had a good rhythm to it, one even a non-musician like Gontran could recognize. He could be a real bluesman, strumming his guitar on a street corner, singing about his troubles. Diaresso might have liked it.
Diaresso. Wonder what he’s up to. Hope he’s doing well.
But singing here was forbidden. Happiness was forbidden. The slightest relief from suffering went against the grain. Venice was hell, which meant that you could either experience torture, or join the torturers. There was no other way.
Gontran was therefore forced to grip reality tightly—as hard as possible—with his teeth, as if his head was strapped to a vice, his eyelids pried open with hooks. He could never look away from the show. You are miserable and you are going to die soon. This was Venice’s message, blasted from every direction at every moment with blinding sound and deafening light. He never got used to it. And somehow the message was always shocking, like he could never stop experiencing it for the first time.
On second thought, maybe Venice isn’t home after all.
With an aching slowness, one which seemed to laugh in Gontran’s face, the sun reached the zenith and then began its descent, rolling ever onward like a wheel of destiny wreathed in nuclear flame. Shadows shortened, vanished, then lengthened out again in a different direction, and such was the power of the sun’s heat that steam and dust rose wherever the light touched. In the warped mirage, pebbles seemed to float in the air by themselves, as though mystical forces were at work.
What else is gravity but a mystical force?
Gontran lugged his lumber. He was followed by a trail of dark sweat droplets—sprinkled from his flesh—which the Earth drank, and which the seeds in the soil drank also, taking the water and rejecting the salt, swelling to shoot out brown roots. Green stems snaked up from the ground, and little red flowers blossomed from their tips.
Somewhere in the Arsenale, David Halevi labored like a clod of dirt brought to life, a pile of shit molded into human form and then imbued with something resembling a soul. Electrical impulses, autonomic responses, and a billion years of evolution packed his frame. But most men ignored him. The rest scowled, coughed, turned away, covered their noses and mouths, and cracked jokes at his expense, speaking incomprehensible countryside dialects with their chums.
Ra’isa, tucked away in her medieval sweatshop, sewed shirt after shirt, pricking red dye from her thumb when the thimble slipped off and rolled away on the floor, unwinding the thread from the bobbin as the heavy wooden looms cranked and creaked, and sweaty feet pushed the pedals.
In the rented room in the parish of S. Martino, Zaynab and Zulaika al-Jariya ate, drank, rested, and gathered their strength, keeping quiet lest the nosy neighbors report them.
As for the rest of the Paralos crew, who knew what they were up to? And yet whatever it was, it couldn’t have been good. It probably involved chains, hard labor, whips, relentless insults.
Time ached past. And this was not a subjective phenomenon. Even the Venetians noticed the slowness. The maestri flicked the hourglasses with their fingers—ting ting ting—unsure if the glimmering golden sand inside had gotten stuck. Sacristans shook their heads at their sundials, then squinted up at the sun. What in Christ’s name…? Fear arose that time itself would end. All the city would be encased in invisible amber, the living beings within turned to statues, and navigators on passing ships would keep their distance, terrifying the cabin boys with stories of how anyone who strayed into Venice in search of buried treasure soon became just another decoration among the thousands of unfortunate souls inside.
City of Amber.
At last, the white sky blued, yellowed, reddened. Evening bells clanged. And Gontran, returning home, struggled to look miserable. He would not turn his frown upside-down. He was unhappy, there was no hope, he would always be here earning money for the bosses, and nothing could stop that. He had accepted his fate. He had said yes to life, even if that life sucked, and even if—by joining hands with his fellow workers—he could upend it. Venice was a banqueting table piled with stolen treasure, and they could flip it if they wanted, they could scatter the gold and silver vessels into the air, send them ringing onto the floor as the red wine splashed.
Back in the rented room, Gontran, Ra’isa, Zaynab, and Zulaika al-Jariya ate dinner. The latter two amazons told both katapanoi—former and current—to rest, that they would wake them in the dark when the city was cool and silent. And yet how could anyone sleep under such circumstances? Lying in bed, Gontran was almost too excited to shut his eyelids. He was finally getting out of here, one way or the other, in a coffin or a boat. There was a chance that he could return to the sea, to the freedom of the wind and the waves and the stars and the sand, the songs of sailors dancing barefoot on the deck.
Then they were shaking them awake. It was here. The time had come. Gontran got up, dressed, checked the rope under his clean shirt, and tucked his stolen sword into his sheathe. If he ever found the pistol-sword, he would toss Boscolo’s blade away—chuck it into the sea and mutter good riddance. But any sword was better than none, especially when freeing slaves from the clutches of a merchant republic.
He kissed Ra’isa goodbye, touched her again beneath her clothes, wondering if this was the last time he would see her alive. What could they even say to each other? Yet there was work to be done. Everything that had happened between them he would always carry in his heart.
Next, he wished Zaynab and Zulaika al-Jariya luck, but they were too busy murmuring prayers to Allah while standing, facing Makkah with their hands held out, palms up. As they bowed on their knees with their shoes removed, he opened and closed the door in silence, and snuck through the dark, almost counting his steps to keep track of where he was.
It was a starless moonless night, just as he had wished. But in the absence of torches and candles, the dark was absolute, and he almost felt like he was trapped in a room without windows or lights. Gontran needed to tread carefully. Otherwise he’d plunge into a canal and drown in the sludge, his lungs packed with other people’s shit. He wished he’d brought a cane so that he could navigate the night like a blind man, tapping back and forth. As it was, he needed to feel about with his hands, sometimes gripping buildings and coasting along their sides like a baby learning to walk. Other times he was so confused about his location he needed to get down on his knees and feel ahead. Once, when he did this, there was nothing in front of him, nothing but a dark silent abyss.
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Hell I can deal with, he thought as he moved on. I could get along with demons eventually. You’re down there for an eternity, so there’s plenty of time to work things out, to psychoanalyze them. ‘Did you wake up this morning telling yourself that you were going to impale an infidel with a steel pike sticking straight through his ass and out his mouth so you could spit-roast him over an erupting volcano?' 'Yes.'
Sooner or later you become numb to even the most unimaginable tortures. The fire, the whips, the blades, the whatever—it all stops hurting. When they say the nastiest things they can think of, you just laugh, you tell them they need to work on their material. They talk about torturing your mom, your sister, your wife, your grandmother, your kids, and you ask: ‘is that all you’ve got?’
That I can deal with. But a dark and silent abyss forever, maybe that’s the true hell. Satan, the adversary of god, you could have some interesting conversations with. But to be alone forever? The mind would collapse in on itself. Trapped like that in eternity with nothing else to do, we would build our own paradise, our own hilly green fields to bound across like Greek gods, our harems of houri, with leopards purring in walled gardens, their eyes glowing in the night, and spice-laden trees singing with phoenixes.
Even then, heaven would get boring eventually. You'd grow numb to every last pleasure in paradise, just as you’d grow numb to torture in hell. So the ideal thing would be to live on Earth, where heaven and hell are mixed like two ocean waves, one above, one below, like the yin-yang whirl—to have your unconscious throwing real challenges, real problems your way. A mix of pain and pleasure, heaven and hell, that's the only way to fight eternity, the inevitable numbness that comes with the heat death of the universe. God’s just trying to pass the time.
Maybe we’ve already done this. Maybe we can’t prove we aren’t doing this right now. All of us have already died, we just don't know. We can't accept it. But there’s no escape. Death is just another step as we unwind the winding path.
Thinking like this could paralyze people or turn them into reactionaries: nothing is real, nothing matters, so why bother helping anyone? But this was how Gontran entertained himself as he worked his way to the Arsenale, found the wall, pulled himself up with the rope, climbed down to the other side, and even found his crew and picked their chains. It all happened quickly, quietly, efficiently. Soon they were free, wasting no time on embraces or celebrations. They had been waiting for him in the night, their eyes open to the pitch blackness, like moons with no sun to make them glow. All were prepared. All knew what to do. Gontran led a small team to procure weapons from the armory while Halevi worked on pushing the Paralos into the water. They had pulled down the tent that concealed the ship, they were handing out weapons, and they were about to shove the Paralos into the waves—with Halevi on the deck working on igniting Talia's inner fires—when torches suddenly flashed to life everywhere around them. These were the true demons: Venetian archers with arrows nocked on their bows, so many that several at least were aiming at each individual member of Gontran's crew.
The escapees stopped, swore, raised their hands. What else could they do?
Gontran's heart sank. We were so close!
The crowning infamy came when the two Loredani—along with the Procuratore—emerged from the shadows. They had already captured Ra'isa, Zaynab, and Zulaika al-Jariya, and shoved them forward, their hands bound behind their backs so that they stumbled and grunted.
“Capitan Cane,” Annibale Loredan said, his blond hair and black velvet gleaming in the firelight, along with the hilt of the Seran pistol-sword sheathed at his side. “You’ve been quite busy, it seems.”
Gontran said nothing. His contempt for this man was restrained by the awareness that if he blinked, every member of his crew would die. By now the archers were trembling from the difficulty of aiming nocked arrows at everyone for so long. Sooner or later one would slip.
“We were watching you,” Annibale said. “All of you. For every moment. In every place. Even the flies in your food were writing reports for us.”
Gontran scoffed. Even the flies in Venice are traitors.
“I didn’t see you,” he blurted.
Annibale smirked. “You weren’t meant to. But now the question is: what to do? It’s hard to profit from slaves who won’t face the facts. Punishment doesn’t work, either. What do you think, father? What are your thoughts on the matter, Procuratore?”
“Death,” the older Loredan said.
“Death?” Annibale raised his eyebrows. “Seems a bit harsh.”
“Kill them,” the Procuratore said.
“Well then, death it is. There’s no need for a trial. All of us can see that you’re trying to steal Venetian property—our ship, our weapons, our bodies. Such behavior cannot be tolerated, as I’m sure you understand, Capitan Cane. We must make an example of you.” He looked to the two older men standing at his sides. “Can you imagine what people would say, if we didn’t meet this lawlessness with the maximum punishment?”
“I want the girls.” The Procuratore nodded to the three amazons.
“But my dear mister Procuratore, forgive me for speaking plainly, but do you not understand that they will eventually escape again? They will kill you in your sleep.”
“I will enjoy them until then,” the Procuratore said. “They will suck my tongue.”
“No,” Annibale said. “I’m afraid we can’t do that. For as the saying goes, a leopard cannot change its spots. There are other beautiful women in the world, after all—ones whose spirits are not quite so strong. Ones who are more pliable. More prone—upon beds, if you understand.” He glared at Gontran. “These people wish to be free, so it is our duty to free them—to free their spirits from their mortal flesh.” He looked to the archers, then raised his hand into the air. “Men, you will loose on my command.”
“Sir!” the archers screamed in unison, making the slaves flinch.
“We will make their deaths beautiful,” the elder Loredan said. “We will kill them all at once.”
Ra’isa turned her anguished face to Gontran. He whispered that he was sorry. And she almost seemed to smile at him, as if to say: “Sorry does not pay the bills.”
But now the end had come. Gontran looked at Ra’isa, the greatest beauty he had ever seen. He realized now that he had wanted to marry this girl, have children with her, grow old with her. A whole lifetime had lain ahead of them, but now it was being snuffed out.
“Oh, I must savor this moment.” Annibale shut his eyes and breathed deeply through his swelling nostrils. “It is so sweet.”
Sweat poured down his archers’ faces. All the muscles in their bodies were shaking violently.
Annibale opened his mouth to speak, and filled his lungs with air.
At that moment, Talia’s blue eyes flashed to life. While hiding from everyone else, Halevi had ignited her. He gasped and stumbled away as she clanked across the deck, the steam fissuring from her bronze armor, her power plants chugging in her chest. Every archer cried out in terror, for in their minds Talia had been no more than a pretty statue, one too heavy to move off the ship. Now she was a demon come to life. They aimed at her instead of the Paralos crew and loosed their arrows without waiting for Annibale’s command. Most whistled into darkness; the few which struck her clanged away and then clattered on the deck.
“Slave masters,” she said with her pipe organ voice, her blue gas fire eyes glaring at the Venetians. “I hate slave masters.”
“Vaffanculo!” Annibale said.
Talia jumped off the deck, landed on the ground—her body so heavy the nearby buildings trembled—and launched herself into the Venetians, whirling through firelight and darkness like a storm. The Paralos crew got to work fighting off their enemies while also pushing the ship into the water. In the chaos, as the Paralos slid into the pool, bells began to ring across the city. One Venetian must have escaped and sounded the alarm.
But before long, the entire company of Venetians were either dead or fleeing, all save Annibale Loredan. His father and the Procuratore had nearly escaped, but Ra’isa had caught them, and with the help of Zaynab and Zulaika al-Jariya, she cut off their balls, stuffed them into their mouths, and allowed them to bleed to death.
In the mean time, Gontran had shouted for everyone to get aboard the Paralos. Now even Talia was there, though Gontran himself remained behind, clutching Boscolo’s stolen sword with both hands, its blade dripping blood.
Gontran nodded to the pistol-sword Annibale was holding.
“That’s mine,” Gontran said.
“If you want it, come and get it,” Annibale said.
As the Paralos worked its way through the pool that was full of ships, Gontran swung his sword at Annibale—who parried, the blades striking blue sparks that leaped in their faces. Gontran stabbed forward, and Annibale darted out of the way, laughing at him.
“You’ll never escape,” Annibale said. “Not even with that bronze monster of yours.”
Annibale cut Gontran’s back. Gontran cried out, fell away, then raised Boscolo’s sword to deflect another blow—but the Seran blade sliced through. Half the blade clattered on the ground, leaving Gontran with little more than a hilt.
Always knew this sword sucked, he thought.
Dropping what remained of Boscolo’s sword, Gontran lunged forward and seized the Seran blade’s hilt. Both men wrestled, grunted, fell to the ground. Annibale was bigger and stronger than Gontran and had been training for this moment all his life. He was superior, he was a poet, a warrior given numerous gifts by god. But there was something here he could never have anticipated. Gontran turned the blade toward Annibale, then flicked the switch that sprung it apart, revealing the gun barrel inside. The only question was: was the powder and ball still loaded after all this time? Or had it fallen out? Would the powder even ignite without a flame?
Only one way to find out.
“Goodbye, Annibale,” Gontran said.
Annibale looked at him, grunting with confusion. He was still strong enough to keep the blade from his flesh, and he was even slowly pushing it back toward his adversary. But Gontran, with one last burst of strength, aimed the barrel at Annibale’s heart, then pulled the trigger. The lock was dry from disuse, and so the two metal parts sparked, combusting the black crystalline powder within. The gun exploded into Annibale’s heart, bursting blood out through his back. His whole body went limp, and he sighed his last.
Gontran pushed Annibale’s body away and stood. Then he tucked the hot blades of the pistol-sword back together and flipped the weapon into his sheathe.
His comrades were shouting for him to join them. Running along the docks in the early morning light, he leaped aboard as the Paralos made its way along the last canal to the open sea.