The Venetian Contract by Marina Fiorato Page B

beast seemed to move with the ragged gasps of his wearer, the bony notches of his wasted back seeming to animate the lion’s wings as he struggled to breathe.
    Now Death was clad, as was fitting, in black.
    He stood for one instant at the top the gangplank, before stumbling down it, aided by the gradient and the winds at his back. On the dockside, Death fell to his knees, tried to pick himself up; couldn’t.
    Feyra watched, wishing she could turn from the pitiful sight but unable to tear her eyes away. She was torn by pity for the fellow and a fervent hope that he would drown now, face down in the waters, or be dragged back into the sea by the ebbing flood that silvered and soaked his heavy cloak.
    With superhuman will, he raised himself up and staggered between those sentinel pillars. By some strange fall of the cloak’s fabric it seemed that he was the only soul in that vast square without reflection or shadow. That and the voluminous black cloak, snatched and rippled by the winds, conferred on the dying man a malevolent, otherworldly appearance; he was the Reaper personified.
    Feyra knew then that the galleas itself, and the cape with that dreadful chimera of the winged lion and the book, had been all part of the design. The citizens would see a Venetian ship, and an infirm man in an Admiral’s cloak, and run to help him. Already, some people were wading across.
    She hammered on the porthole, shouting, but the glass was sealed shut. Proof to storms and battle, the pane did not even crack. Her knuckles were raw and her voice hoarse but it did no good. She ran to the door and rattled the clasp, but knew already it would be no use. She looked up, desperately rattling the gratings in the quarterdeck, trying to force them open. Despairing now, Feyra picked up the wine bottle and smashed it against the porthole, but the bottle shattered in her hand, the green shards slicing her flesh.
    As she sucked at the bitter blood on her fingers, Feyrasaw a woman with her son in her skirts. The mother set the child down, tipping his little tricorn hat over his nose against the rain. The boy clung to her skirts though, refusing to be left, so they went to the cloaked figure together.
    Feyra no longer shouted, but spoke to the woman in a desperate undertone: ‘
Please, please please turn back. Take your child. Be on your way
’. But the woman, with her son trailing along behind, came right up to Death and offered a hand. As if time had slowed Feyra watched Death’s black hand extend from his cloak, and close around the woman’s white one.
    It was done.
    She saw the woman recoil from the face she saw beneath the hood, saw the white hand snatched away and wrapped around the little boy, pressing the little face into her robes with the hand that had touched Death’s. A little knot of people came running, half wading, half running through the knee-high water to see what was amiss.
    Feyra turned back to her father. She did not need to see the sequel to these events, nor tell him what had happened. He read all in her face, and fell back on his cot, defeated. The ship lurched again as the anchor was weighed and the galleass turned, the winds swelling the sails above, and the dock receding swiftly.
    Framed by the porthole, Feyra watched the scene getting smaller and smaller. They diminished with the distance, that doomed little crowd of people clustering around Death, and she watched them till she could hardly see, until they were no bigger than the black spores of the Bartholomew tree.

Chapter 11
    F eyra returned to her father’s side – he was her only concern now.
    She put away her other feelings. She’d been raised to hate the people of Venice, but she felt nothing but pity for that young mother and her child, and the others who had come to aid Death. And she had let
her
mother down; she had failed to warn the Doge of what was to come. But there would be time enough to repent at leisure. Her task now was to heal her father and get him