Pip Vaughan-Hughes - The Vault of bones

This, I knew, was how Constantinople must have been before the Franks had destroyed her – destroyed her, and then built their own city in her image, for Saint Mark's, I saw, was a Greek church, and everywhere about me – on the church, on the walls of the buildings around the great square, on the columns that guarded the waterfront – were treasures that could only have come from the East. It was horrible to see, with the ruin of that other city so fresh in my mind; but Venice is a strange and terrible place, but also a lovely one, and when the sun shines, its warm stone and brick, the outlandish skill of its builders and artisans, and the gentle music of light and water, work a powerful conjuration upon the spirits. So I did not curse the Serenissima, but instead let myself fall under her enchantments.

Enchanted or not, I knew better than to expect an audience today, but nevertheless I screwed up my nerves and walked through the open doors of the palace of the Doges. There were people everywhere in the hall beyond, milling about, gossiping and doing business, all dressed in peacock-bright silks of outlandish cut, their tunics in the main even shorter than my own. I looked in vain for someone who might be official, and at last I asked a guard if he could direct me to where I might arrange an audience with the council. He gave me a crooked look, as if marking me for a moon-struck fool, but pointed out an old man in the black robes of a cleric, who was standing near some grand stairs and nodding, polite and extremely bored, at the men who assailed him on all sides.

I had to wait my turn, for it seemed everyone in Venice wanted an audience, and each one of them had to go through the bored old man. I finally planted myself in front of him, and gave a brisk bow.

'Good sir, I seek an audience with the Council of the Republic. I have several very pressing matters of business, even of state, to discuss…'

The man looked me up and down. He had a beaky nose, from which a great number of white hairs bristled, and watery blue eyes, yet even so he managed to look quite implacably important. ‘Your name?' he interrupted. ‘Petrus Zennorius, sir, from…' 'And your business is?'

'Pertaining to Baldwin, Emperor of the Latins and of Constantinople’ I said, garbling the title. The man's glistening eyes blinked, and one shaggy eyebrow twitched. I believe he is in Venice, and I would speak to him and to the council on urgent matters of.. ‘

'No doubt’ I thought I had hooked him, but now he was lost, already turning to another face in the surging crowd. What had I done wrong?

I have papers’ I said desperately, groping in my tunic for them. The man rolled his eyes in horror, and turned to the man beside me, who launched into his own desperate patter.

'But, sir!' I cried, but already I was being shouldered and elbowed backwards, and I saw it was useless. The guards were already looking my way, and so I stood up straight and marched out of the palace, looking, so I hoped, like a man who had got just what he had come for.

I was out in the cold sunshine again, on the waterfront that the Venetians call the Molo, and it was such a fine sight that I lingered, admiring the ships that were docked there, as thickly as in the port of London, for this was the city's main wharf. There was a veritable wall of masts, and I walked slowly, reading the names painted upon the prows, wondering where they had been and where they would go next. But I felt exposed and nervous out here in the light, and turned back towards the domes of Saint Mark's. Crossing the canal next to the palace I stumbled a little and, with that reflex of embarrassment, glanced around me to make sure no one had noticed. Of course no one had: a man could disembowel himself in the middle of Saint Mark's Square and the Venetian throng would chatter around him, making certain, of course, not to bloody their clothes. But as I straightened up I glimpsed a man dressed in a brighter-than-usual yellow silk tunic stepping into the mouth of a nearby alley. A lovely yellow it was, like the necks of goldfinches or cowslips in spring. Still I thought no more about it, save to wonder whether – unbidden thought! – it might look fetching upon Letice.

I walked on, forcing myself not to hurry. Little round white clouds drifted above me, seeming to wander through the thicket of masts. I doubted I would ever get used to the way the city hung between sky, sea and land, seemingly made from all three elements but belonging wholly to none. The way the marble on the palace facades seemed more spun than carved; the tall windows and columns that echoed both the masts of ships and the wavering shafts of light that danced wherever the sun met the water; the great cathedral, barbaric and glittering, a vast chest full of pillage upturned on the square.

I strolled along past eel-sellers and touting boatmen, past whores and whoremongers, money-changers and cut-purses. A man was selling little grilled birds on wooden skewers – sandpipers or something of the like, to judge by the long, charred beaks – and because they smelled so good, and I had eaten nothing since last night's supper, I bought two sticks. As I handed over my money I caught a flash of yellow away to my right: that tunic again. I began to crunch my way up the first beak and as I bit into the head, the hot, unctuous brains bursting in my mouth made me sigh with pleasure and forget, once again, about tunics of yellow. I went on my way, munching and leaving a trail of small bones in my wake, and soon reached the twin columns that stood at the entrance to the square of grass known as the Piazzetta, which is the one place in all Venice where one may gamble, and where the executions are held. Gamblers had their tables set up between the bronze lion and the saint perched upon his crocodile, and the dice rattled out the tunes of marlota and triga and riffa as men cursed and coins glinted. There had been executions the day before, and the grass was rucked up and thick with dried blood and vomit, but the gamers did not notice or care as their shoes became stained darker and darker while they shuffled in joy or frustration.

I walked on towards the campanile. There was a shout behind me and a clatter, and I looked back to see a table overturned and an angry man set upon by the table-owner's footpads, hidden in the crowd until needed, as always. And there, to one side of the strugglers: a man in a yellow tunic, who stepped quickly behind the pillar that held up the lion as if hiding from me. And he was hiding, I realised. He had seen me notice him, and clumsily dodged out of sight. Someone was following me.

I was so surprised that I just stood there and took another bite of sandpiper. This is ridiculous, I thought. He'll peep out from behind that pillar in a moment. And so he did, like a child playing hide-and-seek with a younger boy who has not quite grasped the fundamentals of the game. But perhaps secrecy was not at stake here, and all he needed to do was get close enough to stick something sharp through my liver. I dropped the last sandpiper and dodged into the throng that filled Saint Mark's Square.

I tried to seem nonchalant as I wove and barged my way through the back-ways of San Marco towards the bridge at the Riva Alta, following the river of Venetians through the Calle del Fabbri and then through the square in front of Saint Salvadore's Church. A gaggle of tarts were arguing on the bridge there and cursed me in their rasping slang as I shoved past. Then I found myself in the midst of a busy cloth market that had all but blocked the alleyway beyond. Finally I turned a corner and saw, at the far end of a small square, the two halves of the Quartarolo Bridge writhing like trapped snakes. A big, deep-water galley had just rowed through and churned up the water, and its wake slapped against the stone walls of the Grand Canal, each slap making more wavelets that rushed to the canal's middle, where they fought one another and the poor, soaked wretches who were stoically drawing the bridge together. The pontoons bucked and twitched, the ropes snapped, went slack and snapped again, and inch by turgid inch the flimsy wooden causeways approached each other, jumping and nervous, like two horses brought to stud.