Chapter 11: Venice

Interlude: The Closest Thing
I called it the closest thing to its old self. Meant it as an accusation. But it sat with me longer than I expected after, because I noticed something in saying it: I'd started keeping a private category for that. Old self. As if there were a newer one worth distinguishing it from. Eleven hundred years in, and I'd apparently decided, without ever voting on it, that some version of Lune's cruelty counted as more authentic than another. The gleeful economy of a manufactured typhoon filed under old self. The fifty quiet years of a palace physician filed under something else I hadn't named yet.
I don't think that distinction holds up. I think I built it because it was easier to hate a Lune that enjoyed itself than a Lune that no longer seemed sure which of its own gifts were mercies. The typhoon was simple. I understood a typhoon. Less of a map for whatever it was doing sitting across from me not knowing an answer to its own question, and simple has always been easier to aim a cannon at than uncertain.
Lune caught me looking at it differently, I think, because it added, unprompted, in a voice with none of the typhoon's pleasure left in it: "Don't mistake the mood for the moment, comet. But I enjoyed exactly one thing about that story, and it wasn't the part you're worried it was." I didn't ask which part it meant. Already suspected, and didn't want to hear it confirmed: that the one thing it had actually enjoyed was watching Saburō's joke land, every morning, for two months, before any of the rest happened. That even Lune, apparently, could still find something worth savoring in a man who wasn't going to die by its hand at all.
Venice, c. 1347
Whatever momentum Lune had built up on Hakata Bay drained out of its face fast on this one, the eagerness collapsing into something flatter before it had even finished its first sentence — I noticed the shift in its posture before I understood the reason for it.
Kami no Tsuihou had grown up the son of a swordsmith in the Rialto district. A boy who spent his childhood in a shop that smelled of charcoal and quenching oil, learning at his father's elbow the way sons did in every trade in that city — though what he mostly learned was that he had no particular gift for the work. His hands were steady enough, his eye for a blade's balance decent, but he lacked whatever it was his father called, without unkindness, "the listening." The sense a real smith needed for when the metal was telling you something and when it was only being stubborn. His father forgave him for it, mostly, and found other uses for him around the shop — keeping the ledgers, running finished commissions to the households that had ordered them, learning the city's back canals well enough to move faster on foot than most couriers could by boat. An unremarkable life, by Venetian standards. He'd never once, before that spring, wanted a different one.
He'd felt the pull for eleven days before the first plague cart came down his street, and for a while those eleven days felt like the only clock that mattered. East, steady, patient — the way it always was in the lives where nothing tried to kill him faster than the thread itself could move. He started making inquiries at the harbor the same week it woke. Quiet ones. The kind a man makes when he doesn't yet know how badly he's going to need the answer, standing at the edge of the Arsenale watching the great galleys fitted out, telling himself he was only curious about where they sailed.
By the time he understood how badly, half of Venice already smelled like the inside of a grave. The sickness had come in on a fleet from the Black Sea that same month, and moved through the close-packed parishes faster than any rumor the city had ever produced about itself. His father's shop closed within the first ten days — not by law, but because half the smiths in the guild were dead or dying and the other half had stopped answering their doors. His father died on the eighth day of the closure. Quickly. The way the disease sometimes had mercy on a very few. Kami no Tsuihou buried him himself, alongside three neighbors doing the same for their own dead, in a plot the parish priest blessed in a hurry between two dozen other burials that same afternoon, reciting the same words so many times that day his voice had gone hoarse by the last one.
The city closed its own throat one quarter at a time that spring, the way a body does trying to save the parts it can still save. Bells that used to mark the hours started marking the dead instead — so many some mornings the ringers gave up trying to keep an honest count — and the great bell of San Marco itself fell silent for three days in April simply because no one was left uninfected among the men whose job it was to ring it. He sold his father's sword. The one good blade the old man had kept back from every commission across thirty years of work, the one he'd always said would go to a grandson Kami no Tsuihou had never given him. Sold it to a merchant who didn't pretend not to know he was taking advantage of a desperate man. Sold it anyway, because a sword was no use against what was actually killing people in that city, and a berth on an eastbound ship might, at least, get him somewhere the thread still wanted him to be. He didn't let himself think, handing it over, about the number of times he'd watched his father test its balance in exactly the doorway they were standing in.
He found Alvise on the docks, a thin, exhausted broker making a small, grim fortune off passages nobody healthy wanted to book anymore, arranging berths for merchants who'd rather risk the open sea than another week breathing the same air as their own neighbors. Alvise had been a fish trader before the plague made brokering passage more profitable than brokering catch, and still smelled faintly of the old trade no matter how many times he changed his coat — a detail he'd stopped apologizing for around the same time he stopped sleeping more than four hours a night. He looked Kami no Tsuihou over once — eyes flicking over his color, his gait, the whites of his eyes, the same quick assessment he ran on every man who paid him — because his livelihood depended on not loading a dying man onto a ship full of people trying to outrun exactly that. He'd been wrong twice already that month, and both times the crew turned the ship back to quarantine at their own cost — a loss Alvise still winced about when it came up. Kami no Tsuihou passed the look. That week, anyway. He paid double the asking price without arguing, and Alvise, who'd stopped asking why men wanted to leave Venice around the same week everyone stopped needing to ask, pocketed the coin and wrote his name into the manifest in a hand grown fast and careless from writing it so many times that spring.
Alvise noticed the state of his hands while he counted the coin — burn-scarred, ink-stained, a smith's son's hands doing nothing a smith's son's hands were built for anymore — and for just a moment the tired arithmetic behind his eyes stopped running. "My own father kept bees," he said, apropos of nothing, folding the manifest closed. "Forty years. I couldn't tell you one true thing about a bee if you paid me for it." It wasn't comfort, exactly. But it was the only unpaid-for sentence Alvise gave anyone that entire spring, and Kami no Tsuihou understood, without either of them saying so, exactly what it had cost him to offer it.
The two days between paying for the berth and the ship's early departure were the longest of that entire loop, though he wouldn't have called it that. And he felt the first wrongness in his chest the second night. Not the thread's pull, which he knew by now the way he knew his own pulse. Something colder. Heavier. Settling into his lungs like water finding the low point in a field.
He told himself it was smoke from the burning pyres. Or the bad air everyone in the city blamed for the sickness. Or simple exhaustion, eleven days of not sleeping properly. He told himself a great many things over those two days that he needed, badly, to be true. None of them were.
He made it to the gangway on the morning the ship was set to leave, close enough to see the crew still lashing down the last of the cargo, close enough that Alvise, checking names off the manifest, looked up and called out to him without thinking twice about it —
"Kami no Tsuihou, hurry, they're casting off within the hour—"
— said the same quick, businesslike way Alvise said every name on that dock, a man he'd known a week and would forget again the following one.
He never got any closer than that. The black rot that had been sitting in his chest for two days finally announced itself all at once, and he went down with one hand still closed around the rope rail — close enough to touch the ship he'd sold his father's sword for.
Alvise didn't come back to check on him. Nobody in that city did anything for a stranger coughing black on a dock that year. It wasn't cruelty. And it was a kind of math everyone in Venice had already learned to do without thinking about it, the same math that let Alvise sleep at night for months by then, and would go on letting him sleep, one manifest at a time, until the plague came for him too, eight months later, in a bed instead of a dock — which he'd have called, if anyone had asked him, the only mercy that whole terrible year managed to hand out.
He died on the dock, close enough to the ship to see men still loading it, eyes open the whole time toward a horizon he'd paid for and would never use.
"You always tell that one fast, damn it." I watched its throat work against the muzzle as it swallowed.
"There's nothing clever in it." Flat. None of the usual performance in its voice. "A disease doesn't care whose plans it's ruining. That one was just weather, the human kind. I didn't have to lift a finger, and there's no joke in a thing I didn't do."
"You still laughed."
"I laugh at funerals too, comet." Something almost like defensiveness crossed its face, gone as fast as it came. "It isn't always about the corpse."