The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,145

breasts. Vendors sold masks and cups of wine; circus wights danced on stilts or juggled fire. Actors screeched their bawdy lines in grotesque leering masks. The sun shone relentlessly, but the air was freezing. My breath smoked, yet the crown of my head burned. I did not know where we tended—I did not care. I walked behind my mother and she talked constantly to me over her shoulder of the sights we were to see, in such a kind and interesting manner that I wondered if my poor brain had invented the events of yesterday. She was a weathercock, altering with the climate. Yesterday storm and darkness, today burning sun.

Apparently we were to progress through the square, so the people may see us, then embark on the Bucintoro at the San Zaccharia pier, to begin one of the most important rites of the festival—the Marriage of the Sea. My father was to take his barge to the center of the lagoon, and throw a priceless ring into the sea, to bring her favor on the city for the next twelve-month. I almost laughed—the San Zaccharia pier was the place I was to meet Bonaccorso Nivola.

The weather had another notion. Perhaps God, if there was one, was angered at the poor sailor’s fate, for the sky darkened quick as a frown and thunder rolled in from the mountains. Rain beat down from the heavens and the crowd scattered under the colonnades—forks of lightning jabbed silver and blue from the clouds. The courtesans screamed and fled, hiking their skirts to reveal their hairy legs, breasts bobbing as they ran. Feathers and fur flattened, costumes bled their cheap dye onto the paving in a dirty rainbow stream. Everyone sheltered under the loggias around the square, chattering and laughing in fear. I was briefly alone, blinded by rain, a small smile curling my lip—a pox on the Venetians and their Carnevale! I opened my eyes to the heavens, willing the lightning to strike me, hoping my sodden hair was still gold enough to tempt its bolts. As if in answer to my prayer I was blinded once more as the sky split—but the lightning did not strike me; it served to illuminate a sight I had looked at every day but never really seen.

Before the great dome of the basilica, high, high on a gilded platform above the great door, stood four bronze horses, bathed in fire, noble, necks arched, mouths frothing and forelegs pawing the ground. They stood over the city, a threatening quartet. Many years in the future my husband would tell me that they were in fact thieved from the Hippodrome in Constantinople, the only remaining quadriga of the Roman world, and a symbol of Venice’s secular might. But I am getting ahead of myself—that was long in the future, when I was married; at this point I had not even been reacquainted with my husband (I had met him, of course, more than once by this point in my history). That day, however, I thought I knew what the horses meant without any instruction. They meant the Apocalypse was coming to Venice. And I didn’t give a shit.

And yet at this very second of the world ending and my not caring, for some strange reason, my brain decided to make amends for my thickheadedness of yesterday. The pieces suddenly resolved themselves—as the four winds battered me from every point of the compass, as my shoes filled and the great square began to flood, as I alone held forth like a doomed ship at sea, I finally realized what I had been taught. The rain beat down on my head, and as if they arrived with the raindrops, three thoughts suddenly plopped into my head.

Credo Uno: Flora had thirty-two roses in her skirts. There were thirty-two points of the compass rose.

Credo Due: there were four winds of the wind rose and four horses before me.

Credo Tre: Zephyrus, the west wind, raped Chloris. Chloris, the lover of the wind. Chloris my mother. Chloris who was Venice.

I knew, as if the lightning bolt had finally lit the dark corners of my mind in an illuminating flash, that whatever secret this city held was in the horse that stood at the extreme left, the west horse, the ponente horse.

The Zephyrus horse.

Then I felt a great tug of my sleeve. Marta, my millstone, had come for me and took me into the porch of the great basilica, where the ducal party dripped and steamed. Outside,