the storm raged, the rain battered the great square till an inch of water stood on the ground. Acqua alta—high water had come; the sea made a bid to claim her city. My mother noted my presence with obvious relief—once again I realized that she cared for me and that she was pleased that I was safe. But I wasn’t safe yet; none of us were. God was not afeared to strike his own house. With the herald of a great thunderclap, a boom and crack sounded from above and masonry began to fall. My father shouted above the screams:
“The gold of the roof attracts the lightning; we must repair to the palazzo.”
It was the longest sentence I had ever heard him say.
He and my mother left first, followed by the crowd of ducal retainers. Marta was swept along with them, and I knew she could not yet miss me. I ducked into a niche and hid. I had no clear plan but to be as far away from my sorceress mother for as long as I possibly could. I needed space to think, space to act. As the atrium emptied I looked up, as if for inspiration, and saw before me a fantastic Roman mosaic of the four seasons. The figure of Spring, wreathed in flowers and mythical beasts coupling to reproduce—pairing off in this Noah’s ark against the flood—sheltered by verdant leaves, looked straight at me and pointed skyward with her hand. I knew then that I was right.
I crept into the great dark space of the basilica, the floor already glazed with an inch of rain. The ark was taking on water. The incense was choking, and the voices of my father’s priests were raised in supplication. They had failed to keep the plague from Venice, even to save my father’s first wife from the pestilence. But with touching faith they tried once again to keep this most biblical of disasters at bay. I hung around the narthex, looking for a door which I knew must be there, for the goddess of Spring had told me so. I found the little portal and climbed the stair, higher and higher into the gallery. As I wound upward into the cupola, Byzantine faces regarded me with interest from their great almond eyes, unmoved as the lightning snaked into the arched windows, attracted to the golden tiles that paved their haloes.
As I stepped out onto the balcony the rain hit me like a blow, lightning struck the dome above, once and again, and I thought I would be sizzled like a scallop. I ducked behind the nearest horse to shelter—ironic, really, that these steeds of the wind should now shield me from a tempest. Only a few moments ago I would have happily jumped from here to my death; now I clung to the beast that sheltered me, hiding under his belly as a foal would suck milk. I knew I was at the wrong extreme—the eastern horse—so I inched past eight long hind legs and eight massive copper balls. At the western-most horse I crept round to the front, clinging for life, and glanced up, dashing rain from my eyes. I looked into the huge, noble copper face of the Zephyrus horse, but his wild eyes told me nothing. He did, however, proffer his right foreleg, raised as a friendly cur would ask you to shake his foot. It felt natural to take the limb and I wrapped my frozen hand around the hoof, looking for an inscription, a clue, anything. The copper limb rang as the lightning struck the cupola again, humming faintly like a coin on a bell. The leg I held shook more, creaked, and fell into my hand. I barely caught the thing, and looked down, appalled at what I’d done—but it was hollow. Hollow, not heavy.
Madonna.
There was something within. I drew out a wooden roll, as long as my forearm, like a pin that pastry cooks use for flattening their pasticcio. Excited, I knew there must be something inside, a folded document, coins, a painting. I expected the roll to be hollow, a kind of cylinder, but it was solid wood. To be sure, there were markings upon it, but the grooves and curves, and crazy inscriptions, were meaningless to me. For all I knew it was merely a support that the copperwright had used to construct the beast, a skeleton to form the cast bronze, never meant to be seen by the eyes