his challenge. And then, only after he had shown he did not care whether Zuliani saw him or not, he pulled his cloak around him and slipped away into the darkness.
*
Zuliani spent a restless night, listening to the wind blowing a storm across the lagoon. He could hear the sea fret crashing against the quays along the edges of the man-made island that was Venice. He even fancied he could hear the creaking of the thousands of wooden posts that had been hammered into the mud banks to create the land on which his and hundreds of other houses stood. It was the very nature of the crazy enterprise that was Venice – a city built on pilings in mud flats in the middle of nowhere – that stirred his and other Venetians’ blood to madcap projects. But sometimes its precarious nature was driven home by foul weather. The chill air of an easterly wind blew through his sleeping chamber, and he could feel the salty spray on its gusts. He huddled beneath the warming lion skin that he had purchased in Kuiju. He had never seen the animal alive, but had grown fond of the skin and its gaping jaws. The head now lay somewhere round his feet, and the tail tickled his icy cheeks until he pushed it away.
The stormy weather would at least have driven the boy who stalked him back to his own home. Zuliani resolved to slip out early in the morning and take action to sever his connection with the plot to bring down the Doge. Why he had aligned himself with the Tiepolos and Querinis he was not sure. They were part of the case vecchie – the Venetian aristocracy, who had always done the likes of the lower class Zulianis down. On the other hand, their enemy, Gradenigo, had over the last few years effectively closed the doors of the Great Council to those whose fathers and other paternal ancestors had not been members in the past. It was a closed society that ran Venice, and Zuliani, the last of his family, stood outside it. So he had been flattered a few days earlier when Francesco Tiepolo, one of the old school, had called on him, ostensibly to view Zuliani’s collection of Eastern treasures. He had taken the overweight, red-faced Tiepolo up to his attic rooms, and brought out part of his collection. Tiepolo had at once picked up a heavy golden bar with swirling patterns on it, hefting it in his hand.
“What is this worth, Zuliani? It must weigh three hundred saggi at least.”
Niccolo smiled politely, seeing that the man only saw the surface value of the item he held.
“To those who possessed it, it was priceless. It was not just a bar of gold, it was a permit that gave the owner access to all corners of the Great Khan’s empire – and power over anyone in that empire. It is called a paizah, and the inscription reads ‘By the might of the Great God and the great grace he has given to our Emperor, blessed be the name of the Khan, and death and destruction to all who do not obey him.’”
Zuliani ran his fingers fondly over the curly writing.
“There were ones wrought in base-metal or silver, but the gold paizah carried the highest authority. It was given to me by Kubilai Khan himself.”
Tiepolo grunted, unimpressed by the old man’s story. He could only see the value of the gold. A Venetian saggio was about one sixth of an ounce, and that made the bar at least fifty ounces of gold. He laid the bar down reluctantly and peered at a pile of fancy clothes. Pushing aside a plain grey cloak of coarse material that lay atop the Chinese garb, his eyes once more lighted on the golden embroidery that covered the robes underneath.
“Who would wear those? The emperor?”
“Oh not these. They are the court dress of his Chinese subjects, and would be considered quite ordinary. That cloak is more interesting.”
Tiepolo listened politely as the old man explained the history of the cloak, though he hardly absorbed what he was being told. And then he even let Zuliani drone on about his collection a little more before broaching the subject of the conspiracy to overthrow the Doge. This was the subject he had really come here to discuss, because he knew that, if he could lure men like Zuliani into the plot, he could bring the ordinary cittadini –