Episode 5: Venice - Part 4: Domitian

Episode 5: Venice

Part 4: Domitian

I step out of Caesar's, and it's like I've already forgotten it – him. I haven't, but I don't stop to wonder about how easily and readily I just got up and left.

I might have had more questions. In fact, I still don't know what Pepin looks like – height, weight, build, distinguishing characteristics. Except that last isn't true in the least. I know his most distinguishing characteristic: his eyes – blistered and bloodshot and red and insane. And yet I am satisfied with what I've learned. Satisfied because it's all I'm going to get, sure, but also satisfied in the way one feels after a job well-worked nears completion.

I stand in the Venetian plaza, my eyes hooded from the noonday sun blaring on me, and I watch the bustle without seeing anything in particular.

I have enough to find Pepin.

Or his army.

If there is one.

He's probably left Venice.

Why do you think that?

It is a hunch, more than anything. The first girl I – he – killed – in the dreams— I felt this... hunger. No desire, necessarily, to kill. But to feed in some way. By the last, the hunger was only for the kill. Whatever need there was had long since been sated. Any desire to store up the... light was secondary at best. And I don't even know what that could mean. I just know I felt it. Considered it.

The time has come to discuss the geopolitical landscape of Christendom in the 900^th year of the Era commonly known as the Common. The Roman Empire has been dead and gone for some three hundred years or so. Over the course of those centuries, many kingdoms rose up across Europe. The largest of these was that of the Frankish Carolus Magnus – Karl der Grosse in the eastern half of his empire, what would come to be Germany, Austria, et cetera, and which was known as East Francia in my time; or Charles-le-magne in the western half, modern France or West Francia. That dynasty was on it's last legs by 900.

Charlemagne conquered and christianized most of Europe – it wasn't for nothing that they called the corpse of his empire Christiandom for centuries after. Because he was a Frank and it was their tradition, he divided his empire into three parts to give to his sons: the West, East, and Italy, the former kingdom of the Lombards. It's complicated and doesn't especially matter, you might say – except to illustrate the mindset of rulers of my time and the centuries to follow – but the Carolingian kings were, by and large, murderous fuckheads who spent their reigns fighting one another in petty familial squabbles that crippled their kingdoms.

Thus it is that by Charles, affectionately known as the Simple, West Francia is more of a geographical identifier than a cultural or societal one. West Francia has broken apart into dozens of duchies, all competing for the Carolingian throne. East Francia still maintains the moniker given to Charlemagne and his kingdom by the Pope of his day: the Holy Roman Empire. Even though the city of Rome was independent even then of the Empire. This kingdom was only slightly less turbulent. The current king was Louis the Child – aptly titled, because he was seven years old when he was corronated – that same year, the 900^th of Our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. He inherited his kingdom from Arnulf of Carinthia, who was the illigitimate great-grandson of Louis the Pious, the son who inherited the kingdom from Charlemagne.

The kingdoms of Burgundy and Provence, those parts of modern southern France, were itching to esxand their reigns. If it was true that Charles, Rudolph, or Louis – of West Francia, Burgundy, and Provence, respectively – wanted Italy, then there would be only one means of ingress into the kingdom: through the Alps, west of Turin. They might skirt them to the south, going into Liguria, but the coast could be risky, and it would be more difficult to reach Pavia that way. I am sure that Pavia is the target, because Pavia is the former Lombard capital. If someone could take it from Berengar, they would take a major source of his power.

Even if Adalbert weren't conspiring against him.

I'm standing in the afternoon sun, just outside the door to Caesar's. If any of the pirates had come out, they might have tripped over me. I feel good. Accomplished. Like I need to be doing something other than what I am. My mind shifts from the problem of Pepin and the potential of what the hell had just happened to me to that of what I was going to do with the rest of the day.

What else was there to do in Venice?

I didn't know, and I didn't get a chance to think about it before I saw him again: the little boy. Maybe eight years old by his size. Barely visible and unmoving in the shadows. Staring right at me. Then I blink and he's just gone.

What is he? Some kind of ghost?

When you jump immediately to ghosts as explanations for something this simple, you're just being lazy.

Or giving yourself a reason not to think about it too much.

I start walking toward the alley where I saw the boy. Knowing that he would be nowhere nearby by the time I got there.

I left my father's home at six years old. Too young. I should have died. Instead I made it to Medieval London. I thought I was going to make myself a hero. That I would be like Beowulf or Arthur. I can remember the streets of London. The great wealth of the city. Perhaps it was not splendid, it was under too-constant attack by the Northerners for that. But it was, for the British Isles, then, as places like New York and Paris and California – and, yes, London – are today: cities where dreams go either to be realized, or to die. The Danes would come to take full control the city the year after I left. But, like all cities, where there is great wealth, there is great poverty. Nothing can exist without its opposite. I remember what it was like for a homeless child. The desperation, the starvation.

Lots of children did things I did not – either because I had not had the opportunity or because I had not had the necessity. Children are not incapable of violence – even evil. You get a group of humans together, no matter their collective age, and they are still human. And there are and will always be those who will use whatever advantage they have over those disadvantaged to them, those with power who would buy – or take – what they should not want. In these ways and many more, children who do not have the security of a family are at the unkind universe's mercy. I got lucky. But maybe I was skilled as well.

Not skilled enough, as it would turn out.

That boy is no ghost. I am sure of it – he's watching me.

I'd done plenty of that kind of work as a boy. Enough to feel a measure of nostalgia that my life had come full circle – now I'm the one being watched by a street child. Not so much nostalgia that I lost myself in memories.

I was right. The boy is gone.

He's probably still somewhere where he can see me, though. I resist the urge to look around with more than my eyes. That is, to visibly give away that I'm looking for him. Not because I want him to think I'm not looking for him – too late for that, likely. I'd just prefer to think he's laughing less hard at me this way.

Venice is best traveled by boat. If only because the land routes through it are plain and boring: the decorated facades of most of the buildings are facing the water. But it's not called the City of Bridges for nothing.

I wanted to know who the boy worked for. And I was going to find out. Was it Metus? Peitho? Her mother? The Master? Some other conspirator – someone conspiring against me or whose conspiracy I am in danger of tripping over?

Who wants me followed, and why?

This is the question I spend the better part of the afternoon obsessing over. Everything else can wait.

I could tell myself that making my way among the poor, asking them about Pepin and Peitho and Metus and the boy and anything else I could come up with is actually an attempt to make a thorough investigation. But of course it isn't. Most of the people I talk to are half- or mostly-mad or know nothing. Of course they wouldn't. But they are people I can give gold coins to conspicuously enough that the boy can see – and get jealous – but not so conspicuously that I might draw a crowd – or a gang.

It doesn't take long. I've been seeing the boy more often, and the greed on his face is as obvious as it is ugly.

I do learn some things. I stumble into one of the places Pepin has spent his time. If the half-mad man in rags with the pet rats I speak with can be believed at all. People will often say just about anything if they get the chance. No one has seen Peitho or Metus. And of course no one saw the girls die or Pepin working on their bodies. But I hadn't expected them to. Nearly everyone knows about the girls, though. Hard not to, I think. None of them had theories of what was going on that jived in any way with my dreams, so I gave them no heed, and will not be reporting them.

Eventually I find myself alone, at a dead end in a complex maze of alleys and backways. Seating myself on a broken barrel, I wait.

The boy has a choice to make. He can risk me finding some way out of here and losing me for a time, or he can come find me. If he does that, he must know that he will have to expose himself from hiding. There is no way he doesn't know I'm hunting him at this point. Even a stupid person would know, and you can't be both a child and stupid while also being homeless or you will quickly be dead. The question is whether he thinks he can liberate me from my coin. The answer is, I learn not long later, yes – he thinks he can.

He appears at the mouth of the alley.

Dirty and wearing tattered clothes, he stands there, staring at me with wide, clear eyes which dominate his face.

“You came,” I say with a smile.

He nods. His body is small, but his face is not that of an eight or ten year-old. By the set of his jaw, the hard defiance of his face, worn that way by years of this life, I imagine he must be closer to fifteen, his body immatured by malnutrition.

“You want to come talk with me?” I ask.

He shakes his head slowly no.

I suddenly wish I had food. This would be so much easier with something sweet. Instead, I pull out a coin – he can always buy whatever he wants to eat with that.

“Aw. Why not? I don't want to hurt you.” I pause, looking down at the coin, then back at him stupidly. “Do you want my gold?”

He nods.

I pull out a second so that he can see it, then toss him the first. He catches it and it's gone with hardly a second between.

I've always liked kids. Maybe it's remembering what I was like as a child, maybe it's something else. Who knows. But I think I like this one especially – most certainly because he reminds me of me. I was never the shy type. Quiet, maybe. But I didn't get caught by the Master because I was shy. This kid has guts. Skill. He's been doing this long enough to know exactly how to make people like me underestimate him. Then he strikes. I amuse myself by imagining him as a sort of king of the street urchins – the best of the best, the elite of the child underworld.

“You want to come talk to me?”

No.

“Hmm. “Well, we can talk like this, if you want.”

Nod.

“All right. Now we're getting somewhere! Can you speak?”

“Yes.” His voice is low, but clearly audible.

“What's your name? I'm Robert.”

“I know who you are, Robert Longshore. Call me Domitian.”

I raise my eyebrow as he says this. Another person who knows too much about me. Why am I not surprised?

“Domitian!” I exclaim. “Now there's a name you don't hear every day. Do you know who else had that name?”

“Yes. He was an emperor. And a master archer.” He holds his head high, his eyes proud.

Hm. What a thing to know about a man assassinated and made into a paranoid tyrant. But I'm distracting myself with trivia.

“You want to tell me why you've been following me today, Domitian?”

He shakes his head solemnly no.

“How about for one of these?” I show him the coin. He doesn't react. “How about for two?” Still nothing. Ah, what the Hell. I toss them to him.

I hadn't expected him to say anything, but I'm still disappointed. This is pointless. Why am I wasting my time with this?

“I know where she is staying.”

I blink, looking back to Domitian. “Who?”

“The tall woman in the foreign dress. Very pretty.”

That could be dozens of women. We were in Venice – possibly the trade capital of Christendom. How many women could I imagine were tall and also dressed funny? Exactly one. Was he talking about Peitho? He doesn't recognize her name, but nods furiously as I describe her.

“Is she paying you to follow me?”

He blinks.

I should have known better than to think it would be that easy to discover his employer. But with the bait he dangled in front of my face, I can't say that I especially care who his employer is anymore. Although I no longer think that I am dealing with just a child. This person, young-looking though he is, is clearly quite savvy. Maybe I imagined right – maybe he is the best of them.

He's involved in this somehow.

Only one way to find out.

“Can you take me to her?”

Domitian holds out his hand, palm up.

“More?” I laugh.

The boy lifts his hand in front of his face and extends all five of the digits, palm now facing me.

“Fine. Five more. But I'm walking them over to you.”

He reaches the hand to arm's length, palm pressing toward me.

I sigh. “Fine.” I toss him five more coins.

Peitho really had given me a lot, but I'm down to the last handful or two. No big deal. They weren't mine anyway, and if she could be believed, there were many more where these came from. Tomorrow, hopefully. Then I could head east. I could get the fuck out of here and anywhere anyone involved might be willing to venture to search for me.

“Follow me,” the boy says. “Do not try to catch me. I will disappear. Do not lose me. I will not wait.” Then he's off.

I scramble after him. Immediately I think I have lost him. After that, keeping up isn't so hard. In fact, it's easy enough that as we wind through the streets and backways of Venice, my mind does a little wandering through backways of its own.

The Master. I haven't let myself reminisce about him, about my life with him, nearly since I left him. Those memories I've tried to bury under emotions like anger and betrayal. And yet, here I am, following a street rat child, lost in my memory of the day I met the Master.

We did not meet, so to speak. I was an eight year-old ragamuffin, evidently very little different from Domitian. The Master, when I first saw him, was just an old man in a grey robe. The baldness of his pate, the white hair which fell from the lower-back of his skull and his face were only indicators of his advanced age, the slowness of which I thought I might exploit for my own gain. I don't know how he caught me picking his pockets. He didn't catch me in the act. He didn't even seem to notice me. Then, as I was making my escape, his coin purse in my hand, he catches me gently by the arm and tells me simply to give it back.

I don't know what he saw in me. As I'm following Domitian, I'm thinking about Metus. He said something about it being unfortunate his Grand Magus – whoever that is – didn't find me before the Master. Was the Master looking for me? Would he have offered to take me away, to educate and train me – the way he did that night – regardless of how we met? I've never thought about this before. I always thought it was a coincidence. A happy twist of fate. Something like that. No matter how many times the Master told me there is no such thing as a coincidence, everything happens for a reason, all those magical thinking things which I summarily and cleverly taught myself to dismiss and disprove. Would he have found me eventually? Was my picking his pocket even my choice? Was it a happy accident of destiny – or was it fated to happen no matter what I had done? There is a way to interpret the past which says that, yes, it was destined.

But that's what destiny is – those things that have happened which seem like they couldn't have not happened.

I amuse myself with a fantasy that the boy could be my me. I could rescue him from this life. I could make him my assistant – the Robin to my Batman. An especially amusing prospect, because I was planning on running the Hell away – not establishing a new franchise.

Eventually Domitian ducks into some shadows on the periphery of a plaza in one of the richest parts of the city and waves me over to join him. I duck down with him, cognizant of how silly it must look to see a man my size, dressed how I am, working so hard to make himself invisible alongside a dirty child – in what evidently is the rich part of town. Domitian points across the plaza to a huge, multi-storied building, its facade a honeycomb of windows.

“There.”

There isn't a thought associated with my staring reverie. When I realize that I have been silent and motionless too long, I look to where the boy was. Domitian is gone. Before I can again wonder whether he were a ghost or some figment of my imagination, my hand reaches for Peitho's purse. It's gone.

That little scamp robbed me!

I laugh a little, shaking my head. I have to hand it to him – if I were thinking someplace in my mind that he could be my second, he'd proved just how far away I was from mastering him.