The Pearls That Were His

  Eyes

  a Tale of Cittàvecchio

  By Ian Andrews

  1

  Ian Andrews has asserted his right under the Copyrights

  Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of

  this work.

  The passages beginning each chapter quoted from The Waste

  Land are copyright © T.S. Eliot and no challenge to that

  copyright is intended or implied.

  First published in the UK in 2008 by

  TATTERDEMALION PRESS

  Red Door, 12 Ardencote Road,

  Birmingham B13 0RN

  This electronic book release © 2010

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by

  way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or

  otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in

  any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is

  published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978-1-4466-4000-5

  Typeset in Garamond. Printed and Bound in Great Britain by

  Lulu.com

  2

  Prologue: Unreal City

  3

  Unreal City

  Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

  A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so

  many,

  I had not thought death had undone so

  many.

  Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

  And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

  T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 60-65

  The night mists of Cittàvecchio are legendary.

  It’s said (by those who live safe and far from the oldest,

  waterlogged quarters) that every night the Tattered King

  throws his cloak over the ancient and crumbling city, his

  constant lover and royal consort. Centuries ago, those

  gossips and harpies say, the Old Gods tried and failed to

  wash her iniquities away with their great deluge; she

  endured, half-drowned, half-dead, knee deep in silt and

  floodwater, a sunken shadow of her Imperial past. Half

  one thing and half another; astride the divide between

  what is and what could have been. Such borderlands are the

  places where the eldritch and wondrous can sometimes

  slip through the cracks; the place where the realm of the

  Tattered King touches our own more mundane world for

  good and for ill.

  And in his ragged winding-shroud, in the fog that clings

  to the water of her flooded streets and mossy canals,

  things not wholly of this dull and dreary world

  sometimes occur.

  4

  The pious call them miracles and gloss over their more

  sinister connotations. The old nobility of the Cittàvecchi

  are skilled at putting masks on things. Indeed, they are

  famous for their masquerades and their carnivals; the

  polite diplomacy; the inevitable stiletto clenched in the

  iron fist – velvet glove optional, but it had better be of

  the most exquisite fashion. Famous, if not infamous, for

  the beautiful and terrible history of their drowned and

  undying city. And, of course, famous for their elegant

  masks.

  Old Cittàvecchio, the ancient Imperial capital. Now in

  drowned and faded splendour; with its bells and towers

  and flooded streets, with its mossy statues and its

  mournful cloak of night mist. A city of quiet magic,

  unregarded by those inured to the miraculous or

  determined not to see it. But for every haughty and

  disdainful mask in the salons of the upper city, turning

  their back on the traditions and the quiet sorceries of the

  city for the new sciences, there is another who

  remembers to bow before crossing a bridge and who pays

  respect to the spirits of deep water.

  If you know where to look, they say (and who are you to

  argue with Them?) there is a courtyard where late at

  night the statue of a lion in combat with a snake dance in

  battle for their own secret amusement. Up a tiny and

  disregarded canal there was once a walled garden in

  Imperial times; there you can find a small pool where the

  Undines come to wash the long weeds of their hair in the

  dark of the new moon. And if you scramble over the

  right rooftops when that selfsame moon is full, you can

  find a walled courtyard with no entrances or exits -

  within, silent dancers trapped forever in a slow and

  stately measure like the marionettes of the city’s famous

  5

  commedia puppet plays dance a solemn and mournful

  pavane, in clothes that were the very height of fashion

  three hundred years ago. In the catacombs and cellars of

  the Palazzo d’Annunzione on the Grand Concourse,

  legend tells of a great war of frogs and mice, every year,

  conducted with cavalry charges, military uniforms and

  pipers. To see it, they say, is to be granted a free and full

  passport into Cittàvecchio’s secret world of wonder. But

  be careful: once the unreal has brushed your shoulder, the

  real is never quite sufficient again.

  There are temples, everywhere, old places of devotion, if

  one only knows where to look (and looks with the eyes

  of a native of Cittàvecchio). Ten places within a minute’s

  walk of the docks where old gods were once worshipped

  – the old fane to Apollo; the stone sacred to Poseidon

  now half-drowned on the edge of the lagoon; the

  weathered crypt sacred to Erebus and Nix, the sons of

  Chaos, deep below the Cathedrale; the ancient

  Mithraeum, temple to a soldier’s god, on the edge of the

  Rookeries. It is rumoured that if you walk three times

  round the Pillar of the Winged Bull in the Piazza,

  between the tenth and twelfth strikes of the campanile at

  midnight, you can see the Cathedrale as its Imperial

  builders intended –and you can behold with your inner

  eye the sacred geometry of the city’s holy places. It is also

  said that such a sight will cause you to run mad. And

  everyone knows someone who knows someone who ran

  mad. Or so they say.

  (And who are you to argue with Them?)

  And of course, everywhere you look - from the name of

  the ruling House to the skewed trident symbol of the

  Trinity; from the fortune-telling cards made in imitation

  of the legends, to the sacred spaces of the city laid to his

  6

  design; even in the masks that all the Cittàvecchi wear -

  there are echoes of the Re Stracciati, the Last King, the

  King in Tatters. Like the proverbial ghost at the feast,

  there are signs of his passage everywhere; hints of his

  presence. Though one never catches a glimpse of

  anything more than his ragged mantle vanishing around a

  corner, or his mocking mask seen from an ancient

  carving, weathered and worn but still watchful. Some

  things in its past Cittàvecchio is not proud of, but the city

  does not forget.

  This, though, is an Age of Reason. Such myths and

  legends are dismissed by the intelligentsia in their salons

  and their cafes on the edge of the Grand Piazza. The mists

  come up in the spring from the marshes and smother the

  city for a while on their way out to the open sea. Simply

  weather, nothing more, they say, and raise laughing masks

  to hide their faces from their fellows. But to the folk of

  the Old Quarter, crammed together ten to a room in the

  warren of decrepit and decaying buildings they call the

  Rookeries, the night mists bring more than a whiff of old

  legend and a promise of mystery. To them, the cloying

  fog is a pillow pressed over their face, a distemper

  creeping into their souls and colouring them grey.

  Or, on occasion, red.

  * * *

  The actor cursed richly and with fervour as the last of his

  coin was swept up from the gaming table by the laughing

  Dane. Fortunately for propriety, his profanity was

  largely lost in the tumult of the crowded gambling-house,

  7

  and in any case, swallowed whole by the Dane’s laughter,

  an avalanche from behind a great quivering red beard. He

  and his shipmates had openly boasted that they had

  washed their dice in the fountain below the statue of

  Merkuri with his staff and had prayed to the old pagan

  god for the luck of the bones. Perhaps the old trickster

  was listening, for they had taken on the entire clientele of

  the Red Lion over the cou rse of the evening and thus far

  at least they had profited richly from their endeavours.

  The dice had been changed three times, when complaints

  at the Danes’ luck became too strident, and what’s more

  it was said that the Lion was under a benedizione, a charm

  that prevented the tricks of gamblers. Rumour had it that

  the Duca’s brother, the Lord Seneschal, had paid for the

  benedizione himself after nearly losing his favourite horse

  to a card sharp in the back-room salon there a few years

  ago, but like many such rumours it may just have been

  clever promotion by Barocchio Iron-Gut, the proprietor.

  A man with whom wise men did not trifle, and a man

  who kept a most accurate and detailed tally of all wagers

  and debts made in his establishment. Barocchio had

  become one of the city’s most successful bookmakers by

  extending lines of credit to those who could ill afford to

  take them – such as actors with a compulsion to gamble

  against those enjoying a lucky streak - and then pursuing

  a most vigorous and on occasions quite visceral schedule

  of repayments. He was into Barocchio for forty ducats,

  and both of them knew that tomorrow would be a

  desperate scramble for funds. Barocchio was not known

  to be tolerant of debtors for long and his reach was

  impressive.

  It had been a long night and he had been spending faster

  than was prudent, trying to bury the memories of the

  afternoon performance. Of all the times to dry, when the

  8

  Donna Ophelia di Gialla was in the audience… the Duca’s

  sister and, it was whispered, the real power behind the

  throne; orbited by her suitors and hangers-on. Half the

  court had come to see his Lussurioso in The Revenger’s

  Tragedy but his performance had been mediocre; his cues

  mistimed, his attention elsewhere. What should have

  been a chance to make a mark, to expand his patronage

  outside the circle of the Lord Seneschal’s Men had been

  carelessly squandered.

  The mood in the city wasn’t exactly conducive to theatre

  at the moment. Even a group as well-connected as the

  Seneschal’s Men needed to be careful; they had been

  advised against showing Revengers but had gone ahead

  anyway – and now, mirroring the events of the play, it

  seemed, one of the leading lights of the city’s political

  scene, Lord Feron, had been arrested for treason by the

  feared and infamous Tartary Guards and swiftly tried and

  executed before his supporters could muster in any

  numbers. The Duca, it was said, was watching the

  theatres and the old city carefully, waiting for signs of the

  promised rebellion; such things often began among the

  intelligentsia and Feron was much loved among the

  poorer sections of the populace.

  He had not died well, or easily, according to the rumours.

  The city’s mood was hard to read, now; but every night

  the play went on, the actors had watched the audience

  nervously. The nobility avoided the play; the Captain of

  the Guard was seen in the upper circle hard-faced and

  clearly not there to appreciate the art. It is a bad time to

  be an actor in a political satire, when the events of the

  real world are more fantastic than anything you portray.

  So the arrival of the Duca’s sister and her hangers-on…

  well, that could have meant a number of things. And,

  9

  whichever of them it meant, it had not done wonders for

  his performance.

  He felt around in the bottom of his pouch, hoping to find

  a loose piastre coin caught in the seam; to no avail. A long

  walk back to the theatre lodgings, then, no comfortable

  boat ride and no whore. And through the Rookeries, not

  exactly the safest part of the city nowadays…

  The leader of the red-haired sailors, a mountain of a man

  whose speech was fiercely accented but intelligible, raised

  his tankard, and called for another round of drinks for all

  who had lost money to him that night; " Gut sport, no ill

  feelinks, gut sport!"

  One more drink then. Can’t do any harm. Recoup a little

  of the lost coin…

  "Abelard, isn’t it? Gianni Abelard, of the Lord

  Seneschal’s Men?"

  He turned to regard the man next to him at the bar who

  had spoken. At first glance he was dressed much as most

  of the rest of the clientele of the gambling-house; plain

  blacks and greys in heavy wool and leather; sensible dress

  for a cold wet night. It was the quality of the clothes that

  gave it away; tradesmen and artisans could seldom afford

  silk shirts or soft leather gloves tucked at a jaunty angle in

  the belt. And few in the lower city wore their hair pulled

  tightly back into the aristocratic topknot nowadays.

  Good enough to deflect a casual glance, but to an

  observer, far too fashionable for dockside. One of

  Barocchio’s special customers, a patron of his fabled Blue

  Room. Abelard stood up straighter.

  "My Lord d’Orlato; I had no idea you would be here."

  10

  The young nobleman smiled, but it never reached his

  cold blue eyes. "There is a… private game in the back

  room; Lord Prospero is once more wiping the floor with

  all comers at cards. I prefer to gamble when there is at

  least a small chance I will not lose; and of course

  Prospero’s forfeits can be quite the spectacle.” The

  nobleman’s eyes flicked across to the sailors, loudly and

  raucously distributing their alcoholic charity to the

  crowd. “I see I am not the only one whom the Lady has

  not smiled upon this evening..."

  Gianni assumed a carefully schooled, neutral expression.

  "Alas too true, my Lord. Dame Fortune’s face was turned

  away from me this eve; coin has fled from me like a sailor

  from a pregnant whore. I rely now upon the charity of

  those who vanquished me for even the simple pleasures of

  a beer."

  Again, the smile that left the icy eyes untouched. "I

  hardly think an actor of your calibre will want for

  employment or the gold it brings for long, Abelard.

  Those who patronise the stage speak highly of your

  talents."

  "But not you, my Lord?"

  Lord d’Orlato’s eyes were moving, his interest in the

  conversation seemingly spent. "No, Abelard. Not me. I

  prefer my pleasures more honest." He gestured to the

  curtained door into the back room of the Red Lion, from

  which a great commotion could be heard. "Go with the

  Father, Gianni Abelard, and buy yourself a drink." He

  flipped a ducat in the air; Abelard snatched the coin with

  well-practiced ease before it reached the top of its arc.

  "You never know when your next one might be."

  11

  Abelard watched the nobleman make his way across the

  crowded floor to the curtained doorway of the fabled

  Blue Room and nod to the burly minders before passing

  through. It was said that the young Lord Gawain

  d’Orlato was the favoured protégé of the Lord Seneschal

  himself; perhaps even a possible successor to the famously

  childless Old Man. But the Lord Seneschal was well

  known as a patron of the arts, especially of the stage.

  Lord Gawain was more famous for his appetites than his

  patronage. Why would he notice, much less recognise, an

  actor?

  I have been marked, thought Abelard. Marked for great

  things in the future. Perhaps today has not been a complete

  waste…

  He turned to the bar, and ordered himself another beer.

  The night was young, and provided he avoided any

  further flirtation with Dame Fortune, the change from a

 

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