[Nick Zuliani 01] - City of the Dead

  Further Titles by Ian Morson

  The Falconer Mysteries

  FALCONER’S CRUSADE

  FALCONER’S JUDGEMENT

  FALCONER AND THE FACE OF GOD

  A PSALM FOR FALCONER

  FALCONER AND THE GREAT BEAST

  FALCONER AND THE RITUAL OF DEATH*

  FALCONER’S TRIAL*

  FALCONER AND THE DEATH OF KINGS*

  The Medieval Murderers

  THE TAINTED RELIC

  SWORD OF SHAME

  HOUSE OF SHADOWS

  *available from Severn House

  CITY OF THE DEAD

  A Nick Zuliani Mystery

  Ian Morson

  First world edition published 2008

  in Great Britain and in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2008 by Ian Morson.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Morson, Ian.

  City of the Dead.

  1. Explorers – Fiction. 2. Bodyguards – Fiction. 3. Murder – Investigation – Fiction.

  4. Mongolia – History – Fiction.

  5. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title

  823.9'14[F]

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6597-7 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-045-7 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  If there is light in the soul, there will be beauty in the person. It there is beauty in the person, there will be harmony in the house. If there is harmony in the house, there will be order in the nation. If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.

  Chinese proverb

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree;

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea

  ‘Kubla Khan’ — S.T. Coleridge

  Thanks for the emergence of this novel go to the two women in my life - Lynda, my long-suffering wife, and Dorothy Lumley, my ever-optimistic agent.

  PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL TEXT OF

  The Life and Travels of Messer Niccolò Zuliani

  Let me tell you about the extraordinary life of the Venetian traveller and explorer, Niccolò Zuliani. Much of what I have written down in this book you will not believe. But it is the God’s truth, copied by me from the lips of Messer Zuliani in the last years of his long and varied life. There is another Venetian, whose name I shall not mention here, whose claims are so unusual that he has truly earned the soubriquet II Milione - Teller of a Thousand Lies. Most are unbelievable, and those that have an element of truth were stolen from his contemporary, and infinite superior, Messer Niccolò Zuliani, who was not able to recall all the events of his full and perfect life. So I have drawn on the recollections of those he lived and worked with, even in some cases his enemies, of which he had many, it must be said. For he was a man of deep convictions, and implacable will, which did not suit those he sought to overcome. I have interwoven others’ stories in the overall narrative, and relate this extraordinary life to you as a story, but believe in its very truth. For every word is accurate.

  Xian Lin, 1299

  AN ENDING

  The butcher is amazed. How can there be so much blood in one small body? Why does he struggle so much? Beasts usually give up their life so easily.

  It fountains up from the slashes, befouling the golden creatures surrounding the two struggling figures. Fabulous beasts from a long and venerable past look on in amazement at the scene, crouching low in horror, and cowering at the sight of so much blood. Ancient dragons hiss as the crimson spout spatters them with its flow. Fantastical beasts with lions’ heads, their heavily maned upper bodies ending in scaly serpents’ tails, flee before the rivers of blood that run across the beaten floor. Not that such fearsome beasts are afraid of such a noisome sight. Oh, no. It is because of the violation perpetrated in such an ancient sanctuary that they shrink back from the stinking flow that threatens to soak their padded paws, and fishy extremities.

  As the bloodletting rends a gaping hole in the stillness of the place, gentler, plainer creatures continue to forage in the undergrowth outside. Until even they catch wind of the scent of death, and raise their homy heads. With nostrils quivering, hart, doe and roebuck trot prudently away from the killing ground not knowing, or caring, that on this occasion they are safe.

  It is human preying upon human.

  It is a cold butchery of cutting and slashing that the victim endures, even though he is quickly beyond pain - beyond recall. One slicing cut follows another, carving up the shocked and dying victim. Soon, he is barely offering any resistance as his life oozes away. His feet slither this way and that in the wet pools of his own life’s blood on the floor beneath him. His breath bubbles one last time through the new mouth in his neck, and his body becomes a dead weight.

  His slayer gasps for breath, realizing the task is done, and lets the body fall. Tired lungs inhale deeply, filling their cavities with the cloying scent of death. The butcher is shocked at the suddenness of the action, and wonders what to do next. This has been so unexpected, in a life that has managed to eliminate the unexpected in the long journey to this point. Yet it has been a necessary task. The feelings should have been of satisfaction, fulfilment, but there is just... emptiness. A great void in the greater emptiness that is contained by the Great Khan’s hollow world. If generation after generation has striven merely to end up at this point, what is the purpose of it all? The butcher’s thought is, Might as well finish it here too.

  But somewhere in the butcher there is a small instinct for self-preservation, a small spark that inhalation still nurtures, kindled into fire by a breath. The fatal lethargy is shaken off, and surveying the surroundings, plans are made. The blood is impossible to wash completely away from the gilded walls, the floor, and the staring beasts. But discovery of this murderous act might still be delayed, if first the body can be hidden. Delay is all that the butcher needs. And it merely involves grabbing the lifeless legs, and dragging the body away.

  1. YI

  If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time

  It was the tenth year of the Pig in the current celestial cycle - Guihai, the end of the great cycle of sixty years. And this morning wasn’t so bad - at least I knew where I was, and something of what I had done last night. I could not have drunk all that much at the Great Khan’s banquet. But then, maybe I had, bearing in mind what I did remember. Had I really volunteered to track down a murderer like some plodding Venetian lawyer? Surely not. I laughed at the idea, though the sound that actually emerged from my lips was more of a hacking cough, wrapped in spittle.

  Then I saw the bundle in the comer of the room, and knew that the nightmare was true. I noticed that the cloth covering the body had been pulled back, and the face left exposed. Also, a bluish arm flopped lifelessly out of the wrappings. The disturbance of the parcel could only have been caused by our Tartar servant, Khadakh, poking his nose in, and satisfying his eternal curiosity. He had attached himself to the household like some faithful hound. No doubt to keep an eye on us for someone.

  As if on cue, Khadakh appeared in the doorway, and looked over questioningly into my eyes. I didn’t feel up to taxing what little com
mand of the Tartar language I had in order to explain. I ignored him. He just shrugged, and dragged himself over to the body. He poked the offending arm with the toe of his boot, and was just about to cover the man’s face, when Friar Alberoni emerged from his chamber.

  He was holding the most precious of his gifts for Kubilai Khan. It was a small vial that contained oil from the lamp in the Sepulchre of God in Jerusalem. Precious it may be, but he almost dropped it when he saw the dead man’s face properly for the first time. Up to now, he had studiously avoided the gruesome remains, but now he looked more closely. He seemed not sure at first, but I could see that a closer examination convinced him. He turned to me, his face drained of all colour.

  ‘This is the man we’ve been looking for. This is Francesco Pisano.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  The friar nodded.

  ‘Look at his black robe. Francesco Pisano is ... well, was ... a Dominican friar. And though he looks much older than I remember, it is after all a few years since I met him in Rome. It was during a mass audience with Pope Alexander the Fourth. At the time of the promulgation of the Pope’s warning about the umm ...’ He glanced nervously over to where Khadakh was busy boiling up some brick tea, and lowered his voice. ‘The Tartar invasion. You remember His Holiness’s “Clamat in auribus" warning us all of the “scourge of Heaven’s wrath in the hands of the inhuman Tartars”.’ Alberoni spoke like that, sort of pompous and righteous all in one. He was especially fond of quoting the Pope. He went to carry on but I silenced him with a look. I didn’t have time for all that flowery talk.

  ‘Still, it has been a few years. And the face is mutilated.’ I wanted him to be sure of his identification. A lot depended on it.

  ‘Yes, it must be over two years since Francesco disappeared off the face of the known Earth. But I would know him anywhere. No, this is him - the man we have come all this way to find.’ The friar groaned. ‘A wasted journey, it seems. Though at least we now know he did find his way to the centre of the Tartar Empire. But what he has done here in the last two years will now remain a mystery.’

  I bent over the figure and gently lifted the wrapping back over the face.

  ‘A mystery? Maybe not. As for our journey being wasted, let’s wait and see.’

  2. ER

  One never needs their humour as much as when they argue with a fool

  Right, back to the beginning. The quirk of fate that had brought me to Shang-tu happened because of my enforced flight from Venice. I had done ... no, it was claimed that I had done ... well, something that needn’t bother you now. Suffice to say, I was suddenly persona non grata in the Serene Republic, and only escaped death by the skin of my teeth. Since then I had had a poor time of it scratching a living on the margins of Venice’s trading empire. With my true name a dangerous invitation to imprisonment and death, I had adopted many over the months, until I had almost forgotten my real identity myself.

  In Sudak I had toiled as middleman in deals that earned me nothing. And worked my arse off as a bodyguard for merchants afraid of the evil reputation of those they traded with, but too greedy to pass up the opportunity for profit.

  Sudak is in Gothia - some call it Crimea - on the northern side of the Black Sea close to Rus. And it was there I had my first brush with the Tartar Empire. An experience that now stood me in good stead. I learned to sup with a long spoon when dealing with those particular devils.

  The trouble was the money poured out of my pockets as fast as it was going in. I seemed to have lost the golden touch that had secured my reputation in Venice. But then, the margins were wafer-thin in Sudak, and the wine expensive. It was soon after my final spectacular trading failure in Sudak that I began to drown my disappointing existence in good wine. Until I could afford the good stuff no longer. I was so poor eventually, that I could only buy the harshest gut-rot alcohol to numb my memories of the good times in Venice. And the lovely Caterina Dolfin. I had been drunk and near to starving, when the friar had pulled me out of the gutter. I had no idea then how Friar Giovanni Alberoni - for years the Zuliani family priest - had even found me. I had been so addled, I had not even quibbled over the friar’s reinstatement of my real name.

  ‘Niccolò Zuliani? Is it really you? I can hardly recognize you.’

  ‘No, not Zuliani. My name’s ... Carrara, Francesco Carrara.’

  ‘Nonsense. I know Francesco Carrara. He’s at least twenty years older than you, and considerably larger in girth.’

  This conversation wasn’t going well, but my drink-soaked brain wasn’t able to come up with a different line, so I let the priest take me back to his lodgings. I knew who he was, even if he had difficulty recognizing me. His piety had bored my father stiff but, as the family priest, he had the ear, albeit reluctantly, of all the Zuliani brothers. Particularly my uncle Matteo, whom I suspect now of sending the friar to save my soul. I was soon to leam that Alberoni had his own reasons for appearing in this arse-end of the crumbling Venetian Empire.

  Let me explain.

  My name is Niccolò Zuliani, once of Venice and more lately of Shang-tu, the summer home of Kubilai Khan, the Great Khan of all the Mongols. Shang-tu is better known as Xanadu, the fabled city of wealth and opulence. How I came to be there is the story I am trying to tell. Which is why I have to go back to Sudak to start the tale, and to the year of our Lord 1262.

  If you saw me now, you would see a tall, red-haired man, thickly bearded in that manly way that the Chinee would consider shockingly animalistic and foreign. Any observer would guess I was in my thirties, despite the fine tracery of lines at the comers of my eyes and mouth. My cheekbones are high and deeply tanned in the way of sailors. My green eye, too, had the faraway look of a sailor. Though some fancied they could also see in them the distant stare of a man with deep pains buried in his soul.

  When Friar Alberoni dragged me out of that gutter outside the drinking den in Sudak’s harbour area, I was not at all like that. I was at what you might call a low ebb. The lowest, in fact, since I had slunk out of Venice under cover of darkness, and at low tide. At low tide you could still cross the Lagoon on foot and unnoticed. And I had needed my exit to be unnoticed. Now, I just wanted to die, and didn’t thank the friar for saving me.

  Until he uttered one word in my ear.

  At first I had not listened much to the friar’s explanation of how he had found me. As I suspected, Uncle Matteo came into it somewhere. But I was too busy working out how I was going to screw some money out of Alberoni to continue my dive into oblivion. I reckoned I could call upon the priest’s sense of duty as the Zuliani family priest to give me enough cash for a square meal. Yes, I would try that on. Priests liked being charitable, after all.

  ‘Are you listening to me, Niccolò?’

  ‘Of course I am. Friar Giovanni. You were saying how much you owed my family.’

  ‘I was saying that I owe it to your uncle to offer you the position of my personal bodyguard. Though, God knows, you are unfit to take care of yourself, let alone another, on such a perilous journey.’

  ‘Perilous . . . ?’ Befuddled as I was, I couldn’t recall what the friar had been talking about, but I didn’t like the thought of that word peril. A risk-taker I might be, and a chancer. But not with my own life. I suddenly felt sick to my stomach, and vomited down the front of the priest’s robe. I passed it off as the raw sewage that I had inhaled in the gutter. And I must have looked a sight then, so I was surprised that Alberoni wanted me to look after him. I must have given the impression I couldn’t look after myself, let alone a man of God who proposed to travel to God knows where. I was filthy, emaciated, covered in the scabs of numerous falls and beatings, and my hair was a mass of lice. But then, Alberoni told me he could not afford the price of a sober bodyguard for such a speculative odyssey. I looked into his eyes, assuming he was making a joke at my expense. There was no humour in them. And as he dabbed fastidiously at my noisome exhalations, Alberoni pressed on.

  ‘It will be a journey to fu
lfil the mission that the Pope himself has charged me with. To go to Tartary. To Xanadu.’

  That was the word that changed it all. I instinctively felt the itch of ducats passing across my palm, and pulled myself together. The heart of every Venetian beats a little faster at the thought of profit, and trade with the Far East - silks, precious stones, salamander cloth, impervious to flames - means big profits. In fact, a Venetian would sell his grandmother to the devil for a profit, and to damn with the fact that successive popes had condemned the Tartars as hell’s spawn. I suddenly reckoned I might even be able to buy myself back into favour in Venice with such riches. I agreed to the commission with alacrity. I had no further left to fall anyway.

  ‘Of course, the place is really called Shang-tu, which merely means Upper Capital in the heathen tongue they speak there.’

  I ignored the friar’s droning catechism, and dreamed of Xanadu. Already it was known as a place of enormous wealth, and I wanted to have some of that wealth rub off on me. After all, it couldn’t be that dangerous, could it?

  ‘And you need a bodyguard, you say?’

  Alberoni nodded, recalling the stories that went round the friary in his youth.

  ‘It is said that the Tartars are anthropophagi - dog-headed cannibals - who eat their victims, and ravish their virgin captives, then cut off their breasts afterwards as dainties for their chiefs.’

  The stories apparently had been told with relish by some of his monastic fellows - especially the part about ravished virgins and violated breasts. And I didn’t doubt they had been the instigation of nocturnal private gropings and moanings under the bedclothes in the dormitory afterwards. But I could tell that for the young Giovanni Alberoni they had been shocking. They had clearly made a lasting impression on him, changing the course of his life. Before then, he told me he had been unsure of his vocation, and had struggled with his studies. After hearing of the Tartars, and their Godless ways, he knew what he had to do.