The Walls and Hands
In the tavern Five Florentines, brother Antonio Bosio flagged his old friend Gianantonio Bonaldi with a shout, fell upon him with greetings, kissed him on both cheeks, showered him with questions, and offered him the house’s best wine, which by chance came from Crete where Bonaldi also called home, Venetian as he was.
Brother Antonio Bosio was a renaissance man, a real mover. He could get by with most of the languages spoken in these parts, was known by most of the merchants, knights, servants and spies who roamed about here, and was best friends with anyone who could give the Religion any help—the saints would not forget—a proven connoisseur of all the Mediterranean’s wines, boats, and pirates, and trusted with many dangerous and delicate tasks by his Grand Master. Among the serving brothers of Saint John of Jerusalem’s Order, he had held a unique position for many years that gave him a great deal of exemptions. In principle this was enough to arouse suspicion, but as far as anyone could tell, his childlike enchantment with serving his order and his Grand Master never waned.
He had met this Gianantonio Bonaldi one blistery evening on a dock in Chios. They had both been in the same straits, no ship heading home and at risk of being locked up by the Genovese Castellan, who at that moment was almost as irritated with the order of St. John as he had always been with the Venetians. Brother Antonio had convinced a Greek fisherman to take them with promises of a gratuity greater than a poor fisherman’s income for half a year. They split for the sea in the midst of a storm and darkness, and that also helped. When they were seized by a Venetian force outside of Negroponte, they cleared themselves using Bonaldi’s good name, and when they fell into the hands of the old pirate Santolino (who, aside from Turks, captured any and all Venetian vessels), Antonio Bosio took him in arms, thumped him on the back, and reminded him of all the fun they had had together that winter. Then Santolino took them to Rhodes, escaping the Turkish fleet, which set out to take him dead or alive. They continued to Lango, escaping all the Turks, and once more finding themselves in the galley benches (which, of course, was always a risk when sailing these waters). From Lango, Antonio helped his newly won friend continue to Crete despite the fact that the order’s relationship with Venice had hit a new low point. The Venetians declared that members of St. John’s, disguised as pirates, captured one of their ships while Rhodes indignantly replied that they completely fabricated this story in order to hide that they were playing under the covers with the unbelievers and put their good before their religion, always playing by the old maxim, Veneziani, poi Christiani. Venetians first, then Christians.
Now they sat there and drank their good wine. Gianontonio Bonaldi had come from Crete with a boatload of wheat, wine, oil, and gunpowder, all marketable wares in Rhodes, particularly after winter when the shipping had slowed down. Stores were lacking and prices climbed. It was his first time in Rhodes and Brother Antonio invited him to see the city in all its glory.
“You must see the Grand Master’s garden. When I was a boy, there were real ostriches there. The Grand Turk had given them to the blessed Grand Master d’Aubusson. They would eat scrap iron, you know, and laid eggs as big as your head in the sand. They never brooded over them. They only stirred them. They hatched by themselves. And there was a rare dog that also came from the Sultan. It was as big as a greyhound and gray as a rat without a hair on its body except for the nose, and so fastidious that it never ate meat that hadn’t been slaughtered the same day. Man, it could jump too! As high as you are tall.”
“Is it still there?” Bonaldi asked a little skeptically.
“No, it died of offence when Carretto became Grand Master. It could not suffer the Piedmonts.”
Brother Antonio paid generously. He kept his vow of apostolic poverty, at least in such a way that he insisted on paying if he had any money.
“Then we will go to the walls,” he decided. “You have to see Carretto’s new tower.”
They went through the city district that had been the Jewish ghetto and brother Antonio narrated.
“This is where Misac Pascha broke through in 1480. They successfully shot the Italian wall to pieces, came through the breach, and made it here. But d’Aubusson had allowed them to destroy the houses from here to the wall and stack up the stones as an emergency wall. There were as many Turks in the breach and on the walls as there are bees in a beehive. You couldn’t see any space between them. The Grand Master stood in the midst of the worst crowding. He swept and hacked as if he were harvesting grain until he took a pike in the side. It went straight into the lung and he came close to dying. Afterwards, he was sick for a long time. But we saved ourselves, thanks to Signor San Giovanni Battista and God’s Holy Mother. They revealed themselves, you know, here up in the heavens.”
He looked straight up.
“You really saw them?”
“Not our people. They stood right under them, and they had other things to do just then. But from the bottom of the moat and the crest on the other side they saw them clearly. The prisoners and deserters told us afterwards. That is why they gave up and fled.”
Bonaldi nodded thoughtfully; he did not belong to the gullible.
They went up the long ladder to the wall’s crown, thirty-two rungs high. There the Venetian stood, surprised and overwhelmed.
“But this is a city square!” he said.
He was right. On both sides of the wall expanded strada di rondo connecting the walkways to the crest, broader than the city’s broadest street. Fifty men could easily walk there, shoulder to shoulder. They were still working higher up, and the path was cluttered with stone blocks, tools, slaves, and stoneworkers, whose chisels clinked against the stones like a final extended bird trill of steel clangs and hammer hits. Through the windows you could see the dark blue sea. It was wide open, shining white and completely level. Only the breastwork along the outer edge cast a blue shadow. The cannons stuck out their round tails with even space. A patrol of guards went on their usual rounds with shiny pikes and their metal hats nodding.
“This is our wall,” brother Antonio said with pride. “Posta d’Italia, the portion that the Italian langue defends. Carretto allowed all this to be done. See, just twelve steps behind the old wall they have built up a new one and the whole space is filled with stone, mortar splinters, and clay stamped and packed hard so that it is as hard as solid ground. This time it won’t break open so easily.”
“Are you so sure they are coming?”
“Sooner or later. But come now, you should see the best. He went to the crest and looked through one of the cannon ports.”
“All French embrasure of the latest model, twelve feet thick and beveled on the outside so that their damned stone balls will come to naught and bounce away.”
“There aren’t any shield shutters to let down,” said Bonaldi competently.
“We have done away with those. They are only in the way. Do you see? All the holes are slanted. They are so long and narrow that it is almost as easy to get a shot through them as to stand two feet from a door and look through the keyhole. And yet they still cover the whole terrain out there. So finely calculated, they are.”
Brother Antonio had climbed up on the guard wall and dragged his friend after him. The Venetian stood speechless again. He had never even imagined a moat like this. It was like a river between perpendicular paths crossing through a mountain massif. And in this valley the new tower jutted out, a massive center tower surrounded by something just as giant-like circling around to the east, not quite as high and completely polished, but a single vast edge. Only at
