elegant?” asked brother Antonio.
“In its way,” answered Bonaldi cautiously. While he thought that former fortress builders would turn in their graves if they knew that such peasant-like work would replace their proud tower.
“We also have the world’s best fortress builders. Because Carretto called Basilio della Scuolo here, but the Emperor will certainly want him back now. And our own Zuenio is no hack either. You should see his map, which Luigi d’Andugar brought with him to the Pope when he left three weeks ago. Made of plaster, you know. So that one can take in the towers and the boulevard with the curtains, defenses, and barbicans and everything modeled to scale precisely as it is. Currently, we are the foremost in the world.
“I wonder,” said the Venetian. “We have a man in Crete who can outdo whoever he wants.”
“Who would that be?”
“His name is Martinengo Gabriele Tadini da Martinengo. He was sent by the signor in order to look over our fortresses. He looks at fortresses the way we others look at women. It is immediately clear to him what a person needs to do to conquer them or to stop those who will try it. He sees exactly where the balls will hit and what needs to be done for protection. You can ask him to calculate with twenty pieces or a hundred. He knows at once where to place them and what they can do.”
“We need that man here.”
“But I don’t believe you can have him. The Duke of Crete is very firm that no one may take service above him. He does not want to upset the Turks.”
They stepped down from the walls again, and went across through the city a short ten-minute walk to the opposite wall that separated the convent, the order’s city, from the business district. The Venetian was surprised by all the new houses.
“Did the Turks do such great damage?”
“Only in one district. Worse was the earthquake that hit it the following year.”
Bonaldi remembered. There had been a frightening earthquake in 1481, unusually devastating even more so in this sector.
“It is very strange,” he said, “that it should have happened the year just after the great siege.”
“Strange! It was the very same day the Grand Turk died, Mohammed, the arch tyrant. He took Constantinople, and then tried to take us. It is not so strange that the earth buckles a little when great people like that go down to hell.”
Bonaldi looked a little askance at his friend, from the side. It was amazing, what some knew to reply to everything. Brother Antonio had already decided to change the subject.
“Up there in the church, you know, there is John the Baptist’s right hand. The one he baptized the Savior with.”
“How did you get that?”
“From the same Grand Turk that stole it in Constantinople. It was Bajazid who gave it to us so that we would keep his brother Zizimi under the order’s protection. He fled here, as you know. His son Amuratte lived out the remainder of his life in the castle at Ferakles. That was a day, you can be sure, when the Holy Hand came here. The old people still talk about it. There was a procession that went from Porta San Antonio all the way down to the square. There were Flemish tapestries and Turkish rugs hanging from all the windows, and there were garlands between the houses and awnings over the square. They were needed because it was warm. And the Augustinian who preached kept going a long time with all the skill of a rhetorician in three parts, and yet he was still unable to say everything. I have seen it myself, as close to it as I am to you now. It is true what they say, that one can see the teeth marks.”
“The teeth marks?”
“Yes, you don’t know about that? When the hand was in Antioch there was a dragon that plagued the whole district. He mostly ate animals, but to make sure that he would leave the people in peace, they sacrificed one of the citizens every year according to a lottery. One time the lot fell on a poor little girl. Her father was a pious man, and a true worshiper of the Holy Hand, and so he went to it and prayed for help. Then he kissed the hand as was his custom. But this time he took the opportunity and bit the thumb, and a little piece broke off. He baked it in a piece of bread and when the dragon came to devour the girl, he threw the bread in his mouth. The monster choked on the spot. Then he just wheezed and died . . . ”
“I wonder if there are any dragons,” the Venetian said doubtfully. Now he was beginning to speak with caution.
“If there are? Come I will show you!”
Brother Antonio shined triumphantly and dragged his friend with him down behind the church and out through the Anthony’s Gate. They continued along the newly built defenses between the walls and out through the brand new Gate D’Amboise. He took the time during the walk to catch his friend up on all the remaining treasures of the church: a thorn from Christ’s crown of thorns (“It blooms every Good Friday, they say, but I have never seen it”), one of the crosses that Saint Helena allowed to be made from the bronze basin the Savior used when He washed the Disciples’ feet, one of the thirty silver pieces that Judas received (“I have seen it, you can get a wax imprint. It is supposed to help with both childbirth and seasickness”). A great piece of the Holy Cross, an arm of Saint Blasio, one of Saint Stephan, one of Saint George, one of the Apostle Thomas, the head of Saint Eufemia, one of the eleven thousand virgins in Cologne, one of Saint Filomene Vergine, one of the Holy Saint Polycarp . . . ”
But now they had come out on to the drawbridge and brother Antonio looked triumphantly at the dragonhead sitting very prominently, nailed up above the city’s gate. It was old and dried out, but all together terrifying, bigger than a horse’s head with a sneering jaws that went behind the ears showing their malevolent teeth.
“I think that looks like a crocodile,” the Venetian said.
“What is that?”
“A type of great monster that is found in Egypt, in the Nile.”
“There are dragons in Egypt? Among the unbelievers? It serves them right. Precisely what one would have thought.”
“But how did it get here?”
“You don’t know? I thought the whole world knew.”
And while they wandered back through the city, Brother Antonio told the story.
The Dragon in the Marsh
Back when Hélion de Villeneuve was the Grand Master here, there was a dragon that lived in the swamp on the other side of Mt. St. Stefan, only a half hour from here. He harried that area for many years. First only goats vanished and maybe a donkey or two. But then he began to take children. Then someone complained to the Grand Master, who offered a reward to anyone who would take him dead or alive. But he shouldn’t have done that. Some returned, bloody and muddy, and with leg skins torn down to their calves as if they had been tortured. Others were never heard of again. Those who got away would describe it. There was no doubt that it was a dragon, twenty feet long with a tail that could break a horse in pieces when it struck. A manslayer, he ate men like sausage. One man tried to shoot him with the strongest crossbow he could find. It just ricocheted off the horrid knots on his back. It didn’t bother him anymore than if one were to scratch him behind the ears. So everyone knew that he was hexed.
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