Sad Times In Malta

• Chapter 1 The Arrival of the Black Wind
• Chapter 2 Whispered Rumors in Valletta
• Chapter 3 The Physician’s Oath
• Chapter 4 Quarantine at the Grand Harbour
• Chapter 5 A City Shrouded in Silence
• Chapter 6 The Madonna’s Tears
• Chapter 7 Shadows Over Mdina
• Chapter 8 The Bells of St. John's
• Chapter 9 The Merchant’s Desperate Bargain
• Chapter 10 The Plague Doctor’s Mask
• Chapter 11 Children of the Fever
• Chapter 12 A Candle in the Dark
• Chapter 13 The Inquisitor’s Edict
• Chapter 14 Secrets of the Catacombs
• Chapter 15 The Exiled Knight Returns
• Chapter 16 The Siege of the Infirmary
• Chapter 17 Blood on the Maltese Stone
• Chapter 18 The Lament of the Lazzaretto
• Chapter 19 A Prayer for the Dying
• Chapter 20 The Governor’s Decree
• Chapter 21 The Unseen Hand
• Chapter 22 The Last Procession
• Chapter 23 Ashes on the Ramparts
• Chapter 24 The Healer’s Redemption
• Chapter 25 Dawn After the Darkness
• Chapter 26 Echoes of Sad Times

The wind began three days before the sails appeared on the horizon, blowing out of the south-southeast with the heavy, unwashed breath of the Barbary coast. The Maltese called it the xlokk, though by the second afternoon the porters along the Marina were calling it something far less polite. It was a suffocating air, thick with red dust scooped up from the African deserts, coating the tongue with the taste of dry clay and turning the waters of the Grand Harbour the color of bruised pewter. The stone ramparts of Valletta, built from pale globigerina limestone that usually shone like fresh butter in the sun, absorbed the heat until the streets felt like the inside of a bread oven just after the embers have been raked away.

Salvatore Bonnici sat behind a trestle table under the low stone arches of the Barriera, the water-gate where foreign sailors were obliged to present their papers without setting foot upon the island. Salvatore was forty-two years old, possessed of a wife who spoke four dialects of Italian and six children who spoke none, and he had served the Health Magistracy—the Magistrato della Sanità—for twenty years. His left leg was slightly shorter than his right, the souvenir of a fall from a ship’s rigging in his youth, which gave him an uneven, rocking gait that caused the water-taximen to call him Il Cammello, though never to his face.

On his desk sat three iron trays. One held sea-sand for blotting; the second held sulfur sticks; the third was filled with sharp white wine vinegar, gray with the drowned carcasses of midges that had plunged in to escape the dust. Beside the trays lay a pair of long iron tongs, polished to a dull sheen by grease and use. Salvatore’s principal duty in life was to pick up pieces of paper with these tongs, plunge them into the vinegar to cleanse them of pestilence, and then hang them on a wire line to dry before handing them to his superiors. It was not glorious work, but it was steady, and it kept him out of the sun.

"Not a rowing boat moving between here and Fort Saint Angelo," remarked Toni, an oarsman whose skin had been cured by salt and sun to the shade of an old saddle. Toni was leaning against a bollard, whittling a piece of pine that smelled faintly of turpentine. "The water is like mutton fat. If a man fell in, he wouldn’t drown; he’d merely stick."

Salvatore picked up a feather quill, trimmed the nib with a small curved knife, and set it down again without answering. Answering Toni only encouraged him, and Toni possessed an inexhaustible store of observations regarding the weather, the price of dried broad beans, and the physical deformities of the Grand Master’s household cavalry.

"They say the Grand Master had his bed moved down into the cisterns beneath the palace," Toni continued, undisturbed by the silence. "To sleep among the frogs where it is cool. Can a gentleman do that? A prince of the Church, sleeping with the toads? It doesn't seem proper."

"His Eminence sleeps where he pleases," Salvatore said evenly. "And he does not consult boatmen on the arrangement of his mattress."

"I am merely saying," Toni muttered, shaving off a curl of pine that fluttered onto the dust, "that when the wind smells of old carpets, trouble comes with it. My grandmother always said: When the south wind doesn't die at sunset, put your money in a jar and grease your boots."

"Your grandmother," Salvatore remarked, dipping a sponge into a bucket of water and wiping his neck, "also believed that eating raw garlic prevented lightning from striking your mule. Go and see if the water-cistern by the fish-stalls has any water left. My tongue feels like a dry sole."

Before Toni could stand, a shout came down from the battery above. It was a high, cracked cry, repeated twice, followed by the clanking of a chain as the harbour watch raised the yellow pennant.

Salvatore stood, shielding his eyes with a palm that was perpetually stained with gall-ink. Out past the narrow throat of the harbour, framed between the low yellow snout of Fort Saint Elmo on the left and the jagged stone teeth of Fort Ricasoli on the right, a ship was drifting into view.

She was a three-masted polacca, rigged with lateen sails on her fore and mizzen, her canvas hanging slack and dirty in the dead air. She moved without haste, pushed along by the sluggish swells that rolled through the mouth of the harbour like great heaps of molten glass. Even at a half-mile distance, there was something unkempt about her lines. Her running rigging was slack, and her spritsail yard hung crooked, dipping toward the water like the broken wing of a gull.

"She flies the cross of Saint George at the main," Toni said, squinting across the blinding glare of the water. "An Englishman. No, wait. Look at the stern-post. Venetian build. Broad in the beam, like a baker's wife."

"She has no flag at the foremast," Salvatore said, picking up his spectacles from the desk and balancing them on the bridge of his nose. The wire frame was held together on the left temple by a wrap of waxed linen thread. "If she comes from the Levant, she should have her clean bill pinned to the yard."

"She has nothing pinned anywhere," said Toni. "Except perhaps bad luck."

A sharp rap of boots sounded on the flags behind them. Fra' Gaston de Verceil, a knight-caravanist of the French Langue who had been assigned to the Port Office as part of his required service to the Order, stepped out from the shadow of the portico. He was twenty-two years old, thin-nosed, with the reddish down of youth still clinging to his jawline, and he wore his black woolen habit with the eight-pointed white linen cross over his chest despite the suffocating heat. Great dark circles of sweat had soaked through the wool beneath his armpits, but he maintained the stiff, slightly startled posture of a young gentleman who had only recently arrived from the Auvergne and still believed that the world could be managed by shouting at it in bad Italian.

"What is that vessel?" Fra' Gaston demanded, resting his hand on the silver pommel of his sword. "Why has she not fired a salute to the castle?"

"She is barely making two knots, your Honour," Salvatore said, bowing slightly from the neck. "If she fires a gun, the recoil might stop her dead in the water."

"Insolence," the young knight said automatically, though there was no malice in it; it was simply the manner in which he had been taught to address civil servants. "Call out the guard-boat. We board her at the chains."

"We do not board, Fra' Gaston," Salvatore reminded him gently. "By the regulation of 1658, we speak her from two oars’ lengths. We take her papers with the irons. If she comes from the east of Candia, she goes straight to the Lazzaretto at Marsamxett without dropping her mud-hooks in this basin."

Fra' Gaston tightened his sword-belt. "I know the regulations, Bonnici. I have read them in French."

"A very clear language, your Honour," Salvatore said, picking up his iron tongs and his wooden case of sulfur matches. "Toni, get the oars into the pinnace. And throw a wet sack over the sulfur pot. If a spark gets into it in this wind, we’ll all be coughing our lungs onto the stones."

The harbor water was so still that the oars made hollow, sucking noises as they bit into the surface. The pinnace was manned by four Maltese galley-slaves whose terms were nearly finished and who were trusted not to throw their oars into the sea and swim for the shore. They rowed with a short, rhythmic jerk, their bare backs glistening like oiled leather under the dust-thickened sunlight.

As they drew away from the quay, the town of Valletta rose above them on Mount Sceberras, a geometric mountain of yellow stone, terrace upon terrace, terrace upon terrace, punctuated by the square towers of the auberges and the flat roofs where women hung out gray sheets that did not dry so much as stiffen in the heat. To their left, the three cities across the water—Birgu, Senglea, and Bormla—huddled behind their ancient, patched curtains of wall like sleeping dogs. The whole place had an air of suspended animation, as if the entire population had laid down under their shutters to wait for the world to cool.

The incoming ship had let go her best bower anchor just inside the roadstead, between the Kalkara creek and the spur of Saint Michael. The iron fluke took the bottom with a muffled splash and a long, groaning screech of hemp cable through the hawsehole that echoed across the empty water like the scream of an old woman.

"Way enough," Salvatore said softly.

The oarsmen held their water. The pinnace glided to a halt six yards off the stranger's port quarter.

Up close, the vessel looked even more wretched than she had from the shore. She was the San Rocco, out of Messina by her nameboard, though the lettering was nearly scrubbed away by salt and neglect. Her sides were bearded with long ribbons of green weed that trailed in the current, and her lower hulls were white with barnacles. A greasy smear of bilge water seeped from an auger-hole near her waterline, smelling of rotted turnips and damp wood.

A man appeared at the quarter-rail. He was thick-set, with a face like a lard bladder that had been dropped in the ashes, wearing a loose shirt of undyed linen that had turned yellow around the neck. He rested two hairy forearms on the teak rail and looked down at the pinnace with small, wet eyes that seemed entirely devoid of curiosity.

"God give you good day, Captain," Fra' Gaston shouted in his high-pitched, aristocratic Tuscan. "You are anchored within the waters of the Sacred Religion of Saint John of Jerusalem. Identify your vessel, your last port of lading, and the state of your company!"

The captain spat into the water. The glob of grease floated between the pinnace and the ship’s side.

"The San Rocco," the captain said. His voice was thick, with the heavy, dragging vowels of the Calabrian coast. "Forty days out from Smyrna, with a touch at Zante for water and fresh cabbages."

Salvatore leaned forward, his spectacles slipping down his damp nose. "Smyrna? Did you touch at Alexandria?"

"I said Smyrna," the captain replied. He did not look at Salvatore; his eyes remained fixed on Fra' Gaston's white cross. He knew who held the power to seize his cargo and who was merely a clerk with an ink-horn. "We had thirty-four men when we cleared the Gulf. We have thirty-four now. We carry raw silk, cotton in the bale, two chests of Turkey carpets, and six barrels of gall-nuts for the tanners."

"A clean bill?" Fra' Gaston asked.

"As clean as your mother’s linen, Sir Knight," said the captain.

Fra' Gaston’s hand went back to his sword-hilt. "Guard your tongue, fellow. Show the patent."

The captain turned his head and whistled through his teeth—a low, broken sound. A boy appeared from the companionway. He could not have been more than twelve, barefoot, wearing nothing but a pair of canvas breeches that were stiff with brine. He held a small sheet of folded parchment, sealed with red wax that had softened in the heat and smeared across the paper like a squashed plum.

"The tongs," Salvatore whispered to Toni, who reached down and handed him the long iron implements from the bottom boards.

The boy did not come to the rail. He tied the parchment to a length of light lead-line, swung it twice with a weak, listless motion, and tossed it toward the pinnace. The lead weight struck the gunwale with a sharp thunk and dropped into the bottom of the boat, right at Salvatore’s feet.

"Careful, you little devil!" Toni snapped, lifting his oar handle.

Salvatore did not touch the parchment with his hands. With the practiced skill of a blacksmith turning a horse-nail, he pinched the corner of the fold with the iron tongs, lifted it, and dropped it straight into the pot of vinegar. The parchment hissed slightly as the cold acid met the sun-baked paper. Small bubbles rose from the fold.

"Let it soak," Salvatore said under his breath. "Give it five minutes."

"He said Smyrna," Fra' Gaston said, looking up at the high, carved transom of the ship. "The Turk has had the fever in Smyrna since the spring. Every gazette from Venice says so."

"The captain says his bill is clean," Salvatore murmured, his eyes scanning the ship’s deck through the gaps in the bulwarks.

The vessel was too quiet. On a merchantman arriving in port after six weeks at sea, there was usually a clamour—sailors shouting to the women on the shore, the carpenter hammering at a damaged spar, the squeal of pigs in their coops, or at least the sound of a cook scouring his coppers. Here, there was only the creak of the main yard swinging against the mast-coat and the dry, paper-like rattle of the lateen canvas in the south wind.

Through the open waist, Salvatore caught sight of a man sitting against the spare spar lashed along the deck. The sailor was sitting with his knees drawn up to his chin, his head hanging down between his shins, perfectly still. A red woolen cap was pulled down over his ears despite the sweltering air, and he wore a heavy coat of gray frieze.

"You there," Salvatore called out, pointing with the dripping tongs. "You on the spar. Stand up."

The man did not move.

The captain leaned further over the rail, his bulk blotting out the light. "He is deaf, master clerk. A Greek from Cephalonia. He took a knock on the head from a block off Modon and hasn't heard a cannon-shot since."

"Tell him to stand," Salvatore repeated.

The captain turned and barked a word in a tongue Salvatore did not recognize—it sounded like Greek, but had the harsh, guttural endings of the Levant. The man on the spar did not lift his head, but his shoulders gave a slight, convulsive shudder, like a dog trying to shake flies from its back. Then he slowly, with immense effort, rolled his face toward the pinnace.

His skin was not brown like that of a sailor who had spent forty days in the Aegean. It was the color of a wet turnip, with a dark, purplish flush over the bridge of the nose and across the cheekbones. His eyes were wide, wet, and milk-white around the rims, staring at nothing with a vacant, terrifying intensity. As Salvatore watched, the man reached up with a hand that trembled like a dry leaf and scratched at his groin, his fingers digging frantically through the rough wool of his trousers.

"He has the calenture," the captain said quickly. His voice had lost its flat arrogance; there was a sharp, greasy edge of anxiety in it now. "He drank bad water at Zante. We gave him vinegar and treacle, but he has the flux."

"Toni," Salvatore said, without taking his eyes from the Greek sailor. "Back water."

"What?" Fra' Gaston looked down at him. "The inspection is not concluded. I have not questioned the mate."

"Back water, Toni," Salvatore repeated, his voice dropping an octave, flat and hard. "Now. Put four boats’ lengths between us and her hull."

Toni did not ask questions. He leaned his weight against the stroke-oar, the other three men caught the rhythm, and the pinnace backed away with a sudden, churning boil of white foam beneath her stem.

"Stand by!" the captain shouted from the rail, his face darkening with rage. "You haven't read the patent! I have five hundred ducats’ worth of silk for the house of Spinola in Valletta! The goods are consigned to Fra' Girolamo! He is of the Langue of Italy! You cannot leave us here in the fairway!"

Salvatore used the tongs to lift the dripping parchment from the vinegar. The ink had run in several places, turning the pale script into gray smudges, but the large black seal at the bottom—the lion of Saint Mark, stamped at Zante—was still visible. Across the top, written in a cramped, hurried chancery hand, were the names of the officers.

Salvatore held the paper up with the tongs, keeping it downwind of his face. He sniffed. There was the smell of the vinegar, sharp enough to bring tears to his eyes, but underneath it, clinging to the damp fibers of the sheepskin, was another odor—a faint, sickening sweetness, like the smell of an old cupboard where greasy lard has been kept in the dark for five years.

"Fra' Gaston," Salvatore said quietly, "we must go to the Grand Master."

"The Grand Master?" The young knight looked scandalized. "For a three-masted polacca with a sick Greek? We go to the President of the Sanità, the Chevalier de Saint-Hermenegilde. He is having his dinner at the Auberge de France."

"The Chevalier may finish his dinner," Salvatore said, setting the paper down on the lead ballast-weight between his boots. "The Grand Master must be told before the sun touches the bastions. Look at the hawsehole, your Honour."

Fra' Gaston turned his head toward the San Rocco.

Along the thick hemp cable that held the ship to her anchor, something was moving. It was not a man. It was small, sleek, and grayish-black, moving with a quick, nervous scuttle down the fibers toward the water. It was a rat—large, thick-bodied, its belly swollen. It stopped two feet above the waterline, sniffed the stagnant air, and then, without hesitation, plunged into the oily gray swell of the Grand Harbour.

A second rat followed it three paces behind. Then a third. They did not swim toward the open sea; they turned their snouts toward the land, their little black eyes bright in the twilight, heading straight for the rocks below the battery of Saint Elmo where the fishing boats were moored for the night.

"Toni," Salvatore whispered, his mouth completely dry. "Row."

The pinnace skimmed back toward the Barriera, the oarsmen now pulling with a frantic, silent energy that they had not shown all morning. Fra' Gaston sat in the stern-sheets, his sword held between his knees, staring back at the San Rocco. The ship sat on the water like a monument of dark wood, her yellow hull fading into the violet dusk that was falling over the water. A single lantern had been lit at her bowsprit, casting a pale, sickly circle of yellow light across the brown surface of the harbor.

The xlokk had not fallen with the sunset. Instead, it seemed to have gathered weight, blowing through the narrow streets of the city with a steady, dry hiss that rattled the dry palm fronds in the garden of the Inquisitor’s palace and blew the ashes from the bakers' ovens across the stone paving of the Strada San Giorgio.

As Salvatore stepped onto the quay at the Barriera, his limp was more pronounced than usual. His knee ached with the humidity, a dull, throbbing pain that reached up into his hip.

"Bonnici," Fra' Gaston said as they reached the foot of the long stone stairway that led up into the city. His tone had changed; the haughtiness of the French aristocrat was gone, replaced by the uncertain hesitation of a boy who has found an adder in his boot. "Was it... do you think it is the great death?"

Salvatore stopped on the third step, the iron tongs still hanging from his right hand, dripping vinegar onto his shoe. He looked up at the great ramparts that rose eighty feet above them—magnificent, impenetrable walls that had broken the army of the Grand Turk a century before, designed to withstand half-pound iron balls and thousands of screaming janissaries.

"The walls are very thick, your Honour," Salvatore said, his voice flat and tired. "The stone is very hard. But the gate has been open all afternoon."

A puff of wind, hot and smelling of the desert and old wool, blew down the stone alley from the market-square above, carrying with it the faint, tinny sound of the curfew bell from the conventual church of Saint John. It struck twenty-four times—the end of the Christian day, the hour when honest men were supposed to bolt their shutters, put out their hearths, and commit their souls to the keeping of the saints.

Salvatore looked down at his desk by the water. A large black rat, wet from the harbor, was already crawling up the leg of the trestle table, its whiskers twitching toward the dry crumbs of bread Salvatore had left behind from his midday meal.

Salvatore did not throw a stone at it. He merely turned his back, gathered his coat around his shoulders, and began the long climb up the hill to his house in the parish of Saint Paul, where his children were waiting for their supper and the wind was blowing the red dust through the cracks in the cedar doors.

The morning sun did not break through the haze so much as it dissolved it into a blinding, yellow glare that pressed against the forehead like a hot flatiron. By six of the clock, the stone steps of the Strada San Paolo were already warm enough to bake bread upon, and the wind had died down to a faint, greasy draft that failed to stir even the cobwebs in the high eaves.

Salvatore Bonnici’s household woke not to the cock’s crow—for roosters had long since been banned within the city walls by a decree aimed at preserving the sleep of elderly bailiffs—but to the screech of his wife’s voice. Grazia Bonnici was a woman of vast proportions and formidable energy who had been born in Syracuse to a customs clerk and consequently viewed the entire male population of Malta as poorly educated simpletons who required constant verbal prodding to keep them from reverting to goats.

"Get up, Salvatore! The goat-herder is already past the corner of the Greek chapel, and if you don't take the jug down yourself, he will give us the milk from the beast with the running eye! Paolo! Put down your brother's shoes! If you chew the leather again, I’ll take a strap to your buttocks until they ring like the bells of Saint Lawrence!"

Salvatore sat up on the edge of the mattress, his bare feet meeting the cool terracotta tiles. He rubbed his eyes, which felt as though someone had thrown a fistful of dry road-dust into them while he slept. The sheets, woven from coarse Gozo hemp, smelled sour with night-sweat. Through the small rectangular window, cut deep into the five-foot stone wall to keep out the midday furnace, he could see the gray flat roof of the baker across the alley, where a row of salted mullet was laid out on wicker mats to dry under the gaze of a one-eared tomcat.

He had not told Grazia about the Greek sailor with the purple cheeks, nor about the three black bodies sliding down the anchor cable into the dark water. If he had told her, she would have spent the night packing three copper cauldrons and seven straw mattresses onto a hired mule to flee to her sister’s farm in Mosta, loudly proclaiming that the end of the world had arrived twenty minutes ahead of schedule.

Instead, he pulled on his linen breeches, which were stiff with dried salt and vinegar around the calves, laced his shoes—noting with mild irritation that his second boy, Paolo, had indeed nibbled the corner of the left buckle—and reached for his pewter jug.

Down in the steep, shadowed alley, the herd of twenty black-and-tan goats was clattering along the limestone paving, their wooden bells knocking with a dull clonk-clonk. The goatherd, a barefoot youth from the village of Birkirkara with legs like cured ham, leaned against the wall of the Carmelite monastery and spat into the gutter.

"Two measures, Tonio," Salvatore said, holding out the jug. "And from the spotted nanny, if it pleases your grace."

The boy squatted, seized a teat, and squirted a foaming white stream into the pewter vessel. "They say the port was shut last night," the boy muttered without looking up.

Salvatore’s hand stiffened on the handle. "Who says so?"

"My cousin Carmelo," the goatherd said, his fingers working with rhythmic indifference. "He brought a cart of melons down to the Marina at fourth watch. The guard at the Del Monte gate told him to go round by the Marsa because the water-stairs were barred with iron pikes. Carmelo says there is a Turk ship in the ditch with fifty dead infidels piled on the deck like firewood."

"Your cousin Carmelo," Salvatore remarked, handing over two copper grani, "has never seen fifty of anything except melons, and most of those were rotten. The port is open. Go milk your beasts."

He climbed the stairs back to his lodging, but his appetite for the morning's barley crust had vanished.

By the time Salvatore reached the Strada San Giorgio, the spine of the city that ran straight as an architect's rule from the City Gate down to the tip of Saint Elmo, Valletta was already humming with its peculiar, nervous life. Water-carriers with dripping goatskins over their shoulders pushed past Sicilian friars whose black habits had turned greenish-brown from the sun. Barefoot boys carried flat baskets of small red figs on their heads, crying out their price in the high, nasal chant of the Levant, while French knights in silver-buckled shoes and powdered wigs picked their way through the horse droppings with an air of profound, aristocratic disgust.

Yet beneath the ordinary clamour, there was an unfamiliar hesitation. People were standing in little clusters at the corners of the alleys, their heads bent close together, speaking in the low, guttural murmur that the Maltese used when they did not wish to be overheard by their masters.

Outside the shop of Master Ignazio, the barber-surgeon whose sign—a painted wooden basin leaking red ribbons—hung above the archway of the old mint, four men were arguing in furious whispers. Master Ignazio himself stood in his doorway, holding an iron shaving-pan full of lather that was rapidly drying to a crust in the morning air.

"I tell you, it was not a Turk," said a tall man in a clerk’s black cape, whom Salvatore recognized as one of the copyists from the Castellania, the civil court. "It was a Christian ship from Messina. But she carried letters from Constantinople. The clerk at the health office burned them on the quayside, and the smoke smelled of sulphur and dead mules. The whole lower town could smell it."

"They burned no letters," Master Ignazio retorted, brandishing his horn-handled razor. "They were carpets. Fra' Girolamo had ordered thirty rolls of Smyrna wool for the reception rooms of the Langue of Italy. The rats were in the weave, big as rabbits, with red eyes and no fur on their tails. When they dropped the bales onto the landing-stage, three dozen of them jumped out and ran straight up the water-pipe into the granaries at Saint Elmo."

Salvatore stopped three paces off, leaning his weight onto his good right leg. "Master Ignazio," he said mildly, "if the rats were in the bales, they must have been very small rabbits, or your eyes have grown twice their natural size since I saw you on Sunday."

The barber turned, his face flushed with the pleasure of an audience. "Ah! Bonnici! You were there! Tell this fool from the Castellania. Was it not the San Rocco? Did she not come from the Levant with the sickness in her bilge?"

Salvatore looked at the little ring of faces. There was Master Ignazio, whose wife had died of the quinsy four years ago and who had spent every winter since predicting a general pestilence to anyone who sat in his shaving-chair; the court clerk, whose salary was sixty scudi a year and who supplemented it by selling court gossip to the Genoese merchants; and two carters from the ditch who smelled entirely of mule sweat and dry clover.

"She is a polacca out of Messina," Salvatore said carefully, keeping his voice level and empty of interest. "She had a broken yardarm and a sick boy who drank too much salt water off Zante. She is anchored in the roadstead until the Health Commissioners examine her books. That is all."

The clerk sneered. "If that is all, why has the Grand Master called an extraordinary meeting of the Venerable Council for eight of the clock? My master had to copy the summons before dawn, and he was using the red ink, which he hasn't touched since the French fleet appeared off Gozo four years ago."

Salvatore did not answer. He turned and continued down the street, his uneven gait rocking him from side to side like a ship in a light chop.

The rumor was already ahead of him. It was running through the straight, gridded streets like oil spilled on dry parchment. At the corner of the Strada Mercanti, outside the palace of the Bishop, a crowd of women had gathered around a priest who was sprinkling the threshold with water from a pewter pot, his sleeve hitched up to avoid the mud. Across the way, at the vegetable stalls, an old woman was loudly refusing to buy onions that had been landed from a goletta from Syracuse that very morning, claiming that the skins looked "spotted with the French pox."

In the great square before the Palace of the Grand Master, the silence was different. Here, the power of the Sacred Order of Saint John of Jerusalem asserted itself in wide expanses of swept stone, guarded by pairs of Swiss halberdiers in yellow-and-black doublets who stood as motionless as bronze figures beneath the stone balconies.

A line of sedan chairs, their black leather sides polished with mutton grease and their brass mountings catching the harsh sunlight, stood waiting along the wall of the Chancellor’s offices. The chair-men, mostly Sicilian freedmen and Maltese laborers, squatted in the narrow strip of shade under the cornice, playing morra with rapid, violent thrusts of their fingers, their voices sharp in the quiet square: "Tre! Sette! Tutti!"

Salvatore climbed the broad flight of steps that led to the Health Magistracy, which occupied three vaulted rooms in the corner of the lower courtyard. The walls were covered with whitewash that was peeling in long, curling flakes from the damp that rose through the foundations from the palace cisterns below. The air smelled of old paper, sour ink, and the sharp, penetrating odor of the vinegar barrels kept in the alcove behind the door.

At the main desk sat Signor Paolo Testaferrata, the Chief Clerk of the Magistracy. He was a small, desiccated Maltese gentleman of seventy, with skin that looked like parchment that had been dried near a fire, and a magnificent silver wig that was perpetually tilted to the left, revealing a fringe of dirty white hair beneath. He was dipping a goose quill into an inkpot shaped like an iron cannon, his fingers trembling with a palsy that made his handwriting nearly impossible to decipher.

Fra' Gaston de Verceil was standing before the window, looking out into the courtyard with his arms folded behind his back. The young knight had changed his habit; he wore a clean black coat of fine Flemish cloth, but his face looked gray, and the circles beneath his eyes were darker than they had been on the water the night before.

"Ah, Bonnici," Testaferrata said without looking up, his pen scratching with the sound of a beetle trapped behind a wainscot. "You are forty minutes late. The sun has already passed the battery of Saint James. When I was an assistant to the Commissioners during the Turkish scare of '45, a clerk who arrived forty minutes late was fined three tari and spent his dinner-hour scraping tallow from the floorboards."

"The streets were crowded, your Excellency," Salvatore said, hanging his wool cap on the peg behind the door.

"Crowded with fools," Testaferrata snapped. "Every washerwoman in the Mandraggio thinks she has seen the angel of death sitting on the spire of Saint Paul's with a sword in each fist. They have been at my windows since seven, asking if they should salt their cabbage-beds to keep off the vapors. And why? Because a young gentleman from the Auvergne doesn't know the difference between a sunstroke and the bubo."

Fra' Gaston turned from the window, his hand instantly finding the silver hilt of his sword. "I know what I saw, Signor Testaferrata. And I know what Bonnici saw."

"Bonnici saw a Greek with a belly-ache," the old clerk said dryly, blotting a line with a pinch of dark sand from an olive-wood shaker. "And you saw a rat. In sixty years in Valletta, I have seen forty thousand rats. They live in the ditches; they live in the sewers; they live in the bread-bins of the Langue of Germany. If a rat swimming in the harbour were a sign of the pestilence, this island would have been an unpeopled rock before the Grand Master L'Isle-Adam set foot upon it."

"The man was scratching his groin," Fra' Gaston said, his voice tightening with that thin, aristocratic edge that did not brook contradiction from social inferiors. "He was shaking like a horse with the staggers. His face was the colour of an old plum."

"He had spent forty days drinking bad water from wooden casks," Testaferrata replied, squinting at his ledger through a pair of round spectacles with iron frames. "Any man’s face would look like a plum if he had lived on moldy biscuit and dried stockfish since the middle of July. What says the patent?"

Salvatore stepped forward to the desk. "The patent is clean from Zante, Signor Testaferrata. But the seal from Smyrna was missing. The captain said it was dropped in the sea when they boarded the guard-boat off Cerigo."

Testaferrata clicked his tongue—a sharp, wooden noise. "A missing seal is a matter for the customs house, not for the Sanità. A fine of ten ducats and an oath before the notary. We do not ruin a merchant voyage for a drop of red wax."

Before Fra' Gaston could reply, the heavy leather curtain that covered the doorway was swept aside, and a man walked into the office with the hurried, proprietary stride of someone who did not consider it necessary to knock.

It was Signor Agostino de' Mari, the resident factor for the great Genoese mercantile house of Spinola. He was forty-five, stout, with a round, pale face that had never seen more sun than could penetrate the glass panes of his counting-house on the Marina. He wore a doublet of dark mulberry velvet that was far too hot for the season, trimmed with silver galloon along the edges, and carried a gold-headed cane with which he tapped the flagstones at every step.

"Testaferrata," the factor said without taking off his hat, which was adorned with a small, discreet feather of black heron. "What is this nonsense at the chains? My boatmen have been waiting since dawn to take off the lighter with the raw silk from the San Rocco. The carters are hired; the warehouse in the Strada della Marina is open; and your two idiots at the Barriera are waving iron pikes at them and shouting about vinegar!"

Testaferrata laid his pen down across the brass inkstand with deliberate care. "Good day, Signor Agostino. God preserve your health."

"My health is perfectly sound," the Genoese snapped. "It is my pocket that is suffering. That silk was bought against bills drawn on Florence that mature on the Feast of Saint Michael. If it sits in the hold of that rotten polacca for another forty-eight hours in this damp xlokk, the moisture will rot the skeins. I shall lose four thousand scudi, and the Langue of Italy will have no new hangings for their dining-hall on the Grand Master’s name-day. Who gave the order to hold the ship?"

Testaferrata did not answer; he merely tilted his chin toward the window where Fra' Gaston stood.

Signor Agostino turned, his small, dark eyes running over the young French knight with that mixture of deference and contempt that wealthy Italian burghers reserved for younger sons of the French nobility who possessed nothing in the world except an ancient name and a habit with eight points.

"The Chevalier de Verceil, I believe?" the merchant said, offering a curt, minimal bow. "A newcomer to our rock. Doubtless your Honour is not yet accustomed to the trade of the Levant. A ship from Smyrna often carries men with the sea-flux. It is the nature of the voyage. If we stopped every polacca that had a sailor with a loose belly, the Grand Master would have no sugar for his chocolate and your own knights would be wearing habits of home-spun Gozo wool instead of Flemish broadcloth."

Fra' Gaston’s hand closed so tightly on his pommel that the knuckles turned white through the skin. "The sailor on the spar was not suffering from the flux, Signor de' Mari. He has the signs."

"The signs!" Agostino laughed, though the sound was too loud and ended too quickly. "The signs of what? A boy from the mountains who doesn't like salt pork? Sir Knight, I have spoken to Fra' Girolamo this very morning. He was with the Grand Master in the private chapel not an hour ago. The Venerable Council has more important matters to consider than the bilious humours of a Cephalonian deck-hand. There is the tribute to the King of Spain to be settled; there is the dispute with the Bishop over the jurisdiction of the taverns; there is the wheat fleet from Licata which is three weeks overdue."

The merchant leaned over Testaferrata's desk, placing his thick, ringed palms flat on the papers. "The cargo must be landed. If there is doubt, let the Protomedico go out in a pinnace and look at the fellow from the rail. If he says the man has the French fever or the gravel, let them pay two scudi to the hospital and bring the bales ashore. But to keep four thousand scudi of Florentine silk stewing in the roadstead while the town gossips tell lies to the fishmongers—it is intolerable!"

Testaferrata looked up at Salvatore. "Bonnici. Did the captain show any symptoms?"

"He looked greasy," Salvatore said. "And his eyes were wet. But he shouted well enough."

"There, you see!" Agostino said, turning his bulk toward Salvatore as though he were an old friend. "A man who shouts is not dying of the pestilence. When the Great Death came to Genoa in '56, my grandfather told me that the dying lay in the gutters as silent as salted cod. They didn't shout at port officers; they didn't even have the breath to spit. They simply turned black and dissolved."

"A very comforting description," Testaferrata said dryly. "Nevertheless, the regulations of 1658 are clear. When an officer of the Sanità reports a suspicion, the ship must remain at the outer moorings until the Health Commissioners have inspected her."

"And when will that be?" Agostino demanded, his voice rising again. "The Commissioners are eighty years old! Half of them don't leave their beds until noon, and the other half won't cross the harbor if there is a ripple on the water!"

"The Commissioners," Testaferrata said with an edge of quiet venom, "will meet when the Grand Master commands them to meet. Until then, Signor Agostino, your silk remains where it is. If your lighter touches her side, my guards have orders to fire on the oarsmen. With ball, Signor Agostino. Not with dried beans."

The Genoese glared at the old clerk, his heavy jowls quivering with suppressed fury. For five seconds, the room was so quiet that the buzz of a solitary blowfly against the high, dusty windowpane sounded like a miniature saw.

"Very well," Agostino said at last, straightening his velvet coat with a sharp, violent jerk. "Very well. But remember this, Testaferrata: if that silk is spotted with seawater when it comes ashore, I shall hold the Magistracy liable for every tari of the damage. I have friends in the Council of State who know how to read an account-book, even if your French boys only know how to read their prayer-books."

He turned on his heel, his cane clacking against the stone flags, and swept out through the leather curtain, leaving behind him a thick, cloying draft of civet-scented pomade that struggled unsuccessfully against the smell of the vinegar.

Fra' Gaston let out a long, ragged breath. "The impudence of these shopkeepers," he murmured, his face still pale. "In the Auvergne, my father would have had his grooms take a whip to a fellow like that."

"This is not the Auvergne, Sir Knight," Testaferrata said, picking up his quill again and dipping it into the cannon-shaped pot. "This is a rock surrounded by water. On an island, the man who brings the flour and the silk has more friends than the man who has three quarterings on his shield. Bonnici, take this docket down to the captain of the guard at the Porta Marina. Tell him that no boats are to clear for the San Rocco without my personal seal in red wax. Not even the water-carriers."

Salvatore took the folded slip of paper. It was still damp with ink. "And the crew, Signor Paolo? If the man dies?"

Testaferrata looked up from his work, his small, rheumy eyes meeting Salvatore’s through the round lenses of his spectacles. For a fraction of a second, the old man’s face looked not merely ancient, but profoundly, irremediably tired.

"If he dies," the old clerk whispered, "pray that the captain has the sense to tie a shot to his feet and drop him into forty fathoms before the sun goes down. Because if he dies on the deck where the watch can see him, may God have mercy on this city. The Grand Master will not be able to save us, and the Genoese will not be able to buy us back from the worms."

Salvatore bowed his head, took his wool cap from the peg, and went out.

The sun had reached the meridian as Salvatore made his way down through the steep, narrow alleys that tumbled toward the Mandraggio, the tangled warren of hovels that leaned against the northern curtain wall. The heat here was trapped between the towering facades of five-story tenements, where lines of gray, threadbare linen hung between the balconies like the molted skins of giant snakes.

Here, the rumors were not about silk or the Council of State. They were cruder, darker, and more immediate.

At the corner of the alley known as the Strada della Fogna—the Sewer Street—a group of barefoot women were kneeling on the slimy cobbles before a roughly painted niche containing a wooden Madonna whose blue mantle had faded to the color of wet slate. A small clay lamp, filled with rancid olive oil, sputtered before the image, casting a smokey smear across the stone.

"Mother of God, preserve our children," a woman was chanting, rocking back and forth on her heels while two small children clung to her dirty skirts. "Turn the black wind away from the gate. Send it back to the Turk. Send it back to the Barbary coast where it was born."

A water-seller, leading a donkey with two leaky wooden casks slung across its spine, stopped beside Salvatore. "They're crazy, Bonnici," the man whispered. He had only one tooth in his upper jaw, which whistled slightly when he spoke. "They say a woman over in Birgu died this morning after eating two figs she bought from a Sicilian tartana."

"Birgu is two miles away across the salt water," Salvatore said, watching the women beat their breasts. "How could a fig from Birgu hurt a woman in the Mandraggio?"

"The air carries it," the water-seller said, tapping his nose with a filthy thumb. "The xlokk. It carries the seed of the rot. My brother says that over at the sheep-pens in the Marsa, three ewes dropped dead in the night, and when they cut them open, their lungs were as black as chimney-backs."

"Your brother," Salvatore said, "is a notorious drunkard who would find a miracle in an empty wine-skin."

Yet as he walked past the open mouth of an alleyway that led down toward the sea-ditch, Salvatore stopped.

The gutter in the center of the lane was dry, choked with rotten melon rinds, cabbage stalks, and heaps of horse droppings that had baked into hard, gray bricks in the sun. But three paces from the wall, half-concealed beneath a piece of broken wicker basket, something caught his eye.

It was a rat. It lay on its side, its belly swollen to the tautness of a small drum, its four legs sticking out into the air like dry twigs. Its mouth was slightly open, revealing two yellow, chisel-like teeth, and from its nostrils a tiny trickle of dark, crusted blood had run down onto the limestone dust.

Two paces further along, another lay curled near the entrance to a cellar-hole, its tail bitten off, perfectly motionless.

Salvatore did not poke them with his shoe. He stood very still, his heart giving a slow, heavy thud against his ribs that he could feel in the root of his tongue.

From an open window above his head, the voice of a young girl was singing a Sicilian love-song—a sweet, lazy melody that wound its way down between the towering yellow walls, mingling with the dry hiss of the wind through the cedar shutters and the distant, rhythmic clank of an iron bell from the high tower of Saint Elmo, marking the change of the harbor watch.