Looking for Marco Polo by Alan Armstrong Page A

thousands of miles away, listens to his. Marco is the string stretched tight between them.
    “Squint,” the doctor suggested. “Pretend you’reMarco, sitting on that stone dock over there watching a long war galley from Constantinople approach, sails down, her sides rough and dark with bits of seaweed caught in clots of pitch and tar and loose caulking. Her deck shines like metal, freshly washed and sanded.
    “Picture her entering the Grand Canal, passing the immense coil of gleaming chain they kept ready in those days to be stretched across should enemy ships approach.
    “The oars flash together like centipede legs as the ship’s boy beats time on his drum and the captain bellows
‘Ohi! Ohi! Ohi!’
to warn off smaller boats. Chained to the mast, a black African and a pale Russian study the eyes studying them.
    “See those two columns at the edge of the square? Those are the seamarks sailors landing at Venice looked for. On top of one a saint stands with his foot on a crocodile. Saint Mark’s winged lion is on top of the other.
    “In Marco’s time strolling musicians played for money here as wealthy merchants and their wives and men and women of court paraded slowly in embroidered silks and rich velvets, flashing their jewels and lifting their robes slightly to show their fine pointed shoes. Some wore thick gold rings set with diamonds over brightly colored kidskin gloves.
    “Suddenly the crowd stills. A prisoner is brought to the dock in a black gondola.
    “Punishments and public executions took place between those landmark columns—flogging and branding for stealing, heads chopped off for murder. It’s said to be bad luck to walk there.
    “This prisoner’s crime was not so great. He got locked in a wooden cage and hoisted partway up the gray column. People teased and threw cabbages and fruit at him until workers came and set up the gaming tables again. Within minutes the merchants and nobles were rolling dice and slapping down cards as they roared out their stories, everyone talking at once like an opera and nobody minding.”
    The doctor looked at his watch. “I’ve got to run an errand. How about I drop you at your hotel for a lie-down? On the way we can look at the merchants’ palace they’d never have let Marco into—the place with books about silk growing on trees and dog-headed Chinese.”
    Boss gave the doctor a look.
    They caught the pitching waterbus to the Rialto Bridge. The lagoon water smelled like the ocean; it was gray, not green like the canal water.
    Boss looked forlorn, head down, his paws spread wide to keep from falling as the boat plunged and yawed.
    Mark moved close and hugged him. “I’ll steady you,” he whispered.
    Boss licked his face. Mark smiled. No dog had ever had a chance to do that before, and he still wasn’t sneezing.
    Every quarter mile or so the vaporetto would stop like a land bus, honking the smaller boats out of the way. A sailboat was luffing in the channel, unable to move. The bus swerved wide as the sailboat pitched crazily in the wake.
    The merchants’ palace was white and grand like a Greek temple, with columns out front, carved gargoyles, and medallions. There was writing over the entrance.
    “What’s it say?” Mark wanted to know.
    “‘Let all who trade here do so honestly,’” the doctor translated.
    “Did they?”
    “Ha!” said Hornaday with a sharp laugh.
“Caveat emptor
—‘Let the buyer beware’—has always been the merchants’ rule, but the doge and his council had regulations to keep things fair and protect the reputation of Venetian goods. They checked quality, weights, and measures. It wasn’t unusual to see smoke rising in the market square when the governors discovered defective cloth or some bad spices and ordered the stuff burned.Public examples like that kept folks honest, because the doge’s men didn’t just burn what was bad; they torched the cheater’s entire stock.”
    “Okay if Boss stays with me?” Mark asked