Venetian Monsters of Land and Sea in the Year of Our Lord 1527

by K. MacCarthy

It’s crammed inside the bàcaro. The air is thick with the ripe stench of stale sweat, spilt ale and fire smoke. Outside, rain lashes.

“It was an accident, I’m sure of it.” Zuanna wipes a cloth across the bar, lingering on chores which keep her out of the kitchen and in the midst of the unofficial post mortem. A cast of serious faces peer back at her, gathered around lamps which cast long, chiaroscuro shadows across the room. Tattered cuffs and gaudy colours betray them as gondoliers and working men. Gentlemen in their black velvet doublets haunt other establishments than this one, which occupies a dingy dead-end by a side canal on a street known as Calle dei Assassini.

“Did you see her face when they pulled her up? Pale, it was. Glistening like an eel.” A hushed murmur goes around.

“The caigo was bad on the water today. A foul miasma. Should’ve known.” Brass tankards glint in succession, reflecting candlelight as they tip up from hand to mouth.

Zuanna lays down a platter of salted cod and polenta. Bloody gondoliers. Always so superstitious. She’s known some of the regulars since she was a child, small enough to toddle between the legs of barstools and men. Back then, her father stood behind the bar.

“You lot don’t know how heavy skirts are like to get in water. Even sodden in rainwater puddles they’re a burden to heave about. Leaden, they must have been. Dragged her down. Poor woman.”

“It was no accident, Zuanna. I’m telling you. She was taken!”

On and on it goes. The wine jug is emptied, refilled and emptied once again. Drink is a comfort after the day they’ve had. Every man there chimes in with a new detail, each one building on the last, until they have constructed an epic as long as the Decameron.

What Zuanna gathers is that the creature was last seen in the time of their fathers. It lives curled up in a great hollow underneath the Punta della Dogana. It belches out a thick, white fog from its belly and a misty day is said to augur its appearance. It only dares surface on moonless nights, when the lagoon is black as oil. As for the dead woman, she was found with crushing injuries, her ribs concave where they should have protruded. Her face was untouched. “Pretty little thing, she was,” says one of them. “Looked as though she were sleeping.” No one can explain why she was spat out and not eaten. Some say the beast is more fish than serpent, others that it has a spiked crest along its back and the flat-topped head of a viper. None of them have seen it themselves, but they all know someone who has. They call it the monster of the black water.

There is a stranger in tonight who listens, rapt, to these tall tales. An ex-mercenary recently arrived from Constantinople. He stands hunched at the bar, short and wiry. Zuanna has already noted the way he placed his hand over hers as she passed him a jug. She refuses to meet his gaze but she can feel it on her, all over her. A scar runs across his eyebrow down to his cheek, and the lid of the eye beneath it remains half-closed, perpetually frozen in a wink. “You ought to be careful by the water’s edge,” he says to her, lips curling into a smirk. “Young girl like you would be a tasty morsel.” The men laugh at this like braying dogs, teeth and whites of eyes exposed. They know she can take a joke. She gives as good as she gets, does Zuanna. Still, they wouldn’t have said it if her father were here. At sixteen, parentless, she’s had to learn for herself that delicate balance between laughing along and pushing back. Sometimes she will allow an arm around her waist, sometimes she won’t. Now, she smiles, caressing the smooth wooden handle of the stiletto knife in her apron pocket.

The rain pummels on. Zuanna has to venture outside and empty the awning with a broom handle. The fire glimmers on its last embers and a grey sighthound stretches out her front paws and yawns. Zuanna finally rings the bell, though she knows they won’t like it. Her calves ache. Her head craves the pillow waiting upstairs.

“Come on love. One more?” The mood has ebbed from somber to feverish and now feels tinged with threat. This time of night is a cusp, the liminal hour between joviality and violence. Speech is slurred, feet lurch as though on deck, eyes roll in heads like dice in a cup.

Zuanna holds firm. She begins collecting empties. As she passes him, the half-lidded man makes a grab for her, lifting the hem of her dress. “What’s that you were saying about heavy skirts, my darlin’?”

She darts away, cheeks reddening and the blood draining from her thighs. I knew this man would cause me grief tonight. There are so many of them and only one of her. If he wanted to … But the small crowd merely cheers, sated by this parting bit of fun.

The men spill out onto the street, doublets over their heads, bellowing indecipherable farewells which are swallowed by the roar of the downpour. Fat water droplets bounce off slick stone and fuzz the surface of the canal. Zuanna sweeps the floor. She has seen the lone man standing in the dark outside, waiting for her to come out and take down the awning. He stays stock still in a shadow, as a creature might lurk in the deep, rain running in rivulets down his scrawny neck. Her hands tremble but her grip is firm. She feels vicious. She won’t meet the same fate as the washerwoman. She’ll aim the blade for his throat.

About the author

K. MacCarthy is a writer based in Yorkshire, U.K., with a particular interest in Early Modern Europe, court culture, and art. She was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship’s 2020 Academic Writing Prize for an essay on Catherine de' Medici and has had short fiction published in Janus Literary and Retreat West. You can find her musings on art, Quattrocento Florence, sixteenth-century France, and historical novels on her Instagram page: @maddalena6817.

About the illustration

The illustration is "Gondolier Venitian", hand-tinted engraving on paper, from Costumes de Différent Pays, by Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, ca. 1797. In the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.