F. Marion Crawford

Little Omobono's thin legs carried him up and down the stairs of Zeno's house at an astonishing pace during the next hour; for Carlo gave fifty orders, every one of which he insisted should be executed at once. It was not a small thing to instal a woman luxuriously in a house in which no woman had set foot since Carlo had lived there, and to do this within sixty minutes. It is true that the rich young merchant had great store of thick carpets and fine stuffs, and all sorts of silver vessels, and weapons from Damascus, and carved ivory chessmen from India; but though some of these things quickly furnished the upper rooms which Zeno set apart for the valuable slave's use while she remained under his roof, yet scimitars, chessmen, and heathen idols of jade were poor substitutes for all the things a woman might be expected to need at a moment's notice, from hairpins and hand-mirrors to fine linen pillow-cases, sweetmeats, and a lap-dog. Zeno's ideas of a woman's requirements were a little vague, but he determined that ZoË should want nothing, and he charged Omobono with the minute execution of his smallest commands.

He himself lived simply and almost rudely. He slept on a small hard divan with a little hard cushion under his head, and a cloak to cover him in cold weather. He hated hot water, scented soap, and all the soft luxuries of the Roman bath. There was no mirror in his room, no elaborate toilet service of gold and silver, such as fine young gentlemen used even then. He liked a good dinner when he was hungry, good wine when he was thirsty, and a wide easy-chair when he had worked all day; but it never had cost him a moment's discomfort to exchange such a home as he now lived in for the camp or the sea.

Women were different beings, however, so he made all allowances for them, and went to extreme lengths in estimating their necessities, as Omobono found to his cost. Yet with all his preoccupation for details, Zeno forgot that ZoË must have a woman to wait on her at once, and when he realised the omission, almost at the last minute, the future conqueror of the Genoese, the terror of the Mediterranean, the victorious general of the Paduan campaign, the hero of thirty pitched battles and a score of sea-fights, felt his heart sink with something like fear. What would have happened if he had not remembered just in time that Marco Pesaro's slave must have a maid? She should have two, or three, or as many as she needed.

'Omobono,' he said, as the little secretary came up the stairs for the twentieth time, 'go out quickly and buy two maids. They must be young, healthy, clean, clever, and silent. Lose no time!'

'Two maids?' The secretary's jaw dropped. 'Two maids?' he repeated almost stupidly.

'Yes. Is there anything wonderful in that? Did you expect to wait on the lady yourself?'

'The lady?' Omobono opened his little eyes very wide.

'I mean,' answered Zeno, correcting himself, 'the—the young person who is going to be lodged here. Lose no time, I say! Go as fast as you can!'

Omobono turned and went, not having the least idea where to go. Before he had reached the outer door, Zeno called after him down the stairs.

'Stop!' cried the merchant. 'It is too late. You must go and get the lady—the young person. Take two palanquins instead of one, and tell Rustan to let her choose her own slaves. You can put the two into one litter and bring them all together.'

'But the price, sir?' enquired Omobono, who was a man of business. 'Rustan will ask what he pleases if I take him such a message!'

'Tell him that if he is not reasonable he shall do no more business with Venetians,' answered Zeno, from the head of the marble stairs.

Omobono nodded obediently and followed his instructions. So it came to pass that before long he found himself within Rustan's outer wall with two palanquins and eight bearers, besides a couple of Zeno's trusty men-servants, well armed, for he carried a large sum of money in gold. The Bokharian and the secretary went into an inner room to count and weigh the ducats, but before this began Omobono delivered his message in full.

'Forty ducats!' cried Omobono, casting up his eyes, and preparing to bargain for at least half an hour.

'I have the very thing,' said Karaboghazji. 'There are two girls who have waited on her and with whom she is much pleased. As for asking too high a price, forty ducats for the two is nothing. They are a gift, at that.'

'Forty ducats!' cried Omobono, casting up his eyes, and preparing to bargain for at least half an hour.

'If it is dear,' said Rustan, his face becoming like stone, 'may my tongue never speak the truth again!'

Considering attentively the consequences of such an awful fate Omobono did not think that the Bokharian risked any great inconvenience if the imprecation should take effect.

'It is far from me,' said the secretary, 'to suggest that your words are not literally true, according to your own light. But you must be aware that the price of maid-servants has fallen much since yesterday, owing to the arrival of a shipload of them from Tanais.'

Rustan shook his head and maintained his stony expression.

'They are worthless,' he said. 'Do you suppose I should not have bought the best of them? There has been a plague of smallpox in their country, and they are all pitted. They are as oranges, blighted by hail.'

As Omobono had invented the ship and its cargo, he found it hard to refute Rustan's argument, which was quite as good as his own.

'May my fingers be turned round in their sockets and close on the back of my hand, if I have asked one ducat too much,' said the Bokharian with stolid calm.

Omobono hesitated, for a new idea had struck him. Before he could answer, a door opened and Rustan's wife, who had put off her finery, ushered in ZoË, closely veiled and wrapped in the cloak she had worn on the previous night. It was, in fact, necessary that she should be delivered up in return for the gold, and the negress had supposed that the counting was almost over.

'My turtle dove,' said Rustan in dulcet tones, 'fetch those two girls who have waited on KokÓna Arethusa. The Venetian merchant will buy them for her.'

The negress grinned and went out. By this time Omobono had made up his mind what to say.

'My dear sir,' he began, in a conciliatory tone, consider that we are friends, and do not ask an exorbitant price. I beseech you to be obliging, by four toes and five toes.'

Omobono wondered what would happen after he had pronounced the mysterious words. Rustan looked keenly at him and was silent for a moment. Neither of them noticed that ZoË made a quick movement as she stood by the table between them. The Bokharian rose suddenly and went to shut the door.

'Where?' he asked as he crossed the small room.

Omobono's face fell at the unexpected and apparently irrelevant question. Instantly ZoË bent down and whispered three words in his ear. Before Rustan turned back to hear the clerk's answer, she was standing erect and motionless again, and he did not suspect that she had moved.

'Over the water,' answered Omobono, with perfect confidence.

'You may have the two for four-and-twenty ducats,' said Rustan. 'But you cannot expect me to take anything off the price of the KokÓna,' he added. 'I bargained with your master, and he agreed.'

'No, no! Certainly! And I thank you, sir.'

'I suppose,' said Rustan, 'that you would do as much for me.'

'Of course, of course,' answered Omobono. 'Shall we count the ducats?'

When the operation was almost finished, the negress returned with the two slave-girls, whose commonplace features were wreathed in smiles, and they began to kiss the hem of ZoË's cloak. Omobono inspected them critically.

'Are you pleased with them, KokÓna?' he enquired of ZoË. 'My master is very anxious that you should be satisfied.'

'Indeed I am,' ZoË answered readily. 'They are very clever little maids.'

The two were almost crying with delight, and only a meaning movement of the negress's hand to her girdle checked them. They were not out of her power yet. Omobono eyed them, and really thought them cheap at twelve ducats each, as indeed they were. He was paying four hundred for ZoË, but Rustan did not mean her to see the gold, and had covered it with one of his loose sleeves as she entered. He now begged his wife take the three slaves to the palanquins while he finished counting and weighing, and wrote out his receipt for the money. He called the negress his pet mouse, his little bird, and the down-quilted waistcoat of his heart, and but for her terrific appearance, and the weapon she carried in her girdle, Omobono would have laughed outright.

Rustan wrote on a strip of parchment, in bad Greek:—

In the name of the Holy Trinity, Constantinople, the Saturday before Passion Sunday, the second year of Andronicus Augustus CÆsar, and the fourteenth of the Indiction, I have received from the Most Magnificent Carlo Zeno, a Venetian, the sum of four hundred and forty gold ducats of Venice, for the following merchandise:—

For one Greek maid slave, slave-born, between seventeen and eighteen years old, answering to the name of Arethusa, without blemish, scar, or birthmark, having natural brown hair, brown eyes, twenty-eight teeth all sound, weighing two Attic talents and five minÆ more or less, and speaking Greek, Latin, and Italian		Ducats 400
For two maid slaves, from Tanais, slave-born, of fourteen and fifteen, answering to the names of Lucilla and Yulia, sound, healthy, never having been tortured or branded, each having black hair, black eyes, and twenty-eight teeth, trained to wait on a lady, and speaking intelligible Greek, besides a barbarous dialect of their own, warranted docile, and not given to stealing; at 20 ducats each		Ducats 40
	In all	Ducats 440

Rustan Karaboghazji, the son of DaddirjÁn, Merchant.
(Witness)—Sebastian Omobono, of Venice, Clerk.

Omobono observed that the receipt acknowledged forty ducats as the price of the two girls, instead of twenty-four.

'Rustan Karaboghazji, surnamed the Truth-speaker, does not sell slaves at twelve ducats,' answered the Bokharian with dignity. 'Moreover, your employer will see that he has paid forty, and you can justly keep the sixteen ducats for yourself.'

'That would not be honest,' protested Omobono, shaking his neat grey beard.

Rustan smiled, in a pitying way.

'You Venetians do not really understand business,' he said, tightening the strings of the canvas bag into which he had swept the gold, and knotting them as he rose.

A few minutes later Omobono was trudging along after the two palanquins, wondering much at certain things that had happened to him during the last twenty-four hours and less. For he was curious, as you know, and it irritated him to feel that something was going on in the world, all about him and near him, of which he could not even guess the nature, manifesting itself in such nonsensical phrases as 'four toes and five toes,' and 'over the water,' which nevertheless produced such truly astonishing results. Since the previous afternoon he had met four persons who knew those absurd words,—the negress, her Bokharian husband, the sacristan to Saints Sergius and Bacchus, and a Greek slave-girl, whom he was far from recognising as the beautiful creature he had seen yesterday in the ruined house in the beggars' quarter. She was so closely veiled to-day that he could not in the least guess what her face was like.

Since she not only knew the first password, but had whispered the second to him, he wondered why she had not used her knowledge to get her freedom. It was incredible that the people who knew the words should not be banded together in some secret brotherhood; but if they were brethren, how could they sell one another into slavery? Omobono was so much interested in these problems that he did not see where he was till the leading palanquin entered Zeno's gate.

Zeno himself was not to be seen. The servant at the door gave Omobono a slip of cotton paper on which the merchant had written an order. The secretary was to take his charges to what was now the women's apartment and leave them there. ZoË obeyed Omobono's directions in silence, still veiled, and the two maids tripped up the marble stairs after her, as happy as birds on a May morning, and taking in all they saw with wondering eyes; for they had never been in a fine house before.

'This is the KokÓna's apartment,' Omobono said, standing aside to let ZoË pass. 'If the KokÓna desires anything, she will please to send one of her maids to me. I am the master's secretary.'

He had been surprised when Zeno spoke of her as a 'lady,' but somehow, since she had whispered in his ear at the slave-dealer's house, and since he had seen her movement and carriage when she walked upstairs, he instinctively treated her and spoke to her as if she were his superior. She nodded her thanks now, but said nothing, and he went away. She looked after him and listened, but no key was turned after the door was closed, and she heard only his retreating steps on the marble stairs. Then she turned to the window, which was open, and she threw aside her veil and looked out upon the Golden Horn.

The two little maids at once began a minute examination of the rooms, which occupied more than half the upper story of the house, and were, if anything, too crowded with rich furniture, with divans, carved tables, hanging lamps, cushioned seats, and pillows of every size, shape, and colour. There were handsome wardrobes, too, full of the fine clothes ZoË was to wear. The girls touched everything and talked by signs, lest they should disturb ZoË's meditations. They told each other that the master of the house must be highly pleased with his slave, since he surrounded her with beautiful things; that these things were all new, which was a sign that there was no other woman in the house; and that they were very fortunate and happy to have been sold, after only a month of apprenticeship under the negress's merciless training. They also explained to each other that they were hungry, for it was past noon. The idea of running away had probably never occurred to either of them, even in Rustan's house. Where should they go? And besides, the fate of runaway slaves was before their eyes.

Meanwhile Zeno sat in his balconied room alone. Omobono had delivered the receipt and had simply told him that sixteen ducats had been saved on the bargain, though Rustan did not wish it known. Thereupon Zeno gave the secretary a couple of ducats for himself, which Omobono saw no reason for not taking.

Zeno was preoccupied and chose to be alone, so he dismissed his secretary with injunctions to rest after the labour of installing the new arrival, which had not been light, and he walked up and down his room in deep thought. He had acted on an impulse altogether against his own judgment, and now he was faced by the unpleasant necessity of justifying his conduct in his own eyes.

One thing was quite clear; so long as he did not draw from the house of CornÈr the money which Marco Pesaro had sent to the banker for the commission, the merchandise was his property, since he had paid for it. But he must make up his mind whether he meant to call it his own, or not. If he decided to keep Arethusa, he must at once set about finding another slave for Marco Pesaro, or else write to say that he declined to execute the commission.

In that case, Arethusa remained his. The reason why he had so suddenly determined to buy her was that he fancied she was a girl of good family whom some great misfortune had brought into her present distress. But she had calmly declared that she was a slave, and expected nothing better than to be sold.

If this were true he had paid four hundred ducats for a foolish fancy. She was perhaps the child of some beautiful slave, and had been carefully educated by her mother's owner; and the latter, needing money perhaps, had sent her to the market; or perhaps he had died and his heirs were selling his property.

All this was very unsatisfactory. If she was slave-born, Zeno's best course was to send Arethusa to Pesaro, as soon as the Venetian ship sailed, for he had not the least intention of wasting money in a futile attempt to free slaves whom the law regarded as born to their condition. Their position was a misfortune, no doubt, but they were used to it, and no one had then dreamed of man's inherent right of freedom, excepting one or two popes and fanatics who had been considered visionaries. To Zeno, who was a man of his own times, it seemed quite as absurd that every one should be born free, as it would seem to you that everybody should be born an English duke, a Tammany boss, a great opera tenor, or Crown Prince of the Empire. Moreover, in the case of a beauty, especially of one sold to live in Venice, there were palliations, as Zeno knew. Arethusa would live in luxury; she would also soon be the real dominant in Marco Pesaro's household, as favourite slaves very generally were in the palaces of those who owned them. They had not yet all the vast influence in Venice which they gained in the following century, but their power was already waxing balefully.

Zeno did not hesitate long; he never did, and when he had made up his mind he sent for one of Arethusa's maids.

'What is your name, child?' he asked, scrutinising the girl's commonplace features and intelligent eyes.

'Yulia, Magnificence,' she answered. 'If it please you,' she added diffidently, as if half-expecting that he would choose to call her something else.

'Yulia,' repeated Zeno, fixing the name in his memory, 'and what do you call your mistress?' he asked abruptly.

The girl was puzzled by the question.

'Her name is Arethusa,' she answered, after a moment's reflection.

'I know that. But when you speak to her, what do you call her? When she gives you an order, how do you answer her? You do not merely say, "Yes, Arethusa," or "No, Arethusa," do you? She would not be pleased.'

Yulia smiled and shook her head.

'We call her KokÓna,' she answered. 'Is not that the Greek word for young lady, your Magnificence?'

'Yes,' said Zeno, 'that is the Greek word for young lady. But Arethusa is only a slave as you are. Why do you give her a title? What makes you think she is a lady?'

'She is a different kind of slave. She cost much gold. Besides, if we did not call her KokÓna she would perhaps pull our hair or scratch our faces. Who knows? We are only ignorant little maids, but so much the big negress at the slave-prison taught us.'

'She taught you manners, did she?' Zeno smiled at the idea.

'She made us cry very often, but it was the better for us,' answered the maid, with philosophy beyond her years. 'We have fetched a good price, and we have a good master, and we are together, all because we waited cleverly on the KokÓna one night and one morning.'

'One night?' asked Zeno, in surprise.

'She was only brought to the slave-prison yesterday evening, Magnificence.'

'At what time?'

'It was the third hour of darkness, for the black woman sent the others to bed as soon as she was brought.'

Zeno thought over this information for a moment.

'Tell her,' said he, 'that I shall sup with her this evening. That is all.'

Yulia, who had kept her hands respectfully before her, made a little obeisance, turned quickly, and ran away, leaving the master of the house to his meditations. She found ZoË still sitting by the window, and the dainty dishes which Lucilla had received on a chiselled bronze tray and had placed beside her were untasted.

'The master bids me say that he will sup with you to-night, KokÓna,' said Yulia.

ZoË made a slight movement, but controlled herself, and said nothing, though the colour rose to her face, and she turned quite away from the maids lest they should see it. They stood still a long time, waiting her pleasure.

'Will it not please you to eat something?' asked Yulia timidly, after a time. 'You have eaten nothing since last night, and even then it was little.'

'I thought I ate all the sweetmeats,' answered ZoË, turning and smiling a little at the recollection of the girls' terror.

The hours passed and nothing happened. Some time after dinner she saw from her upper window that Zeno came out of the house and went down the marble steps to a beautiful skiff that was waiting there. As he stepped in, she drew far back from the window lest he should look up and see that she had been watching him. She heard his voice as he gave an order to the two watermen; their oars fell with a gentle plash, and when she looked again they were pulling the boat away upstream, towards the palace of BlachernÆ and the Sweet Waters.

The maids, having eaten of the most delicious food they had ever tasted till they could eat no more, had curled themselves up together on a carpet not far from their mistress, and were fast asleep. The shadow of the house lengthened till it slanted out to the right beyond the marble steps upon the placid water, and the bright sunlight that fell on Pera and Galata began to turn golden; so, when gold has been melted to white heat in the crucible, it begins to cool, grows tawny, and is shot with streaks of red.

As the day waned in a purple haze and the air grew colder, the two maids awoke together, rubbed their eyes, and instantly sprung to their feet. ZoË had not even noticed them, but just then the even plashing of oars was heard again, and she saw the skiff coming back, but without Zeno. She looked again to be sure that it was the same boat, and a ray of hope flashed in her thoughts like summer lightning. Perhaps he had changed his mind, and would not come—not to-night.

The maids reminded her of his message, and she let them dress her again for the evening. They arranged her hair, and twined strings of pearls in it, which they had found in a sandal-wood box on the dressing-table. They took clothes from the wardrobes, fine linen, wrought with wonderful needlework, and pale silks, and velvet of faintest blue embroidered with silver threads; and when they had done their best they held two burnished metal mirrors before her and behind her, that she might admire herself. They had lighted many little lamps that were all prepared, for it was now dark out of doors, and they had spent two hours in arraying ZoË. And she smiled and patted their cheeks, and called them clever girls, for she was sure that Zeno had changed his mind. He would not come to her to-night.

But even as she repeated the words to herself, he came softly through the warm lamplight and stood before her, and her heart stopped beating.

For the first time since she had taken the final step, she felt the whole extent and meaning of what she had done. She was really a slave, and she was alone with her master.