Free City of Masks by Mary Hoffman Page B

their living-room? And people of our age have one in their bedrooms too? And lots of them have a bedroom to themselves? And they can talk to their friends on the other side of the city without leaving the room? You don’t say!’
    Some things he never managed to explain to her. GameBoys for one, which she simply couldn’t see the point of, and football. The more Lucien described the rules and the rituals, the more ludicrous they sounded in his own ears. ‘But why do they pull their shirts over their heads?’ Arianna would ask, to which he had no reply.
    The more he learned about her world, the more remote his life in London seemed. Arianna told him about the city’s many festivals. The carnival, of course, he knew about from his own reading about Venice, and she had told him about the Marriage with the Sea on his first visit. But there were also mandola races, rowing competitions, festivals of light when all the mandolas carried torches, special bridges where ritual fights were staged between local gangs, the list went on and on. It seemed as if almost every week held some cause for celebration for the superstitious and volatile lagooners. And every festival was marked by huge feasts and wonderful displays of fireworks.
    ‘It all sounds so much fun,’ said Lucien. ‘You Bellezzans really know how to enjoy yourselves.’
    ‘It’s not all like that though,’ said Arianna, looking serious for once. They were sitting on a stone bench within spitting distance of the Great Canal, eating plums. Arianna gestured across the water to where a fine building was nearing completion. ‘That new church is called Santa Maria delle Grazie – St Mary of the Thank-yous.’
    ‘Thank-yous?’ asked Lucien, puzzled. ‘What sort of a name is that?’
    Saint Mary of the thank-yous,’ said Arianna. ‘Twenty-five years ago, long before I was born of course, there was a plague in the city. It killed almost a third of the people living here.’
    ‘That’s terrible,’ said Lucien, thinking of a third of his classmates or one in three of his neighbours.
    ‘It was,’ said Arianna. ‘But it might have been worse. The church has been built in thanks that it wasn’t. That it stopped at a third and left the other two thirds alive.’
    When she talked about the plague, Arianna constantly made the gesture with her hand that Rodolfo called the manus fortunae , the hand of fortune. He regarded it as common superstition and rebuked his servant Alfredo whenever he caught him doing it. Lucien had noticed that citizens of Bellezza did it all the time, spontaneously, a bit like touching wood for luck, but much more often. Now he asked Arianna about it.
    She looked at her hand, suspended in mid-air, surprised to find she was doing it. It was instinctive.
    ‘It means “may the lady goddess, her king consort and her son aid us” and “may the circle of our life be unbroken”,’ she said, reciting it like a school lesson.
    ‘The lady goddess?’ queried Lucien. ‘But that’s a church going up over there. I thought this was a Christian country?’
    Arianna shrugged. ‘So it is. But it doesn’t hurt to keep in with the old gods, does it? I know who I’d rather have on my side if the plague came again.’
    Lucien remembered what Rodolfo had said about the di Chimici bringing medical cures back from his century and then keeping them for their own people. It would be only a step from that to importing twenty-first century illnesses in test tubes. Lucien thought of AIDS and shuddered. Secretly, with his back to Arianna, he made the hand of fortune himself.
    As he and Arianna set off to explore further along the Great Canal, a man in a blue cloak watched them go. And slipped along behind them.

Chapter 6
    Doctor Death
    Lucien was feeling better. He was between treatments now and really beginning to think he would be normal again one day. His best friend, Tom, came to see him – the first time Lucien had been up to visitors since the treatment