The Serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

deeper—she veritably ravages me, and I’ve been nipped on other parts of my body, although not, thankfully, on my manly bits. I’ve awakened from the venom’s stupor to feel blood running down my legs from the wounds she makes on my flanks. If she does not kill me outright, I fear I may succumb to weakness from blood loss or infection of my wounds. Sometimes crabs find their way into the chamber and I can hear them scuttling around in the dark. I kick them away when they get close, but what will happen when I can’t? I actually prefer the future when it’s more abstract, I think. Dark. Yes, I’ve made friends with the dark. More than friends. I’ve learned to fuck the dark. We are one.
    And now, she comes. Past my legs, around the chamber, a splash from a fin or tail, the water swirls with her gravity. Behind my legs—she seems bigger, wider, the picture in my head changes, and it’s harder to hold the winsome, flaxen-haired maiden perched on a rock in my mind’s eye. She is power, she is the dark.
    She slides up the front of me, smooth, slick, and I brace myself for the claws. This is the worst of it, before the venom takes me away, when I’m still sore and raw from the last high tide. I try not to scream but scream I do and she works her claws in, like a fisherman setting a hook.
    “Fuck’s sake! Easy, Viv!”
    I’ve named her Vivian, after some poxy English legend of the Lady of the Sodding Lake. It didn’t seem polite, her having me off every turn of the moon, me not knowing her name.
    But she doesn’t ease into the sex like usual. She’s pulling at me, yanking at me. Her mouth or whatever soft part of her that does me, locks on, hard, the suction hurting. I’m pulled straight out from the wall, the chains taut. My wrists are ripped against the shackles, then my shoulders feel as if they will come out of the sockets. There’s crackling noise from the wall. The chains slip, and slip again, each time my wrists are scored, her claws sink deeper. Her tail is thrashing the water in the chamber so violently I can barely hear myself scream, and I scream and I scream, and the chains let go—
    CHORUS: And so, his chains ripped from the ancient wall, the mad fool was dragged by his hellish lover down—down into the dark depths of the Venetian lagoon.

SIX
    The Players
    A ntonio hurried from the Rialto as the bells of St. Mark’s tolled for the noon prayers. He was followed by an entourage of four young protégés dressed in business finery, a certain uniformity to their dark togs that identified them to others as members of the merchant class, but each wearing a swath of brightly colored silk, a broach, or a bold feather in his cap that advertised his specialness. “I am one of you, maybe one better” was the message. They tumbled along behind Antonio like puppies after a mother hound with her teats on the move.
    “Why the urgency?” asked Gratiano, the tallest of the four and as broad shouldered as a dock slave, as they were about to mount the Rialto Bridge. “If it were important business, we should be headed to the Rialto, not to lunch, should we not?”
    Antonio turned, and was about to point out, once again, the youth’s talent for ignoring context and often the blindingly obvious, when he collided with a short, gray-bearded man in a long coat who had been thumbing through a folio of documents as he descended the steps of the bridge.
    “Jew,” said Gratiano, stepping around Antonio, and grabbing the old man by the arm, hoisting him up on his toes.
    “Usurer!” said Salarino, the oldest of the youths—beginning to go to fat, forever at the flank of his friend Gratiano. He took the Jew under his other arm and at the same time smacked the yellow hat off his head.
    “Antonio,” said the Jew, coming out of his flinch, eye to eye with the merchant now.
    “Shylock,” said Antonio. What now? The two young dolts in coming to his defense were forcing action. Senseless. Profitless.
    “Pardon,”