The Nineteenth Name

Chapter One: The Boat with Two Passengers

I was seventeen that June, and I had never in my life been afraid of paper.

That is the thing I remember first when I think of the boat: my satchel across my knees with three quills, a horn of ink, a knife for cutting nibs, and, folded twice against the lining, a printed decree that had killed my brother more surely than any swelling in his armpit. I held the satchel the way a man holds a child he is afraid of dropping. The water in Marsamxett harbour was flat and grey-green, and it smelled of nothing at all, which was the strangest thing. All that spring Valletta had smelled of vinegar and burnt sulphur and the sweetish rot beneath both. Out on the water there was only salt.

The boatman would not look at us. He had tied a rag soaked in rosemary water over his mouth and nose, and he rowed with his face turned aside, as if we were a bad smell he was too polite to mention. He had been paid double. He had still argued.

"Twenty-two strokes to the minute," said the man sitting opposite me. "He is rowing slowly on purpose. He wants the trip to end and he does not want to arrive. A very human arithmetic."

That was Matteo Calvi. He was perhaps forty-five, thin as a bundle of sticks, with grey coming in at his temples and a face that had been handsome before something wore the softness off it. He wore black, badly. His cuffs were frayed and inkstained and he did not seem to know it. Between his boots sat a wooden case with brass corners, and I had already learned not to ask what was in it, because he would tell me, and the telling would take an hour, and I would not sleep afterwards.

I had met him two days before, in the Castellania yard, when the Order's clerk had pushed me at him and said, "This is the boy. He can write."

"Can he look?" Calvi had said.

The clerk had not understood the question. I understood it later.

Ahead of us the island rose out of the harbour: a long low rock with a wall around it, and inside the wall a city that was not a city. Vaults with barrel roofs, ranged in blocks. A bell tower. Chimneys — dozens of chimneys, more chimneys than a place that size could need, and from four of them a yellow-white smoke came up and lay along the water. Sulphur. They burned it in flues behind the walls to purge the chambers, and the smoke came out of those stacks and drifted, and the fishermen of Sliema swore they could smell it across the creek and that it was the smell of the Devil being kept in his box.

The great lazaretto of Malta. Built for merchandise. Filled, that summer, with people.

"Do you know what a lazaretto is for?" Calvi asked me.

"To keep the plague out."

"That is what it is for when it works. When it does not work, it is a place to put the truth." He nodded at the wall. "Everything that comes into this harbour is written down in there. Every bale, every sailor, every rat, if rats could sign. It is the largest book on this island, boy, and it is made of stone."

"My name is Nico."

"I know your name. I read the contract. Nico Grech, apothecary's apprentice, seventeen years, hand legible." He looked at me then, properly, for the first time — a flat, unhurried look that went over my face the way a mason's eye goes over a wall he is thinking of pulling down. "Grech is a common name."

"Common as dirt," I said.

"Mm." He turned back to the island. "They have engaged me because their own physicians are dead. Four of them since March. Not one of them killed by an argument, all of them killed by the thing they were arguing about. Rome censured me eleven years ago for opening the dead, and Rome has not changed its mind, but the Order of Saint John has a harbour full of corpses and nobody left who will touch them. So they send a boat for the heretic in Padua who cuts." He said it without bitterness, which somehow made it worse. "You will write what I say. You will write it exactly, including the words you do not like. If you cannot, tell me now and I will send you back with him."

The boatman's shoulders twitched. He had heard.

"I can write it," I said.

"Why do you want to?"

The wall was close now. I could see the sea-gate, an arch with an iron portcullis and two guards in the Order's red on the steps, and a hand-cart, and a bell on a post that visitors rang and then stepped back from.

"Everyone else is dead or gone," I said. "I need the wage."

He let that sit for a moment. "That is a lie," he said, mildly. "But it is a well-made one, and we will both pretend it holds until it does not."

I should say here what the lie covered, because everything that followed came out of it.

Five months earlier, in the last week of January, criers had gone through Valletta and Birgu and Floriana with a decree of the Health Office. It was printed and it was nailed up on church doors, and I read it three times before my legs would carry me home. It said that the pestilence now afflicting these islands had been traced, by the diligence of the Office, to its origin: one Salvu Grech, boatman of the customs, who in the winter had carried infected goods ashore in defiance of quarantine, and had concealed his sickness, and had thereby brought this scourge upon the people of Malta.

My brother was thirty-one. He had a wife, Ċeċilja, and a boy of four called Ġorġ. He rowed cargo in the harbour for eight tarì a day and he could not read the decree that named him. By the time it was nailed up he was already in a pest-hut at Marsa with his neck swollen shut, and he died six days later in a fever, shouting at people who were not there. They would not let us near the hut. They buried him in a pit with lime, and afterwards the neighbours broke Ċeċilja's shutters and painted a cross on her door in tar, and a woman I had known all my life spat on my sister-in-law in the street and told her that her son had murdered nine thousand people.

I knew two things that the decree did not say. The first was that Salvu had come home one night in November with silver in his purse — real silver, scudi, not the copper he was paid in — and had been happier and more frightened than I had ever seen him, and would not say why. The second was that a decree does not fall out of the sky. Somebody writes it. Somebody signs it. And every signature in the harbour of Malta ended up in the same place.

In there. Behind that wall. In the largest book on the island.

The boat bumped the steps. The boatman was already shipping his oar with one hand and holding the other out for the rest of his money, and he would not take it from Calvi's fingers; he made him lay the coins on the thwart and then he picked them up with a bit of tarred cloth.

Calvi stepped ashore without looking back. I hauled the case up after him, and it was heavier than a case of that size should be, and something inside it shifted and clinked.

Above the arch of the sea-gate somebody had cut words into the stone a long time ago. My Latin was an apothecary's Latin, good for weights and simples, but I could read it.

Health to those who enter. Truth to those who leave.

"Somebody was being funny," I said.

"Somebody was being accurate," said Calvi. "Ring the bell."

I rang it. Inside the wall, a long way off, a man began to shout that the physician had come, and other men took up the shout, and it went away from us into the vaults and echoed and came back thinner, the way a sound does in a place with too many rooms.

The portcullis went up. That was the fourth of June, in the year 1676, and I did not come out again for six weeks, and I have never once, in the forty years since, gone a month without dreaming of that gate.