“He’s an old man, how far can he throw?”
Venice, May, 1324
“Get ready,” Gradenigo said.
“Are we too close?” Jaufre said in a low voice, rising to his feet, hands at the tie of his robe.
“He’s an old man, how far can he throw?” Gradenigo said.
The old man’s arm raised and Johanna saw the tiny gold ring in his hand, illuminated for just an instant by the rays of the morning sun. She stood, the little craft rocking beneath her feet, and shed her robe next to Jaufre. Everywhere she looked men were tearing at their clothes, on boats, on shore. Her robe fell next to Jaufre’s in the bottom of their boat. They were attired in tunic and trousers and slippers, white for better visibility underwater and wound close to their bodies in strips of more white cloth covered with a thick layer of grease. Johanna’s hair was caught back in a long braid and it too was slicked over with a layer of grease, as was every exposed bit of her skin. Shasha had rendered the fat of two sheep for enough to encase her and Jaufre both during their dive.
A tiny gold object sailed over the gathered flotilla, actually bouncing off the grasping hand of a young grandee attired in velvet, who leaned too far out of his boat and toppled into the water a moment after the ring hit the surface.
“Go, go, go!” Gradenigo said, a moment before a mighty shout went up from the assemblage.
Johanna, who had been taking deep, whistling breaths from the moment they had stopped moving, brought her hands over her head and dove over the side, conscious of Jaufre’s slicing into the water next to her only a second later. Even with all the practice dives they had made over the past month, it was gaspingly cold. Johanna blinked her eyes to clear them, pulled her head down and kicked hard and pulled harder with her arms, heading for her best guess as to where she might find the ring.
Something grabbed at her foot and she kicked hard, half-turning to see a bearded man in shirtwaist and hose hanging off her ankle.
Dana sez–
This is what we in the biz call “payoff.” See Book I, Chapter 5. You’re welcome.
In case you were wondering, the story of the ring was inspired by something I read in Memoirs of a Medieval Woman by Louise Collis, a book that kept on giving as I was writing this one.
