Poetic Justice Read Free

like his hand, doesn't it?"
    John had once seen Shakespeare's will, unearthed a few decades earlier from an Oxfordshire church, and had instantly memorized the poignantly shaky script of the aged Shakespeare. "It is rather like. A worthy attempt. What must I give you for it?"
    Alavieri shrugged. "Nothing. It is my gift to you. In recompense for my losing that play, and causing it to be lost forever." The smile was gone now; he was genuinely saddened, as genuinely as Alavieri could be. "It can be the first of your own collection of fakes, like my own. A curiosity, a cautionary, perhaps. It will remind you that you must not, as His Holiness did, let your hope overcome your sense. Or, as I did, lose a prize for lack of its price." He rose, tossed the leather parcel on the table. "Not that you, my ruthless lad, need be reminded of those."
    Halfway out the door, he looked back over his shoulder. "I would not have let you take the Lear unknowing. I care too much for truth for that. I wanted merely to test you. Now I know that your reputation is true. You have the eyes of an eagle, and the heart of a skeptic. The Jerusalem too must be true, and I have lost it to you."
    John lingered there for another quarter hour, turning the pages of the play, tracing the archaic script with his finger and translating the spelling into modern English, translating the priest's generosity. If it wasn't an original prompt book, it was a very early one, and worth a good deal. Alavieri was not, in John's experience, an impulsive man, nor a benevolent one either.
    Finally he recalled the tide and packed the curiosity away in his saddlebag next to the Jerusalem. The air was cooler now and cleared the ouzo fumes from his head as he rode down the rest of the mountain.
    Down through the winding main street of the village that spilled to the harbor, John kept half of his awareness on his surroundings, half on the sea below. It was sunset, and the fishermen were all gone home to bed, leaving their vessels moored, sails furled, in the tiny harbor.
    There was the Coronale towering over them all, his own sloop, bathed rosy in the dying sun, her single mast soaring, her bow curved as gracefully as a woman's hip. He had other ships, real ships with three masts and dozens of sails and cubic hectares of cargo space. But the Coronale would always be his first love, a lady of mystery, fast and sleek and wickedly experienced. She could outrun any excise cutter and outgun most privateers, though she seldom got the exercise now that he had become respectable. It's a shame the war has ended, he thought, for she's wasted on peaceful seas.
    The dirt road ended at the quay, no more than an old pier with a few fishing sheds drooping over the water. Over the suddenly loud clatter of his horse's hooves on wood, John heard something, something stealthy, the scrape of metal blade from metal sheath, the slide of a boot over wood. His hand found his own blade, gripped it surely, drew it out. He scanned the dock ahead, half-hidden now in dusk's shadows, and urged Malta into a gallop.
    There was a guttural Greek shout, forms catapulting from behind a shed, the flash of metal reflecting the last sun rays, a slash against his boot, across the leather bag under his knee. John let the reins drop, grabbed the bag with one hand, slashed up with the other. One of the attackers dropped screaming, blood spurting from his arm, but two others leaped up as John dug his heels into Malta's side and she sprang away.
    One bandit got hold of John's leg and hung on, and he felt Malta slide out from under him. The fall to the dock seemed to take forever. Malta was halfway to the sloop's mooring before John, curled protectively around the saddlebag, landed against the rough wood and the rough wool of the bandit's shirt. He glimpsed the other bandit leaping, blade held high. John kicked upward, slashed indiscriminately, all dervish motion and deadly intent, his boot heel jamming against the bandit's chin,