Iago stopped, dropped the tip of his sword, the call for alarm caught in his throat. Rodrigo’s scream rattled, broke, but went on piteously.

That darkness thrust again and the screaming stopped. Rodrigo’s headless body sat up on the cobbles for a second, twin fountains of blood arcing from his neck, glistening black in the dim red light. The shadow moved again, puddled around the twitching lump of meat that had been Rodrigo, and Iago saw the eyes, green, like emeralds catching moonlight, swaying, then fixing on him.

A latch clicked to his right, a door opened, and an old man holding a candle appeared. “What’s this?”

Iago dove through the open door, knocking the old man back as he did. He slammed the heavy door and threw the bolt, bracing his back against it just as something hit the other side with such force that he was knocked forward onto the old man, his sword rattling off into the dark. The bolt held, but something worried at the door with frenzied rasping blades on the oak, like a thousand rats trying to claw their way out of a burning barrel, the sound so terrifying Iago that he lay there for seconds atop the old man, paralyzed, until he realized that he was looking at the door by the light of his burning sleeve, set aflame by the old man’s candle.

“No, defend yourself,” came Cassio’s voice from beyond the fury. “I will teach you a lesson in manners, you knave! As soon as I have cleared my sword of this sodding scabbard, I will. Don’t just lie there, you rascal, stand up and fight! Pretending you don’t have a head won’t help you. Fight, I say!”

“I was not a very good child,” said Bassanio to his friend Gratiano, who sat opposite him in the gondola on the way to Belmont. “When I say I was not a good child, I do not mean that I was not well-behaved, nor of good nature, but that I was not good at being a child. I did not care for childish things, and I was never the right size. In my clothes, I was often too large, in games too small—I was often the wrong speed, as well.”

“Slow?” inquired Gratiano, turning his head so the garish feather in his hat would not be bent by the breeze.

“And sometimes too fast. And just when I began to master childhood, suddenly I was a youth, at which I was also undistinguished except for the growing of hair. As a man, I have been a disappointing son, a miserable merchant, a delinquent debtor, and a general disappointment to my friends and family.”

“That is not true,” said Gratiano. “We have very low expectations.”