“Back, you pack of dogs!” I called, pushing my way onto the balcony. “Before the Moor has all your heads bobbing on pikes.” I reached down my back collar for the puppet Jones, who is a vivid example of the fate of the piked head, except miniature and more handsome than most, but Desdemona had asked me to put the puppet up during dinner, as she found his unbroken stare and resemblance to my own striking countenance “right creepy.” Fine. “He’ll have your guts for garters, will the Moor!”

“No he won’t,” said Desdemona from behind.

“No I won’t,” said Othello.

“He’ll rain down death on you and all your families, ravage your women, and fit your children on spikes with frightful efficiency!”

“Set down your arms,” said the Moor. “Were it my cue to fight I should have known it without a prompter.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake—”

The Moor pushed me back from the railing. “I will come down. Let us go before the doge and the council, and I shall there answer your charge under the law.”

“Useless bloody sooty-bosomed toss-tick, that’s what you are,” said I. Othello had invoked the law, and Venice was a city of bloody laws, wasn’t it?

“To prison with you, then,” said Brabantio. “Until a fit time for a trial.”

Then there came from below the cry of a new voice. “Hail, General, it is Cassio!”

I crept to the rail. At the edge of the mob stood an armed soldier in leather and light armor, and with him a cohort of six men-at-arms. Othello’s captain, Michael Cassio, who I was yet to meet.

“The doge calls for you,” said Cassio. “There is an urgent matter of strategy and the entire council is awake and waiting. The Genoans are moving on Corsica.”

“Look,” said I. “Your captain’s brought help. We could slaughter these knaves and still be at the council within the hour.”

“Stop it, Pocket,” said Desdemona. “You’re just trying to come up with new ways to off yourself to ease your grief.”

“You mean kill myself, right?”

“Yes.”

“Possibly . . .”

“I am coming down,” said the Moor.

“Fuckstockings!” Out in the piazza, beyond Cassio and his men, I saw Iago crouching in a doorway, careful not to be seen by the other soldiers. How could I know that even then he was working his dread plot upon the Moor?

On the ship to Corsica the meaning of Cordelia’s dream came to me . . .

“You’re the bloody Jewess!” I exclaimed, coming out of a dead sleep and struggling to sit up in my hammock, which hung in our little corner of the cargo hold. We’d been at sea for two days; I’d spent much of it belowdecks, unwell.

“Rather undermines the disguise if you’re just going to shout that out, Pocket,” said Jessica.