With a little help from some friends in the boat, Michiel took Saskia’s plane in tow and pulled her the last few meters in to the point where lines could be transferred to bollards along the edge of the quay. Suddenly divested of all responsibility, Saskia was able to just stand there on the pontoon, one hand braced on the wing strut, the other waving from time to time at people who had gathered in the park to greet her, to denounce her, or simply to watch. There was the usual variety of signs and banners. The Frederika who had awakened this morning in Amsterdam as Queen of the Netherlands had been tuned to pay careful attention to those. Saskia Orange could afford to shrug most of it off. And to be honest, the feeling was probably mutual. Venice had seen it all. Her arrival was not a big deal.
The park was separated from the docks by a stone balustrade. Along this someone had deployed a banner reading, in English: “Welcome Queen of Netherworld!”
Saskia well knew how to spot the differences between signs that really had been improvised on kitchen tables by amateurs, and ones carefully fashioned to seem that way. This was one of the latter. Nor did it escape her notice that when Michiel—who had vaulted up out of his beautiful runabout onto the quay—stepped forward to offer his hand as she stepped off the pontoon, it all happened with that banner in the background. So the image was all over the world before her foot touched what passed in Venice for dry land.
She had never before encountered that usage of the word “Netherworld,” but she got it. Nederland—her kingdom until this morning—was a land that happened to be low. From a parochial Northern European standpoint it was
It was understood that she’d had a long day and so formalities at quayside were kept to a minimum: Saskia accepted a bouquet and an official greeting from the mayor as well as one from the leader of an entity called Vexital. After waving to the crowd and posing for a few photos she climbed into Michiel’s sleek mahogany runabout and enjoyed a rousing dash across the Lagoon to a private island.
Dozens of tiny islands were strewn across the water around Venice, each with its own long history of use as a monastery, convent, prison, dump, cemetery, or fortification. Many were uninhabited and unused, a fact remarkable to Saskia, who would have expected that a charming private island only a few minutes’ powerboat ride from the Grand Canal would be a hot property. The fact that they were all in danger of ceasing to exist had probably depressed the market. The one they were going to was less than a hundred meters wide. It was square except for an indentation on one side for a dock. Saskia had banked over this island a few minutes ago and got a good look out the side window of the plane. It was outlined on three of its sides by old buildings that had once served as the wings of a cloister. In medieval times those had risen directly from the water of the Lagoon, but sea level rise had forced the owners to expand the island’s footprint slightly by dumping fill into the shallow water to build up a surrounding levee. Resulting environmental controversies had become a political flash point in a way that was suspiciously useful to Vexital: a local movement dedicated to the proposition that Venice ought to secede, not just from Europe (“Vexit”) but from Italy (“Vexitalia”).
Venice itself, at less than four miles long, would seem so small that it was superfluous to have a microcosm of it; but Santa Liberata, as this island was known, had been seen as just that. Cornelia, its owner, had appeared in a very well produced video sloshing barefoot down flooded corridors of its ancient cloisters, gazing sadly down through six inches of water at beautiful mosaics, and looking up at frescoes soon to be dissolved by rising seawater.
