Chapter 117: Insult Me at Your Leisure

Vito didn’t leave the sheets to explain themselves.

He pulled the stack open in one sweep, corner over corner, until three sheets lay spread across the bench, curling at the edges.

Before Nestor could complain, he put the shipwright’s adze across the corner, the mallet across the second sheet, and the pitch pot, its lid crusted shut, across the third.

The man’s face grew a shade darker.

"My tools, you bastard."

He began in Venetian, sending a burst of it toward the sky and whichever saint was responsible for delivering patricians to his workshop.

"<anno data-annotation-id="a6f5a377-0e25-c975-9b55-1c7a91cdcff3" data-title="Παναγία μου!">Παναγία μου!¹</anno> What am I, a fishmonger weighing his catch at market?"

"Easy, amico. You’ll frighten the saints."

Vito raised both hands and made no attempt whatsoever to stop him.

"I am no friends of yours, Barozzi."

Nestor reached for the adze without taking his eyes from the sheet beneath it.

Don’t put that word in my mouth."

His eyes reached the blueprints, then, and whatever complaint died there. For a heartbeat he simply stood over the sheet in silence.

"Hold that corner."

He slapped Vito’s hand down on the paper.

"And you, soldier. Get your hand on that corner."

Zaccaria raised an eyebrow, then obeyed, which was how a man learned to mind the room without asking why.

Nestor pulled a stub of chalk from the pouch at his belt and set it beside him, close enough to hand. His thumb found the stern in the blueprints, searching for the two steering oars that ought to have been there.

Instead, one broad slab hung from the sternpost on iron hinges, filling both empty spaces at once.

"Who in God’s name has hung a door on the arse of a galley?"

He spoke to the blueprints, spreading both hands as if he were presenting evidence to a court that had not had the good sense to convene.

"One sailor at the stern, and a hundred necks bound to his hands. Beautifully stupid."

Vito pressed a hand to his heart. "Ah, my comito! Poveretto. He will weep, maestro, weep like a bride on the Sensa, with the whole lagoon watching."

"Who is he, this comito, eh? Speak!"

"The one who must steer her, maestro, the poor devil with the door in his hands."

"Then let him weep! Let him weep, let him pray, let him light a candle to San Nicolò."

Nestor snatched up the chalk and drew one hard line across the edge of the bench.

"Ένα. One."

Zaccaria tipped his head toward the next sheet.

"The benches, maestro. They lean, all the same way, like drunks along a wall."

The shipwright’s head came up so quickly he nearly headbutted them. "Crooked, he tells me! Crooked! Am I blind? I know they are crooked! That was mine to find, soldier, mine, not yours! You hold the corner and you leave the eyes to me!"

He bent over the drawing again, muttering at the sheets.

Every bench sat at the same slant, staggered down the hull, and every man had his oar to pull. It let more oars fit into the keel without one fouling the next.

"Ναι. She would run, this one, like a cat with boiling water on her arse. Disgusting."

He said it as if that were an insult. "And every oarsman on this lagoon, every one, old men with beards down to the belt, sits down like a child to learn his trade again! Eh? Who tells them? You? You tell them?"

He marked the bench a second time.

For the third sheet, he didn’t bother looking down at the blueprints.

He jerked his chin toward the half-planked hull on the slip across the yard, its ribs still bare where the planking had not caught up.

"That is how a hull is born, patrikios. As God intended."

He said it like a prayer he had stopped believing but still remembered word for word. "First the planks, by the eye of a man! The eye, the hand, forty years of sin and salt! Then the ribs, after, driven in to hold what the eye has already found. So it is done, so it has always been done."

He looked back down.

On the page, the ribs stood alone, numbered, with the planking sketched over them afterward, like a hide put back on bones that had already been hung out to dry.

"An ox on a hook, patrikios! Skinned, hanging, bones out in the wind, and only then someone remembers to sew the hide back on!"

His lips quivered. "Any half-blind boy with a piece of cord, cuts these to the mark and never lifts an adze in his life! And the master? What is the master? A broom! That is what this does to a master, patrikios. It makes of him a broom, to sweep the shavings."

Vito reached toward the sheets, slowly, as though he figured the whole business was no longer worth fighting over.

Nestor’s hand slammed flat across it hard enough to make the bench jump.

"Touch it! Touch it and I break the hand!"

"Calma, maestro, calma! I only look to see if you are finished."

"Finished, he says! I am not finished! I am not even a little bit finished!"

He protected the blueprints like it was his own child.

"Τρία. Three."

The last sheet showed the oars themselves, each pivoted on a frame extending beyond the hull’s flank, the pivots hanging over open water like little balconies built onto a palazzo wall.

Nestor went rigid over this one.

"Balconi."

The word came out smaller than every outburst, while his finger followed the reach of the frame without touching the vellum. "He gives the oars balconies. Balconies, like a palazzo on the canal! The arm is longer, the stroke is the same, and the hull, so thin, so thin, she slips through the water like a knife through fresh cheese."

Whatever else he meant to say never arrived.

He reached for the chalk, marked the bench a fourth time, and snapped the stub clean between his fingers without seeming to notice.

Vito didn’t offer a question this time. There was none worth putting into that silence.

Then Nestor came around the bench so fast and drove one finger, thick as a marlinspike, into his chest till he walked backward and forced his heels to strike the timber stack.

<anno data-annotation-id="caf90255-d320-a0b1-2694-baa800858b74" data-title=""Σαράντα χρόνια!"">"Σαράντα χρόνια!"¹</anno>

His voice had all its old volume again, and then some. "Forty years, and my hands are inside every ship that has ever swum this sea! The dromon! The galandria! The Saracen galleys out of Alexandria, I tore them open with my own hands to learn why they went down! And here, five, five new things on one galley, patrikios! Nobody builds this. Nobody! Nobody could have! Who drew it? Who?"

Vito found his footing shot him an easy grin, one that survived worse confrontations than this one.

"I read, maestro. I read a great deal, in another life, and I had the time for it."

Nestor stared at him.

Then he laughed, one short, hideous bark without a scrap of mercy in it.

"You read it! You read it."

He said it again, slower, as though it might make it less foolish. "A book! A book teaches a boy to hang balconies off the flank of a galley! Tell me, patrikios, tell me, does the book hold the adze for you also? Does the book sweat for you?"

"I manage, maestro. Somehow, I manage."

"Barely! I would bet my last finger, barely."

He wiped a hand down his face.

"Ψεύτη! Liar, terrible liar. And such drawings, Παναγία, such wonderful drawings."

"Then believe what you like, maestro. The paper does not care."

Nestor didn’t correct him for the word this time.

Vito straightened his coat and found a white smear of chalk dust across the front where the old man had grabbed him.

He left it there.

"It is not the hands of the Republic I want, maestro. Yours I want. Yours."

He nodded toward the city beyond the wall. "A yard of your own, maestro, rented outside the walls, where no man in a red cap tells you which way the ribs go in. Your own timber, your own men, and your own mouth, as filthy as God made it!"

"A patron! Hah!"

Nestor spat the word like a fish bone caught in his throat.

"Patrons talk, patrikios. Patrons have mouths, and mouths open."

"I talk less than I look, maestro. Much less. It’s only the face that fools people."

"Όχι. No."

He said it flatly. "You speak of patrons as though I were a free man, sitting at my door, waiting for one to come, cap in hand!"

He turned back toward his timber without looking at Vito. "I was brought here, in a hold, with whatever was worth the taking from a burning quarter. A slave with a trade eats, they told me on the ship. So, the Arsenal figured my hands were worth the bread, and put me to plane planks already drawn. That is my patron now."

His voice dropped lower.

"I built in the Emperor’s yards on the Horn, patrikios, before your ships ever came through."

Vito, for once, was left in silence.

There was nothing he could put on his face that wouldn’t be another lie, so he said nothing.

Nestor talked himself, in a smaller and meaner voice than the grief had used. "And I do not like people, patrikios. Never have, since the cradle. The Arsenal knows I am the best hull-master on this lagoon, and they hate me, they hate me, for making them say it."

He picked up the blueprints and held it longer than who meant to throw it away.

"The pins of the rudder. They run in iron, or in leather?"

"It’s on the sheet, maestro."

"I know it’s on the sheet! I can read a sheet!"

Vito let him have that. "The silver, it isn’t in my hands yet either, maestro. My partner, she is still making the numbers behave, and until she does I couldn’t lay a keel on a beach, let alone in a yard. So take your days, insult me at your leisure while she works. I am a patient man, as the saints know."

He squared the sheets into one stack and said a short line in Greek.

Nestor’s hand came down on the last sheet before it could leave the bench.

Vito raised an eyebrow and waited.

The hand lifted at last, grudgingly, and Nestor turned back to his propped plank as if the whole conversation had cost him more time than he intended to spend on it.

"Take your paper. Go, go! I have work."

And so they left.

Both men were almost to the gate when Nestor’s voice caught them from across the yard, louder than ever.

"Iron! Not leather, iron! You tell whoever drew it he’s a fool, a fool, and you tell him iron, do you hear!"

Zaccaria glanced at the white mark still ghosting across the front of Vito’s coat.

"Leave it, it’s just chalk."

"Have I mention it? Me?"

"And now, amico, the cathedral."

Zaccaria’s step didn’t slow, but his eyebrows rose.

"What is at the cathedral, Barozzi? God, I know, is there already."

Vito didn’t answer.

He kept walking toward the water, ready for even more business.