Chapter 121: Breakfast at the War Table

Dawn came through the shutters in thin gray bars, and the canal sent up its scent of low tide.

Vito washed his hands at the ewer before touching the food. The habit had survived a siege, a sea, and the whole crew’s mockery.

Marouda set the tray on the little table without a word. That table had held cargo plans one night and a season’s accounts the next. This morning it held a campaign.

A round wheaten loaf, still warm. Hard-boiled eggs, sheep’s cheese, small salted lagoon fish, figs split by the sun, and a bowl of cherries. Honey in a pot and watered wine in clay cups, with a jug of boiled water on the side.

He missed the little black bitter cup his old century had given him at dawn. The bread made up for most of it, and the cherries were better than most his old life had ever sold him.

There was no fork anywhere.

The history fanatic in him grinned. He knew the old story of the Greek bride in a Doge’s house who ate with a little golden fork, and the preacher who swore God had rotted her for it.

Now he sat in the world where a fork was still a scandal, peeling an egg with his thumbs like a sinner.

Caterina sat across from him, sleeves pinned above the elbow, her braid still hanging over one shoulder, her notebook open beside the bread. The tips of her ears were pink, and she was pretending it had never left home.

He watched her forearm as she dipped the pen, and in his mind, he figured he could live a long life with this daily view.

Marouda poured the watered wine while her eyes went from the rumpled bed to Caterina’s ears to Vito’s face, then up to the ceiling, as though the room owed her an explanation.

Vito grinned into his egg.

Caterina didn’t lift her eyes from the page, but even then she caught the grin. She had a knack for watching him the way a merchant watches a scale, without seeming to look at all.

She idly noted. "Marito, why smirk at your eggs? Unless you have either witnessed a miracle or done what you ought to confess."

Vito turned the egg in his fingers like a jeweler with a stone that had proved flawless.

"A miracle, cara, and a small one, but I’ll take it. A noble egg. A sainted egg."

He held it up to the gray light. "And your ears, moglie, rpipe as those cherries to the very shade. Shall I carry the bowl around the city and let the whole Venezia judge the match?"

The pen scratched on, brisker than before. A woman truly unmoved, he reflected, wouldn’t write so fast.

"Eat, Vitale, before I enter that egg as a loss."

He reached for the pepper. The little pot at his elbow held a smear of black dust and nothing more.

He reached for the pepper pot and found a black smear at the bottom, dust, the ghost of a fortune. His hand hung above it a moment, like a mourner’s over a grave.

"Caterina." It came out wounded. "Where is the pepper?"

"Sold."

She turned a page without haste.

"Every grain. The sweepings too, swept up, weighed, and entered twice."

He laid a palm flat against his chest. "Seventeen tons of the stuff, enough to ransom a city, and the master of this house cannot season his own egg. San Marco, witness it. Write it down."

"Season it with the profit."

She didn’t so much as glance up, but a smile tugged at the corner of her lips.

"That is entered as well."

He bit into the egg, out of pure spite, and found it very good, and thoroughly undefended.

Then he wiped his fingers on the cloth and sat back, pleased with himself. "So. The commerce is done, moglie, every sack sold, every purse heavy. What now? A feast? Bells? A modest procession in your honor, a few boys with olive branches?"

She tapped the page twice with the butt of the pen, a small drumroll before a sentence. "The sale was the easy part, marito. A draft is only a promise until the bench honors it, the buyer’s carters stand at the door, and the Commune’s scale has weighed every sack, and a notary has set it all down in ink with his seal beneath."

Her finger traveled down the page in the order of a litany. "The investors have their silver come to them, and the ones in Constantinople must be reached before the sea is closed. Rome’s balsam draft falls due in the autumn. The pepper goes over Mont Cenis on mules, God pity the mules, and the alum to Siena and Florence."

Listening, Vito had pictured all of it, mules on Alpine ice, a notary’s quill, a changer’s face going gray, and understood that behind that voice sat a map he could never have held in his own head.

He set his egg down with ceremony.

"Nobody sings it."

"Sings what?"

The old fanatic rose up in him, the one who could recite an order of battle to any soul unlucky enough to ask.

He raised a single finger. "Homer, cara. Every poet since Homer. Achilles sulks, Hector dies, Troy goes up in flames, the gods sit on their clouds quarreling over the wine. And in all that howling, not one line for the man at the tent flap, counting the boots. Asking whether the Myrmidons were paid."

"Then I am that man."

She said it to the page, and he saw a ghost of a smile cross her lips, there and gone, a debt acknowledged to be paid later.

"The finest in Christendom."

He said it warmly and meant every syllable. "Kings have their poets, popes have their choirs, and I, God help me, have a wife who counts pepper."

"Someone has to."

Her finger ran down the list. "Today I take the benches and the notaries. Zaccaria and Domenego hold the warehouse door, and pity any carter who tries them."

The pen swung up across the bread and pointed at him like a lance at a tourney. "And you sign where I put my finger, and you let the Rialto see your face."

"So I am the ornament."

He laid a hand over his heart.

"The gilt on the altar. The painted saint in his niche, very fine to look at, forbidden to speak."

"You are the seal, marito." Her eyes came up at last, quick. "And a seal never talks."

It was a compliment and a tease at once, fitted together so neatly he couldn’t tell which she had meant harder.

Vito peeled a fig.

"And after the boots?"

"More of the same, marito. Bigger."

She swung the notebook around until it faced him, and her whole face changed with it, the clerk put down, the conqueror picked up. "The next colleganza is wider. Same terms as this one, half the profit to them, their silver returned whole before we touch a grossi."

Her finger stabbed down the page, item by item.

"More naves. A yard of our own. More routes, and the seed for all of it lies in the strongbox."

Vito laughed with real admiration.

"Near enough, that you have already spent next season’s profit. Twice."

"I counted it twice, it’s only prudent."

"And you mention the yard? The Greek?"

The pen stopped. He watched it hover above the page and judged that it had never once hesitated over a sum.

"The silver is there now."

Her cadence was still a merchant’s, but slower. "And a yard of our own would build trade ships, cargo hulls, naves for the venture. But the Arsenal owns his hands, marito, and the man it listens to must be paid. And that man names the price."

The smile he had been wearing wouldn’t stay. He let it go.

She looked at him a moment, then the pen went down and scratched out a single line. He didn’t ask to read it, and she didn’t offer.

At last, Caterina continued. "The houses I’m courting sit in the Great Council, or keep cousins who do. Those are your voices, marito, never mine."

The fig stopped halfway open in his hands. Voices. The word went into him like a key and turned, and behind it, unlocked, lay the whole island.

It came out flat as a dropped stone. "Crete, then. Whoever Venezia sends will step off the boat with a letter in one hand and an appetite in the other, and I want the rooms warm before he walks into them. Warm, Caterina, fed and friendly."

"You mean what is left exposed."

She put it gently, the way a physician names a wound. "Then let me name it. The Candia ground, given on Leon’s word alone. Chania’s tolls. The estates you handed to your obedient archons. The two seats you promised, Leon’s, and the one you all but dangled under Kalergis’s nose."

Her eyes held his.

"Every one of them rests on your word, Vitale. On that, and on nothing else."

"How do they vote, these houses. By love? By fear? By scripture?"

"By kin and by debt."

She answered it like a figure out of a column. "They resent being managed, marito, and they love being informed. Houses that have more than doubled their silver will listen kindly. So give them reasons, never orders."

Vito turned it over. Reasons, not orders. It was the oldest trick in politics, and he had only ever seen it fail when one forgot it. The half-open fig had gone warm in his hand.

"Then I go to the Avogadori and see my own name in ink upon the rolls."

Across the sea, a blind old man who should have been in his grave was alive and breathing in Constantinople. The calendar Vito had learned for this city as a boy had come loose page by page and blown away.

August might keep its appointment. It might not.

He ate the fig.

"The Great Council, old foxes, every one, in the henhouse since before I was born."

He reached for his cup and found his hand perfectly steady, which pleased him more than it should have.

"There are two more debts, your family’s table, my family’s door."

The pen stopped. In the gray light he watched a bead of ink swell at the nib and fall, a small black blot on the page, the first he had ever seen her make.

"I know what I would say to them. I don’t know yet whether I’ll say it."

"I have three speeches for Zio. Two are insults. The third is a very long insult."

"Eat, marito." It came out warm, for her. "Before the day takes the rest of the bread."

She read the day’s list aloud like a herald at a muster, the pen ticking time down the page. "The benches, before any changer hears bad news from somebody else. Then the notary. A letter to Rome by way of Ambrogio. The Avogadori, and the rolls. The houses, one at a time. And Nestor’s yard, once there’s a door standing open in the Council, and not a breath sooner."

Vito rose, warm and amused, and buckled [Artiglio del Leone] at his hip. A general’s orders of the day, he thought, and every line of it a good deal harder than a battle.

"San Marco bones, moglie, is that the whole of it? The whole day?"

"That’s the first page."

She turned it. A second column waited beneath, and a third behind that, all in her small square hand.

Vito nearly wondered. "We sold everything, cara, a fortune in pepper. The very dust from the pot. I thought that was the work."

"That was the part they sing about, marito."

Vito looked at the second page. Then the third. Then the last cherry in the bowl. It didn’t take him long to decide which of the three he could conquer before noon.

He ate the cherry.