Chapter 123: The Grand Council of Venezia

The dark closed over them like a door slammed by an impatient man.

Vito’s hand went to his left hip for the hilt that now lay across a porter’s palms back at the entrance, and found only cloth. His body hadn’t yet accepted the rule.

Zaccaria muttered behind him, his arms folded over a belt that carried nothing. "I hand my blade to a porter like a tooth to the barber, tomorrow they ask for the boots, the day after, the breeches. Then I go before the Republic naked as Adam with my good name for a fig leaf, and a thin leaf it is, mona."

Vito tossed the answer back over his shoulder. "Calma, amico, we are still on the porch of the house. And smile, no? A man who frowns at the Republic, she remembers his face."

His eyes adjusted to the dark.

The walls were thicker than a person was tall, breathing out cool air that smelled of wool steaming in July, beeswax, oak-gall ink, and damp from the lagoon. Beneath it all came a noise like the tide against pilings, several hundred men talking at once.

The hall appeared around them.

Shafts of light fell through high, narrow windows, with dust turning slowly inside them. Benches rose across both sides of a broad aisle, filling with dark gowns and hats of every shape a patrician had ever thought worth putting on his head.

At the far end stood a dais with a row of high chairs.

So this was the room where the Republic made up its mind.

It smelled like a wet sheep at a notary’s office, and Vito loved it at once.

A hand like a mooring line clamped onto Vito’s arm, and Fantin hauled him out of the doorway.

"Camina, cugino, camina!"

It was a hiss, but a hiss pitched to reach the rafters. "Daghe! A legend who stops in the doorway, ciò, he is a pigeon! A fat pigeon on the Piazza, waiting for bread, or a stone!"

They merry band up the aisle arm in arm, and Fantin loosed his voice on the benches like a miller opening a sluice.

"Ser Piero! God keep your gout and your wife’s mother, in that order!"

"Ser Nicolò, you have grown! No, no, I lie, it is the gown, but how it flatters you!"

One bench turned, then the next, until the movement washed across the hall ahead of them like a wave crawling across a mudflat.

The whispers came in three strands.

The first was the legend, and every bench had improved it a little. The Emperor had been strangled with a bell rope, with a wet eel, fallen from the dome and Vito had caught him, asked his name, then strangled him out of courtesy, apple and all.

One patrician on the left swore there had been two Emperors and a bear.

The next was less friendly. Marco’s nephew was on Fantin’s arm, the fellow from Crete who owned an island and, apparently, a face worth discussion.

Those grumbled that the Latins had lost their Emperor to the Bulgars in Thrace that spring, and now the lagoon was cheering a cadet who had only killed outdated news. Then how Fantin’s walk was like a hen carrying off a stolen egg.

The ending was warmer.

Across the side benches, a stout man lifted two fingers from his knee, like debtor who has paid what he owed. His cousin’s house had put silver into a Barozzi’s colleganza and had received twice as much back.

An usher sent Zaccaria to the wall with the other retainers. Fantin had presented him to every bench as a Michiel on the good side of the blanket, and a gray-haired patrician near the wall seemed to believe it.

The old man dipped his head.

Zaccaria dipped his in return, stiffly, like paying a toll he would rather not pay.

Near the front, the murmur thinned in one place, like warm water cold around a stone.

Vito looked up.

Zio Marco sat on the front bench in a wine-dark gown, the same dye as the mantle across Vito’s shoulders. Some knot of patricians from other houses gathered close around him.

He was thick, his hands folded on his knees.

On his head sat a stiff hat shaped exactly like a pudding that had taken holy orders.

The memory Vitale had left him had one thing about this man. A lean boy in a doorway, asking the price of a length of rope, and silence for an answer.

It was there now.

No joke came to cover it.

Zio Marco was already looking back. He lifted his chin by a finger’s width, as if checking whether a debt is still standing.

Vito kept the grin and nodded exactly as deeply as an uncle was owed, and no deeper.

Neither said a word.

The hall watched them as if bets had been put down on the result.

Whispers vanished around them, benches creaked, and Fantin’s arm went stiff as a spar.

A bell struck somewhere in the roof and neither man looked away. They held each other’s eyes for a full breath after the stroke.

Three Ducal Councillors came onto the dais and sat around an empty chair, while the other three were across the sea with the Doge that chair belonged to.

Fantin walked as a member and walked Vito to the foot of the dais, where three Avogadori looked up from their roll-books.

The eldest was old as a rafter and inked to the wrist, with a voice like a door dragging across a dry hinge. Beside him sat a stooped young man with Fantin’s nose in a smaller edition.

"Name, and the house that stands behind it."

Vito put on the formal speech like a borrowed doublet. "Messer Avogadore, with all reverence. I am Vitale Barozzi, of the house of Barozzi, born in lawful wedlock in this city beneath the lion of San Marco, and of full age to answer for my own sins. This I swear before the bench, upon my baptism and upon my name."

"Sworn by whom, ser?"

Fantin sang it, one hand flying to his chest. "By me, Messer, by my mother’s rosary, may she wear it to threads in peace, by my mother’s sister’s husband’s, ah, that is Zio Bortolo, the one with the leg, Messer, the leg he left at Zara, God rest the leg..."

"By you, then. Say it."

"By me, Messer."

"Sworn. Enter."

The old man then continued, and the quill came up at last.

"Now the voucher. Speak, and keep your sails furled."

Fantin laid a hand on the roll-book as though it were a relic, flung the other wide to take in the bench, the dais, the rafters and very probably God, and swelled like a sail catching its first wind.

"Messeri Avogadori! Illustrious! Thrice blessed! Lamps of the Republic, lions of the books! I, Fantin Barozzi, sixth son of the fifth branch of a tree, Messeri, a tree whose roots go down, down, down into the very mud of Torcello, where our blood was drinking the lagoon before there was ever a Doge to tax it..."

"Fantin."

Just the name, set down like a pebble in a well. Then, mildly.

"I am an old man, and I mean to die in my own bed."

Fantin stopped.

"The formula, the words as they are written."

The performance slid from Fantin like a cloak dropped on a floor. "I stand surety with my own mouth. This is Vitale Barozzi, of my blood and of my house. If he lies, then I have lied, and I answer for it."

The old man turned his head toward the front bench slowly, like a heron turns toward a ripple, and the whole hall turned with him. "The senior of the house is present. Good. Does he stand with this vouching? Let him answer in this hall, with his breath, so that the clerk may hear it."

Every head in the hall turned toward Marco.

Marco didn’t rise.

The hat didn’t move, and no word came from beneath it.

Thus it was proclaimed. "Let the record show, that Messer Marco Barozzi, senior of the house, was asked in the hearing of this hall, and gave no answer. Write it as it fell, boy."

The pen lifted, and the pause before it came down was long enough to hear the dust in the light.

The hall supplied the rest, it came as a low swell from every bench at once, like a pot beginning to boil.

Vito kept his eyes on the bench.

The copyist’s nib touched the leaf. The quill scratched, and the oak-gall smelled sour and sweet.

The letters appeared wet and black.

Vitale Barozzi.

Vito watched them dry.

What was a name in ink worth to a man who had died under one and woken under another?

The eldest Avogadore laid his palm flat on the leaf, and finished the business. "It is entered as a petition. It goes before the electors on the feast of San Michele, when they sit and the roll is made new. Until that day Messer Vitale may sit in this hall as the guest of the member who vouched for him. He has no voice upon this floor or a vote until then."

Chairs scraped at the front bench.

Marco rose, and the knot around him rose with him like geese with their leader. They crossed the floor toward the door without a glance back.

Vito watched the pudding pass above the heads, the wine-dark gown swinging beneath it.

"Then we have until San Michele, time enough to learn every bench in this hall by its name, and by its debt."

He lowered himself onto the guest bench, stretched out his legs, and let the whole Republic watch him do it. "So call it a long breakfast. We sit, we chew, we smile, and we watch which of these good gentlemen chokes first."

The door shut behind his uncle.