Chapter 125: Voice of His Own

Letters came from Pellegrino on the last trade ships.

The island was fine, the southeast stirred, and Pescatore remained unseen. Leon sent a letter asking about his seat and Vito wrote back that he remembered it, while Caterina closed her notebook over the sum before she had to say the number aloud.

Back in Venezia and in the council, Vito had no voice on the floor with which to speak, and Marco never spoke to his nephew in the palace. No letter crossed the lagoon between them, and no insult crossed the benches either.

Crete never came up.

Vito cut no leash and touched no debt. Fantin brought the news from a cousin’s table, and his face, which could make almost anything into a laugh, found nothing funny in this.

Marina Badoer kept tabs on the Barozzi in a book she swore was for silk. The Rialto took bets on which one the hall would follow, and the odds moved with the cushions, since Venezia had many ways to discuss politics, and betting was one of the more sincere ones.

In the first days of autumn, the bells began at the Lido and ran up the lagoon. Every campanile from San Nicolò to Torcello took the cry from the one before it, until the whole water rang.

Vito and Caterina stood on the Molo between the two granite pillars, with half the city packed behind them and every hull in the Bacino dressed in whatever cloth it owned.

The galley came in from the open sea with her oars rising and falling together, a flock of blades lifting from the water.

The old man came up the Molo in a chair with carrying poles, though no one standing on the stone called it a litter. The three councillors who had crossed the sea with him walked behind, sunburned and grim, while the three who had kept his chair warm came down to meet them.

He was thinner than the old fellow he had left in Constantinople, and slower too, his head bare and white. Vito had watched those hands work the prayer beads one bead at a time, like a clerk counting coin, but hey moved now at the same pace.

The blind Doge who had led an assault on the sea walls of an empire came up the Molo carried like a folded cloak.

Caterina’s hand found Vito’s sleeve and closed around it.

The chair filled the seat on the dais at the next sitting, while the blind face lifted toward the guest bench, as though toward a window, and stayed there for a breath.

Vito never learned why.

The hall began counting who would come after.

San Michele came in with bells, and the electors sat behind the Palace doors. Vito waited at the step with the porter, who held [Artiglio del Leone] across both palms like a bishop’s mitre.

Fantin waited beside him and talked for the first hour, until even Fantin ran out of words.

Then the stooped cousin with the small edition of his nose came running through the doors with a leaf in his fist and handed it to Fantin.

Fantin read it twice, his lips moving.

More ink had been struck from the leaf than remained on it. The yes sat at the bottom, about the width of a pudding hat, while every struck line was a man Marco had called on before his soup went cold.

Vitale Barozzi stood in the roll. The ink he had watched dry had a book under it now.

He took the sword from the porter’s palms and buckled it on. For one breath, his hip had everything it had been asking for since summer. Then he laid it back across those same palms, and the porter, who had received that sword for a season, took it a second time without surprise.

Vito walked up the steps as a member of the Great Council, and the palace let him in.

Marouda sewed in a corner of the room at L’Angelo, a slipper at her elbow in case the groom proved forgetful, while the wedding grew around her needle like a list. That was the way of weddings. Someone always had to keep the list.

A notary’s draft lay on the little table with a hole left in it for the dowry. The ring lay in the trunk where it had been since Alexandria, wrapped in linen beneath the scraps. The proposal Vito properly owed her was still owed.

No priest had been chosen. The only name either of them could bear to see in a doorway was Ambrogio’s, and he had already begun pricing the candles. Zaccaria and Fantin would stand witness. A house to receive the bride was still nothing more than a rented floor.

Two items on the list required somebody besides the two of them.

The dowry clause waited on Contarini silver that had never come, from a house that had offered a chapel, a dinner, and a calendar with no room left in it.

The other waited on the senior of the house of Barozzi, who had been asked in July to stand with his nephew and had sat inside a hat instead.

Both houses remained at the back of the list, and the hole in the notary’s draft remained open.

The eighteenth of October was the feast of San Luca, and the Great Council would sit that day to answer one question.

It would decide whom the Republic named over Crete and on what terms, and what became of everything standing on Vito’s word there, be the ground given on Leon’s word alone, the Chania tolls, the estates handed to obedient archons, and the seats promised and never delivered.

The sea would close within weeks. Whoever the council named would sail in days or wait until March.

An island left a whole winter without its master would have to live on nerve and presence, with Pellegrino and a lion’s reputation standing in for a governor.

For the first time in that hall, Vito had a voice of his own to spend.