Chapter 126: Dandolo at Breakfast

From the depths of the blanket, the Doge flung the number up and let it fall where it would.

The exasperation was palpable on his voice. "Forty-one steps! Forty-one, Madonna, and four sailors to haul me up them, snorting, like a cask some poor devil swore on his mother’s bones to deliver without spilling one drop."

He sat beside the brazier with a blanket up to his chin and a bowl growing cold in his hands. The tallow smoke had the sour-sweet aroma of herbs.

Far below the office, benches scraped over stone and a broom got to work, like an army setting up camp.

Beyond the shutters, a mallet tapped. "Hear that, boy? Every dawn some carpenter climbs up and raps the bronze horses on the nose, tap, tap, ’Eh, bello, are you awake?’, as if the beasts might answer. Greek horses! They’ll answer when it suits them."

The blind face swung toward Vito’s breathing instantly.

"Bah, whatever. You’re on time, Lion’s blood, before the sun, even."

Vito squared his shoulders, and the mantle fell into folds as pleased with themselves as he was. "Messer Doge! I am most deeply, most honored that Your Serenity should condescend to receive me at so early, so sacred, an hour."

The old man’s mouth crinkled, and he cocked an ear toward the rustle of good cloth behaving badly.

"Basta, basta, I can hear you bowing from here, boy. The whole cloak begs for mercy."

Vito shrugged the pose off his shoulders like a wet cloak and came up grinning, a hound let off its leash. "Too much? Sì, sì, too much. Corpo di Bacco, I heard my own spine complaining. Very well, Messer Doge. I’ll sit on it."

On a stool beside the door sat the Councillor for Dorsoduro, eyes closed, hands on his knees, breathing in a even rope.

The Doge tipped his chin toward the stool by the door without turning, and lowered his voice with a conspirator’s relish. "Dorsoduro sleeps, hear him? Slept through two Doges and an earthquake, that one, I swear it. If the Last Trump sounds, he’ll ask it to repeat itself after breakfast."

The silence ended as abruptly as a slammed shutter, and the Doge’s breath came easy again, as if it had never left.

He crowed, beads clicking. "The boy who brings my broth tells me the whole hall has lit a candle for your tongue, as if you were a saint with the toothache. And the benches are laying wagers on the day it comes home."

"Five by the next sitting, Messer Doge, I swear it by my mother’s soup."

A sly crease deepened at the corner of the blind man’s lips, and the beads slowed. "And the girl, her grandfather, God keep his bones, was my friend when we were boys and the Rialto was still mud and ambition. And now the boy with the bowl brings me, every dawn, everything the lagoon says about L’Angelo. Everything, Lion’s blood."

Vito’s grin came up like a hook he’d baited himself.

"Go on, then. What does the lagoon say, Messer Doge? I hear she is an incurable gossip."

"That you’re already bound by her charms."

"Ma va’."

Vito threw back his head, and the laugh banged round room.

"Well informed, Messer Doge, scandalously well informed."

The old man burrowed his chin into the blanket like a hen settling on a clutch, enjoying himself hugely. "And now Almorò Contarini sends me eels, every week, a basket, still wriggling. The oath forbids gifts worth mention, but who cares about an eel?"

He stabbed a forefinger toward Vito’s voice voice and held it there, trembling slightly with age and purpose. "When there is a wedding, Lion’s blood, I will hear of it before the fishwives. Before them, you understand? From your mouth, not from the Rialto fish stalls."

"Before the priest, Messer Doge. Before the priest, before the bells, I’ll swear it on my own neck."

Vito kept the grin on his face.

The cough started, then stopped. By the door, the sleeping breath caught, then found its rhythm again. The old man put down the bowl and brushed a hand across the edge of the table, and Vito waited his wrist to find.

When his voice came, it was small and exact, a knife slipped from a sleeve.

"Your letter was badly folded, boy."

Vito barely had time to react, but by then, the old man run over his words with a rant.

"I had it read to me. Three times."

His thumb ground down on a bead. "I brought the gist to the Emperor, dressed up as merchants’ gossip out of Candia. Baldwin laughed! Louis of Blois laughed louder, the big laugh, the barrel laugh, with the whole chest in it."

Then it came a snort, and in there was a sharpness that didn’t disappear with age. "And then three hundred knights rode into Thrace, Lion’s blood. And I stayed in Constantinople, snug as a cat, as an old man of my years may. As a man of my years may."

The Doge waited.

The mallet stopped, the shutters changed from gray to weak wine. Vito’s voice came out low and bare, a candle with the glass taken off.

"I wrote to the one man I could reach, Messer Doge."

Even blind, the old man gaze made it obvious he didn’t believe a word. Yet from his expression came no reproach, but advice from an old man in the twilight of his years. "I keep my questions in my sleeve, boy, where the wind can’t read them. Keep your book there with them, deep in the sleeve, and let the sleeve be deep."

Vito closed his mouth on a sentence that had begun with reading.

He ended the discussion. "The girl laughs at my jokes, Lion’s blood. A kind girl, or a clever one. With her, who can tell? And one day she will ask what I owe you, and why. What does an old man say, then?"

There was no reply.

The beads clicked on, one at a time, patient as a clerk’s abacus. "The debt is paid in the coin the oath allows, boy. I own the order of the sitting, I call the speakers. And I sit..."

Click.

"...I sit as long as this ruin of a body will hold."

Vito leaned closer. "Then fix the charge before the man, Messer Doge. The charge first, nailed down like a coffin lid, and only then the name."

He ticked the names off on his fingers, quick and rough. "Giacomo Tiepolo, Ranieri Dandolo, Ruggiero Premarino, whoever the benches whisper over their wine. Any of them, Messer Doge, any one, will take shears to the island and cut it to fit his coat if he is named first."

The beads stopped on a single bead, and the old man purred like a cat discussing mice. "I hear the Rialto like any man, and I repeat nothing. Charge first, then the man, I had it done before you finished, Lion’s blood. Before! But I enjoyed the sentence. Say it again sometime, it is a handsome sentence."

A cough took whatever he meant to add, and then took more, till he bent over the table with a cloth at his mouth. When he folded it away beneath the blanket, it was darker than linen should ever be.

Then the old man straightened and went on as though nobody had coughed.

"You have a speech. I can hear it in your feet, boy. Tap-tap-tap, rehearsing."

"Three, Messer Doge. Two insults and one very long insult with a bear in it."

"Give me the first."

Vito threw both arms wide, and the mantle swung out like a door. "Members of the Great Council! Gentlemen, Christians, Venetians! I ask you, nay, I implore you, to look upon the HAT..."

A grunt cut him off at the root, brutal as a pair of shears.

"Dead on the hat. The second?"

"The hat’s mother."

"Dead as the hat’s mother’s mother. And the long one dies on the candle, boy, bear and all."

His forefinger sketched the candle in the air, tall and patient.

"The question is Crete, Lion’s blood. Your uncle’s hat belongs to another sitting."

Vito drew himself up, and the doublet returned onto his shoulders. He cleared his throat with all the gravity. "Messer Doge, I most humbly ask that the charge confirm what stood on Crete before the Republic came, and that the governor hold the garrisons, so that my company, my brave, hungry, long-suffering company, may come home to me."

"Listen to him. The doublet is back."

The old man fingers walked over one bead, tapping out a verdict. "What stands. That is your speech, Lion’s blood, and you will say them standing, on your own feet, chin up, with a clean conscience."

Far below, the ruckus stopped.

In its place came the noise of several hundred men arriving.

The Councillor for Dorsoduro came off the stool in one motion, as if hauled up by a string, and his voice was flat as a plank.

"Messer Doge. The bell."

"All Venice hears it, Dorsoduro, even those who have slept since the earthquake."

The old man lifted a hand, and a boy who had been part of the wall until then stepped out of it and took the bowl.

The beads began again. "Be short, Lion’s blood. I can sit to the third band of the candle, no further. After that the chair passes to the eldest of the six, and him, boy, has never once been amused. Not at his own wedding, nor his own funeral, if he could attend."