Chapter 128: Giacomo Tiepolo’s Stratagem

Tiepolo stepped into the aisle, and the floor spoke.

His boots had heels of solid oak, because the porter at the steps had strong complaints about iron and none about timber. Every stride rang across the stone like a mallet striking a keel, and the hall had learned to wait for that like sailors wait for the tide.

The blind face at the dais swung toward the ringing like a hound’s toward a dinner bell, and the old mouth beneath it began, very slightly, to curl.

"Oak!"

The voice was thin as drawn glass, and, like glass, it reached the back benches without once being raised. "Oak on old stone, eh? Ah, those boots! Those boots I know, me, I know them like my own sins. Who else in all Venezia shoes himself for the ears of a blind man? One fool, only the one. Speak, Tiepolo. Speak, before I grow fond of the noise."

Tiepolo met the chair with a bow so deep and so loud, heels cracking together on the way down.

"Messer Doge!"

He threw the name up at the dais. "Messeri of the six! Messeri of this Great Council, God keep your cushions and your splinters alike! Ostrega, I have counted my sentences! On the stairs I counted, at the door I counted again, and there are thirty-five! One for every year the good God has left me standing! And I spend them like a shipwright spends nails, messeri. One, one, one! One nail, one plank, and God help the plank that asks for two!"

Then he laid one hand flat over his heart. "My bed, messeri, warm! Dio, how warm! My cat, fat! So fat, so content, he has forgiven the mice! My books have one page, one beautiful page, I haven’t yet finished admiring, and I swear it, by my mother’s soul, by San Marco, by San Teodoro, by every saint who can be reached before noon, I am the humblest man on these benches! Me! The humblest! I keep a list of the others."

Across the middle of the hall the electors barked a laugh and swallowed it whole.

He flung an arm toward the far wall. "Duty, messeri! Duty drags me down this aisle by the beard, and the beard, I tell you, the beard resists! Per la Madonna, how it resists! Now, consider the Duke of Candia! This Duke must keep his accounts as a good keel keeps her line, true, true, from stem to stern, as I keep my..."

The answer came off the dais like a hinge, and it caught his sentence the way a nail catches a sleeve.

"Ah-ah-ah. Stop there, messer."

The voice was mild, almost kind. "’As I keep my.’ I heard it, eh. You have made the Duke an ’I.’ A man does not put his own name, not in this room, not with his own mouth, not while I sit. The law is bleeding, fio. I can hear it drip."

Tiepolo stopped with one heel in the air, balanced like a heron in a canal, and the whole hall leaned to see where the foot would come down. It came down like a dropped stone, flat, and his face rose with it, radiant, wounded and joyful all at once.

"Bandaged!"

The word rang like a cracked bell. "Look, bandaged! Already! I have bandaged the poor law myself! A man, messeri! I said a MAN! A man made of paper and good intentions, a man I have never met, Dio, never! A man whose address God keeps secret from me, as He keeps the hour of Judgment! That man, that man, keeps true books!"

The hall laughed, the Feathers thumped goose down, the eldest of the six didn’t move a muscle, and at the dais the beads clicked.

Tiepolo hadn’t taken his eyes from the chair since the first word.

He spread both palms to the hall and walked the aisle with them held out before him, like the freshest fish on a Rialto slab. "This man, messeri, his accounts are his own! His OWN! Ciò, look at his hands! Clean, clean to the wrist! He owes not one grosso to one soul in this hall! His father, he keeps a different table, God bless it, and his cousins eat at their own tables, thank the Lord, each one at his own!"

A block of bare oak stiffened. Electors who owed the man beneath the pudding studied their fingernails with the devotion of monks.

The oak heel came down once, a gavel for his own sentence. "He borrowed once! Once, messeri! At twenty! To buy a share in a ship, a little share, a boy’s share, a share you could carry home in a hat! And he paid it back, with interest, before the ship had finished unloading! And he has been unbearable about it ever since! His mother wept for joy, oh, how she wept! His creditor... ah, his creditor wept for other reasons!"

On the Feathers, the houses with silver in the colleganza shifted on their cushions. They heard the word creditor like they heard their name called across the Rialto when they owned debts. Ranieri Dandolo’s knot went still as ballast, and down the tar bench a low growl passed, like tide behind a mole.

Tiepolo turned his back on the hall, planted his boots wide as on a heaving deck, and let them look him over like a hull on the slip. "A back like a mast step, the Rialto says! Not I, messeri, the Rialto! I am far too modest! Inspect it! Come, inspect! Knock on it, if you doubt. Hear? Seasoned oak! And the Rialto, messeri, the Rialto has never once been wrong about wood!"

The hall roared, and goose down thumped like a flock taking flight. Even the tar bench grinned.

He came about like a galley under a hard oar, boots slamming round to face the dais, and flung both arms wide as if the chair were a harbor he had been rowing toward all morning.

"Messer Doge! Whose blindness sees farther than my two good eyes, farther than every eye in this room, God forgive us each one! Whose memory holds every tide since Noah, messeri, and remembers the weather! Whose chair holds up the Republic as the keel holds up the hull, silent, under the water, and never once thanked! Messer, I would kneel, Dio, if my knees were not so busy standing!"

The beads ticked once. The eldest of the six had turned to furniture.

He dropped his voice to a merchant’s confiding purr. "Ten thousand hyperpyra a year, messeri, ten thousand! That is eight hundred and thirty-three and a third a month. Dio, what a hard thing to owe! The Duke of Candia will sleep badly, badly, until it is paid."

A bench near the dais closed its eyes, moved its lips, then opened them again looking sour.

His heels slowed to a friendly knock-knock. "The garrisons, messeri, belong to the sons of this city! Not to hired swords, not to strangers who would sell a wall for a cask of wine. To Venetians! To the younger sons, messeri! Give each one a field to hold in service and a lion on his sleeve, and what has the island? Walls!"

At the word field, the benches leaned like barley in a wind. At younger sons, they leaned twice as far.

He continued it sweetly. "The archons keep their privileges. Oh yes, every one! Mare de Dio, who would touch a Greek’s privilege? He would never forgive us, he would tell his grandchildren! And their sons eat at the Duke’s table, an honor, messeri, an honor, where a man can count the spoons! The Greeks of the island will be obedient. Or, ah, they will be reminded!"

Tiepolo glanced at the candle, found a loose end, and turned his whole body to the Feathers.

His voice was warm yet neutral. "The island lies calm, messeri. Calm, calm as oil in a saint’s lamp! A cadet of this house, of this very Council, holds the three harbors for the Republic, under the Republic’s commission. Mark it, the Republic’s, no one else’s! The Duke who inherits a calm island leaves it calm."

Every head in the hall turned toward the Feathers for the length of one breath. Vito sat with his hands on his knees, and goose down rustled around him, which was the loudest comment made.

By then the flame had eaten deep into the wax and was nosing toward its next red ring. Tiepolo swung round to it like an old enemy across a card table. "Candle! You, yes, you, with the red rings, you wax-bellied tyrant! Ciò, I have beaten better candles than you in smaller rooms! I will spend half your band, only half, I am a gentleman, and leave you the other half to cry over!"

His heels quickened to a gallop, oak on stone, a drumbeat for the last stretch. "Messeri! My whole offer. Hear it once, I go where this hall sends me! To Candia, to the devil, I will pack for both! And if none stands, I go home. Home, to my bed, to my cat, to my books, and I will be insufferable about it for a month!"

He drove the oak heel into the stone on the last word, and the he crack went from dais to door like a dropped plank, and a boy at the back lost his cushion. Tiepolo bowed from the neck only, and sat. The flame stood halfway to the red ring, and the candle looked cheated.

Murmurs rose and fell, oak creaked, and hats leaned together. Ranieri Dandolo’s knot closed like a fist, while Marco’s bare oak stayed exactly as it was.

Vito’s eyes crossed the hall. Tiepolo sat with the polite face of a closed door, while the benches turned his offer over in murmurs, like an offer no one trusted.

The whispers rose, fell, and was starting to rise again when the old voice slid under it the way a blade slides under a door.

"The oak has stopped."

The thin voice was dry as paper. "Ah, good oak, eh? Now the floor is given again, to any man who will use what is left of the candle. Come, messeri, come."

A bench scraped in the middle of the hall. With it came boots that made no click at all, soft sea leather that had learned on wet decks.

The Doge’s blind face turned toward the silence, hunting for a step it could not find.

Ruggiero Premarino rose, and the stone beneath him said nothing at all.