Chapter 129: Ruggiero Premarino’s Fable

The Doge’s blind face swung across the floor like a lantern on a loose chain.

Then the thin nose lifted.

Tar reached the dais, then wet leather, then old rope.

The voice came up out of the old chest like a cork drawn from a very old bottle.

"Ahhh."

The thin nose lifted higher, quivering, and the whole room heard the smile climbing up behind the word. "Tar! Tar, and wet wool, and old rope, and a coat that has not dried since Zara. Ha! I know that coat, caro, eh, that coat stood at my elbow while a Christian city fell and the Pope took offense."

One spotted hand fluttered up off the chair arm, and pointed at the smell.

"Speak, Premarino. Speak! The floor has been dry far too long."

The old men on the front benches warmed to it, and on the tar bench open palms began striking oak.

The old captain face looked like salted rope, and he planted his feet wide on stone and swayed with a tide no one else could feel.

Premarino lifted one huge hand flat above his head. Finding the Republic’s ceiling sound, he brought the hand down in a bow.

"Messer Doge!"

The voice spread out slow and low and in no hurry to arrive. "Old shipmate! Ostrega, that nose of yours does the Republic honor. She keeps a hundred clever clerks to learn who has walked into a room, you need only sniff."

He straightened and swung round on the benches, the whole length of him. The voice that was made to cross a gale strolled across the room instead, and hundreds of men leaned in to catch it.

"Messeri of the Great Council! We will say a few words, mind."

Premarino rocked back on his heels and let the voice go low and rolling. "Years ago, messeri, we took a galley out of Chioggia, the Sant’Erasmo, God bless her planks, with a hold full of salt, and for a company of..."

He held up one hand, fingers spread, and waited for the room to lean into the gap.

"...forty cooks."

The word dropped into the silence like a ladle into a pot, and he let it sit there ringing while the electors tried to picture it.

He sighed, a long, tender gale of a sigh. "And the sailors? The sailors, messeri, were at a wedding. A wedding! The cooks were what the wedding left behind."

Both palms came up and out, presenting the wreckage. "Off Otranto, ah, Otranto, a gale came up out of the south, and the cooks, who were free men, mark, voted the rigging by raised hands."

One huge hand rose, solemn as a blessing.

"Hands for reefing!"

He counted them off the empty air, one finger at a time.

"Nineteen!"

The other hand shot up, trembling with conviction.

"Hands for holding!"

A beat.

"Twenty!"

His head turned slowly, eyebrows climbing.

"And one cook abstained. He was stirring soup."

The whisper carried to the back rows.

"The wind counted no votes, messeri."

Two strides took him to the nearest bench. The huge palm came down on a patrician’s shoulder, and the man’s hat slid over his eyebrows like a lid on a pot.

"Nineteen, twenty, the wind couldn’t read. The sail went over the side, and it took the cook with it."

He leaned in, and the hat-man shrank.

"The very cook who was counting."

The laughter spread low through the benches and broke on the dais like a pebble on a seawall. The eldest of the six took it without a ripple.

Premarino swung toward him with grave, almost fatherly concern.

"Messer of the Six."

His voice fell to a murmur. "Ah, caro. You do not laugh. We once had a stowaway goat, messer, a goat with a rotten tooth and no education at all, who laughed at less."

Nothing moved on that deep, flat face. At the dais, the beads ticked once.

He heaved a sigh that smelled of old harbors, and his whole frame sagged under it.

"Pago, messeri. At Pago we were robbed naked!"

The hand flew to the collar of the coat, then fell, injured. "Corsairs out of Zara, sons of a dockside goat, every mother’s pup of them, took our coat, our boots, our dignity, and sent us home shirtless."

He turned his palms to the rafters.

"Now, messeri, we keep a share in a cabbage patch at Oriago. A small share, a simple patch."

He leaned in confidentially.

"And the cabbages have taught us patience. They sit. They wait. They tell no tales."

The great head swung slowly from side to side, rueful.

"The sea teaches faster."

Premarino turned by inches, slow as a capstan, and shot the benches a deep look, face by face, as if each man were a hull he meant to buy.

"By San Nicolò, messeri, hear us! The island of Crete is water, with a rock in it."

The lilt sharpened, and a rasp came into it. "And the rock belongs to whoever holds the water around it. And who holds that water this dawn? A Genoese corsair who calls himself Count of Malta. Count! A count of keels, messeri, a lord of ships."

The voice flattened to a growl.

"He holds keels and an appetite. That is all he holds, and it is enough."

At the word Genoese, a hiss moved across the benches. It was a room that had hated one city for a hundred years and still found pleasure in the work.

Premarino let it simmer, then raised two fingers as a priest asks for quiet. "Ah, we know them. We chased the Genoese down the whole of the Adriatic to Modon, the whole of it, messeri, stem to stern, and they never once stopped swimming."

A bark of laughter came from the tar bench. He bent, solemn, and lifted one boot for inspection.

"And Zara!"

He leaned on the word. "At Zara we commanded a galley while God and the Pope argued over for a year. A year, ostrega! Letters flying, saints fretting, bishops pacing in their best slippers."

On the dais the old mouth twitched, and what wished very much to be a cackle was strangled behind the lips.

"Abydos."

He said the name calmly.

"At Abydos the Republic hesitated. She does that, messeri, she is a lady who thinks."

His mouth quirked.

"So we put our own coin on the table to keep the fleet fed. Mind, our own."

He flicked a hand, lordly as a man tipping a boy.

"The Republic is welcome to the interest."

Ranieri Dandolo’s knot listened with chins tucked, doing the sums.

"Now hear us."

Premarino continued, and the rhythm went up. "A galley is a hundred men pulling one way, messeri. One way!"

He opened both fists, and for a moment the room saw a hundred oars rise and fall in the air between his hands. "Every man of them free, hired in the Piazza, paid on the pier, no chain on him but his pride."

The voice warmed.

"And their children shout our name in the taverns."

On the tar bench, the palms quickened by a hair.

"The fishermen of Candia!"

He threw it into the room like a mooring line. "They pull an oar as well as any Venetian, messeri. Some days better, and we will say so to a Venetian’s face. Pay them on the pier, in coin, on the day the work is done. And they will row for the man who pays, and row until the sea gives up."

Vito’s grin went all the way up. He had heard this sermon once before, over a loaf of bread in Candia, from a woman with ink on her fingers.

Premarino’s voice dropped, and the fable went out of it like a tide.

"We were an elector, the year the Piazza killed a Doge."

His eyes moved down the Feathers and came back.

"The men in that room were wise, they were warm, they were well fed."

The pause that followed would have held a ship.

"And nobody, messeri, had asked the oars."

The beads at the dais stopped on a bead. The tar bench’s palms struck once, hard, and the beat traveled through the oak into every seat in the room.

From his belt Premarino drew a bit of cord. While he talked, his fingers found the loop, the turn and the tuck without being asked.

"A fleet needs still water to winter in, messeri. Still water, and a wall to keep the wind off."

The knot drew snug.

"And the piers of three harbors belong to the cadet Barozzi."

He let the old head tilt half an inch toward the Feathers, and every other head swung for the length of one breath.

"There, among the geese, in the good down. We wish him a long life."

The bowline tightened.

"And a stout wall."

Vito sat with his hands on his knees and kept the grin in place. A cushion creaked beneath him, the only comment he permitted himself.

Premarino’s eyes rose to the candle a second time and stayed there exactly as long as a lead takes to touch bottom.

"But back to the cooks, messeri! The gale is still blowing, and the sail is in the sea."

The cord went back into his belt.

"Eleven cooks drowned for a vote."

He said it lightly, almost fondly, and a few of the benches laughed.

"Eleven. And the twelfth..."

A long, loving pause, one finger rising.

"The twelfth stopped the vote, and took the helm."

The chuckle began, and he rode it gently, a hand on a bridle.

"The Sant’Erasmo lived, messeri. And that cook, that very cook, cooked supper for the survivors."

The smile deepened.

"The supper was excellent."

The laughter thinned out halfway, a dozen men at a time, as the room understood whom the fable was about.

He walked it out one step to a phrase, until the aisle became a deck beneath him.

"The oar obeys the captain."

Step.

"The captain obeys the chair."

Step. His chin lifted toward the dais, and the old Doge’s blind face rose to meet it.

"The chair obeys this room."

Then he stopped and the arms went wide, and the sleeves of the old coat fell back from forearms like hawsers.

"And this room, messeri, this room is the helm!"

Several hundred men held their breath for a count of three.

His arms came down slowly, and the voice came down with them, soft as a hand laid flat on a sleeping hull.

A shrug moved the whole coat.

"Name whom you like, the oars will pull."

The candle bent toward the ring.

"And the oars..."

He let the flame touch it, and on the last word it did.

"...will be watching the water."

The flame touched the ring on the last word. Premarino sat and the bench made no sound, though a man that size ought to have made it complain.

The room replied slowly, body by body. The tar bench’s palms faded into silence, goose down rustled along the Feathers, while Marco’s bare oak remained as stiff as before. Among the silver, Tiepolo’s face stayed shut as a book.

The thin voice came down from the dais, dry and crackling and pleased.

"Ahh. Salty in that, eh? Salt, and a little pepper besides."

The beads began again, tick by tick. "The floor is given again, to any with the stomach to use the next band. Two remain, messeri."

A step crossed the stone in plain leather, and the old man’s blind face turned toward like it was his own name. He had heard that step cross a hundred floors, first when it belonged to a child, then a youth, then a captain.

The beads, which had only just started, lay still in his fingers.

Ranieri Dandolo rose, and the stone beneath him answered in plain leather.