Chapter 130: Ranieri Dandolo’s Confession

Ranieri Dandolo walked through the floor like a notary who had lost his pen and was determined not to admit it, each leather shoe with one flat slap against the stone. He had an admiral’s shoulders beneath a dark gown, his father’s chin below a neatly combed gray beard.

He stopped before the old men and put both hands on his belt, face still showing nothing at all.

Premarino’s slow palms were still dying on the tar bench, and the beads at the dais had gone silent. Then Ranieri drew a breath that started beneath the floor and rose through the gown without ruffling a fold, the whole hall seemed to lean toward it.

"Messeri of the Great Council!"

The beams caught the words, passed them hand to hand, and threw them back. At the rear a boy dropped a cushion, dust came shivering down the shafts of light, and hundreds of shoulders jumped as one.

The body remained neutral, but the voice went everywhere.

Then he raised a thick forefinger. "I come before you as a sinner, messeri, on my knees in spirit, since my knees themselves refuse this floor! Seven sins, and I shall hand you three of them at once, here, now, with no priest to bargain me down!"

He let the words sit there for a heartbeat, then continued. "I am proud! Proud, Dio bon, proud as the four bronze horses that sailed across the sea to stand on San Marco and look down their noses at the whole Piazza! And a proud man, messeri, guards whatever bears his name to death!"

To name the next, a second finger went up, and he wagged the pair at the room like a cook with a ladle.

The voice thunderously spread through the hall. "I am a glutton! Ah, but a glutton of the right kind! A hungry glutton steals, I know it, you know it, and your wives know it best of all! A fed glutton pays his soldiers on the very day it falls due, and then goes home to his supper in peace! Every debt I ever owed I have paid upon its day, messeri, because a debt paid late curdles the digestion, and I am a man who loves his dinner!"

The tar bench let out a low grumble of approval, while around Tiepolo the silver sat shut as a strongbox, and the Feathers wheezed like a row of bellows.

The third finger rose, and with it his chin. "I am wrathful! My temper is known from the Lido to Torcello, and the fishermen cross themselves when they hear it! I cannot hide a plot! I cannot hide a sneeze! And if some Genoese came sidling up with a purse of silver and a price for an island, I would refuse him so loud that Treviso would send for a priest to bless the lagoon!"

At the foot of the dais the eldest Avogadore, starved through all of Premarino’s ’we’ for a single genuine ’I,’ was suddenly handed forty of them in one breath and didn’t know which to write down first.

Ranieri lowered his voice to a confidential murmur, which in that hall meant it carried only as far as the third row from the back. "Envy, sloth, avarice, those I keep for private use, messeri, behind a shut door, as God and the Church intended! But seven, says the Church. Seven! Ah, and the Republic, the Republic, she has been considering an eighth, the one the priests forgot to write down!"

He spread his hands toward the ducal chair.

"The eighth sin, messeri, the very eighth, God forgive me, is to be the Doge’s son!"

The laughter among the Feathers stopped halfway through while some benches creaked.

Ranieri turned slowly, a lighthouse sweeping a harbor of faces. "Every bench in this hall has read my surname rather than my name! Don’t shake your heads, I have watched you do it, lips like old women at their beads! Every wager, every whisper from here to the Rialto, always Dandolo, never Ranieri! And I stood in the room, messeri! I stood in the room while you have done it!"

At the dais the beads let out one dry tick and the old mouth shut like a hatch, though the blind face stayed tilted toward the voice.

"So then, messeri, I will do the one thing a son can do for this hall."

The roar fell, though none of its strength went with it.

He swept one arm across the hall as though the benches were a chart and the far wall were Crete. "Candia, messeri! The Duke of Candia sits a whole sea away from San Marco’s chair! So send the surname to the far end of that sea, in leather boots, and your fear sails with him!"

The hush hardly lasted enough time, then he was walking.

"So! Come, walk it with me, messeri! Here! Here is Candia!"

The plain boot came down a pace from the Feathers with a thud.

"And here! Hear the stone answer? Here is Chania!"

The second boot landed beside the tar bench, and the whole row tipped toward it like barley bending to wind.

"And here, messeri, close enough to smell, eh? Here is Rethymno."

The third step brought him so near the electors that the closest of them could see the nails in his sole, and Ranieri pitched the voice down to an almost companionable tone.

Then he continued. "I keep what stands, messeri! What stands, stands! I keep the archons their privileges, and let them keep their grudges too, they have earned them! The tolls keep their tollkeepers, the quarters keep their roofs, and the Barozzi company keeps the gates of all three, where it stands this day and where, by San Marco, it shall go on standing! The garrisons go into the Duke’s hand, as the charge commands, and the hand takes them as it finds them, soldier by soldier, finger by finger, until it is broad enough to hold them all!"

Some hundred eyes swung toward the Feathers and off again, quick as swallows off a wire. Vito sat on his five cushions with the grin nailed up, named like a milestone, as a fact of the road.

Ranieri showed them his hands, palms empty. "And now, messeri, the last sin! The best sin! The one I kept for the end, the way my father keeps the Sensa, when every soul in Venezia is watching!"

Then he bellowed. "I confess lust, messeri, God help me! My father marries the sea every Ascension, before the whole Piazza, with a ring of gold and a vow in Latin, and every year, every year, she takes the ring and sends him back fish! I have, I confess it! A rock with goats on it, and for a dowry, tolls and cheese, and in all Venezia not one man has asked her to dance! She waits at the far end of the sea for a Doge’s son with a loud voice and leather boots, and I hear her calling to me in my sleep, and she bleats, messeri! Ah, how she bleats!"

The windows rattled in their frames, dust danced in the light, and the laughter that broke over the hall was bigger than the first. Ranieri walked back the way he had come, one flat slap of leather at a time, and sat on his bench with nothing on his face.

The flame stood a hand above the second ring, and the loudest man in the hall had left wax on the table. Ranieri’s own knot answered first, each man rapping his knuckles once on the oak like witnesses signing a deed, while the Feathers laughed again.

Down the tar bench, one low stamp passed through the floor. Tiepolo’s silver stayed there while a man beside him leaned to another’s ear, and Marco’s bare oak made no sound, the hat above it unmoving.

The side benches muttered in pieces.

"He said it. Out loud, in this hall, with the six sitting right there!"

"Cried himself like a bale of wool on the Rialto, Madonna, with his own mouth!"

"A rock with goats! A rock with goats, and the man proposes to it!"

From the dais the thin voice came across the floor. "Plain boots, and a very large stranger inside them, wearing my chin, so I am told, and a voice I never taught him. Ah, I know every boot in this house, every one, I know it by the slap on the stone, and that gentleman I do not know. Who let him in? No, no, never mind. The chair, messeri, the chair hears nothing from its own blood. Nothing at all."

The cough caught him on the last word, and the laugh that rose to meet it had an edge on it.

The eldest of the six lifted his flat face a finger’s width. "By the custom of this Council, the Six open the floor to any member who will take up what remains of the band. Let him rise, and let him be brief, for the candle is not."

Vito was ready to stand, but the goose down hissed beneath him like a rebuke, and a creak from the front bench stopped him halfway.

The pudding hat rose above the heads, the wine-dark gown beneath it, and bare oak groaned as the whole following came up after.

His uncle stood.

The man who had sat when his nephew’s name was asked. The pudding hat stood above the heads of the Great Council, and the floor was his.