Chapter 143: The Sea’s Closed, Business’s Open

The sea was still closed, and Caterina intended to be ready the dawn it opened.

She pinned a clean sheet to the plaster beside the chart and wrote three headings across the top in her small, square hand.

The route, the goods, and the ships.

Her sleeves were pinned above the elbows, her hair coiled at her nape as a married woman wore it, and the gilded band on her finger, only a few weeks old, caught the light whenever she moved her quill.

Vito stood at the chart with one palm flat on the vellum.

The whole Mediterranean lay before them, rendered as best a monk who had never seen it could manage, while grey light fell through the leaded panes and a mallet in the yard kept knocking away at the winter beyond the bridge.

Caterina rapped the quill twice on the rim of the ink horn.

"The route first, marito mio."

The quill swung toward the chart and stabbed the air above it. "To buy cargo for a voyage no one has chosen, ah, that is the oldest way to bleed money on the Rialto. I have watched grown men do it, men with beards down to here, and weep afterward."

Vito clicked his tongue in agreement. "And the route chooses the ships, so, we haul out the ones that deserve to live, and the rest..."

He flicked his wrist to dismiss a dozen rotting keels.

"The rest can sleep in the sand like old soldiers. Let the crabs pay them their pension."

"Ostrega, I would have arrived there by supper, and with the soup still hot."

She wrote it in small letters under the third heading regardless.

With her free hand, she touched the four pins on the old chart in the order they had been set, copying each harbor under the first heading as she went.

Candia, Alexandria, Acre, Limassol.

She leaned against his shoulder to reach the last one, as naturally as she might lean against a wall that belonged to her.

Then she continued with an easy tone. "Last year’s route was a good one, I give it that before I cross it out, you understand, a little courtesy for the dead. We will make money again, more than before, probably, much more, and the houses, they sign the colleganza with their eyes shut, they don’t even trouble to read..."

"Ma va’."

Vito’s palm leapt from the vellum as though the chart had scorched it, and flung itself toward the ceiling beams. "Ah, che bellezza. That is a route for a man who wants his tombstone to read solvent, moglie. Carve it in marble, put a little angel on top. Save it, save it for when we are old and fat and afraid of the rain."

Caterina had been considering the route’s virtues on her fingers when she burst out laughing, her mouth still open as she was about to name the next one. Then she drew a neat line through the four harbors and wrote a word beside them.

Later.

Her next words came more excitedly. "I priced it only for the pleasure of crossing it out. Crete will manage without us, Ranieri’s understanding with you, and the boy with the slate, he has been learning the clerk job since the new year, God bless his little ink-stained fingers."

Vito’s palm moved up the chart toward the northeast, over the pin without stopping, while the tip of her quill reached the same patch of paper.

The married couple stood looking at the blank stretch where the monk’s coastline ran out and some artist had helpfully drawn a winged beast to take its place.

In the books Vito had loved, this was the Black Sea, its northern shore was Crimea, and the roads beyond it led to the Silk Road. The peace that would eventually keep those roads open was called the Pax Mongolica, though none of those names existed yet.

Caterina’s quill hung forgotten in the air as she watched the blank space. "No one has put a figure on that coast, marito, no Genoese has docked there, and the Genoese would sell their grandmothers for a new harbor, and no Pisan either."

For a heartbeat, she caught up on her breath. "So who in that place has learned what a Latin keel is worth? And Constantinople at war, ah, it needs everything... so it pays the first ship that arrives, then double for the second, in whatever it has left. And after a sack..."

Her eyes flicked to the door as if the Doge himself had an ear against it.

Vito let the silence ripen.

"There is a back door, moglie. Up on that northern shore. Soldaia."

He said the name softly.

Then he continued in a low tone. "And beyond it, past the Cumans, past everything else drawn on this sheet, that is where the roads east begin. And one day those whole steppes will have a peace so broad, so wide, that a merchant will cross it with his purse swinging in plain sight, and not a knife to be seen."

"And when? Which year, which month? When does this grand peace of yours arrive?"

"Ah, if only I knew, moglie. I don’t. Truly, I don’t."

He knew where the route led, but not when it would become safe to travel. The calendar in his head had stopped agreeing with the world several months ago, a fact he kept to himself.

Caterina didn’t ask how he knew. She laid her free hand flat between his back and left it there.

She put forth their plan. "Then the route must earn its keep while that door stays shut, caro. Constantinople, that is what pays us, Constantinople and whatever lies a short sail beyond it.

Her smile pressed itself briefly against his sleeve. "

"This door of yours is a gift, if it ever opens. Only a gift."

"Then I leave it unlatched, moglie, enough for the wind to try the handle."

Vito’s fingertip started down the straits from Constantinople, across the water north onto the new sea. "Now you will say, the straits might close in a war. And they might, I know it. And there is no fondaco on that coast, no consul, not one quarter beyond the city walls, so the first Venetian keel to put in answers to whatever the harbormaster had for breakfast. And the Empire!"

His free hand flew up. "An Emperor in Bulgarian hands, a regent with an army in Thrace, a treasury dry as a well... ah! The houses will demand reasons, they will demand them, and I will give them reasons, by the barrel!"

"Ostrega, I was about to say every word of that, and you said it better. Insufferable man."

He kept checking the sea. "So! We go to the city first and see it with our own eyes. We keep well clear of the western shore, since the Bulgarians hold it, and we go straight across through open water, the needle in our hand, bold as you please."

Caterina snickered. "And my branch must be met in person as well. A fraterna in everything but name, it can be argued by letter for a year, a whole year, back and forth, the ink drying and the cousins smiling. I am sailing, Vitale."

Vito spun around, caught the hand ink and all, and pressed it to his chest as though it were a relic he’d been searching for all winter.

"Ma certo, of course we go together, did you think otherwise? I was already rehearsing how to ask you, and you, strega, you stole the words right out of my mouth."

She returned to the sheet and wrote beneath the first heading as she spoke, while he set pins on the chart to match.

Caterina idly nodded. "Constantinople first. The houses are there, my branch is there, the court that wants everything is there, so, no discussion. Then Sinope, to learn the nearer coast. Then a third harbor, which we choose after we have seen the first two. Trebizond I would name, I would name it tomorrow, if only the Komnenos would let a Venetian ship in without hanging the captain from the piers"

Vito pressed a pin into Soldaia. She tapped his wrist with her quill.

He laughed. "Piano, piano, Sinope, then the third harbor, and only then the door. Do you see? The third is our test. If it lets a Venetian ship come in and out, then Soldaia, probably, will do the same. And if it doesn’t..."

One shoulder lifted in a shrug.

"We learn it with only a short sail behind us, and not the whole sea."

The quill swept in a long arc over the open water, drawing the voyage home in the air before she committed it to paper.

Caterina continued their route. "And home from Soldaia across open water, by the needle, back through Constantinople and out toward Venezia."

Vito put the last pin firmly into place. The northeastern part of the chart bristled with pins like a camp full of soldiers, but he didn’t study it for long, reaching for the next problem.

"Ecco! There is the route, signora mia."

She laid the quill across the first column and put an ink-stained fingertip beneath the second heading. "And now, caro, we come to the part that decides whether we eat, or whether we sit on the riva with a begging bowl, watching other ships sail by."

He took the quill and held it over the second heading. "What an empire at war will pay thrice for, what a coast that has never laid eyes on us will want for a cargo it never expected."

The married couple knew the whole voyage would stand or fall on one, which had to sell in a city stripped of everything worth stealing and on a shore that had never seen a Venetian ship.