Chapter 144: Goods for an Unknown Shore

Across the closed sea, an empire at war was waiting for merchants to bring goods worth buying.

"Two rules, marito. Only two, so even you keep them in the head."

Caterina’s nail came down beneath the heading with the dry click. "The goods needs a buyer with the silver in their purse, not ’on my honor,’ and it needs reliable ships that carries it over the water without ruin."

Vito let the table take his weight from the elbows.

It creaked, and he spread his hands. "Ah, and this is the beauty of it, moglie, the foreigners must want the thing before they know what the thing is, so we bring goods that need no explaining. He looks, he touches, he pays, ecco."

She stole back the quill and wrote both rules across the top of the column in her small, square hand, then listed dyed woolens beneath them, with two lines underneath for good measure.

Her eyes already had profit in them. "From Ginevra’s looms, caro, by way of her merchants at San Bartolomeo, red cloth, Vitale, not that tired pink they sell to the common folk. The Imperial Court that has lost its wardrobes will pay whatever it has left for a cloth it can hold up to the light."

Vito clicked his tongue in agreement. "And past Constantinople, ciò, the shore wants wool, plain Lombard linen, cloth it can cut to its own measure. Dyed for the city, plain for beyond."

She passed him the quill, and he wrote silk and glass in a hand that strayed straight into the margin, though the appeal of both goods soon wore off.

Caterina cocked up an eyebrow. "Vitale. Constantinople was weaving silk when the Rialto was no one but mud and frogs, and the Latins who looted the city, they will buy their silk back from us? From us? Ma figurati. And the glass is worse, worse, the lagoon makes none."

"Ma va’!"

Vito dragged the quill through both words in one stroke.

He kept the quill and wrote iron, stretching the word almost to the edge of the sheet before adding the tools. "Bars, nails, hinges, adzes, saws, whatever necessary to rebuild what the fire ate. A city burned to the bone, moglie, it needs carpenters, and carpenters need tools, eh?"

Caterina took the quill from him, as calmly as removing a cup from a husband who had drunk enough. "Lead for the roofs the fire ate, tin and copper, all by the bar. Metal is the one language the Rialto speaks in every harbor, caro, and the metal merchants by San Giacomo will sell it for whatever price they can argue out of us."

Vito took the quill back.

"Then timber for the rafters, no?"

He glanced up at the beam above his head. "Some burned city, rafters, rafters everywhere... no. No, no, wait, I have heard the whole coast beyond the straits is one forest, from here to the end of the world."

He struck it out himself with a flourish that took half the corner off the sheet.

Caterina’s decision was final. "Iron stays. A smith, caro, he makes what he likes from a bar. Hinges, a plowshare, a sword if his soul is dirty, that is the smith’s account to answer for, not ours."

Vito raised an invisible cup toward the ceiling. "Then, amen! May every smith spend his days making hinges, hinges, nothing but hinges, and die of boredom, in his bed, at ninety!"

His finger traveled down to the empty space at the bottom, where the finest thing they’d ever brought ought to have been listed, and stopped.

He clicked his tongue. "The distillate spirit, moglie. Alexandria, she drank it with tears running down her face, tears, and Cyprus paid for it like ransom."

Caterina delivered the news as if reading out a bad sum. "There is none, Vitale. The Cretan stillmen made that batch on commission and went back to their own business. In Candia we have no still of our own, we cannot hire one before the sea opens, and our ships, they won’t touch the island this season, so, nothing."

"Then we are masters, moglie, masters of the finest empty hold in all Christendom."

Behind her eyes ambition moved, exact, like accounts turning its page. "Next season, we make our own. A still, on one of the little islands in the lagoon, out where the smoke, and the questions, they don’t reach the Rialto. We buy one, or we build one, I haven’t decided."

She wrote beside the empty space, then marked an island in the margin.

"Ah, but wait, wait! Let me add the thing no Latin can refuse."

Vito snatched the quill. "Constantinople has a Patriarch, a Venetian, a Morosini, one of ours! And a whole Greek city to dress in the Latin rite. Vestments, altar linens, chalices, censers, good wax candles, missals... and we go through Ambrogio and his procurator at the Lateran. God provides, moglie."

A short, dry laugh escaped her, and she tilted the sheet toward the failing light as if to read the profit in it. "Ambrogio will charge us for every thread, by the splash, Vitale, by the splash, like holy water. And the Patriarch will pay, a church, it sells best to a city that has just been taken."

He wrote altar goods in his sprawling hand, and the page made room for them.

Caterina touched the little space remaining at the bottom of the sheet. "Last, one small lot, for the harbormasters’ breakfasts? Needles, knives, shears, some few little gifts cut from the cloth, things that explain themselves to a man who has never in his life seen a Venetian, so no one needs to hire a dragoman."

Vito added in his usual sprawl. "And bells, small ones, little ones, silver-voiced. Ah, on what shore, in what language, has anyone ever needed a man to explain a bell?"

She nodded. "And what the coast sells us for the voyage home is for the coast to decide. We see the shelves, then we know."

That was met with his unconditional agreement.

Caterina straightened the sheet against its pin. "The colleganza is mine, I word it wide, wide enough to cover a harbor no one has yet named, and let the lawyers choke on it. Ginevra, Ambrogio, the metal lenders, mine, all of them. You, caro, you have the yard."

Vito lifted his mantle from the peg-stand and swung it over his shoulders with flourish. "The yard and the sleepers. I find out which of them deserve to live, then I go and see what Nestor’s hulls look like under the tar. And Bepi, he in a shed with Nestor, I stand very far away, and I bring a chair."

"Then go, go, curse your shipwrights and I will curse the lenders, and we see, caro, whose language improves first."

"Mine, mia cara! I have Nestor, and he is a whole liturgy of blasphemy!"

"Basta, Vitale. The benches close at Vespers, and Ambrogio after dark, he charges double. Go!"

Vito rushed over to the door with a smile and a chuckle. Behind him, the quill was already scratching away, putting a price on an empire.