Chapter 76: Marito, Don’t Move

The walk to the Venetian Quarter took less time than the argument that came along with it.

Caterina refused to match his stride for the whole way, which Vito considered a particular kind of insult, though she never once stopped holding his sleeve either. Whatever the discussion claimed, her hand told another story.

"Half of Candia will have us married by supper, Vitale. The other half will have decided I’m carrying your child by Epiphany."

"Let them ask."

Vito’s grin had not left him since the pier, though his ears had not entirely recovered their color either.

"Free entertainment for a city that’s spent a month watching walls go up, mia cara."

"And that justifies how you spun me off my feet in front of the whole waterfront."

"Ah, ah, and you kissed me, called me marito loudly enough for the fishwives to sell the story back to me by supper, and then left me standing there red as a Chioggia crab."

"That was your own fault, handing me three galleys worth of treasury. What was I supposed to do, thank you properly with a bow?"

"I wouldn’t have complained."

She gave him no answer, but the look she shot him made it plain the argument was not finished. It had merely been postponed until they had a door to close behind them.

Her house stood beyond the second turn, just where it always had, with her guards present at the gate.

Caterina swept past them without so much as a glance.

Vito got out of his mail the instant they were inside. The padded gambeson came off a breath later, and both landed across the nearest chair with the graceless relief of a homecoming he had made no effort to disguise.

Caterina loosened the laces at her throat until she could breathe properly again, then went to the wine shelf herself instead of waiting for him.

He watched her do it twice before finally speaking.

"That’s my job."

"Really? I thought your job tonight was making a spectacle of both of us. I’ll manage the wine myself."

She poured two cups and handed one over.

Vito raised his high enough to catch the last light coming through the shutters. "Then, to my moglie. Who kept this whole venture standing while her husband went off collecting silver from traitors."

Caterina rolled her eyes so hard that he half expected the poor little bone inside her skull to lodge a formal complaint.

"You are entirely insufferable."

She delivered it like a verdict, then seemed to reconsider spending another evening arguing with him and tapped her cup against his.

"Salute. Fine, salute."

She lowered the cup, reached across the short space between their chairs, and tapped one finger against his chin. "Now, and exactly how does a man make a grand return like this one, husband, when I sent him away with three galleys and a temper?"

He caught her hand before she could withdraw it and kissed her fingers, warmly. "Simply, mia cara. Chania and Rethymno signed sharper terms, with heavier tolls at their harbors and an entire Venetian quarter reserved in each. Half of the nobility estates changed hands before I’d finished my second cup there."

The kiss caught her more off-guard than she wanted him to notice. Light pink climbed her throat, and she recovered by grabbing his sleeve and hauling him toward the two chairs in her office.

She set the bottle down hard on the table between them. "I want to know every clause. Sit, Vitale, and don’t leave anything out just because you’d rather kiss my hand than give me a proper report."

He gave her the long one.

Vito took her through Chania first. The increased toll on grain and wool passing through its market, the estates handed to the archons who had bent the knee fastest, and the fondaco quarter reserved, though not yet built.

Then came Rethymno. The coup had been exposed and crushed in a single night, its senior voices restored and grateful, or suppressed enough to give him a harder hand over harbor traffic.

Caterina made him repeat the Rethymno figures twice. She turned each one over aloud, as if expecting a weakness to crawl out of the numbers if she stared at them long enough.

None did.

By the time the third bottle stood empty between them, the day’s formality was gone.

Vito’s collar hung open at the throat. Caterina’s hair had escaped its pins one strand at a time while she paced the room, adding up the whole business in her head.

She stopped in the middle of a stride and laughed, sharp and delighted, at whatever conclusion she had just reached.

Then she dropped straight into his lap, facing him, casually snuggling her knees on either side of his hips, her skirts bunching between them, accompanied by the sudden warmth.

One arm slipped easily around his neck as though she had spent every night of her life there, instead of never having done it before tonight.

Her voice turned into a mischievous whisper. "Do you understand what this actually means, Vitale? Candia, Chania, Rethymno, and every one of them owing more to our venture than to any other house on this island."

She drove one finger into his chest to make the point. "By the time Venezia finally sends some governor to sit over the lot of it, we’ll already hold trade rights no new arrival could match if he tried for a decade."

Vito had nothing ready.

Her weight rested against him, warm and unmistakably real, her voluptuous breasts settling softly against his chest as she leaned in. And she did lean closer, often enough to make it difficult to believe she was entirely unaware of the effect.

Each time she shifted to speak or curled more comfortably against him, her rear moved across his lap beneath the folds of her skirts, a small, absent-minded motion that did nothing at all to help him remember what they had been discussing.

The loosened hair brushed his chin and was sweet beneath the smoke of the room. Rosewater, faint but unmistakable, an unexpected discovery after two lifetimes spent hearing about this century’s way of bathing.

He said nothing.

"Vitale."

Nothing.

"Vitale."

He blinked, caught somewhere between her voice and the scent of her hair, and replied before he had properly collected himself.

"Sì, moglie..."

The word escaped before he could stop it.

A beat later, he realized what he had said. There was no way to take it back, so he simply moved on.

"Sì, the timing. Mare clausum’s close enough now that none of this could have landed better."

November had crept close enough that the closed sea was no longer some distant concern. The sea routes would soon shut for the four or five months every sailor on this coast treated as gospel.

No keel went back onto open water before March.

Caterina seized on the thought, either unconcerned with how she was sitting or too deep in her own wine to notice. "Then we’ve a whole winter with no ships to chase and nothing to lose by staying put. Time enough to push the fondaco, gather whatever capital available, and have real trade to move before the sea opens again in spring."

Vito’s voice returned, and the surprise was hidden by his usual self. "And before Venezia sends someone to give this whole thing an official shape. Alexandria first, the moment the season allows it. Then the Levant, if Alexandria proves worth the trouble."

"It will."

Caterina popped her tongue, more seductively than she warranted. "Egypt’s truce with the Crusader states is stable enough for now, and a merchant who already knows how to talk a beaten city into thanking him for the privilege should find an Egyptian customs house easy enough by comparison."

She nodded, already turning that over as well, and Vito let her keep talking while a simpler thought took form.

Candia’s walls, Chania’s tolls, Rethymno’s frightened gratitude, all of it rested on what he had today through nerve and presence alone.

The Republic’s slow, oligarchic machinery would eventually put a Duke over the whole island. Giacomo Tiepolo most likely, if the history he had once read for pleasure remained as reliable here as it had everywhere else so far.

Whether his own hand in these affairs had already pushed that outcome toward larger than a governorship remained unanswered.

He left it there and turned his attention back to the woman still talking against his chest.

The wine and the planning wound down together. Somewhere in the middle of Caterina’s third repetition of the same figure, she stopped talking altogether.

She sank more deeply against him, her breathing slowed, and without either of them noticing when it happened, she drifted into a full, warm, entirely unglamorous sleep against his chest.

She snored softly enough that he only noticed because his ear happened to be close to hers.

Vito sat very stiffly.

The idea to move seemed both difficult and unnecessary. All that waited for him was an empty chair and a cold cup of wine.

He laughed under his breath, careful not to shake her loose, and let his own eyes close.

The winter’s plans remained pleasant and unfinished, and neither was in any hurry to solve a problem he had no particular interest in solving.