Chapter 82: The Ayyubid Sultanate of Egypt

The thought about Aimery hadn’t quite finished turning over in Vito’s head when Toffolo appeared beside him. The boy had left a coil of rope half-finished behind him and forgotten it the instant a new question took hold.

"Ser Barozzi! Forgive me, but I’ve been chewing on this the whole voyage, and I’ll go mad if I don’t ask now."

He didn’t wait to discover whether forgiveness had been granted. "You talk to nobility, and by Momolo’s account you’ve read every book in Venezia twice. Who’s the king down there? Is he even a Christian, or one of their Saracen kings?"

Vito had to bite down on a laugh. It wasn’t the question that amused him, but the fact that the boy had wandered remarkably close to the truth and had done it for entirely the wrong reason.

He explained all the same. "Egypt’s got a Sultan, ragazzo. Unlike half the fools we’ve dealt with this past year, he doesn’t much care whose god you kneel to on Sunday. He only wants to know whether you paid your customs duty on the way past."

His name was Al-Adil, though the Franks called him Saphadin. He had been Saladin’s brother. When the great man died in 1193, his empire went to his nephews, who all thought themselves the rightful heir.

Al-Adil spent the next decade pulling it back together, uncle against nephew. By the end of it, nobody was left standing over the inheritance but him.

By now it ran rather like a family business. Cousins and brothers held Egypt and Syria besides, each answering to Damascus the way a partner answers to the man who keeps the army.

Alexandria was simply the door through which the wealth passed on its way somewhere else.

"Oh! So Momolo was right after all! I thought it was a bunch of bullshit!"

"Ma va’. I read a great deal, in another life."

Toffolo nodded as if that explained everything. As far as he was concerned, it simply did.

Then one shadow over Vito’s shoulder caught the boy’s eye. It stood tall and pale, higher out of the haze with every stroke of the oars.

It was a tower, though calling it a tower seemed about as fair as calling La Contessa a rowboat. It rose white above everything else on the coast, taller than any campanile Vito had ever stood beneath in Venezia.

Smoke climbed from near its crown and bent eastward in the wind.

Toffolo shouted in surprise. "Madonna santa, what in God’s own name is that?! Who builds a thing so tall it ought to fall over from sheer shame?"

Vito only laughed. "Cazzo. That, you fool, is older than every empire that’s ever tried to own this coast, mine included. Show it some respect."

Greek kings had raised it, the Ptolemies, centuries before Rome thought this coast was worth the trouble. It stood among the wonders the ancient world had used to measure itself, and its fire burned bright enough to guide a ship home from farther out at sea than any sailor had a right to expect.

A library had stood beside it as well, and scholars sailed in from three continents to read what it kept behind its walls. That was gone now, taken apart by fire and neglect over more centuries than anybody had bothered to keep count of.

Alexandria itself had seen better days. Its authority had moved inland to Cairo generations ago, leaving this coast as only the busiest gateway to the whole sea.

Beyond the tower’s base, the first hint of walls was beginning to gather out of the haze.

The walls kept rising as they drew nearer, higher and longer than anything that ringed Candia. They ran so far along the coast that Toffolo had to turn his head to follow them.

The boy eventually asked. "Ser Barozzi, you’re sure they mean to let us dock, and not toss us into some prison the moment our boots touch their sand?"

Vito shook his head. "A fondaco is waiting for us, ragazzo. Our own little piece of Venezia dropped on the Sultan’s doorstep, and I’ll wager the wine there is better than anything you’ve had all winter."

A fondaco was like a small island inside another country. It had its own consul, its own courts, and its own chapel behind the warehouse walls. All of it came by treaty.

Genoa and Pisa also had one inside these same walls. Venezia’s foothold was smaller than either rival’s and still years away from anything a treaty might call permanent.

Every ship flying a cross put in through one entrance of the harbor and no other. That was a line the Sultan’s men had drawn across the water.

Past the walls, where the coast bent into a harbor, the water itself answered whatever doubts remained.

Ships sat three and four deep along the quays, with flags overhead that Toffolo had never seen in his life.

"Oh, okay! And we are here to trade, right? Sell our stuff and buy...?"

"Pepper, ragazzo. One sack of it is worth more, pound for pound, than most of the men who’ll carry it off that dock. Myself included, most weeks."

The pepper came from India, down the Red Sea by ship. From there it passed through the hands of the Karimi, merchants who had built a guild and a fortune out of that very road.

It went up through Qus and down the Nile to a warehouse in this harbor. A buyer was already waiting there.

Cinnamon and silk followed the same road. Egypt’s own grain filled the rest of the holds, feeding half this sea long before there had been a Sultan in Damascus or a Caesar anywhere at all.

Not every hold in that water carried spice or grain, though. Slaves changed hands on these docks too, bought and sold across whatever line religion happened to draw between one deck and the next.

Money had never once cared whose god blessed the hand it landed in.

Vito didn’t give Toffolo that part of it. Whatever joke he might have found for anything else on that dock refused to come, so he let his gaze settle somewhere else along the horizon until the moment passed.

Ahead, where the water narrowed into the harbor entrance, towers stood watch on either side. They were manned, and they were clearly meant to be noticed.

Toffolo’s eye went straight to the soldiers posted along them. "Are we likely to fight anyone here, Ser Barozzi? Is this lot an enemy the way that bishop was, or Pescatore’s Genoese?"

"No, not unless you insult their mothers in three languages at once. Given your history, I wouldn’t rule it out."

The Sultan and the King of Cyprus and Jerusalem had signed a truce only months before. Six years of peace had been sealed with nothing heavier than a signature.

That meant a trade fleet like Vito’s could sail into this harbor without a blade being drawn to greet it.

The truce belonged to a larger quarrel that never stopped simmering elsewhere on the sea. Crusade on one side, jihad on the other. The Pope’s legates were happy to threaten excommunication over trading with a Sultan like this one.

None of it stopped the trade. Money moved faster than any doctrine a churchman had ever preached, and every captain crowding this harbor knew that in his bones.

The ship narrowed toward the passage between the two watchtowers, and the last open water began to close around them.

Toffolo let out a breath that seemed to contain enough excitement for two men. "Ser Barozzi, I’ve lost half of that already. Sultans and towers and pepper and this truce, all tangled up in my head like a net nobody bothered to coil. Must be all that reading of yours, in another life, that keeps it straight in your head and not mine. Tell me again once we’re ashore?"

Vito laughed outright and cuffed him lightly across the back of the head. "Go coil that rope you abandoned first, ragazzo, before Bepi throws you in after it. I’ll tell you the rest twice more before we’re home."

Toffolo grinned and went.

Vito tried a line of Arabic under his breath while he waited, checking how it felt in his mouth after a whole winter spent chasing it alone by lamplight.

It came easier than it had any right to.

The city already had a smell to it, salt and dust with sweeter aroma underneath.

Beyond those walls waited a merchant who already owed his time to a patron he had never met. That connection had been bought and paid for a season ago, in a fondaco office half a sea away.

Vito was about to find out what that was worth.