Chapter 84: No Pyramids in Sight

They had barely started walking again when the voice decided Vito had earned the privilege of learning exactly where he stood.

🦁 [HOLDING OVERVIEW — FONDACO DI VENEZIA, ALEXANDRIA]

Status : Established (Trading Compound, Sultan-Granted)

Governance : Egyptian Authority, Administration Through a Temporary Consular Representative

Population : Approximately 120–180 Souls, Merchants, Factors, Clerks, and Attendants

Major Structures : Walled Warehouses, Merchant Lodgings, Administrative Hall, Private Chapel

Annual Revenue : Approximately 4,000–6,000 Silver Lire

Trade Reach : Egypt, the Red Sea Spice Route, Levant, Eastern Mediterranean

Trade Volume : Approximately 800–1,200 Tons Annually

Trade Route : Alexandria → Cairo, Acre, Venezia, Constantinople, Damietta, Crete, Aleppo, Sicily, Genoa, Pisa, Aydhab, Qus, Aden, Damascus

Main Trade Goods : Pepper, Cinnamon, Sugar, Alum, Textiles, Dyes, Timber, Metals

Economic Growth : +8–12% Annualized

Barozzi Presence : None (Guest, Pending Reception)

A rare experience for you, being somewhere you don’t already own. I shall be interested to see whether you remember your manners for the occasion.

Vito laughed under his breath. The reminder pleased him more than it stung.

He had spent a year building things with his own hands. Now he was standing somewhere that had existed long before he was born in either life, and which owed him not a thing.

The gate shut most of the harbor noise behind them, and what took its place was narrower and stranger. The streets were barely two men wide, with awnings stretched between the upper floors to break the sunlight into strips instead of letting it come down all at once.

Even the ground beneath their boots had been swept clean of the grit.

Venetian agents sat hunched over open accounts books in doorways too small for a decent desk, while hired porters and camel drivers carried sacks and barrels between the pier and the warehouses in a steady rhythm, as though they had been doing it forever.

They called to one another in Arabic, Greek, and the flattened, borrowed Italian that served as a common tongue when nobody had anything better.

A boy dragged a jar twice his own size toward a stone cistern built against one wall. The water had been brought in by canal from the Nile itself.

Beyond the walls, the call to prayer that had followed them from the harbor rose again, closer now, reminding Vito that this Little Venezia sat inside a city much larger than itself.

Vito let that thought sit for a moment.

Then, he asked Bertuccio without ceremony. "How’s the season sitting, amico? Not the version you’d give a stranger."

"Good enough that I sleep well most nights, Ser Vito."

Bertuccio wiped his brow again, although the shade of the streets had already done most of the work for him. "Pepper and cinnamon still carry the whole business on their backs, same as ever. Sugar’s well this season too. Alum for the dyers back home, flax besides, though nobody ever bothers to compose songs about flax."

"And Venezia’s standing in the middle of all that?"

Bertuccio’s grin narrowed a little, though his feet never stopped.

"Standing well enough. Standing behind, if you want the clear measure of it."

He pointed toward another walled compound. A red cross snapped above it, owing nothing whatsoever to San Marco. "Genoa’s had that quarter a good deal longer ours. Pisa too, past that one. The customs men know their faces better than ours by now, and a familiar face gets waved through faster than a new one. Every single time."

Vito followed the gesture. Beyond the red cross stood a third flag, Pisa’s foothold squeezed in beside its two older rivals.

"No treaty yet, then."

"Four years off, by every account I’ve heard. Maybe longer."

Bertuccio shrugged in an easy manner. "If you want Venezia standing taller than Genoa when that paper finally gets signed, Ser Vito, you would do well to start making yourself known now."

He spread both hands.

"The Senate isn’t going to remember we exist by itself."

Vito tucked the thought away, then turned the conversation toward the other question that had been sitting with him since the harbor.

He asked. "Is the Sultan’s court anywhere near as loud as Crete? Bishops plotting, archons selling out their own cousins, that sort of noise?"

Bertuccio gave a short, genuine laugh. "Al-Adil wants his customs paid on time and precious little else beyond that. I’ve heard the man taxes his own household the same way he taxes mine."

He fell back into step as the alley bent toward a wider crossing. "The actual ruckus on this coast comes from merchants trying to undercut each other over a shipment of alum. Egypt’s the calmest patch of ground on this whole sea most years."

Beyond the wall to their left, a bell rang once, low and unhurried.

Bertuccio noticed Vito looking toward it.

"Copts."

He said it simply, with no need to dress the answer up. "Their church sits past that wall. There’s a synagogue farther along too, if you go looking. This city has kept more faiths under one roof than most, and done it for longer than most."

"And the trouble, when it comes?"

"Comes from farther off. The Crusader states, mostly, whenever they can’t leave well enough alone."

Bertuccio shrugged.

"Egypt counts its coin and waits for the rest of the sea to sort itself out."

That answer suited Vito well enough.

He continued his inquiry. "When do we get to see Alexandria itself? Beyond these walls, I mean. There’s a whole city out there I’ve been reading about my whole life, one way or another."

A mule stood tethered outside a merchant’s doorway ahead of them, patient and thoroughly unremarkable.

Vito’s eye caught on it before Bertuccio answered.

"In time, and gladly."

Bertuccio followed his glance and nodded toward the mule. "A horse in this city belongs to the Sultan’s soldiers and nobody else. We ride mules here, as everybody who wasn’t born to the privilege. Plain cloth too, once you’re past this gate. Save the wine-dark mantle and the lion for feast days inside these walls, where they belong."

He tapped the flask still hanging at Vito’s hip. "And that goes under your coat the moment you’re outside them. Wine in the open is an invitation to trouble neither of us needs."

"How novel."

Vito grinned.

"I’ve made worse trades for less, amico. Show me the beast and I’ll learn to love him."

Bertuccio laughed, delighted by how easily the whole thing had gone.

"Most spend a week sulking over the mule alone."

Toffolo had been drifting a step behind them through the whole exchange, but that brought him bounding forward again, his eyes on the inland horizon beyond the rooftops. "Ser Barozzi, since we’re properly in Egypt now, do you suppose we’ll get a look at the pyramids before we sail again? I’ve heard men speak of them since I was old enough to listen, great stone mountains built by giants, or slaves, depending on which drunk was telling it that night."

Vito laughed outright. "The pyramids sit closer to Milan than to where we’re standing right now, ragazzo. You’d want a camel under you and the better part of a month besides."

Toffolo accepted the correction without so much as a flicker of embarrassment.

"Fair enough! Is there at least a market worth seeing?"

He never got to hear the answer.

Orso dropped the matter with all the patience of a man who had none left. "Enough about stone mountains and mules. Is the wine here worth drinking, or is that another thing this city expects a man to do without?"

Bertuccio grinned. This question pleased him more than any of the others had. "Better than good, inside these walls. Half of it is what your own ships just brought me, so drink your fill in here and welcome to it. Just remember what I told your patron about carrying a cup past that gate."

He was still chuckling when the streets opened out and the administrative building finally came into view ahead of them.

It stood at the end of the avenue in cut stone, sturdier than anything else they had passed since the gate.

A lion carved into the stone above the doorway had gone dark with age. It was easy enough to miss unless a man already knew to look for it.

"There."

Vito nodded toward it, and Toffolo squinted until he finally found the shape hiding in the worn stone.

Bertuccio left them at the foot of the steps and went ahead alone.

He exchanged a few words with two clerks stationed at the door, and one of them slipped inside. Bertuccio returned wiping his brow one last time.

"The consul will see Ser Barozzi."

He said it with no ceremony left in his voice.

"Alone. The escort will wait out here with me."

Orso dropped onto the shaded step beside him without complaint, glad to have been spared whatever waited beyond that door.

Toffolo lingered a little longer, asking Bertuccio about the clerks and whether either of them had ever laid eyes on the Sultan himself.

Vito crossed the last stretch of ground alone.

He had sat across from a blind old Doge who had outlived every man clever enough to trick him, and from a marquess too tired and too bitter to bother pretending otherwise.

As he climbed the last of the steps, he wondered which sort of man waited behind this door.

Would charm do him any good here? Or would patience, the lesson he had spent all morning learning from a man with a book, prove to be the only coin worth spending?

The door stood open ahead of him, and beyond it there was nothing yet but shadow.