Chapter 86: The City of Many Tongues

Couple days had passed since Soranzo’s office, and in that time Vito had learned just how small a room could be while its owner was still expected to believe he’d been given the better half of the bargain.

His chamber sat at the top of narrow stairs, barely wide enough for the bed and the trunk chest against the far wall. The shuttered window looked out over warehouse roofs instead of the harbor.

Below, the ground floor was packed with sacks and barrels nearly to the ceiling in places, while a handful of mules stood stabled across one wall, waiting for whatever errand required them before dawn.

Orso had the only other chamber worth calling one, one door down the same stairs. Between them, that was every private room the fondaco had to spare.

Everyone else stayed aboard the ships, nearly a thousand souls spread across the ships. Oarsmen, sailors, and soldiers who had sailed as escort, they ate and slept in the same places where they had crossed the sea.

There simply wasn’t space in Alexandria wide enough to hold that many foreign men loose inside a city that wasn’t theirs. A fondaco that stretched its privileges quite that far usually found itself without those privileges afterward.

Vito dressed without wasting much thought on it. The mail went into the chest, the mantle folded beneath it, and plain undyed cloth took their place. He tucked a knife beneath his coat where his sword usually hung.

He had spent the days earning the freedom to leave the compound at all.

Soranzo’s contact had arrived within a day of the meeting, eager enough to start talking about cargo that hadn’t even cleared its hold.

Vito gave him just enough to keep him pleased, half a manifest and a vague promise of a fuller accounting once the figures came in.

Whenever the man pressed harder, Vito let him believe that a good portion of the season’s cargo, wool and wine alike, had already been promised to buyers waiting at Acre and Cyprus before the fleet left Candia.

The finest wool and most of the distillate were held back on the claim that they needed appraisal first.

A consul’s chosen man, Vito had decided within the hour, was a debt easier to lose than to pay.

He found Orso waiting at the foot of the stairs, stripped of his mail and looking personally insulted by whoever had cut his coat.

"Cazzo, Barozzi. Look at me."

Orso pulled at one shoulder, and the seam was already straining.

"I look like a beggar who stole a rich man’s washing off the line."

"You look discreet, amico. That’s rare quality on you."

Vito grinned.

"Wasted on a man built like a city gate, I’ll admit, but that’s the coat’s problem, not mine."

Orso spat the words as though they tasted worse than the cloth felt against his skin.

"I look like I’ll split this seam the first time someone makes me laugh."

"Then don’t laugh. Discretion cuts both ways."

The fondaco’s gate opened directly onto the wider city, with no second wall between one world and the next, and Alexandria’s noise hit them both at once.

A pillar of pale, ancient marble stood half swallowed by a newer wall not ten steps beyond the gate. Its capital was carved in some old style neither man had a name for, and it had only been left standing because tearing it free would have cost more than simply building around it.

Alexandria kept its bones showing everywhere, older stone into younger walls on every street they crossed. It was a city that had plainly been grander once, and had simply gone on living inside what remained.

The crowd alone made Candia look like a fishing village, and Venezia itself shrank a little in memory. Orso had to put a shoulder into the crowd more than once just to keep them moving down the street.

Camel trains threaded lanes too narrow for any cart to manage, and donkeys loaded with baskets and skins moved faster than the camels ever could, while porters on foot outpaced both.

Vito walked through it more slowly than he needed to, and said nothing about why.

The market appeared around them one street at a time, each street keeping to its trade the way a guild kept to its hall back home. Sacks of pepper and cinnamon marked the first, then the dyers’ street came next, with vats of indigo staining the stones beneath their feet and cloth hanging overhead in colors there was no Italian word for.

Beyond that, hammers against copper in a rhythm that never quite stopped.

Beyond that again, bolts of cloth hung finer than anything sold on the Rialto on its best morning.

Some call to prayer rose over the whole market partway through. Beyond the street, a bell answered it, low and unhurried.

A city built on this much trade with the wider world kept its resident Christians and Jews close for precisely that reason, men and women who spoke both the market’s tongue and the fondaco’s made their living between the two.

A vendor called something to his neighbor as they passed, one word plain enough that even Orso half caught it.

Frank.

Neither man broke stride.

"Merda, it’s hot."

Orso tugged again at a collar that had never fit him.

"How does anyone trade anything in this heat without melting into his coin?"

"Practice, amico. Give it a season."

"Give me a season and I’ll be a puddle some boy sweeps up with the rest of the street."

The market thinned into a side street that had shed most of its noise by the time they crossed it.

There the gate they actually wanted stood waiting, plain enough to pass without a second look. It was no different from any other wall around it.

A man posted beside it straightened as they approached. He was neither welcoming nor unfriendly, just doing his job, and that was all.

Vito stopped in front of him and spoke in Arabic, low and quick. The words fit his mouth more easily than they had any right to after one winter spent chasing them alone by lamplight.

<anno data-annotation-id="1ecbf426-e9d4-3622-1c66-4860bd21c735" data-title=""Kitmān."">"Kitmān."¹</anno>

The gatekeeper’s whole posture changed. Whatever suspicion had been sitting behind his eyes a moment before gave way closer to recognition, and he pulled the gate open without asking for a coin or being offered one.

Beyond it sat a courtyard ringed by two or three stories of shuttered rooms. Storage was visible at ground through open doorways.

The whole place had been built for exactly this kind of dealing, private and unremarkable to anyone passing outside.

The gate shut behind them with noise that Orso plainly didn’t like.

"How in every saint’s name did you know to say that, Barozzi?"

He kept his voice low, though nobody was near enough to overhear them. "We’ve been in this city for a few days, and you just talked your way through a stranger’s door like you’d done it a hundred times already."

Vito only grinned. "Some patrician who reads as much as I do picks up more than history along the way, amico. That’s a story for wine, best saved for later."

Orso grunted about men who trusted books more than blades.

Then he settled in to wait, arms folded, plainly dissatisfied with the answer he’d been given.

The courtyard told them nothing else for a while. Few servants crossed it once on some errand of their own and never looked their way twice.

The stone beneath their boots had the sun’s warmth long after the shade had covered the rest of it.

Orso’s patience wore thinner with every passing minute, until even his restlessness began to feel like its own kind of clock.

Then something changed in the courtyard’s stillness.

Footsteps crossed from a doorway Vito hadn’t noticed until that exact moment. A shape came out of its shadow, moving toward them with no hurry at all.

Vito watched her come.

He let himself hope, if the voice behind everything he owned could be trusted at all, that this was finally the merchant he’d paid for a season ago.

He had never once laid eyes on her until now.

<annotations style="display: none;">Discretion</annotations>