Chapter 97: The Acre Accounts

Vito was able to see more of Acre than he expected, and he was happy to take every hour of it. The Hospitallers had made themselves a fortress here since Jerusalem fell, with the Templars close behind them.

Both orders were holding court inside walls that hadn’t originally been built for either one.

The Latin cathedral drew him back more than once. Most days it was crowded with pilgrims who had crossed an entire sea for the privilege of kneeling in those floors.

One of those afternoons provided a story of its own.

He and Momolo were cutting through the pilgrim district when a small crowd stopped them cold. It had gathered around a peddler who was holding up a battered wooden box as if the thing contained the whole Kingdom of Jerusalem.

The man proclaimed, prying the lid open no more than a hand’s width. "A splinter of the True Cross itself, brought out of Jerusalem and kept safe through fire and war that ought to have claimed it and somehow did not. I have papers and a bishop’s seal to prove it."

Momolo’s eyes were already wet.

"Ser Barozzi, do you feel it? The air around that box has changed."

"The air around that box smells like fish, amico. Same as every other stall on this street."

Vito kept his voice low enough for Momolo alone. "I’ve seen that same splinter, or its twin, or its great-great-grandchild, in Santa Sofia back in Constantinople. Another in Candia. A third in Alexandria, if memory serves. The wood is remarkably good at breeding."

Momolo heard none of this. He dug into his purse with trembling hands, ready to buy some piece of his own soul.

Vito let him.

No argument ever invented had beaten a man’s faith out of his pocket, and Vito had learned that lesson before either of his two lives had taught him much else.

Word of the King’s death reached Acre properly within the week. Ships and couriers brought it in, and confirmed well enough that black cloth appeared over church doors within the day.

Aimery of Lusignan was gone, and with him went the one crown that had kept Cyprus and Acre together in the same man’s hand.

The two kingdoms split apart again. Cyprus passed to a boy not yet old enough to hold his own sword, with a regent already standing behind him before the old king’s body had gone cold.

Jerusalem remained with Queen Isabella alone, a woman who had already buried three husbands before this one and now had to bury a fourth crown along with him.

Beneath the mourning spread a harder worry, the sort merchants preferred to say in whispers rather than say aloud. The truce that kept Egypt’s harbors friendly to a Christian keel had rested on one dead man’s signature, and nobody in Acre yet knew whether his successors intended to honor it.

Vito kept a calendar nobody else in the city could keep, built from memory instead of any courier’s letter.

Somewhere inside all that public grief, he did the reckoning privately and found that the fourteenth of April was already more than a week behind them.

No ship had brought word of it. None could have, not yet. News would have had to travel from Thrace to Constantinople and then across the length of the sea to reach a Levantine port.

Vito understood better than any man in Acre what that silence did and didn’t mean. It said nothing at all about whether the thing had actually happened.

It had.

He had read it a hundred times in another life, in books written centuries afterward by men who never once doubted it.

Baldwin’s army, marching to relieve a city that was already lost, walked straight into an ambush laid by a coalition of Bulgarians and Cuman horsemen. Nearly three hundred knights died on that field, Louis of Blois among them.

The Emperor was taken alive. Historians who studied the incident centuries later generally agreed that this was probably the worse fate of the two.

And somewhere in the wreck of that retreat, or weeks afterward in Constantinople, depending on which chronicle a man trusted, Enrico Dandolo died as well. Vito had never found two accounts that agreed on precisely where.

He had sent the letter after all.

Vito held onto that much, at least, standing in a foreign street with a battle weeks behind him and a whole sea between himself and the old doge who might have needed the warning.

The letter that had sat unfinished in a drawer all winter had been completed, sealed, and handed to the fastest courier coin could buy, at the very hour the fleet departed from Candia.

Whether it had reached the old man was impossible to know. Whether it had reached him in time to matter was worse.

And whether a man as stubborn as Dandolo would have listened to a youngster warning in the first place was a question with no answer.

Vito stood there a while longer with a question that had no answer waiting at either end.

Caterina would hear of it eventually, wherever the news finally found her, and potentially grieve a grandfather outside her family.

Whatever feelings the year still owed him, it also had accounts of its own to close.

Guibert took his share, Walter took his, and between the two of them the fleet’s cargo changed once more before Cyprus.

The cheese and distillate in the cargo came to twenty-seven and a half tons of cheese and just under three tons of distillate. Guibert and Walter split half between them, leaving nearly fourteen tons of cheese and a ton and a third of distillate still bound for Cyprus.

The merchants paid a little over twelve hundred bezants for its half. The cheese brought close to three hundred of them, while the distillate brought the rest.

What Vito spent in return occupied a third of the space the sale had opened.

Guibert’s glass, boxed and cushioned with more straw than the cargo itself weighed, cost a little over five hundred bezants for three and a half tons.

Walter’s silk and balsam added another two hundred and fifty, roughly a ton between the two of them.

Five hundred bezants remained in Vito’s hand once the commerce had finished.

The wine, wool, honey, wax, and cotton went untouched through the entire visit.

All told, the fleet sailed out of Acre carrying just under one hundred and sixty tons. Every ton of it was worth more now than when it had first gone aboard.

When the reckoning was finished, the voice laid it out directly enough.

🦁 [TRADE OVERVIEW — ACRE, 1205]

Contacts, City : Established (Guibert of Tyre, Glass; Walter of the Burning Sands, Silk and Balsam)

Goods Sold : Cheese, Distilled Spirits

Revenue : Approximately 1,275 Bezants

Goods Purchased : Glass, Damascus Silk, Balsam

Expense : Approximately 775 Bezants

Cargo, Departing : 159 Tons

Next Port : Cyprus

Vito read it once and was satisfied.

It was a smaller, tidier close than Alexandria, but exactly as valuable.

A second display followed, and this one was unlike any he had seen before.

🦁 [TREASURY — HELD CURRENCIES]

Grossi (Venezia) : 5,000 — ~2.2g Silver Each

Dirhams (Egypt) : 5,000 — ~2.9g Silver Each

Bezants (Crusader Kingdoms) : 500 — ~3.4g Gold Each

Vito looked over them and grinned.

Acre’s business was finished cleanly behind them.

Late April brought the fleet past the Tower of Flies one final time, bound at last for Cyprus, the last market before the road home.

Whatever word waited there for him about an old man, a battle, and a letter that might already be too late to matter was, for the moment, entirely outside his hands.