Chapter 174: Bells From San Marco to the Lido

The earliest day the Church could manage was the cathedral’s feast of San Pietro in Vincoli.

Children in Venezia were baptized quickly, as those who died without baptism were buried outside the church, and one of these two children had entered the world blue and silent.

Whatever else could wait, that could not.

The notary arrived by barge and drew up the document. The names went onto the page, the boy was entered in the Barozzini deed with every other son of the house, and Caterina sent word from her bed that the girl’s dowry was to be written large.

A family could leave many things to chance, but a dowry was not one of them.

By custom, a mother remained in bed until she had been churched, so Caterina heard the barge depart and had no choice but to let it go without her. She told the ceiling exactly what she thought of the custom, in Greek, and took her time about it.

That left the oath, and the Six who were charged with keeping it.

The Doge’s apartments stood forty-one steps above the hall, and herb smoke had ingrained so deeply into the walls that a man could smell the old fellow before he reached the door.

Cannaregio laid the tally stick across his forearm and addressed a point just above the Doge’s left shoulder.

"Messer Doge. With all the reverence the law allows me."

He raised one finger. "Item. By your own oath, your goings and your comings are in the keeping of the Ducal Council, and the Six, I have it from every one of them, withhold the leave."

Then one more. "Item. A sponsor at baptism becomes kin to the house, and kin is favor, and the Council will call it favor, and not permit it."

At last. "Item. Your physician, a man with a degree and a great fear of being proved wrong, declares that the heat of August will finish you before the water does."

The old man heaved himself upright in his chair, every joint filing its complaint, and thrust a finger at where he judged Cannaregio’s chest to be. "That is the whole of it? Ha! Item, item, item! You tick like a death-watch beetle, Cannaregio, and the heat! The heat has been trying to kill me since Zara, and the Greeks gave it lessons at Constantinople, and still I am here to hear you count on your little stick."

The voice came steady, regardless of age. "Now listen, and keep that stick still. Kill me here, on this very spot, and save me the stairs. Or arrest me! Chain me, carry me! I shall hold that child at the font in irons and hold him as well as any man in silk. Or let me go. Choose!"

"The Six do not kill their Doge, Messer."

The Doge snorted. "Then arrest me! Eh? Eh? Nothing? Not even a little chain? Then one road is left, Cannaregio, and the shortest, God be thanked, my legs being what they are."

"Item."

The word came out raspy.

"The Ducal Council permit the Doge to go."

"Then cut it deep in your stick, Cannaregio, so the grandchildren can read it! And call my barge!"

The cathedral of San Pietro di Castello stood low and dark with smoke on the feast. Marouda had scrubbed Ambrogio at the door with lime-water until his ears shone, though it had done little for the tears.

Cristina brought the girl, Marouda the boy, and the Doge’s servants placed his chair beside the font, with Vito standing at his elbow.

Ser Nadal put salt on each child’s tongue, and the Doge renounced the devil for them in Latin, from memory and through the linen. His voice was so thin that it ought to have given out before it reached his knees, yet it carried to the back of the cathedral.

The warm water went over each little crown, followed by the chrism made from the family’s balsam. The hands that had once led an assault on the sea walls of an empire held Lucia above the font, then Leonardo, without a tremor.

Lucia, who had been scolding the whole household since the day she was born, accepted the water without a sound. She kept her eyes wide open, attending to the business as though someone might ask her to give an account of it afterward.

Leonardo, who had arrived blue and without a cry, woke at the first drop and shrieked until the lamps swung.

Cristina laughed and wept together, and Vito’s grin spread across his face, wide and wet.

Ambrogio clutched the missal to his chest and mopped at his face with a sleeve wet enough to wring. The tears, which had been waiting all morning for permission, now ran in earnest down a chin scrubbed to a martyr’s pink.

"Madonna santissima! Bellissimi, bellissimi, both of them!"

Both hands flew up to heaven to submit the finding for inspection.

In the same motion, without a breath between, the right one came down and turned palm-up, as though the two gestures were one prayer. "Messer Doge, Messer Doge, consider! Three nights I sat with the canons, the candle burning to my fingers, hunting for the prohibition! Warm water for a font! A sponsor in rags! And Dio be thanked, Dio be praised, not one of them forbids it, not one, not a comma! And now, Messer Doge, now, who pays for all that searching?"

The Doge’s laugh came out as a wheeze through the linen, and a thumb like a knot of rope swung toward the man at his elbow. "Eh! Eh, Ambrogio, you vulture in a surplice! What would you have of me? Send your bill to the Lion’s blood. It stands right here, grinning at you."

"Put it down by the splash, and I will pay it by the splash. And sprinkle twice as much for the interest, since you Churchmen love it so!"

"Barozzi! Figlio mio! Benedetti, benedetti! Blessed be the Barozzini, blessed their sons, blessed their daughters, and blessed, blessed, blessed be their silver, amen!"

The old man returned to his barge with the beads passing through his fingers more slowly than they had in the palace. They brought him up the forty-one steps, the Councillor for Dorsoduro was back on his stool beside the door, and the bowl-boy sat at the foot of the bed with his chin on his knees.

The beads in the old man’s hand clicked once, then came to rest on a single bead.

Before Lauds, Enrico Dandolo died in his bed, having lived as long as the years would permit.

The first bell spoke from San Marco, slow and deep, and every campanile took up the stroke from the one before it, carrying the sound down the lagoon to the Lido.

By Terce, the shutters across the Riva were closed and the Piazza was full.

Women knelt on the bridges, men stood bareheaded in the calli, and old oarsmen wept openly into their sleeves.

Gondolas hung black cloth from their prows, and the bells continued from San Marco to the Lido without leaving so much as a breath between them.

All across the city, in the streets and over the water, citizens said the same thing.

He had been theirs.

The Doge was dressed in the ducal robe and laid in the palace with the beads still in his hand. The Mass was sung at San Marco before Vespers.

His bier crossed the Piazza through a crowd so thick that the bearers had to turn sideways to pass, while the old veterans who had followed him to Zara and into Constantinople walked behind it with their gray heads uncovered.

The Republic buried Dandolo at San Marco, in the Doge’s chapel, in the city he had led over the sea walls of an empire. The Piazza remained full long after the stone was set.

The whole Great Council came to the hall dressed in black, every man carrying his hat in his hand. They stood together before the empty dais.

There was no sitting and no speech. While the bells continued to ring, no man in that hall was another man’s enemy.

For once, the Republic had found on which all its members could agree without a vote.

Vito returned home with the tallow from the Mass still in his clothes. He washed at the ewer longer than the rule required, lifted Lucia from her cradle, and sat on the edge of the bed.

Caterina lay in the nest with Leonardo at her breast. Tears dripped down her face and onto the boy’s linen, and she made no effort to stop them.

Vito wept too, silently, with his face against the girl’s head.

Her voice had gone to a thread, but the thread held. "He swore he would live until the water, Vitale mou. The old fox. And he did. He waited for it."

Vito’s voice cracked clean through on the endearment. "He held them both, mia cara, both, with hands as steady as a mast in a flat calm. He asked their names twice and said them over to himself, and Leonardo, Madonna, Leonardo! He screamed until the lamps swung on their chains, and the old man laughed. I heard him laugh under that rag, laughed like a boy."

"Ohimè... ohimè, I wanted to hear it, Vitale. I lay in this bed and listened to the barge go without me. Without me, Panagia mou!"

She pressed her mouth to the boy’s head, and the next words came out smaller.

"There is no one left, amore. No one who knew nonno when he was a boy."

Vito spoke without looking up. "Three galleys I had, mia cara, three galleys and a mouth the size of the Arsenal gate, and he put his seal behind me when no one else would put a grossi. And did I thank him? Did I? Not once. Not properly. Not with so much as a cask of the good wine."

"Oh, he knew, amore. Of course he knew, why else would he call you Lion’s Blood? He never said that to a stranger, Vitale mou, not once in his life."

Lucia screwed up her face and made it plain that she had heard enough of this conversation.

Vito rocked her against his shoulder. "Si, si, piccola, I know, I know. Enough, you have made your complaint, the whole house has heard it. He heard it too, you know. From the stairs."

No one spoke again until the boy had finished feeding.

The Republic was already at work. From the palace to the poorest calle, every house in Venezia turned its attention to the choosing of a new Doge.

Beyond the Lido, a fleet was sailing home with a season’s cargo in its holds and a season’s accounts waiting to be settled.

Venezia would choose a new Doge, and the fleet would return to him.