Chapter 175: Goose Down for the Doge

The chair on the dais stood empty, and no one in the Great Council hall would sit on the bench beside it. The cushion that had kept the old man’s feet warm was still where he had left it, covered in the finest silk the Rialto could supply and stuffed with goose down.

The Ducal Council kept watch over the palace and its doors, while Cannaregio held the keys and the tally stick. Dorsoduro, who had slept through two Doges and an earthquake, managed to stay awake through every sitting, though no one mentioned it.

The older men remembered the year the Piazza had killed a Doge, and the law lying on the table was what Venezia had made of that unhappy lesson. A Republic that feared a prince still had to choose one, an inconvenience no one had managed to legislate away.

Before long, the sea would close at San Martino, and the Young, the Old, and the three benches that sold their support began tallying what each had to gain.

On the feast of San Lorenzo, the Avogadore laid his palm flat on the leaf and read the law.

The Great Council named four men, who went behind a closed door and chose the forty-nine who would sit as the Council of Forty. Once sworn, the forty-nine would name the Doge, and no one else in the Republic got a vote, however much he might have liked one.

The four were one patrician with clean books, one with a scar from Zara, one related to a salt keeper, and one who had never lost a case before the Avogadori.

On the Assumption, the forty-nine were announced by name, and the hats throughout the hall came off as each man was called. Marco Barozzi emerged from the Old, and Vitale Barozzi from the Young.

At the ewer in the master chamber, Vito washed his hands up to the elbows, lifted Lucia out of her cradle, and sat on the edge of the bed where Caterina was nursing Leonardo.

"Well, marito?"

Caterina lifted her chin from the boy’s head. "What happened in the hall when they cried out your name? Dio mio, I have had only the ceiling to talk to all day, and the poor thing has run out of words."

He rocked Lucia against his shoulder. "Forty-nine names, anima mia, forty-nine, and two of them Barozzi. The Lion and the Hat shut in one room together, like two pike in a barrel."

Caterina’s eyes narrowed.

In that bed she was still the keeper of the keys, and the whole sweet, sleepy tableau had just become a hearing. "Dai, Vitale, listen to me! A gift is a debt, and a debt has a vote, and a vote has a price. I wrote every one of those leaves with my own hand, so you promise nothing to anyone, you hear me? Not a favor, not a nod, not even a fish!"

He lifted his free hand. "Tomorrow I swear on the Gospels to say nothing, moglie, and may Lucia scold me from the cradle if I break my word. Look at that face. already she has written the sentence."

Every dawn, Vito’s gondola landed him between the two granite pillars of the Piazzetta, which Sebastiano Ziani had raised in the years when the Pope and the Emperor made peace in Venezia

His son Pietro Ziani had inherited old, clean silver, no great office, and some of the glory that came from sacking a city.

Everyone in the room knew what Ziani would do with the chair, how he would hold what the Republic already held and keep the Latin Empire fed, then build on it all, in harbor, in stone, and in the Piazza itself, while the podestà in Constantinople discovered a leash.

Benedetto Gradenigo, from an apostolic house, belonged to the Old and would tighten the oath one clause at a time. Anzolo Venier, an admiral from the Zara years who was loved in every tavern, would hold the Black Sea and the Peloponnese with oars.

Three other men were mentioned once and dismissed just as quickly, each for his own reason. Ranieri Dandolo had a fleet and an army, Marino Zeno sealed his own edicts, and Sanudo kept an island he had taken himself.

Each held abroad a power a Doge couldn’t command at home.

The old man’s saying, that the chair heard nothing from its own blood, had been turned against his son, and everyone managed to do it with excellent manners.

The forty-nine swore on the Gospels at San Marco to keep whatever was said in the room inside the room. By day they sat in the side chamber behind the hall, with Cannaregio at the door, and at night they went home through their water-gates, and Vito went home to his children.

Each dawn the electors spoke in order of seniority, oldest first, and a name that fell stayed down. The three men with fleets, private edicts, and islands fell first.

Vito spoke twice in all those weeks.

On Our Lady’s birthday, Caterina was churched at San Pietro di Castello, and Ambrogio charged her by the splash. She walked home and took the warehouse key off its hook herself.

Around the feast of the Cross, the fleet returned through the porto in the order the books had predicted. There had been no storm, no corsairs.

Fantin stepped onto the Riva with the sealed letters in his coat and heard the news from a clerk. His face, which could turn a funeral into a feast, went blank, while Bepi received the news at the steering oars and Zaccaria at the bow.

The letters went to Caterina. She took the entire business of the fleet’s return into her hands, the warehouse, the books, the brokers, and every sealed leaf.

Cristina and Marouda brought the children to her at feeding time, and she nursed with one arm while writing with the other, the key at her belt and ink up to her wrist.

Vito knew his wife. He sat through the council meetings, took the children at night, and left the accounts alone until she brought them to him.

On the feast of San Matteo, the eldest Avogadore laid the leaf flat on the table and called the forty-nine one by one, each man answering aloud with a name, just as they had done for the Duke of Candia.

Ziani’s name went around the room. Gradenigo’s men and Venier’s friends offered their names here and there, but almost everyone else followed the same choice.

No one had expected the matter to be settled so easily. The electors looked at their hands, the table, and one another like guests who had come armed to a wedding and were now wondering whether they had misunderstood the invitation.

The eldest Avogadore called Marco Barozzi.

"Ziani."

Marco said the name in a flat, heavy voice.

"Vitale Barozzi."

Vito rose and put on the formal costume, with a small joke sewn into the folds.

"Pietro Ziani, Messer Avogadore, with all reverence. May the chair be kind to him, and the cushion kinder, for the geese of Venezia have given all they have."

"Entered."

The room noticed that both Barozzi had named the same man and let the matter pass in silence.

Vito had named Ziani because of the ground beneath his feet. He held Murano’s shoreline, a shipyard on the Castello shore, a fondaco on a duchy, and a route across a sea that answered to no lord, and every stone of those holdings needed a steady hand on the lagoon.

The Avogadore laid his palm flat on the leaf.

At dusk, the forty-nine crossed the Piazza behind a boy carrying the old Doge’s cushion, with the oath laid on top of it. Cannaregio walked at the boy’s shoulder to keep him from colliding with a pillar, since the boy could not see over the cushion.

Ca’ Ziani stood only a short walk away, an old-silver house behind a plain door. Pietro Ziani himself waited in the doorway, dressed in plain cloth, while the light faded from the calle.

Cannaregio proclaimed. "Messer Pietro Ziani! By the voice of the forty-nine, in the sight of God and of San Marco, you are named to the chair, if, Messer, you will carry it."

Ziani’s eyes went to neither the crowd nor the cushion’s silk.

They went to the folded oath lying on top, the only object in the whole Piazza that interested him. "Messer, I carry nothing I have not first read. It is a poor habit in a man, to lift what he has not weighed. And I thank the forty-nine for their patience, truly. A lamp, if the house can spare one."

"Item. A lamp."

A servant ran to fetch one. Ziani took the oath from the cushion and stood in his doorway to read it, clause by clause.

The forty-nine waited in the calle, and the Piazza waited behind them for a name it didn’t yet have. Vito stood at the back of the forty-nine.

He had read about this custom a hundred times, but none of his books had made it look like a man standing in his doorway and reading by lamplight.

The oath, the people at San Marco, and the new Doge all depended on the man at the door.

And the man was still reading.