Chapter 182: The Queen Who Is Called King

The sandbar at the entrance of the Phasis broke white over the brown water in the first week of June, and for the second summer in a row no one had lit a fire on the hills.

Zorzi waited beyond the surf with her war colors struck, the Lion at her masthead and the black lion beneath it, while Orso’s platoon occupied the benches.

A customs boat came through the breakers, bringing an envoy in good mail and a monk in a black cowl who climbed aboard behind him.

The monk asked the name of the galley, and a sailor told him she was Zorzi. In Georgian, that was Giorgi, the name of Saint George, whose cross stood in every church along that coast. It was also the name of the Queen’s son.

Vito had once wanted to name his galley Blasphemy. His wife had vetoed the idea, and he now congratulated her on the decision where no one could hear him.

A clerk opened the gift chest and found mirrors and silver bells packed in straw. He waved it through without weighing it, and the harbor fee for one keel went into the book in copper, entered under the name of a saint.

The governor fed the Latins while a rider went up to the court, returning with the Queen’s answer in his satchel.

The Venetian would be received at her western seat.

The Queen sent horses to fetch him. Heavy cavalry rode at the head of the formation, light cavalry with bows brought up the rear, and between them traveled Vito in his wine-dark mantle, carrying a standard with the Lion banner and the black lion beneath it.

Orso and a few dozen soldiers went with him, along with the Doge’s letter in its case and two mules, each carrying a chest.

There was no shortage of ceremony, though whether all that ceremony would prove important was a different matter.

The diplomatic mission traveled up the river by barge for two days, then continued on horseback for three, and the Queen’s country fed them all the way. Every village had a table ready before they arrived, with wine, ghvino, poured from clay jars buried up to their necks in the courtyards and bread slapped against the inside walls of clay ovens and peeled off hot.

Every cup went up to gaumarjos, which meant victory, while stone towers stood on the ridges and domed churches occupied the valleys.

By the third village, Vito’s stomach had surrendered. By the fifth, the locals had invited it to another battle.

At the first night’s table, a rider handed Orso a drinking horn as long as his forearm. The bear emptied it to the bottom, and the company roared its approval.

Vito, who loved history and had found himself a giant for an audience, explained four times that they were traveling up Jason’s river to the city of King Aietes. Orso wanted to know whether the king had left any wine behind, and Vito told him the Georgians had plainly kept it all.

On the fifth dawn, the road climbed one last ridge, and the city appeared on its hill, its domes catching the light.

A herald stood at the doors of the hall and began reading the Queen’s titles from a roll that seemed determined to outlast the Doge’s oath.

She was Tamar, by the will of God King of Kings and Queen of Queens, Sovereign of the Abkhazians, the Kartvelians, the Rans, the Kakhs, and the Armenians, Shirvanshah and Shahanshah, Master of the East and of the West, Heir of David and of Solomon, Defender of the Cross on the mountains and in the plains, and Sword of the Messiah.

The herald unrolled a second length of parchment and proclaimed Vitale Barozzi of La Serenissima, envoy of the Most Serene Doge, bearer of the Lion of San Marco, victor at Constantinople, slayer of the Emperor of the Romans, and servant of the Republic’s honor and commerce.

He continued with a list of offices and honors Vito had never held, but which the Doge’s letter, apparently, had bestowed upon him.

Clergy in black cowls stood along one wall of the hall, while lords in mail and brocade lined the other. A lean man with ink on his fingers sat at the Queen’s table, and Vito made a point of not staring at him.

A man too fond of history could lose a charter by gawking at a poet, and Vito had come too far to lose one over his own curiosity.

The Queen’s son, a sixteen-year-old boy named Giorgi, stood beside her and looked Vito over with serious attention.

The Queen sat in a tall chair beneath a canopy of red cloth stitched with a cross of golden vines, occupying it as naturally as a lance sat in its rest. She was nearly fifty, tall and straight, with black brows and black hair threaded with silver beneath a crown whose pearls hung to her shoulders.

Her face had clean, firm, and her robe was deep-water blue and heavy with gold.

If she refused him, the Doge’s letter would remain a debt that had bought nothing, and Vito would go home carrying the same paper he had brought. A man could spend a great deal of time obtaining permission to build a pier and still end up with nothing but permission.

Vito walked through the hall in his formal costume and greeted the Queen in Georgian, calling her mepe at the end of his greeting, the word her own people used.

She rose a brow at the word. "My barons call me so with a bone in the throat, like men who have swallowed a carp whole and are too proud to cough. You, Latin, you say it like bread. Hot bread, still in the hand, peeled from the oven wall."

Two fingers lifted from the arm of her chair, and the monk with the psalter moved. "So. A tongue so sincere should be checked. The queen at the king’s right hand, in gold. Read it to me, and slowly. I like to watch a man earn his words."

The monk held out a psalter, and Vito read the verse in which the queen stands in gold at the king’s right hand. The words seemed especially well placed in that hall, and the Queen listened in silence.

The psalm ended. Vito closed his mouth on the last word and waited.

The Queen let the silence stand until the boy beside her shifted his weight.

Then she spoke softly. "So. You are the Lion. The one who went over the wall of the city that threw my kin into the road."

She leaned back beneath the golden vines. "Apologies, Latin, apologies I have. Vai me, how much apologies I have, a whole cellar of it, laid down in jars like ghvino, and every envoy who walks through that door brings one more jar and waits for me to drink. I am full. I am drunk on it."

The pearls trembled at her shoulders.

"So I ask you once, and you will answer me once. Are you useful?"

The hall waited for his answer, and Vito kept his hands where they belong.

"Mepe, I didn’t walk into your hall to weep."

He kept his voice low, and the Georgian came out round. "The Emperor who held those walls, him I killed, Dio bon, with these hands you are so kindly inspecting. And now the walls are Latin. So, I bring you no apology, only a harbor, worth a fortune."

She turned her attention to the Doge’s letter, which the monk had begun to offer in its case.

"The Doge."

She set the title down like a strange, foreign term. "Twice my monks have read me this, Latin. Twice, in your Latin, and each time I hear the same man. Who writes as equal to a queen across a table, and waits at the bottom for someone to bring him a chair. Read it to me a third time. Perhaps by then the Doge will have learned to stand."

That afternoon, the gift chest went into a side court, where the Queen’s physician was waiting. He was a Georgian monk with a long beard and clean nails, and beside him stood a groom whose leg had rotted after a horse kicked him.

The wound was rotten as old cheese beneath a green skin, and it stank like a stable in August.

The chest contained samples, flasks of green mold, lime, ether, and ergot in Murano glass, all stoppered with wax. Vito explained that an Alexandrian physician had taught him the washing and shown him the green.

No one in Kutaisi had ever met an Alexandrian physician, which made him a convenient teacher, and no one present could contradict the story.

Vito was doing it for trade, and there was no reason to pretend otherwise. A living Queen meant an open road, and a stable country meant stable commerce. The books Vito loved gave Tamar’s death as 1213 but didn’t say what killed her, so disease was a likely cause.

He didn’t know what would kill Tamar, so he gave her the washing and the green.

The monk washed to his elbows in lime water because the Venetian had insisted on it.

The Queen said nothing, which in her case amounted to permission, and the monk applied the green to the groom’s leg. The groom swore at the monk, then at the Venetian, then at his own mother, in that order.

Days passed. The leg was washed and dressed twice a day, and the groom became the most important patient in Georgia. He accepted the position with sulky dignity.

By the tenth morning, the rot had given way to clean pink flesh, and the groom crossed the yard on his two legs. The whole court watched while the monk followed behind him as though guarding a relic.

The weeks that followed fell into a familiar pattern. The council met every morning, a feast filled each evening, and the Church took over every Sunday, which lasted longer than the feast.

At the long table in the council hall, the treasurer read the dues aloud while the lords fought over every one of them. They wanted a tenth, and a guarantor behind every Latin keel.

Vito felt the back of his neck go cold when the loudest lord spoke. That man’s house was built on borrowed silver, and the guarantor disappeared from the charter between one reading and the next without anyone appearing to notice.

The Clergy wanted the Latin chapel small and silent. Vito, who had seen what Latin bells could do in Constantinople, was happy to give them that.

The argument over the tenth ended when the Queen tapped the table once with her finger. The tenth became a twentieth.

All five terms were granted.

The dues were fixed at a twentieth, with the harbor fee entered separately for each keel. A Georgian officer would live at the fondaco and handle the single weighing required for every office, using the house’s weights, stamped with the Queen’s seal.

The pier would stand on piles across the near bank beside the fortress at Phasis. Inside the walls, the Latins could have a chapel, provided it had no bell outside, and a consul would keep the house, the very position Vito had told the Great Council the Republic lacked on those shores.

Until the Republic appointed its own man, a Barozzini factor would fill the post.

The Queen set the price herself.

She counted on the ringed hand, and each finger that went down looked like a door closing somewhere on Vito’s side of the table.

"As for the rent for the ground."

One finger. "A gift each year, from your glass. Murano, yes? I like how it catches the light."

Two. "My officer at your gate, who sits, who watches the scale, so that my treasurer may sleep at night like a child."

Three. "And every spring, your ships will carry my monks, and my gifts, to the Holy Land."

Four, and the ring caught the light. "The roads there are thick with thieves, batono, and the sea, I am told, is thick with Venetians."

The court laughed a beat late, and Vito laughed a beat after that, out of prudence.

Vito added it all up in his head and winced when he reached the Caterina at the bottom of the account. The officer, the rent, the annual gift, the monks’ berths, and the rules he had written for the monk-physician would all find their way to the Queen’s desk in time, along with the favor of the Great Council, which he had entered as a debt. She would put a price on every one of them.

A merchant might call that an expensive bargain.

A Queen with a working treasurer could afford to call it business.

The charter was written in Georgian, with a Greek copy beside it and a Latin copy prepared for Venezia in the monk’s hand. The Queen’s seal went into red wax, and the governor and the Clergy added their marks.

The Queen then proclaimed. "It is sealed. Do not thank me, Latin. Thanks are for weddings and for funerals. A vine is not judged at the planting, it is judged at the harvest. I have planted. I will wait for the grapes."

The wax hadn’t yet hardened when the display appeared.

?? [HISTORICAL DIVERGENCE CONFIRMED — REWARD : 150 FATE]

On the dawn of his departure, the Queen came as far as the top of the hall steps, a courtesy her people said she granted to no one.

"Come each summer, Venetian."

She said it down the steps.

"Each summer, hear me, not once, and then a letter. A cure is not proved in a month."

One black brow rose, and beneath it, for the first time, what was almost a smile.

"Neither is a merchant. Go with God. Come back with the swallows."

The charter traveled down the river in its case, carried by the mule that had brought the medicine. At Phasis, the governor’s soldiers drove the first boundary stake for the new quarter into the near bank beside the fortress, where a priest blessed it and a clerk entered it in the book.

From there it was back into the waters.

Six days of open sea lay ahead to Soldaia, where Nane and her pile driver Bortola would either have a pier ready or have an excuse for not having one.

After that came six more days to the Golden Horn for a short stop, then the long run home to Venezia, with San Michele waiting at the end.

Zorzi passed through the sandbar and turned her bow north-northwest.