Chapter 183: The Podestà’s Seal

Six days out of the Phasis, with only open water behind them, Zorzi’s lookout spotted oak piles spreading out from the shore at Soldaia and called it a miracle.

Less than a year ago, that pier had been a leaf of parchment with three seals on it, and now it stood in the mud, supported by thick posts.

La Verde and the three naves anchored where Nane had left them. Ashore, Greek workers hired through the archon’s steward labored beside his sailors.

The warehouse walls had risen to knee height, built with lime mortar, while the first walls now reached a meter.

Everything had gone according to plan. This was a private fondaco, belonging to the house itself, with a black lion painted on a plank above the gate.

The only difficulty was Nane, who had taken to naming his piles. Every oak post that went into the mud received the name of a wife from the town, picked up at the market, and the whole crew shouted it out as the hammer fell.

On the day Zorzi arrived, he found the carpenter standing at the end of the pier, glaring at a post that refused to go down.

"Ostrega! Down, Eudokia! Down, I say, you pig-headed Greek heifer! Daghe, Bortola, daghe! All the way to the hip, cara, and afterward you can thank me proper."

The maul fell. The oak groaned, shuddered, and gave up an inch of itself to the mud.

Bortola brought the hammer down, and the pile sank more inches. The Greek husbands stood on the mole with their arms folded, as they naturally didn’t enjoy hearing a foreigner call his wife a stubborn cow, and even less when she goes down on the second blow.

The clerk from the three offices entered every name in the stamp book exactly as the crew shouted it. By now the list looked like a parish roll, and Pellegrino paid for every complaint with a candle in a Greek church.

Vito cupped his hands around his mouth and called from Zorzi’s deck. "Maestro Nane! Ohé, Maestro! A Greek will forgive a man for building him a pier, that I grant you. But what you are doing to his wife, before God, the saints and half of Soldaia? That he will want explained, and I tell you plainly, I will not be the one to explain it!"

Nane waved a hand without looking around and gave Bortola the next name.

From there, Vito went ashore and climbed to the north gate. The smoke rising from the wagon yard was thinner than it had been the previous summer, and there fewer wagons than expected.

The old caravan owner came across the trampled ground to meet him, grayer now. He had predicted a thin road and was pleased to have the satisfaction of being right in front of other people.

News came from him, how the Rus princes of the north still hired horsemen to settle their wars. Vsevolod of Vladimir, called the Big Nest, had burned a neighbor’s town and paid his riders out of the ashes.

The old man spat to one side.

"Thin road! Thin, sea-man! I say it, I say it before, and you laugh. Ha! Now look. Wagon few, silver few, and from beyond big river, new name come down. Mongol."

He dropped his voice then, though not so far that his grandsons couldn’t hear. "One khan. One tamga. All far grass bow down. Grass is patient, sea-man. Grass wait, wait, wait. But this one..."

He shook his head slowly.

"This one, maybe grass not forgive."

Vito had read it dozens of times but had never heard anyone speak it aloud, so he kept the knowledge to himself. The books told him how that story ended, but they didn’t tell him whether the ending had already begun, whether it was still far away, or whether it would come sooner than anyone expected.

Before leaving the wagons, he bought two small felt horses from the old man’s grandson, one for each child, and slipped them into his coat.

The naves closed their hatches over the light cargoes, and Vito walked to the last pile on the pier with Nane beside him.

The maestro would stay with the fondaco and his pile-driver, the Greek workers, and about forty of Pellegrino’s platoon. They would lodge on the plot until the walls were ready, with Pellegrino remaining to keep them there.

Vito gripped the carpenter’s shoulder and went down the cabin.

Pellegrino went up to the church to light one last candle.

Zorzi, La Verde, and the three naves sailed out together. Behind them, a wife’s name spread across the pier as the hammer fell, then the oars took the water, and the journey to the Golden Horn began.

Six days later, Constantinople appeared through the morning haze, gray and carrying fewer sails than a capital ought to have. Beyond the long harbor, two state galleys rode beneath the Lion of San Marco, long and black beside the fat merchant hulls.

The senior clerk, who inspected ships by the nose, put the tally at five hulls and told Vito that the podestà had kept his door shut against the Doge’s man for twenty days.

News were as expected.

Henry still held the crown, Kaloyan’s nephew Boril was raiding Thrace, the Lombards of Thessalonica refused to bow, and bread cost less than it had during the famine year. The Greeks called that a saint’s work, while the barons preferred to take the credit themselves.

The Venetian Quarter belonged to the Republic, and the Republic had come to collect. Ziani’s letter had arrived in the spring, placing the colony’s courts under the Doge’s seal, appointing a podestà of his choosing, and ordering Zeno home to answer for himself.

The militia remained loyal to Zeno, the citizens waited to see what would happen, and the Pisans watched from the shore like men who had been left outside a wedding.

Zeno’s name had been spoken once in a closed room in Venezia. It had come first, because a man who seals his own edicts is not a man a Doge can easily command. Vito had been sitting in that room, and the words spoken there had stayed with him.

Within the hour, two sealed letters came aboard, one carrying Zeno’s wax and the other the Doge’s man’s. Both invited Vito to meet them at the church door.

He wrote the same answer on each and sent them back with the same boy. Orso’s platoon sat on Zorzi’s benches, their weapons racked and their helmets off, just as they had been at the Phasis.

The next morning, Zeno’s edicts still covered the church door, where they had hung for three years. Beneath them, nailed up in a smaller space, was the Doge’s letter. That was the only paper anyone on the door was bothering to read.

The Doge’s man waited at a table on the steps. Zeno came down in his black gown and drew Vito aside.

"Ah! Messer Barozzi! A galley and a private company, and all for me? Fie, fie! Madonna santa, had I known you traveled in such company, I should have had a second table set, a longer one, and a notary to witness the soup."

"Messer Podestà. I come to this door as a member of the Great Council, a witness, no more."

Some of the dryness left Zeno’s face. What remained was courtesy.

"Tell me, Messer Barozzi, for it has troubled my digestion these two summers past. Two answers reached my table from your wife’s cousins. The first swore, on every saint they could name, that the Barozzini take the side of whoever pays for the dinner. The second swore, with equal fervor, that they take the side of the Republic. Now! Which of these sincere witnesses am I to believe?"

"Both, Messer Podestà. And neither cousin lied. In Venezia, the Republic has always paid for the dinner, she only sends the bill afterward."

Zeno gave his small, reasonable smile.

Then the Doge’s man stood and read Ziani’s letter clause by clause, just as the Doge himself would have done. The terms took some time to explain, how the podestà of the Venetians would now answer to the Republic’s seal, and Zeno was to return home.

When the reading was finished, Zeno drew out the silver seal that had pressed the Lion into three years of wax and placed it on the table, where it rang like a little bell.

"Three years this little Lion has bitten wax for me, and never once complained of the diet. Let him bite the table, then. Once. And be finished. Carry my answer to the Doge, and tell him how I laid it down, as a gentleman sets down his sword. That is the whole favor I ask of you."

"I will carry it, Messer Podestà, word for word."

It was the favor the Barozzini had owed since the Lion first bit the wax in Zeno’s house, and it was a small one. Zeno kept his house, and the colony breathed again.

Lunardo, whose silver was bound to Zeno with more knots than a ship’s rigging, came down to the wharf carrying a letter for Cristina. He held it out in both hands while the ships took on bread and water.

That night Zeno sealed his answer with his plain ring. It was the only seal he had left.

The case rested under Vito’s arm as the Hellespont appeared ahead of them.

Inside were the Queen’s charter and Zeno’s answer, two seals from opposite ends of the world that had never expected to share a lock. Twenty-four days by the compass brought them home without a storm, past Tenedos, Andros, Cape Malea, and Ragusa.

Then came the Lido, the porto, and the Bacino.

Across the water stood the Doge Palace, which could wait until the next day.

Vito knew what awaited him, or thought he did.

Caterina had sworn that Lucia would stand up and march to the door the day after he sailed, if only out of spite, while Leo would be on his back, perfectly calm, studying the architecture. Two little felt horses and a letter for Cristina were tucked into his coat. Lucia, he suspected, would have bitten hers before supper.

San Michele was a little more than two weeks away, his seat was on the roll, and his wife held the key.

On the scaffold of the east wing, now the tallest structure in the calle, a watcher spotted the Lion on the water and shouted down into the courtyard.

A man ran for the crank, and the iron grille at the water-gate began to rise on its windlass.