Chapter 189: A Year of Good Business and Bad Habits

By Epiphany the wake had closed, and the lamps along the Molo were snuffed out as daylight spread across the grey horizon. Vito’s gondola brought him ashore between the granite pillars just as the Palace opened for the new year.

That month the new colleganza went around the table, richer than the previous one. Every house signed under the old terms and thanked God for its corner.

In the last week of January the printing press behind San Bartolomeo produced its first page, a calendar of feasts and tides. The goldsmith had cut every letter backward, as instructed, and they all printed correctly except for one S in San Marco, which he had cut forward out of habit, so it came out backward.

He was impossible to live with for the next month regardless. The notaries, meanwhile, bought the formulary before the ink had dried.

Caterina pinned the first copy to the plaster beside the old chart and stepped back, her thumb black to the knuckle.

She snickered and told him. "Mark me, Vitale, mark me well, for I’ll not say it twice. The Rialto will buy these by the hundred, and every last one of them will swear on his mother’s bones he never needed a line of it. Proud as peacocks, the lot! They’ll pay good silver for the sea itself and call it a kindness to us."

Before Ash Wednesday the first bars of soap arrived from Chioggia, and Marouda stood guard over the soap bar at the ewer as though it were a relic, slipper in hand. The washing rule was now soap first, then water.

The sugar island sent its first loaves across the water before Easter, and the apothecaries and the patrician houses promptly began fighting over them. Some loaves remained at home, safely placed on a high shelf.

By the week after Easter, the fleets departed along the same two routes as before.

Fantin and Zaccaria went south to Alexandria and the crusader coast, while Marin went north to the Golden Horn, Soldaia, and Phasis, Bepi taking his place at Zorzi’s oars. That made twenty-three hulls, and Vito stayed ashore once again to look after the hall and the children.

The twins stood between the pillars on their own legs to watch the ships leave. Lucia climbed onto the step at the foot of a pillar so she could see the oars better, while Leo held her sleeve in case the step decided to cause trouble.

At the Ascension fair the scented waters went on sale. The brides, the patricians’ wives, and the women of the bridge bought every flask by noon, and every one of them insisted it was for the linen.

In June the Arsenal’s first hull came off production line and slid down the canal into the Bacino, while the Marinai watched from the wall with their hats in their hands.

She was the first of ten, built from numbered ribs that passed down the waterway through gangs of workers, each gang with its own task. Nestor stood on the bank with his adze.

He normally let the lagoon decide the names of his ships, but this time he chose one himself. La Bugiarda, after the author of the sheets. The red caps repeated the name as a joke, and before long the lagoon had accepted it.

Nestor spat into the water. "Liar! Liar, I called you, Panagia mou, to your face, patrikios, in front of the saints! ’A hull from numbered ribs,’ you tell me, ’passed hand to hand like a bucket at a fire.’ Ela, re, who believes such a thing? And now look at her. So. I take it back. There, it is said, but keep your thanks in your purse, patrikios, Nestor does not sell his words twice. Let her carry it, the beautiful liar, and let the sea sort out the rest."

Vito spread his arms toward the hull as though she had been built especially for him. "Nestor, Nestor, you wicked old Greek! The finest hull ever to kiss the water of this city, and you christen her Liar, and in the feminine, mind, with a skirt on her! Madonna, wait until Caterina hears, she’ll want to know which one of us you had in mind, and I swear to you, per Dio, I will not be the one to answer her."

The tower clock was a gift to the Republic, which accepted it in the usual fashion. The Doge’s oath prevented him from accepting gifts, so the Ducal Council accepted it on his behalf, while the Avogadori recorded it on their rolls as the property of the Republic and the Great Council thanked the house, entering the thanks as a debt.

On San Giacomo’s day the iron frame was carried from the courtyard workshop to the Rialto tower, with the bell-founder walking beside it, red-eyed, as the first weight was dropped.

The first strokes were wrong according to every bell-ringer in Venice, and the Rialto agreed for the first time in its life.

The clock was wrong.

By the third day the clock was right, and the Rialto was wrong.

On the thirtieth of July the clock was still right, and in the east wing a printed sheet hung low on the wall, at the height of a child’s eyes. The twins were three, and their words had come steadily throughout the summer, like a rising tide.

Lucia now gave her orders in complete sentences in two tongues, while Leo could count past twenty. They had also taken charge of the ewer, with Lucia turning away every visitor who had not washed and Leo keeping a tally of them.

The press had printed the sheet for the twins, which gave them both words for the alphabet. For ’A’ there was was amphorae for Vito and alum for Caterina, since neither parent was willing to surrender the argument.

Lucia placed her finger on the A while Leo held the page flat with both hands.

"Amphorae! I came first, so I choose first. That is the rule, Leo, the rule! Ela, ela, now you."

"Alum, its Mama’s. Its a good one, this."

The fleets returned by the Cross, all twenty-three hulls, and the southern fleet had left Alexandria before the last month of the truce. By then all ten new naves were sitting in the lagoon, one hull behind another so closely that the red caps had given up inspecting them, bringing the house’s total to thirty-three hulls.

The crusaders truce expired in September, and so far nothing happened.

Acre had sent word to Cairo before the agreement ran out, and both sides continued observing the old terms while their clerks fought over the new ones. A merchant could hardly ask for better news, though there was nothing particularly exciting about it.

The northern fleet brought a letter from the Queen, who wrote that the quarter at Phasis had reached its roof beams, that Nane would winter there again, and asked where the swallows were. Vito replied that he would return in the summer.

On San Michele the roll was renewed, and the hall voted to permit Crete’s Ducal Council to grant a seat to a Greek.

The Greek was Leon Skordilis.

Six years earlier, at Leon’s table, Vito had promised him a seat in the Great Council, and now the hall had found him a different door. The vote was read aloud, a hundred and twelve to ninety-eight.

The last galleys to leave Acre before the sea closed brought word that John of Brienne had married the girl queen and been crowned king at Tyre.

By San Martino five of the six new industries had paid their first silver, and the clock had begun paying in hours.

The sea had been closed for three weeks when a leaf arrived from Padua.

Otto the Welf, crowned in Rome the year before, had marched into southern Italy, and the Pope had cast him out of the Church. Ziani read the news three times, and the Great Council sealed a short answer.

Back into their household, the bed had spent every night of the autumn proving Cristina wrong in her belief that a full belly left no time for sin, while Santa Lucia, who had heard the same news once before, watched the theory fail again during her own week, this time in writing.

Caterina sat at the oak table with the children’s thick, plain book open before her, ruling a third line beneath the twins’ names while Vito leaned against the doorway, holding a copy of the Padua leaf in his hand.

"A third, Vitale. In the heat, Madonna santa, in the worst of the heat! I checked twice, and once more on my fingers, in case the Blessed Mother was making her little jokes at our expense again."

"Ma va’! Ma va’, ma va’!"

Vito pushed away from the doorframe and kissed the top of her head, laughing. "A third! Madonna mia, planted in the autumn and harvested in the heat! The Queen told me a vine is judged at the harvest, moglie, and I, great fool that I am, never knew she meant us!"

She blew on the wet line. "You told the Queen next summer, Vitale, so next summer you will be home. Here, in this house, in that chair, wringing your hands and getting under the midwife’s feet, and not on some Georgian riverbank! Now go and tell my mother. Go, run, if you love me. She’ll have the liver on the fire before you reach the stairs, and she will want you at the table to watch me eat every scrap of it."

He was only halfway down the stairs when Cristina’s pot lid clanged in the kitchen, long before he had managed to say a word.