Chapter 103: An Island in Good Order

The days that followed were spent doing the ordinary work required to make a fleet ready to leave again. Hulls were checked for whatever the voyage had shaken loose, casks were scrubbed and filled with fresh water, and the strip of sailcloth on Zorzi that had gone thin beyond Rhodes was taken down, mended, and put back where it belonged.

Caterina’s household carried trunks and books up the gangway one load at a time, while Marouda drove two servant girls through the narrow passage with the brisk authority she would have used in her kitchen.

A ship could be loaded without much ceremony, but a household apparently could not.

A couple of days took care of that well enough.

What took longer was what Vito kept thinking about more than the cargo. Crete was stable enough, Zaccaria told him so plainly enough, usually between complaints about the months wasted at sea, and there had been no uprising since the fleet left the harbor in spring.

The archons who had once spent their time weighing silver against promises had found a simpler answer. The granaries were full, the tolls were open, and the coin arrived when it was supposed to, asking only for patience in return.

More than one archon had discovered a renewed affection for the Republic in the very week his old friends’ ships sailed out without him.

Chania and Rethymno had kept their peace much the same way, though neither had bent as completely as Candia’s fondaco district. They had held all the same.

None of it had come cheaply in men.

Sixty of the company’s soldiers had spent the whole season aboard ship as escort, while the rest had been spread thin across three cities and the countryside between them. They were held together by stress, long hours, and the hope that nobody would notice exactly how few men were holding exactly how much ground.

Zaccaria and Pellegrino had kept the stability as much by being there as by having steel in their hands. A familiar face at a gate was often enough to discourage trouble, particularly when nobody had any reason to find out whether the garrison behind that face was as small as it really was.

The one part that hadn’t worked was the island’s far south and east. That coast and hilly countryside had never quite bent to whatever authority Candia claimed over it, and Zaccaria brought the matter up with patience about an old debt.

He didn’t press, there was no need.

The time for that business would come, and until then the debt could sit where it was.

The fondaco had lost its new look. After months its walls had weathered enough to stand comfortably beside the walls around them, and Marietta’s crane stood over the yard without work.

Her sisters, Isotta, Santina, Beatrice, and Concetta, stood beside her as well, all four idle for the moment, with nothing left to lift, drive, or saw.

It was a strange sight after watching the place work itself into existence, but there was nothing wrong with it. A crane could hardly spend its whole life lifting things just to prove it was useful.

What surprised Vito more was who else had found the place.

A handful of foreign hulls now sat across the pier, ships that hadn’t been there in march. Their captains had heard, somewhere along the chain of gossip that carried news from one port to the next, that a Venetian fondaco on Crete was open for business.

They had then wagered a whole voyage’s worth of cargo on a rumor that was already two ports old.

Considering where the island sat, between Constantinople, Alexandria, and nearly every port worth reaching in between, Vito was more surprised the traffic had taken so long to appear.

He liked men willing to gamble on a good harbor, too, probably more than he ought to have.

The island called this calm, and for the moment it was.

Candia’s archons had stopped asking Zaccaria nervous questions every week, and the dockhands had begun leaving their weapons at home.

Needless to say, Vito refused to believe Pescatore was finished with Crete.

What the company soldiers had put down at Chania and Rethymno was Genoese money buying local treachery, an archon’s ambition, a bishop’s greed, and a handful of men willing to open a gate for silver. The man himself had never come.

His reckoning was still waiting for him.

The peace was real enough, but so was the man who might come to disturb it.

Zaccaria was bound to join the voyage this time.

He had never left Crete since the day the company first claimed it, holding Candia, Chania, and Rethymno through while Vito went chasing sieges, negotiations, and Egyptian customs men across half the sea.

Whatever waited for him in Venezia, whether it was a family’s grudging attention, a seat on the Great Council, or simply the sort of standing that made the colleganza worth mentioning in a letter home, Zaccaria had spent enough time beside Vito to know that his ventures tended to pay.

A company captain who had built his name by choosing which patron to serve saw no reason to miss the voyage that mattered the most.

The whole decision took about as long as it took them to cross a dock, there was a nod, a grip of the arm, and that was that.

Some decisions deserved speeches. This one naturally didn’t.

That left the question of who stayed.

Pellegrino took the news with one hand to his saint’s medal, already counting how many more candles this would cost him before Father Ambrogio stopped keeping track.

Command of the whole island was a heavier burden than anything he had carried before.

Three cities were not one platoon and a construction yard, and Pellegrino knew it. Still, he accepted it as a debt he suspected he would be paying for years.

Orso came ashore for good this time, with the whole voyage behind him. It was difficult to tell whether he considered that a mercy or an insult.

Ground beneath his boots was worth the trouble, and so were the absence of mules and the return of clothes cut for a man his size. Missing whatever trouble came next was worth considerably less to a man who measured a good season by the number of bruises he collected in it. Orso hadn’t yet decided which he preferred.

Domenego took his place aboard instead.

The company’s numbers ended where they had begun, with the platoon that sailed trading places with the platoon that stayed.

The ropes came off the bollards two days after the fleet made port, and La Contessa moved out first, with the others following one by one into her wake.

Candia’s shore grew smaller behind them. The fondaco walls and Marietta’s crane dwindled with it, joining the same pale line that had marked the whole island while it disappeared.

There was less ceremony to it this time, though Vito knew better than to mistake the calm departure for a lesser one. They had come to the island with a problem and were leaving it with with looked suspiciously like a foothold.

This time the bows pointed north instead of east. The Adriatic and the coast that fed into it lay ahead, and beyond them, finally, the lagoon itself.

Venezia was waiting there, along with whatever the city wanted to make of an ambitious cadet.