Chapter 154: Hospitality Under Arms

The fleet kept coming for nearly an hour, and all the while the smoke rose over the hills, one column after another, a fourth, then a fifth, each answering the one before it. No customs boat appeared, and the timber piers stood empty on their piles.

Across the coast, the fortress remained shut, and a pheasant called from the reeds, carrying on with its morning as though no one had told it there was a fleet offshore. They had been promised a sandbar and a boat, and while the bar was there, the boat was not.

Bepi considered this proof that he had been right all along. An open door without a host usually meant a trap or a frightened man, and if the fleet had been caught here, the crews would either be forced to fight or be ransomed while the cargo went into their hands.

Vito’s eyes stayed on the empty piers, and his voice came out low. "Ferma, Bepi. We hold here until some living soul on that shore walks out onto a pier and lets us look him in the face, either a name or a hand I can see, or a word I can weigh."

Bepi spat over the rail. "Ciò! I hold and I smell, and what I smell is a trap with the lid propped open, no? Not even one bored harbor-whore waving a rag from the pier, in all my years I never saw a port so shy! Madòna, I can smell the prizes from here, sior, and the prizes are us!"

The ships swung around in a rough arc beyond the surf, with the galleys on the seaward side and the Lion flying her standard while the war colors came down.

Hours went by as the beacons kept passing their messages inland, yet still no one came out of the harbor. The soldiers sat armed on the galleys, the oarsmen waited at their benches, and the men sweated through their mail, taking turns at the watch as the stink of river silt washed over every deck.

At the stern, Vito read the psalter aloud with a monk’s solemnity, while Caterina silently worked through her word-list, which lay over the closed gospel, keeping an eye on the empty piers.

She tapped the end of her quill against the page, once, twice, and let her gaze rest on the empty piers. "Marito, listen to your wife and not to David. A kingdom that taxes the very salt in a soup, and it sends not one clerk, not one little man with a wax tablet? That is not neglect, caro, someone has shut this harbor with his hand. So ask yourself, Vitale, what does he fear so much that he would rather lose the money?"

By afternoon, the lookout spotted dust rising over the forest along the coast road, and the columns of smoke stopped climbing. Whatever work had been assigned to them was finished.

Light cavalry emerged from the forest at a canter, followed by heavy cavalry at a walk and then foot soldiers marching in ranks beneath banners no one aboard could identify. They passed the fortress and poured onto the harbor, where shield formations closed across the pier heads and bowmen climbed onto the walls and timber piles.

The army simply made itself a wall between the ships and the town.

Zaccaria armed the soldiers aboard La Contessa and signaled the galleys to do the same. Bepi’s confidence had turned sour, eleven hulls and a little over a thousand souls were facing a kingdom’s levy, and a bad welcome could end with everyone on the ransom block.

Then nothing happened. The two groups watched each other across a cable’s length of brown water, neither side making a move.

The waiting dragged on. Vito reckoned that rowing a gift crate toward an army with its weapons drawn would look like the beginning of a landing, and the Georgians seemed to have reached the same conclusion about anything that moved.

What does an army do when the fleet it expects to fight refuses to come ashore? It cooks supper.

Then La Quinta’s anchor began to drag. The nave, which the lagoon had named for running out of ideas, slid over the silt toward the piers, and Georgian spears dipped in her direction as bows came up along the wall.

Bepi roared with all his breath. "La Quinta! Ciò, La Quinta! Your anchor is sliding, you goat-begotten sons of a drowned cook! Drop the second... mola, MOLA!... or by San Nicolò you’ll start the war yourselves, and the Devil will be the only one to thank you for it!"

Vito’s voice carried down every deck. "Spears racked! Helmets off. Pian, fioi, pian, slow as priests at the altar. Let the wall count your hands, every one, every finger, and let every last one come up empty."

A second anchor went out, and La Quinta stabilized itself.

Both sides breathed out together.

Then a boat came from the harbor with an officer in good mail and a monk in a black cowl seated in the bow, while local oarsmen picked their way through the surf.

Vito and Caterina met them at the rail. The envoy came from a country ruled by a woman, so he accepted Caterina standing beside the captain without making a question of it.

Then he began in Georgian, cold and formal, while the monk translated into Greek for her.

Vito answered in Georgian, putting on the formal speech like a costume. Between the psalter and the word-list, he could manage to sound like a monk and a market-hawker in the same breath. When he called Tamar mepe, the title her own people used for her, the envoy’s face changed.

Caterina, shut out of the language she wanted so badly to understand, inspected faces instead.

The envoy explained the situation, and the monk translated it into Greek a line at a time. "Eleven ships from the western sea, and before them no herald that any man on my shore has seen, no name sent ahead to knock at our door. Fleets of this size have come to this coast before, to plunder, so the governor has called out the muster, and he has sent me, before the sword leaves its sheath, to learn the one thing that matters, must he draw it?"

Vito bowed. "Wise, my lord, blessed is the governor who keeps his gate awake for his mepe. We come to buy and to sell beneath the eye of your kingdom. Every hold on every ship stands open to you, so count it, my lord, weigh it, thump every cask with your own fist."

The envoy went down into the holds and found icons, church brasses, incense, and wine casks stacked to the beams. The monk lifted an icon from its straw and crossed himself, and the envoy’s suspicion began to fade.

Zorzi and Zustignana would remain outside the bar, while Georgian pilots would take the flagship and the naves across at dawn.

While the envoy’s men counted the casks, Caterina leaned toward Vito, her face arranged in serene piety for the benefit of the envoy’s clerks as they thumped and counted the casks.

The whisper had a smile in it, and a small knife behind the smile. "Dio mio, Vitale, the hold packed to the beams with wine, and we carry it to a country that sleeps in its vines! They will weigh it, they will taste it, and then they will weep with laughter. And if the Rialto ever hears of this, caro, I was seasick, dying, confessing my sins to a bucket, you understand, and I saw nothing, nothing at all."

The envoy offered his apology like a debt, taking his time and weighing every word while the monk translated each syllable. That night, wine went out to the fleet, jar after jar, and the sailors drank every drop, despite the fact that their ships’ largest cargo happened to be wine.

Vito returned the favor with needles, knives, and shears from the small-goods crates. At the governor’s word, the levy stood down, and the fires on the piers became fires of celebration.

At dawn, Georgians led the flagship and the naves across the bar, and the camp had vanished from the harbor. For days, the governor entertained the couple with one long toast after another, and Vito’s bookish Georgian pleased everyone at the table.

His passion for history found its own occasion for celebration in a cup raised to a poet named Rustaveli, who was said to be finishing a great poem at Tamar’s court.

Caterina walked the stalls with her tally while the couple considered what the shore might buy. Church goods looked like their best chance, since a wealthy crown might pay well for icons, brasses, and incense in a country full of cathedrals.

The court might want silk, the hill villages might take glass beads, and the markets would need plain woolens and linen, while oil, figs, and raisins looked like poor prospects and wine looked worse in a country already full of vines.

The shore had plenty of goods of its own. Valley farms produced grain and wine, village hives supplied honey and wax, and the hill herds provided hides and wool.

The forests yielded timber, pitch, and boxwood, while the smiths in the hills worked iron and copper.

The finest goods came down the road farther east. Tbilisi silk, Persian carpets, and gemstones from Central Asia, goods that took little room in a hold and brought a great deal of money, exactly the sort of bargain a crowded ship could appreciate.

Slaves stood in the market too, as they did in every market on this sea, but Vito refused the idea before anyone had properly finished suggesting it. Caterina struck it from the tally.

The holds were already full, so every ton bought meant a ton had to be sold, and the houses in Constantinople wanted first claim on whatever came home. The Georgians had taken the Lion for a raider in the morning and a guest by supper.

The couple agreed that Phasis was a small way station by Constantinople’s standards, and every stop added one more stone to their fortune. Stamped receipts lay piled on the cabin table, unread, their contents left for the accounts, which came next.

Beyond Phasis, across open water to the north, lay Soldaia.