Chapter 157: Cumans from the Steppes

The sailor wrapped the rope twice around the bollard, hauled it tight, and straightened up with his palm out. He was a licensed harbor mooring worker, and the rope had to be paid for.

Two ports had greeted the fleet with bows and an army, so no one had expected the foremost demand at the third to come from a man in a wet tunic.

Some of the naves went alongside the piers, while the rest anchored in the bay and unloaded by lighter, with Zorzi and Zustignana holding off the waters.

The first clerk came down the mole carrying a writing board under his arm. He worked for the archon’s customs house, counting the hulls against their names before pressing his seal into the wax.

A second clerk arrived from the weigh-house and counted them again. Then a third came from the brokers’ sworn measurers, the tally men trusted by the wagon trade, to count everything a third time.

The three totals differed by small amounts, and each office insisted the other two had no right to count at all. The customs house represented what remained of the empire, the weigh-house represented the church, and the measurers represented the harbor.

None answered to the others, so every man was free to object and no one could settle the matter. Each office collected its due and stamped the papers to prove it. The town kept its order through a steady taking of small dues, with no one above the men who collected them.

The three seals dried on every page, each one declaring that its owner had the only proper opinion of the same hull.

The archon never came near the harbor. He ruled from a house below the ridge wall and answered, more or less, to the Greek claimants who refused to recognize the Latin Empire, sending them greetings but no money.

He spent the summers on his estates, leaving his seal in his steward’s hands. The town’s allegiance was a letter no one bothered to check.

The steward received the couple at a table in the customs house, a dry man in a good coat who had met Latins before and found little to like about them.

He squared a sheaf of papers with two fingers. “Your Lion, Latin. I am told it has teeth, and that it has lately learned to eat cities. So tell me, whose hand does it feed from? Which emperor does it answer to? Consider your reply with care.”

Vito drew on his formal costume, and bowed from the waist. “Ah, what a question! The Lion, good sior, kneels to no crowned head at all, God keep them each in their palaces. It answers to our serene Doge of Venezia and to the Great Council that raises him up and, when the mood takes them, sets him down again. We are merchants, Sior, merchants to the marrow, and our hulls come with open arms and open holds.”

The steward stamped a license and slid it across the table. No war goods could leave on the Latin Empire’s account, crews could go ashore a few at a time with clay tokens, and every keel owed its due.

The rules were plain enough, and the payments would doubtless be plainer.

The town had few grand houses and less money than their owners would have liked, while the Cuman convoys in the wagon yard carried most of the trade coming down the road.

The venture meant to sell through Soldaia and let the road do the work of finding buyers.

The next morning, wagon wheels creaked along the north road as pale dust hung over a trampled yard below the ridge. Vito, Caterina, and Zaccaria walked through the north gate to see what had arrived.

Tall-wheeled wagons stood in rows among oxen, horses, and felt tents, while a dozen fires sent smoke into the air.

The Cuman convoy masters sat among their riders, men from the steppes dressed in padded coats and felt caps. The yard smelled of horse sweat and dung, woodsmoke, dust, and fermented mare’s milk.

It was not a place that encouraged a man to linger over his breakfast.

Vito tried Greek, then Latin, then Venetian, and finally the pidgin spoken on the piers, but no one in the yard understood a word of any of them and no interpreter could be found.

They spread their samples on a cloth, and the Cumans laid out samples of their own.

Then Caterina pinched the Cumans’ notched stick between two fingers, hoisted it with her bare hands, and shook it under her husband’s nose. “Ma varda, marito, varda qua! Prices, quantities, the lot, and no notary, no seal, not one little man with a wax pot to tell me what I already know. A knife and a stick, ecco, done! This, I would trust with my mother’s pearls.”

After that, Vito spent each morning sitting on an upturned crate among the wagons, his ears open and Caterina beside him, cutting notches. He had to learn the language by listening to the talk in the yard, and he learned quickly.

The lesson was useful, though it charged a price.

On the first day, he tried a word he had heard three times that morning and used it on every convoy master at once, sending the whole yard into laughter until an ox lowed in alarm.

For the rest of their stay, a boy followed Vito to the gate each evening, calling the word after him.

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Numbers came first, then goods, then oaths. By the third day Vito could bargain in half sentences, and by the sixth he was arguing with the masters. Caterina, who had no title to help her, learned the numbers first, as people who count for a living tend to do.

On the sixth day, Vito turned to the nearest convoy master and spoke his first complete sentence in the tongue of the steppes. “Kardash! This cloth, it cross the sea, to come to your wagon. Now you say me what your road pays for it. And start with truth, yes? Truth first!”

The masters stopped talking, and one of them put down his cup.

From there, the trade grew by degrees. They tasted and fingered the samples, made pledges over notches, and watched the first wagons roll out through the north gate loaded with goods.

New convoys arrived from the grass to take their place. The venture was sending its unsold stock up the road and buying whatever the wagons brought down, while everything from Phasis and Sinope stayed below for the west.

The harbor became a thoroughfare, the hulls rode higher at their moorings, and the yard grew so crowded that even the oxen had to queue.

The three offices stamped every lot three times and argued over every stamp.

Some convoys offered people along with their hides, captives taken in raids on the grass. Vito refused every offer, now in the Cumans’ tongue, and no captives entered any book belonging to the venture.

Near the end of their stay, the old man who had spent several days watching from the edge of the yard finally crossed the trampled ground to where Vito and Caterina sat among their sticks.

He was weathered and scarred, and he owned more wagons than anyone else in the yard. The masters made room for him as he passed, as the chiefs respected his word at the caravans, and his mark on a tally was recognized along the whole road.

He spoke in Greek. “You speak grass like man who learn in yard, one week. Ha! Is bad. Very bad. But grass is old, grass is patient. Grass forgive you, mostly.”

He spat to one side, not unkindly. “Listen, sea-man. This year, road is thin. Every prince north of steppe is buying horsemen for his quarrels, so convoys come small, and next year smaller. Remember it when you count your profit.”

He dug into his coat and came up with the horn. “Take. At every caravan, the chiefs know this mark. Is my word, my tamga. Show it, and water is yours. I ask nothing for it.”

The scarred mouth creased.

“Now.”

He pressed a notched horn tally into Vito’s hand and walked back across the yard without waiting for an answer.

On the last evening, stamped papers lay heaped on the table in La Contessa’s cabin, each bearing three seals whose discrepancies the accounts would have to settle.

Caterina tied the papers together with cord and put the Cumans’ notched sticks in a separate bundle, since Constantinople lay next on the road home, with Venezia beyond it.

She placed the horn token on top of the heap, and beneath it every paper lay three seals deep.