Chapter 160: Kin by Sea

Vito gave the order, the hatch groaned open, and the wharf got its answer all at once.

Grain dust washed out in a yellow cloud, followed by the stink of hides that had been stewing in summer heat for a week. The porters took one breath, spat, and bent their backs to the work regardless.

The senior clerk had inspected the fleet twice in the spring, but now he checked it once and trusted his nose to finish the job. He asked if all that grain was buried under the hides, and Vito told him it was, then bowed and invited him to smell as much of it as he pleased. The clerk wrote a line on his board and walked off, satisfied that his nose had never yet given him bad advice.

Zeno’s customs men inspected the cargo twice more. Since the spring, the colony had acquired more edicts, while the crews remained confined to the stretch of stone between the bells. Vito and Caterina went ashore with Zaccaria and Domenego behind them, leaving Bepi to mind the ships.

A street through the colony led them past the Venetian church to a high wall with a green door set into it, where the porter opened the door before Caterina could reach the brass ring, just as he had in the spring, leaving her hand raised for a moment.

Lunardo waited at the top of the courtyard steps, mild and stooped, with Cristina beside him, folding and unfolding her hands. The instant she saw Vito, she hurried down the steps and caught him by the sleeve.

Her voice came out in a hurry. "Eh! Madonna santa! Ciò, Lunardo, varda, varda! The sea, she has been eating his suppers again, the thief! Poveto! All bones, this boy, a skeleton in a coat! Sèntete, caro, sèntete, sit, sit, sit! The fish is on the fire already, and not one word of cargo, not one, you hear me, until that plate is clean. Dio bon, I will hear nothing, nothing!"

Vito attacked the bream as if he had just come off a long fast. Once the plate was empty, they got down to business.

The common goods would be sold here, the grain, most of the hides and wax, and the gray squirrel skins, along with a little sable and marten for the households supplying gowns to the Latin court. The capital was hungry and needed every bit of it.

The rare goods would go home. The carpets, crimson dye, lapis, turquoise, rhubarb, and boxwood from Phasis, the red earth and hazelnuts from Sinope, the amber, walrus ivory, and most of the sable and marten would stay below, along with a small share of the wax and hides for the lagoon’s altars and leather trades.

The holds emptied here would be filled here, because even an empty ton cost its share in crew wages.

The grain went to the quarters and the garrison, and by the third day the crowd on the stair had thinned. Bread kept the throne standing, while the throne kept Venezia’s paper worth the vellum it was written on.

The regency still had no crown, while the barons continued quarrelling over who should wear it and who should pay for it, with no particular hurry to settle either question.

The division of the cargo was a matter for the accounts, and by the end of the week the hatches stood open over an empty wharf.

Even after the sack, Constantinople remained the one place where the Black Sea route, the Aegean, and the Levant coasters met. With Laskaris having closed the land road through Nicaea, eastern trade had to reach that junction by sea, and although the ruin had reduced what the city could buy, it had not stopped goods passing through.

Greek ships from the Black Sea ports and coasters from Cyprus and the Levant brought eastern goods to the Golden Horn. Among the dealers on the benches were Armenians from Cilicia, Syrian Christians, Jewish houses, traders from Konya, and Georgians looking for Phasis.

They came because the Latins paid in silver and gold, and because the Venetian colony let them settle their own disputes in their own courts.

What they offered was costly, scarce, and suited to a nave or a wealthy household, be the raw and figured silk, spices arriving through Syrian and Cilician ports, pearls and gems, musk and camphor, indigo and lac, drugs and gums, and carpets.

Alongside the eastern goods, people were brought west, roped and priced in rows at the ends of the city’s streets. The venture’s books had no place for any of them, and none of them appeared in its accounts.

Caterina went down her tally with one dry fingertip. "Four tongues, marito, and one price, and always the highest of the four. Ah, bravi! Let them sing, every tongue they have, let them swear on every saint and prophet they can name, Caterina will listen to everything and buy only what the Rialto will pay twice for. Once is charity, and I keep no poorhouse."

Down the bench an Armenian was calling her name, and a Georgian was calling it louder.

As for the matters of their family, the Contarini branch would send a galley with the fleet, a war galley that had been laid up at the Golden Horn since the sack. She would carry clerks, younger kin, household servants, and guards, and count as the twelfth Barozzini hull.

The branch had spent three generations in the city and still stood just below the old blood, with no ladder for its young people to climb. In Ca’ del Leon’s accounting room, the Barozzini had rungs to offer and needed hands, while the branch had hands to spare and nowhere for them to go.

Lunardo and the cousins would remain to keep the branch’s books and maintain its ties to Zeno. Cristina would sail with the young kin.

The fraterna would remain a fraterna in every respect except the entry in the books, with the notary’s act having to wait until they reached the Rialto.

An amicable man, Caterina’s father found just enough courage to quarrel with the victualer over the biscuit his wife would eat for the next month. It was the greatest dispute of his life, and he won, while the victualer lost his weevils.

He saved the one thing he wanted to say to Vito for the courtyard by the cistern, unwilling to trust his voice on the wharf. "Vitale... fio mio. My wife, she will tell you what to eat, and the young ones, they will tell you what to think. This is the way of the world, and I have made my peace with it. One thing only I ask. Look after them. All of them. And my daughter, who will tell you, I promise, that she needs no looking after."

He swallowed.

"She is lying, a little. She is always lying, a little, in that."

Vito swore he would, on the biscuit.

On the last evening, the accounting room’s lamp burned above two open books. The receipts lay beside them, stamped by the houses, Zeno’s clerks, and the brokers. The goods bought through the eastern trade had been weighed and left on the wharf for stowage, and whatever the stamps added up to belonged in the accounts.

Caterina uncapped the ink, set the first stamped paper between the two books, and began.