Chapter 165: Closed for Audit

Vito set the Cuman horn tally on the fourth tier of the walnut shelf and turned it until the old caravan owner’s tamga faced the room. Beside it he placed a boxwood pheasant, no longer than his thumb, carved aboard a log-floater’s raft at Phasis, then lined them all up with the Alexandria stones, the Knossos agate, and the Constantinople scale.

The collection was coming along nicely.

He stood in his smallclothes with the gray dawn on his skin, a row of crescent bites crossing his chest, madder-red around the edges, and four long nail tracks down his ribs. His back stung in places he couldn’t see, and his lower lip had swollen enough to remind him whenever he smiled.

It was going to be a fine morning for keeping a straight face.

Then he turned around, and the office looked like Constantinople the week after the sack, only with better wine and fewer Varangians. Hairpins littered the table, the jug lay on its side beside a Commandaria stain shaped like Crete, the chair lay on its back, and his tunic, hose, and mantle lay in three separate heaps, each having apparently chosen its own escape route.

The peg-stand leaned, the chart had lost its pins, and the key lay on the matting, while through the open second door, the bed stood untouched.

"Mare de Dio... a sack, a true sack, and no one even stole the silver."

Behind him, a hinge creaked, and a low voice rose from the corridor. Caterina stood at the door in her thin linen chemise, her loose hair falling dark and copper down her back, holding the door open no wider than a hand, just enough to invite trouble and not quite enough to admit it.

"Kyria!"

Marouda hissed through the gap.

Caterina planted her hip against the wood and braced one hand on its edge. "Ciò, Marouda, basta! The office is closed, closed for the audit. No one comes in, not for the linen, not for the saints, and not for the Doge himself, no."

"Audit! Ah, audit, she says to me, to Marouda!"

A slipper jammed into the gap at the floor. It pushed, the door yielded an inch, and the gray light fell across Caterina’s throat.

The realization brought a gasp from the servant. "Panagia mou! Po po po po po, Kyria, your neck! Christe mou, who has done this, who has taken you by the throat in the night? The vinegar! The cold cloth! A priest, bring a priest, bring two!"

Caterina threw a hand to her neckline, spreading her fingers over the dark marks. "Madder, Marouda! Only madder, from the vat. Ma cossa vustu, a priest? It stains everything it touches, che roba!"

"Madder. Ah, madder, of course, madder! The Panagia hears you, Kyria, and she is laughing."

The slipper kept the door open with brutal patience. "Ela, then, the tray. Kyria Cristina’s pot is boiling since before the bell, and a woman who... audits all night, ah, she needs her strength..."

Caterina eased the door a finger wider, took the tray through with both hands, and shut it with her hip.

Marouda’s voice followed her through the wood. "At the bell I return, with the linen, and with the slipper, Kyria. Audit... hah... I know what is this audit."

Vito had been laughing silently ever since lentils entered the dispute, and when the latch dropped, he pretended to distract himself with the shelf. There are times when a man ought to keep shut, and this was one of them, though he was finding it difficult.

Caterina turned with the tray balanced on her hip and stepped over the wreckage. She cleared a corner of the table with one forearm, sending pins ringing across the wood and down into the matting, then set the tray down with a solid thump.

Her mother had packed every ounce of authority she possessed into their breakfast, in a loaf the size of a shield, eggs, cheese, figs, honey, watered wine, boiled water, and a whole bream whose eye seemed fixed on everyone in the room.

Caterina picked up the books from the end of the table and tilted its final figures toward the light, a Commandaria wet mark, the size of a grosso, sat squarely on the sum.

"Varda, marito, varda! The numbers closed, the sum cast, and a jug has signed it."

Vito hauled the chair onto its legs and patted its back. "Sì, sì, enter it. Miscellaneous provisions, moglie, and leave a wide margin. That mark, it will have company, plenty, plenty company, if I know my wife, and cazzo, I begin to learn."

"And if the notary asks, a storm, marito, a storm came through the house in the night."

"A storm with quick hands and a great, great many pins."

Vito retrieved the mantle from its heap and lay it around her bare shoulders. She hooked the cloth aside with one finger, revealing marks that ran down her neck and over her collarbone, indigo at their centers and madder at the edges.

She whispered coquettishly. "Look at me, Vitale, from the chin to the shoulder, purple, as if you dipped me in the vat like a skein of wool. And Ginevra, she pays five thousand two hundred a ton for this color, while me, I wear it for nothing, free, a gift from my husband."

He laughed and threw open his arms and thrust out his chest, the crescent bites marching across his ribs in formation. "Ma va’ là, you speak of dye? My chest, moglie, madder at the edges, indigo in the middle, a bolt of the finest cloth from the Arte della Lana, dragged through the shed of a drunk dyer."

"Eh, the dyer, poverino, she had teeth, marito, very, very sharp. A hazard of the trade, no?"

Caterina then sagged against the table with one hand at the small of her back, and her lips went soft with a wicked, exhausted fondness. "Marito... my knees, I do not feel them. Both are gone, lost at sea, hull, cargo, the whole crew, and not a soul to pay for the loss."

The laugh took him by the ribs, and turned into a groan halfway out. "Ostrega! And me, I slept one hour, and half of it standing up, like a horse, like a sentry in the snow!"

He said it with a face so innocent that a saint would have grown suspicious.

She snorted, ignore such remark, and laid her palm flat on her belly. "But the load was received, marito mio, by the ton, with the warehouse full to the beams. Now I am with child, if I was not already, and the Madonna, she may enter it in her book however she likes."

Vito’s grin came slowly.

His eyes fell to her hand and he covered it with his own, and for a moment all his plans disappeared. "Then, sì, sì, we need a second warehouse, moglie. A cradle, nurse, and a notary, a very large notary, with a very large pen, because with you I do not make small entries."

He sank into the righted chair and drew her across his lap, wrapping the mantle around them both. Caterina shivered once, then snuggled against him, her hair spilling over his arm. For the moment, the office could remain closed.

She tore a heel from the loaf and pointed it toward the window. "If we are to raise a family, it must be a wealthy one. The distillery, marito, on one of the little islands, where the smoke blows away from the Rialto, and no neighbor comes to ask what is burning."

Vito’s chuckle rumbled through his chest and into her back. "Rent one, build one, buy one, mia cara, choose, choose. The strongbox is fat enough to buy an island, and a monk or two thrown in for the prayers."

She bit into the bread and spoke around it.

"Then which island, and who tends for it?"

It was a rhetorical question, a problem for later. He clicked his tongue and brought the conversation forward.

"The hulls, moglie. First the fleet, before the frost, before the fire, before everything."

Her eyes narrowed, and the tally came off her tongue. "And La Rosa, and all her sisters, their planks are worn so thin a sailor could read the Gospel through them. They want to retire, marito, before they retire us."

Vito rubbed his chin on her, ticking off the numbers. "How many new keels, then? Four? Six? And how many galleys to stand guard over them? Bepi will tell us, oh, he will tell us, loudly, for the whole Rialto to hear, as soon as he has finished cursing the refit, that bastard of a refit."

"And the shipyard, Vitale."

"Rented mud, moglie. We need to seek for berths of our own."

Her head sank against his shoulder and her voice with it, softer now. "And then the fondacos, Vitale... Soldaia, Phasis. A warehouse in each, a lion above every door, and all of it, all, on a sea where we own nothing."

Vito’s voice took on a patient, amused tone. "Soldaia, ah, the archon sells his grants through his steward, and so, moglie, we buy the steward. And Phasis there’s the governor, who answers to a queen who writes in a script I learned in one week."

Her fingers drummed against the bread, and ambition sharpened her tired voice. "And our fraterna young kin, they sit at the clerks’ desks, begging, begging, for a job. Put them there. So, which first? Which one first?"

"Whichever answers the first letter, moglie, that one. And then Murano, ah, Murano."

His free hand left her waist and began sketching the whole plan, furnace by furnace. "Think of it, glassmen, they burn their furnaces among timber houses, and one bad night, and half the city, pfff, gone to smoke."

The plan soon turned into form. "The Council will drive every furnace out to the island, you watch, and when it does, the ground out there will cost five times what it costs now. So we buy first, and then I stand in that hall, moglie, in front of all of them, and I make the Council vote it!"

"And the ground, Vitale. Who holds the ground out there? Who, tell me, who?"

"That, moglie mia, is exactly what we find out, before the sea opens."

Her head dropped against his shoulder. The light climbed the shelf and found the pheasant, carved far from Venezia, and now sitting among objects from half the known world.

"Well... I cannot total a single figure today, marito. Shut the shutters and send the clerks home."

Vito’s hands found the hem of her chemise and the warm curves of her beneath it.

"Then I shall return to my marital duties. It’s a matter of diligence, nothing more."