Chapter 194: Four Threads to Rome

The overseers’ boat went out to the nave of the southern fleet, where the yellow cloth still hung from La Quinta’s mast like a stain against the dawn. Ser Zuan Michiel climbed the side-ladder while the whole of the harbor watched.

He had come to inspect her cats himself, and he meant to do it properly. The law assigned every nave a cat, with an overseer to keep an eye on it.

The captains complained, the cats hissed, and the Rialto began taking bets on which would have kittens first, while the overseers’ priest asked, with considerable dignity, that no one told him the odds.

On the fourth day of quarantine, the captains came ashore carrying a salt-stained letter from Soranzo at Alexandria.

Ziani read it three times before Dorsoduro was permitted to read it aloud.

The letter reported that three Christian kings had beaten the Almohad Caliph in a Spanish mountain in midsummer, news the Aragonese at the Alexandria market had been telling anyone who would listen, and which had pleased the Pope, who had heard first.

Castello put his tarred hand flat on the letter. "Spagna! Three kings and one Caliph in a mountain pass, and the Holy Father a whole sea and a whole mountain away from the bloody war. Ostrega, siori, and he is the one who wins!"

He complained with gusto. "My oarsmen say it every time, the Pope wins every battle he never turns up to. Cheapest army in Christendom! No pay, no biscuit, no bailing, no widows to feed, only the bells afterward, and who is it that rings them? Him!"

That night Vito fastened two red threads to pins in the plaster beside the old chart.

One stood for Spain, the other for Alexandria, and he linked both to Rome, tightening the second knot beneath his thumb.

In the last week of September, a satchel from Modon brought a strip of vellum as long as a harbor rope. Dorsoduro took one end and walked backward along the Doge’s table, the strip following him over the edge and continuing to unroll until it spread across the floor, while Ziani still had two fingers resting on its head.

It was the Duke’s list.

A company of settlers had landed in Crete after Easter, made up of younger sons of patricians and citizens. Each had received a holding, a horse, and a feudal contract bound to serve the Duke whenever called.

The island was calm, just as the settlers liked it, and now they wanted clear title to their land. Leon Skordilis asked only that his cousins’ noble rights be written down formally where no Venetian hand could erase them.

Ziani complained eloquently. "Dio me varda. Titles, Messeri! Titles upon titles, every titles with a number and every number with a cousin! You all know I read slowly, and I have been at this one since the bells and not yet reached the beginning of the end."

He sighed. "So tell me, who is to write the Greek lords’ lands into this Republic books, and who answers for it afterward, when it is my seal sitting at the bottom of it?"

Vito stood in his formal costume. "Messer Doge, with all reverence, and with my knees only a little bent. Let one clerk write every number in Greek, and another the same number in Latin. Let one copy stay at Candia and one lie with the Avogadori. Then the Duke’s settlers and the Duke’s archon stand on the same roll, side by side, and no living pen can scrape either away.

He then gestured wildly. "And I would not care to be the clerk who loses a grove, Messer! The Avogadori would write his name in red, and the Greeks would fry him in his own olive oil."

The Ducal Council approved the proposal, and the Duke’s clerks would begin with the boundary stones, walking them before witnesses as they had done at Chania.

In Vito’s books, the Greek lords lost their land and the island rose against Venezia for a century, while here, their holdings were written down and they kept them.

Back into his chart, he tied the third thread, from Candia to Venezia, while the long strip of vellum still covered the palace floor.

The clerks were still rolling it up when San Michele filled the hall. A jar stood on the dais, and the clerk’s son, now a year older, drew three tokens from it. The election had been written twice, and no one in Venezia had yet managed to scrape both copies.

The Young sat on their goose-down cushions, while the Old had to make do with bare oak. The Salinari had their salt, the Marinai their oars, and the Netti their warden of Murano, while every bench watched Cannaregio to see what he would do next with the Six.

The Republic drew its electors from a jar, wrote its register twice, washed its midwives’ hands, built a hull at the Arsenal in a fortnight, and made sure every captain brought compass.

Half of these things belonged, in Vito’s books, to a date two centuries in the future.

On the fortieth morning of the quarantine, the yellow cloth came down La Quinta’s mast, hand over hand, with Ser Zuan Michiel’s boat alongside and the Riva crowded with people watching.

One of the two sick men had died in the second week, and they had buried him in the island chapel’s yard beneath a plank cross, and the overseers’ priest had said the Mass himself.

No flux had crossed the water, and the city had not coughed.

Ser Zuan stopped in front of Vito. "Eh, fio! Forty days, forty, and the Riva smells of fish. Fish, Dio bon! Fish and tar and wet rope and some poor fishwife’s frying. For forty years, fio, I have had nothing in this nose but the other smell, the one in the hold and the one in the sheets, and this morning I could weep into my own breakfast. I can taste it! Bread, onion, and the little fish in vinegar!"

By noon, the Rialto had changed its wagers, and the cousins who had laughed all autumn were buying candles. The cargo woke up, the pepper none the worse for its stay.

In the last week of October, the Scotti brothers came down from Mont Cenis ahead of the snow.

Ricciardo knocked the Alpine mud from his boots onto the accounting hall floor on one side of the door, while Rickhart did the same on the other, each starting before his brother had finished.

"Twenty thousand children, Messer Vitale! Singing down from the mountains, barefoot on the stones, little feet blue as plums, every one of them behind a single boy who swore, swore on his mother’s soul, that the sea would open for them like a curtain at a feast!"

"Siebenhundert, Ricciardo. Seven hundred, ja, not twenty thousand. At every valley a toll, and at every toll a lord with a tally stick, and every lord counted them for me. And the sea, Ricciardo? Nein. The sea did not open."

Neither brother could say how many had walked home, and both knew that some had not.

That night Caterina sent the same short rule to every captain of the house, no child, no band of pilgrims, and no one sold by the head would ever be allowed aboard a house ship.

Vito bound the fourth thread, from Cologne to Rome, and the Scottis’ bootprints remained across the floor until dawn.

In December, a letter came over the mountains from Padua.

Ziani placed it beside the Welf’s old privileges and read both three times. The Pope’s ward, a boy of seventeen, had crossed the Alps and been named King of the Romans, while the Ducal Council had only just got used to having a councillor of thirty years old.

The Welf’s privileges still stood, guaranteeing safe roads, fixed dues, and a court of their own, all under the seal of a man the Pope had cast out.

German iron continued to travel down those same roads. The Six sealed two courteous answers, one for each side, and knelt to neither.

They also decided to send an envoy in the spring to inspect the horses and friends beyond the mountains, then report the number aloud in the hall. Vito wrote the instruction himself.

That week, Ambrogio’s procurator wrote from the Lateran with news that the Pope had said the march of children brought shame upon the Church and intended to write to all Christendom.

A clergy with a ban for everything would soon find a reason to call for ships.

Venezia had the ships and the road to Egypt, while the Pope, who owned no hull of his own, had only one weapon at sea, excommunication. The fifth thread linked the Rhine to Rome, and the two letters lay side by side.

By Epiphany, the stick was still hanging on its peg, and five red threads crossed the old chart. Leo touched each thread with a small finger and counted under his breath, while Lucia stood on a stool beside him, the end of one thread wound around her fist.

Vito bound the sixth thread, from Phasis to Venezia, and pulled it tight until the pin creaked in the plaster.

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Vito lifted the thread from her fist and wound it back around its pin. Lucia allowed him to do it, as if a general granting a stay.

At the oak table, Caterina sat with Lucrezia on her knee, the child chewing on a loose red end.

"That’s a great deal of wool for one wall, caro mio, a whole sheep’s worth."

"Four to Rome and two home, moglie. By next Epiphany I want this wall turned inside out, four threads coming home, and Rome left holding two."

Pentecost fell on the second of June, and the Ducal Council would be named again. The commission’s two years would end in the autumn, and Rome’s letter would arrive in the spring.

Vito took the stick from its peg. The barge was waiting at the water-gate, and on the plaster, the thread to Phasis remained tight.