Chapter 197: Grain for the Pope

The bell of San Nicolò on the Lido called the mobilization the week after the Assumption.

Thirty of the hundred galleys were prepared, and every oarsman received his pay on the day he sailed, paid for with the bank’s new shares.

The ships raced from the Lido to the Molo while the Riva roared for its own district, and the ten fastest captains appeared before the Doge at the water-stairs. Ziani read their names three times and chose Premarino, the very man he would have chosen without putting anyone through a race.

The Riva was packed with faces, and the women on the bridge were selling a last night to every oarsman who had silver in his belt.

Ziani named the three members of the Ducal Council who would cross the sea with him.

San Marco and Santa Croce made the list, along with Cannaregio. Castello kept the Arsenal, San Polo the bank, and Dorsoduro the pen and the book.

Then came the grain. The Republic grew none of its own, so the bank sold new shares and bought every sack the Apulian merchants could supply. In the week before the Cross, the grain lay piled on the Arsenal wharves beneath the torches, with bundles of ladders bound together like firewood beside it.

After dark, the two thousand soldiers came down from the marsh posts, where Chioggian boatmen had taken their places, and went below in single file by torchlight, a hundred to each nave.

After the last man climbed down, a cat was handed into every hold, and the sacks were carried across above their heads. The ladders went down with the men, buried under the sacks.

They were told they were going to Rome to safeguard the Doge’s grain. Only the hall knew the rest, and every captain had his own sealed instructions in his sea chest.

The overseers’ boat considered one cat in every nave and another aboard the Doge’s galley. An ewer of lime-water stood by each hatch, because the soap shed at Chioggia was now ash. The men came up in tens at night to breathe and piss, while every captain kept a compass in a box on his deck.

Then the last hatch was lowered over the sacks.

At dawn the week after the Cross, the household appeared at the pillars, where the fleet lay beyond them in the Bacino. Caterina stood with Lucrezia on her arm and the twins in front of her.

Lucia pushed through her mother’s skirts, put a walnut shell in Vito’s palm, and closed his fingers around it.

"Papà, tò! Tò, tò, take her! This is the capitan’s ship, dikó mou, mine, and mi te la presto, eh, only lent. Two figs on the first of the month, not one, not one and a half, and you bring her back to me whole. Whole, Papà! One scratch, one little scratch, and ti te pagarè. Ti, not the Arsenal, not the Doge, ti!"

"Fifty, Papà. Cinquanta! Thirty galee and twenty naves. I counted twice, once left to right and once right to left, and it came fifty both times, so it can’t be wrong. Fifty go out, Papà. Don’t forget the number."

Vito slipped the shell into his coat. "Ostrega, a flagship that fits in my coat, and not one red cap in all Venezia can come aboard to measure her. Ma va’, the Arsenal will tear its hair and weep into the pitch. Dry as biscuit I’ll bring her home, capitan, my hand on it, and the two figs riding in her hold. Fat ones, too. I’ll carry them in my teeth if I must."

"The figs fall due on the first, caro mio. The first, not the second, not whenever the wind permits. And I look in the book, and what stands beside your name? Nothing. Not a mark, not a stroke. So pay the one debt, come home, and fill the other, eh, and spare me sending that girl’s collectors after you. You’ve met her. She’d chase a councillor into the lagoon."

No one even thought of Malta.

Down the Molo, the Doge walked to the water-stairs on his feet, following the banners, the white candle, the naked sword, and the gold umbrella above a sky that had no need of shade. The six silver trumpets, said to have been given by a Pope, sounded for a fleet whose order was silence.

San Nicolò’s bell rang for the sails.

From first light until noon, the fifty hulls passed out through the Lido porto, thirty galleys and twenty naves, their oars rising white as a field of wheat. The songs from the benches would have made a bishop cover his ears, and Vito looked back once before the last nave left the porto at noon.

On the fifth day out, with Chioggia and Bebbe’s palisade far behind them and the Padua war carrying on without their help, Ziani sat beneath the gold umbrella with the three councillors around him. He put two fingers on the lead seal of the Pope’s letter and read it for the third time.

It was from the same Pope who had placed the Venetian fleet under excommunication over Zara and condemned the sack of Constantinople. Now he wanted its oars, having summoned every bishop in Christendom, along with the envoys of every king and city, to a council at the Lateran in Rome.

The Pope wanted a new crusade through Egypt, to sail in the summer after next, which meant he wanted ships. Trade with the Saracens in iron, arms, and ship-timber was to end, which could shut the route to Alexandria and break the treaty Venezia held there.

Jews and Saracens were to wear a mark on their clothes, and the Church was to be repaired from the bishop down. The Lateran would also condemn pirates and anyone who gave them shelter, giving both sides a useful word to throw at the other.

Ziani intended to give the Pope ships while surrendering as little of the trade as possible. The lead seal remained beneath his two fingers, and the whole council was waiting behind it.

Three days after the fleet lost sight of land, the south wind rose, and the naves slowed everyone to their pace. In the Doge’s cabin, Vito pressed a pin into a dot south of Sicily on the coast chart, while Santa Croce leaned closer and cupped his ear.

The dot was Malta, a day’s sail south of Sicily’s southeastern corner, with every western ship bound for Crete, Egypt, or the Golden Horn passing within a day’s sail of it.

It was the door in the middle of the house.

The island was little more than a rock full of goats, with a deep harbor and a sea-castle on the point.

On paper, it belonged to the Kingdom of Sicily. Its king was the Pope’s ward, crowned in Germany that summer as the German Emperor, but his regency could barely keep its barons in line, much less pay for a fleet to recover a rock.

Whoever took Malta from the Count would be taking it from a pirate.

The man was the Enrico Pescatore. He called himself Count of Malta, and six summers earlier Premarino’s oars had closed a cove and burned his ships on the sand, though he escaped in a single small galley.

Genoese silver had rebuilt him since then. He taxed every Genoese and Pisan ship that took water in his harbor, and seized Venetian stragglers on the grain road.

The Pope’s Council would keep Rome, and the Padua mobilization had supplied the sailors. By the time the Pope put his curse on pirates, a pirate’s island would belong to Venezia.

For three weeks the fleet had ridden the black water with fifty lamps showing, like a city that had decided to go to sea.

On the appointed night, a hooded lamp rose and fell three times aboard the Doge’s galley. The twenty galleys belonging to the Doge’s half kept their lamps burning, while the naves put theirs out and steered by the compass.

The captains of the ten southern galleys and the twenty naves broke the wax on the leaf’s order. It named Malta, the hour, and laid down the rules. The two thousand soldiers below would hear the news at dawn.

Vito crossed the Doge’s deck. "Messer Doge, con tutta reverenza, I must take my leave. The mission goes south and I go with it, as the hall required. The rest I ask you to carry to Rome for me, all of it, and may the Holy Father find it light."

"Ebbene, Messer Cannaregio. Go with God and the needle, and may they agree. When the news reaches Rome, I shall be astonished. Oh, thunderstruck! A hand at the throat, a little pallor, I have a month to practise the face. And I read slowly, you know. Very slowly. I shall begin tonight."

Vito climbed down the side into a boat, the walnut shell still in his coat. The oars brought him across fifty paces of black water to Premarino’s galley, where the admiral waited.

The Doge’s lights sailed north toward the straits and Rome, while the grain naves and ten galleys turned south.