Chapter 23: Khandaq, Chandax, Candia

The walls sharpened from a gray smear into mighty stone, towers rose against the skies, and the thing that had been little more than a doubtful dot on the horizon an hour earlier became, beyond argument, a city.

Vito watched it happen with satisfaction, as if an old promise had been fulfilled.

🦁 [TERRITORY OVERVIEW — CANDIA, CRETE]

Sovereignty : Unclaimed (La Serenissima)

Governance : Fractured (Local Archontes)

Population : Approximately 15.000

Civil Order : Fragile

Harbor : Broad bay. Long Stone Pier, Ample Port

Military : Stone walls, Towers, Garrison

Major Districts : Harbor, Market, Administrative, Noble, Religious, Suburbs

Barozzi Presence : None

The harbor came into view first. There was nothing the sea had made about it.

A long stone pier reached from the shore to break the worst of the swell, block piled upon block by human hands long since returned to the earth. Behind it sat the quays, crowded with ships smaller and shabbier than his own galleys. Mostly fishing boats, and some coastal traders low in the water.

Beyond them stood warehouses, squat and practical, their roofs patched in three different colors of tile, each apparently belonging to a different century in which their owners finally remembered that roofs were supposed to keep rain out.

The city climbed back from the water in a tangle no stranger could have understood at one glance, with streets that bent around themselves like a man’s explanation to his wife after coming home at midnight.

More houses stood close and crooked, red-tiled roofs crowding against pale stone walls bleached to the tone of old bone in daylight. Some domes broke the skyline here and there, squat and round in the Greek fashion.

Vito had an idea of the city history.

Arab hands had cut the first ditch around this place some three hundred years ago and called it Khandaq, which was a sensible name for a fortified hole men felt it was worth living inside. Greek hands eventually took it from them, as Greek hands eventually took most things back, and softened the name into Chandax.

Greek enough, in time, to make the Arabic past easy to forget.

And now Vito was about to give the place a third name altogether.

Not a soul down on those docks had the faintest idea that the city was two conversations away from spending the next several centuries as Candia.

"Three names in three hundred years."

He said it to the empty air, at the absurd privilege of getting to watch the next one happen.

"This city changes its name more often than a man running from his creditors."

Beyond the walls, the land parted open and arose.

Olive terraces spread in patient gray-green rows up the lower slopes, vineyards occupying whatever ground the olives had failed to claim first. Near them, small farms and huddled villages scattered across the plain as if someone had thrown seed over the earth and then neglected to arrange the result.

Beyond all of it, exactly where Vito had left it, Mount Ida kept the whole scene together.

Blue-gray and enormous, it was entirely indifferent to whichever name the city beneath it happened to wear this century.

Down on the docks, ordinary business had not stopped merely because six foreign ships had entered the harbor.

The workers still hauled nets and stacked crates while fishwives carried baskets between the stalls.

For one peaceful morning, Candia remained entirely unaware that Vitale Barozzi was about to become one of its problems.

By the time Vito finished admiring the city, the ships were already being brought alongside.

One harbor official, assuming the city still had one who deserved the title, waved them toward open berths along the exterior piers with resigned haste and no desire for conflict.

The ropes went out and gangplanks dropped.

Within the hour, the Barozzi fleet sat tied up in a Cretan harbor as comfortably as if there had actually been an invitation.

When the ships were properly secured, Zaccaria assembled an escort of fifty soldiers.

He tugged a strap here, straightened a shield there, and performed the tedious inspection with precision.

Good mail, spears and swords. Enough men to make a point, and nowhere near enough to start a war unless somebody was determined to be foolish.

Zaccaria eventually walked to where Vito and Caterina waited. "That should do. Any more and it looks like an invasion, any fewer and it looks like a request to disrespect us."

"Right then boys, let us make a splendid first impression

Vito bellowed to the retinue.

"Look frightening, but keep your faces pleasant. A little menace, a little charm."

"Shall we also offer them wine while we threaten them?"

Zaccaria fell in beside him.

"Reckon that’s the Venetian way."

Caterina, at Vito’s other side, had traded her gown for a close-fitting wool tunic belted at the waist, with fitted hose beneath it and a short mantle pulled close over her shoulders.

The clothes left her arms free and showed rather more of her figure than modesty usually permitted, but that was hardly the point this morning. Her sleeves were fastened tight, and there was no gold thread, jewelry, or anything else on her that might catch a thief’s eye.

Vito had made rather less effort to disguise what he was. A patrician mail covered his tunic beneath a wine-dark mantle, the Lion of Saint Mark stitched across it in thread that caught the morning light. A sword hung at his hip, completing the impression with considerably less subtlety than Caterina’s outfit.

Her gaze passed over him once. "Chin up, Vitale, shoulders back. And do try to look like a man they might want to meet again."

"Noted."

Vito grinned at her.

"Beforehand, even. A rare courtesy."

Once they were ready, they moved off the docks in a loose column, Zaccaria’s men around them in the standard escort formation. The streets swallowed the group the moment they left the harbor, narrow and crooked in exactly the way the city had promised from the water.

Barely a hundred paces from the harbor, and the first shutters began to close, then another, and another, the wooden clatter ahead of the column as word of their arrival passed from doorway to doorway.

A woman caught two children by the shoulders and rushed them inside, pulling the door shut behind them, while an old man watched the procession pass, spat into the gutter, and muttered some curse under his breath.

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The cry came from a window above them, cracked with age and certain enough in its accusation. Vito looked up, but saw only a dark shadow and the shutter being drawn closed.

He could not catch every word thrown at them, and neither it was necessary. Some things translated themselves through tone alone.

The city simply watched, waiting to discover what the new authority over the land meant, and whether these strangers were worth the trouble of resistance.

That suited Vito well enough.

They had almost reached the market square when the street ahead began to crowd.

One group of men was coming toward them, a dozen at first, perhaps fifteen by the time they had closed the distance, dressed in fine cloth and polished leather, with enough weapons among them to make it clear that this was not merely sent to complain about harbor fees.

The delegation spread across the street and stopped, leaving just enough room for the two groups to see one another clearly.

At their center walked a tall, gray-bearded man in a dark, heavy robe, its faded gold border worn thin in places but still carrying the dignity of what had once been expensive.

Vito stopped.

Around them, the street seemed to have grown silent, as though everyone nearby was either ready to watch a show, or join one.

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