Chapter 36: The Gospel, According to Momolo

The crowd began to murmur even if no one had the courage to shout. It spread down the street in a hurry, low at first but increasing volume as it went, until the words turned into multiple conversations altogether.

The prisoners drew in a breath for what was plainly intended to be the loudest noise of the entire evening, and Vito cut the attempt coming a full breath before any voice could escape.

"Hands boys."

That was all.

Four gloved hands clapped over four mouths instantly, all stopped in mid-breath so neatly that one of the soldiers actually grinned at the others, pleased with their synchrony. It was a fine piece of work, and soldiers are not above taking pleasure in the small victories.

Vito put one boot forward, spread his hands in the universal gesture of no harm, and went rummaging through every scrap of Greek he had ever seen written by some monk who had taken great pains to make his letters beautiful.

<anno data-annotation-id="7d08b71d-069a-e9db-6e82-3e1a4672c7db" data-title=""Ειρήνη υμίν."">"Ειρήνη υμίν."¹</anno>

The words came out stiff as old parchment and about as natural, having been borrowed whole from a monk’s hand rather than from the mouth of any living person who had spoken them in many centuries.

The villagers stared at him, from suspicion to very close to offended confusion, which was the natural expression when one receive a blessing from their own burglar in the middle of a robbery.

Vito abandoned the pose. "Ma va’, that’s not working. I need someone who actually speaks the damned language. Now, before this gets any worse."

One of the soldiers stepped forward at once, chest out and confidence blazing from him, plainly convinced that fate had just handed him his moment. He rattled off a rapid string of Greek, and whatever he had meant to say, the result made three villagers look as if the man had just politely inquired after their goat’s arse.

Vito waved him away before he could make another attempt.

"Basta, basta, that’s enough damage for one night."

Before Vito could ask a second time, one more soldier shoved through the ranks. He was lean, sharp-nosed, and possessed a voice that had clearly been made for rooms much larger than this street.

The instant he got through, he planted his boots wide, drew one long breath like a singer against some theater, and looked perfectly ready to give the occasion the entrance it deserved.

"Momolo steps forward!"

He shouted, one hand flat against his chest. "Momolo, who once held an entire piazza in Venezia silent for three whole verses, until a fishmonger’s cart came through and killed the ending. Again."

"My brother in Christ, do you speak Greek?"

Vito made it half a question and half a prayer.

"Fluently, Ser Barozzi, and worse besides."

Momolo tapped his temple. "I spent years in Constantinople, selling verses nobody paid for and learning their tongue because at least that part was free. A stage never found me there, but a language did."

Vito let out a breath. "Fine, talk to them. And Momolo, for the love of every saint I owe penitence, don’t improvise."

Momolo grinned in a way that made it plain he had stopped listening somewhere around the word ’talk.’

He lifted both arms toward the street as though he were calling down a blessing, and the street hushed just enough for an old woman near the front to find the courage to speak first.

<anno data-annotation-id="e5f817d8-b4e1-8820-0acf-167be75a6ecc" data-title=""Ποιοι είστε και τι θέλετε από τον παπά μας;"">"Ποιοι είστε και τι θέλετε από τον παπά μας;"¹</anno>

"She asks who you are, and what business soldiers have with her priest!"

Momolo turned back toward Vito with solemnity, as if he had been entrusted with the fate of kingdoms, "And Momolo tells the good people of Peza that the answer is coming. The answer is coming! Patience, patience!"

Vito clicked his tongue, "Tell them we’ve serious business waiting at Knossos, on the archbishop’s word, and that we only stopped here to bring the padre a message on our way through."

Momolo swung back to the crowd, filled his chest, and returned to them the Greek version with all the solemn grandeur of a royal decree.

He added, as naturally as breathing, one small flourish, how the archbishop himself had personally begged this very priest’s counsel on a matter too delicate to put on parchment, and the matter was so urgent that soldiers had ridden through the night rather than wait for dawn.

The murmur changed.

Confusion turned into suspicion, and considerably more tired. Four bound men being dragged through a broken door was no less absurd merely because an enthusiastic soldier had supplied them with an archbishop.

"Now the rest of it."

Vito’s grin sharpened, cheerful and utterly shameless. "Tell them we arrived and found the four of them tangled together in a manner no priest should ever be found in, and that decency alone prevents me from describing the details to good Christian ears."

Momolo’s face lit up as though destiny had finally remembered what it owed him. He had been handed the finest role of his career, and he meant to play every word of it.

Both hands began working as he painted the scene for a street that had certainly not requested a performance, pointing first at the priest’s torn robe, then at the youth’s split lip, then at every convenient scrap of evidence the brawl had left lying around for him to exhibit.

The priest strained against the hand clamped over his mouth. A furious, muffled cry climbed out of his throat, but the soldier holding him pressed harder and drove it back down before even one syllable could escape.

The crowd’s murmur broke open into louder cries and much less orderly. The gasps turned into demands, demands turned into questions, and toward the back the story was already being repeated again and again.

Some middle-aged woman raised one trembling hand and pointed straight at the stout man’s chest.

<anno data-annotation-id="17378ade-0f1f-5797-8397-36ca2f51eab7" data-title=""Είναι παντρεμένος! Τον ξέρω, είναι παντρεμένος!"">"Είναι παντρεμένος! Τον ξέρω, είναι παντρεμένος!"¹</anno>

She turned at once to the woman beside her and repeated it even louder, as if saying it twice might somehow make the thing easier to believe.

Momolo turned back to Vito, delighted beyond reason and almost amazed at his own luck.

"Married, she says! Married! And now the whole street is going to know it too!"

"Then tell them there’s no other explanation that fits."

Vito kept his voice easy, almost bored, as though he were stating facts too obvious to waste time on. "Venetian soldiers riding through the night, straight to this one chapel. Ask them plainly what else would bring us here."

Momolo delivered the story with genuine confidence now. The crowd had already begun carrying it for him, and the murmur around them turned quickly from disbelief into more dangerously close to agreement.

The whole street was busy rewriting its priest’s reputation before the man himself.

Vito reached for the cord beneath his mail and pulled one signet ring free. He held it up, letting the nearest torchlight catch the carved stone set into the heavy gold.

It was a churchman’s seal, and an important one.

"Momolo. Show them exactly what that is, and whose hand it came off of."

Momolo took the ring as though it was a saint’s finger and raised it high above his head. He turned slowly, giving every torch in the street its chance to shine on the stone.

This time he needed no flourish, as the crowd recognized the seal for themselves.

Vito murmured, mostly to himself, one corner of his lips lifting. "The Archbishop’s signet. Lent to me very generously, considering the man’s presently my guest back in Candia."

Whatever had been holding the villagers suspicion together weakened all at once. It happened so quickly and so completely that Vito nearly admired it, as one signet and one lie should not have been enough to topple a crowd, yet there it was, finished.

🦁 [TITLE ACTIVATED] — Conquistatore per Contratto

He nearly blurted it out, caught off guard by the notification. Was the title a passive effect? Had it triggered somehow? And if it had, did a contract count as the sort of situation that involved charisma, even when there wasn’t a piece of paper in sight?

He had no answers, and the voice, apparently, had no desire to supply them.

The villagers began drifting back toward their houses in twos and threes. The soldiers moved among them, while the torches guttered out one after another and the street emptied of everyone who wasn’t already sworn to the Republic.

When the last villagers had gone far enough that they could no longer hear him easily, Vito walked over to the four prisoners and crouched until he was looking them in the eye. He came close enough that the next words belonged to them alone.

Momolo appeared at his side almost at once, as if interpreting had just become his newest side job in the company.

"My deepest apologies."

His voice was warm, almost gentle. "None of that was true, of course. But you’d all do well to think a great deal harder next time before you join up a rebellion you haven’t got the stomach or the numbers to win. At least you can mend your reputation, but if you lose your life in an uprising, there is no second chance."

Four pairs of eyes stared back at him, furious and helpless.

The soldiers got to work after that. They lashed all four prisoners across a pair of spare horses, tying wrists and ankles directly to the tack so that escape would require dragging half a horse along with them.

Vito swung into his own saddle. The night’s cold had finally reached him, finding muscles that had wrestled a stubborn old man away from an altar.

"Next up is Knossos."

He laughed, as if he couldn’t wait a second more. "Mount up, all of you. Peza’s finished, and I’ve got an appointment with a labyrinth that’s only kept me waiting eight hundred years."

The company turned together and rode out into the dark. Peza was already shrinking behind them, while somewhere ahead waited Knossos, a city of dead kings and older troubles, with its labyrinth still keeping its ancient appointment.

<annotations style="display: none;">“Peace be with you.”“Who are you, and what do you want with our priest?”“He’s married! I know him, he’s married!”</annotations>