Chapter 52: Bells for a City That Isn’t Ready

The first day went exactly as promised.

Water slipped beneath them while the sky put on a grand show of threatening rain without actually doing anything about it. By the time the daylight finally decided it had had enough, the galley dropped anchor beside a stretch of coast nobody aboard could name.

There was no chart worth the trust once a man’s eyes stopped working, and Bepi had no intention of finding out what that coast might do to them in the dark merely to save a few hours.

Dawn came with the oars keeping their rhythm, while to starboard, the coastline moved past in low green hills and pale rock. There was nothing remarkable about it except that they were still sailing forward.

Rethymno appeared off the bow around midday, low walls and a modest knot of rooftops near a small harbor, close enough to make out fishing boats working the water in front of it.

The galley didn’t slow down. There was no reason to, and ships had little use for stopping at a place merely because it happened to be there.

By then Domenego had his platoon lined up along the waist of the ship and was putting them through an ordinary inspection.

Apparently, ordinary was only temporary.

He stopped before a young soldier named Zuane, took the man’s crossbow straight out of his hands and turned it over twice with solemn care.

"Tell me, Zuane. What happens when this string gets wet and snags, and you’re standing forty paces from a Greek pikeman who has decided, quite reasonably, that he’d like you dead?"

"I... reload, Lieutenant?"

"You die, Zuane. You die terribly and precariously, and then I have to write your mother a letter because her son couldn’t be bothered to wax a string."

Domenego’s voice rose, and there was real heat in it now. "Do you know how many letters I’ve written this year? Do you have the faintest idea what that does to a man’s hand? To his fingers!?"

Zuane had gone pale as old parchment, while the remaining soldiers became suddenly fascinated by their own weapons.

Then Domenego’s face broke into a grin, and he put the crossbow back into Zuane’s hands with care surprisingly close to tenderness. "You had the right idea, though. Reload. That’s instinct, and instinct is worth more than technique during the first five heartbeats of a real fight."

He turned Zuane around by the shoulders until the young man faced the platoon. "This one will outlive most of you. Learn from him, or don’t, and explain that choice to your mother yourselves."

Zuane looked as though he could not decide whether he had just escaped an execution or been awarded a medal. From the expression on his face, he had wisely concluded that either possibility required caution.

Vito watched from a few paces away with his arms crossed, thoroughly entertained and more than a little impressed.

Whatever else could be said about Domenego, the man knew exactly how to put the fear of God into sixty soldiers, then take it back out of them and hand it over as discipline.

Rethymno had been out of sight for hours by then, and the coast spent the whole afternoon as interesting as an empty wall. Low hills, empty beaches, and not a soul in sight who seemed determined to break the silence.

Now, idle men aboard a ship are a dangerous species, and Momolo took it upon himself, as he apparently took upon himself most matters nobody had actually assigned to him, to remedy the situation personally.

He began modestly, with only some lines about Troy, spoken in a low voice to a knot of bored soldiers near the mast.

It did not remain modest for long.

Within a hour Momolo was standing on an overturned water cask, proclaiming that the deck of La Contessa was unworthy of the story about to be performed upon it and recruiting the entire platoon into his service with decisive authority.

"You!"

He pointed at a soldier built like a capstan, by far the broadest man in the platoon. "You are Ajax, greatest of the Greeks after Achilles himself, and you will hold this water barrel over your head for a shield. Momolo has decided that Ajax’s shield was made from seven ox-hides, and Momolo has only one barrel available!"

The soldier looked delighted by this promotion. He hoisted the cask overhead at once and let out a roar that might have been battle fury or a complaint about his back.

Zuane, still carrying the memory of his brush with death from earlier, was dragged forward next and declared to be Paris, prince of Troy.

The reason, according to Momolo, was that Zuane was young enough to believe himself invincible, which was apparently the only qualification the role had ever really needed.

Then came Helen, when Momolo displayed the full extent of his genius. He seized the boy who had earned a cuff around the ear early in the voyage, then threw a fishing net over the poor creature’s head as though he were unveiling a bride.

"Behold. The face that launched a thousand ships."

Momolo’s voice broke with genuine, shameless reverence.

"Though in this case, only one ship, and presently very unhappy about it."

The boy’s protests disappeared beneath the laughter of dozens of grown men, enough to get him red to the ears.

That left the ship’s commander conspicuously without a part. Momolo was not the sort of man to leave a hole in his own production for long.

He turned on Vito with theatrical hunger. "Ser Barozzi! You shall be Agamemnon himself, King of Kings, who dragged a thousand ships across this very sea because another man’s brother lost a wife he barely liked in the first place."

"Generous casting, Momolo, but I don’t remember stealing anyone’s wife."

Momolo’s grin widened, pleased with himself.

That brought a roar from the men around the mast, and Vito, never one to abandon a good premise once it had been offered to him, rose to it completely.

He climbed onto the nearest crate, spread his arms as wide as Agamemnon’s reputed ego, and addressed the Greeks, Trojans, and one thoroughly miserable Helen with all the solemnity a man could manage while standing on a barrel of salt fish.

"Hear me, sons of Achaea! We sail not for glory, nor for gold, nor even for that woman’s face, which I understand from reliable sources is presently hidden beneath a fishing net! We sail because Momolo has decreed it, and Momolo has never once been wrong in the whole of recorded history!"

"Momolo agrees entirely with this assessment!"

The entire platoon broke apart laughing, while the one playing Ajax laughed so hard that he nearly dropped his shield-barrel onto Zuane’s unprotected head.

Even Bepi, watching from the tiller with some sullen, bearish expression, allowed himself what in the right light, might have been mistaken for a smile.

Then the lookout’s voice came down from above the mast and cut through the laughter.

"Land ahead! Walls!"

Every man on deck prepared immediately. The fishing net came off the boy’s head without ceremony, and the doomed royal family of Troy scattered back to their posts.

Chania came out of the haze at distance.

Old stone walls in an unbroken line, with towers set close enough together that no stretch looked entirely neglected. Behind them, rooftops climbed inland in tight, sun-bleached rows toward whatever church or archon’s hall occupied the city’s center.

It was small, considerably smaller than Candia, perhaps eight thousand souls.

But there was nothing small about the walls, and nothing small about the harbor beneath it, crowded with ships that had not been built in any Cretan yard. Genoa’s money, comfortably behind good defenses.

Bepi kept La Contessa on her course, not toward the harbor mouth.

At the stern, the banner snapped open in the wind, plainly visible to anyone on those walls who had eyes.

It did not take long to discover whether anyone did.

The first bell rang thin and uncertain, like one voice in an empty room. The second and third followed almost immediately, and within a hundred heartbeats the whole city rang itself hoarse.

The alarm was urgent, carrying clean across the water to a galley that had done nothing yet except sail past in plain sight.

Vito’s grin turned colder, though no less pleased.

"There it is."

The galley kept her course past the harbor, oars kept their steady rhythm, the banner snapped in the wind, and Chania was left ringing its bells at an enemy who had not even stopped to give them the courtesy of being insulted in person.

Beyond the walls, the coast parted open into fields, low and empty. There, a pale beach stretched toward dry-stone walls that cut the ground into olive terraces farther inland, while the land rose toward hills already taking on the low gold of late afternoon.

Bepi brought La Contessa close to shore, her shallow draft right up against the beach in a place where no round-bellied nave could have followed her.

The oars shipped during the final stretch, and the hull kissed the sand.

"Down!"

Domenego’s voice had gone flat and businesslike.

"Shields first, packs after. Form up on the beach!"

The platoon went over the side in good discipline, boots striking wet sand, and within moments the work of unloading had swallowed the beach in noise and movement.

Vito let them get on with it and walked off alone instead.

His boots sank into the sand a short distance away, and his eyes moved over the ground.

The open fields were flat enough for a camp. Beyond the nearest terrace, the land rose just enough to matter to whoever got there first.

And the sun was just about to lay down for the day.