Chapter 65: Divide, Then Rule

The week that followed taught an useful fact about occupation.

Give fear one night to think things over, and a city could change its mind remarkably fast.

By the next dawn, the barracks yard had more visitors than the soldiers knew what to do with. Archons arrived in their finest robes, each eager to announce that he had always been loyal, provided nobody was rude enough to ask where that loyalty had been when Melissenos marched an army out to die for them.

Vito let them all talk. Any men trying hard to convince he was on your side was generally easier to handle than one still wondering whether to fight you.

Ruggiero, Bortolo, and the rest of the platoon’s worst-off came in from the field camp within two days, hauled in whatever carts the quartermaster could find. They traded a surgeon’s tent pitched in half-dried mud for a roof and a bed inside the walls, which was the sort of promotion wounded soldiers tend to appreciate.

Four names appeared within days that couldn’t be bought back into that sudden forgiveness. These were men who had done more than stand aside while Melissenos mobilized his levy, as coin, grain, or sons to fill his ranks.

Kalergis brought the names himself, apologetic even as he did it, as though turning over his own neighbors was a social obligation he had never learned how to perform gracefully.

Vito had the men imprisoned that same afternoon. There was no trial, only a clerk simply reading out what each man had done so none could pretend later that he had been misunderstood.

Then a company seal went into the wax, and four more cells filled beside Melissenos’s.

Their lands didn’t remain empty for long, keeping five confiscated estates in the hands of one tired platoon who could scarcely fill their own barracks yard was no plan at all. Within the week, every estate had a new master, chosen from among the archons who had bent the knee quickest.

Boundary stones were walked out and marked before witnesses, while clerks read the old deeds aloud, then struck each former owner’s name from the parchment.

One family’s entire fortune passed into another family’s hands before the household goods had even finished going through the door. A man could watch his own cousin inherit his vineyard and then find nobody left three cells down to hear him complain about it.

There was not much left for that anger to do except beat itself against the stone. Vito didn’t lose sleep wondering how that worked out for him.

Coin, silver plate, and whatever hangings were worth carrying were counted and taken down to the docks over those same days. Silver candlesticks and rolled tapestries went into crates while the comito tried to get the whole lot back to Candia without the benefit of a proper convoy.

Most of it was under Caterina’s responsibility now, at least on paper, though the gold hadn’t yet found its way into the treasury. She kept better books than any of the men who had owned that money in the first place.

A share went to the men who had actually bled for it, and it was divided before any of the treasure could leave the city.

Vito had learned that lesson from a general much more successful than himself.

Caesar had bought his legions’ loyalty with plunder handed out by his own hand, and generation after generation of soldiers marched for the man who paid them personally and made sure they knew it.

Vito had learned much the same lesson from considerably less respectable company, watching Don Rizzo hand out a cut of every shipment so his crew wouldn’t start wondering whether loyalty might pay better somewhere else.

Same lesson. Better clothes this time.

Meanwhile, in the city, itself, market doors began closing a half-beat too hard when soldiers passed, while orders given to the city watch came back a breath slower than they should have.

The men who had stood in Melissenos’s levy only days before were now posted beside the very soldiers who had broken their army, taking orders from men they would gladly have put a knife into if they had found half a reason.

The battle was still fresh in every arm and leg in the city, and the odds had already made themselves clear. Soldiers who had broken five hundred men in open field had little need to raise their voices to make themselves understood.

Down by the harbor, Vito marked out a strip of ground for a Venetian quarter of its own. It was not meant to rival Candia’s fondaco.

It only needed to give the Republic enough ground to unload grain, wine, cotton, salt, honey, wax, cheese, wool, spices, and silk without first paying for the honor of being robbed by a professional.

Stakes went into the dirt at the corners while a clerk wrote the boundaries into a chart that meant very little to anyone in the city until the first Venetian keel actually touched that stretch of shore.

When the week was over, the ground was still marked and empty. Buildings could wait a season or two, but the ground itself could not.

The terms he walked away with beat anything from before, and not by a polite margin.

Chania’s archons signed over a heavier share of the tolls on everything passing through their gates into the countryside beyond. Grain, oil, and wool now moved under Venetian seal instead of slipping past while some local customs man felt what the charge ought to be that particular week.

Fear had bought Vito these terms, fresh and still warm from the slaughter outside the walls, and he was forthright enough to admit it to himself even while he enjoyed what fear had purchased.

Chania’s clergy caused him no trouble worth mention. Some handful of priests kept to their churches and never once threatened to bar the doors as Candia’s archbishop had done.

The archons, meanwhile, discovered a wonderfully sincere hatred for their former Genoese friends. Their devotion to the Republic blossomed on the very night those same friends’ ships slipped out of the harbor and left them behind to face the consequences alone.

Loyalty, Vito discovered, could sail remarkably fast when it had a ship underneath it.

When the week finally ran out of things to surprise him with, the city could be summed up plainly enough.

🦁 [TERRITORY OVERVIEW — CHANIA, CRETE]

Sovereignty : La Serenissima

Governance : Latin-Aligned Archontes (Estates Redistributed)

Population : Approximately 8,000

Civil Order : Tense, but Stable

Harbor : Broad bay. Stone Pier, Sizable Port

Military : Stone Walls, Compagnia del Leone Nero (Third Platoon)

Major Districts : Harbor, Market, Administrative, Noble, Religious, Suburbs, Venetian Quarter (Reserved)

Barozzi Presence : Established (Garrison, Trade Terms Secured, No Fondaco)

He was down on the docks himself when the watch called out.

It rode low in the water, with a sharp enough bow that Vito knew it for a war galley before he could make out a single useful detail of the rigging.

The Lion of Saint Mark hung from her mast plain enough for anybody to see.

By the time she came close enough for the hull to show clearly, Vito recognized her as one of his own. Zorzi or Zustignana, he could not tell at that distance.

Either way, she belonged at Candia, and there was no earthly reason for her to be sitting off Chania’s harbor instead.

Nobody had sent for her.

Vito watched her come on and found, for once, that he had no idea what to make of it.