Chapter 73: A Plan Built on One Bad Assumption

The five faces beyond the locked cell hadn’t grown any less confused while Vito tried to work out just how badly he had made a mess of things.

Leon spoke Italian because months of harbor tolls and council promises had taught it to him, as any man learns a language that keeps food on the table. Kalergis and Chania’s lesser archons had learned enough to bargain against Venetian captains.

Rethymno had never bothered. It was too busy with isolation to waste words on outsiders. Nobody had ever pushed these five hard enough to make the language necessary.

The purveyor had warned him, back in the garden shadow, not to get them all killed. That was, in fact, the wrong catastrophe to worry about.

There would be no dying tonight.

Not one soul understood a word he was saying, and that was beginning to look like the greater difficulty.

Talking had failed. Hands had not, at least not yet.

Vito pushed the cell open and gripped the senior archon’s arm, firm enough to make the order plain and gentle enough to keep him from escape, then drew him toward the stairs.

The other four followed once they understood there was no better choice, watching every blade in the room and trusting none of them.

The saloon looked like another house by the time they crossed it again. Torches now burned steadily in the streets instead of flashing about in scattered alarm and bound men in torn finery sat against garden walls while soldiers stood over them, calmly.

Toffolo met him near the gate with the household behind him. The wife, daughter, and boy walked behind them under guard.

"All accounted for!" Toffolo saluted. "No casualties from our side!"

"You say that like it’s a small thing, ragazzo."

Vito nodded toward his own torn sleeve, where the blood had gone dark.

"We’ll compare wounds later. I’m curious which of us had the worse night."

Toffolo grinned and moved his prisoners along.

Vito’s group passed two more knots of soldiers with captured nobles farther down the street. Zaccaria’s men, Orso’s, and Pellegrino’s had all found what they came looking for.

He put the question to the next soldier he passed, with just enough hope left to make the answer hurt.

"Tell me you speak Greek."

"I speak sword, Ser Barozzi. Tonight that’s been plenty."

He tried again a few strides later.

The man considered the question with such solemnity that the answer was funnier than it had any right to be. "Three words. Learned them off a girl in Constantinople, and not one will get you anything but a very different sort of arrangement."

Surrounded by two hundred soldiers without a single speaker of the local tongue, and nobody to blame but his own recruiting standards.

Vito was still chewing sourly on that when he spotted Zaccaria ahead, blood dried dark across a sleeve that was plainly not his own.

"Report. Good news first, if you’ve got any."

Zaccaria wasted no breath on preamble. "Mine, Orso’s, Pellegrino’s, and yours, all inside the district and in position. Domenego’s is the piece I can’t give you, there’s a glow toward the church district that might be him."

"Silence isn’t like him."

Zaccaria agreed, making no effort to pretend that helped either of them. "And there’s worse news, since you’re standing here. Whatever militia pulled off the walls tonight is putting itself back together, close to three hundred, with enough of the coup’s retainers stiffening its spine to make a real fight of it. Out the five gates in this district, they are ready to assault three."

Hundred some footmen, spread across five gates, against three hundred still fresh enough to believe they can win. Not a fight he could afford to have with steel.

Cazzo.

Not while he still had five men whose names had more weight in this city than any sword his soldiers could swing.

"Momolo. Where."

"Orso’s gate, last I saw him. Can’t promise he’s stayed put."

Vito found him exactly where promised, still standing and still armed. After a night like this, that felt like a small miracle.

"Momolo!"

"Ser Barozzi finds Momolo alive and eager, at precisely the hour when Momolo’s gifts become impossible to do without! Some patron saint plainly favors a dramatic entrance over a comfortable one."

"Ma va’, save the speech. I need your Greek, right now. These men here can win this district back, if you can make them understand in time."

Momolo turned to the five, and the real work began.

All the performance vanished the instant the stakes landed on him too. They would be restored to their standing, their property returned, once Venezia sat easy on this city. In exchange, they had to walk out to their people and tell them them to surrender.

One of the older men replied first, low and cautious.

<anno data-annotation-id="60f12be2-4aa8-5a2f-12a9-f1621370a794" data-title=""Πώς ξέρουμε ότι δεν θα μας κλειδώσετε πάλι, μόλις τελειώσει αυτό;"">"Πώς ξέρουμε ότι δεν θα μας κλειδώσετε πάλι, μόλις τελειώσει αυτό;"¹</anno>

Momolo answered him plainly, without any flourish left, and his answer changed the old man’s expression.

Five exhausted men who had spent days chained beneath their own city’s floorboards came to the same conclusion one after another. Whatever they thought of Venezia, the men who had actually locked them there had already answered the only question worth asking tonight.

They agreed, reluctant and resolved at the same time.

The five split for the multiple gates, and Vito followed the one the other four had deferred to all along without ever seeming to notice it. He was an older man, yet he carried himself straighter than days underground should have left him.

They reached the nearest of the three contested gates, with Momolo close at Vito’s shoulder.

Beyond the low wall stood militia and a harder core of retainers, torch-lit in the gray edge of dawn. Spears were raised, everyone waiting for an order.

The old man asked, through Momolo, for the gate to open just wide enough to let one unarmed man through. Vito permitted the order against every instinct two lifetimes had taught him about sending a man into a crowd that might kill him on sight.

He stepped into the open ground between the gate and the crowd, empty-handed, a fresh bruise purple along one cheekbone, and began to speak.

<anno data-annotation-id="9d02ee6b-f83d-3777-d7a0-c86698adc7e0" data-title=""Ακούστε με! Ξέρετε ποιος είμαι!"">"Ακούστε με! Ξέρετε ποιος είμαι!"¹</anno>

Momolo kept up a low translation at Vito’s ear, making the speech clear enough for Vito to follow.

This city hadn’t been taken for any cause worth a militiaman’s life, but sold in the dark for Genoese silver. Whatever these men had been told about Venezia murdering every noble locked away was a lie, meant to keep them fighting after good sense should have stopped them.

A murmur moved through the front rank, then farther back, faster than any single voice could have carried it.

The name broke loose and made the rest of the journey by itself.

<anno data-annotation-id="ad9af132-d7ab-ffd8-9907-1d9dd83f850a" data-title=""Σκορδίλης! Ζωντανός!"">"Σκορδίλης! Ζωντανός!"¹</anno>

Skordilis. Alive.

The word passed from man to man faster than the old man’s speech had managed, recognition racing through the crowd until every face had caught up.

Weapons came down one by one and then two by two, spearheads lowering before anybody seemed to decide to lower them. Each man’s nerve gave way half a step behind his neighbor’s until every spear was down.

The retainers held on for half a breath longer, watched the militia they had been sent to stiffen simply stop fighting, and then broke as well.

No order was needed. Their boots carried them to retreat faster than anything tonight had managed.

Skordilis’s cousin stood his ground until the crowd had gone. He was alone, unarmed, and for the moment entirely unharmed.

Then he turned back toward the gate and the men who had broken half a city open to find him.

The noise around Vito quieted almost like an ordinary night, torches burning, prisoners guarded, not a blade drawn anywhere he could see.

He let the thought sit with him for several long breaths.

The noble district belonged to Venezia now, and not merely in name.

Then his eye caught the glow still climbing toward the church district. Vito remembered, sour and tired, that not every part of tonight had reported in yet.

<annotations style="display: none;">“How do we know you won’t lock us up again once this is over?”“Listen to me! You know who I am!”“Skordilis! Alive!”</annotations>