Chapter 78: The Lion’s Island

Winter kept Vito considerably busier than a closed sea had any right to allow.

Within the month, the ships along Candia’s waterfront had been hauled onto dry sand, their hatches sealed and their hulls scraped bare to wait until the waters remembered how to behave. Vito had expected the season to amount to mud, boredom, and complaints about the cold in three dialects at once.

Apparently, he had never actually tried running an island through winter.

The fondaco finished what it had begun. The walls closed over the last of the rubble and the gulls, and by midwinter, one could cross the whole compound without stepping around a crate that was still trying to decide whether it meant to become a wall or a warehouse.

Marietta’s wheel kept turning in the cold, hauling cut stone long after any lesser crane would have demanded a blanket. Santina drove her last pilings into mud made hard and stubborn by frost, and didn’t complain about it once, at least not where Nane could hear.

The sawmill and stamp mill finally got a drink of water when the channel was wide enough.

Both machines earned names that week, their blades and hammers finally free of the groan that plagued them. Nane surrendered to Beatrice for the sawmill, the name Vito had tossed out half as a joke before and never expected anyone to use.

He named the stamp mill Concetta himself, then refused to explain why. A father, he said, didn’t owe anyone an account of what he chose to call his own daughters.

Word of an actual master shipwright, the sort the voice had dangled before a bedridden fool who could barely stand, remained exactly that.

Word.

That debt could wait its turn.

Chania and Rethymno went without fondacos that winter, and neither missed one badly enough to complain. Each city got its own Venetian quarter instead, staked out when the terms were first signed and finally turned into buildings, rather more substantial than a line on a chart.

Modest walls, stone piers, and enough room to let a cargo ship unload without paying some local merchant for the privilege.

Meanwhile Caterina spent the winter fattening ships instead of walls. Grain, wine, honey, wax, cheese, wool, cotton, and whatever else promised on paper came in from across the island and filled holds that had been half-empty.

The distilled spirits joined the pile around the new year. Once Caterina worked out exactly what one barrel could fetch from a apothecary desperate enough not to ask where it came from, she reacted as expectedly when confronted with a number that large.

Vito found himself off his feet and thoroughly kissed in the middle of the fondaco.

Her guards had stopped even glancing up months before.

One of her servant girls, by report, kept a private tally scratched into the margin of a laundry list, because someone in that household ought to keep a sincere record of something.

Vito had lost his own count somewhere around the fourth, which struck him as either wisdom or surrender. He still hadn’t decided which.

Every one of those goods passed through Candia’s hired population before storage. Workers hauled, sorted, pressed, and barreled them, earning considerable coin since Caterina’s wage strategy took hold in autumn.

Naturally, some city that eats and drinks according to a venture’s success has every reason to want them to succeed. Candia’s workers had figured that out for themselves months before anyone thought to explain it.

Bepi took other news considerably worse than the sawmill had taken its new name.

Vito told him the method plainly enough, a way to hold a course and chart a coastline without relying on memory, prayer, or whichever saint happened to listen that day.

Bepi looked at the little brass needle placed before him as a man might look at a snake after being assured, unconvincingly, that it was harmless.

No competent pilot, Bepi insisted, could truly know his position without reading the sea for himself. The conversations all came back to that same point without ever quite landing on it.

And wherever such knowledge had come from was exactly the sort of question a wise man learned not to ask twice.

He refused to touch the instrument for most of three days, grunting theories that ranged from a favor purchased from some obscure Levantine saint to a bargain made with cultists considerably less holy.

He tested it on the fourth day, purely to prove it wrong.

First he checked the coastline west of Candia from memory, the whole stretch he could have sailed blind. Then he checked his reckoning against the little needle and Vito’s chart.

They agreed, down to a distance Bepi could judge with his own eye.

He tried again the next morning, farther out and on water he knew less well.

The needle was right again.

By the end of the week, Bepi had run out of things to argue with.

He taught the method to every captain under his charge, grumbling the whole time about idle young men trusting a scrap of brass over forty years of a sailor two eyes.

He also used the thing himself every morning.

That aside, all three cities grew richer and more impatient for spring that winter. Markets stayed fuller than the season had any right to permit, docks remained busier than idle ships should have permitted, and every restored archon from Chania to Rethymno spent the winter pleased with the trade prospects.

More than one sent a personal letter asking, politely, exactly when his share might arrive.

Leon Skordilis got his own reunion from the season, too, kept well away from public notice and worth considerably more for it.

Nikephoros, his cousin, came to Candia in December, thinner than a man ought to be after a week in his own city’s cellar, and the two spent a night together that nobody outside Leon’s household ever learned much about.

Some victories didn’t need an audience.

Vito found himself, somewhere in the middle of all that restored gratitude, counting exactly how many men his first year on the island had put behind bars or under guard.

Melissenos. Vlastos. An archbishop who still had not forgiven him for the rats.

And a fresh crop of traitor archons besides.

It was, by any fair reckoning, a remarkable collection for a cadet who had arrived with three galleys and no plan for any of it.

Even then, the island’s far south and east never got the message.

Small, stubborn troubles spread through the whole winter without becoming rebellion. A tithe collector was chased from one village, then some rumor was preached from some pulpit about Latin soldiers taking children for the slave markets, followed by a flock of goats requisitioned for the garrison’s table, which its owner considered plain theft regardless of what anyone called it.

Zaccaria and Pellegrino were called out to settle such matters more times than either cared to count.

Pellegrino, a man who had once sworn off further confessions until spring, found himself adding another candle to his debt whenever the work required putting a fist through some village priest’s protest.

Nobody died over any of it.

That was the simple, unglamorous truth of the season.

There were broken noses among priests, an uncomfortable week in a cell for the loudest farmers, and an uneventful return to work once the point had been made.

The company spent far more patience than blood.

By the end of the season, Zaccaria had stopped reporting every incident to Vito at all, on the reasonable grounds that a man who wanted daily news about broken noses could walk outside and count them himself.

Underneath all of it sat the truth Vito mostly kept to himself.

Everything he had on the island now, Candia’s fondaco, Chania’s tolls, Rethymno’s gratitude, existed on nerve and presence. No one had yet given him any right to hold it.

Venezia’s Great Council would eventually finish its slow argument over who properly governed Crete, with six Ducal Councillors and a hundred merchant houses carrying their own opinions into the matter.

Whatever it finally created, Vito meant to be standing in the right room at the time, not learning the result secondhand from a messenger.

The whispers he had bought should already have begun doing their work.

The voice’s other gift proved harder to ignore.

Greek had come to Vito over the winter without any effort on his part. Whole conversations with dockworkers and archons now made sense in a way that would have required Momolo at his elbow only months before.

He had started Arabic on his own once Alexandria became more than a name on a chart he intended to sail toward. The ease of it unsettled him even while he used it.

Two lifetimes of hard-won learning apparently counted for less than whatever the voice had decided to hand him for a single title and a bruised pride.

One piece of business he couldn’t quite put down sat in a locked drawer through the whole winter, half-written more than once and finished none of those times.

He meant it genuinely enough.

Enrico Dandolo had backed him from the first negotiation. Blind and eighty-some years old, he was sharper than the patricians in Venezia with both eyes working.

Vito had grown fond of the old man for reasons that had nothing to do with what his name could still accomplish for him.

Caterina’s affection was deeper still, a friendship reaching back to her grandfather. Vito had watched her laugh at that old man’s jokes often enough to know what his death would cost her when it finally came.

The trouble was the difficult business of warning him.

Dandolo wasn’t sitting behind a desk in Venezia where a letter could reach him within some number of days. He rode with the crusader army, somewhere in Thrace by now if the season had followed what Vito remembered.

Any letter would have to chase him across ground he had never walked and couldn’t predict with much confidence.

Worse, a warning delivered in time might change nothing. The campaign was already committed to its course, and Vito made himself face what that meant.

An old man believed in his own judgment, leading an army that believed exactly the same thing about itself.

Vito put the letter back in the drawer, unfinished once again, and told himself, without much confidence, that he still had until spring to decide.

March arrived then, with noise.

Hulls were dragged back down to the waterline, and crews returned to benches they hadn’t occupied in four months. The whole waterfront shook off its long stiffness inside a single week.

By the day their voyage was ready to depart, Vito was set by the stone piers.

Ships stood ready in front of him.

Crews stood mustered.

Whatever came next, the sea itself had finally agreed to let a man go and find out.