Chapter 94: Acre’s Traffic Is Terrible

Vito watched as Acre rose out of the haze.

The walls caught the dawn light, and a hard citadel of stone above, repaired after the city had been fought back into Christian hands.

Towers stood across the walls, with the king’s fortified quarter behind them thick enough to fight a siege twice over. More church spires rose above the rooftops than a town this size had any reasonable use for.

South across the bay, Mount Carmel held its blue shoulder against the sky, patient and enormous, the sort of landmark a sailor could find blind on a storm.

Closer in, where the water narrowed toward the harbor entrance, a low, stubborn islet sat crowned with its own little fort, its walls hunched tight around whatever waited at its base.

Vito let himself have the whole sight for one breath.

Then the ships came into focus.

Dozens of them, and then more, packed into water that looked nowhere near wide enough to hold them all. Flags from every maritime house that mattered on this sea snapped over hulls wedged close enough to trade insults without raising their voices.

Bepi’s face, beside him, had gone exactly as grim as promised.

Momolo leaned over the rail with an expression of pure awe.

The whole crush ahead put to his mind, for one absurd moment, memories from another lifetime.

Cars jammed at narrow roads on rush hour. Every driver certain his own work mattered more than his neighbor’s, and not a soul willing to give an inch. Replace that many cars for timber and canvas, add men with knives on their belts, and there it was.

Vito grinned.

Whatever this century lacked, it had never once lacked for this.

A round-hulled Genoese ship crowded them first, swinging in close enough that a man with anger issues could have stepped from one deck to the other. Her crew shouted as they passed.

"Row home to your lagoon, you drowned rats! Venezia never built a keel that didn’t leak!"

The words came in the coast’s tangled speech, half a dozen tongues worn down together until they fit in one mouth.

Vito grinned instead of bristling and gave it right back in the same blended speech.

"Leaks less than your mother’s roof, amico! At least ours keeps the rats out!"

The Genoese sailor’s face went through three colors before he found another insult.

Beside him, Momolo had already abandoned whatever business he’d meant to attend to, both hands planted on the rail.

"Ser Barozzi, do you hear the disrespect?"

He didn’t wait for an answer. "Momolo has crossed this sea listening to men who couldn’t find their own arses, and I tell you, Genoa, your crew has all the seamanship of a drunk man pissing from a moving cart! Go home and practice your insults on a mirror first!"

The distance widened before either crew could think of a answer, both sides still hurling curses as La Contessa slid clear.

A Greek merchantman drifted across their bow next, oars nearly fouling, and her captain’s fury needed no help crossing the water.

"Latin dogs! Is there no sea left that belongs to anyone but you?"

Momolo answered before Vito had to, delighted. "Keep your temper, captain, or I’ll tell every port between here and Italia that Rhodes breeds sailors who steer by throwing dice! I’ve seen a goat bound to a post make fewer mistakes than your helmsman!"

The Greek captain’s face darkened further, caught off guard that he’d been answered in his own tongue at all.

"Mind your own oars, Venetian!"

"Mind yours first!"

Momolo called back just as an oar blade nearly kissed their own, and Bepi’s voice cracked across the deck behind them, correcting course before either ship could do the other any real harm.

The Greek ship fell away astern, her captain still shouting words neither of them bothered to catch.

Bepi went rigid before either Vito or Momolo caught sight of the next hull.

A long white scar ran down her bow planking, old and pale against newer paint, and a wiry, sun-blackened captain stood at her stern shouting orders at a crew still fumbling with her sheets.

"Cazzo."

Bepi’s voice came out flat and disbelieving.

"That’s her. That’s the same bastard nearly took my mast off last season."

Vito’s grin turned wolfish at once.

"Well then."

He turned toward Momolo, delight plain on his face.

"Ma va’, amico, this one we do properly."

A sailor on the Pisan’s deck leaned out first, shouting some tired boast about Pisan seamanship and Venetian cowardice, entirely unaware that he was shouting it at the same ship he’d nearly wrecked once before.

Vito replied for Bepi as much as for himself. "Seamanship! Cazzo, I’ve seen pigs fight over a bucket with more coordination! Your captain couldn’t steer a donkey down a straight road, couldn’t find the harbor if you painted the walls red, and couldn’t tell port from starboard if God Himself stood beside him pointing! Put a rope in his hands and he’ll trip over it, put a wheel in front of him and he’ll steer straight into the nearest wall. And this is the man you call a captain? I’ve seen better helmsmen in fishermen’s dreams!"

The Pisan captain’s face changed the instant the words landed.

Beside Vito, Bepi allowed himself an expression closer to a smile than anyone aboard had seen from him all season.

The Pisan galley gave them a wider berth this time, easing clear without so much as scraping a rail.

The press only thickened as they neared the harbor’s true entrance.

The low fortified islet stood guard over the harbor mouth, with a heavy chain stretched across the entrance beyond it. It was still raised, still barring the last stretch of open water into the harbor.

Ships stood stacked three and four deep waiting on it, crews shouting over one another with no room left to maneuver.

Momolo climbed halfway up the rail itself for a better view and found, in the chaos, exactly the stage he’d apparently been waiting for all morning.

"Behold!"

He threw both arms wide, addressing the noise as though it owed him an audience. "The walls of Jerusalem never held back so many fools at once, and Momolo has seen both! Weeks of siege, towers, engines, soldiers screaming at one another! Acre manages the same misery inside a single day, and calls it ordinary!"

Behind them, Bepi shouted actual orders at the crew, sharp and practical, entirely unmoved by whatever epic Momolo believed himself to be narrating.

"Keep her nose off that Provençal’s stern, you blind sons of goats, or I’ll have you rowing to Damascus and back!"

Vito, for his part, added nothing but delight.

"Sing it louder, Momolo! I don’t think the Pisans heard you the first time!"

The chain dropped at last with a groan that carried across the whole crush.

Iron slid free of the water, and the press ahead of them began, ship by ship, to break apart into what almost looked like order.

It took the better part of another hour before La Contessa their way inside, the crowd of hulls thinning around them as ship after ship peeled away toward its berth.

Bepi wiped his brow and looked back once at the mess they’d left behind.

"Give me a forthright storm over that harbor again, and I’ll thank God for the easier day."

Momolo, still glowing, clapped both hands together as though closing a performance to genuine applause. "A story worth every coin Momolo never charged for it! By the time we reach Cyprus, three ships will have tried to sink us and a whole Pisan fleet will have chased us the length of this coast."

Vito laughed and let them both have the last word, watching the harbor open ahead.

The customs process, when it finally came, proved almost embarrassing after the morning it followed.

A harbor official climbed aboard, ran his eyes down the manifest, counted six hulls against six names, and waved them through with barely a second glance.

He then turned toward the next ship crowding in behind them.

A Venetian attendant met them at the pier not long after, unhurried and unbothered by six ships’ worth of new arrivals.

He led the way inland through streets narrower than Alexandria’s own, awnings strung low between the upper floors and the smell of tar and salt fish following them the whole way.

A church of San Marco stood at its corner, modest beside its namesake back in the lagoon but unmistakable all the same, the lion carved plain above its door.

Inside the fondaco’s counting house, a clerk who looked as though nothing short of the Second Coming could trouble his day dipped his pen.

He entered six Venetian hulls into Acre’s harbor register with same flat, unhurried hand he’d have given six fishing boats.

Vito watched him write it, amused despite himself, and said nothing at all.