Chapter 99: An Anxious Sort of Welcome

The pier at Limassol smelled of pitch and drying fish, like every other on this sea, but the city behind it wore its latest conquest closer to the skin than any Vito had seen yet.

Domes still ruled the skyline, round and Greek and apparently unconcerned with whoever claimed to own them now, their stone turned the hue of old bone by years of salt wind. Where the new masters had found the money and the reason to make repairs, rougher work had been patched around the old stone.

Raw scaffolding were still present around one gate tower, and fresh mortar showed pale against the blackened stone at the harbor.

Around Vito, his crews hauled ropes and stacked crates as in every port, which, as far as they were concerned, this morning was simply another port.

The Greeks working across the quay were less convinced. More than one looked at the new banners on the water longer than courtesy allowed, then discovered terribly important tasks to do with a fishing net.

Then, one man came forward fast enough that he nearly tripped over his own boots, a small daybook clutched to his chest as though it might otherwise escape and leave him to explain himself.

He never finished his first sentence before starting the second, and by the time he reached his name he had apologized three times, once for the condition of the pier, once for being late, and once, rather vaguely, for the weather, which had done nothing wrong that day.

"Alvise Trevisan, and forgive me, forgive me entirely, Ser Barozzi. I would have been here the very moment you arrived, only the harbormaster insisted on his own count first, and one does not simply argue with a harbor master these days, not with matters as they stand, though things aren’t truly so dire, only, well."

He took a breath.

It did nothing to slow him down.

"You understand."

Vito laughed under his breath and clapped him once on the shoulder, easy and warm. "I understand a man who apologizes more than he breathes, amico. Vitale Barozzi. This is Toffolo, who keeps his sword sharper than his tongue, and neither of us bites unless properly provoked."

Toffolo grinned and held out a hand that Alvise was too flustered to notice.

"Forgive me. I’m aware I’ve apologized more than any competent man ought to by now, and I apologize for that as well."

Alvise looked down at the little daybook in his hand, opened it, found some little note, and closed it again.

"Yes. Yes, of course. This way, this way entirely. I’ve seen to most of it, or enough that it shouldn’t matter."

The street beyond the harbor was narrow and crowded, with Greek voices haggling over baskets of dried fish and green olives while a boy no older than eight led a donkey twice his size between the stalls without once looking up from the coins in his palm.

One small shrine was wedged between a cobbler’s stall and a storehouse that still smelled of raw pine, its icon dark with candle smoke and its lamp burning despite the hour. It sat beside newer Frankish timber, an old habit beside a new law nobody had quite managed to enforce yet.

"You must understand, Ser Barozzi, the kingdom finds itself in a difficult moment, nothing that won’t right itself once the regency gets its feet under it. These things always right themselves, given time, given patience, given..."

Alvise trailed off, apparently unable to find a third thing the situation required.

"Ser Barozzi!"

Toffolo cut straight through the middle of Alvise’s sentence, entirely unconcerned with whose sentence it happened to be. "Is it true the wine here runs purple as a bruise? A sailor off the Moresina swore an oath on it, and I’ve thought of nothing else the whole walk over."

Alvise answered before Vito could open his mouth, apparently unable to let a question go unanswered. "I. Yes. I believe so, though I couldn’t rightly say if it’s purple so much as a very deep red. I’ve never actually held a cup up next to a bruise to compare them."

He abandoned the thought altogether and turned back to Vito, his daybook already open again.

Vito laughed and waved the whole apology away with one hand. "A fresh crown and a nervous port go together the way wine and a headache do, amico. Cazzo, I’ve had worse landings than this. Once, an entire city tried to arrest me before I’d finished admiring the view."

Alvise managed an expression close to a smile, and for one hopeful moment he looked as though the reassurance might actually reach him.

It didn’t. "You’re very kind to say so, Ser Barozzi, very kind, but I don’t think you understand quite how difficult things have truly become."

He hugged the daybook tighter against his chest.

"Every foreign district on the island has received decree, Ser Barozzi."

Alvise counted the point off on one finger. "Venetian, Genoese, Pisan, it makes no difference. We’re all asked to stay behind our walls until the regency finds its feet. No wandering the wider city without real cause, and I’m afraid curiosity wouldn’t satisfy the guard if they asked me to answer for it on your behalf."

Toffolo’s face fell, all the good cheer draining out of it in a breath.

"Not even the market at dusk, Ser Barozzi? I heard they sell figs here the size of a fist."

Vito laughed and clapped him once on the shoulder without breaking stride.

"Later, ragazzo. The figs will keep, nobody’s shipping them off just to spite you."

Alvise’s worry had already moved somewhere else, his eyes on some trouble beyond that hadn’t yet found words.

They passed beneath a low stone arch where the street narrowed until two men could barely walk abreast.

There Alvise’s voice dropped. "There is also, and I hesitate even to raise it standing in the open streets, some troublesome news out of Constantinople. It reached the house only days ago, and I confess we’ve all been rattled by it since."

Vito went rigid and sharp beneath an otherwise even face, though none of it reached his voice.

"What word, amico?"

Alvise drew a long breath. "An ambush, Ser Barozzi. In Thrace, near a town called Adrianople. Bulgarians and their Cuman horsemen together, and our Latin Emperor rode straight into the middle of it thinking he rode to relieve a siege."

He swallowed. "Taken alive, into their camp. Three hundred knights, they say, perhaps more. Louis of Blois among the dead, a man who dined at this very house not two years past, and now."

He did not finish.

He did not need to.

Vito shook his head, his voice low and even. "That’s a wound this whole crusade will carry for a while, amico. My condolences to your house, and to Louis’s family, wherever word of it finds them."

Alvise nodded, turning his attention toward another worry, the loss of an Emperor apparently only the first item on a much longer list he intended to work through before they reached the door.

"And the Doge himself?"

Vito asked it lightly.

"Old Dandolo. I hope he fared well enough in all this."

Alvise glanced up from his daybook, entirely untroubled, as though the question barely deserved the breath it took. "Oh, the Doge never rode out at all, Ser Barozzi. Stayed in Constantinople, minding the city and the Republic interests. Of course, with his age and his eyes, sending him would have been the far stranger decision."

The words landed straight into Vito’s chest.

He said nothing for a moment.

There was nothing worth saying that Alvise would have understood anyway.

An old man he’d shared wine and old grievances with was alive where Vito had begged him to stay, in a letter sealed and handed to a courier at the very hour the fleet left Candia.

The same coalition had gathered in the same field. The same ambush had closed around the same army. Three hundred knights had died exactly as expected in every book he had ever read, on a train, in a library chair, in another life entirely.

Only one thing in the whole disaster stood outside that familiar tale.

One man had stayed home this time, when every account Vito had ever read sent him out to die with the rest.

The letter had done that, nothing else had changed enough to explain it.

Alvise stopped mid-stride to frown down at his daybook, flipping back a page to check some detail of the day’s business.

He muttered under his breath about a room and a supper he hoped hadn’t already been promised twice.

The lull belonged to Vito alone.

Well. There’s a word for what just happened, and I don’t often get to use it.

🪙 [HISTORICAL DIVERGENCE CONFIRMED]

Reward : 50 Fate

Consider it earned, but don’t let it go to your head. I’ve only just finished cleaning up after the last thing that did.

Vito had a reply ready, several of them, actually, each sharper than the last.

None of them could leave his mouth with Alvise standing three feet away, scowling down at a page about supper as though the fate of the kingdom depended on whether the fish course arrived before the wine.

The building turned out to be a converted house near the old customs yard, Greek in its bones and unmistakably so. Its courtyard was tiled in a pattern nobody had bothered to replace, while a fresh coat of paint slapped across the door fooled nobody about how recently Venezia had staked its claim on this street.

Four years, if Alvise’s account could be trusted, since an envoy first talked Aimery’s government into granting the concession at all. It was more a foothold, still new enough that nobody quite knew what it would become.

"Here we are, here we are."

Alvise pushed the door open himself. "I’ll see you properly looked after for the length of your stay, Ser Barozzi, however long that turns out to be, and there’s the evening meal to sort besides, and I really must speak to someone about the shutter on the second floor before another guest arrives and finds it broken again."

He was through the door and gone, entirely unaware of the news he’d just handed a patrician during one short walk down one narrow street.