Reborn in The Most Serene Republic of Venice – Rise of a Doge

The oars had found their rhythm beneath him, a steady heartbeat that came up through the deck and into his boots. Vito let one hand brush along the rail as he crossed toward the stern, feeling every stroke through the wood.

Behind them, Constantinople was already shrinking into one dot small enough to hold between two fingers, smoke, domes, and the whole battered ruin of an Empire dwindling together at last.

Five more ships kept pace around them, their sails catching one after another as the fleet found its formation on open water.

An entire month of rooms, papers and men who wanted flattering before they would surrender a single coin, and here, at last, was motion.

Vito grinned at the whole absurd notion of it and ducked below, toward the cabin claimed for whatever passed for the venture’s own business.

Caterina had beaten him there.

She sat at the small table bolted to the cabin floor, one hand planted on a corner of the map spread across it, holding the thing down before the ship’s roll could send it sliding into her lap.

The map itself was doing very little to win either of their confidence. Crete sprawled across the vellum in a shape owing more to imagination than to any coastline Vito had ever actually seen. Its ports were marked in cramped little letters some monk had plainly been paid by the word to write, while distances were given only in days’ sail.

No scale, compass rose, or nothing that would have lasted an afternoon beside the maps he had once pored over in another life, back when men had finally learned to draw a coast the way it truly looked.

Vito loved it at once.

He found a small cask lashed against the cabin wall, exactly where a sensible man would keep anything worth saving from the sea, and poured two cups without being asked. He set one in front of her rather than into her hand, then used the opportunity to bring up the one piece of business from the dock he had been saving all morning.

”About that kiss.”

He sat down into the chair across from her, looking far too pleased with himself.

”I confess, mia cara, you’ve left me with a difficulty.”

He lifted his cup. ”I can’t decide whether I should thank you for it, or be terribly offended that you stopped at one.”

Caterina’s fingers tightened around her cup, though she kept her eyes on the map for a moment longer than the vellum had any right to demand.

”Please, do not flatter yourself. I was simply protecting an investment.”

She looked up at him, entirely untroubled. ”The higher you stand in your family’s eyes, the more useful you become to me. Andrea was being difficult, so I let him see what he could understand.”

Her mouth curved faintly. ”Besides, if I had wanted to kiss you, Vitale, I assure you, you would not be sitting there wondering whether I had.”

Vito leaned closer over the table, watching her with an increasingly amused expression.

He said nothing at first, and simply watched her over the rim of his cup, his mouth threatening a smile whenever she averted his gaze to the map below.

When she finally glanced at him, he lifted one eyebrow.

”Investment.”

He savored the word. ”Is that what they’re calling it in the Contarini mansion these days? From where I was standing, mia cara, it looked considerably warmer than that.”

Her cheeks flushed slightly, though her chin came up all the same. She would give him no satisfaction if stubbornness could prevent it.

”How fortunate for you that I am so practical.”

She returned her attention to the map, though the smile at her mouth betrayed her.

”And here I was beginning to think you might have something more interesting to say about it.”

Vito grinned wider.

He believed not a word of it, and he might have gone on enjoying himself at her expense if his eye had not wandered over her shoulder to the map.

There, some long-dead hand had drawn what looked unmistakably like a sea serpent coiled around a ship that appeared to be having a very bad day.

”Sweet Madonna, tell me that’s meant to be a fish.”

The cabin door banged open before Caterina could answer.

A broad, sun-cracked man ducked through, his hands scarred and thick as rope, his beard gone half white from more winters at sea than he had ever bothered counting.

”Ah. There you are.”

The man’s hand came swinging out and clapped him hard across the shoulder. ”I’ve been looking all over the ship for you. Thought you’d gone overboard until the boys told me you were hiding in the cabin like a maiden waiting for her dowry.”

Vito laughed and caught the man’s shoulder in return, hard enough to return the favor.

”You make it sound as though I have been enjoying myself.”

”I know you too well to accuse you of anything so innocent.”

Bepi turned to Caterina next and took her in with the very bluntness he had shown Vito. There was no polish in it, and evidently no need for any.

”And this, I assume, is the reason you have suddenly found the cabin so comfortable?”

”Caterina Contarini.”

Vito made the introduction properly. ”And this reprobate is Bepi, our comito. He’s responsible for the ships, and from what I remember of growing up under his eye, he does it a good deal less gently.”

Bepi grunted, apparently satisfied, and looked Caterina over as though she were a piece of weather he had not yet decided whether to trust.

Caterina let the teasing end where it was. Her attention had already turned toward something more useful than watching Vito squirm.

”Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

She barely seemed to care about the pleasantries, ”Then you’re the man who can tell me how many weeks stand between this voyage and our investment.”

Bepi leaned over the table and dragged one thick, weathered finger down the coastline, tracing a rough path south through a scatter of small painted islands. ”We hug the coast the whole way, as any sane man does these days. No chart worth trusting beyond what a man’s own eyes can tell him, so we go stone to stone, island to island, never more than a day from land we can actually see.”

He tapped the vellum twice near a cluster of marks. ”Through the Cyclades, past Negroponte, down along the old roads every Venetian captain’s grandfather knew before your family ever put a name to a ship.”

”And how long before that road actually ends?” Caterina asked.

”Two weeks, if the wind loves us. Three, if she wants to argue first.”

Bepi straightened and scratched at his chin, ”The season’s kind to us right now, mind. Nobody’s fool enough to sail past November, but May’s an easy month.”

He pointed a warning finger at nobody in particular. ”And don’t let me catch a man whistling on my deck between now and port. The sea can hear it, and she’s a feisty creature.”

Caterina’s thoughts had plainly gone somewhere beyond the weather already.

Bepi’s finger had already wandered back down to a small mark tucked near the island’s northeast corner, the sort of modest notation that matched everything Vito had heard whispered around the docks for the past month.

”This the spot, then? This little spit of rock everyone’s been going on about?”

Vito reached past them and put one finger flat against an entirely different mark, larger and more carefully lettered than anything else on the map.

”Candia.”

He said it simply, without a shred of apology or hedging, and left his finger there for a moment.

Caterina’s hand came off the map altogether.

The corner she had been holding down curled back against the ship’s roll.

She exhaled, then replied, ”Vitale, that is not some forgotten little harbor where you can put a few men ashore and call it a foothold. It is the largest and most important city on the island.”

Caterina’ stare had daggers on it.

”You cannot simply decide to put a garrison there because you happen to like the idea of it.”

By then Bepi’s weathered face had lost most of its friendliness.

He folded his arms across his chest. ”Take some forsaken strip of coast and there is nobody there to object when you put your men ashore. In Candia, we have to convince the people who own the harbor that they ought to let an entire foreign fleet dock there.”

Bepi gave the map a doubtful look.

”And if they decide they would rather not?”

Vito looked from one to the other.

He let the silence sit longer than necessary, chiefly to watch them both lean toward him without noticing they had done so.

”There’s a reason for it,” he said at last, reaching for his cup before giving them anything more.