Chapter 7 Beneath the Salt Sheds #4
Pietro Ziani was waiting on the quay with the posture of a man who had spent several hours deciding which insult to use first. The Stella Maris lay behind him, her deck lanterns small and yellow against the black water.
Sailors moved cargo beneath shouted orders.
The promised delay in sailing had not made him more patient.
“You vanished into the salt marsh with half my passengers,” he told Adelasia.
“Then a customs boy arrived asking whether I had seen men with a scar, a limp, a brown cloak, a gray cloak, and perhaps a red cap, which describes every third man between here and Ancona. Now my mate tells me the wind will change by morning, and I have a choice between leaving with cargo and without you, or waiting until the sea itself comes ashore to ask what nonsense detained us.”
Adelasia held out the stamped leather. “Recognize this.”
Ziani did not take it. “I recognize ingratitude.”
“Pietro.”
He took it.
His irritation vanished.
Not entirely; it merely found a narrower target.
“Where?”
“An abandoned shed south of the pans.”
“Who carried it?”
“We do not know.”
Ziani turned the scrap toward the lantern. “This mark belongs to the old Badoer-Zorzi freight partnership, or belonged. Used on lighters and warehouse seals. I have seen it on account tags in Chioggia and farther north.”
Adelasia said, “A San Giorgio house?”
Ziani looked at her. “There was one near Grado. Another connected to warehouses beyond Caorle. Why?”
Lucetta unfolded the reconstructed strip just enough to show him the words.
Ziani read slowly. “Porto... If the missing word is near one of those, you are not going there by mule in a day.”
Ysoria said, “By sea?”
“If the wind holds.”
A gust came across the quay hard enough to snap one of the hanging cloths against a post.
Ziani looked toward the darkness beyond the harbor.
“If it holds,” he repeated.
Bertran said, “What is changing?”
“The wind has been wrong since sunset. Warm over the land, cooler outside. Clouds to the east.”
“Dangerous?”
Ziani gave him the patient look sailors reserved for soldiers asking questions about weather.
“Everything is dangerous if you insist on naming it before it happens. I can sail at dawn and likely make the next sheltered roadstead before the worst of it. I can wait and perhaps lose two days. I have cargo under contract. Men ashore believe ships wait because stories do.”
Lucetta said, “If another party left before us?”
“They may already be ahead. Or they may be vomiting into a bucket somewhere offshore. The sea does not respect priority.”
Adelasia looked at Lucetta, then at Bertran.
This time Lucetta did not speak first.
Bertran asked Ziani three questions: how far to the next safe anchorage, what condition the vessel was in, and whether the crew believed departure at dawn was ordinary risk or foolishness purchased by urgency.
Ziani answered each without drama. The Stella Maris was sound. The first leg could be made quickly with a favorable wind. The weather might worsen after midday, but the signs were not certain. His mate favored leaving. One older sailor did not.
Bertran listened.
Then he looked at the company. “We sail at dawn if Ziani still intends to sail. Not before. Everyone sleeps aboard or close enough to answer a bell. We divide the papers. We divide the keys. No one goes into town alone.”
Lucetta said, “Agreed.”
He glanced at her, perhaps expecting resistance. “You are becoming inconveniently reasonable.”
“Do not become accustomed.”
Naldo came up behind them carrying the two wrapped boat poles as if he had forgotten to return them. “If we sail at dawn, I want to look at the sky before I sleep.”
Ziani pointed toward his vessel. “You may look at the sky from my deck while helping coil line. You have spent enough of today using boats that are not mine.”
Naldo grinned and went aboard.
Lucetta remained on the quay for a moment after the others moved.
The salt district lay behind them, its lamps scattered and low.
Somewhere there, Berto di Lino was perhaps telling his daughter that scholars had paid him for an old porter’s name.
Cilia Marelli might be closing shutters beneath the leaning wall.
Martino would have tied his punts and cursed the silt.
None of them knew that an iron-cornered box moved through their families’ memories had become one strand in a pursuit spanning years and jurisdictions.
Bertran stopped beside her.
“Your hand,” she said.
“I knew reasonableness would not last.”
“The bandage is dark.”
He looked down. The linen at the heel of his palm had indeed spotted through. “It opened when I drew the sword.”
“You said it did not hurt.”
“It did not then.”
“That is a dishonest defense.”
“It is an exact one.”
She turned toward him. “You are not permitted to borrow my habits when they serve you badly.”
For a moment his expression changed, the tired amusement becoming something quieter. “Lucetta, if I promise to let Odelin rewrap it, will you promise not to decide that one missing place-name is worth sailing into weather Ziani himself does not trust?”
“He said he does trust it enough to sail.”
“He said sailors do not know weather until it arrives. There is a difference.”
“And if we wait two days?”
“Then we arrive two days later.”
“And if the key is gone?”
“Then we follow it. We have done that before.”
She looked toward the Stella Maris. “You make every failure sound temporary.”
“No. I make every delay sound survivable until it proves otherwise. There is a difference there too.” He rested his uninjured hand on the quay post. “I know what you are thinking. Somewhere ahead is a man who has read what we have not, and every hour gives him advantage. But if he is ahead, he also has weather. He also has bad roads, tired animals, suspicious officials, and sailors who charge more when frightened. You grant our enemies too clean a road whenever you cannot see them.”
Lucetta considered that.
Then she said, “Brother Odelin should change your bandage.”
Bertran laughed softly. “That is not an answer.”
“It is the answer you are receiving.”
He offered his arm in exaggerated obedience. “Then lead me to judgment.”
They went aboard beneath a sky that had begun, far to the east, to lose its stars.