Chapter 5 Customs
The boatman who had argued with Naldo before sunrise proved, once they were all aboard, to possess the temperament of a man who believed passengers were a regrettable defect in the business of boats.
He accepted Bertran's coin without gratitude, accepted Adelasia's instructions without agreement, and accepted Orsino's tool case only after making the locksmith swear by every saint Orsino could remember that no loose iron would gouge the planking.
Then he pushed them away from the steps with a pole, muttered that the tide had less patience than merchants, and sent the little craft nosing through the pale water beyond Ravenna.
Lucetta sat beneath a strip of coarse sailcloth rigged against spray and watched the city recede.
Morning had come gray and low. The marshes beyond the channels lay flat beneath mist, reeds whispering whenever the wind turned them.
Farther east, where the light widened, the sea was only a brighter line beneath the cloud.
The smell changed before the view did: stagnant ditch water and damp earth giving way to salt, tar, fish, wet rope, and the sour sweetness of cargo that had been too long under canvas.
Naldo breathed more deeply as if the coast itself were food.
“You have been complaining of Ravenna since we arrived,” Lucetta said. “Now you look as though someone has returned property stolen from you.”
“Ravenna is a good place for merchants who enjoy standing still while they argue over who owns the mud beneath their shoes. This is different. Water does not care who your grandfather was.” Naldo glanced at Adelasia. “No insult meant to grandfathers generally.”
“Only to mine?” Adelasia asked.
“To all grandfathers who become legal arguments after death.”
“That is nearly all of them.”
The small boat rolled beneath a crosscurrent.
Lucetta caught the gunwale. Bertran, seated opposite, did not move except to shift one boot against the travelling chest so it could not slide.
His attention had been divided since dawn between the water, the boatman, the shores, and Niccolò, who sat near the stern with Corrado's agreement wrapped in waxed cloth beneath his coat.
Bertran had never said that he mistrusted Corrado's man.
He did not need to. His manner toward Niccolò was the exact courtesy he used with a loaded crossbow whose cord he had not examined.
Niccolò noticed everything and complained of nothing.
“You may spare yourself the labor, Messer Albaric,” he said after a while. “If I meant to throw any of you into the channel, I should have recommended a larger boat. There is hardly room to lift a man by the belt.”
Bertran looked at him. “I was deciding whether you can swim.”
“I can.”
“Then I was wasting my time.”
Niccolò smiled thinly. “Messer Corrado said you possessed humor when sufficiently provoked. I had assumed he was being charitable.”
“He is seldom that.”
Lucetta felt Adelasia's elbow touch hers in warning before she could enter the exchange. It was not fear of quarrel. Adelasia's rule in negotiations was that one should never spend a useful argument merely because silence had become uncomfortable.
The Stella Maris appeared by degrees: first the upper part of a mast beyond the reeds, then rigging, then the dark rising curve of the hull as their boat entered broader water.
She was not a great galley of war or a proud merchant vessel built to impress a harbor.
She was a working coastal ship, broad enough to carry mixed cargo and shallow enough for ports that made deeper ships wait outside.
Her sail was furled. Men moved along the deck with the quick indifference of sailors who had already been working for hours and considered arriving passengers an interruption.
Pietro Ziani stood near the rail in a dark wool tunic with the sleeves rolled above his wrists. He watched them approach without waving.
“You are late,” he called.
The boatman shouted back something obscene concerning wind, tide, and men who waited aboard larger boats. Ziani listened, nodded, and said, “He has always lacked respect for time.”
“He says you lack respect for mothers,” Naldo translated unnecessarily.
“I heard him.”
A rope ladder came down. Naldo went first, then Ysoria, who climbed with the flat efficiency with which she did almost everything.
Orsino surrendered his tool case only after Ziani promised it would be stowed where no barrel could crush it.
Odelin made the sign of the cross before climbing, not because the ladder was dangerous but because the water beneath it moved.
Adelasia climbed in skirts without accepting assistance until the final step.
Lucetta followed and hated the instant in which one foot had left the boat while the other had not yet found the ship.
Bertran came last after the baggage. He looked less pleased on deck than he had on land.
Ziani saw it. “You dislike ships.”
“I dislike ground that chooses its own direction.”
“The sea does not choose. Men choose badly and accuse it afterward.”
“Then I dislike men who build ground out of planks.”
“That is a more respectable prejudice.” Ziani turned to the others.
“If any of you become sick, do it downwind. If you touch a line because you believe it is in your way, Naldo will hit you before I do. If the weather changes, obey orders even when they are shouted by a boy younger than your boots. A ship is not a commune. We do not debate authority while sinking.”
Orsino lifted his brows. “You should carve that above a council door.”
“Councils are permitted to sink.”
They sailed before the sun had fully burned through the cloud.
Ravenna fell behind them, then the coast itself blurred into a green-brown edge.
Stella Maris carried casks of oil, sacks of pulse, bundles of cloth, two crates of worked metal, salt fish, and a small consignment of wax that Ziani watched more carefully than any other cargo because, as he explained to Adelasia, thieves preferred goods that could be sold without explaining their smell.
The passengers were allotted little space.
Lucetta's travelling chest and Adelasia's baggage were secured near the stern beneath an awning.
Orsino's tools went in a dry locker. The document cases remained on their persons or under direct watch.
Bertran objected to stowing any of the three Saint Aurelia keys in a single place, and Orsino objected more loudly to letting a salt-stained sailor come within an arm's reach of the Warden's or Treasurer's key.
The result was the same division they had kept since Ravenna: Orsino carried two wrapped separately beneath his clothing, Bertran carried the long, filed Notary's Key, and Lucetta carried none.
That last fact troubled her more than she admitted.
She had once assumed that possessing the object she studied was the natural condition of understanding it.
The road had cured her of that. A key could belong to their common purpose without resting against her own ribs.
A document could be safer in Adelasia's memory than in Lucetta's case.
A man who guarded a road did not thereby own the people walking it.
Still, when Bertran checked the fastening beneath his coat, she noticed.
The first hours passed without incident.
Naldo moved into the ship's work as though he had never been away from it, taking a line when asked, shifting cargo, laughing with a deckhand over some obscenity concerning a Paduan donkey.
Ysoria asked Ziani questions about ports, ferries, and the time required to send a message inland from each anchorage.
Odelin sat near the lee side with a psalter open but spent more time looking at the horizon than reading.
Orsino inspected every hinge he could see until one sailor told him he would be charged for repairs to mechanisms he had not been invited to diagnose.
Adelasia found Ziani near noon and asked him about Cervia.
“The port or the salt?” he said.
“The men who make money from both.”
“That is a longer answer.”
“We have water enough.”
Ziani studied her, then leaned one arm on the rail.
“Cervia is salt before it is anything else. Salt draws officials because officials draw revenue. It draws merchants because merchants draw profit. It draws thieves because thieves understand both. You will find warehouses, pans, barges, men with municipal seals, men who pretend to have municipal seals, and men who can tell the difference only after they have taken your money. If your business concerns an old maritime house, you should assume someone there remembers the name even if the family itself pretends not to.”
Adelasia said, “And customs?”
“Customs remember cargo better than families remember sons. They have to. A nephew may disappear and become a monk. A barrel of pepper still owes what a barrel of pepper owes.”
Lucetta had come near enough to hear. “Would records be kept?”
“Some.”
“For how long?”
Ziani turned his head. “Mistress Verani, every clerk believes his records eternal until the roof leaks.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the most accurate one you will receive before we arrive.”
Adelasia smiled. “You see why I hired him.”
“You did not hire me.”
“I persuaded you to accept profitable cargo that happened to include us.”
“That is what merchants call hiring when they wish to keep their pride.”