Chapter 7 Beneath the Salt Sheds
The salt carrier who sold memory at merchant prices was called Berto di Lino, and he received them beneath an awning made from a sail whose first life had been more prosperous than its second.
He sat on an overturned basket beside three wicker hampers, a pair of cracked weighing scales, and a boy whose chief occupation seemed to be driving flies from a dish of onions with a willow switch.
Berto himself had a broad brown face, a white beard clipped unevenly at the chin, and the swollen knuckles of a man who had spent thirty years lifting loads for other men and had concluded that any knowledge acquired in the process should at least once be carried by someone else.
Naldo stopped before him. “This is the man.”
Berto looked from Naldo to Adelasia, then to Niccolò, and finally to Bertran, whose wrapped hand made him appear more dangerous rather than less.
“I said I remember a Marelli family. I did not say I remember them for free. Memory is work when respectable people arrive with questions. If you wanted gossip, you should have come before dinner with a cup of wine and no soldiers.”
Adelasia did not bargain at once. She studied the old man’s baskets, the cracked scales, the boy, the poor shade, and the salt crust embedded in the seams of his sleeves. Then she named half the sum Naldo had reported.
Berto laughed until he coughed. “Mistress, if I had wanted insult I could have asked my daughter.”
“Your daughter would charge less,” Adelasia said.
“You remember enough to tell a stranger that a Marelli family existed. That much has already escaped your keeping. What remains is whether the memory concerns the man we seek or merely a cousin with the same name, whether it was heard by you or borrowed from another tongue, and whether three denari will turn it from fog into scripture. I pay for useful knowledge. I do not pay merely because a man has wrinkles enough to make ignorance look venerable.”
Berto’s eyes sharpened with pleasure despite himself. “Four.”
“Two now. Two when I know you have not sold us your daughter’s husband by mistake.”
“Three now.”
“Two and a cup of decent wine if we pass the tavern before you die.”
The boy snorted. Berto cuffed the air in his direction and held out his hand.
Niccolò began to reach for his purse. Adelasia stopped him with a glance and paid from her own. “Your master may reimburse me later. I prefer not to let every porter between Ravenna and Rimini conclude that Messer Salviati’s purse travels behind us with its mouth open.”
Berto rubbed the coins between finger and thumb.
“Piero Marelli was no sailor, though sailors used him. Porter captain when I was a boy. Had six men under him in the good years, more when ships came together. His wife, Lieta, sold beans, onions, little fried fish if the catch was cheap, near the old gate. Red cloth over the stall in summer. She could skin a man with her tongue and then feed him because she had done it.”
Lucetta felt the name settle against the fragments she had reconstructed. “Did he hire boats?”
“Sometimes. Carts more often. Boats when men wanted to move goods without carrying them through the busiest road. The channels were better then.”
Naldo crouched so that his eye was level with the old man’s. “Which channels?”
Berto glanced at him. “You know them.”
“I know what remains. I want what was there before half of it silted.”
The old man pointed with one bent finger beyond the salt sheds.
“A cut ran behind the old warehouses and joined the larger canal south of the pans. Not broad enough for a sea boat. Good for punts and flat craft. Salt went that way when carts were dear or roads bad. Timber too. Anything that did not complain about wet feet.”
Lucetta said, “A strongbox?”
Berto’s finger stopped.
Adelasia noticed it. “There. That is worth the second two denari.”
Berto looked offended. “I have not said anything.”
“No. You have merely stopped saying everything.”
He studied them again, longer now. “There was a story. My father told it when I was small because Marelli frightened him. A chest came through one night, not large enough for grain and too heavy for linen. Iron at the corners. Two men from a merchant house accompanied it. Marelli took it from a cart at the red fish shed and sent it by water. My father was paid to help lift.”
Lucetta’s heart quickened, but she kept her voice level. “Where did the boat go?”
“If my father had known, perhaps I would own a house with shutters. He said Marelli dismissed half the men after loading. Kept only one boatman and a nephew. They went south.”
“Which nephew?” Adelasia asked.
“Tommaso Marelli. Or Tomaso. He was older than my father and already married. Became a boatman after Piero died.”
Naldo said, “Did he keep a boat here?”
“Not here. San Michele cut.”
Lucetta looked at Ysoria. “The old gate.”
Ysoria was already thinking in routes. “If the San Michele cut still reaches the lagoon channels, a boat leaving there could avoid the customs quay entirely. If it does not, then the name survives and the water does not. We need someone who knows where the cut ended, not where people call it now.”
Berto lifted a shoulder. “Ask the eel men. They curse old water better than priests curse sin.”
Bertran said, “Who has asked you about Marelli before us?”
The old man’s expression closed so quickly that Lucetta knew the answer mattered.
“Men ask about dead men every year. Debts. inheritance. kin.”
“That was not my question.”
Berto’s hand covered the coins. “And I am not paid to answer yours.”
Adelasia leaned forward. “You have already taken money from us. If someone paid you before, say so. I do not care whether you sold the same memory twice. I care whether that buyer had the same questions.”
Berto looked toward the road. “A man came three days ago. Not scarred. Younger. Good boots, plain cloak, manners too careful for a porter. Asked whether anyone remembered Piero Marelli and whether his family kept papers. I told him I remembered nothing. He paid me to remember that there had been a nephew named Tommaso.”
Niccolò’s mouth hardened. “Three days.”
Ysoria said, “Then the rider who gave the customs description did not begin at Ravenna. Someone has been asking ahead.”
Bertran asked Berto, “Did you tell him about the channel?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he did not ask the right question.”
Naldo grinned. “There is justice in the world.”
Berto pointed at him. “Do not become pious on my account.”
Lucetta paid the remaining coins herself. “Where did Tommaso Marelli live?”
“Dead these twenty years, I think. His son kept nets. The son’s widow may still be alive near San Michele, if fever has not taken her and family has not dragged her inland. Name is Cilia. House with a fig tree against a wall that leans enough to frighten anyone who sleeps under it.”
They left Berto drinking the promised wine from a cup Naldo purchased at the nearest stall. The old man shouted after them that the wall had been leaning since before Lucetta was born and had not killed anyone yet.
Naldo muttered, “That is exactly what a wall says before it kills someone.”
The old gate district lay where the town grew less certain of itself.
The main road narrowed into lanes between sheds stained by brine and years of smoke.
Salt lay everywhere: in baskets, in carts, in heaps protected beneath rough roofs, in white scales on the boots of workers, in powder that blew against doorposts and settled into the cracks of windows.
Men came out of the pans with their faces reddened by glare.
Women carried jugs of water and covered food with cloth against dust. Beyond the last row of houses, the land flattened toward channels and reed beds that shone dull green beneath the afternoon sun.
Bertran did not allow the group to remain bunched together. He sent Naldo and Ysoria ahead, kept Orsino near Lucetta and Adelasia, and made Odelin walk beside Niccolò. The arrangement made Niccolò smile.
“You continue to treat me like a guest whose knife you have counted,” he said.
Bertran answered, “You objected yesterday when I said I wanted you where I could see you. I have improved the courtesy of the arrangement. You may now walk beside a monk.”
Brother Odelin said, “Do not mistake my habit for a guarantee against violence, Messer Niccolò. I have administered estates. I know what men do over boundaries.”
Niccolò looked at him. “Is that a threat?”
“It is a description of experience.”
They found Cilia Marelli in a courtyard where three generations appeared to be mending the same net.
The wall did lean, and the fig tree had grown against it as if trying to decide whether to support the masonry or escape from it.
Cilia was a narrow woman with a back bent by age but an unbent voice.
She listened to Lucetta’s introduction, crossed herself at the name of Saint Aurelia, and then refused to let any of them enter until Bertran removed his sword belt.
“I have seen men say they came for papers and leave with chairs,” she said. “A sword does not read.”
Bertran unbuckled it without argument and handed it to Naldo, who was delighted by the symbolism.
Inside, the house smelled of fish oil, damp rope, and figs not yet ripe.
Cilia had no letters from Piero Marelli and no chest of ancestral secrets.
She had one wooden coffer containing marriage cloth, two old spoons, a rosary missing three beads, and a wrapped packet of family receipts so ordinary that Lucetta believed them immediately.
“Men came before,” Cilia said while Lucetta examined a fading rent acknowledgment.
“My husband’s father was dead by then. They asked for a key.
Not a house key. Some iron thing Piero had carried.
We told them he carried hooks, knives, warehouse keys, boat keys, whatever men gave him.
One stranger said this key was shaped differently. My mother-in-law spat at him.”
“When?” Lucetta asked.