Chapter 11 The Fortified Harbor
The harbor looked smaller from the sea than Lucetta had imagined it from the records, and more formidable.
Two squat towers guarded the entrance, each built upon a stone foot thrust into the water, and between them the channel narrowed until even Stella Maris seemed suddenly broad.
Beyond lay a forest of masts, tiled roofs pressed close behind the quays, a church bell tower, cranes over warehouses, and the pale line of a wall curving landward.
The sea outside was bright beneath the morning sun, but within the harbor the water had the dark green of depth, refuse, tar, shadow, and constant traffic.
Fishing boats slipped past them under shouted orders.
A grain vessel waited while harbor officers in a low boat examined its papers.
Near the farther tower a patrol craft turned slowly across the entrance as though measuring every newcomer.
Ziani watched all of it without speaking for some time.
He had changed his coat before dawn, not for vanity but because a captain who intended to argue with officials preferred to do so without looking as if his ship had recently tried to drown him.
At last he said, "We enter when they wave us.
We do not enter because Mistress Verani has discovered impatience.
A harbor is a town with water for a gate, and the men who keep that gate do not become more reasonable because a traveler believes her business important.
If anyone asks what we carry, we carry lawful persons, personal baggage, tools, letters, and no taxable cargo beyond what is entered in my manifest. If anyone decides that one of you looks rich enough to improve the treasury, you let me object before you do. "
Adelasia folded her arms. "You have said that three times since sunrise."
"And I shall say it a fourth if you continue looking toward the quay as though you mean to jump there."
Naldo, seated beside the mast with his injured foot raised on a coil of rope, said, "If Mistress Adelasia jumps, she will land before the customs boat and then all our troubles will be simplified. They will arrest only her."
"You are forbidden to be amusing until you can stand without making that face," Ziani said.
"What face?"
"The face of a man whose foot has been struck by an anchor."
"It was not an anchor."
"Then you have even less excuse."
Lucetta heard only half of them. Her attention remained fixed on the harbor.
Somewhere behind those walls had lived or worked Pietro Varesi.
Somewhere a clerk, warehouse keeper, servant, widow, porter, shipmaster, heir, or priest might remember the Varesi name from documents if not from living memory.
Somewhere, perhaps, stood the old coffer Beatrice's inventory described.
She touched the satchel at her side and felt the hard edges of copied entries beneath leather.
Bertran noticed. "Do not press it so often."
She looked at him. "What?"
"The satchel. Every time you think about the coffer, your hand goes there. If I can see it, another man can."
Lucetta let her hand fall. "Then perhaps another man will conclude only that I am anxious about my papers."
"That would already be useful to him."
"You have become intolerably observant."
"I was hired for it once. I retained the habit after the wages stopped."
She nearly smiled, then looked back at the towers.
The conversation they had begun two nights earlier had not been finished.
Perhaps that was why every ordinary remark now seemed to carry an edge beneath it, something neither wished to touch while the company stood on a deck within sight of armed officials.
Lucetta had spent years believing uncertainty could be reduced by naming its parts.
Bertran had made uncertainty more complicated by becoming one of them.
A horn sounded from the nearer tower.
Ziani straightened. "Now."
The patrol boat came toward them. Three men sat in it: two oarsmen and an official wearing a short dark mantle despite the warming day.
He carried a writing board and a packet of folded papers.
Ziani went to the rail and answered questions about origin, last anchorage, cargo, crew, passengers, sickness, damage, and intended duration of stay.
The official's eyes moved across the deck and rested briefly on Naldo's bandaged foot.
"Injury?"
"Storm," Ziani said.
"Fever?"
"No."
The official looked at Naldo.
Naldo raised both hands. "No fever, master. Only a quarrel with rope, deck, and my own stupidity, all of which I lost."
The official did not laugh. "You will remain aboard until the health officer has seen you if ordered."
Naldo's hands lowered.
Lucetta saw the small change in Bertran's posture. He did not move toward Naldo; he simply became attentive in a different way. The storm injury had ceased to be private discomfort and become a jurisdictional fact.
Ziani handed over the ship's papers. The official read slowly, returned two sheets, kept one long enough to copy a notation, then asked about the passengers by name and purpose.
Adelasia gave merchant business. Odelin gave ecclesiastical visitation and records.
Orsino said he was a locksmith and metalworker traveling with clients.
Ysoria identified herself as a courier. Bertran said armed escort.
Niccolò said clerk and factor's representative.
When it came to Lucetta, she said, "Documentary inquiry concerning property in private custody."
The official looked up. "Whose property?"
"That is part of the inquiry."
His expression suggested that he considered this answer both irritating and familiar. "Then you may find our courts busy."
"We hope not to trouble them."
"Everyone hopes that before landing."
He returned the papers to Ziani and gestured toward a berth on the eastern quay. "You will wait there. No unloading until the quay clerk enters you. If the injured man develops fever, you report it. If he dies, you report that sooner."
Naldo watched the boat pull away. "A hospitable city."
Odelin said, "He has likely seen men conceal illness because detention costs money."
"I still prefer priests."
"That judgment proves your fever has begun."
Stella Maris entered under shortened sail.
The harbor changed around them once they passed between the towers.
From outside it had appeared compact; within, its channels and quays unfolded into separate basins, slips, landings, and rows of warehouses.
The smell thickened—salt fish, damp grain, tar, wood smoke, horse dung from carts on the quay, bilge water, onions, wool, and hot stone.
Men shouted from cranes. A bell rang from somewhere inside the walls.
Two mule carts waited beneath an awning while clerks counted sacks.
Armed town watchmen stood near a customs post beneath a painted board.
Naldo forgot his foot long enough to lean forward.
"There," he said.
Bertran followed his gaze. "What?"
"The lower quay. See the sheds with blue doors? Behind them the lane rises. If a man wanted to move a coffer from water to a house without crossing the main customs yard, he would use that lane."
Ziani said, "If he wanted to be hanged for avoiding dues."
"Only if he were caught."
"Your moral education remains incomplete."
"My education was practical."
Their berth lay beside a stone quay broad enough for two carts to pass.
The quay clerk arrived with two assistants, inspected Ziani's manifest, counted visible cargo, and accepted a fee with the bored dignity of a man who believed all ships had been invented solely to produce paperwork for him.
By the time he permitted passengers to go ashore, the sun stood well above the wall.
Bertran divided them before Lucetta could propose that everyone go everywhere at once.
"Adelasia, Lucetta, Niccolò and Odelin to the merchant quarter first. Orsino with them until we know whether anyone can identify the coffer. Ysoria finds lodging and the land gates. Naldo stays here."
Naldo opened his mouth.
Bertran held up a hand. "You said you were useful in warehouses. You will be. Not before you can put weight on that foot for ten steps without lying about it."
"I can put weight on it."
"Then do ten steps."
Naldo glared at him.
"That is what I thought. You stay with Ziani, learn the harbor from men who work it, and ask questions without making it sound like questions. That is not being made useless. It is using the part of you that still functions."
Naldo's expression remained resentful, but less wounded. "If I find more than you do, I want witnesses."
"You will have an entire ship."
They went ashore carrying only what they needed.
Bertran kept the Notary's Key beneath his clothing.
Orsino carried the other two in separate wrappings, one on his person and one in a locked tool case that looked too ordinary to attract attention.
Lucetta carried no key. She carried copies, notes, and the small burden of knowing that whoever searched her satchel might assume the entire expedition lived inside it.
The first Varesi address took them to a narrow house above a shop selling imported cloth.
The present tenant had no Varesi connection and resented losing five minutes of business to dead men.
The second address led to a courtyard where an old warehouse had become three smaller storerooms. A cooper there remembered the name only because it appeared in an old rent dispute copied into the property book.
That reference sent them to a municipal clerk responsible for property transfers.
By noon they had learned that Pietro Varesi had possessed, leased, or guaranteed property in four different parts of the harbor over thirty years, and that none of it could yet be tied securely to the coffer.
"This is what prosperous men do to history," Lucetta said as they stood beneath the arcade outside the clerk's chamber. "They distribute themselves among too many documents."