Gallipoli, April 1440
The Pelagios stood propped in the dockyard shed, her port side open to the morning. A few men worked the lower seams from a stage slung under the bilge, and a boy went back and forth to the pitch fire at the shed's mouth with a ladle too large for him.
Nestor came in out of the light with his hat under his arm. Matteo was aft under the counter with the master shipwright, one hand flat against a plank.
"Well?" Nestor said.
"Two days." Matteo came out from under the hull, wiping his palm down his thigh. "They opened her for the one plank and found the two behind it soft. Good oak on the face, cheese behind it. Before you say anything, we had her repaired at Chios last year, and it seems the wood they put in was never properly dried. Can happen."
"You told the Admiral Friday."
"The wood had another opinion, Nestor."
Nestor walked the length of her, looking up at the new strakes, pale against the old. Two days would still put them at Mytilene by Saint George's, Smyrna before the month was out. The Admiral wanted both ships south, the dispatches delivered to the Gattilusio, then the summer with the squadron at Smyrna.
"Two days won't hurt us," he said. "The Helena is watered, and the dispatches are aboard already."
"Then we are rich in time." Matteo took a nail out of his mouth and set it on the frame beside him. "Good. There is a widow at Rhodes who has been waiting for me since October, and if this ship had sunk under me on the way south I would have died owing her, and she would have cursed my soul out of purgatory and back."
"We call at Mytilene first. I could mention the widow to your wife over dinner."
"You could. You'd eat that dinner standing in the street." Matteo looked up at the hull. "She owes me money, the widow. Whatever you're imagining would have cost me less."
The horn went on the seaward tower, one long note, and then the second tower answered it. They walked out to the shed's mouth. Up the strait from the north came three heavily laden round-ships with two escort galleys. The leading ship was already shortening sail as she came in for the mole.
"That'll be the Italy convoy," Matteo said.
They watched her come in. A dozen or more monks stood along the rail in dark habits. Four of them stood apart near the quarter, dark-skinned men in heavy wool, watching the towers slide past. A boat came away before the anchor was down. A man in chancery grey went ashore with a satchel held tight against the spray and climbed the water steps.
"Abyssinians," Matteo said, nodding at the rail. "From beyond Egypt. I have seen their kind at Alexandria, going up to Jerusalem with the caravans. A long way from home, those four."
"Abyssinia." Nestor watched the four men for a moment. "I have never met a man from that far south." He turned back into the shed. "Two days, then. I will tell the Admiral the season starts on Saint George's."
They went back to the hull. The caulking irons started again, and for a while they watched the men work.
A boy went past with the ladle. "Good thing the list kept us together this season. Half the winter I thought the Emperor would send you to Genoa, the way he kept asking about that cloth."
"Three times he asked me the price of a bolt. Three." Matteo shook his head. "The Emperor wants to know what a deckhand pays for his trousers. I still don't understand it."
"He counts everything. Everyone knows that."
"Then he can count without me. I'm not going to Genoa, orders or no orders. I have bills there I'd rather leave across the sea, and buying looms is trader's work. Let him send a trader."
"I wouldn't mind if he forgot the whole thing," Nestor said. "Never saw much in that cloth. Ugly, and it fades inside a season."
"It outlasts wool three to one. It dries fast. That's not ugly. That's a sailor's cloth."
An officer from the tower found them an hour later, out of breath from the stairs and the mole. The Admiral wanted both captains. At once.
Matteo looked at Nestor, then took his coat from the nail.
The Admiral's working room was in the great tower, one floor below the council chamber. A table, the chart of the seas with the dividers lying open on it, a lamp burned too long into the morning. The packet on the table had been opened, the seal broken through, and Laskaris had the leaves of it squared under one hand.
"Shut the door."
Nestor shut it.
"You are off the season's list," Laskaris said. "Both of you."
Matteo laughed, one short note. "Genoa. I knew it."
"Farther."
"There is not much farther than Genoa."
"Rhodes," Laskaris said, "to begin with."
"Rhodes is two weeks, there and back."
"Rhodes is where the Pelagios leaves you." Laskaris turned the first leaf. "You sail south as soon as she is ready. At Rhodes you put off your commissions and your colors, and you go on as merchants. A Genoese venture, under his name." A nod at Matteo. "Yours appears nowhere. Cyprus, then Alexandria. Then by whatever roads there are, to the court of the king of the Ethiopians."
Neither of them said anything. Out the shutter a maul was going somewhere in the yard, patient as a heartbeat.
"There is a king of the Ethiopians," Nestor said.
"There is, and the Emperor is writing to him." Laskaris read from the leaf. "A Christian king, beyond the sultan's country. Called in his own tongue Kwestantinos."
"Admiral." Matteo had his thumbs in his belt. "I hold a contract with the fleet. Escort and patrol, it says. It says nothing about Egypt."
"The contract is suspended and the retainer runs on. The venture sails under your name and whatever it clears is yours. The chancery was generous." Laskaris did not look up from the leaf. "Read it yourself if you like." Matteo said nothing. Whatever number he had ready, the Admiral had already passed it.
"Admiral, the squadron goes into the summer two captains short," Nestor said. "And I took the Helena a month ago."
"I wrote the season's list. I know what is on it." Laskaris turned the order so the signature faced them, let it lie there a moment, and turned it back. He went on down the leaf. "You carry a letter under the privy seal and a book from the Emperor's own hand. They go into the king's hand and no other. If the road fails, they come home or they burn. They are not taken."
He slid them across the table. The letter was small and heavy with its seal. The book was wrapped in waxed linen, the size of a lectionary, and Nestor took it and felt the weight of the boards through the cloth and set it down again with more care than he had picked it up.
Laskaris turned the second leaf and went on. "The Emperor sets one task more. On your return you carry seed, of a plant of that country. It is called buna. Fresh, and in number." He set the leaf down and squared it with the others.
"Seed?" Matteo said.
"Yes, seed," Laskaris said. He went to the inner door, opened it, and said a word, and a fourth man came in.
It was the youngest of the four from the convoy rail. His dark wool had been brushed, his staff was outside the door, and a scrip hung at his side with the strap worn bright. He stopped, and bowed to the three of them together.
"Brother Didimos," Laskaris said. "His country is the king's country. His brothers sail for Italy tomorrow. He stays, and he goes south with you. He knows the roads past Egypt and the groves the seed comes from." He glanced at the leaf again, and said the word in the middle of his Greek, buna, and the monk's head came up at it, the one word he had caught, and he touched the scrip at his side and nodded once.
"His Greek is a dozen words," Laskaris said. "His Arabic is good." He looked at Matteo. "You know Arabic."
"Harbor Arabic. Buy, sell, curse, and be cursed."
"That will do."
Matteo said something then in Arabic, slow, and Didimos answered, three words, and for the first time his face moved.
"The factor at Chios writes your credit through Alexandria," Laskaris went on. "Enough to move, not enough to draw eyes. You," to Nestor, "travel as his partner. A Greek merchant of Mytilene, under Gattilusio protection. The islands are full of such men and nobody counts them. Letters home go through the factor, if letters can travel at all. Word by autumn, if God is kind. Yourselves within the year."
"And if the year passes?" Nestor said.
Laskaris looked at the chart. "Then it passes."
"The Helena?" Nestor said.
"Stays at Smyrna, as planned."
Through the shutter came the sound of the mauls. Six keels stood in frame along the slips. Other men would take them down the ways.
"One more thing." Laskaris set the leaves down. " The sultan has kept war galleys at Salines since the autumn. Fourteen, at the last counting. Whatever your papers say, you water at Limassol or you stand off Cyprus altogether."
"Fourteen galleys sit right across our road," Matteo said. "A trader out of Rhodes waters, boarded by the sultan's men. Our papers had better be very good."
"Then we stand clear of Cyprus," Nestor said. "Water somewhere north of it, and make the Egypt crossing long."
"Make it however you like, so long as you make it." Laskaris folded the orders closed. "Go and load your ship."
Two days later the Pelagios came off the shed in the morning, her new seams still smelling of pitch. Water and biscuit went aboard first, then the trade: bales of paper out of the City presses, and a long bundle sewn in canvas that two men carried up the plank between them.
Didimos came down the mole with his staff and his scrip, went aboard without help, and found the place forward where a man is least in the way.
Matteo came last, and came up the plank counting the water casks along the waist with his eye, out of habit, and caught Nestor watching him do it, and stopped. Stratis had the current figured and the hands at the lines before Nestor reached the afterdeck.
The wind stood fair out of the north, and on the mole a few of the yard men stopped work to watch her go. "Mytilene," Nestor said. "Two days, if it holds." The lines came off. Matteo came to the rail beside him and looked back at the towers going small over the wake. "You told me once you wanted to see Alexandria."
"Next time I will be more careful what I wish for."