Winter in the Republic of Venice was not as bleak as winter in the Holy Roman Empire. It was still wet and cold, which made repair work a little more difficult than at other times.
This fact was relevant. The Casa Montescue was busy getting a facelift. True, the great house of Montescue was technically bankrupt twice over, but that was a good reason to do it now. "If we don't do it," said Lodovico Montescue calmly to his granddaughter Katerina, "everyone will think we are down to our last ducat."
Kat shook her head at him, smiling. "But Grandpapa, we are down to our last ducat!" She couldn't bring herself to be hugely worried about it. Come financial ruin or any other disaster, she had Marco. And it seemed, now that the feud between Valdosta and Montescue was finally healed, that Lodovico Montescue, once the Colleganza-genius of Venice, had found his verve once again.
He chucked her chin. "Cara mia, if we have the place looking too shabby, then we'll have our creditors on our necks. Watch. We start spending money, they'll back off. We've got political connections, even if not business. Something will turn up."
She shook her head and sighed at him, but without the despair that had plagued her, waking and sleeping, for so many years. "All that worries me is where the money to pay for this lot is going to come from."
"If need be, we'll borrow it," he said, making Kat raise her eyes. "But watch. Things will begin to right themselves." He stretched out his big, liver-spotted hands and looked at the slightly bulbous knuckles. "Marco has not come yet?"
"He said he'd be here by the terce bell." Kat felt the warmth of knowing this lift her.
"Good." Lodovico nodded his satisfaction. "I want him to work on these old hands again. I'll swear that boy of yours has magic in his fingers, never mind his skills as a doctor."
"He is going to be great physician!" said Kat defensively, trying very hard not to think about the other things that he was. Magician, for one. Vehicle for—something else—for another.
Lodovico chuckled. "I don't disagree with you, girl. I'm becoming very fond of the boy myself. How is the annulment of that marriage of his going?"
Kat made a face; this was the one shadow on her days, for she and Marco could not wed until he had been rid of the wife-in-name-only he had taken out of a misplaced sense of honor and obligation to his benefactor, his wife's brother Petro Dorma. "Slowly. That Angelina! One moment it's a nunnery, and becoming a saint . . ."
Lodovico snorted with laughter. "Saint Puttana. I'll believe all the girls in the House of the Red Cat turned Siblings first."
Kat grinned, in spite of herself. "You shouldn't use language like that in front of me, Grandpapa. Anyway, one minute she's all set on being a saint and a martyr. The next she's screaming at poor Petro that he wants to lock her away."
"And if you didn't hate her guts you might almost feel sorry for her," said her grandfather, still amused.
Kat shook her head at him. "She was, and is, a spoiled, selfish brat. And stupid on top of it. She got herself pregnant and got poor Marco to claim it was his to save her face, and then tried to run away with her lover anyway! And she's still trying to manipulate things in her own favor, no matter what that does to people around her. And yes, I sometimes hate her. But at least I haven't taken out an assassination contract on her head."
Lodovico acknowledged the hit with a wry smile. "I was wrong that time. And Marco and Benito lived through it. Besides, if she delays any more with this annulment I wouldn't bet on you not doing just the same."
They were in a small salon just off the front hall, and thus the pounding of the great Lion-headed knocker was easily audible.
Lodovico chuckled. "He's eager, this young man of yours. Early, too."
A faint frown creased Kat's brow. That was a very forceful knocking. She'd come down to wait for Marco often enough to know he used the knocker tentatively. Maybe . . . bad news. Or good news, finally, about the annulment of his marriage to Angelina. She hastened out into the hallway.
White-haired old Giuseppe had not announced the visitor, because he was gaping at the two of them. They were . . . enormous. They loomed over Giuseppe in the way that the Church of Saint Hypatia Hagia Sophia loomed over the square outside it. Giuseppe and Kat would have been terrified, had the two blond giants not looked like two very lost little boys, crushing fur hats in their hands, hoping for a welcome.
"Pardon," said one, in Italian so atrocious that only familiarity with Erik Hakkonsen's accent enabled Kat to understand him. "But is this the dwelling of the family Montescue?"
"It is," said Kat, blinking at him. It wasn't just the accents of these—boys?—that was outlandish. It was every inch of them, clad as they were in garments like nothing she had ever seen before. Oh, in part, they resembled some sort of Norselander or Icelander; Venice saw enough of those coming in and out of their ports. But not all their garments were fur and homespun woolen. They also rejoiced in leather leggings with fringes of a kind that no Icelander had ever boasted, and there were beads and feathers braided into their hair, which was shaven on the sides, but long everywhere else. And in sheathes at their sides, each of them wore a weapon that Kat recognized. Erik Hakkonsen favored that kind of little axe or hatchet—a tomahawk, it was called.
"Ah, good." The speaker's face cleared. "And is the clan chieftain here? Chief-Lodi-Ludo—"
"Blessed Jesu, boy, don't mangle my name further!" Lodovico growled, as he limped into the hallway. "I am Lodovico Montescue, of Casa Montescue. Who the devil are you?"
Both boys drew themselves up with immense dignity.
"Gulta and Bjarni Thordarson, at your service," the speaker said, and both bowed. "Sent we were, by Clan Thordarson, a trade alliance to make. From Vinland we come, for that purpose." A corded oiled-sailcloth bundle was at the man's feet, and he used the hatchet to slice open the flax cords binding it. It opened, spilling out fine woven cloth, dyed in rich hues. Not wool; something finer, Kat thought. The weaving was done in geometric patterns like nothing she had ever seen, and when the boy bent down and pulled up a corner and handed it to her, she stroked it. And the touch—
"Grandpapa!" she cried involuntarily. "It is as soft as silk, but silk made into wool!"
"It is alpaca," said the one who had not yet spoken, diffidently. "And this is cotton."
He bent and pulled out a snowy white piece and held it to her for her inspection. She touched it as well—cotton she knew. The Egyptian and Indian cloth was shockingly expensive, so much so that only the wealthy could afford the gauzes and cambrics made from it. This was certainly cotton.
"We have these, and other things. Furs, spices. We wish a trade alliance with Clan Montescue to make," the first boy said proudly. "Carlo had said—"
At first, Kat wasn't sure she heard him correctly. "Pardon—who?" she managed.
The boy knitted his brows in puzzlement. "You know him not? Carlo, of Clan Montescue? Is he not here? But he had said—"
And that was when all hell broke loose.
Marco walked in at just that moment, which complicated matters further. Kat was weeping, Lodovico shaking the poor Vinlander boy in a way that would have made his teeth rattle had he not been as big as he was, and yelling at the top of his lungs, while the other boy looked utterly bewildered. Somehow Marco managed to separate Lodovico from his victim, get them all herded into a quiet room, and (relatively) calmed down.
With Marco's prompting—while Kat clung numbly to his hand—the boys managed to piece together part, at least, of what had happened to her father.
His vessel had been taken by pirates, who had, in turn, sold him to some strange Vinlander tribe in the south of the continent. He had escaped, or been rescued, by some other tribe—the boys were rather vague as to which, or how it had happened—and they in their turn had traded him up the coast until he came into the hands of the Thordarsons.
Now, they had had to pay a great deal for Carlo Montescue, and by their custom and law, he apparently discovered that he couldn't just find a ship and come home. No, he had to earn his freedom; until then, he was what they called a "thrall." Not exactly a slave, but certainly not free, and branded as such by the iron ring around his neck. The boys were very matter-of-fact about it, and although Kat could have wept even harder with vexation, the part of her that was a Venetian trader to the core could see their point.
At any rate, it soon was proved that Carlo was going to earn his freedom in record time, for exactly that reason. Records. Record-keeping and accounting, at which, apparently, the Vinlanders were shockingly bad.
Lodovico grunted at that. "So not all that cursing I did when he was a boy was entirely wasted."
Evidently not. "Our clan-folk have holdings down on the valley of the Mother of Rivers, as well as trading posts at Where-Waters-Meet upon the eastern coast," the first boy—Gulta, that was—said proudly. "Carlo made our profits to rise like a swan in flight! It was he who said that a trading mission to Europe and Venice and perhaps the silk houses of Constantinople might pay a very rich dividend. And we sent him home to await us and prepare the way, while we gathered goods and chose who to go."
"But he never arrived." The loss in her grandfather's face made Kat gulp down her own tears. If she began crying, he might not be able to hold himself together.
It was a crumb of comfort that the boys looked stricken, too. "We sent him home!" Gulta half-protested, as if he thought they doubted him.
Lodovico managed to reach out and pat the boy on the hand. "We believe you, lad," he replied, his voice cracking a little. "But a great deal can happen between Vinland and Venice."
They were all thinking it. Including shipwreck.
All but Marco, it seemed, who stuck out his chin stubbornly. "Not shipwreck," he said firmly. "I can promise you that. Whatever has delayed him, it isn't that. And until I hear otherwise, I will be sure it is only that—delay."
It wasn't sane, it wasn't rational, but Kat took heart from his surety—and so did her grandfather, who sat up straighter and nodded.
"By Saint Raphaella, Valdosta, you shame me," he said. "If you, a stranger to our family, can have such faith, how am I to doubt? Right enough. My son has survived so much else, how can he not return home to us?"
"Exactly so, sir," Marco agreed, giving Kat's hand a squeeze.
Now Lodovico turned to the Vinlanders. "And that being so, young sirs, please: Let us hear your plans, and how Casa Montescue means to figure into them."
To anyone but a Venetian, that statement would have seemed callous in the extreme. Here, Lodovico's son had literally been raised from the dead, only to vanish again, and he was discussing trade alliances?
But Kat knew, and Marco surely knew, that this was perhaps the bravest thing that her grandfather could have done. There was nothing, or next to nothing, any of them could do to help Carlo, wherever he was. And this trade agreement was her father's hard-won legacy to the House of Montescue. Should they now throw it away because he had vanished again? That would be like taking gold he had sacrificed to send them, and flinging it into the canals and starving, setting his sacrifice at naught because he was not there himself.
No! She and her grandfather would trust to God and her father's eminent good sense and cleverness, and fight to preserve what he had given them.
Lying in bed, late that night, Kat realized her father's ambitions were going to cost a great deal. Yes, the profits from trade in Vinland goods, particularly this cotton, could be very, very lucrative. Egyptian and Indian cottons were only for the very rich. Cotton was as expensive, or more so, than silk, because picking the seeds out was such a laborious process. Either the Vinlanders had some process to remove the seeds or labor must be dirt cheap over there. Still, however it was done their prices would bring the fabric within reach of the merely well-to-do. But it would require offices and warehouses in either Flanders or Denmark or Ireland to meet up with the Norse-Celtic Atlantic trade ships. The family her father had tied in with were of Icelandic stock. The Icelanders tended to run a Denmark-Vinland journey. It was not a good route for serious volumes of merchandise. It was too slow, with too many overland expenses and tolls and tariffs. Yes, from a port somewhere on the Atlantic coast, they could and would sell to northern Europe. But the east and markets on the Mediterranean would be best served by meeting the Venetian Atlantic trading convoy and selling out of Venice. But that meant warehouses. Local agents. And money. Lots of money.
Are we in the fire, still? she wondered, before she drifted off to sleep, or have we at least climbed back into the frying pan?