Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (44 page)

The band continued to blare out from the walls as the Afentiko led the group to his own residence, the former palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John, the crusading order that had ruled Rhodes for over two centuries. The palace was less a palace than a broad-shouldered Gallic fort that hulked just below the highest point of the city, covered with the blazons of the conquerors. The building seemed a foreign imposition—built in the heart of a Byzantine city, the palace was a military structure that could have been dropped into the city straight from France, a fact that reflected the hierarchy of the Hospitallers themselves, who came from many nations but were usually led by a Frenchman.

Yet the gate, with its towers, was magnificent, and as Foscari passed through it he noted not only the blazon of some half-forgotten Grand Master, but also the name of Benito Mussolini, who during his own heyday had rebuilt the palace—though not, Foscari assumed, personally.

Beyond the gate was a large courtyard, or drill field, surrounded by buildings that looked very much like barracks. Foscari's heart gladdened at the small party awaiting him, their finery glittering in the sun of the courtyard.

Smiling, he doffed his cap to the Afentiko's family and approached. He took the hands of Serafina Kanellis and smiled into her deep blue eyes, and kissed her on both cheeks.

“Contessa, I myself perceive you remain as lovely as the day of your marriage,” he said, employing the redundant subject pronouns of their native
Venexiàn
.

“You yourself are kind,” Serafina said, in the same language.

Foscari looked at the two girls, fourteen and twelve, who curtsied.

“The young ladies they grow in beauty,” Foscari said. And it was true, Efimia and Anastasia had both inherited their mother's chiseled patrician looks—though Efimia, the eldest, seemed also to have got a dose of her father's burly build.

She might well grow to have the face of a goddess on the body of a middleweight boxer,
Foscari thought,
in which case any man in her life would have to beware.

He turned to look at the seven-year-old boy who stood, hands braced defiantly on hips, and grinned up at him.

“And the
puteleto
he thrives, clear enough,” Foscari said.

“Go
arancioneroverdi
!” the boy shouted, raising a fist. “Go winged lions! Gooooooooal!”

“Goooooal!” Foscari echoed.

Thanks to his Venetian mother, young Nikolaos had been raised a ferocious partisan of Unione Venezia, the greatest and most glorious football team in all the world.

It further struck Foscari that Nikolaos was wearing a tunic and trunks that strongly resembled the orange-black-green colors worn by his favorite team.

“We will ourselves kick the ball soon,” he promised the boy.

Serafina smiled and touched his arm. “You yourself bring news from the Rialto?” she asked.

“I myself have, madonna. And I also myself bring letters.”

“We shall ourselves speak at dinner,” Serafina said.

When the Afentiko's first wife had died fifteen years ago, it had been Foscari who suggested that Kanellis enhance the then new Venetian alliance by choosing a second wife from the Republic. When the Afentiko seemed interested in the idea, Foscari had then promoted the fortunes of the lovely, well-educated, twenty-two-year-old Serafina Zentil.

She was the child of an old Venetian noble family, one of those who had social prestige but no political power, and who still clung to their pretensions and their decayed ancestral palazzos. As a class they'd expected to step into their old roles after the Change, and fully intended to run everything again; but they'd reckoned without the city's mayor and administration, who back in 1998 had been Communists. Thanks to the Communists' firm refusal to stand aside for the old families, the nobles had been kept from power, and an orphan from the working-class island of Giudecca had a chance to rise to the rank of Ammiraglio.

Foscari considered himself a good Communist. Not that he believed in Marx—with no industrial base there were no industrial workers, there was no bourgeoisie to rise against because everyone was poor and near starvation. Foscari's brand of Communism consisted of making sure that the poor kids got a fair shake, that all adult citizens were allowed to vote, that state offices were filled on the basis of merit, and that power wasn't handed to a bunch of inbred nitwits.

Nevertheless the old nobility had its uses. The Afentiko was flattered by the idea of marriage to a woman who could call herself “contessa,” especially a contessa who was beautiful and nearly thirty years younger than himself. Serafina, for her own part, had quickly seen the advantages of marrying the master of an island republic, particularly when the alternative was to spend the rest of her life in a damp, dark, crumbling structure slowly sinking into the lagoon.

The marriage seemed happy, and that happiness had promoted Giustinian Foscari's career and given him the command in the Eastern Mediterranean, where managing Serafina, her husband, and the alliance had become his principal responsibility.

After the meeting with Serafina came a feast in the refectory of the palace. The fires had been lit as soon as the lookouts in the city had seen Venetian sails floating up over the horizon, and the cooking had been going on all day. Foscari shared a long trestle table with his officers, with the Afentiko and his family, the Archbishop, Archiploiarchos Georgallis, and members of the Rhodian government and military.

The meal had started with formal toasts made with glasses of ouzo, each of which had to be drained on the spot. With the ouzo came mezedes, appetizers of olives, tzatziki, goat ribs, sardines, sausage, fish roe, anchovies, brains, skewered meats, and pitaroudia, the chickpea fritter that was a local specialty. After this came main courses—the special moussaka of the island, sea bream and red mullet grilled with oregano and cumin, lamb chops grilled with oregano, garlic, and lemon, cheeses, octopus, baked Cretan potatoes, salads, rabbit stewed in red wine with pearl onions, Smyrna meatballs, red cabbage slaw, lamb marinated in honey and baked underground in the style of the Klepht guerrillas, and hilopites, a local pasta served two ways, with tomato sauce and in a hearty chicken soup.

Clearly, nearly thirty-two years after the Change, the island was no longer in danger of starvation.

With the main dishes came wines—red, white, and pink—and along with the wine more toasts. Fortunately it was not customary to drain the cup of wine at each toast.

The Knights Hospitallers, who had eaten in this hall for centuries, had probably never seen such a glorious meal.

Foscari's crews were being feasted as well, on the lovely beaches on the north end of the island.

Conversation in the refectory was polyglot. Foscari and Serafina could speak their native
Venexiàn
, and also converse in Italian, which was a separate though closely related language. The Afentiko was a native Greek speaker and knew some Italian, and though Foscari knew a fair amount of Greek, most of his conversation with Kanellis and his staff took place in English, even though there was no native English speaker in the room, or possibly on the island. English remained the international language because no other nation had achieved sufficient political dominance to force its tongue on anyone else.

Though if Foscari had anything to say about it,
Venexiàn
would be the language of the Eastern Mediterranean for centuries to come.

Foscari gave Serafina news of home and of her family, and to the Afentiko he spoke of the possibility of opening a pilgrimage route to the Holy Land. The pilgrim trade had provided vast profits to Venice throughout the Middle Ages, and now Italy and other nations had recovered to the point where they might have enough surplus wealth to take up pilgrimage again.

“Where would these pilgrims go, exactly?” asked the Afentiko. “Jerusalem is abandoned—no water.”

The Middle East had seen one of the greatest tragedies of the Change. Outside distant and backward Yemen, the cities and towns of the arid region lived almost entirely on fossil water, and once the electricity was gone, the water could no longer be pumped. People had died very, very quickly, and in appalling numbers.

“You survived here with your cisterns,” Foscari said. “The Holy Land is not without rainfall. And there is the river Jordan, of course, and other watercourses.”

The Afentiko tugged his beard. “There is Cyprus,” he said. “There is Spiridon. Between here and the Holy Land.”

“Do you think Spiridon is foolish enough to fight Venice? Our forty-third galley is being built in the Arsenale even now.”

“Ah,” said the Afentiko. “Your miraculous Arsenale.” There was a touch of envy in his words.

The Black Annunciation was the reason that Venice had survived the Change, but the Arsenale was the reason it had reclaimed its empire.

The Arsenale had been founded at the beginning of the twelfth century, and had been the world's first industrial plant, all for making ships and boats. Purpose-built structures were erected to make rope, cut timber, cast cannon, fashion oars, weave sails, boil pitch, bend timber frames. All forty-five hectares of the Arsenale were enclosed by a strong ten-meter wall, the only part of Venice that had been fortified. At its height in the late Middle Ages it could launch one fully equipped warship per day, built assembly-line style out of prefabricated parts.

The Arsenale had been converted to other uses in the late twentieth century, being used as an army base, a museum, an exhibition hall—but it had never ceased to make boats, and on the day of the Annunciation, all the old buildings were still standing, safe within their powerful walls, and still under military guard.

After the Change, the Arsenale was put to use converting every motor vessel in the area to sail or oar power. The sea and the lagoon would provide the protein necessary to keep the population alive, and anyone with access to a boat became a fisherman.

But supplies of cordage and sailcloth were limited, and when they ran out they needed to be manufactured. So a traveling exhibit of modern art was chucked out of the old ropewalk, the museum emptied, and the Arsenale's ancient manufacturing centers were brought again to life.

Sailcloth remained a problem, because the output of an entire village, for an entire year, would create but a single sail—as long as the looms were hand or foot powered. So barges were anchored in the flow of the Brenta and Bacchiglione rivers, each flanked by paddle wheels that powered large, industrial-sized looms, all components of which had been ripped from industrial museums or crafted in the Arsenale.

Inexpensive cloth led to increased demands for raw materials: wool, cotton, flax, hemp. These had to be traded for, or the areas where they were grown brought into Venetian influence. So the first expeditionary forces were sent from Venice onto the mainland, to secure the food and resource-producing areas of the Veneto. The Veneto, like all Italy, was dominated by medieval walled towns and hilltop castles; but many of the surviving inhabitants were eager to rejoin civilization, and the rest were too few, or too disorganized, to use their defenses wisely. Venetian forces triumphed everywhere they marched.

Venice had been a city filled with ancient arms and armor, all sitting in museums or displayed in the old palazzos of the nobility. The sheer amount of arcane weaponry helped first to maintain order, then to expand the influence of the city. Only the Pope, with his Swiss Guard who actually knew how to use their halberds and great swords, could field a comparable force.

For the first decade or so Venice depended on its fleets of converted motor craft to carry its trade and transport its armies. But in time the Arsenale produced its first purpose-built warship, built on the pattern perfected in the Middle Ages with flourishes added by modern engineers.

At present the Arsenale was far from producing the warship-a-day that had marked its prime. Such a schedule required a greater surplus of raw materials than was currently available, and a nation that was less precariously placed than at present.

But trade had followed in the wake of its warships. There had been no piracy after the Change for the simple reason that there was no seaborne trade to plunder: but when hulls began plying the seas again, other ships dashed out to acquire the contents of those hulls. Those who had survived through cannibalism were hardly going to stop at piracy.

The fleet was sent after the pirates, but there were logistical problems. A twenty-four-meter-long galley with a crew of two hundred and forty couldn't carry much food or water, and there was no room aboard to sleep the entire crew at once: normally the galleys were drawn up on the beach at night, and the hull rested alongside its slumbering oarsmen. A safe harbor every thirty or forty kilometers was a necessity, and so Venice found itself establishing settlements and forts along the Adriatic, mostly on islands like Hvar and Corc˘ula where there were safe harbors.

Split was on a defensible peninsula, and Dubrovnik's old town already possessed splendid walls. All these places had once been a part of the Empire of Venice, and now they rejoined, usually with the consent of the inhabitants.

Pirates in the Adriatic were exterminated with admirable efficiency and ruthlessness. Farther south the Republic absorbed Corfu and the other Ionian islands. Foscari and his mentors and allies had always pushed a forward policy: the more area controlled by Venice now, the firmer footing the empire would stand on later. And so far the forward policy had prevailed. Crete was too large, and would have to come later, as would the Morea—or, as the locals called it, the Peloponnese.

And Foscari had another dream—to advance up the Dardanelles to Constantinople, the greatest city of the ancient world, the glittering prize that would unlock the wealth of the Black Sea . . .

Yet all that was later. Venice was well organized but overstretched, and though its hand was felt in many places, its touch was light. No one was more aware than Foscari of the Republic's fragility.