No one was present as Gontran snuck across the silent campo and, with the two nails from Monselice in his pocket, picked the locked doors of the Procuratore’s red palazzo, gaining a small amount of lockpicking XP that made little difference to his Master Lockpicking Skill (8/10).
Easy peasy, he thought as the lock clicked open.
Gontran snuck through the heavy doors of oak carved to resemble the lions and peacocks that guarded paradise. The doors quietly groaned on bronze hinges with their green patina of rust. Inside, he found a stone hallway which was somehow even darker than the campo behind him.
Darkness of the tomb. The darkness of death. But when you’re dead, you don’t see anything. You don’t perceive. There’s no darkness to see. It’s not a darkness or an absence of light. It’s an absence of sense. Of mind. A senselessness, a thoughtlessness, even as your body just lies there, and the world goes on around it like in one of those movies where the camera holds still in the middle of a city and everything speeds up and blurs past something that doesn’t move. One of those mondo movies. No different from sleeping dreamlessly for hours and remembering nothing.
Gontran felt his way along the hallways and parlors, keeping his feet silent, almost holding his breath, listening for people snoring on the other side of closed doors. These doors were only distinguishable by their wooden textures and ornate handles, all of the finest craftsmanship, the most unbelievable opulence. Rich Venetians, what did they love except beauty?
Beauty built upon the backs of slaves.
Any door here could have imprisoned Ra’isa, but to open one risked rousing the guards. Where was she? It was so frustrating! Gontran was so close to finding her and getting out of here. He would have given anything…
Gontran stopped. I am a rich piece of shit. I own a beautiful, expensive new slave. Where do I put her? As far from the street as possible. Away from prying eyes and ears and fingers. I want her all to myself in the safest part of my house.
In the olden days like the ones in which Gontran was trapped, people rich enough to own multistory homes usually lived on the ground floor in case of fire. Their servants lived higher up. The question was: had the Procuratore sequestered Ra’isa near his bedroom, or was she among the servants’ quarters? He must have been married—excepting monks and nuns, almost everyone above the age of thirteen was married—but his wife would probably be jealous of someone as lively and beautiful as Ra’isa. There was even a risk that the Procuratore’s wife would hurt Ra’isa or even sell her in secret. Plus, you didn’t want to sleep near a dangerous slave, even if she was chained up, since she might escape and then kill you while you were dreaming of fucking her. That meant she must have been locked upstairs. Did the Procuratore have a eunuch or two to guard her? No, eunuch guards were an eastern thing. In Venice, they just used eunuchs in choirs.
Gontran found a wide marble stairway and climbed it as noiselessly as a cat stalking a mouse. On the second floor, he was afraid to try any of the doors. More than likely, these rooms were full of guards, servants, flunkies. No Important Person could be complete without a gaggle of paid fools swarming him wherever he went, pretending to do vital work on his behalf.
One door even had golden light glowing around its edges. The instant Gontran noticed this, someone rumbled about inside. As Gontran darted out of the way, the door creaked open, and an armored guard stepped out holding a torch. Yawning, smacking his lips, the guard squinted with exhaustion and stumbled along the hallway, so tired he missed Gontran, who was pressed against the wall, holding still and keeping silent in the darkness. His stealth XP ticked up.
When the guard went downstairs, Gontran ascended to the third floor with the silence of a panther. There he went to the hallway’s end and unlocked the only door he found there, slipping inside just as the guard checked that floor on his patrol. Thankfully, the guard tried none of the doors. It was apparently enough to check the hallways. Gontran heaved a quiet sigh of relief as the guard returned to the second floor. The guard could be heard shutting the door to his own room and groaning as he fell into his bed.
A chain rattled in the darkness and tightened around Gontran’s throat. He tried to pull it off, but he couldn’t breathe, and whoever gripped the chain was too strong.
“Who are you?” a familiarly accented voice whispered into his ear.
“Gontran!” he rasped, expelling the last breath in his throat.
“Gontran?”
Ra’isa released the chain, and Gontran fell to his knees, rasping for breath and clutching his throat.
“Gontran,” Ra’isa whispered. Her muscular calloused hands helped him up and felt his face. “Is it you?”
He lunged into the darkness and kissed her, feeling her amazing body beneath her cloak. She kissed him back. His charisma XP increased to 80/100. It always increased whenever you could get anyone to like you. Soon he might even level up to Professional Charismatic (8/10).
“Just thought I’d stop by,” he whispered to Ra’isa, forcing himself to pull away. “See if you wanted to get some coffee, maybe catch a movie—”
“Finally!”
He picked the lock to her chains in the dark and freed her, gaining a little XP as he did so. They crept out of the house and into the night—which was turning to day. Gontran was unsure of where to go, but his room above the tavern was too close to the Procuratore’s red palazzo, and he worried at the same time about creeping through Venice, since people were already up and about, and they would remember a mysterious man and woman running together along the narrow streets. It was a city, but one full of spies and nosy busybodies who were all eager to find any excuse to report on one another. When the Procuratore realized that his precious cargo had escaped, and announced a hefty reward for any information leading to Ra’isa’s safe return, the thought of getting rich would transform any Venetian, even the cutest child, into a hunter. The safest thing was to find Gontran’s horse in the stables in Canareggio and get to the mainland—
“Where are you going?” Ra’isa whispered, stopping him after they had put some distance between themselves and the campo. “We must help the others.”
“Where are they?” Gontran said.
“The Arsenale. That is where I saw them. The ship is there, too.”
“Convenient.”
“Gontran—we do not leave Venice until we find every crew member, do you understand? We do not leave anyone behind.”
“Listen, I don’t know who you think you are, but I don’t take orders from—”
She kissed him and, for a moment, even grasped him inside his pants. The breath caught in his throat. Then she pulled back and looked straight into his eyes with nothing but light shining in her own.
“Alright,” he sighed. “Whatever you say, boss.”
She smiled. “I thought you will change your mind. You are a good man, even if you are bad sometimes. Now we must hurry. The monster soon awakes.”
She turned and, taking his hand, guided him to the Arsenale. This was the open-air factory occupying the eastern edge of Rivoalto. It was huge, actually, and took up about a tenth of the city. Workers swarmed this place even early in the morning, the sound of their conversation mixing with hammers pounding wood or clanging metal as saws rushed up and down through enormous logs. The older garzoni (journeymen) sawyers standing on top of the logs, the younger apprendisti (apprentices) below, their eyes blinded, reddened, torn by the sawdust pouring from the blades’ steel teeth, which glowed red from the friction.
Everything could be heard over the walls, towers, and gates that guarded the Arsenale from prying eyes, its trade secrets protected from other Italian city-states. Piles of plywood rattled. Bells rang—not for church, but to announce shift changes, as the appointed watchers eyed the sand flowing in their hourglass bulbs. Black tar glop bubbled in iron cauldrons above whirling infernos as garzoni caulked ships with gummy pitch, building these vessels up from mere plans to keels to ribs to galleys which, upon completion, slid from their moorings into the dirty canal water. No cheers rose when this happened. The Arsenale’s craftsmen could build one ship per day so long as the materials kept coming. Rivers of fresh water and whole countrysides of grain were needed for their gullets alone; thousands of latrines flushed their waste into the sea with the tides. How many blacksmiths forged their tools, how many weavers made their clothes and blankets, how many alewives brewed their beer and allowed their grape juice to ferment into wine? And then, at the end of every day, the craftsmen used barracks-like dormitories to rest their weary bones.
The Arsenale hungered. Right now, the Slavic nations were axing entire pine forests in Dalmatia and the nearer woods of Montello along the Piave, rolling trees down hills and mountains, loading them into galleys, and shipping them here across rivers and seas. Hemp for rope came all the way from a new Venetian trading post established on the other side of the world, near the Sea of Azov. Thousands of slaves were likewise chained in the Balkan Mountains, hacking iron ore that was then blacksmithed here into nails, swords, armor. The cotton woven into sailing canvases was drawn like silkworm silk from the eternal Egyptian fellaheen, who had lined the Nile’s shores with fields and irrigation ditches since before the days of Pharaoh, guarding their flesh from the lash of the sun with headdresses worn over their heads and shoulders like the hoods of white cobras.
As for the Arsenale guildsmen—called the Arsenalotti, “the sons of the Arsenale”—they lived in crowded parishes surrounding the Arsenale itself. Though there were thousands of them, everyone knew everyone else, and thanks to the feudal guild system, no new apprentices were signed on unless current guild members died or retired, with their own male children first in line to replace them. Outsiders would therefore be spotted immediately. Sneaking in would be difficult if not impossible.
Inns and taverns were only present on the Arsenale’s outskirts. Gontran and Ra’isa hid themselves inside one of these after purchasing as much food as they could carry from the market. They were on the second floor, and the room’s windows came with a decent view of narrow streets, canals, even the Arsenale itself, just visible over the towers and crenellated walls. It looked like masts tangled in nets of rigging, their long spars leaning at odd angles, almost like fishing poles dangling over the sea. The wooden bellies of ships rested like beached whales on huge piers, piles of rope were coiled about them like snakes, and yards were stacked with lumber.
Herakleia, me, and Alexios all came from the future, Gontran thought. When we got here, we tried to modernize this world, each in our own way. But the Venetians had already built a huge modern factory without any help from time travelers. They built the future deep in the past. You have to wonder if there’s anything like this anywhere else on Earth. Not outside of Sera. Still, you can see how the Arsenale isn’t quite modern. The guild system holds the Venetians back. Venice still has its feet stuck in medieval mud. Division of labor here isn’t as intense as in modern times. Guildsmen and even peasants have more protections than modern workers. Profit maximization and reinvestment also isn’t as intense here. The market doesn’t dominate every aspect of existence, like in the old world. Eleventh century Venetians don’t have banks, they don’t have insurance, they don’t have limited liability companies or patent law, they don’t have a state that’s willing to bend over backwards to help every businessperson succeed—with fire departments, for instance, public sewage departments, police departments to keep workers under control at home, and professional militaries to keep them under control abroad. You don’t find that shit all together in one place until the nineteenth century—
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“So,” Ra’isa said. “What now?”
She was leaning against the window—her back to the dawn—watching Gontran. Her words startled him. As a merchant, he had been more impressed with the Arsenale than he had realized, losing himself in the details of its construction and operation. For a moment, he even wondered if he was fighting on the right side. No one in the eleventh century was better at making money than the Venetians.
“I guess we should wait,” he said. “They’ll probably sound the alarm when they figure out you’re missing. Then we have to lie low until things cool down. Then—”
“No.” She stepped closer, her eyes fixed on his. “I mean, right now.”
They held each other, kissed, and fell into bed. Ra’isa still wore only the shift the auctioneer had thrown over her broad muscular shoulders the previous afternoon, but Gontran had shoes, pants, mail, a shirt, and a belt with a scabbard. All their clothes they pulled off and threw onto the floor, Gontran’s sword clanking on the wood. Then they lay together and held each other, Gontran kissing Ra’isa’s body, feeling her, and staring at her—unable to believe her beauty.
“I wish we do this sooner,” she whispered. “Twenty times we almost died.”
“Better late than never,” Gontran said.
After some time, she asked: “When did you first notice me?”
“The moment we met,” Gontran said. “Everyone notices you. Every man wants you the instant he sees you. What about you? When did you first notice me?”
“Maybe a few minutes ago.”
Gontran laughed. “Come on.”
“You are a dangerous man, and very handsome and charming. Many women want you. And even some men.”
“Too bad for them.”
When they finished and Gontran was cleaning up, he offered Ra’isa a drink of water. She accepted, and he poured her a cup from the ceramic ewer on the nightstand. As she drank, he made the bed for her, then fell in beside her with his own cup of water. Lying there, he watched the golden clouds curl outside the window, rising like castles in the air, and listened to the chirping swifts. A couple of people were talking in low murmurs in the street just outside. Gontran heard them mention the phrase “prezzo del sale”—salt prices. He shuddered. His own blood and sweat lay in those salt prices.
Ra’isa took his hand and examined it. Tell me she isn’t going to do palmistry. But she had noticed the marks from the manacles on his wrists.
“You too,” she said.
He looked at her. “At least one of us rescued the other.”
“What do you mean?”
“After we ran into the doge, when I woke up, I didn’t even know where I was—”
“I cannot believe you are doing this now.”
“What? What am I doing?”
“You are not the only member of my crew. There are eighty-seven of us. We have mission. You knew the risks.”
“Yeah, but—”
“It is true what Herakleia said about you. You are so individualistic, you care only for yourself.”
“Sometimes that’s the only way to get ahead.”
“Maybe so—maybe for you in the past. But now, Gontran, it will destroy you and everyone around you if you do not change. Can you not see what happened?” She held up his wrist. “How many other people are chained like this right now? How many more are chained to their lords by the debts of their ancestors? We cannot escape by doing what they tell us—by working harder and hoping for the best. And we cannot escape by becoming them. No. There is only one escape. Through each other.”
“I didn’t come here for another political lecture.”
“Like I said, you must learn, or next time you will not be so lucky.”
“I got captured because I was helping the uprising. I escaped on my own—without the uprising’s help.”
“Again I say, millions of others have not been so fortunate.”
“You know, I expected a little more gratitude from you. I risked my life back there to—”
“You have my gratitude. You saved me. In return, I gave you my body—the one that cost thirty-six golden solidi. These breasts, this ass, these legs—like chicken parts—everyone wanted them, and I gave them to you. Now you give something to me. Now we free the crew and leave this evil place.”
“What about us?”
“What do you mean?”
“Once all the excitement dies down, we could leave…”
“Without the crew?”
Gontran nodded. “Yeah.”
“Idiot,” she scoffed. “That is Roman word, is it not? Idiōtēs. Someone who only cares about himself. That is what it means. When crew is free, when we are back on the sea, I will not be your lover, if you talk like this again.”
“Hey, wait a minute. I thought I was your katapan. You can’t talk to me like that. You take orders from me.”
“You got captured. We had an election. I won. I am your katapan now, Gontran Koraki, and you will do as I say.”
He was opening his mouth to answer when frantic bells clanged in the distance. Ra’isa and Gontran looked at each other. Wordlessly they climbed out of bed and dressed. Gontran checked his sword, then the door lock. As for Ra’isa, she had nowhere to hide save under the bed. By then shouting and crashing had engulfed the city. Gontran peaked out the window just in time to spot soldiers running, screaming, knocking over carts of produce, harassing anyone foolish or unlucky enough to still be out there, and going inside every building and yelling about “la schiava oscura”—the dark slave, or “la puttana del Procuratore,” the Procuratore’s bitch. They pulled a Slavic woman outside a mill by her hair and, as she struggled to answer their questions in her thickly accented Venetian, they threw white powder in her face, then shoved her into the canal, where she struggled and gasped, barely able to keep her head above the disgusting water. When she grabbed the shore, one soldier raised his steel boots to stomp her fingers. She flung herself back into the canal just in time and swam to the other side. Breathing heavily, drenched in filth, she clung to the shore, and looked back at the soldiers as they destroyed whatever they could find on the street. One kick from a steel boot was enough to kill an unfortunate hen which had been clucking in the muck.
Soon the soldiers were stomping up the tavern stairs, their steel boots shaking the floor and walls so hard it seemed the whole building might collapse. Now they were on the second floor, throwing open doors and attacking whoever they found inside. They pounded Gontran’s door, wailing like demons, barking more like dogs than men. Gontran threw himself into bed and shut his eyes just as they burst inside. He sat up, pretending to be startled out of sleep, and the soldiers screamed at him—three men, flushed red and drenched in sweat. They hauled Gontran to his feet, shrieked in his ear as loud as they could, and even pressed a sharp knife to his throat. Shaking his head, he answered in Greek, babbling that he didn’t understand. They told him to speak Venetian, and so he repeated—in the vague broken Tuscan dialect—he didn’t understand.
“Io non so, io non so!”
Infuriated, they threw him to the floor and left him, slamming the door with such force that it bounced back from the frame and banged against the wall, marking the wood. Then they stomped down the stairs and returned to the street. Gontran stayed where he was, listening as they trashed other homes and shops and interrogated other unfortunate people. Then Gontran turned to Ra’isa, who was hiding under the bed and watching him with wide eyes.
Once it seemed the soldiers were gone for good, Gontran silently got up and closed the door.
“Some lock,” he whispered.
“Quiet,” she whispered back. “We do not know who listens.”
He peeked out the window. The narrow unpaved passageways below the tavern were silent, as were the canals and the birds. Even the Arsenale had stopped. But every church in Venice was ringing its bells as if a soldier was pressing his sword into the back of every sacristan.
“You’d better stay down there for now,” he whispered to Ra’isa.
She answered by sticking her hand out from under the bed and giving him the thumb’s up.
They waited. The bells were ceaseless. ’Tis the sound of your doom. The holy rapture. Gontran feared doing anything, going anywhere. He was a man of action, and so being stuck in a small room frustrated him. To his surprise, he even found himself longing for books. A good way to pass the time—he needed something difficult to break his brain, something you could really lose yourself in. Look down, you’re in a different world, and when you look up again, it’s a few hours later. Dante’s entire Divine Comedy, in keeping with the current Italian theme of Gontran’s life. A novel like Ulysses or even Finnegans Wake, something that would never stop challenging you, never stop rewarding you for taking the time to roll each word on your tongue, grind the potpourri on your molars and inhale the reeking perfume. That was what Herakleia or Alexios would have done. You could keep them in a room like this for weeks, but as long as they had food, water, and books, they’d be fine, they’d even throw in a little daily exercise, jogging in place for an hour a day. Diaresso would have been happy with a Koran. He would have treasured it—treated it like a princess or a queen rather than an inanimate object, losing himself in the gorgeous cursive, the poetry so intense it had conquered half the world. La illaha Allah illaha. That’s what it sounded like. Undeniable beauty.
But Gontran had never much liked books. In the old world, he must have read hundreds—he was a studycat back there—but with the exception of the boy wizard series, books were a source of torture and annoyance, something to get out of the way for a reward that never came, a carrot dangling always out of reach. Although as he thought about it, he realized the reward had been more vague than any carrot. Your reward for working is—more work! No rest. You study hard, pass the tests, do extracurriculars, go to a good college, network, get a good job, and work, work, work until retirement, and even beyond. Your boss texts you nonstop outside work. Don’t complain—there’s thousands of people lined up to take your job. You have a family. Not only that, but you need to do family things whenever you’re free, even if you’re miserable and exhausted, and then you need to exercise on those rare occasions when you have neither work nor family. Keep up with appearances. Look healthy, fashionable, rich, or else you’re a failure. Adopt an attractive, ironic detachment to your futile existence. Take nice vacations, upload photos of beautiful cakes and beaches, your smiling family doing all the right things, your kids winning awards at school. Keep up with current events, which depress you, but don’t connect the dots, don’t ask deep questions, don’t question the corporate media. Watch popular TV shows and force yourself to read the occasional popular novel so you can participate in water cooler conversations at the office, a gray fluorescent labyrinth of smalltalk, where minotaur-like management is always hunting for people to fire. You wonder why everything everywhere is so fucked up all the time, then tell yourself to stop thinking about it, things will work themselves out like they always have, it’s not survivorship bias. Bring up this odd concern of yours, like a white midlife crisis movie from the 1990s, and your closest friends and family will think you’re insane and recommend yoga, mindfulness, or some therapy app.
Then you get back to work. Spreadsheets. Grant applications. Emails. Agonizing over the proper word choice to avoid getting fired.
He wasn’t even there yet, but he knew what to expect. Back in high school, to even have a chance of attaining that paradise of paperwork and business casual known as an office job, he had memorized so many textbooks, answered so many questions, written so many papers, passed so many tests in so many subjects, pretended to like so many mediocre teachers and authority figures. If he’d stopped for even an instant to wonder what the hell he was doing, the whole world would have collapsed around him like in a disaster film. Crumbling buildings, streets split by fissures, mountains exploding with lava, the moon crashing into Earth.
Just keep going. Don’t look back. Don’t stop. Don’t think.
He’d only gotten some perspective by being trapped in the year 1082, when his frantic life had slowed down a little. It had surprised him to feel so free here, to have at least some desire to stay. Time travelers stuck in the past never want to stay. Reactionary thinking, Herakleia would have called it. 1082 had plenty of serious problems. Never idealize the past. But most of the time he had thought it strange, as he’d traveled across the medieval world—which consisted almost entirely of either wildernesses or small villages, cities being a rarity—to think that 1082 would one day lead to 2022. But in Venice it was easier to see the future of factories, merchants, and police that was even now growing in the womb of time.
He sighed, whispered to Ra’isa to tell him if she needed anything. Another thumb’s up came from under the bed.
Usually it’s monsters hiding under the bed, not the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen in your life.
Hours passed. The bells kept ringing. The soldiers kept ransacking the city. And soon enough, Gontran—with his eyes on the Arsenale, where his crew was enslaved—started planning his next steps.