Venice kept quiet for the rest of the day and into the night. Everyone was waiting for something to happen. It seemed each building and canal was holding its breath. Would Ra’isa and Gontran escape capture? People also must have feared being picked up on the street, or of finding themselves in the middle of a brawl. There were no oars rowing in the canals, no singing gondoliers. No one even dared to whisper. Candles and torches remained unlit in dark windows. Children stayed inside. The dead hen still lay where the soldier had kicked it. Even the church bells had finally ceased ringing, the metal reverberations melting into air.
Ghost town.
By then Gontran and Ra’isa were both exhausted and starving, especially because they had been awake since early morning. Just before arriving at the inn, they had bought all the food they could find in the neighborhood, and now they ate. Ra’isa remained under the bed, lying on her side and eating the hunks of bread and cheese Gontran handed her. Meals usually went with wine, but they had both decided to stick to water to keep their heads clear.
When they finished, Ra’isa told him she needed to take a piss. Those were her words, and there was nothing impolite about them, though Gontran still winced, like he was Queen Victoria reborn. He had noticed that in the Middle Ages, blaspheming upset people. Insulting family upset people, and so did comparing people to dogs, or calling them liars. To declare a man of equal social stature “false” meant making the confrontation physical. But shitting, pissing, and fucking—and talking about these things—was normal. It rarely bothered anyone. Medieval people were as comfortable with these words and what they represented as most moderns were with blasphemy. The 21st century liked to pretend that it was above the past, that it was progressive and looking to the future, but Gontran had realized, since spending nearly a year in the 11th century, that 21st century people were prudes. Medieval people would have thought of them that way. Actually, in the 2020s in some ways it seemed like the 19th century had never ended. The surface was different, but the core was unchanged. People in the 21st century had cars, phones, internet, and different clothes, rockets had left the solar system, women were free to work the same dead-end jobs as men, and people of all kinds could vote for different political candidates—all of whom were owned by the rich—but other than that, what was new? Queen Victoria’s spirit ruled Britannia—she still reigned supreme over the empire where the sun never set—even as her corpse rotted in its cold marble tomb.
Ra’isa crept out from under the bed to squat over the chamber pot on the room’s far side, pulling her shift aside to release a hissing stream of piss. But Gontran was the one who needed to empty the chamber pot over the street, since Ra’isa’s dark beauty stood out so much. He ensured no one was wandering around below the window, then showered the earth with piss, moving his arm left, right, up, and down as he mouthed the words: “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, amen,” thereby reserving a spot for himself in the Hell of the Damned.
It’s a real relationship milestone, he thought, looking at Ra’isa as she crawled back under the bed. When you empty your partner’s chamber pot into the street.
As he replaced the chamber pot, doing his best to keep any remaining drops of piss from getting on his hands, Gontran realized that the whole city must have smelled like urine—that almost every medieval city must have smelled that way. He had gotten so used to it that he barely noticed anymore, always watching his step for turds whenever he entered a city—a pointless endeavor—and keeping away from the windows overlooking the street. You could be having the best day of your life—laughing arm-in-arm with the romance of your dreams, your pockets stuffed with gold coins, in the bloom of health and youth—but if you got splashed with some of that slop, the moon would eclipse the sun, daylight would turn to darkness, happiness to despair, warmth to frigidity, love to hatred, laughter to tears…
It was illegal to dump piss out of your window, too. Every town and city government warned against it. But because sewage systems barely existed if at all, people did it anyway.
Ra’isa remained under the bed. As the temperature dropped, Gontran wanted to give her his blanket, but she said it was too dangerous. If the soldiers returned, they would ask why he was sleeping without a blanket on such a chilly night. How could he explain himself? So Gontran said he would look for another.
“Be careful,” she whispered.
“I always am,” he whispered back.
“A week ago, you fell out of a window. We thought you were dead.”
Gontran left the room without answering, closed the door quietly behind him, and tried the other doors in the hallway outside. All were locked. The proprietor—a rounded aging alewife—must have locked them after the soldiers’ raid; no one else was staying here now. Should he pick one of the locks? No. It would arouse suspicion if the alewife found out. Difficult as it was, he needed to act normal.
Downstairs, the tavern was silent and empty. Gontran walked among the tables and even went to the cookhouse in the courtyard out back, but no one was present. Luckily, he found a closet with piles of linen folded inside, and brought up a spare blanket and pillow for Ra’isa. She was shivering when she thanked him. More than anything, he wanted to help keep her warm, but she said it was too risky.
So close, yet so far, he thought as he fell into bed, careful to keep to his own side to avoid crushing her.
He wondered if anyone should stay awake to keep watch. What were they supposed to do if the soldiers found them? They would have to jump out the window. Well, it was nothing he hadn’t done before. He’d fallen from the doge’s palace here in Venice, and he’d also thrown himself out a window with Diaresso back in Abydos when this whole adventure first started, and Maleïnos’s goons had been after them. Here and now, the ground outside this particular inn was earth, mud, and grass, so Gontran and Ra’isa would be alright, aside from rolling around in their own piss, not to mention everyone else’s.
Still better than rolling around in our own blood, gutted like pigs.
As Gontran was wondering whether to spend the night fighting to stay awake, listening for the soldiers’ return, he passed out, waking to the golden light and warmth of a Venetian morning. Instantly he recalled that a gorgeous person was sleeping under his bed. He checked to ensure she was still there, and found her snoring softly, wrapped in her blanket like a caterpillar in a cocoon, even more beautiful asleep than awake.
He lay back in bed, luxuriating in the fact that, at least for now, no one in his immediate vicinity was trying to kill him. Outside the window, Venice was making noise as though yesterday had never been. Horses clopped, carts rumbled, people talked. Yet Gontran had noticed that Venetians were often guarded in their speech. They murmured, they whispered, but they rarely raised their voices (unless they wanted to kill you). Everyone must have been reporting on everyone else. István had mentioned that the Murano glassmakers could be sentenced to long prison labor terms or even death if they were caught leaving the island without permission. Trade secrets. Probably the same was true for the Arsenalotti. This place was one of those insulated safe family-friendly “communities” where everyone was trash-talking everyone else behind their backs.
Wanting to let Ra’isa sleep, he crept to the window, his eyes on the forest of spars beyond the rooftops, walls, and towers of the Arsenale, where hammers were already hammering, and the gasoline smell of pitch was in the air.
Today’s the day I try to get a job in the shipyards. The shit-yards.
He would need to find the guildhalls, and pray they were hungry for apprentices. As he thought about it, he realized he had no idea how the guild system even worked. Would he be paid a wage? They offered room, board, and knowledge, but was that all? Maybe there was also companionship? Good references? Experience? Exposure? The guild was almost like a union and a corporation combined, but less efficient than either. You had one guild for making rope, another for tying it together, a third for carrying rope—and only rope—to wherever it was needed. That sort of thing. And they always kept their trade secrets secret. This arrested technological progress in the name of ensuring that the guild members could feed themselves. It was similar to the old world patent system, but less efficient, since enforcing patents was impossible here.
Ra’isa, in the mean time, would have to remain in their room. She was too beautiful, turning the heads of men, women, children, animals, and even plants and inanimate objects and the air itself wherever she went. This warrior goddess needed to stay here. After Gontran snacked on some bread, he got down to the floor and whispered for her to wake up.
“Hey, Ra’isa, listen. I’m going to try to get a job in the Arsenale so I can find the crew.”
She nodded, her eyes shut, and started stretching like a cat. Once again, Gontran was astounded with her beauty, even as he caught a whiff of her morning breath. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. He was obsessed to the point of annoying even himself.
“We’re going to play ‘House,’” he added. “I’ll be the husband going out to bring home the bacon. And you’ll be the housewife…laying low at home to hide from the police.”
“I am spouse only to the uprising,” she said. “And Muslims do not eat pork. It is haram. Disgusting.”
“It’s just an expression.”
“Bring home something tastier. Like chicken or lamb. ”
He winced at the thought of the poor hen kicked by the soldier yesterday. Then he took Ra’isa’s meaty hand—the top soft, the palm calloused—and kissed it. “I will, darling.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
He uttered this archaic term of endearment with an ironic tone in order to conceal his appreciation for her, out of fear that it would repel her, if she realized how much he liked her. With every moment he spent in her company, he worshipped her further. Sometimes she annoyed him—often they disagreed—and yet he suspected he would soon find himself bowing on his hands and knees before her muscular naked body like he was a supplicant before a Greek statue of Athena which had come to life.
“That reminds me,” he added. “I’ve been meaning to ask—why aren’t you using the farr?”
“It doesn’t have power here,” she said. “The Venetians, they only work for themselves. They are all competing with each other. It is like a footrace that never ends, and which has no prize.”
“What are you talking about? The Venetians work together. They have a huge shipyard just outside the door—”
“But why do they work? What is the shipyard for? To get slaves. I have no comrades here, and that means no energy. You are a merchant, working only for yourself. Any Venetian here would betray the world if he could become leader of this place. Each is just a little emperor, a less-fortunate emperor, a traitor to humanity. The air here is heavy. It hurts me, it is hard to fight, I almost cannot even breathe—”
“Alright, alright, I got it. You stay here and keep quiet. I’ll be back as soon as I can. If I’m not here by morning, it means I’m in trouble.”
“When are you not in trouble?”
He leaned forward and kissed her. Then he left.
As Gontran made his way along the earthen streets and over the bridges of wood or stone crossing the canals to the Arsenale gate, he found himself in the company of growing numbers of guildsmen. They were young, thin, and short, with more variety in their skin tones and hair colors than might be expected, their noses and eyes often noticeably large.
Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Italians, French, Spaniards, Slavs, even Turks, Arabs, and Touaregs—all more similar than they’d like to admit, Gontran thought. Mediterranean people. If they dress the same and keep their mouths shut, it’s hard to tell the difference.
Their clothes were worn, but clean, and they themselves were not covered in dirt or mud. Each had at least rinsed his face before coming here. Farther from the Arsenale, they greeted one another, conversed, cracked jokes; closer, however, they kept quiet. In the busy campo before the Arsenale, they formed—with militaristic discipline—a single line to enter the Main Gate. This structure was built alongside a pair of stone towers overlooking a canal, the gate doors open but guarded by several ancient maneless lion statues which were covered in red runes which must have been left at some point by rioting Vikings drunk on mead. The standard of Saint Mark billowed above the gate, and a single black-clad Venetian official sat at a small wooden table before an hourglass and a massive book. Each guildsman presented himself to this official, stating his name, guild, and parish. The official licked his fingers, then flipped through the book’s pages, located the guildsman’s name, and checked it with a quill dipped in ink. Then the official said: “entra,” and the guildsman stepped through the gate and into the industrial maw beyond. A pair of armored soldiers flanked the official’s sides, looking alert, as though violence was a normal occurrence here.
The line moved fast. Gontran swallowed drily when his turn came.
“Nome?” the official said without looking up.
“Uh, I don’t work here,” Gontran said. “I was wondering if—”
“The Palazzo delle Corporazioni is there.” The official indicated a small, castle-like structure at the other side of the campo, through whose doors many people were coming and going. A sign hanging above the door, of finely wrought glass, depicted a cord of rope.
“Next.”
Gontran stepped aside just in time; had he hesitated, the guildsman at his back might have shoved him out of the way. Entering the Palazzo delle Corporazioni—the guildhall—Gontran found a large room, paneled in wood. On the right, the room was full of tables and chairs for meeting and community events. On the left was a raised wooden desk which reminded Gontran of the judicial bench from when the Venetian judge had confirmed that he belonged to the Loredani. Behind the bench sat a long-haired Venetian elder who was stooped over yet another massive book and scrawling there with a quill dipped in ink. Shelves stuffed with musty scrolls in a variety of materials—paper, vellum, and what might have even been papyrus—lay behind him. Large glass windows let in the morning light, illuminating the elder’s sunken features. Gontran had seen no other medieval city with so much glass.
An orderly line of supplicants—all women and children—were speaking with the elder. Respectfully they bowed, curtseyed, clutched their hands, and used polite words in sweet tones—“buongiorno,” “signore,” “per piacere,” “grazie.” When it was Gontran’s turn to speak, he planned to imitate them—he always needed to struggle to be polite in these situations—but before he could even open his mouth, the elder said, without even looking up from his book: “no openings.”
“Signore—”
“You’re holding up the line.” The elder stopped scrawling, struggled with his trembling bony gnarled hand to lower his quill as though it weighed a hundred pounds, and hauled his filmy eyes up from the depths of their leathery sockets—as aged as the parchment pages of his book—to regard Gontran. “What kind of fool are you? We take only child apprentices. And you have no donation, I presume? Fool of a Francese! Do they not have corporazioni in the muddy French shithole you crawled out of?”
Under other circumstances, Gontran might have reached for his pistol-sword—his beloved, long-lost Seran pistol-sword—even though it was ridiculous to attack a man so bent with age he seemed to be transforming, Tithonus-like, into a giant cicada before Gontran’s eyes. But because Gontran was surrounded by Venetians, and needed to lie low, he left the ropemakers’ guild and stepped outside. The hot sun had climbed a little higher in the whitening sky, and the line into the Arsenale had vanished, along with the black-clad official, his book, his hourglass, his table, and his two guards. The gate beneath the winged lion flag—fluttering in the hot humid sea breeze—was shut, and men were rowing a galley along the canal into the Arsenale, presumably for repairs. Bells rang across the city.
Focusing on the task at hand, Gontran needed to walk only a little before he found the shipwrights’ guild, but here the story was the same. “We only take bambini.”
Child labor. Completely normal. Even praiseworthy. They can learn valuable marketable skills.
At the sailmakers’ it was the same. And at the sawyers’. The blacksmiths’. The stonemasons’. Only at the carpenters’, an hour later when Gontran was growing hungry, frustrated, sweaty, and tired, did he find success. This was the busiest guildhall he had seen, and the maestro he spoke with—a man notably younger than the other maestri Gontran had encountered—offered him a garzone contract on the spot.
“You arrive at sunrise and depart at sundown every day but Sunday,” the maestro said. “You do as you’re told. Wages start at one soldo per day.”
For a moment, Gontran needed to remind himself about the different monetary values here. They changed depending on which town or city you were in. In Venice, a lira was roughly the equivalent of a golden solidus or nomisma. It was twenty silver soldi to the lira, and twelve silver denari (or pennies) to one soldo. Translating into his old world brain, one soldo was about ten cents.
Ten cents per day.
Gontran almost accepted, but he forced himself to ask questions to look less desperate. “Any benefits?”
“Sunday dinners and funerals are on the guild,” the maestro said. “Any male children you have receive preference in hiring. There’s widows’ compensation. And also opportunity for advancement. After seven years, if you perform well, you can complete a masterpiece. If my fellow maestri approve, you become one of us.”
“If I sign now, can I start today?”
“You’ll get half wages,” the maestro said. “Another thing. There’s to be no organizing of any kind. No formation of groups, no combinations, no sindacati di garzoni undermining the authority of the maestri. We are one big family here, and don’t need interference from quarrelsome outsiders trying to stir up trouble and turn good people against each other. If you hear any talk of this, you’ll receive ten soldi for reporting it to the maestri, so long as your accusation can be proven with two additional witnesses. Is that understood?”
Gontran bowed. “Sì, maestro.”
The maestro smiled and reached across his table to shake Gontran’s hand. “Benvenuto.”
Once Gontran had signed a paper contract in duplicate—writing an ‘X’ for his name to conceal his literacy—a younger maestro who introduced himself as Nicolò Calafado guided him over the rickety wooden bridge that crossed the Arsenale canal to the lumber yard. By then it was past noon, which meant that Gontran got to work on an empty stomach carrying heavy logs over his shoulder to a sawmill, where the sawyers sawed them into planks. There was nothing more to this job. Gontran was brute muscle and bone, to be used like an animal until breaking point, though animals he suspected were more difficult to replace than garzoni. He was “over it”—to use an old world expression—by the time he had delivered his first log. Wage labor was awful enough on its own, since the wages the boss paid you always ended up back in his class’s pockets sooner or later.
Gontran remembered seeing some story from the old world about an Ohio pizzeria owner who had once decided to divide up the day’s profits evenly among all his workers. Each worker ended up making a ridiculous sum, something like $80 per hour. If you did the math, it meant that the owner of some random pizzeria in Ohio was easily pulling in tens of thousands of dollars in profit per month. All he needed to do was reinvest most of that money in real estate and he would never have to worry about anything again—barring a revolution, of course. This knowledge was alienating enough. On top of Gontran’s exhaustion—on top of his body’s destruction—was the awareness that he was helping his class enemies at his own expense. With every log he delivered to the sawyers, he was helping the Venetian ruling class build more ships to enslave more people.
He saw no more of the Arsenale that day, and encountered no one from the Paralos. No one even mentioned it. Among his fellow garzoni, conversation was limited. They were too tired and miserable to speak, but Gontran also sensed the eyes of the maestri burning holes in his back. No conversation, no idling. The structure of exploitation here was so flimsy that a few words might bring it all crashing down.
All he could look forward to was seeing Ra’isa in the evening. This soon became the sole reason he continued working. He forgot the Paralos and his crew. At the same time, Ra’isa would be disappointed if he gave up and walked off the job on day one, especially after spending so much time looking for a boss who would give him a chance in the first place. All he wanted was to go home and see her. As the hours passed, memories of Ra’isa gained a saintly glow in his mind, and he felt his heart aching. She was on the deck of the Paralos, and wind was blowing her hair. She was kissing him as they stopped in a side street while fleeing the Procuratore’s goons. She was naked in bed with him. He was describing how difficult his day had been, and she was listening, telling him she was sorry, that everything was going to be alright.
By the time the vespertine bells were ringing, Gontran was almost too broken to even return to the inn where she was waiting for him. He picked up the day’s wages—six silver denari, the equivalent of about five cents—and staggered back across the rickety wooden bridge and the Arsenale Campo and along the narrow streets crowded with indifferent strangers, the garzoni around him parting ways—still without speaking to one another, though the maestri and signori were gone—and melting into the masses. Many went to packed taverns, where they converted their soldi into wine.
Gotta stay away from those places or I’m fucked.
Gontran was ready to collapse by the time he found the inn. With the last of his strength, he climbed the stairs, unlocked the door, and fell into bed, drenched in sweat and sawdust. Yet he soon found that there was a problem. Ra’isa was gone.