Had the Venetians found Ra’isa? Gontran was too tired to get up, splash his face, or even find a hunk of bread to force down his throat—let alone look for his katapan. His stamina was gone. Even turning over in bed was too much. Thought itself became difficult. He could only wallow in his own filth and misery, his exhaustion so great that—with growing horror—he realized that he was unable to sleep. And if he couldn’t sleep, how was he supposed to rest for tomorrow? He only had a few hours of freedom before he needed to return to the Arsenale, yet he only felt dread.

Babies sometimes acted like this, didn’t they? They became so tired that, like the grapes of Tantalus, sleep receded beyond the reach of their little fingers, leaving them no choice but to scream and cry and drive their caregivers out of their minds. Yet Gontran was too weak to make so much noise. Groaning was the best he could do. Had he even closed the door behind him?

I was only at the Arsenale for a few hours. Just a few hours of carrying trees did this to me.

But he knew that carrying trees wasn’t the problem. He could have done that back in Trebizond all day without a complaint—carrying trees to help people build homes to live in. No, the issue was working for a wage. That’s what did it. In the old world, rich people disdained wage labor. You didn’t get rich from being employed. You got rich from employing others. From investments. Entrepreneurship. Parasitism. Grifters called it passive income.

Those who do all the work have nothing, while those who do no work have everything. That’s what Herakleia had said. Gontran hated wage labor. So he was a merchant. He bought goods cheap in one place, carried them to another, then sold them for a profit. That’s all, folks. Nothing to it, at least as long as you knew how to use a sword, and join up with bigger caravans moving through the more dangerous parts of the world, where bandits lurked behind every huge shadowy gnarled tree encroaching on the muddy path.

At some point in the evening, when all was dark and silent, he started—had he fallen asleep?—at footsteps falling on the stairs. Someone crept along the hallway just outside the door to Gontran’s room, feeling their way through the blackness. Gontran tried to find his sword. Where had he put it? He’d left it under his bed before heading out to work. But the footsteps were already inside his room and locking the door. Something soft was set down on the floor. A basket?

“Gontran,” Ra’isa whispered.

“Here,” he managed to answer, struggling to sound strong.

Clothes fell on the floor. Ra’isa climbed into bed, hugged him for a moment, then stopped.

“You haven’t washed,” she said.

“Sorry. I was tired.”

“You smell bad. The bed will stink!”

“I’m sorry, Ra’isa, I’m so sorry…”

Using fire strikers, she lit a candle from the basket she had brought into the room, then helped Gontran from bed, removed his sweaty clothes, and managed to wash him with the soap and water left on the room’s small table. These materials were meant only for hands and faces, but she used them for his entire body, whispering complaints about how men always acted like infants—treating her like she was their mother practically the instant she first looked at them.

“We must find an apartment,” she said. “This inn is not for workers. Yes, we need an apartment with a—how do call it?—a large bowl, a basin for washing after work. Each of us needs another change of clothes…”

Gontran was too tired to respond. By then Ra’isa had blown out the candle and returned him to bed, minus his clothes. She climbed in next to him, commenting that she was finished sleeping under the bed, and she touched him and kissed him, but he was too tired for sex, even with this naked goddess lying beside him. All Gontran felt was relief that she had returned. His thoughts were flying apart in the darkness of his mind, a prelude to unconsciousness, as he reverberated back and forth from awareness to unawareness.

“You are just going to leave me like this,” Ra’isa said, frustrated. These words drew him back from sleep.

“What?” he groaned.

“I do not know how to say this…I want to make love with you, but you are too tired.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”

“Sorry for what?”

“You can use my body,” Gontran said.

“You mean…”

“Yes. Even if I fall asleep.”

The last thing he felt, as he lost consciousness, was Ra’isa climbing on top of him. Then bells were ringing in the darkness. He opened his eyes to morning light filling his room, and a blurry swarm of swifts rushing past his window.

A swarming blur of rushes swifting past his window.

In another time, if he had been a tourist, these sights and sounds would have delighted him. But because he was a worker, they filled him with dread.

I don’t want to go to work. I don’t want to go to work. Just a few more minutes…

Ra’isa was lying beside him, snoring softly. Distantly he recalled what had happened the night before, as though his memories belonged to another person—someone much luckier than him. Had she fucked him in his sleep? He felt his crotch. Yes. She had cleaned up, but you can’t get everything unless you wash. Chuckling, he kissed her cheek, and she turned away, sighing. A sweet sound. Sweet paradise to lie in bed with this woman, though an inferno surrounded them.

He hauled his aching body out of bed. Ra’isa had prepared his clothes the night before, and even breakfast and lunch. Ravenous, he stuffed his face with the food left out for him—thick heavy moist focaccia this time, dipped in olive oil, with goat cheese and salami, a gourmet meal!—even as he recognized garzoni from yesterday walking to work along the street below his window. He needed to get moving.

He kissed sleeping Ra’isa goodbye, and then he was off, wondering how she had left the inn yesterday and seemingly even bought things at the markets without being spotted. Maybe the Procuratore had given up on searching for her. His big investment had vanished, but he might have been so embarrassed he just wanted everyone to forget it.

Then the sights in the street distracted Gontran. Everyone was either going to work, or already there. Woolcombers combed their wool, cordwainers worked on shoes, bakers were hauling the first fresh bread loaves of the day from their ovens using their wooden peels, and pork butchers butchered their pork, the red meat hanging on hooks and buzzing with flies in the warm air. The sight was unpleasant for Gontran, but it would have disgusted Diaresso. “Swine eaters,” he would have muttered. Gontran wondered what his old friend was up to, if he was even still alive. Was he on his way back to Tomboutou, or had he gotten into trouble somewhere? Ra’isa probably would have reacted in a similar way. It was funny, no matter what Gontran did, he always ended up around Saracens. Why was he so attracted to them? Well, they were attractive people. Diaresso and Ra’isa were both good in a fight. Dependable. Fun. Intelligent. Hardworking. What was there to dislike? It was like Ovid said: “If you want to be loved, be lovable.” Whatever that meant. Lovability depended on context. To be lovable in Nazi Germany meant something very different from being lovable in the Soviet Union. Gontran was now at the point of mentally quoting the ever-popular Publius Ovidius Nasso. Did he actually feel good? How could he? It was the rush of food in his body, the rush of bodies around his own body. Everyone was getting started with their day. And he himself was, for the first time in ten days, part of something bigger. The creature that was Venice—the octopus-like islands of Rivoalto—were waking up.

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Gontran returned to the Arsenale’s Main Gate. He checked in with his guild, entered the lumber yard, set his lunch aside in the workers’ cubby, and got to work carrying trees.

In the beginning, as he worked, he marveled at the industrial process on display, thinking that even Trebizond could learn a thing or two from Venetian efficiency. He would deliver a tree to the sawyers, return to the pile of logs, pick one up, and bring it to the sawyers again, all within minutes. By that time, they would be ready for another log to saw. It went on like this all day. The logs themselves were replenished by the city’s longshoremen—another important guild—who unloaded them from the big merchant galleys (called navi tonde or “round ships”), which themselves docked as close to the Arsenale as possible. Trees, hemp, iron, and labor went into the Arsenale, and ships came out.

Still, this particular workplace was on the colder side. There was no István to befriend Gontran and help him escape—nor were there workers, like in Trebizond, chattering endlessly about history, politics, or philosophy. Here in the Arsenale there was little conversation and less camaraderie among the garzoni. Gontran suspected it was because everyone wanted to advance. Everyone wanted to be a maestro as soon as possible to escape this labor. But how many maestri were there? Probably only a few hundred people—in a city of tens of thousands—were wealthy enough to spend their days relaxing rather than working. Venice was ostensibly a republic with a senate to which any male citizen could be elected by his fellow male citizens, but most if not all of Venice’s rulers had probably been born into their positions of power and wealth. And even if you worked your way up to that point, look at what happened. You turned into the Procuratore, so overwhelmed with ennui that you blew thirty-six nomismas—the equivalent of about two years’ of Gontran’s wages—on a slave girl who ran away at the first opportunity.

In the mean time, there were other ways to escape the misery here. Gontran noticed the smell of wine on everyone’s breath. Most work in Venice required little thinking, so you could spend the whole day drunk if you wanted. It made things easier. Sawyers needed to worry about sawing off their fingers, of course, and haulers like Gontran risked throwing out their backs—and missing work and pay for several days at least—whenever they picked up another log. You could also crush your hand when you set the logs down. The trick was to get drunk enough to dull the pain, but not so drunk that you were puking your guts out, collapsing, picking fights with your coworkers, or stumbling into the blurring saws. Finding the happy medium of drunkenness and safety was difficult, however, especially as the alcohol waxed and waned in your bloodstream. It seemed like everyone except Gontran had already gotten hurt. One man’s thumb had been flattened almost like a pancake. Gontran reflected that this disturbing sight stuck out like—well—a sore thumb.

Wage labor was already alienating enough, since the maestri were alienating surplus labor from the garzoni, but the garzoni themselves intensified that alienation by drinking, which only further separated their minds from their bodies. Was this then the true origin of Cartesian mind-body duality? As the maestri dominated the garzoni, so did the minds of the garzoni dominate their own bodies. With the help of wine, your mind could retreat and relax in an imaginary palace—reclining on a gilded couch while a beauty hand-fed you grapes—as your body in the real world groaned like an ox beneath the yoke.

Workers could only dwell in imaginary palaces which were so fragile that the slightest interruption would make them vanish. Thus did these people guzzle wine in taverns; thus did they pray fervently in temples or gamble whenever they got their hands on any money at all. The ruling class alone lived in palaces of the real, thereby having no need for escape.

Gontran at first told himself that he would refrain from drink. Even a drop of wine was dangerous in a place with so many roaring saws, swinging hammers, and fetid canals. But time passed with such an aching slowness, it almost seemed to go in reverse. To be a day laborer was like falling into a singularity in the far reaches of space. Minutes here passed in hours, while days passed in minutes, as wage labor turned time itself inside-out. Gontran checked the nearest hourglasses, pleading with the sand inside the upper bulbs to fall faster into the lower ones, even as the glittering grains fell in slow motion, as if they were infinite. The sun, too, hung in the sky like it had been fixed there by God to torment the human race burning underneath. He held it above the Arsenale’s workers like in the Battle of Gibeon. Gontran would also make deals with the world. If I carry five more logs, please make another half an hour pass. He would tell himself that a lot of time had gone by since he had last checked the hourglass, he had been working forever, lunch must be close, he had lifted twenty logs, hadn’t he? Then he would check the hourglass, and it would look the same as before.

Lunchtime finally somehow came, and he wolfed down the food Ra’isa had packed.

My angel Ra’isa.

A small flask of wine came with the cloth bag she had given him, since it was normal even for children to drink at least a little wine now and then, but he wondered about the implications of drinking. Gontran had a weakness for alcohol. He always tried to keep away from it, since even one drop felt so good, it led to rivers pouring down his throat—seas, oceans, entire worlds of gushing wine drowning his mind. Then he would be singing, crying, fighting, puking, and—finally—blacking out. He would wake up and have no idea where he was. Sometimes strange women would be lying in bed with him, snoring with their mouths open.

Why did he do this to himself? Everything in his life—not just working at the Arsenale—was too painful to deal with. Leaving his family behind in Metz, annoying Diaresso so much that he had left, losing the Paralos, failing the uprising, never getting home—just thinking about any of this was a labor too great even for Hercules. And so as Gontran finished his bread and meat, he stared at the wine flask, telling himself he should dump it into the canal or give it to someone else. With Gontran’s luck, if he drank one mouthful, he would stumble into a saw and cut himself in half. He loved wine, but couldn’t stomach it.

Yet the pouch kept talking to him. Even as he knew that wine tasted like cough syrup, his desire imbued the pouch with mesmerizing power, like it was an idol come to life, Galatea for Pygmalion.

It was the thought of returning to work that did it. Many hours remained until sunset, but the shift bell was ringing, and the garzoni were already getting up to return to their labors. Gontran’s morning had taken forever, but lunch had passed in almost an instant. It was so unfair.

Wine would even the odds a little.

Before he even knew what he was doing, he had opened the flask and downed every drop. Wiping his mouth, he stuffed the empty flask into his cloth sack, set them aside in their cubby, and looked around to check if anyone had noticed. Nobody cared. All the garzoni were shuffling back to work in silence under the maestri’s watchful eyes. Even during lunch, the workers had kept to themselves, doubtless fearful of losing their jobs due to too much idle conversation. And here, even a word, a hand signal, or a raised eyebrow could count as idle conversation. The maestri wanted the garzoni to act like cattle. Slaves would run away or even kill you, but workers might stay and work hard as long as you dangled the possibility of advancement before their eyes. You could also get a few soldi for reporting on your fellow workers, so everyone was watching everyone else. This place was a panopticon made of living flesh, living eyeballs.

Venice: the beautiful nightmare.

The alcohol took a few minutes to hit him. As Gontran picked up the first tree and grunted under its weight, wondering if this was going to be the one that snapped his back, he likewise worried that he had somehow downed a flask of grape juice rather than wine. But then the warmth in his stomach began to seep through his veins and into his mind. He felt dizzy and lightheaded. His muscles stopped aching, his bones stopped grinding against each other, and he squinted and smiled with a blissful foolishness. It was a miracle.

Yet the flask had been small, and so the effect only lasted minutes. Soon he was back to raw-dogging reality, only this time with no way out. Now he felt even more tired and sullen than before. He told himself he would find his way to a tavern after work and spend his wages there, even as he recalled that he had barely possessed the energy to stagger back to his inn the evening before.

Why had he even come to this awful place? To find the Paralos. To free his crew. Well, neither were here. They had all vanished so completely it was as though they had never existed. And even as he groaned under the weight of entire trees, he thought of how the Arsenale was absorbing him and changing him just as it absorbed and changed wood into ships. Gontran had walked through the Arsenale Gate a free man, a merchant and adventurer and former katapan who had seen the world, but the Arsenale was transforming him into just another garzone, one who would undertake no more journeys, except from home to work and back again. If he wasn’t careful, the sack of money he had stolen from those Venetians at Lake Garda would run out, and soon he and Ra’isa would forget that they had ever come from Trebizond. They would transform into just another couple, raising Venetian children who had never known anything other than Venice, speaking Venetian even at home, thinking of themselves as citadini de ła repùblega. They would accept their new lives.

Lotus eaters.

Gontran would not die a violent death, as he had always expected. He would not find the Paralos, nor would he find his crew, nor would they escape. He would never return to his home in the old world. Instead, he would wither away in Venice, like a flower in a vase.

It took forever, but the vespertine bells rang, and Gontran picked up his one soldo and returned home. On his way there, his legs carried him into the first tavern they found, where he bought a round of wine for himself and everyone around him. Soon enough he was drinking and singing, and even flirting with the barmaids. Rivers of wine poured down his throat, until he was no more.