I tried not to let my past color my dealings with this man in the present. As always, I dreaded anyone knowing what I had been. And besides, he didn’t seem to hold it against me that I was a eunuch as many another of his kind would. Or did he perhaps not know our costumes?
Then the sail of my mind recaught his name—Giustiniani—and I navigated to the realization that he was not really Genoese at all. He hailed from the island of Chios which, since Muhammed Fatih’s conquests, was the one eastern outpost remaining to that city across the spine of Italy from my homeland. All Italian Chians called themselves Giustiniani whether they originated from the first colonizing couple or not. I wasn’t certain the name actually had imperial Roman roots, as it sounded. In any case, it gave their settlement and their trading organization a certain familial solidarity. They were a force to be reckoned with in foreign parts. My guess was quickly confirmed. My new acquaintance described how he had set sail with the first clearing of the lanes that year as part of the escort for Chios’ ambassador, come to pay the island’s annual tribute money to the Porte.
“Actually, he comes to negotiate terms,” Giustiniani confided. “Even with trips to the usurers, there is no way Chios can pay the forty thousand ducats owing.”
After some exclamation of disbelief and sympathy, I assumed to myself that I had misheard. Such a vast sum was clearly impossible.
But, encouraged by my sympathy, Giustiniani went on, explaining that since their first offer to buy the Turk’s oversight for a handful of silver less than a hundred years before, the annual dues had steadily risen. The present sum was the culmination of three unpaid years of that steeply inflated tribute. And it was exaggerated by the fact that, whereas the Chians were counting by the Christian calendar, as was their custom, the Porte was expecting payment according to the Muslim book of days, which came round just that much faster every year.
“And I will not hesitate to tell you—because it cannot be kept a secret anymore—that we have been raising this money for years on the backs of bad investments. No Giustiniani likes to remove fee from his own purse when he can take it from the moneylenders’. “The wink his obsidian eyes gave me imitated the glinting gold cross that dangled from his ear, asking for sympathy if not conspiracy.
So I hadn’t heard wrong at all. The debt really was forty thousand. And all this posturing after ancient honor was a sham. Whenever we used to anchor in the smile of Chios’ harbor, my uncle had always warned our men to be careful how they cursed the name of Genoa in the taverns on shore. But there had been contrary rumors even then: “Drink up now; you don’t know how long before this harbor is as dry as the rest of the Turk’s realm.” Such rumors were closing in on confirmation, then. The Empire which held the rich and strategic bit of soil bracing the Izmir coast was hardly Roman; it very nearly belonged to the Turk, in deed if not in name. But I kept my thoughts to myself where politics were concerned and spoke of neutral ships instead.
“Ah, I can see you are a good judge of seaman’s timber.”
Giustiniani was now showing me the ship, rather pretentiously christened The Epiphany, of which he was master. And some comment I had made in passing caused him now to rub his chin, appraising me as thoughtfully as I had been appraising the keel. I’d seen that the ship was quite unladened, the keel bobbing high out of the Golden Horn’s very ungolden scum. The seams were excellently made and pitched, with a new coat of tar and tallow against shipworm on the hull.
I wondered what he saw when he looked at my chin, equally smooth and growthless.
Then he told me. “You can take the sailor out of the sea, but not the sea out of the—”
The look I gave him was enough to freeze him up like a European river at Christmastide. But I couldn’t hide my knowledge that he was justly proud of his little craft. Though small, no larger than a caravel, she was solid and round-hulled as the best of northern cogs.
“You’re not looking to sell, are you?” I said in my most solid Turkish. “Because if you are, I must set you straight. Don’t waste your time. I’m not—”
“By God’s Mother, of course I wouldn’t sell her!” Giustiniani’s emotion confirmed that he was the true seaman I took him for: a true seaman would sooner sell his own mother than his bark.
“Just idling here,” he said when he was calmer. “Just hoping to scare up enough cargo to fill my hold. To make it worth hoisting her sails once more and be off.” Well, I’d certainly spent enough days of my life at that same task to sympathize.
“And in a day or two Ramadhan will be upon us,” my companion continued. “A Christian man can’t hope to get anything done for a whole month then, once those cannons start going off every cursed night.” And there was that wink once more.
But my pulse was already racing with other possibilities. If Chios was not really a foreign port, after all, if it was so close to
