It was becoming an almost automatic process. Upon waking to the bells and the morning clouds, Gontran decided that he would act like a machine. There was so much that needed to be done, and none of it matched his desires. This meant that he needed to force himself to act, but also to shut down his consciousness, in a sense—to retreat inside his mind, and act like he himself was just a tiny pilot inside his skull, pressing buttons, shoving levers, kicking pedals, turning wheels, gripping control sticks, eyeing readouts. His body became a giant contraption which obeyed its tiny pilot’s commands, with all the pain and frustration and fatigue showing up as indicator lights rather than physical sensations.


    And so although he wanted to lie in bed with Ra’isa and go back to sleep, he got up. Although he wanted to stay home, he got dressed and had breakfast. And although with every step he took, he wanted to turn back, he continued onward to his destination. The infant—who cares only for his own desires—learned about the needs of those around him, of family, friends, society, the world. Thus did he become an adult.


    When he arrived at work, it was like a movie of his life playing before his eyes, each scene rapidly cutting to the next. Here he was coming to the Arsenale, checking in, and putting away his sack of food—with a flask of water instead of wine this time—yet again. There he was getting to work hauling lumber, his muscles and bones straining, the computer alarms in his cockpit wailing, their screens reddening. Then other indicators flashed, reminding him of his mission objectives and ordering him to explore the Arsenale without arousing suspicion. Otherwise the mission would be a failure. He would be absorbed into Venice. And so, awkward as it felt, he forced himself to talk with his coworkers. None wanted to speak—eyes were always watching, and ears pricking up—but sometimes the workers would murmur without even looking at one another, shielding their mouths with their hands (pretending to wipe the sweat from their faces) so no one could see their lips moving, even as they continued to labor without interruption. Gontran managed to communicate to one man, named Bartolo (whose name sounded too much like Boscolo), that he needed someone to cover his shift for the next hour. If Bartolo covered for him, Gontran would do the same for Bartolo—who could take a break. Bartolo agreed.


    The next task for Gontran was to look like he belonged. Any lone garzone wandering the Arsenale would look suspicious. Each Venetian citizen reported unusual behavior by stuffing anonymous paper notes into the mouths of lion statues built specifically for the task. The citizenry likewise knew that with the city’s growing wealth, outside powers—undeveloped, flailing, backward, and incompetent as many were—nonetheless longed to penetrate the Serenissima and learn its secrets in order to seize its accumulated treasures.


    Gontran therefore needed to look the part. The maestri were the ones who owned the tools, and they only shared with the garzoni when necessary, but some older dull broken rusted hammers, hatchets, gimlets, chisels, saws, braces, and other means of production had been discarded here and there in the lumber yard. All were useless—thus their abandonment—but Gontran picked up the least-damaged ones, tucked them into his belt, and carried the rest, careful to avoid cutting himself, having no need to contract tetanus. The medieval European treatment to this disease of fatal muscle spasms involved drinking enough wine to make himself sweat while coating his wound in manure.


    Probably not effective.


    As for his clothes, black was often the uniform of the Venetian ruling class, with garzoni forbidden to wear this color, and so to make up for his lowliness Gontran needed to walk with a straight back and a confident step, like an upwardly mobile garzone—one favored by the maestri and assured of his success, trotting about like the boss’s favorite dog. One, in other words, who would soon be wearing black.


    I belong here, he thought as he left the lumber yard for the Arsenale interior, his nervousness growing. There is nothing unusual about me being here. I’m comfortable. In my element. Thriving.


    He had no idea where he was going, but he forced himself to walk with purpose, and did his best to keep from staring. Past the lumber yard and the carpenters’ workshop was a second yard full of finished materials—the masts, spars, bowsprits, and beams which were ready for assembly into ships. The ground here was dirt, and the canals were crisscrossed by narrow wooden footbridges which could be raised with ropes. The canals connected big square pools—what else to call them?—which were filled with rowboats, galleys, Hanseatic cogs, Arabian dhows, and any other imaginable kind of seagoing craft from the world of the Inland Sea. Nearly every vessel was either damaged or unfinished; many of the newest ships lacked sails, masts, or hawsers, for instance, while the older ones suffered from shipworms which had devoured their hulls almost like living corkscrews, reducing them to the lamentable state of Swiss cheese. Independent docks or piers, Gontran was unsure of what to call them, floated among the ships—wooden platforms which enabled the maestri and garzoni to pull their tools and spare parts and piles of coiled rope right up alongside various vessels.


    Many ships were also under construction in the drydocks. They began there as mere piles of wood. Some were just wooden ribcages propped up on stilts, surrounded by men coated in sweat, their muscles almost bursting from their flesh as they hammered beams into place. But as Gontran progressed, he found ships which were closer to completion, the caulkers slathering the hulls with boiling pitch, and he even saw one vessel being slid out of its flooded dock. Though these ships had all been slammed together with hammers, all were delicate works of art which, while pleasant to look at, were sea terrors.


    Yet Gontran likewise knew enough about ships to recognize that their designs—excellent as they were—failed to match that of the Paralos. His baby outclassed them all. With her longer, narrower keel and her broad deck, she was faster and sturdier than any vessel here. For all their faults, the Romans still knew a thing or two about shipbuilding.


    But naturally, the Paralos was nowhere to be found. In fact, it seemed like every ship on Earth was present here except the Paralos. Gontran also did his best to check the swarming garzoni for familiar faces, but none were present.


    Gotta put the crew back together.


    Each member of the Paralos crew was probably in some random part of the city. Zulaika al-Jariya had been forced into sexual slavery, like Ra’isa, and was now sitting in a brothel, waiting for johns. David Halevi the Kitezhi was washing dishes at a tavern the next parish over. Down the road, a Trapezuntine was drenched in the stinking liquids from a tannery. Across the canal, a Varangian was baking bread. A Khazari Jewish warrior had even found his way to the merchants confined to the Ghetto, passing the stonemasons with their clinking mallets and chisels, where his comrade, the Cordoban, had been captured and re-enslaved—not far from his fellow rower Hassan Ali, who was now working as a food porter. As for one-armed Ibn Ismail and one-legged Dmitri Anatolyevich and one-legged Athanasios, Venetians had no use for disabled slaves, and had dumped them on the churches, for the weak needed to make way for the strong.


    And on and on. It would have been too easy if everyone had been in the Arsenale. Gontran would have to search the entire city, into which his crew had been scattered like dust in the wind. By the time he was finished, it would be the year 2022 again. This made him realize that finding Ra’isa had been a miracle. Had he passed that slave auction five minutes earlier or later, he would have missed her, and she would still be trapped in the Procuratore’s ca’, or house. Although as Gontran thought about it, he began to suspect that no ropes, chains, or locks could hold her back. Ra’isa was too powerful even for death itself. After her body expired, her soul would burst free from the dungeons of Hades and return to the world to live again.


    Yet as he walked about and did his best to look purposeful, he discovered an unusual part of the Arsenale, one which made his heart beat harder. It was a huge brown tent erected above a drydock, and covering it on all sides. The only entrance was flanked by a pair of armed guards standing at attention.


    Bingo.


    Unsure of how much time would pass before he could return to this place, Gontran realized that he needed to try to get inside. Crossing the wooden footbridges, he made his way to the tent. When he approached the guards, both reached their right hands over to the swords belted at their left sides and drew them halfway from their sheathes. In movies, this action would always make a metallic shing! sound, but here the movement was silent, which was more frightening.


    Gontran stopped and bowed. “Forgive me, amici. I’m just here to deliver tools. I was sent by Maestro—”


    Gontran searched his memory.


    “—Nicolò Calafado.”


    “No nota, no permesso,” one guard said.This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    “Oh, mi dispiace.” Gontran searched his pockets. “Where is it? I must have forgotten. I’ll go get it.”


    As he was turning to leave, he peeked inside the entrance for an instant, and not only recognized the Paralos hull, but saw Talia standing on the deck, still as a statue. The clever Venetians could never guess that the statue was actually a living being. Black-robed men were everywhere inside the tent, examining everything, talking with one another, measuring with compasses and squares and rulers, scratching notes into old wax tablets.


    I''ve found her.


    Gontran returned to the lumber yard with a spring to his step. His excitement was deadened, however, by the next logical question, especially as he noticed the huge pools of water crowded with half-finished ships, the piers mobbed with gangs of workmen careening hulls, and the single narrow canal which led to the sea.


    One way out.


    When he returned to the lumber yard, it was his turn to cover for Bartolo. Gontran was soon working twice as hard as before, with barely a moment to think. And yet in those rare times when he recalled his own existence, he thought that he could do almost anything so long as it had purpose—so long as he was working toward a positive goal. In the past, this had only meant working for himself. He had always thought that he could get rich first, enjoy his money a little, then help humanity. But now he had begun to understand that this was never going to happen no matter how hard or smart he worked. That ship, for lack of a better metaphor, had sailed. Everything that could make money was already making it, and the small group of people who owned these money-making things would kill anyone who threatened them. The only way to escape the prison they had built was to work together with the prisoners. Normally Gontran would have thought this was impossible, but he was part of the uprising. Ra’isa was his katapan. Though this labor was exhausting, he was indeed working toward a positive goal. He would find the crew and liberate them all.


    Despite his exhaustion, when Gontran picked up his soldo and walked home at workday''s end, he was still smiling. The exhaustion in his limbs was a good one. Ra’isa would be excited when he told her he had found their ship. He needed to ask her to pick up some writing materials in order to get past those guards or anyone else who challenged him during his little excursions around the Arsenale. But just thinking about this woman who had given him everything filled his mind with warmth. It seemed nothing could bother him. A scullery wench could have dumped a bucket of slop and god knows what else from a third-story window straight onto his head, and he would have thanked her, smiling as though taking a hot clean shower.


    May the honeymoon phase never end. Let the moon be soaked in honey so that it can drip down on the world forever.


    Ra''isa, in the mean time, had found them a small apartment in the nearby parish of S. Martino. Even more importantly, she had found them a metal cauldron for washing. Both had worked hard that day, and so they stood in the cool water and sudsed each other''s bodies with soap. He asked if she could pick up some paper, a quill, and some ink next time, and she told him she would try.


    “This is reward for good work,” she said a little later.


    Standing behind her, pressing her body close to his, he said: “Just doing my duty, sir.”


    She looked at him. “Would you like promotion?”


    He kissed her. “I’m happy where I am.”


    “I can see that.”


    “But an award of some kind would be nice, if you know what I mean.”


    “I understand.”


    Toweling one another off, they climbed into bed and were soon making too much noise. The neighbors must have been annoyed by the creaking bed and their grunts and groans, but Gontran and Ra''isa were too lost in each other to care. Each time he kissed her neck, cupped her breasts, gripped her rear, or graced her belly, he recalled how he had spent so many days aboard the Paralos longing to do exactly this—watching her body sway beneath her clothes as she swayed across the deck, wondering what it was like beneath her dress. And now he knew that it was glorious, that he could never get enough, that he would be her slave forever if only she would allow it.


    “You know, this isn’t appropriate,” he blurted, not even knowing why.


    “What?” she said.


    “Sleeping with a coworker, a superior officer. Usually a bad idea. Could produce a toxic workplace environment.”


    “Quiet.”


    “See?” He kissed her. “This is what I’m talking about.”


    When they had finished, Gontran realized, as he lay beneath the covers, how unfair it was to expect Ra''isa to work so hard—to find them an apartment and a metal bathtub, to labor all day as a seamstress, to buy the day''s food at the market, and then to prepare dinner, clean the dishes, and have their clothes and lunch packed for tomorrow. His workday began and ended when the bells rang, and he had Sundays off, but when did Ra’isa get a break? Women were just expected to do the work of at least two people, and often more, without complaining or asking for pay. And so Gontran summoned what remained of his strength. Ra''isa had drained nearly everything from him—she was so drenched in sweat she complained that she needed another bath—but he still had enough stamina to perform the last of the day''s domestic chores. Though he was an Uninitiate Cook (0/10), he did his best to prepare dinner, breakfast, and lunch for both of them. His XP rapidly increased, but Ra’isa was unimpressed with the quality of the food, and said she would take care of it next time. Nonetheless, Gontran scrubbed their clothes and hung them up to dry.


    Ah, domestic bliss. Family happiness.


    Their apartment was almost the same as their room at the inn. A plain room, undecorated and almost completely unfurnished save a bed, a table, two chairs, the metal tub, Ra’isa’s basket of goods, and an empty wooden chest. One door led forward to the street, another to a grassy courtyard shared by other tenants as well as the landlord; there you could find a cistern, a cookhouse, and people’s clothes drying on laundry lines. There was no bathroom. Venetians did their business in outhouses overhanging the canals. The tides took care of the mess, but it was a good idea to stick to the land, and drink and wash using only rainwater cisterns.


    Gontran had barely noticed his new apartment when he first arrived, since he was too busy noticing Ra’isa’s broad shoulders, her elegant hands, the roundness of her beautiful eyes that shone like lights in dark tunnels. And yet as he sat with her at the table munching dinner, with the sun going down, both of them almost too tired to speak, he thought it odd to view her this way, as an assembly of different parts. Ra’isa was a soul, a mind, a history. There was a unity to her that would be lost the instant her life ended. At that point, the whole universe would suffer from her absence, and never be the same—never be as rich. He almost compared her to a work of art, but she was so much greater, since no statue, painting, or building—no inanimate object—was worth even the most wretched human life.


    The game voice warned that he was losing mercantile XP thinking like this—and gaining empathy—but Gontran didn’t care. It was his skill as a rogue that had broken Ra’isa free, not his skill as a merchant. Being a merchant was pointless when you didn’t have any money.


    Looking at Ra’isa, he thought that, although she could be prickly, she was a gift to the world, a treasure, a fully realized person—a full human being, what a human was meant to be. Not like the myriads of stunted people from the old world—rich, poor, and middle class alike—who were all so wounded by society it was as though their eyes had been removed along with the part of their brains that would make them aware of this fact. The result was that they bumbled about like zombies from childhood to old age, never waking, always infuriated if anyone told them the truth, unable to see beyond their own immediate problems, unable to connect the dots. And they could be all kinds of zombies—from the homeless person who exclaims that what the world really needs is a nuclear holocaust, to the worker who votes against unionization at his workplace, to the intellectual cranking out superficial academic works which do nothing except reinforce the status quo. All of these people were zombies—sophisticated intellectual zombies who were missing chunks from their brains, wounded souls wounded by a wounded civilization. Gontran had been like this once. In many ways, he still was. But coming here had changed him. It was still changing him. Every day he learned more. And it was Ra’isa, now, who was his teacher, this full human being who shone like the sun in the darkness, whose vision pierced every veil.


    They finished eating, and Gontran cleaned up. Then they went to bed. At first they held one another, but then this became too hot and uncomfortable, so they turned away. Gontran recalled that in the old world he would never go to sleep without reading something until it was impossible to keep his eyes open anymore, but books were as expensive as cars here—even in a city as literate as Venice—and so he contented himself with touching Ra’isa’s back. This was enough to soothe him into sleep.


    “Men are babies,” he heard her say at some point. “Big strong angry babies.”


    It seemed like Gontran fell through a whirling tunnel of darkness, one which led to a garden with trees where glittering crystalline fruit swelled on the branches. Then he woke to bells ringing in golden light.


    With Ra’isa sleeping beside him, it was like paradise. And with his awareness of the day that lay ahead, it was like the inferno.


    He got up with Ra’isa. They dressed, ate, and kissed each other goodbye.


    “Find the crew,” she told him. “Get ready for our escape.”


    How am I supposed to do that? he thought, nodding to her and saying: “Yes, katapan.”


    “Do a good job, and I will give you another reward tonight.” She kissed him, then grasped him inside his pants.


    His breath caught in his throat, but he managed to bow and say: “Sir.”


    She walked away along the crowded street, and he watched her move inside her dress, unable to believe that such a woman had even looked at him. Once she had reached a street corner, she turned back, blew him a kiss, and disappeared.


    Gontran swallowed drily. He was tempted to return to his apartment to squeeze one out. But he controlled himself.


    Eyes on the prize. Find the crew. Escape on our ship. And maybe do a little damage to the city. Take a little revenge. All we wanted was to be friends, and this was how they repaid us!


    There was work to be done. And so Gontran went to work.