The gold caught Vito’s eye before the pain, which struck him as a strange way to wake after being carved up as thoroughly as he had been.
He lay on the cold marble a while longer, staring up before either fact truly made sense. The sunlight slanted through high windows somewhere above, late enough in the day to tell him the fighting had gone on without him and never bothered asking whether he meant to come back.
Above him stretched a great dome that swallowed every scrap of light it took in and somehow gave back twice as much. Some saint watched from a wall dressed head to foot in tiny gold tiles, calm as you please, showing no concern at all for the bleeding fool laid beneath him.
Marble spread away in every direction, streaked with green and deep purple, the sort of stone men once hauled halfway across the world for no better reason than proving they were stubborn enough to do it. Beyond him, wounded men lay where space could be found, and incense had finally driven the smoke out until the place almost smelled holy again.
It took him longer than he’d have liked to figure out where he’d landed. When he finally managed it, he laughed in spite of everything else his body had to complain about.
Santa Sofia.
He’d gone to sleep bleeding into a street and woken inside the finest church in Christendom, apparently because the crusaders felt the best field hospital was whatever large building nearby.
Whole books had been written about that dome and he’d read more than enough of them.
"Sì," he said aloud to the empty church. "Just how I always imagined making the pilgrimage."
Some physician had stripped him down to his braies and wrapped him like a mummy while he was too far gone to object. Since he had the leisure now, he took stock.
The spear wound in his forearm ached steadily beneath the bandages while his shoulder still hadn’t forgiven the mail bursting across it. To add salt to the injury, his ribs flared in pain whenever he drew a sharp breath, and his chin was bruised on one side thanks to an elbow he mostly remembered as a bright white flash behind his eyes.
Then there was the newest wound, bound tight enough to itch already, the long cut across his thigh where an Emperor’s sword had found him before that very Emperor lost the privilege of being alive.
"Cazzo," Vito muttered with heartfelt conviction.
Then he looked down at the leg alone.
"You’re a disgrace, an absolute wreck. I hope you’re pleased with yourself."
The leg, showing uncommon wisdom, had nothing to say.
Once the jokes ran dry, everything he’d been putting off came drifting back. It waited with the patient determination of water wearing down stone, never in a rush because it never had to be.
An entire, whole life had crashed into him all at once, more than any man ought to carry in two hands, and knocked him flat. Some of it had cleared while he slept, the way muddy water clears once the current quits stirring it up.
Since he wasn’t going anywhere and there wasn’t another sword left to swing, he might as well look at what he’d been given instead of waiting for it to jump him again.
The name came first. That one had never hidden very hard.
Vitale Barozzi.
That was the name he’d been baptized with, as any legitimate son of the family. Vito was what the people who mattered had always called him instead.
Now both names belonged to him.
The rest followed naturally enough, pull one thread and three more came after it whether you wanted them or not.
Barozzi wasn’t just a surname in Venice.
One of the old houses, blood so old nobody argued over it anymore, but simply accepted it. Every legitimate son walked into the Great Council when he came of age and took his seat by right. No vote, favor, nor permission required.
It was an honor that cost nothing to keep.
As far as Vito could remember actually living it, it was also worth precious little by itself. Some grand name would open the door, then leave a man standing in the hallway while the fellows with real money walked past toward supper.
After that came the mansion itself, familiar the way an old home stays familiar no matter how many years a man spends away from it. Worn stone beneath his feet before he’d ever truly walked there, one courtyard he could have crossed blindfolded, one kitchen forever smelling of garlic and woodsmoke, winter or summer making no difference.
Then, clearer than anything else in the whole muddle, came a woman’s face. Warm and worried, exactly as much as a mother always seems to be without making a show of it.
He missed her with an ache that belonged to a son, though he’d never once actually met her himself.
He let that memory to the side.
The venture was the reason Vito liked this body almost from the moment he’d woken inside it.
Three galleys under his command, and none had appeared because some wealthy uncle had emptied a purse.
Vitale had talked them into existence, be with cousins, merchants, those who owed his father old favors they’d rather forget. He’d gone from one to the next promising profit, glory, and whatever else seemed likely to loosen their grip on a coin.
Somehow it had worked, more or less. Like most of Vitale’s ideas, it started badly, involved a great deal of arguing, and still managed to remain standing when common sense said it shouldn’t.
Vito remembered one name sharper than the rest.
Andrea Barozzi.
A cousin, much closer to the family’s real fortune than Vitale had ever been.
Vitale had asked him plainly for backing, and Andrea had refused him just as plainly. No real reason beyond the sort of contempt comfortable men often reserve for poor relations with ambitions bigger than their purse.
In the end they sailed east in the crusading fleet under different banners, proving once again that sharing a family name never guaranteed sharing much else.
Vito almost laughed there beneath the conquered church ceiling.
Ma va’.
Andrea Barozzi hadn’t wanted his family’s name anywhere near this crusade, yet now that name was stitched clean through the middle of the whole affair. Vito found himself sincerely hoping the news had already reached him about which Barozzi had brought the Emperor down.
The company came back after that, and it was steadier ground than bitter cousins.
Near enough sixty men had followed him through the towers, though the galleys had many more between the benches and the fighting deck. They’d signed on for wages and whatever share of the plunder a crusade happened to create, whether the division turned out fair or crooked depending on whose hands counted the piles.
Zaccaria, in particular, joined because Vitale had sought him out on purpose, paid good money for a captain whose reputation had been earned convincedly over years at sea, and brought that reputation under Barozzi colors instead of somebody else’s.
They’d sailed together long enough now that Zaccaria used the family name the way old crews always spoke to a patron who’d earned loyalty instead of inheriting it.
That was when the part he’d been avoiding finally caught him.
Every nameless corpse he’d stepped around in the streets. Every man he’d watched fall.
They all became a companion, a brother at arms.
The memories came in no sensible order. A laugh from below deck during the voyage, an argument over which saint deserved credit for calm seas, some dice trick that never fooled anyone, though somebody insisted on trying it anyway.
Every one of those men had climbed aboard because Vitale asked them to.
While the battle raged, none of it had meant anything to Vito. Some corpses had simply been another obstacle between him and survival, that old habit of not looking too closely at the dead had crossed over neatly enough from another life filled with another kind of violence.
Now every body had a whole life behind it.
There wasn’t anything left between Vito and grieving them all at once.
He lay there a long while.
The church kept its silence around him, and this time no one needed to break it. He wasn’t in any hurry to do the job himself.
If only.
Complete memory transfers have a tendency to damage the subject. Sometimes they go mad, sometimes they lose themselves entirely, with another life’s memories taking up rather more room than expected.
You appear to have avoided both outcomes.
How fortunate for you.
I would say that makes you unusual, but that might encourage you.
Vito grinned despite sarcasm. He was already putting together exactly the sort of answer that would make the voice wish it’d kept quiet.