Chương 70: Interlude - Customs

Interlude"Institutions are not designed. They accrete. The man who appears to have built one is, more often, the man who refused to leave the room." - Codex of the Long Watch, Watcher's Commentary Customs The candidates had been gone for a day, and the Baron had not slept well. He stood at his office window in the southern compound and looked across the courtyard at the pale ridge that hid the shrubland above. The doctor had walked out of his gate with a pack on her shoulder and three foreigners at her elbow.

The math of the altercation was wrong. So he had made concessions. He was experienced enough to understand when a fight would be too costly. People who could take out stone guardians were not the kind of people he could put a knife into and call the matter settled. A smuggler understood, above all, that perception was the asset. Goods could be replaced; men could be replaced; routes could be replaced.

The one thing that could not be replaced was the conviction in another man's eyes that to cross you would be expensive. But his old routes had taught him to be flexible, and so he had moved on to the other tool. It was a thought he had been working on since he understood the power dynamics of the new world. The strangers had only accelerated the timeline. Robbers became politicians. Smugglers the customs house.

He had spent fifteen years on routes from Tunis to Trapani to Tripoli reading them from the wrong side, paying the duty when paying was cheaper and slipping around it when it was not. He knew their structure intimately. He went back to the table. The page on the table said the Compact across the top, in the careful Latin hand his grandfather had drilled into him on Sundays after the man had spent the week running American cigarettes to the Sicilian coast. Below the heading he had been drafting clauses.

Operational lead, civil. Operational lead, military. Senior council. Civil council. Maritime council. He had written no name beside any of the roles. He was to be the convening party and the man with the answers. There was an old precedent for this island. Two and a half centuries of Grand Master and Captain, civil and military, a council of langues, and a customs house that had funded the most expensive defensive walls in the Mediterranean. The structure was already written in the past.

There was a knock at the office door.

"Ejja." Enzo opened it and came through.

"From Captain Azzopardi," he said. He set a folded note on the corner of the table.

"Came by his man. Mela, he is asking about the Tarxien supply road. Patrols overlap in one stretch and miss in another. He wants to coordinate." The Baron picked up the note. He read it and smiled to himself. He had been waiting for a door, any door. This one was bigger than he had hoped for.

"What's the runner like?"

"Older. One of the Captain's old legionnaire colleagues, no? Civilian now. Walks like he's been a soldier."

"He's still here?"

"Drinking water in the kitchen."

"Tell him I will write a reply. Have him wait." Enzo nodded and went out. The Baron sat for a moment. He poured himself a third finger from the bottle on the windowsill and looked at the page that said the Compact across the top. He looked at the note that said coordinate. A man who asked to coordinate a supply road had not yet decided to be a rival. There would be no neighbours and no rivals in the period that was coming. The strangers had demonstrated that access to Malta was possible.

He did not fully understand how they came, but he had a feeling that travel in the near future would not be as limited as he had initially thought. He turned the page over and wrote a reply of three short paragraphs. He said yes, the supply road overlap was wasted manpower, and he was glad the Captain had raised it. He said he had been thinking, in fact, about a number of overlaps.

He said he would come to Azzopardi's compound, at Azzopardi's convenience, with one man and no weapons beyond what an honest traveller carried. He closed: I believe we have more in common than the ideology between us suggests. He signed it Noel Zammit. The Baron was a name his crews used. The man writing letters to a former legionnaire was a citizen. He sealed the page with wax and took it down to the kitchen himself and put it in the runner's hand. The runner took the letter, nodded once, and went.

* Azzopardi's compound had grown in the last few days. Some construction was in sight and the fence was new. It had been built carefully, with proper posts. He came on foot, with Enzo three paces behind and a bottle of his own Ġellewża in his hands. There was a reason wine was a part of all negotiation tables. The Captain met him at the main tent, hair greying at the temples, close-cropped, eyes that were not hostile but were not friendly either. He did not offer a hand in greeting.

"Mr Zammit."

"Captain."

"Come in." A single long table had been brought to the centre, with bread and two cups and a jug of water. The Captain's people had not put wine out, so the Baron set his bottle in the middle of the table and uncorked it himself.

"From my own vineyard, my friend," he said.

"Such as it is, these days." The Baron began with the road. He drew a sketch on the back of a scrap of paper Enzo had brought, showing the overlap and, more importantly, the unmonitored stretch. He showed the gap between the two zones where creatures would pass undetected. He made a few scratches to propose changes. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. The Captain studied the picture and then nodded and sat back.

"You could have sent this with my runner. You came here to show me a picture?" he asked.

"I came here to show you a picture, Captain. And after this picture, mela, perhaps a much larger picture."

"Hmmm," the Captain said noncommittally. The Baron took a sip of the slightly tart wine and set the cup down.

"Mela, Captain. You have thirty soldiers. I have forty-five fighters. Between us, on this small island, we have most of the trained men. The other settlements, they have militia. The militia are brave. They might hold a wall but they will not hold what is coming."

"And what is coming?"

"You have heard, I think, of these nodes and the strangers activating them? Qim, Hypogeum." The Captain's face did not change.

"We know the strangers came from England and they are doing something on the island. If they are activating these nodes as they call them, Malta could end up on a network that has no map and no harbourmaster. How do we know more foreigners will not arrive on Maltese soil? With abilities our men have not seen. With intentions we do not know. The first hundred, the first two hundred, the first thousand of them will find Malta in the state Malta is in now. Which is to say, in pieces."

"Mr Zammit."

"Hear me out, Captain. I ask nothing yet. I tell you only what I see." The Captain folded his hands in front of him on the table and let the Baron continue.

"Thirty soldiers can hold a perimeter against what is here. Seventy soldiers might hold against what is coming. I'm proposing we join forces for the good of Malta, for the good of the people against the unknown. Your military experience is what we need, and you will have operational command. Real command." The Captain looked at him.

"And in return."

"In return I would ask only that the structure we build together be a formal structure. That it be written down, and that it have a council. Civilians will also sit on the council and have a voice equal to any other. I would ask, Captain, that we build something that survives whichever of us dies first. Because both of us will die. And I would prefer that what we built does not die with us." The Captain was quiet for a moment.

"Mela. You speak of councils. Councils mean votes. Votes mean factions. Factions mean a thing that talks more than it acts."

"A council such as I am proposing meets when it must."

"And you. Where do you sit on this council."

"I sit nowhere on it, my friend. I would not accept a title. I would not accept a vote. I am, in this proposal, the man who has the room and the wine. The convening party. Nothing more." The Captain looked at him for a long moment.

"That is a fiction," he said.

"It is. Iva."

"You will run the civil side. You will levy and you will write the customs."

"I would. Iva."

"Then say so."

"I would run the civil side, Captain. I would not have a title. The first because someone must. The second because no man in your position would sit under a man with a title who used to run cigarettes. I have lived in the world a long time, my friend. I know what a title is worth and what it costs. I would rather have the work than the word." The Captain drank wine and set the cup down. He looked at the window, where the children were kicking a ball.

"What about the strangers? I was told they had a deal with you to train more healers after they took yours from you." The Baron did not rise to the bait.

"What about them? They are not Maltese. They are a passing nuisance, mela," he said.

"I would use them to legitimise the council. The Compact must have a customs schedule. Like any port. Like any state. Anything taken from Compact territory pays a duty. Anything taken from Compact heritage sites stays within the state. There would be an appeals panel, its schedule public. Disputes heard within a day. It would be lawful, Captain. It would not be a robbery."

"And the candidates, when they come up, will pay this tariff."

"They will pay what is owed."

"They will not like it."

"They will not. Mhux. But the tariff will be written before they arrive, and the appeals panel will exist before they arrive, and the customs schedule will not be a thing invented for them. It will be a thing they happen to be the first to encounter. There is a difference, my friend. The difference is what makes the Compact lawful instead of theft. I have lived my life in the gap between those two things. I know the difference." The Captain did not speak.

The Baron waited him out, watching his face with the patience he had brought to a hundred faces over coffee tables in Marsala and Sfax and a half-dozen back rooms in Valletta. He knew when he was watching a man who had already made a decision and was now deciding how to word it to his own conscience. The Captain spoke at last.

"My men are not your men. They will not become your men."

"They will not, Captain."

"Issa, Mr Zammit. My children are in this compound. The children of my soldiers. The civilians who came to me because they trusted a soldier and not a smuggler."

"I know it." The Captain was silent for some time. Then he reached across the table and refilled his own cup from the bottle, which was the first thing he had taken from the Baron of his own accord, and he drank it slowly.

"Mela. Two days," he said.

"Bring three of the settlement councils. A civilian magistrate. Mdina, if you can get them. Three Cities, certainly. We will write something down. We will see what it looks like in writing."

"Very well, Captain. Two days." Enzo was waiting at the tent flap when the Baron came out. The Baron did not hurry. He let himself be seen leaving by every man in Azzopardi's compound who cared to see him leave.

"He said yes, ta'?" Enzo asked when they were clear of the compound.

"Half-yes. We have a big meeting to prepare for." It was time to change his perception. * The meeting was kept at the Baron's compound for its relative comforts when compared to Azzopardi's camp, and for the fact that it had rooms with doors. It would not do for word to get out before the ink was dry. It opened with bread and water and ended with wine, which was the order of these things in Malta as it had always been. In between there was stuffat tal-fenek.

The Baron thought the rabbit stew, a dish first cooked in quiet defiance of the Knights of St John's hunting bans, fitted the nature of the meeting rather well. Mdina sent its former mayor, Vincenz Galea. The Three Cities sent two: a dockmaster from Birgu called Karm Cassar and a parish chairwoman called Rita Mizzi. Marsaxlokk sent its fleet master, Tonio Mifsud. The last person in the room was a magistrate from Mdina, Pia Borg. A magistrate at the table added a level of legitimacy to the discussions.

The Baron was the first to speak. He stayed in his chair and laid his hands flat on the table and began.

"My friends. Thank you for coming. My letters have already given you an outline for this discussion. This island has not, in living memory, been a state. Today we have the chance to make it one. By writing down, between us, the arrangement that already exists in our heads and on our roads and at our docks, and by giving it a name.

"What I propose is called the Compact. One seat per settlement and two operational leads, civil and military. An appeals panel of the Captain, the magistrate, and a rotating council member. A customs schedule that applies to anything brought in and taken out of Compact territory." What followed was seven hours of jostling for power and position. The Baron was satisfied. Jostling meant the people in the room were committed. Now, the question was finding the right price.

It ended with Mdina becoming the seat of Malta's power, with the citadel and the new customs house. The Three Cities were given joint anchorage of the harbour as well as joint patrols of the territory. Marsaxlokk got exclusive fishing rights in Maltese waters, all twelve nautical miles of them. The Baron sat alone in the room for a long time after everyone had left, looking at the Compact sheet. It was a good sheet, lawful and procedural.

It carried, in every line, the texture of a thing thought through by serious people in a serious room. It was also the sheet that would make him the most powerful man in Malta, and then in the entire Mediterranean.