Title: Brothers of the Sea

Series: The Ballot Boy, Book Three

Author: Larry Mellman

Publisher: NineStar Press

Release Date: 01/07/2025

Heat Level: 3 – Some Sex

Pairing: Male/Male

Length: 121100

Genre: Historical, historical fiction/14th century Venice, lit/genre fiction, gay, May-December romance, age difference, political rulers, political intrigue and plotting, existential threat, apocalyptic wartime, military leaders, naval action and adventure, Venetian warships, lagoon warfare, protection of waterways and foreign trade routes, family drama, old friends, sex in a church

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Description

Running a gauntlet of raging seas and enemy warships, Nico and Admiral Vettor Pisani race to Constantinople to rescue Venice from Byzantine treachery.

A triple alliance of powerful princes plans to besiege Venice by sea and land and seize the reins of St. Mark’s legendary four horses. With Nico as his right hand, Pisani leads a war fleet to secure the island of Tenedos in the Aegean, fulcrum of the impending war. Amid the mortal dangers of the journey, Nico and Pisani wrestle with their overpowering physical and psychic attraction, knowing that the choices they make will change their lives irrevocably.

Nico first met Pisani and fell under his spell at the age of fourteen. In the decade since, despite great loves and failed loves, Nico never lost his starry-eyed admiration for Venice’s greatest admiral. Pisani, thirty years older and wiser, hesitates to risk everything for a young man’s love until Nico throws open new doors, and their age difference evaporates in the heat of battle.

The enemy triple alliance—Padua, Genoa, and Hungary—outnumbers Venice five to one. Mounted armies blockade the mainland shores and rivers while the enemy fleet breaches the lagoon. Venice can only win on water with Pisani leading her. When he is forced to fight a battle he knows he cannot win, Pisani’s disastrous defeat lands him in prison. Locked behind bars while Venice hovers on the brink of annihilation, Nico and Pisani sketch a bold plan to save the Republic.

Excerpt

Brothers of the Sea
Larry Mellman © 2025
All Rights Reserved

Venice, March 9, 1377

A Surprise Visit

I always know when he’s following me. He has followed me all my life like a vengeful shadow. My father—Marcantonio Gradenigo, also known as Brother Bernardo of the Hermits—ranks high in the hierarchy of demons roving this earth wreaking havoc. He dogs me and won’t take “no” for an answer, determined to make me his evangelist. The second time I killed Ruggiero, my half-brother, I severed his head to make sure he was dead and could never return. Nothing less will do for my father. He always appears when I least suspect him and leaves me scrambling to counterattack. He springs out of nowhere, threatens, laments, cajoles, using every weapon in his arsenal to win me to his side. I always say no and somehow escape. He takes perverse pleasure in trying to break me. Each failure gives him another opportunity. He will eventually kill me, I have no doubt, but at his discretion. To my eternal ignominy, I have failed thus far to kill him. Today may be the day. Hope springs eternal.

His presence feels clammy and close as I slip through the labyrinthine back lanes of St. Nicholas of the Beggars parish. I can do it with my eyes closed; he can’t. He makes mistakes. If I lose him, I can’t kill him, but at least I won’t have to listen to him.

He’s complicated. To the world, my father died during the failed rebellion he led in Crete. He faked his own death to escape hanging and quartering between the Columns of Doom. Everyone, even my mother, believed him dead. Today, we know better. He snuck into Padua, presented himself to the abbot of the hermits, and pleaded to be accepted as a postulant. The hermit monks wander and beg, living off alms. Brother Bernardo wanders and begs gullible nobles and princes to join his insurrection against the Republic of Venice, leaving a wake of destruction. A hefty price hangs on his head in Venice, but only the church has jurisdiction over the clergy. Since my father aims to destroy Venice, Lord Francesco Carrara of Padua protects him.

I don’t hear him; he’s too accomplished for that, but I smell him, a ravening boar. He comes to woo me, his handsome hero son, to seize the throne of Venice after he overthrows my doge. The doge eagerly anticipates snaring, hanging, and quartering him. Only I give my father the credit he deserves. He’s not indestructible, but thus far, he has eluded every attempt to snuff his candle out.

My father knows the ways of Venetians better than I do, but I know the streets. I have engraved maps of every inch of every alley, square, and bell tower in my flawless and all-encompassing memory. I never forget anything, a tremendous boon and a torturous curse.

Maybe I can trap him in the bell tower at St. Nicholas of the Beggars and kill him. He’s sixty years old to my twenty-three. He can’t give much of a chase, and I’m ferociously fit, so I take off. I’ve outrun him before. I tear across the bridge from Angelo Raffaele, taking the stairs three at a time and vaulting off the far side, but I can hear him behind me. It’s as if he knows where I’m going. I stupidly underestimated his stamina.

Maps of Venice’s twisted islets stitched up with bridges unreel in my brain. I plunge into blind alleys, whipping around corner after corner in a precise zigzag between close walls at sharp angles until I’m behind St. Nick’s church. I duck into the bell tower before he sees where I’ve gone.

The only light in the dark tower falls in thin beams through mullioned windows eighty feet overhead and lancet windows on the landings. Three flights of steep stairs ascend the brick walls of the central shaft, forty feet square, to the belfry where six bells wake the parish up and put them to bed. I bar the door behind me and climb to the top so I can watch him below.

Brother Bernardo sniffs the air at the edge of the canal behind the tower. He swivels toward the tower, and his eyes follow the masonry to the belfry, to the window where I stand watching him. As he reaches the tower, I lose sight of him, but I hear him. He rattles the barred door but can’t open it. His sword clangs from the scabbard under his hermit robes. He slips the blade between the door and the jamb and cleverly manages to slide the wooden bar until one end falls to the floor. The door creaks as it swings open. He pauses while his eyes adjust to the dark before tilting his head upward, following the sunbeams to the belfry. It’s pointless to hide in shadow; he knows I’m here. I step into the light and a twisted smile transfigures his face.

“You just can’t leave me alone, can you?” My voice echoes in the belfry.

“That’s no way to greet your loving father.”

“You weren’t so loving when you tried to kill me. What was I? Eight months? Ten?”

“A fantasy your mother fabricated to make you hate me. No, my darling son, the worst harm I did to you was to favor Ruggiero. I learned better too late, and I’ve already apologized profusely for that. I was wrong. I’m tired of apologizing.”

He starts up the stairs as I descend toward him from the belfry.

“I’ve heard your plea many times before,” I say. “My answer is no.”

He pauses, smiles, shakes his head wearily. “Alas, the world has confounded you. A monarch you abhor hops into bed with your nemesis at sea. An ally you hate falls, and false friends reveal themselves as enemies. Armageddon for the Serene Republic perhaps? I beg you, for your own sake, listen to me.”

“Not for my sake, for yours. Only ever for your own sake.”

My father flinches, as if I slapped him. “You haven’t learned a thing. Yes, I have done bad things, but always for a purpose and only out of passionate devotion to a cause. Noble Venice is as corrupt as a Syrian brothel. You know that close-up. All we need do is act decisively, and the craven weaklings of the world will kiss our feet and obey your every word. Whether they love you or hate you, they worship you. The hero of Trieste, of Curano, and of Buonconforte. The best bowman from Grado to Cavarzere four times running. A common bastard. A man of the people. They would offer you sacrifices were you bold enough to declare yourself a god.”

“No.”

He eases across the middle landing and pauses to study me a flight above him.

“You break my heart,” he says, “throwing away such a brilliant future. Donato would spit at your cowardice. He valued audacity and ambition above everything. He had no more loyalty to the doge or the Republic than I do, but he stupidly bet on their winning, choosing them with the same misguided fervor I chose Ruggiero over you. Sorry mistakes. Alas, my sons. Did you know Donato was your half-brother when he fucked you?”

“I found out after my other half-brother killed him.”

“Ruggiero was always impetuous. You never suspected?”

“Why should I? He came with the doge’s imprimatur.”

“As the ancients said, ‘When the cock grows hard, the mind grows soft.’”

“Despite being your son, Donato Venturi was a great man, and I loved him.”

“What did you love besides his body?”

“I loved everything about him.”

“Then you must love me. I am as much him as you, father to you both.”

He raises his arms in an embrace separated by a flight of stairs, gazing at me sadly.

“Your tongue befouls Donato’s name, Father.” Furious, I target his heart with my sword.

Unphased, he continues upward, toward me. To innocent eyes, he would appear to be weeping. His step is slow and measured.

“I hope you understand,” he says, “that I’m not being vindictive, but you are too dangerous a piece to remain on opposite side of the board.”

He lunges, and I dodge his sword, but he disarms me with an upward slash. I scramble for something to turn against him and find only words.

“You destroyed my mother. You ruined my life. You killed my friends and countrymen, and you want to kill my doge, who is a million times better than you. I spit on you.”

My spit lands in his eyes. He wipes them, advancing toward me.

“Better doesn’t matter,” he says. “Winning matters. Louis of Hungary, Carrara of Padua, Campofregoso of Genoa, even the idiot emperor of the east will kneel at your feet when we’re done. How can you say no to the only great man in this world who loves you for exactly what you are and not in spite of it?”

“Because I know you will fail, and whoever throws in with you will be hanged and quartered between the Columns of Doom for beggars to spit on. To his eternal shame, Bajamonte Tiepolo’s coup attempt failed, and he was a far greater man than you. They drove him out, razed his palace, and sowed the ground with salt. Marino Faliero, the doge himself, failed, and the Ten chopped off his head. No coup has ever overturned our Republic. What makes yours any different?”

“You.” The point of his sword presses against my heart. “The little people adore you, like they adore Admiral Pisani, another blind fool. You both betray the people’s love with your blind obedience to that sad wreck of a once-prosperous merchant who was elevated far above his station. After your exalted Andrea Contarini was blackmailed onto his throne, he wept he was not man enough for the job, and for once, he was right. I raised Ruggiero to seize the throne, but he was the wrong man for the job. He deserved the death you dealt him. Poor brave Donato, blinded by an incompetent doge’s bullshit, turned against me. But you can be invincible with me behind you.”

“Byzantine style, your dagger in my back?”

“You will learn to trust me.”

“I’d rather kill you. This world can’t hold us both.”

“Pompey and Caesar.”

“Me and you.”

“Good, because I am sick of your idiot refusals. Join me now and have everything or join your brothers in hell.”

He’s stronger than I remembered. Not a precision instrument, like Donato, but a paragon of brute force, fearsome but unsustainable, little consolation as he stabs and slices. Sweat blinds me. My head spins. He presses the blade of his sword across my throat.

“Last chance.”

His eyes lock on mine. They implore me, and for that instant, he is mine. I kick his balls so hard he collapses on the floor, and I leap into the tower’s empty shaft, grabbing the rope that swings twelve-hundred pounds of bronze bells. The rope rips my hands. I twist it around my wrists as I plummet downward. The headstock in the belfry creaks as it rotates. The clappers slam the bells like bombards. My toes graze the tower floor. I can’t free myself from the rope to escape. The headstock swings back and jerks me up toward belfry. My father lunges as I rise past him. I swing wide of him, pulled upward until my weight tips the headstock, dropping me to the tower floor.

He leaps down the stairs, stabbing at me, but he can get no purchase and fails to strike home. The brazen clangor of the bells batters our skulls like Vulcan’s hammer.

I hear voices. Roused by the bells, parishioners run toward the tower. Brother Bernardo is too canny to murder me with so many witnesses, each of them hating him as much as I do, more if that’s possible. As I am yanked upward again, he bolts out the door, past the priest, and disappears between the buildings, leaving me hanging.

I tell Serenissimo—Andrea Contarini, the sixtieth doge of Venice, my master—about my escape from Brother Bernardo. He furls his brow and shrinks deep into his gold robe, his features drooping like a Greek mask of tragedy. “That maniac wants you to be Brutus to my Caesar.”

“Exactly. He wants to publicly humiliate you before cutting off your head and feeding your body to feral pigs that have been starved for a week, and then mount your head to rot on a pike by the palace gate, at eye level, for all to pity and revile.”

Serenissimo’s eyes close. Despair becalms him, and he drifts in the current. “He’s willing to offer up his son like Abraham sacrificing Isaac.”

“Three sons that we know of, each sacrificed in his own way.”

“I witnessed his fake death, a bloody but transparent ruse accepted by the Senate, who wanted to believe it. I never believed it for an instant. A body with no head, stripped of everything, dragged behind a horse and hurled into the sea, could have been anybody. The spearhead of a bloody insurrection escaped. Thousands of our patriots were killed before we put it down. When I get my hands on him, and I will…” Serenissimo grips my forearm with his right hand, but his fingers are weak. “…I will crucify him upside down in front of Saint Mark’s until every Venetian has cursed and spat on him.”

“What the Romans did to Spartacus. He would be exalted in that. He’d take your judgment as affirmation of his greatness.”

“I know, I know…” Serenissimo grimaces, eyes closed, and just when I think he has dozed off, he clenches his fists and growls like the Serenissimo I love. “Fuck your father. Fuck the pope, fuck King Louis, fuck Francesco Carrara, fuck Domenico Campofregoso, fuck Handsome John, emperor of the east, fuck Charles the Fourth, emperor of the west. Fuck every scheming tyrant who dreams of bringing us down.”

“Don’t include my father with them. They have armies behind them. He has nothing. No peasants to milk, no slaves to arm, no bridges left behind him. He’s pathetic.”

“He’s dangerous,” Serenissimo says. “He kills without conscience.” He twiddles his thumbs assiduously. “From this moment forward, you will no longer leave this palace without armed guards until his head hangs on a pike in the square. Two men-at-arms minimum, wherever you go. Don’t look so horrified. They’ll grant you privacy. They can stand outside and wait. But they go everywhere you go and back again. Do you understand?”

I see red, as he knew I would. “Why only two? Why not a whole procession, like yours, priests and musicians and pages behind me while I go to the chancery archives or buy anchovies in Santa Margarita Square?”

“He knows your routines and inclinations, and he wants to kill you.”

“I’m twenty-three years old, not fourteen. And, oh yes, need I remind you he escaped from your prison with the aid of one of your guards? No, thank you, sire.”

Serenissimo flinches, opens his mouth, but holds his tongue.

“Your concern honors me, but when my father determines to kill me, only I can stop him. I take that into account every time I turn a corner.”

“He reduces you to a brawling wharf rat, flailing blindly. Your hatred warps your reason. He always manages to surprise and outwit you. He knows you too well for your own good.”

“You know me. He doesn’t. After he failed to murder infant me, he didn’t see me until my fourteenth year.”

“Not that you know of.”

“He knows nothing about me. I didn’t matter to him until I was selected ballot boy, and he thought he could use me. That changed the game. Yesterday, he made the stakes perfectly clear. But I know when he’s close, and I will kill him before he can kill me.”

“I’m not asking you,” Serenissimo says. “This is an order. No going out unguarded until he’s dead.”

He pauses outside the door before we join the Senate. He places his hand gently on my forearm as if for support. “I beg you, once again, from the bottom of my heart, to forgive me for stealing your youth and ruining your life.”

“You didn’t, Exalted Serenity. I was chosen at random. You couldn’t have done anything differently.”

A supplement of sixty wise men joins the Senate, extremely rich nobles with key appointments, critical players in the whirligig of committees that rule the Republic. We await the ambassadors from Padua, Hungary, and Genoa, joined by the Patriarch of Aquileia. No surprise there, but Admiral Vettor Pisani standing near the dais surprises me. I had no idea he would be here, and I’m embarrassed to discover that my boyish crush persists.

I first met Pisani in 1368. I was fourteen, an untutored fishmonger’s apprentice thrust into the palace by chance. He had to share his horse with me because I didn’t know how to ride. The rest of the noble delegation scorned me, but Pisani lifted me up with one arm and slung me behind him on the fateful day he delivered the bad news to Andrea Contarini that he had been elected doge. I overheard Pisani pleading with Contarini to accept the ducal crown after flatly refusing it. Pisani’s honesty and gentle demeanor, his adamant loyalty and patriotism, his noble brow, and downward-sloping eyes failed to convince Andrea Contarini. Only the threat of expropriation and exile did that. But they won my heart instantly and completely. Afterward, Pisani always treated me like another person, not a pest, and I learned much about the workings of the palace and the nobles from him. Vettor Pisani, Marino Vendramin, and Serenissimo were my magi, bearing gifts of wisdom, experience, and love. Whatever I am, they made me, not my father, still wreaking havoc in the guise of a hermit friar.

The ambassadors and the Patriarch of Aquileia exude belligerent defiance, each with an axe to grind. Allied, they constitute our worst nightmare. King Louis has money and a large land army. Padua commands the mainland rivers that feed us and would join any coalition pledged to our destruction. Genoa, most dangerous of all, has a navy to rival ours. If these allies attack us by land and sea, only a miracle can save us.

“Welcome, brothers,” Serenissimo says. “For we are all brothers in the one true Church of Rome. The Holy Father weeps for our grievances and begs us to behave like true Christians, to forgo warring amongst ourselves, and focus on our common enemy, Sultan Murad and his schemes for our fair lands.”

Serenissimo looks into the eyes of each ambassador and waits until each nods under threat of excommunication.

“We have no animus against any of you,” Serenissimo says. “We are bound by treaties. It would be a violation of law and a sacrilege for you to wage war against us. Please, let us resolve our grievances.”

Serenissimo finishes talking but continues staring them down, waiting to see who takes up his challenge. The silent Senate crackles like a brush fire Serenissimo lit. The four ambassadors look at one another for a sign. Carrara always waits for King Louis’s ambassador to speak first so he knows what to say. Given the hatred between Genoa and Venice, centuries old and well-known to everyone in the room, their ambassador also defers to Hungary lest he put both feet in his mouth. The Patriarch of Aquileia beams beatifically at King Louis’s ambassador, praying silently for gold and troops to keep Venice and the Turk from his farms and vineyards.

“We protest your occupation of Tenedos,” Hungary says. His jeweled brocade surcoat glitters in the sunlight through the high window. Handsome, polished, he could never be accused of willingly telling the truth, and he spreads deceit with Angevin refinement. “That is our concern.”

“You are mistaken,” Serenissimo says. “Emperor John Palaiologos the Fifth ceded Tenedos to us in exchange for returning his crown jewels which his mother pawned to Venice in 1354. They have never been redeemed, nor has he paid the twenty thousand ducats in reparations owed to us.”

The Genoese ambassador pushes forward. “Venice has no right to Tenedos.”

“Nor has Genoa,” Serenissimo says. “We, however, have the goodwill of Emperor John Palaiologos, and you do not.”

So angry he’s tongue-tied, the Genoese ambassador turns to Hungary for support.

“Be that as it may,” Hungary says, “none of us can willingly cede control of the Hellespont to Venice. Tenedos guards the entrance to the east with a fort you have recently reoutfitted. Against whom?”

Serenissimo irons every trace of rancor from his expression. “As the Holy Father so wisely reminded us, we have a common enemy, the Turk.”

Genoa explodes. “Damn your bullshit. We all know what you’re up to, and you might as well hear from us here and now. We will stop you once and for all.”

“Are you declaring war?”

“Of course not.” Hungary steps in front of the fuming Genoese ambassador. “We also revere the Holy Father. We only wish to make clear to Venice and Byzantium that Tenedos cannot be ceded to the highest bidder. All our interests must be served.”

With that, Genoa storms out and the others follow. The Senate devolves into a thousand arguments about whether we are at war or not and what to do about it. Serenissimo insists we are not at war. Yet. That unleashes more chaos until the meeting adjourns to allow the Doge’s Council to prepare an agenda for tomorrow morning.

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Meet the Author

Larry was born in Los Angeles and educated in literature, political science, and life at the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked as a printer and journalist in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and St. Paul, Minnesota. Larry also worked with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground on the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in NY, Provincetown, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, was mentored by Dean Koontz, and shared a palazzo in Venice with international opera singers Erika Sunnegårdh and Mark Doss.”

While living in Venice for many years, Larry also taught English, led tours, and immersed himself in the history and art of the Venetian Republic. The Ballot Boy was born in Venice and completed in St. Paul.

Larry is a lifelong social activist and writer, a voracious reader and researcher, an opera fanatic, and devoted walker. He currently lives in St. Paul with his partner of twenty-one years and his ex-wife of twenty-five years. His son is a pianist devoted to blues and jazz.