Race of Scorpions

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘I will if you will,’ said Nicholas. Together, they turned their backs on the Albanians and rode amicably over to the left of the assembling army, where the cavalry of King Ferrante was taking its stance. Astorre awaited them, his mighty crest wagging above his red, bearded face. ‘Now we’ll show ’em!’ he said. His sewn eye was convulsed with delight. With heady determination, Ferrante’s horse took their places around them, and the two lines of their foot assembled with clattering vigour.

  Nicholas laughed and said, ‘What do you shout when you charge?’

  The wicked smile spread. ‘Niccolò!’ said Astorre. ‘That’s what I’m going to shout. Niccolò!’

  Tobie opened his mouth. It stayed, wordlessly open. A blaring trumpet had sounded just behind them. In a moment, it was joined by another, and an immediate and shocking crashing of drums. A moment later, and all of it was drowned by a bellow: a moose-like roar from the ranks of the Albanians, and the combined crash of handguns fired violently into the air. The army shuddered. Astorre said, ‘Attack! We aren’t –’

  ‘Go,’ Nicholas said. ‘Go, go. It’s Skanderbeg’s order. We’re not ready, but neither’s the enemy.’

  They were on the move as he spoke. Crazily, chasing into position as it went, the army of Ferrante and Skanderbeg rolled down the slope, racing, galloping, shrieking, to crash into the totally unprepared army of Piccinino.

  Nicholas, urging his horse, saw Piccinino’s guns fire, grey carnations in the hot sunlight, and then saw them tossed aside as the terrified trace-horses reared at the noise. He heard the crackle and flash of hackbuts, and the soaring whine of cross-bolts, but in the packed throng about him saw hardly anyone fall. With a sense of awe at the sheer naked effrontery of it, he found himself there, his horse’s shoulders blundering against Angevin horse, his sword engaged, while Piccinino’s left wing, disrupted by panicking animals, took the brunt of the Albanian cavalry and fell staggering back. Nicholas wished the Albanians luck.

  Here, facing his wing, were not, this time, the amateur army of Rimini. These were soldiers from Provence and from Anjou. Some of them were French, displaced by the rising in Genoa, or even Genoese, flung out with them by those who disliked friends of the French. Nicholas had time to think it ironic that his round ship that had brought Urbino’s army was still called the Doria, that most famous of Genoese names. Then he had no time to think. He fought on the level he perceived was required of him, and within the extra dimension of fire, for the crossbow and hackbut fire did not cease. Once, he was hit, but the armour he had brought back from Trebizond allowed him to suffer no more than a blow. He saw no faces he knew among the enemy, but often the intent eyes of one of his own men, flashing him a look of recognition and welcome between one blow and the next. One of Astorre’s men. His own, now.

  After a time he could not count, he realised that his wing was prevailing. At first it was only a thinning of the opposing horse. Then it became, here and there, a movement away from them. Then, suddenly, the Angevins broke, and he and Astorre and the men of Ferrante were thundering after a retreating foe. They killed as they went, and only stopped when summoned by trumpet. To turn, and to engage Piccinino’s troops at the rear.

  At the rear was Piccinino’s third line of foot, the Genoese and the Calabrians. Pushed back by Skanderbeg’s attack on the two lines before them, they now received the impact of Ferrante’s attack from the rear. They gave way, fighting, and broke, back to back, into the corps of the army behind them. At that point, all order in the enemy’s ranks was disrupted. For moments, ally and enemy were indistinguishable. And then, suddenly, the army of Piccinino and the Angevins gave way and, running, determined to save themselves. It became a rout; then a bloody rout; then a victory. Then the aftermath of victory.

  Astorre, drawing rein, said to anyone he knew within earshot, ‘I told you! That was a fight to be proud of. They’ll never come back. My view is they’ll never come back. That’s Ferrante made King of Naples at last. And we did it.’

  He said it again to Tobie, as they regrouped in due course on the silent battlefield, and began to look for their dead and their wounded. Tobie said, ‘A great victory. Twenty-five enemy flags. A thousand prisoners. Four thousand enemy dead.’

  ‘A victory,’ said Astorre with satisfaction. ‘How many of ours?’

  ‘Only a thousand,’ said Tobie. ‘A few hundred wounded, of course. They didn’t capture John of Calabria?’

  ‘Escaped,’ said Astorre. ‘Fled to Troia. The bastards hauled him in with a rope, and he’s probably on his way to Genoa by now. Good riddance. Where’s Nicholas?’

  Tobie’s horse stopped. He said, ‘He fought in your company. Don’t you know?’

  Astorre stared. ‘Fought very well. Lost sight of him when the Angevin wing took to flight. There’s the dead. He’s not among them.’

  ‘Or the wounded,’ said Tobie.

  Astorre rubbed his nose. ‘Well, that’s all right. He’ll be with Ferrante, or Skanderbeg. Without the men he brought down from the north, it might have been a different story. They owe him something.’

  ‘You mean you think he’s getting happily drunk in someone’s pavilion? It’s possible,’ Tobie said. ‘But I’d like to know. After all, I gather he’s our employer. You find out. I’m going to be busy.’

  Astorre viewed him without rancour. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘You go off. I’ll track him down somewhere.’

  ‘Now,’ said Tobie. ‘Go and find where he is now.’

  In the hospital tent, as in battle, time lost all shape and importance. But once, moving from patient to patient, Tobie thought to summon a boy and send him with a question to Captain Astorre.

  It was Astorre himself who came to walk through the tent, stopping where he saw a man that he knew, until he reached Tobie. Tobie straightened.

  Astorre said, ‘That’s odd.’

  ‘What?’ said Tobie.

  ‘He’s not here,’ said Astorre. ‘Not in the camp. Not left on the field. Not to be found anywhere. He didn’t run off. He wasn’t killed.’

  ‘He might have been captured,’ said Tobie.

  ‘By a retreating army? Who would want to capture him?’ said Astorre.

  ‘Almost anyone,’ said Tobie wearily.

  Chapter 8

  OF HIS OWN volition, Nicholas had gone nowhere except into oblivion. When he emerged from it, he was at first conscious only that he was extremely unwell. He recognised the signs of past fever: the weakness, the thudding headache, the shirt sodden with sweat. He was lying somewhere in darkness on a sheet and mattress equally clammy – no one, then, could be tending him. This was odd, because even a tavern would offer some sort of service. He attempted to shift his position, and stopped at once. This was different. This stiffness, this burning soreness was the result of some fight. And a fight he had lost, for he was not among friends. So what had happened?

  It was not at all easy to trap his thinking processes and set them to work. When they did, they were muddled. He had been in many fights, and suffered from many feverish illnesses. He began to trust his most vivid memory, in which he had been contending somewhere on horseback and had found himself cut off from his fellows. He thought he remembered being pulled from the saddle, and booted feet around him, and the beginning of the blow they had felled him with.

  And that part, at least, was quite accurate. He moved one arm and brought his hand slowly up to explore. His hair was stuck with dried blood over a vicious cut which, although swollen, was already closing. Time therefore had elapsed since all this happened. As, of course, it had. Dimly he began to recall a long journey. He remembered being manhandled. He remembered wondering what had happened to his sword. He remembered no faces.

  He slept, and woke, and tried to force himself to stay awake and return to that memory. Bit by bit, his recollection came back. It had been a battle, in Italy. Astorre and Tobie. Ferrante and Skanderbeg. And his side had not lost, they’d been winning. The Angevin cavalry had been beaten and starte
d to fly. He’d turned to make for Piccinino’s Genoese rearguard. He had been snared between the soldiers of Anjou and Genoa, against whom Tobie had so frivolously warned him. Katelina, who wished him no good, had been in Anjou with her husband’s father. Her husband did business with Genoa. Between them, a genteel family bargain might have been struck, which had just found its physical target. He felt a twinge of distant amusement. He should have stayed with the Albanians.

  His closed eyes were stinging with sweat; the place where he lay was without light or air. He felt by turns heavy and bodiless; his head swam as the rest of him swayed. Like a child awake in the night, he became conscious of adult voices above him, a woman’s among them. Footfalls suggested space, unlike his own stale confinement. He supposed himself to be in a cellar. He heard the voice of the woman again.

  Despite all he and Tobie had said, it was unlikely that Katelina van Borselen had personally joined the son of King René in Italy. An agent of hers, it might be. What was entirely probable was that Duke John of Calabria was his final captor. The Duke had lost the battle. He must be in hiding. To him, perhaps, Nicholas represented a possible fortune. Jordan was capable of offering a fortune, to get rid of Nicholas.

  His awakening mind prompted him to wonder what day it was. The engagement had taken place on a Tuesday. Astorre and Tobie must surely have missed him. Fleeing, the Angevins might have taken him with them to Troia, which was loyal to Anjou. And then, maybe west to the coast. From there they could take ship anywhere northwards.

  Ship. Abruptly, he pulled himself to his elbows, and banged his head as he did so. The succession of noises, of movements explained themselves suddenly. He was on a ship. He was on a ship as his enemy’s prisoner, and was being taken wherever the enemy wanted. If it was an Angevin ship, he would be in Provence in a matter of days.

  He objected to that. He thought, if he could find the wits and the energy, he could get up, find a weapon, and take someone else prisoner instead. He began some sluggish movements. He had already stopped when the door opened on daylight, and a man in a rubbed leather jerkin came in. The fellow said, ‘You’re awake. And about time. I’ve brought clothes. You’re to wash. They want to talk to you.’ That was all he said. Setting to work, he paid no attention to questions.

  Nicholas submitted. His wound ached, but his senses were clearing. Washed, dressed and fed, he was able presently to follow the man out of his cabin, his limbs uncertain but his head swimming only a little. In the fresh air on deck, he felt better. He began to look about him.

  He was on a round ship, sailing fast under canvas, and high in the water. Haze prevented a view of the coast, but the sun was on his right quarter, which meant it was late in the morning. If there were soldiers on board, he could not see them. He noticed seamen, but couldn’t judge their nationality. Of identifying banners and pennants there were none. So near to Naples, the beaten claimant of Naples would lie exceedingly low.

  His captor had, however, commandeered the best quarters. From the threshold, Nicholas saw that the master’s cabin was as large as his own, but better painted. Ushered in, he found the usual settles and a large central chair, upon which was seated a middle-aged muscular man in a straw hat speared and pinned with good gems. Buttons of gold closed the thin stuff of his doublet and a chain of gold spanned his strong shoulders. The ringed hands on the knees of his hose were nevertheless soldier’s hands, and under coarse brown hair, his gaze was peremptory. This could be Duke John of Calabria. It could be one of his captains. Beside the chair, to one side, sat a young man and one a good deal older. Both were also well dressed, in the Italian style. On the other side, on a bench, sat Primaflora.

  Nicholas looked nowhere else. She wore a purple silk dress with its bodice lightly embroidered and her hair, threaded with laces and ribbons and pearls, was caught in intricate pleats round her head, in the way he remembered from Ghent. Her eyes on his were like aquamarines under water; her fingers moved a little, interlacing together. She spoke, looking at him all the time. ‘He is unwell. You should not have brought him here.’

  She spoke Italian with the accent of Savoy. The man in the chair answered in a purer version of the same language. ‘Then let him be seated beside you. Messer Niccolò?’

  Nicholas stayed where he was. ‘I do not know,’ he said, ‘in whose company I should be sitting?’

  The man smiled. ‘Let us use French. My name does not matter, nor that of my companions. But you know the lady Primaflora, do you not? Is that not enough?’

  ‘More than enough,’ Nicholas said, ‘if she planned my abduction. But I imagine you yourself had some part in it?’

  ‘No, no,’ said the man. ‘Absolve the lady. She has been an unwitting conspirator.’

  ‘You tracked me through her then?’ Nicholas said. He made his anger quite plain, although he made his way to her bench and sat down. She looked at her hands.

  ‘You might say so,’ said the man. ‘I apologise for your treatment. Speed was necessary, and the men who brought you here were not the kind I would have chosen. Your wounds tell that you fought a brave action at Troia.’

  ‘There were no cowards, that I saw,’ Nicholas said. He paused. ‘The Angevin losses must have been heavy.’

  ‘They deserved to be. They were led by a fool. And Piccinino, everyone knows, serves only for money. Duke John has fled to Ischia, I hear, and King Ferrante has a secure throne in Naples, and is likely to stay there.’

  Nicholas became aware that silence had fallen. He drew his hand down from the back of his neck. He said, ‘I seem to have lost count of time. What day are we in?’

  ‘You have been ill. It is Saturday. Late afternoon on the twenty-second day of the month of August. You have missed four days, that is all. Where are you going?’

  He had reached the door before they could stop him. He drew aside the curtain and looked. The sun had moved a little from the right quarter and was now more clearly aft. If it was the late afternoon, it could not be so. Unless they were not sailing north. Standing there, he said, ‘We are sailing east.’

  The voice behind him was composed. ‘You are not surprised, Messer Niccolò? You knew – surely you guessed – that you are going to Cyprus?’

  Cyprus. He was struck dumb before his own incompetence. He had not guessed. His mind bent on his intricate plans for his army, he had neglected the obvious. He had been curious, as Tobie had said, to see what Katelina might do. He had failed to see that the choice he had finally made might be threatened not by Katelina, but by Carlotta of Cyprus.

  Nicholas turned back, smoothly closing the curtain. He spoke to Primaflora in a voice perhaps softer than usual. ‘My congratulations. Colard Mansion would add his, if he knew. All the time, you were working for the Queen. You questioned Thomas, you traced me, you told Queen Carlotta where to find me. Well, you have failed. I will not work for her.’

  The girl said nothing. The man in the chair plucked his lip with his hand, and the jewel in his hat winked and shivered. He said, ‘The Queen is a powerful woman, and a bad enemy.’

  ‘I can believe that, if this is her friendship. I will not serve her,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘She offers land, rank, possessions – all the wealth in the world, once she has been restored to the island,’ the soldier said. ‘The Pope commends her. The Duke of Savoy her uncle supports her. She is raising armies to help her. You married a woman of great worth, I believe, and found it no hardship to work with her. So why not this Queen?’

  ‘The reason is quite immaterial. The answer is no,’ Nicholas said. ‘So what happens now? Am I thrown overboard, or do her servants stop short at that?’

  ‘Not often,’ said the man. ‘So it is fortunate, perhaps, that I am not her servant. Do you really feel so strongly against her?’

  ‘For her personally, I have no feeling at all,’ Nicholas said. ‘The matter is just as I have stated. I do not wish to go to Cyprus, and I will not be coerced into it.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the man. ‘But that is a
different argument. Once, I am told, you had no objection to trade in the east? You considered sugar, I’m told.’

  ‘I considered many things, before my wife died.’

  ‘In Cyprus,’ said the man, ‘we grow, as you know, the finest sugar reeds in the world. We need an able, vigorous man to revive those trades that the long war has disrupted. The manufacture of sugar is one. There are other prospects of note in the capital. If you wish to fight, a princely contract is yours. If you do not, there is ample scope for the rest of your skills. May we not tempt you?’

  Nicholas said, ‘What sort of offer is that? You hold Kyrenia in the north. The prime cane fields are all in the west or the south. The capital is Nicosia which is not, either, in the Queen’s hands. My other skills, as you call them, could find no outlet unless I fought for you first. Until you clear Cyprus of the usurper and his Egyptian soldiers, you have no such posts to offer.’

  The man sat back, and clasped his hands before him. He said, ‘But, Messer Niccolò, I speak for the usurper, as you call him, and his Egyptian army. The usurper holds the sugar, the royal capital. The usurper has driven Carlotta into Kyrenia. The usurper, whose servants you fought so worthily, so disconcertingly that day south of Bologna, has been most impressed by the tales of your resistance to the blandishments of the Queen, tales which I have now seen for myself are quite true. I,’ said the man, rising suddenly, ‘am making no offer to you on behalf of Carlotta of Cyprus. I speak to you in the name of James, her half-brother. All she offered, he will give you and more. And much more, if you will come and work for him in Cyprus.’