The doctor said, “Should that worry Trebizond? It’s hundreds of miles west of Sinope. Or you think the Sultan’s aiming at Sinope?”
“Certainly the Turkish fleet may move along the Black Sea. Even if they only try to besiege Sinope, they could make it both dangerous and expensive for your galley to travel west in the summer. On the other hand, you take a risk leaving your goods and your galley off Trebizond. If the fleet arrives here, it will seize all the ships the Emperor might otherwise use. And as you know, there are no walls round the suburbs.”
“What are the Genoese doing?” the doctor said. He made no effort to give her her title.
“As you see, the round ship is still at anchor. When the caravan comes, they will no doubt store their purchases in the City.”
“And the Venetians, Despoina?” the priest said.
“I hope your letters tell you that,” said Violante of Naxos. “For it was a matter your Messer Niccolò and I touched upon when we were sailing. The Venetian agent at Erzerum had instructions to make his purchases on the spot but not to send them to Trebizond. All the Venetian cargo is going to Kerasous.”
The red-haired mechanic said, “Why?”
He, too, had set aside courtesy. She took her time before she answered the question. “There is less fear the Turks will attempt to land there. It is immensely strong, and has less to offer than Sinope and Trebizond. Its offshore island is hated by seamen. With the right ship, cargo could be uplifted from Kerasous and slipped clear to the West through the Bosphorus if other circumstances allowed.”
The priest said, “You are suggesting that we, too, send our purchases out to this Kerasous?”
“That is for you to decide,” she said. “I have nothing further to say on these points. I now come to my errand. I wish to hire your ship for a week, crewed by men of my choice.”
It was le Grant the ship-master, of course, she was looking at. He said, “Yes, Despoina? And where were you hoping to sail her?”
She said, “East, to Batum. There is some special cargo to be delivered quickly and in secret. It is not a ruse of Messer Doria’s to deprive you of your galley, but I understand you will hardly believe that without sufficient proof.”
“No, I shouldn’t, highness,” said the red-headed man. “It would take a lot to persuade me to agree to anything, these days.”
She said, “I thought that it might. On the other hand, had I wished, I could have sent someone else on this errand. I have a clear conscience. If you have been used, it is by your own side.”
The red-haired man did not answer. The priest, looking from one to the other, chose to return to the subject in hand. “Certainly,” he said. “Before we lose sight of our ship, you would have to show us good reason, Despoina. What can you offer that would make us consider it?”
“Who reads Greek?” she said.
It was the doctor who took the scroll she brought out from her robes, and paused at the seal. The silk and the wax with its one-headed eagle, emblem of the Imperial Comneni. Then he broke it and read, and then passed it wordlessly to the priest. The man John le Grant said, “What is it?”
And the doctor said, “We are asked to take the Empress to Georgia. The Empress Helen.”
She said, “The Empress’s daughter is Queen of Georgia.”
“Secretly?” the doctor said. He had a small, twitching nose like a ferret. “Not, then, a family visit. She wants an army to set out from Tiflis to Trebizond?”
“Or Tiflis to Erzerum,” the engineer said. “I expect Uzum Hasan could do with a little help.” The Scots inflection, when he was angry, sounded coarsely through the Italian.
The doctor said, “But it was the Empire of Trebizond, surely, that our friend Fra Ludovico and his party was seeking Christian help to preserve. There was a Georgian envoy among them. I can’t remember how many soldiers he promised. A lot.”
She said, “You would require to take her to Batum on the Georgian border, and wait for her message. It is only a hundred miles to Batum, and less than that to the Franciscans inland at Akhalziké. By the time the galley returns, the Turks’ plans will be clearer. You might even wish to anchor this time at a spot less conspicuous than the road off Trebizond itself. You would call your absence a trading voyage. It is always the season for slaves.”
The priest said, “Will the palace children go with her?”
“It is not an escape,” said Violante of Naxos. “The children remain, and all the other women. The plan is not at present known to the Emperor.”
“But the oarsmen will be Venetian?” the red-haired man said. He had read the situation already. The others, she saw, would not be far behind.
She said, “They will be the best we can get, who are also trustworthy. They will be paid by us.” She addressed herself to the priest, since none of the others had emerged as a spokesman. “You may use your own seamen and officers, including Messer le Grant if he will go, and if you can spare him. The payment would be appropriately high.”
“For example?” said the doctor.
She knew the Florentine prices, and made sure this was better. They could have little quarrel with that. She said, “I don’t ask you to decide now. You will be given an audience. I have told the Empress that, even if you refuse, your silence can be trusted. She would hope to see you in any case when you bring the completed work to the Emperor.”
“What completed work?” said the doctor.
She looked at the engineer. He said, “They don’t know. It didn’t seem worth mentioning now.”
“Mentioning what?” the doctor said. He looked annoyed.
The engineer got up. “What Nicholas was working at in his room. I gave him a hand with some of the parts. He left notes to help me go on with it. As a present. A gift for the Emperor. It was to go to the Palace when finished.”
“When what was finished?” said the doctor.
She waited, watching them all: sure, now, of her diagnosis. She was pleased, now, that she had troubled to do this herself. Le Grant; the doctor; the slave, of course, whom the young man had used, she believed, as some sort of confidant. And the chaplain? So far, she could not tell what he thought. The bald doctor asked all the questions, but the priest listened, and watched. Watched her, as she was watching him.
Now, le Grant stood, and caught the eye of the negro, and then turned to the rest. He said, “You might as well come and see. The lady, too, if she wishes. We kept the door locked.”
They remembered to let her go first. As they walked, she spoke to the doctor. “I thought Messer Niccolò had shown you the manuscripts.”
The doctor was staring at John le Grant, not at her. “He brought some medical books from the Palace.”
Le Grant answered the doctor, not her. “It was nothing that mattered. It filled the time. It could have been useful. It had to do with one of the manuscripts from the same source as yours. The Byzantines copied old Greek treatises, and the Arabs got hold of them and translated them into something different; and then they come back to the Greeks as presents or booty. There was an Arab engineer in Diyarbekr, though, who wrote an original work a couple of hundred years ago on mechanical devices. It seems a copy turned up in the Palace. Nicholas saw it, and built something from it. That’s all.”
“The Basileus was amused to discover and foster Messer Niccolò’s special talents.” she said. She could hear them thinking. She added, “And where, then, is the confection?”
“Here, highness,” said the engineer; and opened a door.
She had seen the drawings which were, of course, fantastical nonsense. However, it was a nonsense that tickled the Emperor’s fancy, and there was no reason why an ingenious man, good with his hands and well-stocked with artisan’s patience, should not make, from straw paper and wood, the kind of simulacrum that the Emperor would be pleased with. An ancient mechanical jest, reproduced in another dimension.
What she saw, as she went forward, was the image of the nonsensical drawing. An ancient mechanical jes
t now transformed into an object of art which was also, in its gentle, affectionate way, a tribute to the bright, merry soul of its Arab inventor. And more than that, the essence, you would say, of the man now gone: the man who had made it.
On the floor stood a rubicund elephant. Behind its Indian driver a maiden sat within a tall canopied howdah, intricately painted and tasselled. A bird sat on the roof of the howdah, with a turbanned Arab fixed to a valance below him. From inside the roof hung a dragon, its coiling neck and stretched jaws leaning upwards. The dragon glistened with rude, childish malice. The maiden looked coy. The Indian driver gazed furiously at his hatchet. The elephant appeared uncertain and also deeply preoccupied. The enamels glittered and glowed on all the smooth, fashioned surfaces. The lady Violante looked round. Priest and doctor, shipmaster and negro: each face had cleared and was smiling. The priest said, “It’s a clock. Is it?”
Le Grant said, “Yes. The maiden points to the time. There are revolving openings, too, inside the roof of the howdah. If you look, you’ll see them change colour. For the rest…” He crossed the room to a long bench on one wall. On it were tools, laid out neatly as scalpels, and coils of wire and a vice. There was also a sand-glass. The engineer said, “I gather he made things in Bruges.”
The doctor said, “All the time. What happens here?”
“You’ll see,” said le Grant.
They had slipped into childhood. She watched the men more than she watched the elephant clock; and even when the performance began, and the bird whistled, and the mahout struck the elephant, and the Arab dropped a pellet into the dragon’s open mouth, she looked at them, curious about what she saw on their faces. The pellet, circulating, sprang from the dragon’s fundament into a vase and disappeared within the elephant, from which emerged, with sonority, the sound of a gong. A thing of delight. An explosion of fine controlled gaiety that a man with artisan’s patience had made.
Throughout, the engineer gazed, absorbed, intent on following each faultless move. The chaplain had begun to look, smiling, and then ceased to see, although his eyes remained on the clock. The doctor laughed once; then his smile fixed like the grin on a terrier and he turned aside, jabbing his fist like a man lost for words; or for a reason for something. Then, without taking leave, he let his arm drop and left.
The priest came to himself. He said, “Is that all you wished to say to us, Despoina?”
“Oh. Yes,” said Violante of Naxos. “And of course, I ought to tell you. The caravan from Tabriz will arrive in eight days. Messer Doria will be back in plenty of time to prepare for it.”
She returned, without event, to the Palace and was charming, that evening, to her great-uncle the Emperor and all her beautiful relatives. Caterino Zeno my husband, you have a wife beyond price. Everything, everything is as you wanted it.
Chapter 30
CATHERINE DE CHARETTY negli Doria, thirteen years old and the youngest of three, had never met a sick man in her life, let alone nursed one. When the halt and the blind and the mutilated came back from one of Captain Astorre’s wars, it was her mother who paid them their pension, and visited their wives with baskets of blood-sausage and puddings and eggs, and took their children into her ’prentice loft.
Catherine was surprised when her husband’s gallant fortitude hardly outlasted his visitors. They had barely gone before he began to fret for one reason or another. He had not enjoyed the interrogation, and seemed to blame her in some way for the incursion. Also, where was the hospice physician, now that he lay here exhausted? At his bidding, she limped off to find him, and received less than passionate thanks for that or the other services she found, in his servantless state, he required of her. When he considered there was not enough wine, or the brazier was smoking, or he wished to be helped to his bed, it was his little Catherine who, with a certain perfunctory charm, was recruited to serve him. When, in need of comfort, she pressed herself close, he asked her to keep off. He moderated his voice almost immediately, but there was no doubt it had been strident. It became apparent that he did not want to make love. Catherine resented every moment of the week they spent in the Sumela monastery. It reminded her quite often of those parts of her daily round at the Leoncastello which she also greatly disliked.
Of course, life in beautiful Trebizond was never less than glorious. Remembering her routine existence in Bruges, there could be no comparison. But it was not all a matter of feasts and fine clothes and dignified gossip. To look after the residence and the warehouse there was Paraskeuas their steward; and Pagano naturally had ordered him to see to everything without troubling the lady his wife. After all, her mother had run her business without doing her own daily marketing, or putting soles to the family hose, or personally baking the family bread, or salting the family meat, or making its sheep cheeses at lambing time. Unfortunately, when Paraskeuas was away, the household seemed to think they should resort to Catherine in his place. And not only her household, but the women of the rest of the colony.
In Bruges you bought everything in the town. Here, contracts were made by which your oil and your wine, your geese and your capons, your leeks and your onions and pigeons were brought in from outlying farms, and there were always complaints of short-changing or rotten goods or lateness or failure of delivery. In such cases; or when some roof leaked, or the water was muddied or a slave fell sick and the doctor was away, what was she expected to do? They seemed to think she must have time to spare, since she didn’t cut her own cloth, or check the cellar or storehouse, or supervise the washing and sewing and certainly not the beastly business of cleaning the commodes. When the orange and pomegranate trees in sheltered places began to sag for want of watering, Pagano had said as if astonished that he had supposed she was attending to it, as the duty didn’t seem to be hard. It occurred to her, a little late, that Pagano had never in his life stayed very long in one place, and that if there were women about he assumed that such matters were being taken care of. He had been the most perfect and skilful lover that any girl of her age might have wanted, but his imagination, she saw, did not really stretch to practical things. She kept having to remind him.
He was still thinking about nothing but his health when the time came to go back to Trebizond, and she felt, sometimes, that he was not really listening when she talked of more important things. She thought a lot about what her mother would do without Nicholas, and whether Pagano would have to bother with Bruges, and what it would be like to give orders to Father Godscalc and Meester Tobie. She wanted to know Pagano’s plans. She was becoming uneasy, as well, at the long abstinence his injuries had imposed, which her body resented. She had made her disappointment quite clear on their last night at the monastery, and had got him at last to court her properly although he could not, of course, carry her into bed. Then, having roused her, he suddenly cried out and rolled aside, groaning, while she ached and throbbed unfulfilled at his side. That was when she struck out at him, without caring where the blow fell, and he shouted at her and left the bed and crept to a chair, where he sat hugging himself and swearing under his breath. Later, he asked her to forgive him, but she wouldn’t for a long time. On the journey back to the Leoncastello they hardly spoke, and once there the Genoese doctor put him to bed and gave him something that kept him sleeping all night. It was the first time, too, that she had ever heard Pagano snore. But Willequin gave her a wonderful welcome.
The next day she went out, and stayed out. After the monastery, it was delicious to take out a fresh gown and veil and braid her hair up with flowers and walk out with her attendants to see her acquaintances in the City. She told, several times, the story of how Pagano had fought off the Kurds single-handed. Once, she saw the big Guinea slave Loppe in the distance and when Willequin barked he turned his head and began quickly to push towards her. Luckily, she was near the house of an embroideress she wanted to visit, and slipped through the door before he got near. Nicholas had known how to get round most people, and she supposed they were sorry in one way that he h
ad gone. But you couldn’t expect grown men to enjoy taking orders from her mother’s apprentice. It was better for her mother this way, however sad it made her at first. Felix would have been sad as well. When she had a thought like that, she dismissed it. The wife of one of the Ancona merchants asked her to take dinner with them, and she did. She had quite a satisfactory day.
As soon as she got back to the fondaco, she felt that something had happened. The big yard that could hold whole mule-trains was busy with hurrying people, and she saw a group of servants waiting in Venetian livery. There was an air of briskness, of excitement even, that had not been there when they had received their injured consul the previous day. She met Paraskeuas as she hurried in.
He was smiling, as always. Looking after Cardinal Bessarion’s dying mother had made him good at pleasing people, while doing much as he wanted, she suspected, behind their backs. But he was a very hard-working steward, and his wife and son were always respectful and neat. Now he said, “His excellency asks, madonna, that you will excuse him for a moment. The Venetian Bailie has called. It seems that the Tabriz caravan is only two or three days away, and they plan to send messengers to find out its size and its merchandise. His excellency has been to the Palace already.”
Catherine wondered why. Dismounting yesterday, Pagano had claimed never to wish to see a saddle again. It was even more amazing when, presently, free of his business, Pagano joined her in her parlour with the resilience back in his step and his handsome face again full of colour and life. He said, “Well, demoiselle: greet your wounded husband who does have the esteem of some people. Out of regard for us both, the Emperor has said he will never countenance a revolt by your mother’s servants. The Charetty company in Trebizond is now rightly yours, and you may do with it as you please, with the Emperor’s blessing.”
She considered. “Do we have to move out to their villa?”
He laughed. “Would you prefer a little fondaco to the Leoncastello of Genoa? No, sweetheart. Later, we shall appoint men of our own to see to the Florentine contract. Meantime, I hesitate to turn the poor fellows out of their compound. When the caravans come, they will simply find their gates locked until all the trading is done. The Emperor has ordained it. Otherwise it would be nonsense: two sets of people claiming to speak and buy for the Charetty company. Catherine. I am jealous of my privilege to buy you your rubies. Now you can have them. Now, when the camels walk over the bridge, you can have all you ever wanted.” He put his arm round her shoulders and in his glowing face was the look that she had missed for a week. He said, “The news has cured me already. We shall find some way, my Caterinetta, to honour these jewels you are going to have, so that they and you will recognise who is their master.”
The Spring of the Ram: The Second Book of the House of Niccolo Page 46