The Spring of the Ram

by Dorothy Dunnett

  The woman was useless. All that could be done was being done. Who knew what the girl had eaten? Something from the dog’s dish, like as not. Certainly she could not travel as she now was. Messer Pagano would have to be patient. Or if he doubted her, call in a doctor.

  Pagano Doria preferred not to call in a doctor. On the other hand, if the illness developed, he could not avoid it. If the illness developed, he could not sail with her anyway. He conferred with Crackbene his master, and sat at his papers, interviewing people, dealing with all the last-minute details of sailing. Now and then he could hear the girl crying in a lonely, dispirited moan. Touched, he had tried to cheer her at first. Now he sent in little presents: a pot of herbs, a lotion, a phial of red for her lips. That night he went to bed thinking he had lost his game against Fate. He could never sail at the right time. The girl was dying; or was at best an invalid.

  He woke to the sound of a scream, and the bang of a door, and running footsteps. Fumbling to find tinder and candle he heard a second door open. The nurse spoke, and was answered by the girl’s voice, thin and shaking.

  By the time he got to the door, it had closed again. He rapped, and nothing happened. Then he heard the nurse’s footsteps again. The door opened and she appeared, her face shapeless and red in the light of his candle. She held the girl’s door shut behind her. “You heard it?” she said. “Such a fuss. But you’ve no need to worry, my lord. Come back in the morning and the little lady will be ready to see you, and as proud as a queen.”

  “What?” he said.

  “What do you think?” said the nurse. “The Holy Mother knows I’ve worked hard enough for it. I never guess; it’s unlucky; but I thought this might be the moment. They get frightened. You’ll hear her crying, but never worry. Turn over and get you a good night’s sleep, my lord Pagano. Make the most of your sleep. Because if I know that little lady she will keep you busy in more ways than one. The bigger the pain, the bigger the hunger. That’s the truth about virgins, Messer Pagano.”

  He let her go back to the room, and returning, stood by his window, enjoying the night. Then he went back to bed and slept soundly till sunrise.

  Catherine received him next morning. Sitting erect with her russet hair combed and a silken shawl wrapped round her shoulders, she was a different girl from the creature of yesterday, although her cheeks were white still and her eyes circled and brighter than normal. They held, as she watched him, a timid and rather charming appeal. But mixed with the traces of strain and alarm was pride, as the nurse had expected, and the edge of a tremulous happiness.

  He dispelled all her doubts by flinging himself at the side of her bed and covering her with the lightest of kisses. Then he gave her the ring he had kept for this moment. Tears came into her eyes. But when he pressed her lips hard with his own, her arms came round his neck as if she would absorb him.

  They were married one evening in Florence, just before they achieved the secret retreat from their lodgings. She had fought tooth and nail for an open ceremony, a public Mass, a flaunting of her new state before Nicholas, and he had to explain his reasons for secrecy. Once Nicholas knew where the round ship was sailing, his jealousy would be boundless. He would envy Pagano his beautiful bride. He would envy them both their golden future in Trebizond. He might even, Pagano told her, take ship and set out to stop them.

  “He wouldn’t follow us?” she had asked. She was white still, and moved about cautiously, content enough to be married in name. When she was ready, he had to lead her to the next barrier. He had promised her a wedding mass at Messina. And after that, he had let her understand lovingly, he would make her really his wife.

  She hardly heard him, he thought; there was so much else happening. And now that she was a woman, all thought of returning to Flanders had gone. He had offered to write a long letter to her mother explaining it all, and she saw it go off, with his seal on it. Otherwise her mother would never believe it. She was going to Trebizond to learn how princesses lived, and dress in silk gowns and bracelets and rubies.

  He thought she might even get them, if they were lucky.

  Nicholas sailed two weeks later. It was a pity, and perhaps even a danger, that Doria had stolen a march on him, but a round ship could go where a galley could not, and it would have been folly to risk his ship earlier. Also, he had an instinct about Doria that he trusted more than the weather.

  The last letter from Marian his wife came just before the Ciaretti left port. It said a little more than he was accustomed to hearing, because it was written at Christmastime; the first that had passed since they became man and wife; and they could not share it. As boy and mistress, they had never spent Christmas apart since he came to her dyeshop at ten, although the relationship had been shaped, for most of that time, by the berating edge of her voice and the frequent whack of the dyemaster’s stick.

  Even though he remembered, he did not smile, reading. Tilde was turning out a fine girl although it worried Marian that she hardly went out with her friends, but lingered about the office or dyeshop instead. With young Catherine in Brussels, now her mother could do what she wanted; everything had become less troublesome, in a way. But that should not be so, because Catherine was a member of the family too, and it was wrong that she should come to think of her uncle and aunt as her parents, and Brussels as her home. Marian thought that in a short while she would send Gregorio to Brussels to talk with her. Cool and sensible, Gregorio would weigh matters up and would bring back a report she could trust. She prayed for Nicholas. She had made him a scarf. It was not in the Charetty colours. It was for him, himself. She had put her thoughts, she said, in the stitches.

  When he unfolded it, he saw how fine it was, and guessed, since her days were so full, that she had worked every night to complete it. Every night, probably, since he went away.

  He had sent her something too. A little music-box which uncoiled like baled cloth, and had perfect small teasels for hammers. He had made it himself, and got someone to cast it in silver. Her name was engraved on the side.

  He had told Gregorio, but not Marian, the developing story of the Doria. He would be careful, of course. But his brief acquaintance with Pagano Doria had indicated a light-hearted man, amused by small devices. Godscalc thought the same. “That is a man,” said the priest, “who sees the world as a mirror for his own excellent person. He toyed with me. He will toy with you. He does not seek to destroy us because we illuminate him.”

  Often, Nicholas found himself disconcerted by Godscalc. He said, “I thought perhaps I imagined it. I’ve felt, all these weeks, that Doria could have stopped this voyage of ours, if he’d wanted.”

  “And now he wants you to chase him,” the priest said. “I am glad you’ve decided against it. Is chastity difficult?”

  This time, it was not asked by a woman intent on dissecting another woman. Nor, it seemed, did the question hold any special pastoral emphasis. Nicholas said, “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m not sure,” said the priest. He wrinkled his brow so that the mess of black hair tangled into his eyebrows. He said, “He will look for a weak spot.” His brown gaze, though direct, remained civil.

  Nicholas said, “We’ll dress Tobie up in my clothes. You liked Doria?”

  “No,” said Father Godscalc. “I think I was sorry for him.”

  “For him?” Nicholas said.

  Shortly after, they sailed; precisely on time, thanks to the north winds of February. The mainsail was not painted; but in place of the lilies of Florence there flew from its mast a large silken flag in a peculiar blue which had cost Julius, in professional pain, three-fourths of the price of a weaving-loom. Below the mast lay one hundred and thirty-eight feet of floating debt called the Ciaretti.

  The trumpets blew as she rowed out of Porto Pisano. The flourish sang through the boisterous wind and drowned the imprecations of fifty good seamen and a hundred highly paid members of the Charetty army, seated three to a bench and attempting to keep time with each other. They had been for
bidden to sing leaving harbour, on account of their unlikely repertoire.

  Every other man stood on deck and watched the land recede, their hair and cloaks snapped by the wind, and their blood hot for adventure. Nicholas turned and looked at them all: the marine bowmen already in place on the fighting-stage of the prow, or by the mast, or on either side of the long central gangway. The mates, the caulkers, the carpenters, the rowing-master and trumpets; the rest of his team of eight helmsmen. Then, in the stern with the pilot and steersman, his friends the officers of the ship and the company. Godscalc its reserved and powerful chaplain. Tobie, bald and acid, its barber-surgeon. Julius, former master and ally, its notary-purser, with beside him the black face of Loppe, and their servants. The bearded, complacent face of captain Astorre with Thomas his deputy. John le Grant, seaman and engineer, with his eye on the wind and the helmsman and a hand already half raised for the vital order, when the oars would cease their massive drive and the ship would shake and thunder and chime like a battlefield as, one by one, the sails would be brought to break out and belly. He flung his arm up and, as they had practised, it happened.

  And so they were sailing, with the oars shipped and the cables formed in their whorls, and men, excited and bright-faced, jostling, talking together. His men. His ship. His risk. His success, or his failure. No, Marian’s.

  He knew, better than anyone there, the size of the task he had chosen. He knew he had to make the crew his, before Trebizond. Or at least give them a pride in themselves, and their owner. He believed he could do it. But deep-sea sailing was new, although he had spent half his life at a seaport. He emerged from his winter congested with study. He went to sea: the earth fell away and instead there was space, into which he sprang vividly whole.

  Julius watched, like the rest, as Nicholas overran the ship like a wave, making it his own from the hold to the mast-basket. Passing Tobie his bucket, he said, “He’s taken to it.” Tobie groaned. He had taken to it; but in many ways he was isolated still by his ignorance. The mechanics of sailing were simple—a matter of opposing forces, of stress, of angles, of pure mathematics. The weather was not simple at all, nor the pattern of human effort he had—through John le Grant—to control and depend on. At sea, even material things—wood, rope and canvas—changed their character; and had to be studied afresh. He could not judge, as yet, either his boat or his men. When, suddenly, the sea ahead turned rough and dark and the sky blackened, it was John le Grant and his seamen who tested the strength of the coming squall and saved time and effort by risking staying at sea instead of rushing for shelter. Already, le Grant had the respect of Astorre and the crew. On such occasions as these, Nicholas was a silent observer, with nothing to contribute.

  There remained another unconquered dimension. Driving past Elba and Corsica, witnessing unreel on his left the coastline of Italy, Nicholas became aware of a limitation. He knew the political divisions of Italy: without that much, you could hardly organise trade, or a courier service, or plan to contract out an army. He knew where the lands of the Republic of Florence gave way to the lands of the city state of Siena; and where that in turn met the Papal States. Putting in to the harbour of Civita Vecchia, he pulled Tobie unwillingly to his feet to show him the hills on the horizon where, the year before, Tobie had confirmed the discovery which had made this venture possible. There, under the scrub and the turf, was the superb deposit of alum which Venice was paying the Charetty company to say nothing about. Sooner or later, of course, someone else would make all the deductions and find it. But by then…perhaps he would have found compensations.

  That, so far, had been the extent of his interest and knowledge. It was the same when Rome had been passed, and the southern boundary of the Pope gave way to the frontier of the disputed Kingdom of Naples, where last year Astorre and the army had fought for King Ferrante against the French-supported John of Calabria. He thought he knew all about the Italian coast, although he had never seen it before. Then he caught snatches of conversation between Pavia-educated Tobie and Godscalc the priest, his sick-visitor.

  Serving Julius and Felix in Louvain, Nicholas had learned to understand Latin. To a mind that absorbed and retained, its grammar was easy. But Godscalc and Tobie were quoting poems; recalling legends; speaking of great civilisations as if they mattered today. It had not occurred to Nicholas to wonder who had possessed these lands before, or what mistakes they had made, or what successes they had had. The world today held enough of wonder and challenge for him.

  He did not dismiss what he heard, because, if nothing else, he was intelligent. He placed it in his memory, to be thought about.

  Outside Naples, they armed. Later, they might expect roving pirates, although they were less common in winter. All the time, there were Genoese vessels lying in wait in these waters, to board and rob and kill as the French masters of Genoa directed.

  The Ciaretti passed through them unscathed. Pagano Doria had been speaking the truth. Whatever he held against the Charetty company, it was personal. No orders had come from Genoa to hinder their voyage.

  Many of the harbours they used had seen the Doria. In Sicily, they learned they were only ten days behind. The round ship had paused at Messina, picking up grain; unloading Catalonian sugar and all those strings of fat cheeses. They had done more, as Julius returned on board, flushed, to complain. There was no water to spare at the wharf. Nor were there any hens to be had, or beef—live or salted—or biscuit, or fish in the keg. Another purser, well provided with florins, had cleared out all they had.

  It was raining. Nicholas, wearing his boat cloak over a fuzzy felt cap, said, “Where’s the list?”

  Julius said, “They want three times the usual prices. And we have to wait.”

  “What do you wager?” said Nicholas.

  He came back in three hours, followed by a train of porters carrying everything. The prices were half what was normal. Julius was surprised and resentful.

  “Well, you did it yourself,” Nicholas said. Sicily was full of the new season’s vintage, and he had deployed it like Bacchus.

  “What?” said Julius.

  “Fought for Ferrante in Naples. The viceroy in Palermo knows all about the Charetty company, and so does his agent in Messina. Water, cattle and chickens.”

  Julius went red. He said, “How did they know?”

  Nicholas grinned. “Letters from Monna Alessandra. Don’t you remember? Lorenzo’s brother trained in Palermo.”

  “She wrote letters of recommendation for you?” Tobie sounded disbelieving.

  “Well, she wouldn’t write them for you,” Nicholas said. “And we’ve got all Doria’s cheeses.”

  “Cheeses?” said Julius.

  “Yes. He sold them to his agent in Messina, and the agent’s had to sell them to us. By the viceroy’s special order. At half-price. They’re good cheeses, too,” said Nicholas. “I think Messina’s been bad luck for Doria. Did you hear that he married while he was here?”

  “That was sudden,” said Tobie.

  “No; a girl with a dog. She was on the galley already.”

  “The veiled midget?” said Julius.

  “She isn’t veiled now. And she isn’t a midget. She’s a child: twelve or thirteen years old, says the agent.”

  Godscalc said, “I don’t like the sound of that very much.”

  “At least they’re married,” said Julius.

  “Even so,” said the priest. He looked at Julius and then at Nicholas who shook his head, and then smiled, and then heaved up the wine flask.

  “And what about the rest of the journey?” Julius said. “Have you got letters for every provision merchant? They may not know Lorenzo Strozzi’s brother, whereas the Doria have served them for centuries. No water; no food. We’ll be living on biscuits.”

  “Well, biscuits and cheese,” Nicholas said.

  At times during the sail from Messina across the flat Ionian Sea, Julius returned to the question, but with lessening conviction. The crew had settled into a tea
m. The cook had learned how to create dishes for Astorre’s satisfaction. The soldiers, natural athletes, had succeeded with small trouble in mastering their work at the oars, and more besides. They knew, too, enough jargon to converse with the seamen, and were learning more every day. At meals, the leaders of the Charetty company spoke Greek together while, at odd times and in odd corners, Nicholas made the African Loppe repeat al! he had ever learned of Arabic. With the aid of Loppe, also, he taught himself the art of swimming with credit. When, over supper, his officers raised, again, the question of the Doria, he answered calmly, “I doubt if the Doria can spare the time to stop where we’re stopping. We’ll only cross tracks at the big ports. Modon next, for example. He’s got to unload there.”

  “Then let’s pass it,” said Tobie. “Take on supplies somewhere else, and go straight on to Gallipoli.”

  “Well, we can’t,” Nicholas said. “We’ve got to pick up our passenger.”

  They had assumed they were now in his confidence. He had said nothing at all of a passenger. Julius looked exasperated. “Didn’t I tell you?” Nicholas said. “The Greek with the wooden leg. Nicholai Giorgio de’ Acciajuoli. John doesn’t know him.” He explained amiably to John le Grant, ignoring the others, “We call him Greek, but he’s from the Florentine race who used to rule Athens. He came to Bruges, raising money to ransom his brother. Without him, we might not have thought of this voyage.”

  “What’s he doing in Modon?” said the engineer.

  “Trading. Bartolomeo his brother is free now, and sells silk in Constantinople. Well: Pera, over the water. With the help of Acciajuoli, we’ll do business with him.”

  “You’re talking of Bartolomeo Zorzi? I saw him captured. Silk, yes. And more. That’s the man that runs the Venetian alum monopoly. Did ye know that?”

  Nicholas grinned and waited.