The Spring of the Ram

by Dorothy Dunnett

  It was Doria, in the end, who came to the rescue. He gave up, like the Bailie, the effort to find common ground and reverted to chatting instead of acquaintances known to himself and the Venetian; of spicy intrigues and amusing vendettas and scandals. The Duchess of Athens. The scholar Filelfo and his mother-in-law. The home life, God help them, of these crazy Byzantines. The Emperor David’s late brother who tried to kill both their parents. His mother who slept with her treasurer. His sister the Empress who had been caught in the marital position with her brother. A different one. And this, which the princess had told him…

  Seduced from his difficult duties, the Bailie gave the Genoese his cordial attention. It left Nicholas stranded, Godscalc saw. The talk had turned to high social tattle, and Nicholas had no social experience.

  Lesser officers could chat to each other, and the men from the Doria fell into conversation soon enough with their opposite numbers. Godscalc watched; wondering if Nicholas would give up and join them. Doria was saying, “All the Sultan does, we are told, is favour his own sex, which could be a tactical advantage. Does the Emperor realise it? Are his envoys too plain?” He broke off. “Alas! I think I have shocked Messer Niccolò! Would you be wise to turn back? My dear fellow: one glance at your handsome notary, and Mehmet will go mad.”

  Julius opened his mouth. “That’s why I brought him,” said Nicholas. “My lord Bailie, forgive me. You and Messer Pagano must be weary of discussing the Sultan. But I see a ship from Rhodes in the harbour. I wondered if you had anything recent to tell us?”

  Wrenched from his pleasant diversion, the Bailie thought, on reflection, that he might as well pass on his news. If it brought the evening to a premature end, his guest had no one to blame but himself. He said, “Of course. I had thought to leave serious matters till later but…By all means, let it be now, if you wish. The ship you saw did bring news. It seems to be true. It affects us all. It is better, I fear, for me than for you. My lord Pagano, this is new to you also.”

  Doria turned his head sharply.

  “About the Turk?” Nicholas said.

  The Bailie looked at him. He was not an unfeeling man. He said carefully, “You know about this young Sultan. He builds an empire. Today he is concerned to drive the Greeks and the Serbs from the northern part of his lands. Tomorrow he will look to the south, to Asia Minor, where his lands are at present surrounded. Part is occupied by the Empire of Trebizond, which pays him tribute already. In the rest, he is baulked by powerful tribes. The rival Turcomans of the Black and White Hordes and their princes. The Sultan of Karamania. The emir of Sinope. The Christian princes of Georgia, Mingrelia. Many of these are uniting against him. Many are allied in marriage. Some of them have envoys in Europe, with Fra Ludovico da Bologna. You have met him.”

  Pagano Doria said, “And, my lord, you think the Turk is about to cross into Asia?”

  “I ought to rejoice,” the Bailie said. “What has occurred will divert his attention from the Morea. But it is nevertheless a tragedy created only by laziness, vanity, ignorance.”

  “What happened?” said Nicholas.

  The Bailie placed his fingers together. He said, “Perhaps the Emperor of Trebizond expected too much from his alliances; his appeals to the West. He had sent to the Pope. He had sent to Philip of Burgundy, promising to make him King of Jerusalem. There has been no time, of course, for any response. But the Emperor thought enough of his prospects, it seems, to withhold his annual tribute to the Sultan. Instead of paying his three thousand pieces of gold, he sent to Constantinople demanding remission. Unwisely, he entrusted the message to men who were already armed with a demand of their own. Not a demand: a deliberate insult. He used the envoys of his niece’s husband, the Persian prince Uzum Hasan.”

  “A powerful man,” Nicholas said. The priest looked at him.

  “His envoys think so,” said the Bailie. “The envoys of Uzum Hasan went to Constantinople and committed their madness. They announced that the Emperor of Trebizond wished to pay no more tax. I doubt if they were tactful. Then they told Sultan Mehmet that their own prince Uzum Hasan desired an account to be settled. The Sultan’s grandfather had promised an annual gift to the grandfather of Uzum Hasan. For sixty years, it had never been paid.”

  Doria’s eyes shone. “They demanded all the arrears?”

  “They demanded all the arrears,” said the Bailie. “Equipment for one thousand horses, added to one thousand prayer rugs and one thousand measures of corn. Multiplied sixty-fold.”

  “Imbeciles,” Tobie said.

  “The King of Kings didn’t pay it?” Doria suggested.

  The Bailie said, “He didn’t keep the envoys, or kill them. He told them to go in peace, for soon he would bring these things with him, and pay what debt he might owe. He keeps his promises, Sultan Mehmet. He means war. Against, one assumes, Uzum Hasan. Against, very likely, more than Uzum Hasan. They say he is building a fleet there in Constantinople, the like of which has never been seen.”

  The Bailie paused. The Bailie said, “You, my lord consul of Florence, my lord consul of Genoa, knew the danger, I should suppose, before you left Italy. In sailing east, you have already committed yourselves to more than the business of trade. You are brave men. I shall not ask what you carry, or what you propose to do: we here in Modon are trading ourselves under sufferance. But I salute you.”

  “Capers, mainly,” said Nicholas cheerfully. The high spirits were genuine, Godscalc noticed. He supposed he ought to find that reassuring. Nevertheless he was relieved when the visit ended quite soon. After such news, there could be little to say. What there was, he hardly heard anyway.

  Rather more important than capers, the Ciaretti was bringing a hundred armed soldiers to stiffen Trebizond. If the Turk ever suspected, they’d never win past Constantinople. And if the prankish Pagano Doria ever found out, it could be equally dangerous. Meanwhile, what they had heard merely attached names and dates to risks they already knew. Before, there had been a chance that the Medici trial year would elapse and the Turk would do nothing in Asia. Now, the summer might see an attack. But not necessarily on Trebizond. Remote, mountain-girt Trebizond from which the Sultan was already milking off tribute. That secluded Paradise, Bessarion had written, rich with all the treasures of the earth.

  The doctor Tobie, who spoke a different language from Bessarion, had put it at once in a nutshell. “You want to know about our business venture in Trebizond? If the Turk doesn’t attack, or attacks someone else, we’re in clover. If the Turk attacks and we win, we’re in roses. If the Turk attacks and we fall, then you and I get a stake up the arse, Julius gets cut for a eunuch and Nicholas gets to wind up a dye business as well as a farmuk. It’ll make a real mess of his ledgers.”

  “He’ll adapt,” Godscalc had said. He half meant it. It was his reading of Nicholas, then.

  After the animation of leave-taking, the Bailie’s guests were on the whole a subdued party, walking downhill to the sea gates. Of the Charetty company, Julius had his mind on arrows for crossbows. Both Tobie and Godscalc were thoughtful. John le Grant, who said very little, had long ago lapsed into silence. Only Messer Pagano, leaving his officers, had linked his arm through that of Nicholas and now fell into step with him, talking. On each side of them came the Bailie’s guard with their torches, and behind, their own servants had joined them. Among them was Loppe, taking care to keep clear of black Noah.

  Doria seemed in good humour, and in no want of a more friendly companion. He produced a stream of good stories, some (in a murmur) at the expense of their recent and well-meaning host. Julius distrusted Pagano’s style of humour. Nicholas evidently did so as well. He smiled now and then, but without undue resort to his dimples. It was the first time Julius had observed this phenomenon.

  Pagano Doria knew Modon. Instead of making direct for the shore, he got their escort to take them nearer the fringe of the town, where the solid houses were fewer and reed-thatched cabins clustered instead; the homes of the smiths. This was not th
e Arsenal. This was the quarter for native craftsmen. Here they worked out of doors, red-eyed tailors of iron, seated crosslegged each in an apron of light from his window. A boy or woman knelt tending every fire. The bladders swelled and sank to their thrust, half-buried like burrowing piglets. Behind the chimes of the anvils, their eager confusion of panting recalled the hunt, and the kill. Yet nothing could have been more still, or more peaceful.

  That is, until Doria’s party approached. Then heads turned, and children jumped to their feet, and the wayward chords became spaced and irregular, and were replaced by the drumming of bare feet on dirt, and the sound of harsh voices. Lean bodies fenced out the light, and hands poked and jabbed, clutching objects of leather and metal. “Buy! Buy!” they were calling.

  The Bailie’s escort closed politely about them. But Julius put one hand on his purse and one on the hilt of his dagger, and wondered why they were here.

  Pagano, the firelight ruddy on his straight nose and well-spaced cheeks and mathematical chin, was quick to tell them. “Messer Niccolò! We represent the Western world: the Bailie said so. We are fellow-voyagers, friends on this Argosy. Against the dragon, the Turk, I will defend you, as you, I am sure, will defend me. But in trade, in the matter of bringing back gold, we are rivals.”

  “Isn’t there enough for us all?” Nicholas said. His voice had altered.

  Pagano Doria laughed, and the firelight illumined the amphitheatre of his teeth. He said, “Not for me. I shall be satisfied by nothing less than the whole Fleece. But in chivalry it is usual for knights to face each other equally armed.”

  “Knights?” Nicholas said.

  Doria glanced at his neighbours and smiled. “Gentlemen, then,” he made amend.

  “Gentlemen?” Nicholas said.

  The smile lessened, but did not vanish. “But of course,” the Genoese said. “A consul can be nothing else.”

  “No matter what he does?”

  Pagano Doria, with four men and his servants behind him, looked across the dark space between himself and Nicholas, standing taller than any man there save the chaplain. Around them the voices of vendors still chattered and shouted, but the escort were silent. Loppe had moved nearer Julius. Beside the black page, a white page had arrived by the Genoese party. “But of course,” said Doria. “You are Florence; I am Genoa. We make our own laws.”

  “But you think we should be armed,” Nicholas said.

  The light of the fires, playing through the crowds, struck starry colours from Doria’s wide hat with its jewels and streamers, and two sparks from the caves of his eyes. He threw out a gloved hand. “Look there, on that stall. I have had two daggers fashioned. They are identical, except that your name is on one, and mine on the other. The price is fair. Unless you object, I propose that we each present one to the other. A symbol, you might say. Whatever is to occur, we set out as equals.”

  The weapons were there, laid on a table by one of the anvils. Men drew back, and Doria walked past and fingered them. He said, “Or perhaps the price is inconvenient. Let me present you with one.”

  Nicholas had stopped sounding like someone else. The laugh he gave was Claes’s laugh, uninhibited, all the way from boyhood and Bruges. “Not at all. I’ll take them both,” he said. “And present you with one later on.”

  The pause before Doria also laughed was very small. He said, “You don’t like my fancy. Leave it. The smith will not mind.”

  But as he was speaking, Nicholas opened his purse and put coins on the table. It was more, Julius saw, than the weapons were worth, although they were good ones. Then he picked up one of the daggers. Before he could pick up the other, Doria laid a coin down himself and took the other blade neatly. He said, “I prefer to pay my way now.”

  “Like a gentleman,” Nicholas said. He reflected, and then removed his extra coin. The smith’s hand, stealing out, recovered in silence the price of the two. Pagano Doria tilted his blade so that the firelight exposed the inscription. Then he held out his hand.

  “Messer Niccolò: your mistake. You have the weapon with my name.”

  “And you have the other with mine. What mistake?” Nicholas said.

  This time, the silence was longer. The red light flashed from the steel into their eyes. The bodies and heads, pressing about, seemed suffused by it. The jewel in Pagano’s hat flashed and flashed again.

  It was not, Julius saw, being lit by the fire or the knife blade. It was catching the light from the harbour. From, no doubt, the basket-light on its post at the mole.

  It was not catching the light from the mole. It was throwing back fire from a fire on the water itself. From a ship on the water. From a great galley at anchor. From the Ciaretti, enfolded in crimson-shot smoke.

  Their ship was in flames.

  Chapter 10

  BY THE TIME Julius drew breath, others had shouted, and men were turning, alarmed, towards the glare in the harbour. At first, no one seemed to move. Julius struggled, hammering with his fists on the shoulders of others until suddenly he was loosened as men started forward. The rest of the town had already roused. Fire was serious. Modon had seen fire often before. Trumpets blew from the walls. Men and women emerged from their houses. The ways down to the gates and the shore carried a growing concourse of people. Only Nicholas didn’t run. He stood, a boulder in a stampede, and stared over and beyond the moving heads of the crowd to a small figure just at its edge.

  Julius saw him. Nicholas was staring at Doria’s page. At the black servant Noah. Or perhaps at the white who, Julius saw, broke away presently, grinning. The next moment, both pages had turned and, racing away from the crowd edge, had vanished. Then Nicholas started to run, but not to the shore. Head lowered, blunt as a ram, he drove across the thrust of the crowd, in the direction the pages had taken. It was, of course, senseless: a belabouring progress against close-packed, hurrying people that made no speed at all. Julius, making use of his wake, overtook him. He seized an elbow and roared. “Look! The Ciaretti’s on fire!”

  Nicholas paid no attention. His eyes, fixed ahead, were searching the further side of the crowd. Julius struck him and Nicholas wheeled. Julius dropped his arms. Then, saying nothing, Nicholas turned and continued his incongruous charge in the same direction as before. Julius stood in the torchlight and stared after him, rocking under the impact of other men’s bodies. Tobie crashed into him, grabbed him and said, “I saw that.”

  Julius said, “Saw him ready to kill me?”

  Tobie got his hand up and, declaration of war, hauled off his cap. His hairless scalp glistened. “You go,” he said. “Leave him to the company doctor.”

  A second passed, and then Julius said, “Yes,” and set off. Over his shoulder he saw Tobie begin, in his turn, to force his way after Nicholas. Who had lost his wits, or suffered a fit. Who had received notification, you might say, that hell existed and he was to prove it. Rarely fanciful, Julius didn’t like what he had seen in Nicholas’s face.

  When Tobie caught him, Nicholas had struck beyond the last, busy pathway and was casting through alleys in the flickering darkness. The glare from the burning Ciaretti distorted everything. Leaping from one inky shadow to the next were goats which ought to be people; cats which were possibly children; men and women who showed their fear and resentment when a foreign giant dashed headlong between them and ran on in silence, followed by a smaller man without the price of a hat. When Nicholas began to slow, Tobie slowed also, hoping that matters were returning to normal. Against that, Nicholas had thrown not a glance towards the distant seawall, and the crawling column of red that disfigured the night sky beyond it.

  Nicholas stopped. Breathing hard, Tobie advanced. He said, “What did you see?”

  A man winded by effort will pant. Instead, Nicholas stood taking in air in erratic and terror-filled spasms, as if escaping from something rather than running towards it. He was also shaking.

  Tobie walked round and stood firmly in front of him, scanning his face. He said, “Is it more important tha
n the ship?” He saw what had shocked Julius.

  Nicholas looked at him. There were people standing in doorways and watching them. Women and grandfathers, mostly. All the able men were down by the shore. All except the owner of one hundred and thirty-eight feet of floating debt, now consolidating itself into cinders.

  Nicholas said, “You wouldn’t remember her.”

  “Who?” He thought he knew.

  “Catherine,” Nicholas said, proving he didn’t. “The little one. Marian’s…He’ll have her back on board. A boat. I need a boat.”

  Catherine. “Catherine de Charetty?” Tobie said. He didn’t show disbelief. He said, “How? Where?”

  “With Doria,” said Nicholas. “The white page. With the black one.” He looked at Tobie, and the red light striped his cheek, over the scar. He said, “Don’t you remember? He married in Sicily. She was on board. Veiled. Twelve or thirteen, they said. She was even in Florence. She was in Florence, and I didn’t do anything.” He looked at Tobie with recognition and almost with a recognisable manner. He said, “Go to the Ciaretti and do what you can. I have to board Doria’s ship.”

  “Why?” said Tobie. He had had time to think quickly. “Kill him; take her away? She’s been his wife ever since Sicily. Tonight, he has fifty men on that ship, and he’ll laugh at you. Your galley is burning. He’ll laugh at that as well. You have to see to that first, or give the family another disaster to deal with. What will a few hours do to the girl that hasn’t been done already?”

  He conveyed brisk impatience. He had no idea whether the man had had a nightmare or whether there was an atom of truth in what he was saying, nor did it matter. He thought he could get him back to his ship. The question was whether, once there, he had any stamina left to do any good. But even that mattered less than getting there.