The Spring of the Ram

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Tobie said, “You really can’t desert your own crew. Tomorrow, let’s try something that has a chance of succeeding.”

  You could hear the roar of people, far away, behind the nearer sounds of shuffling feet and people talking. After an agonising space, Nicholas said, “Yes.”

  On the way downhill, Tobie quickened his pace and then broke into a run. Nicholas did the same, after a moment. The wetness had dried on his face: he had been unaware of it. On the shore, the waves slapped at the quays in scarlet peaks and black shadows. Between the sea and the shore, the crowds of would-be helpers were in disarray and, dismayingly, Julius and the rest were still among them. Where skiffs and ships’ boats had claimed every stanchion by daylight, now the places were empty. Ranging fast round the beach, someone had found a shallop, but it was holed. By the time a shed had been unlocked and a boat launched, the smoke, pumice-grey, was pouring towards them and turning the water to lava.

  Godscalc, Julius and le Grant were scrambling in just as Tobie pounded towards them, Nicholas following. Tobie sprang into the boat, his fingers dug in the notary’s shoulder. Julius, who had opened his mouth, slowly shut it. Nicholas stepped into the boat as if it were empty and sitting, got hold of his oars and settled them, too, as if they belonged to somebody else. When le Grant barked, he leaned forward and pulled with the rest. They were well into the harbour when Tobie saw his eyes become aware and his lips part. He inhaled: a vast breath, which went on to include all the air in the Morea. Then, with visible purpose, he turned his head on his shoulder and began to study the fire on his galley.

  First, Astorre and the crew were still on board, and active. So much could be glimpsed as the smoke wavered and curdled. In the same uncertain moments of vision, you could see that the ships at anchor were supplying help also, sending skiffs or moving up cautiously. Two of the boats from the Doria were prominent among them. When, coughing furiously, the Charetty rowers swung their way through the murk and came at last near the flames at its centre they could hear the shouting from the far side of the galley, and the splashing and hissing of water. Although her leaders were absent, the Ciaretti was not being abandoned.

  They shipped oars almost under her side, with the heat radiating down on them. Gasping, they twisted to look at her. The length of the hull on this side was intact, although above their heads, the parapet of the outrigger frame and the frame itself were gapped and blackened and smoking in places. The port divots for the ship’s boat hung empty, but were not warped. They had either cut the boat loose, burning, or had launched it. The Ciaretti carried gunpowder, Tobie remembered. If there had been time, Astorre would have dragged it out and sent it to sea.

  The force of the fire, it now seemed, was in the middle or on the opposite side, because none of the helping boats were now visible. Not that anything was especially visible, except in glimpses. High against the black of the smoke, the rigging glowed red as a joy-frame for fireworks, already melting to nothing. The mizzen mast wasn’t there: they could see the scars of its falling. No doubt it floated somewhere beside them, with its yard and its tangle of cordage. The sail, thank God, had not been stepped. The smoke thickened and swirled. Mixed with it were burning fragments. Overhead, a blazing stanchion slackened and dropped, to strike the sea hissing beside them. They were on the lee side of the wind, and the water was littered with debris.

  Someone said harshly, “Right. The other side,” and he saw that it was Nicholas, and that he and le Grant were now working together. They pulled round the stern, looking upwards. The rudderpost was undamaged. The stern-castle had lost canvas and curtain and its woodwork was blackened and charred, but the structure still held. While looking, they found their oars striking wood. They had come across the first of the flotilla of helpers and had to pick their way half-blind between them. There was shouting, some of which they made out, and some of which was drowned in the groaning and cracking of timbers and the blustering sound of the fire and the hiss and smack of the boisterous water. Within the ship, too, the noise of men’s voices was urgent and continuous but also oddly diffuse, like an argument heard in a steam bath. As they passed other boats, gleams of red picked out faces and arms, and once a cargo of sandbags. The Ciaretti, Tobie remembered, carried sand as ballast as well. If they could reach it that, too, would help. They cleared the high stern at last, and the smoke swirled and let them see what the others were telling them.

  It was not the half-ship they had expected to find. The companionway was not only unburned but let down, and a chain of buckets moved up and down it. Above, there hung for a moment the manic face of the bearded Astorre, red as the axe in his hand. He croaked, “Clods! Were ye sleeping?”

  Nicholas stood up in the boat. “How bad?”

  “From the hold up. The smoke’s holding us back. She’s still watertight and I think we’ll keep her that way. We’re getting on top of it.”

  He went on yelling hoarsely as they clambered aboard. “Two missing; two hurt when we got the mast down. Is that fool of a physician sober?”

  He had sent someone already, Tobie found, to secure his medical bag in a safe place. A man who could command a mercenary troop could handle emergencies. But he was better pleased than he would admit, Tobie guessed, to have Nicholas there. To take the burden. To report to the owner his wife. And Nicholas, responding, had without doubt accepted his duty. First, the ship. Then, hallucination or not, the other matter.

  If you were used to a battlefield, or a hospital, you knew what it meant, working through the worst of a crisis. In an hour of unthinking, automatic outpouring of ideas and energy, they stopped the spread of the fire. By the time another hour had gone by, they had it mostly smothered and safe. One by one, the ministering boats came to report and drew off, each crew with a jar of strong wine to reward them.

  Once from the sea, and once by hailer from his own deck, Pagano Doria himself had expressed his regrets and asked if more help were needed. The Bailie had sent similar messages, with promise of shipwrights and timber. The last assault on the fire was at that time at its worst, and it was John le Grant who each time received and answered the greeting. Nicholas, below in the hold, had from his arrival not so much directed the attack as embodied it. There were patches of glistening red on his skin, and he carried the reek of burned hair. Godscalc, remonstrating, had been brushed aside. Julius sympathised. “Nicholas thinks he’s an expert. The dyeshop burned down last year.”

  “And he ran into the heart of the fire?” Godscalc said.

  Tobie overheard, heaving water. His scalp glistened. “The dyeshop was paid for,” he said.

  “Indeed,” said Godscalc. “Well, I may be wrong, but I think that something else is being paid for just now. Perhaps you should restrain him.”

  “Twice?” said Tobie; before he realised that Godscalc knew nothing. He didn’t try to explain. Time enough to consider that later.

  The second hour passed. As the upper fires died, darkness reclaimed the harbour except for the rolling grey smoke from the galley. On board, they worked now by lamplight, picking their way through a wintry landscape of rubble and charcoal. They moved debris, and cut down and lashed what was dangerous and began for the first time to search out and assess the real damage. During this, the missing crew member was found: a lump of rags, flesh, hair and bones among the tufts of Charetty wool, the warped frame of a lamp at his side. The wool was a pile of black scales and glitter: the sweetened smoke hung like a fog.

  Soon after that, Nicholas had whistles blown for a rest. In the glimmer of tallow, the men straightening from their work might have been cut from black paper and mist: their eyes red, their throats raw with the stink of charred wood. Broth was heated and thrown into cups. Burns were wrapped, and a sleep rota agreed on. The tattered canopies were replaced with old canvas, and blankets and coverings searched out to keep resting men from the cold of the night.

  In the patron’s cabin the fine wood was cloudy and black but had not caught, though the fire had reached throu
gh the door and set alight the carpet, the table, the curtain. Their fragments lay still on the deck where they had been dragged away. The cuirasses and weapons still hung on their hooks on the wall and were sooty and warm to the touch. Summoned, the senior men of the Charetty company followed Nicholas there and sprawled on the congealed tar of the boards and swallowed the soup and the bread and the smutty wine that was all that Loppe could find.

  Tobie, last to enter with his bag and his clean hands and his unsavoury shirt, looked around at a circle of striped clowns and grunted. Smeared, singed and hollow-eyed, but none of them injured beyond the burns that everyone showed. The human losses had been as Astorre said. Two soldiers caught under the falling mast and for whom he could do nothing. A marine presumably knocked overboard and still missing. And a sailor who had, it seemed, taken a thirst and a lamp to the warmest part of the hold, and there drunk himself into the stupor from which the fire had resulted.

  Of course it was bad, but nowhere so bad as it might have been. Because of the sand in her ballast, the slow-burning nature of wool and a number of more unusual factors, the greater part of the ship was intact. She was afloat, and she was not taking in water. How much of the cargo was safe was not yet established, nor what equipment had gone; nor what precisely was needed to repair and replace what was damaged. Between now and dawn there was still heavy work to be done.

  Aware of it, no one spoke very much. The single lamp flickered. Nicholas, in the shadows, had a cup of broth in one hand and a stylus in the other, with which he made notes, from time to time, on a tablet propped on one knee. Tobie wondered where the tablet had come from, and if the company books had survived. He saw Julius was watching as well, but had no intention of speaking to Julius. Then le Grant stretched and shifted and said aloud what they were all thinking. “Well: it might have been worse. A week, and we might be at sea again.”

  Astorre grunted. His face, without eyebrows, looked naked. He said, “You tell a soldier to stay on board and he stays. Tell a sailor he can’t go ashore and he drowns his sorrows and tips over his lantern. Cheaper to let them ashore.”

  No one answered. Tobie looked over to Nicholas. As if he had just heard le Grant speak, he looked up. “A week? No. We have to be able to sail in a day.”

  Tobie saw the rest exchange glances. “We can’t,” said le Grant flatly.

  Nicholas remained looking up. “Why not? We have unlimited help. We can buy what we want from the arsenal. We refit what we can. We buy ready-made what we can. And at the end of the day, we collect what we haven’t managed to finish, load it on board with the workmen, and sail with it. This isn’t a round ship, it’s a galley. All we need is a seaworthy hull, the right number of oars and enough benches. If you can’t get those in time, then I can.”

  John le Grant looked at him. “Aye,” he said. “Ye need even less for a raft. What about that?”

  He and Nicholas stared at one another without noticeable animosity. Nicholas said, “All right, I’ve understated it. But not by much.”

  “That’s your opinion,” said the red-haired engineer. “As, of course, a seagoing man. Allow me to advise you. I can get this ship seaworthy in twenty-four hours for rowing right round this harbour, and she won’t take in a drop. But the Aegean in March? That’s for dummies.”

  “I’m in a hurry,” said Nicholas. He held the lamp out of the way and threw the tablet over the deck. “Twenty-four hours.”

  “Why?” said the engineer. He picked the tablet up, but didn’t look at it.

  Tobias Beventini didn’t look at it either, because the light had shown him Nicholas’s face. He wondered if the others saw what now existed, fixed, beneath the dirt and the burns. He had been wrong, and twice over; and Godscalc had been right, with nothing to go on but guesswork. Despite the disorientation on shore, Nicholas had possessed, after all, the reserves to deal with the fire. Such things normally brought their own mercy. Now Tobias Beventini looked at Nicholas and recognised that not for a moment had Nicholas let the matter slip from his mind. It still occupied all his real thoughts as he sat there. And as awareness reached him, he heard Nicholas repeating the engineer’s question. “Why the hurry? I have something to raise with Pagano Doria. He won’t like it. He may dislike it so much he lifts anchor. And if he tries to leave, I want to outsail him.”

  “I”. Not the company “we”. Not either the disarming tone they were familiar with. The face of le Grant showed he could make nothing of it. Tobie, half-prepared to be called on as an ally, wondered if Nicholas even remembered his existence. It was Loppe’s voice which broke in before them.

  “Messer Niccolò?” Alone of them all, he gave Nicholas the title, and his Italian name. Nicholas rose to his feet.

  Loppe said, “The smoke has cleared. The Doria is not in the harbour.”

  The cold of the night swirled through the masked door as Nicholas left. The others, scrambling, followed. At Tobie’s side, Julius said, “That business on shore?”

  “Yes,” said Tobie. With the rest, he got to the side.

  It was true. Where the round ship had lain was pooled water, reflecting the light on the mole, and the bow lights of the small ships at anchor, masked by the last drifting smoke from their fires. The fires which the Doria had helped to extinguish. And then, politely withdrawing her skiffs, she had made herself ready for sea and, in the smoke and the darkness, had vanished.

  Godscalc came up. He said, “She must have been provisioned already. He meant to go.”

  “I should have known. Of course he meant to go,” Nicholas said. “He started the fire.”

  There was a second’s pause. “Rubbish,” said Astorre.

  “You think so?” said Nicholas. When he turned suddenly, Astorre had to look up to him. Crewmen, taking notice, were listening. Nicholas didn’t look at them, but his voice was pitched louder than usual. He said, “It wasn’t an accident. I lifted the head of the man who was burned. His skull was caved in. If Tobie looks, he will tell you. He lay on the Charetty bales—the only uninsured part of the cargo. The silk escaped. The structure of the ship escaped—the Doria boats helped us themselves. He didn’t want the ship lost. He did want to delay us. He did want to get his people aboard to see what we carried; what we were protective about. I suppose there is no doubt at all that Pagano Doria now knows we have soldiers aboard, and how many. Captain Astorre?”

  In the half-naked face, the unimpaired eye glittered and the scarred one folded into a scowl. Astorre said, “D’you think we gave them an inventory?”

  “No. But he’d see some of you worked as a team, and hear your language, and learn, of course, that you were their commander. Not just Doria’s men, but all the crews who came aboard will have seen that. How on earth could you have helped it? Your job was to save the ship, and you did. But only Doria has a vested interest in telling the Turks.”

  In the uncertain light, the face of Julius showed a bemused fascination. He said, “But Doria couldn’t have started the fire. He was with us.” He paused, and his face changed again. “The daggers? Was the detour to the smiths’ quarter to delay us?”

  “I should think so,” said Nicholas. “He needed time for his men. And he likes his sport too. He enjoyed the idea of a challenge.” He stopped, and Tobie saw how shallowly he was breathing. Then he said, in the same, very clear voice, “As for who started the fire…there is one man missing still. A marine, whom no one knew very well. We may find his body. But I rather think he’s now safe and well on the Doria.”

  He had half the crew listening now, and throaty murmurs answering him. It was Julius, surprisingly, who said, “I don’t see it. You think he’ll betray Astorre and the rest to the Turks, and get the galley himself as a prize? But you heard him. You may be rivals in trade, but your soldiers will keep all the trading colonies in Trebizond safe. It’s in his interest, too, to get your men past Constantinople.”

  “You’d think so,” said Nicholas thoughtfully. “You’d really think so. But what his true interests are,
we really don’t know, do we? That was one of the reasons for the little talk I expected to have with him. And it’s really quite an incentive to stop whining and get this galley out to sea after her. For one of the things I fancy least is having Pagano Doria board my ship and kill my men and burn my cargo and sail into Constantinople ahead of me.”

  He turned, a youth with a scarred, dirty face, and stared at the crew crammed all about him. “Can we catch her?”

  “Yes!” they roared.

  John le Grant paid no attention. He said, “You want us to prepare for a race with a round ship? And what after that? Your wool’s gone. You face the cost of repairs. And even if you reach Constantinople before him, the rumour of Astorre and his men may have got there. Why not cut your losses and turn back from Modon?”

  “Award a triumph to Messer Pagano?” Nicholas said. The men were shouting still. “They don’t want it. I can’t believe you want it either. And I—I’ve still got this knife with his name on it.”

  Chapter 11

  WHAT NICHOLAS HAD given was a performance. Well, he was used to that. The accounts of the feats of mimicry, the practical jokes perpetrated in his juvenile past, had always seemed uniquely repellant to Tobie. At the same time he had seldom heard something like this carried off quite as neatly.

  At the time he said nothing, but accepted the orders that poured upon him from above and refused to engage in controversy with anybody. He did, upon demand, examine the corpse of the man in the hold and he was able, with every justification, to confirm officially that the man had been done to death before being incinerated. After that, he did what he was told for a number of hours until, according to rota, the time had come for him to sleep. Then, instead of finding his blankets, he watched for Nicholas.