The Spring of the Ram

by Dorothy Dunnett

  The secretary, also mounted, had a clear olive skin and a little beard trimmed like fine silk. He wore a tunic and leggings, and his hat had a jewelled cockade in the front. He smiled and bowed his neck, when she waved to Pagano. He was really quite young. She went back to bed.

  She woke the second time warm and confused, and thought she was in bed on the Doria with Pagano asleep on her breasts. His weight pleased her.

  Someone said kindly, “Is it?”

  Someone replied, in a voice she had never heard before, “Yes.”

  Then Catherine opened her eyes. Nicholas was installed on her bedcover, watching her.

  Chapter 13

  NICHOLAS, HER MOTHER’S apprentice, was in her room. Her mother’s husband.

  His face was in shadow, but Catherine knew who it was. And even then, in the midst of her shock, her imagination leaped to see herself through his eyes. How the red-brown hair on her pillow would seem the identical shade of her mother’s. How her eyes were the same blue. How her face was young, and fresh and unblurred, as her mother’s was not. Then, and only then, did she cast wildly about her to cover her bareness. She found her modesty unimpaired. The sheet was up to her chin and her cloak, for good measure, laid over it. The cloak lay on her breast, not Pagano.

  “Catherine?” Nicholas said. He sat as still as a cat at a mousehole. “Don’t be afraid. Your woman is here, and Father Godscalc. I should have waited, but I have to go soon, and I had to see you. Tell me what’s happened.”

  One of her women was there, looking frightened and even plainer than usual. Godscalc? That was the chaplain her mother had hired, to join the army somewhere in Italy. She saw a big man with a tonsure and black, untidy hair, but hardly remembered him. She heeled her way up the mattress and sat with the sheet wrapped like gloves round her collarbones. She could hear her own shortened breathing. She stared in exasperation at Nicholas. Claes.

  A gentleman would have called, by arrangement, with bridal gifts. Or contrived (dazzled) to see her at some superior function. Or challenged Pagano to fight him. Or climbed a rope and attempted to abduct her. Nicholas sat planked on her bed in his old clothes, like a busy cook who had run down a kitchenmaid. And had brought the family priest with him.

  Catherine said, “I remember Father Godscalc. He was in Italy when you killed my brother Felix.”

  He had his back to the light, and didn’t stir. He said, “We heard you had married.”

  “Did you?” she said. “Well, you heard right. You can’t break it, either. Pagano got all the papers. Twice. We married in Florence, and then in Messina. Not some hole-in-the-corner affair in a borrowed chapel.”

  “But not with the blessing of your family, either.” It was the priest’s voice. He was not even Flemish. He had nothing to do with it. She stared at him. She said, “The family signed the papers. You don’t know them.”

  “Who?” said Nicholas.

  “My godfather. My uncle. Thibault de Fleury. You saw his brother dead, too,” Catherine said.

  The maid suddenly whined and Catherine turned on her. “Do you think he’s going to kill you? Don’t be afraid. He gets other people to do it. He couldn’t even ravish you unless you were old.” She turned back. “I expect my lord Pagano at any moment. He fights men who insult his wife.”

  Nicholas made no comment on that at all. He said, “Does your mother know?”

  Naturally, it would be all he could think of. She said, “Now she will. Pagano wrote her from Florence.”

  He said, “Pagano did?” but she saw no point in repeating herself. He said, “You left no word for your mother before Florence?”

  She made her tone insolent. “No. She would have stopped me, wouldn’t she?”

  “Yes,” said Nicholas. The flow of questions had stuck. He sat bent like a man with the stomach ache, his arms folded, his eyes on the floor. Then he took a quick breath and looked at her afresh, with no sign of annoyance or anger. He said, “Look. Never mind all that, it doesn’t matter now. We’re here just to be sure of one thing. That you’re with Doria by your own wish and of your own free will, and that you’re happy. Will you tell us that, Catherine?”

  She recognised, with pleasure, the opportunity he had given her. She dropped one hand on her lap, and gave him a disdainful smile. The sheet, gracefully maintained at her breast, exposed one naked shoulder and a fall of fine russet hair. She said, “How could you imagine my happiness? My marriage is perfect. My husband is better born than anyone you have even met. And don’t think you can spoil it, for he thought of everything. He waited till I was a woman. He gave me a dog.”

  Nicholas looked at her. It was his stupid look, straight from a fight in the dyeyard. He said, “I knew that was the mistake.”

  The priest said, “Take it steadily.”

  Nicholas acknowledged it, if at all, with an unhurried fall of his eyelids. Then he began again in his most ordinary voice. “I’d like to talk to your husband. I shall wait as long as I can. But whether I do or not, I shall be writing home, Catherine. What shall I say to your mother?”

  “What do you usually say to my mother?” she said. “Ask her if she would like me to send her something from Trebizond. Pagano will see to it.”

  “When will you come home to Bruges?” Nicholas said. His voice throughout had been easy and level, only changing in the amount of breath he brought to it. Normally, Nicholas had more voices than anyone she knew. But then, he had nothing else.

  She said, “I don’t really know. These days, I find the idea of Bruges a little revolting. I suppose Tilde doesn’t mind, but my husband isn’t used to such things in his family. I suppose we might buy a town house in Brussels.”

  “Not Genoa?” Nicholas said.

  It seemed an odd idea, but she lifted her brows. “Or Genoa,” she said.

  “When, Catherine?”

  She was becoming bored. “When he’s finished in Trebizond. I don’t know when. Ask my husband,” she said.

  He rose off the quilt then, and stood as if at a loss by the bedpost. Godscalc drew a breath and Nicholas looked at him and said, “No. What good will it do?”

  Godscalc said, “Very well. But there is almost no time. You can’t leave them to face it alone.” He hesitated and then said, “If you like, I will stay.”

  “No. You mustn’t,” said Nicholas.

  Anger rose in her. They were talking over her head. They were discussing, apparently, how long it would suit them to coerce her. Catherine drew a long breath, and emitted a single, deliberate scream, followed by the names of her page and her manservant.

  The manservant came in immediately but looked at Godscalc, who said, “It’s all right. We’re leaving. The Madonna is over-excited. Stay with her.” All the time he was speaking he was looking over his shoulder at someone else who had come to the door.

  It was a man, cloaked and hooded, she didn’t know, although she thought she smelled incense. Nicholas knew him. He went and spoke to him in a low voice and then turned back to them all. He looked first at her, and then at Godscalc. Godscalc said, “What?” and without waiting for a reply pulled open a shutter. Then he said, “She’s in, and dropped anchor. Let’s go.”

  Nicholas said, “It’s too late. She’ll have been boarded already.”

  “And?” Godscalc said. He had a large face, like a pudding.

  Nicholas said, “Someone has told the Grand Vizier that we have Julius and le Grant on board. A troop of Janissaries is on its way to arrest them.”

  She heard it. “Master Julius?” said Catherine de Charetty, with all the authority of her mother. “Master Julius? What for?”

  Nicholas turned to her. “He knows the wrong people,” he said. “He was a favourite of Cardinal Bessarion. In these parts. Bessarion is regarded as a traitor to the Greek Church and an enemy of the Turks.”

  “And John? Why John?” Godscalc said; and Nicholas gave a wry smile.

  “Didn’t you know? He nearly saved Constantinople. It was his countermining that defea
ted the Turkish sappers over and over. He came to serve under Giustiniani Longo. Longo, the Genoese leader. A Doria man.”

  “A friend of the Doria?” Godscalc said.

  “Related to them, just like Catherine’s husband. So John is twice damned, as a sapper and a Genoese-lover, and not likely to be spared by the Sultan. My lord Pagano, though, has nothing to fear. Not after his acceptable trip to the Vizier this morning.”

  Master Julius. Her mother’s notary. Well, he had chosen to go with Nicholas. Catherine said, “My husband took gifts. Everyone has to.” She said it sharply.

  “I know,” Nicholas said. “I’ve been afraid of what he might give. But he chose to take the black page, not the white one.”

  “Nicholas,” Godscalc said. But this time he received no acknowledgement.

  Catherine de Charetty said nothing as her mother’s husband came forward into the light, and hesitated, and then knelt at her side. He said, “So long as you’re happy, none of us will interfere. But if anything should ever go wrong, you have only to call. I shall be at Trebizond. There is a ship, and you have many friends, and people closer than friends. We are always there for you.”

  “I don’t want you,” she said.

  They spoke very little on their way to the ferry that would take them over the Golden Horn to where the Ciaretti lay off the point, surrounded by guard boats from which, even at such a distance, they could see the glitter of steel. The monk from the Franciscans’ had been right, in the message he’d brought them. The Turks had sent an armed detachment to halt the galley and board her. The excuse, it seemed, was to take John and Julius. On the Ciaretti, they had been prepared, of course, for boarding by customs officials; by delegates from the Porte. They had all been carefully primed what to do; what to say. But being overrun by a troop of enemy soldiers was another matter. Of course Nicholas had planned for it: he had planned for everything. Except, of course, that the lives of two of his men might now be forfeit, or at the very least, hostage. But one didn’t know, yet, how much that meant.

  It’s too late, Nicholas had said, back there in Pera; and for a shocking moment Godscalc had thought he meant to leave the ship to her fate, as had nearly happened at Modon. But this time Nicholas had set off downhill at once to the shore; although what lay before him, Godscalc saw, was a fiendish replica of the earlier occasion. Whatever his concern for the girl, Nicholas had to abandon her for his men and his galley, now exposed to something at least as dangerous as the fire, thanks again to Pagano Doria. No one else could have told the Turks that le Grant and Julius were on board; reminded them of le Grant’s war record; exposed the link between Julius and Bessarion. Unnoticed by anyone—unnoticed by himself as well as the young, the immature Nicholas—Doria had always held the fate of these two men in his hands. Julius, who had shared some at least of Nicholas’s boyhood. Red-headed le Grant, who had so readily joined them after that ingenious masquerading in Florence. Who had once fought, it seemed, for a Genoese leader. Well, there was little room now to doubt where poor le Grant’s loyalties lay.

  At the water’s edge, Nicholas stopped, on the point of jumping down to the skiff. He said, “Wait. You should stay. If anything happens, there must be someone to look after the girl.”

  Godscalc looked at him. He said, “I have a shipload of souls to look after. She has Pagano Doria.” Nicholas said nothing more.

  It was cold on the water. As soon as the oarsmen started to pull, Nicholas got a flask from his pouch, took a long swallow and, wiping its mouth, held it out. Godscalc hesitated, and then, accepting it, did the same. The strength of the spirit surprised him into coughing. He passed the flask back, but although Nicholas drank from it twice more in short, savage snatches, he didn’t share it again. Nor did he appear to be watching his ship. Instead, all the time he kept his eyes on the long seawall of Stamboul as it began to come nearer. Behind it stood the dome of the Holy Wisdom, once the greatest church in the world. Nicholas said, “What does it tell you, this place?”

  Godscalc looked at him. The flask, tilted a little, had made a spreading stain on the man’s dark felt cloak. Godscalc said, “You want a sermon on human weakness, greed, courage? A history lesson? It tells me what all cities have to tell.”

  “All cities?” said Nicholas. “I thought this was the New Rome, the new Jerusalem; the second Mecca?” He lifted the flask again and checked, meeting Godscalc’s brown eyes.

  They were getting near. Godscalc said, “Must we? Well then, yes, you are right, it is a special case. Zeus and Jupiter. The Latin God, the Greek God, the Muslim God. A spiritual stew. The reek is one I am used to; I need a smell to diagnose illness, as Tobie does. Why, does it worry you?” It was, under the circumstances, an extraordinary conversation.

  Nicholas turned. “I don’t know,” he said. “I only feel an abomination somehow in the air.”

  They were among the guard ships, and turbanned men were baying at them. Godscalc said, “Because of the Turks? Doria?” He saw Nicholas express a convulsive and irritable negative. It seemed to restore him, like a sneeze. The reek, not of spiritual decadence but of alcohol rose from his person. They were being urged to their feet and prodded by maces towards their own companionway.

  Godscalc went first. Behind him, Nicholas said in a voice thickened but perfectly sane, “After winning, the Sultan made a gift of four hundred Greek children to the rulers of Egypt and Tunis and Granada. I thought I saw a dead child. I felt as if a wave of doom were waiting to fall on me.”

  “Well, it is,” Godscalc said. “But we all expect you to deal with it. So get on board that galley, and act.”

  Bound and bleeding in the cooking quarter of the Ciaretti, Julius heard Godscalc’s voice through the Turkish babble from the flotilla outside. He was speaking in Flemish, and Julius, with what he could muster of viciousness, hoped that the person he spoke to was Nicholas.

  At present, what remained of his mind was equally divided in hatred between Pagano Doria his tormentor, and Nicholas, the conceited clown who had allowed this to happen.

  As instructed, the Ciaretti had taken its time about rowing the last miles to the Horn. It had not been difficult. As instructed, they had not resisted hailing and boarding, even though it had occurred before they had even dropped anchor. Instead of customs searchers and harbour officials, they had been boarded by Janissaries: silent, muscular men with white felt hats and an armoury of weapons, sharp and blunt, which they used. With them was a soft-spoken man called Tursun Beg, in a fur cloak over a long buttoned robe and a cap with a turban wound round it.

  The ill-treatment had begun immediately, when they found the priest and patron were missing. They knew the name Niccolò. John le Grant had been slammed out of his senses for failing to follow the dragoman’s distorted Italian and had yet to come to himself. Julius, although he hastened to answer, had received two blows to the face and, when he resisted, a kicking that had ended when they dropped him here, his arms and legs bound. Behind him, scorching his back, was the oven. And beyond that was the cooking fire, with a pair of tongs in it. They were used to getting co-operation.

  Above him on the deck of the poop, all the senior officers of the ship had been collected together and made to stand in the open, encircled by men with axes, maces, daggers and pikes. Among them was Tobie. The rest were the Florentine complement. Other armed men occupied the length of the gangway, back to back and facing the uneasy oarsmen, who still sat, one or two on each bench, as when they rowed in. One or two, instead of three. This was a trireme. From below came the hollow sound of voices and footsteps, as the rest of the boarding party worked their way through the stores in the hold.

  Tursun Beg looked like a man who could count. Lying burning and freezing, his hair in the dung from the beasts in the stable beside him, Julius peered up at the Turk and his dragoman and answered everything that they asked. He told them that Messer Nicholas the patron and his holy man would be returning. They had merely hired a ferry across to Pera, where the patron had a ma
rried kinswoman. He gave the name of the kinswoman’s husband, the Genoese Pagano Doria, but it effected no change in the dark disinterested face with its neat black moustache.

  The next question should have been about the number and origin of his oarsmen. Instead it was an order to summon before Tursun Beg the notary Julius, and the engineer-captain John le Grant.

  Amazed, he had gazed up through swollen eyes at his questioner. The mace had already sunk into his ribs when he saw Loppe moving weightily forward and heard his voice, in sonorous Arabic, launching into a reply in his place.

  Seen from below, Loppe was the size and width of the mainmast. He was also, unusually, stripped to the waist. Above the white drawers, his muscles were shapely as unbarrelled pitch. He turned and, talking still, stabbed a finger first towards Julius and then towards the unconscious form of le Grant.

  Breathing was painful, but ignorance was much worse. Julius scraped up some breath and croaked, “What is it?”

  Loppe looked at the robed Turk, who nodded. Loppe said, in Italian, “They’ve given me my freedom, Master Julius. Imagine that!”

  Nicholas had given Loppe his freedom the previous year. Loppe spoke the languages of all his previous owners and was probably working hard on Hungarian. Julius said, “What do they want?”

  Loppe smiled. “To put you in prison, Master Julius. And Master le Grant. He’ll be executed for fighting the Sultan.”

  “I haven’t fought the Sultan,” said Julius.

  Loppe said, “Well, maybe not. But this letter came from Cardinal Bessarion, addressed to you in the care of Master Nicholas. The Turks have got it.”

  Bessarion. From the recesses of his aching head, Julius remembered as if from another world his misdeeds at Bologna, and the need to get Bessarion to vouch for him. He said, “What did it say?”

  Loppe said, “It was a friendly letter, Master Julius, so I suppose it was the good news you were waiting for. It talked of telling my lord Cosimo de’ Medici what a fine man you were, and that they could rely on you, wherever you went in the East, to see to it that all men should be encouraged to return into the unity of the Catholic and Universal Church, and spurn the Eastern errors of worship. They think you’re a Latinist spy sent to subvert the Greeks and get them to join a Papal Crusade. They’re going to execute you as well, Master Julius.”