The Spring of the Ram

by Dorothy Dunnett

  As ever, the Archimandrite was in the cabin, his black robes overwhelming his sitting stool. In all that time, he had been absent only once, on the night of the stabbing, when, of course, nothing had happened. Instead, Violante of Naxos had made sure that he understood her contempt for him. It had been a cruel demonstration, as well as a needless one. He knew his own deficiencies better than she did.

  Since that night a routine had been established, which he now followed precisely. After greeting the lady in Greek, Nicholas moved to her other side and, invited, dropped to sit, straight-backed and motionless, on a second stool. He was wearing his shore-going doublet and shirt for tomorrow, although not the short robe which would naturally cover it. The cloth was good enough, and reasonably cut. What was wrong with it he already knew from his tutor. And she, in turn, now sat and considered him.

  Violante of Naxos, between birth and young womanhood, had initiated many people into many mysteries. She had been trained herself in the dance, and in the arts of music and painting. The practice of high manners had from childhood been as natural to her as breathing. She required it in others, and discounted those who thought it unnecessary. She had been taught how to read and to write, and knew her poets and a wide enough range of other writings. More important, she knew what should be known by a man of high rank holding conversation with his peers. Where her own learning ceased, that of Diadochos meantime served. In the case of this Flemish youth who had everything to learn, one could only do so much in three weeks. Set the door a fraction ajar. Judge, if one could, how much or how little lay behind it. And of course, she could make no test of his higher intellect. Formal learning, she saw, he preferred to avoid. Such misgivings, she well knew, were common.

  She had thought to shock him, at the beginning, into a state she could handle. To appear disrobed before him was a small thing, misunderstood only by men of the Church and those little acquainted with life. It was not the first time she had used such means to achieve a quick ascendancy. And he had responded—there had been no mistake about that. Only she had been disconcerted by the speed of his recovery. By the end of the first twenty-four hours, then, she knew she had a competent actor. It had taken her a week to discover what she really had.

  And, of course, he knew that she had been able to reach some conclusions. He had been under scrutiny more than once, she deduced, by those who found themselves suddenly doubting his simplicity. If naïveté had once been his cloak, it could never be so again. He had to find other protection, and was doing so. It would not be a quick transformation, or a simple one. But one day his mask would be in place, and impenetrable.

  He had already realised that he needed her in his strategy. He also needed her for what she could teach. In three weeks, he had trawled knowledge from her until she felt exhausted. Last of all, she had told him what to expect on arrival. The merchants lived outside the walls of the City of Trebizond, and near to the harbour. The Florentine quarter was small, but Michael Alighieri had built a fondaco there, an assemblage of living quarters and storehouse and stables which would serve as a temporary home for himself and his officers until a better could be built. He knew who would come on board when first he sailed in, and which members of the Imperial household would escort her on shore to the Palace. At that point, he would receive his message of welcome from the Emperor and, some days later, a summons. Meanwhile, he would be offered gifts and provisions and lodging for his soldiers and seamen. He had memorised it, to the last detail.

  Now he said, “Highness, we are concerned, as you know, about the Genoese consul who will expect similar treatment. He has on board the Emperor’s highest official.”

  He had not asked before about George Amiroutzes. He was clever enough, she thought, to have extracted all she could teach him before he risked dangerous ground. She said, “I don’t think you may expect the Emperor’s Great Chancellor to malign you at court, any more than his great-niece need praise you. One makes use of a vessel. One does not take on the stink of its timbers.”

  She saw him discard something other than a sober reply. He said, “The Treasury and the Wardrobe are often the same. If his excellency buys for the Palace, it would be useful to know if he shares the Emperor’s tastes.”

  The Emperor’s tastes were something that would shock even this agile deceiver. Amiroutzes liked experienced women. The lady Violante said, “His excellency prefers books and wise discourse to luxury. He is a learned man, born in Trebizond but fluent in Latin. He represented the Emperor twenty years since at the great Church Council in Florence: impressed the Pope; dined with Cosimo de’ Medici.”

  Nicholas said, “So he knows monseigneur the Cardinal Bessarion.”

  She said, “Extremely well. The lord Amiroutzes approved of union between the Greek and Latin Churches, as Bessarion did—and, indeed, the present Patriarch, before his reconversion. My lord Amiroutzes has also acted as envoy to Genoa. A discreet and subtle negotiator. It is, of course, in the blood. His lady mother and the mother of the Sultan’s Grand Vizier Mahmud were both ladies from Trebizond. Indeed, cousins.”

  She broke off, to observe. Her listener’s eyes were alight with what could have been genuine pleasure: the dimples arrived and were packed off, as if into some basket of stage gear. She found Diadochos watching her. She had long found the Greek monk a nuisance.

  The young man said, “But how sad for such lords! Related, and yet on opposite sides!”

  “It often happens,” she said. “A princess of Trebizond marries abroad, and one of her ladies becomes wife to a prince of that country. The Sultan conquers the country, and a son or two of the lady changes faith and joins the side of the conqueror. Sultan Mehmet makes good use of such men. So with the Emperor. He does not penalise my lord Amiroutzes for a relationship he cannot help. So should all kinsmen learn to practise forbearance. You agree, my Flemish apprentice?”

  His artless smile widened without changing in quality. It told her nothing. He asked, mildly, one further question about Amiroutzes, and then left the subject for another of no great importance. At length, in his own time, he took his departure. She had done nothing either to detain or to dismiss him. Nor, although he might have hoped for it, had she told him anything else. Only, when he had gone, she sat thinking of Venice; and reviewing, one by one, all the intricate plans she and others had skilfully laid there. Some would have to be changed.

  Caterino my husband, it is not as we thought. It is not as I thought. Something has to be done about this person Niccolò.

  Chapter 18

  SO THERE CAME TO the poisonous honey of Trebizond the two vessels from barbarian Europe, the four months of their travelling over, and winter turned into spring. One after the other, they crossed the wide, irregular bay towards the green amphitheatre which lined it. In its midst, the classical City gleamed on its tableland, alight with marble and gold against the dark mountain forests behind. There stood the fabled City, treasure-house of the East. There were the groves that had once known the Argonauts, haunted by legends of sacrifice and redemption: of the tree and the scaffold, of the ram and the lamb each impaled there. There was the frontier of Islam.

  On both ships men prayed, or were silent, or uttered reassuring jokes and obscenities. On each, the leader, smiling, ordered wine to be broached for the company; and the eagerness on the face of Doria and on the face of Nicholas vander Poele was the same.

  The legend caught Catherine de Charetty in its grasp, and kept her there till she landed, and after. The barge which came to fetch Treasurer Amiroutzes was covered with gold and flew the Comnenos eagle of the Imperial dynasty. A handsome Genoese boat took herself and Pagano to shore because, for some reason, their own seamen were not fit to row them. At the little harbour called Daphnous, the steps of the wharf were of white marble, and its walls had reliefs on them, and the names and titles of Byzantine emperors; and carved and painted creatures stood on either side of its gates. By then, the Genoese community had come there to greet them, in gowns and coats and
caps of their own familiar Italian fashion. But the boys who scampered to take the mooring ropes and the men who came to shoulder their baggage were quite different. They were bare-legged and bareheaded, and wore cotton shirts and coarse overtunics and their skins were of every colour: blond and olive and walnut and ebony. Free men, perhaps, Pagano said; but more likely slaves. Trebizond and Caffa, over the water, sold Tartar and Circassian slaves to the world.

  Landed, she had gazed at the high ground backing the harbour, and the big houses there, set among vines and pastel bouquets of fruit trees. She glimpsed tall doors, and window grilles; and a loggia. She said, “It looks Italian.”

  Beside her, Pagano glanced round at the others and smiled. He said, “Indeed, sweeting. These are the suburbs, where the merchants live, and the richer burghers and some kinds of artisans. The City is high over there, behind the long walls. The Palace, the court, the Citadel, the churches, the people who serve the Basileus. We shall be invited there soon.”

  “The Basileus?” she had said.

  “Another name for the Emperor. His ancestors have been living there since the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople. Behind those walls, it is not Italian,” said Pagano. He held her arm, because no one brought horses and the ground for some reason was rocking.

  No one had brought horses because the home of the Genoese colony was here, on the headland between this harbour and the next. Until invited, they were not to climb to the City with its golden domes and its palaces; and for a moment she felt disappointment. But there were old men all about her studying her, and asking dull, polite questions. So she walked in as stately a manner as her sealegs would allow and showed absolutely no surprise to find that she and Pagano were to share a great fortified building within a walled and moated enclosure high on a ridge, and provided with yards and warehouses, wells and bakehouse, stables and mews, smiths’ and carpenters’ shops and other buildings whose use she couldn’t imagine. The fondaco was called Leoncastello, or Lions’ Castle, and had two lions, eaten by salt, on its gateposts. Overhead flew the flag of St George, and within the gates had gathered a large number of uneasy, vaguely welcoming people, few of whom were women.

  They had not been expected, and so the consul’s rooms were not prepared. It didn’t seem greatly to matter. After shipboard, here were solid walls and a roof, and the ground was ceasing to move. After such confinement, it was enough to perambulate, thought suspended, while servants came and the place was hastily brushed down and sluiced. It didn’t occur to her to question what was being done or to take charge of it. Her women, after hovering, had gone off to unpack their own things and hers. Sometimes Pagano came to find how she did, and seemed pleased to find her contented. Away from seamen’s society, Pagano’s language, she observed, had recovered its Genoese purity, and all his beguiling ways had returned. Already the anxious faces about him were changing and warming. From one of her windows she could see him sometimes below in the yard. She could hear his compatriots laugh as he made some easy joke, or chaffed a servant or two. Pagano her husband, in his beautiful doublet, smiling with his fine teeth in Trebizond.

  She returned often that day to her windows. Beyond the yard she could see the expanse of the gulf to its furthest blue arm from which they had come. Below the acropolis lay the arms of another small harbour. Elsewhere, the gritty dark shore was uninterrupted save for rare jetties packed with skerries and fishing boats. The few great ships like their own stood off in deep water, stoutly anchored. If the Emperor of Trebizond had a fleet of thirty war galleys, as Pagano had assured her, they were not visible here.

  Where the hilly ground met the shore were dozens of fisher shacks, untidy with creels and nets and children and goats and ragged cloths drying. Behind and above lay the handsome suburbs she had seen when they landed. From there, the wind brought her woodsmoke. Now and then something else crept through the small landward windows, obsequious as a Colchian serpent. It was a scent not yet familiar: the compound of fruit, musk and incense that was the essence of Trebizond.

  But here, she was in Italy; or very near it. In those villas were other merchants. Over there, on a promontory a little less steep than their own, stood another trading enclosure, with towers and rooftops which flew the Venetian Lion instead of the Cross of St George. There lived Pagano’s compatriots, rivals, enemies: the merchants and Bailie of the Republic of Venice. She was studying it when she saw the Florentine galley arrive, and heard, at a distance, its trumpets and guns.

  Nicholas. Soon her mother’s servants would all come ashore. Master Julius. Master Tobias. Captain Astorre. Godscalc, the foreign chaplain who had helped Nicholas enter her room. Loppe, her late brother’s negro, and the thin shipmaster who was new, with red hair. Not making, of course, for this castle or the Venetian palace but for some cheap hired fondaco over there in the suburb. Nicholas in his artisan’s clothes who was going to meet Pagano at last, and be abashed before him. And humbled. And jealous.

  She turned aside then, and went to find Pagano and see how her gowns had survived the unpacking.

  The Charetty company, settling in turn in the Florentine fondaco, responded in its various ways to the new situation.

  Julius became disagreeable. Tobie, amused, put it down partly to the change from maritime life which took some men oddly, like a return to home life from a war. It had other causes. Although Julius knew that the City was meanwhile forbidden, he longed like Catherine to go there; to see the marvels, to affirm the success of the voyage. Instead, he was working to plan as they all were: landing and storing their stock; furnishing the house and arranging services and provisions; interviewing Alighieri’s caretaking staff and appointing others to help them.

  Regularly, eating together, they turned over their problems with Nicholas. Most of the nuisances had been foreseen: the clamour of would-be vendors at their gates; the attempts to set extortionate prices; the caution of the Greeks around them towards the new foreigners; the small resentments among their own men over precautionary restrictions. From his own days in the army, Julius knew how to deal with that; as he knew how to set up a bureau and prepare the accounts and the ledgers for business. He helped receive the unofficial, swift courtesy calls from other established Latin merchants, including the secretary of the Venetian Bailie, and was inclined to talk when he should have been listening. He had, indeed, strong views on many things, which he freely expressed to his colleagues in private and on which, Tobie noticed, Nicholas seldom commented. It was left to Godscalc, or Astorre or himself to point out the weakness in his argument, if there was one. Only if the idea was good would Nicholas at once endorse it.

  He was their nominal leader, but with Julius he was still being careful. For Julius, alone of them all, had once been considered fit to lead the first Charetty expedition on his own, although he’d never known it. Once, on a hot night in a war camp in the Abruzzi, Nicholas and Tobie had talked of opening an overseas agency under Julius with the young Charetty boy, Felix, to help him. But now Felix was dead, and Nicholas self-banished from Bruges. More than that, the promising franchise they had expected had turned into a project much more perilous.

  Nicholas had never said so, but it seemed to Tobie that Julius would have found the management of this venture beyond him. And yet, of them all, Julius alone owned to some ambition to lead. The innermost part of Tobie’s life, although he would never admit it, seemed to belong, as Godscalc’s did, to the strange, deep exigencies of his profession. Pushed further, he would have conceded his interest in Nicholas. But for Nicholas, he would never have renewed his contract with Marian de Charetty, or followed her husband into this risky personal venture. Without Nicholas, he would probably seek a new company under, say, the Count of Urbino. Without Nicholas, this company would turn into a bad debt, and dissolve.

  Listening now to Julius complaining, Tobie recalled something else: the frown with which Julius had watched, day by day, another man enter the cabin of Violante of Naxos. He believed Nicholas when he said the Archima
ndrite was always present during those sessions. The woman’s manner betrayed her disdain. In private, she would bring an importunate suitor to heel by humiliating him. A man of low class would be crucified. He had seen it done in his time. Nicholas, strolling out of that warm, scented cabin had never looked either abashed or resentful, never mind distraught with frustrated desire. But then, Nicholas was learning control of every natural reflex.

  He was presumably drawing on his self-command now, eating and listening placidly to the fulminations of Julius. Apparently Pagano Doria was defying convention, and before being received at the Palace, had already begun to trade at the Leoncastello.

  “Well, I can’t stop him,” said Nicholas. “And we can’t trade: we have to wait for the Emperor’s formal agreement. It’s a pity, though. It would be nice to know what he’s doing.”

  “Perhaps I could get in,” Julius said.

  Tobie caught Godscalc’s eye. Julius wrecking their venture by invading the Genoese consulate and seizing the consul’s wedded wife by the scruff of the neck had been their most constant nightmare. Nicholas said, “Could you? It would help a great deal. Or no, Doria would recognise you. What we need is someone living there, whom he trusts, and who could bring us constant reports of what he’s doing, and how Catherine is faring. A steward, for example. He’ll need a steward.”

  So that was the game. The eyes of Godscalc and Tobie met again. Godscalc lowered his lids. Tobie said, “Wait a moment. The Bessarion household. Didn’t that Venetian tell you the mother had died and Amiroutzes was helping the staff find other positions? He mentioned a steward.”

  “Paraskeuas,” Godscalc said. “A man with a family, all employed in the Bessarion household. But they live in the City. We couldn’t get near them.”

  “I could,” Julius said. “Privately. I could get through the gates in the morning, with the country people. I know where the house is. I could condole with them over the mother. The cardinal used to talk about her in Bologna. John, the cardinal’s name is. He called himself Bessarion later.”