The Spring of the Ram

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Nicholas looked round the table. “It sounds risky, but if Julius is ready to try, it might be useful. Doria needs a steward and the man is free and might even have some Italian. For the cardinal’s sake, and some money, he might agree to go to Doria and spy for us. If he doesn’t, we try someone else.”

  Astorre said, “I was going to suggest something like it myself. We need a man or two over that wall, to reconnoitre the City before we’re invited. It’s a rule of mine. Never go blind into another man’s town. You send in Meester Julius, and I’ll give him one of my fellows as escort, and a list of what he should look for.”

  “Julius?” Nicholas said. “I’m not sure. You’re hardly fit after Pera. Would you do it?”

  “Well, they’re not going to break my bones again, are they?” Julius said. “Of course I’m fit. Unless they make me laugh more than usual.”

  He set out for the sea gate early next morning, in a tasselled hat and a rough woven tunic, with one of Astorre’s men behind, a carpet over his shoulder. He looked magnificent. Watching him leave, Tobie said, “He thinks it was all his idea.”

  Godscalc smiled.

  Nicholas said, “It’s just as well, isn’t it? We three can sit eating and drinking and playing with words, but only Julius has spent weeks on campaign; is tough and quick on his feet; has Greek, and knows Bessarion and is ready to risk his skin for that girl, one way or another.”

  Godscalc bent on Nicholas one of his long, calm, considering looks, but didn’t answer the challenge. “Your point is taken,” he said.

  “Oh, it’s taken,” said Tobie. “But I’m damned if it’s accepted. If you want me as a confederate then you must expect me to polish my badges. On the other hand, I’m not fussy. I don’t mind doing the rough work and letting Julius practise his cunning, if you’d prefer it.”

  “I think,” Godscalc said, “that Nicholas is trying to tell us that we are an equal team, with different talents. What’s wrong? You’re not jealous of the lady from Naxos?”

  “You mean—?” said Tobie, startled.

  “He means,” said Nicholas, “that Julius is almost certain to try and find his way into the Palace. It’s all right. Astorre’s man has orders to stop him.”

  He looked unruffled, as he had been throughout. Tobie said, “God damn you, my child.”

  “All right,” said Nicholas. “But not until we’ve bought our silk and seen Doria off and you’ve found where the brothels are. Then we’ll let you do the rough work while we practise our cunning.”

  Julius came back half a day later, a little the worse for wear, and exuberant. It was a city worth seeing: he had roved through all but its highest part; he had called on the house of Bessarion’s dead mother and had found the man Paraskeuas and taken him off to a tavern and, after a great deal of talk, had got him to agree to do what they wanted. The man, with his wife and son, would call on the Grand Vestarios that very day, and ask his help in obtaining an appointment with the Genoese consul. Paraskeuas himself was the sort you might expect, in the household of an old woman. A soft-bodied, well-trained Trapezuntine who spoke sadly of the cardinal’s long absence from the family home, and the sweetness and generosity of his mother.

  “Generosity?” said Tobie, alert.

  “Oh, he held out for a fair sum, but I gave him what he asked in the long run,” Julius said. “After all, he’s taking his life in his hands. If Doria finds he’s spying for us, it’ll be the end of him.”

  “But you had to fight him before he’d agree,” Nicholas said.

  Julius glanced at his torn tunic, and stretched his bruised face in a grin. Behind him, Astorre said, “He fell off a wall.”

  “A wall?” said Godscalc obediently. This time, Tobie let Godscalc exercise all the cunning.

  “Into the Upper Citadel,” Julius said. “I couldn’t get through the gate to the Palace. Astorre’s man nearly fell too, but managed to hold me. The walls look well, but need some expert attention: that’s one of the things you wanted to know. Anyway, it didn’t look a bad climb.”

  “With half-mended ribs and a cracked collarbone?” Nicholas said. “Astorre’s man should have let you drop. But I’m glad you reached Paraskeuas while we can still do it secretly. We’ve had news. We’re invited into the City tomorrow to witness the Emperor and the court attend divine service. Then we have to return in the afternoon to attend a traditional show in the stadium. By request, Astorre’s archers will take part. We shall watch as guests of the Emperor. You can climb walls, if you like.”

  Julius sat down, rather carefully. He still looked pleased with himself. “When did all this happen?”

  “You just missed the Emperor’s envoy, bearing gifts and Imperial messages. Between the church and the festival, I have to go to the Palace with my credentials. And return, I hope, with the privileges we were promised.”

  “You alone? Not the rest of us?”

  “They only want one of us to begin with,” Nicholas said. “Then they line the rest of us up, and let the women choose who goes tomorrow. What’s the rush? You’re going to be here until you’re middle-aged, if we’re lucky.”

  “It’ll be too late when he’s middle-aged,” said Tobie, from habit. You had to admit it. Most times, Nicholas knew what he was doing. It made it interesting, waiting to see what he was going to fail at.

  To Pagano Doria there arrived on that Sunday the same envoy bearing the same invitations, in addition to a silk brocade coat, subtly dyed the dull green of carnations. It was for Pagano, not Catherine; although she did receive a length of embroidered cloth and a cushion. There was no mention of rubies.

  The summons to audience was not for her either. All she would see of the Emperor would be a glimpse as he went in and out of some church, and another glimpse as he sat in his box watching horsemen and jugglers. There wasn’t even a tournament. They didn’t have tournaments in Trebizond. She brooded, until Pagano reminded her that she would see the City at last, and the other merchants. She could wear her best dress, and her earrings.

  She brightened. She said, “Do you think Nicholas will be at the church?” She saw Pagano stop what he was doing, as if the thought was new, or in some way unwelcome.

  “Perhaps,” Pagano said. “All the foreign merchants, all the guilds will be there. On the other hand, the Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans is fastidious, and may have learned by that time to distinguish between myself and his consul for Florence. Poor Niccolino. The Treasurer feared for him.”

  Sailing from Pera, the man Amiroutzes had taken pains, she was aware, to instruct Pagano in the ways of the court. They thought Nicholas ignorant. She had assumed so herself until she had noticed, by chance, a cloaked and unrecognisable figure disembarking from the Florentine ship. Leaving the Florentine ship, and stepping into a gilded state barge.

  Dragged too late to the window, Pagano questioned if any member of the Imperial household would choose to travel with the Ciaretti; unless perhaps some clerk with an errand. She had been offended to have her theory dismissed. She was still offended. She said now, “Nicholas? He’s always been sly. Sometimes he can surprise you.”

  But Pagano only warmed her cheek with a laugh. “You should have seen him at Modon,” he said. And then, drawing away, smiled into her face, his eyes sparkling. “But, of course, you did see him at Modon. One ought not to mock. But after the fright he gave you in Pera, I doubt if I shall be civil in Trebizond. If I tease him, will you forgive me?”

  “He isn’t my father,” said Catherine.

  Next day they left with their retinue, she and Pagano, and rode uphill through the wide streets of the suburb, past the stadium of the Meidan and over the narrow eastern bridge to the City; and the moist, heavy air pressed upon them its serpentine odours.

  The City was long and narrow and secure behind walls that had been modelled on the walls of Constantinople. It was built on an irregular table of rock whose surface inclined steeply upwards as it joined the foothills of the mountains behind. At its highest point
was the Upper Citadel, with the Palace within it. In the middle, among the houses and orchards, was the monastery and church of the Chrysokephalos, the Imperial basilica, to which the bridge led them. The Lower Citadel sloped down to the shore, from which it was separated by the vast ochre brick wall of its double ramparts.

  The wall and the Black Sea itself defended the City on the north. To the east and west it was protected not only by walls but by two dizzy ravines, worn into the rock by boiling rivers which rose in the mountains behind and plunged side by side to the sea, enclosing the high rock between them. And last and best of its natural safeguards there lay to the south a mountain barrier fifty miles thick, of which the high wooded range, behind the City and Palace, was only the face.

  So guarded, the dynasty of the Grand Comneni had survived in Trebizond for two centuries and a half, a safe bond-house between Europe and Asia, and residual heirs, as could be seen, of all that was precious in both. For many generations, the consorts and princesses of the Imperial family had been known for unsurpassable beauty, only matched by the fairness and strength of their lords. The City they inhabited seemed worthy of them, or so thought Catherine of Bruges as she entered it, sitting carefully sideways on a pretty mule which slipped on the steep marble paving, while the bells rang and rang, for Easter Monday, and the Emperor.

  Around her, behind high discreet walls, could be glimpsed pillars and cornices, a carved garland, a statue. Beyond those were the baths and the arcades, the wells, the markets and courtyards, the convents and hospices that lay under the golden domes and the towers. Here, the streets of the ancient Milesian builders were steep and narrow and filled now by the people on holiday in folded caps and thick coloured cottons, admiring the procession of foreigners as it wound its way through the gates of the monastery. The royal road that led uphill to the Palace, empty as yet, was hung with patterned carpets, and floored with green branches and lined with men in glittering livery, bearing bows and lances and axes that were all tipped with gold.

  Pagano, before her, was wearing his Imperial coat, his heavy emerald chain round his shoulders. Beside and behind them walked their retinue led by Paraskeuas, the stout, soft-spoken steward and dragoman whom Amiroutzes had found for them. When they reached the basilica courtyard, it was Paraskeuas who helped her dismount and take her place beside the conventual buildings and under the fig trees. There was a bronze dragon beside her, with water coming out of its mouth, and a sentence in Greek about the emperor whose feat it commemorated. It reminded her of the stories she had had to listen to on shipboard, which had depressed her so much. She could hardly believe that once she had been discontented.

  The church of the Golden-headed Virgin stood in the centre. It had a copper-gilt dome on a drum, below which every inch of the walls was covered with holy paintings in buff and brown and dark red and ochre and olive and a dark blue which the dyer’s daughter in her told her was smalt, which surprised her. The pigments of the walls absorbed the dull light except where, here and there, she could see the glint of mosaic. Next to the paint, the rich cloth of living men’s garments glowed like the tufts on her mother’s price card, artfully displayed in soft light. Here, you could tell all the factions and guilds by their different colours; not least themselves, the foreign merchants, placed on each side of the patio. The Genoese, behind and beside her, were dressed in red Lucca velvet. The Venetians wore brilliant yellow, the Bailie broadened with fur and flashing with goldwork. Exceptionally, among the crowds on the other side of the yard, there stood a small group in quite disparate dyes under a banner which bore, surely, the lilies of Florence. Its leader, like Pagano, wore a coat whose depth of colour and richness of pattern could only have come from the Imperial looms. The wearer was Nicholas.

  He carried it off, she had to admit, almost as well as Pagano, and being well set-up and taller, presented an appearance she would not have been ashamed of, had he not been her mother’s new husband. Below the good velvet hat, the fresh-skinned face was devoid of any familiar expression. The eyes, unusually open, were looking straight at her.

  Catherine de Charetty grasped her husband’s arm. “Look!”

  His gaze was already on the Florentine party, and he did not remove it. “I see,” he said.

  “He is wearing—”

  Then he looked at her, amused. “Well, yes. He, too, has been dressed by the Basileus. I rather think, my Caterinetta, that your stepfather and I are to be received at the Palace together. What could be better?”

  “But—” she said.

  “But what? He cannot harm me, and what he will get from me, he has earned. Now, much more important: here is the Emperor.”

  The path from the Palace was steep. Observed from below, the cavalcade appeared at first smooth as a serpent, uncoiling in the grey, lightless air; incongruous as a brushful of paint on old cloth. Then it became near, and distinct, and through the brilliant clamour of the bells you could hear the fluting of other instruments as well as the drumbeats; and you could see the silk and gold fringe of the standards, rocking like ships leaving harbour.

  In Bruges, one saw the world. Catherine had watched Duke Philip and the court of Burgundy ride into the Princenhof, his train a mile long. She had seen the state arrivals of princes, and the captains of the Venetian galleys. She understood costly fabric. She knew with what diverse and extravagant costume men of high birth affirmed their rank in the West. She had heard of Byzantine ritual but had never witnessed, in ordinary life, the consequences of preserving intact through the centuries the mode and costume of an ancient culture. Except, of course, for the dress and rites of the Church. There was no one to explain that the Emperor stood on earth for his god, and hence such rites were his everyday habit.

  The standards were made of crimson satin, heavily fringed, and the standardbearers and musicians wore the same colour. The horses had manes white as silk, bound with ribbons and tassels; and golden harness and beaded caparisons, and saddles studded with silver. The riders wore crowns and diadems looped and strung and fringed with fine jewelled chains, and had shining hair in every colour from bright gold to black. Their robes, narrow as grave clothes, were armoured with precious stones; with gorgets and belts and bands of ancient gems, thick as crabs. Their backs were straight; their bodies were slender as dancers’; their faces were masks of symmetrical beauty. They reached the plateau of the monastery and began to pass round its walls, while the murmuring silence was pierced by the abrupt clamour of trumpets. There was a pause. A body of scent began to move through the air, displacing the incense. Where it came from, you could see the gleam of cloth of gold, and a sparkle where drifts of jewels gathered in shadow. The cavalcade had dismounted. The court was there, disconcertingly close, and about to enter the monastery precincts. She could see them. The scent was suddenly oppressive and strange. The composed faces, men’s and women’s, were painted.

  Heralds and standards came first; and then young boys and maidens throwing yellow spring flowers. A golden-haired boy of a beauty she had never imagined walked next, dressed in ivory silk, a gilded bow in his hand. Behind, pacing slowly between his confessors, was the Emperor. In the crook of his right arm the Imperial crosier lay like a lily. Over his left was wrapped a swathe of the long, elaborate pallium. Above the tunic, the dalmatica, the silken eagles woven in purple and gold, she saw a noble profile, calm and resolute beneath the tall stiffened gold of the mitra. From the rim of the crown, strings of light pearls fell to the jewelled yoke on his broad shoulders, and mixed with the loose curling gold of his hair and his beard. Behind him, the train of men and women and youths, of officials and nobles and churchmen stretched far off through the trees. There was a ceremonial escort in moulded gold armour, each line of plumes as white as filled down on a nesting ledge.

  From the north porch of the church, a group of white-bearded men had slowly emerged, robed in sparkling vestments. Their crosses and icons made freckles of light on the pillars. Then the Emperor drew abreast, and Pagano’s hand thrust Cat
herine down, and she knelt, her neck bowed, as the court passed into the church, and its doors closed, excluding them all; foreigners; aliens; followers of the Church of Apostasy in Rome. The bells stopped. Silence fell in the courtyard.

  She found she was shaking; and caught Pagano’s hand, and held it tightly. She knew she was young, and had a lot to learn. She understood that she was frightened, and would be again; because this was a great world, and she wanted to enter it, and that was the price you had to pay. She was willing to pay it. She didn’t want to stay in a dyeshop. She could do anything, now she had Pagano to learn from.

  Rising, she looked across for the tall figure of her mother’s husband, and found it, and trained upon it all her joy and her defiance.

  Julius said, “There he is.” He kicked Nicholas, and repeated it.

  Nicholas said, “I have still, thank God, the power of sight. That is the Protonotarios, who came to see us. The man with the hat like a basket is Amiroutzes, the Treasurer. The man bringing up the rear is either the Count of the Walls or the Prefect of the Guard: tell Astorre. The man greeting them in the doorway is the Patriarch, with his clergy. The man—”

  Julius said, “You don’t want to know? There, facing you over the path, is Pagano Doria, who set fire to your ship and nearly got John and me killed by the Turks. The girl’s behind him, with her hair all wired up and her skin bare down to her neckline. You don’t mind?” He waited, expecting support from Tobie and Godscalc. But Tobie, standing behind him, said nothing, and Godscalc behaved as if he wasn’t there.

  Nicholas said, “Go and hit him, then. That’s what he’s praying you’ll do.”

  Julius went on breathing hard. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to ruin the business,” he said.

  “That’s the spirit,” said Nicholas. “Anyway, he’s wearing an Imperial coat. The Emperor must have called him to the same audience. He and I will have the chance of a civil word or two on the way. I’ll convey your good wishes.”