Simon stood without moving. The voice said coldly, “Put your sword down, you fool. Or don’t think I won’t get my grooms in to thrash you.”
Simon’s face was bone white. For a moment the sword seemed to move, as if he would like to use it, and not on Gregorio. Then he lowered it.
“And now, poor Master Gregorio. How is it with you?”
Hearing, like sight, had become vaguely unreliable. But above him Gregorio saw, quite distinctly, the form of the largest, heaviest man he had ever encountered, swathed in opulent velvet and topped by a broad-brimmed hat made of fur that would have kept a dozen men dry. The eyes trained upon him were as chilly as the question had been.
He could not speak. The man smiled, unperturbed. He said, “The vicomte Jordan de Ribérac. You have heard of me. It was my ship which my son here so inconsiderately removed from Antwerp without my permission. I believe it is now named the Doria. So appropriate, is it not, for Colchis and the Fleece? We are dogged by gold in this kingdom. We would rather be dogged by gold, however, than lawyers and, unlike my son, I prefer talk to action. Will you talk to me, my dear Master Gregorio? When you feel better?”
Gregorio said, “You watched?” He saw dimly that the girl, who had not spoken throughout, had risen to her feet by the window and was looking at them.
Jordan de Ribérac smiled. “Did I delay a little too long for your comfort? I was curious to see if you would fight. You did. Not very well, but you did. Allow me the pleasure of seeing your wounds of honour attended to.”
Gregorio’s wounds of honour were attended to on a pallet in a strange room by the same white-capped woman he had seen on his arrival. She seemed to be as expert with sword-cuts as with infants: for a while, dosed with possets and lapsing drowsily into various states of unconsciousness, he felt like one. The last time he woke, the candles were lit and Jordan de Ribérac was seated in a tall chair beside him, his hands clasped on the knob of a stick. Gregorio stirred.
“Ah,” said the fat man. “The paladin is restored. I am glad. I should prefer to be assisting Louis de Gruuthuse celebrate his hard-won knighthood. I hope you feel well enough to depart?”
“Certainly,” said Gregorio shortly. He was, he saw, already wearing someone else’s shirt and an unknown doublet lay at the foot of the bed. His arm, bandaged and strapped to his side, was brutally painful. He added, “When I have what I came for.”
The fat man laughed. His several chins gleamed. He said, “We are to receive no thanks for our labours?”
Gregorio held the unpleasant gaze with his own. He said, “I am grateful, of course. Thank you.”
“Thank Agnès. It is she who saved you,” said Jordan de Ribérac.
“Your son’s servant?”
“He thinks so,” said the fat man.
“You spy on him?”
“Of course. We dislike one another. But that does not mean I wish him exposed as a murderer as well as an idiot. Neither Agnès nor I rescue my son’s victims out of philanthropy, Master Gregorio. Do you really consider this poor Nicholas to be worth ten of Simon?”
“I should imagine most people are,” Gregorio said, and flinched despite himself. The cane, whipping up, hung with calculation over his wound. It stayed, gleaming; then shifting, delivered a biting blow to the other shoulder instead. Its point returned, with deliberation, to the floor.
“Watch your mouth,” said the vicomte de Ribérac placidly. “The face of young Master Claes should remind you. It was he, you may know, who caused my present exile from France. Or perhaps you are unaware of the deadly proclivities of your little man? They far exceed, I assure you, anything my fool Simon has done.”
“Nevertheless…” Gregorio began.
“…Nevertheless, you wish Simon to command the return of our decorative friend Pagano Doria, or at least cancel his orders. You also wish Doria brought to book for using his undoubted charm of manner and body to seduce and even marry Marian de Charetty’s unfortunate daughter. You wish the marriage annulled, or denounced, or denied: whichever will save the girl’s face and punish Doria to the full. And in return for all this, you are willing to let my son’s part in the business remain secret?”
“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Gregorio said.
“You look surprised. You do not have, Master Gregorio, a monopoly of legal training. You understand you are condemning Messer Doria to death or perpetual exile?”
“That was my intention,” said Gregorio.
“And that, being remote, he may still do your company harm before my son’s message could reach him?”
“I hope he doesn’t,” Gregorio said. “For the demoiselle, through me, will demand full compensation.”
“For the company—she shall have it,” said Jordan de Ribérac. “For the life of Nicholas…” He tossed something in the air, caught it and deposited it with a light slap on the bed. “One silver groat. Debased, I fear. I had to separate it from its fellows today. You see, my dear sir, it is the fortune of Nicholas to invite rivalry, suspicion, ill will. He will meet his death, I make no doubt, through one of them, and the hand of Pagano Doria need never be lifted. You cannot expect me to pay you for that.”
“But you will put this in writing?” said Gregorio.
“Yes indeed,” said Jordan de Ribérac. “When you produce proof that my son arranged to have that silly child abducted.”
Gregorio said, “I can prove that Doria is his agent. And that he took your ship from Antwerp.”
“With my permission!” said the fat man immediately. “Of course, I lent Simon my ship. I asked Simon to establish an office in Genoa; send an agent to Trebizond. I have told you how close we are.”
“So you would deny everything if I press all the charges,” said Gregorio. “And will put nothing in writing. And meantime, who knows what is happening? We cannot reach them for four months.” He held his burning shoulder. “I have forced you to your knees, I can see,” he said bitterly.
“Very few people can do that,” said Jordan de Ribérac. “But you have warned me of a folly of my son’s of which I was unaware, and I am grateful for it. I do not, of course, offer you gold, which you would throw in my face. I shall, however, provide you with transport home of the kind that will serve your wound best, with entertainment already arranged for you and your men on the way.”
“And your son?” Gregorio said. “What do you expect him to do?”
The fat man got up. Standing, his hands on his stick, he showed a glimpse, in the width of his shoulders, the depth of his chest, of the athlete he might once have been. Remotely, one could see how he might have sired the exquisite Simon. He said, “If Doria fails him, St Pol will have to care for the business himself. He has his heir. He is free. I should not be at all surprised, my foolish friend, if Simon did not leave soon for Genoa. Or wherever he might get news of Doria. For it is quite possible, is it not, that Doria has considerably exceeded his remit?”
“Will your son listen to you?” said Gregorio.
There was a silence. Then the fat man gave a slow smile. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Simon will listen. Over his lady wife, however, I have to tell you that I have very little control. That is a warning. That is perhaps the most valuable warning you have ever received.”
Chapter 25
FOR SOME LITTLE TIME after the fever broke, Nicholas was too limp for anything except, perhaps, thinking. Remarkably soon after that, however, he was up and about: cheerful, biddable, and co-operative. From servants and men he received a tacit welcome and the same rough goodwill they had shown him before. The name of Simon of Kilmirren meant nothing to them: they didn’t care who was paying Doria.
It meant very little either to Captain Astorre, whose contempt for my lord Simon was immaculate, or to John le Grant, who had never heard of him. There remained the trio of Julius, Godscalc and Tobie, whose manner to their scheming junior had substantially changed. To Julius, the disclosure of his further duplicity was a personal insult. It not only increased his ha
tred of Doria, it made him even more angry and suspicious of Nicholas who, with double his motives, had failed to confront Doria, man to man; or allow Julius to do so. For the others, who knew the abomination he had forced upon Simon, they saw now revealed what was ugly as well as what was engaging about Nicholas.
For his part, Nicholas acted as if he observed nothing; attended assiduously all the policy meetings called by Julius and tramped alongside whatever delegation issued as a result to call on probable buyers or possible sellers, to identify orders and to argue through some problem of money exchanges. He spent quite a lot of time on his own. As they had threatened, his colleagues had withdrawn from him both his freedom of action and movement. Although still publicly head of the station, in practice he was powerless.
Anything to do with Astorre’s men, Julius saw to. Le Grant was given charge of matters to do with the repair and overhaul of the galley and the concerns of the seamen. The provisioning and control of the household passed into the efficient black hands of Loppe, who proved to be the best domestic bursar in anyone’s experience. This freed Godscalc and Tobie, helped again by le Grant to proceed with the modified torture of wresting out of Treasurer Amiroutzes the wherewithal for the new Florentine compound. In between meetings, Godscalc made a round of all the monastic churches in the district, bought what texts he could, and set a large number of scribes to profitable work. Julius, avoiding Nicholas, promoted a clerk called Patou to countercheck his calculations.
They all became familiar with Trebizond. Deepening spring brought more rain and an increasing warmth which clothed shore and mountain in shining and vigorous green, and devoured every space with opulent flowers. Waxen petals, fuddled with scent, crammed through tall, pillared windows. Drifts of cherry and pear blossom filled the furrows of doublets and straw hats; tree-vines burst into clubbable leaf. Markets turned into empires. A street of carpenters would wake to find itself choked by watermelons, or cheeses, or chickens.
Nothing, in fact, was quite as orderly as might have been expected of the Imperial family of the Hellenes: the Autocracy of all the East, the Iberias and the Transmarine Provinces. The unshaven hill men who came through the passes wearing hair tunics and leggings and driving goats or panniered pack-ponies owed nothing to classical harmony; nor did the dark-faced men jangling with gold who rode in with foot-trains of armed servants to take their ease in the baths and the brothels. They had money to spend and lived in castles, some of them. They earned their keep by exacting tolls and protection money from those who picked their way through the mountains. They brought news, of a sort. It was true what they said about the Sultan. He was already in Asia, in Ankara. His army, under Mahmud Pasha, was in Bursa and ready to move. Where, he was keeping a secret. If a hair in his beard knew, he had announced, he would tear it out and cast it into the fire.
In Trebizond, the court moved from the Citadel in its accustomed routine of devotion. To the church and monastery of Panaghia Chrysokephalos, to the church and monastery of St Sophia beyond the western ravine, to the church of St Eugenios beyond the eastern ravine, near the Summer Palace. Then a week’s expedition to the cliff monastery of Sumela. The ray of the divine Logos, Heaven’s king, the Emperor David prayed at their head.
The court, in a state of spiritual well-being, was able to spare some time for leisure. It took heed of its athletic prowess, engaging in spear-throwing and archery and playing vindictive cavalry games at the Tzukanisterion; none of it with particular style. It filed south into the mountains and ceremoniously went hunting and hawking. It held small, select feasts and patronised the company of men of learning who might beguile its tedium with intellectual discourse. It gambled prodigiously. It listened to music. It read, or was read to. It diverted itself with performers of many kinds; with dwarves and with animals; and witnessed processions of prisoners who had had their teeth hammered out and were wearing the intestines of oxen and sheep on their brows. These might be land-hungry nomads, or brigands caught raiding villages for stores, cooking-pots or children to sell to the whorehouses.
The court spent much of the day making itself beautiful, in order to spend much of the rest of the day in a state of physical gratification. It lay under silk awnings in the Summer Palace, engaging in minor intrigues, and in gossip. It was the Burgundian court compressed into a single trapezium, instead of spread half over a continent. It was a feminine version of the Burgundian court, producing carnivorous blooms on a leaf-bed of tradition that went back to Homer.
The memory of Byzantine battles remained still in its soldiery but, unlike Burgundy, it had created no orders of chivalry to foster the skills of its knights nor, until now, had it considered hiring the capability that it had failed to preserve. From the narrow strip of its lands and its wellwishers inland, it could count, on a good day, on two thousand foot and horse. The grandiose figures for fleet and army quoted during the Emperor’s last appeal to the West seemed to have been forgotten. The present little crisis was different: was not a crisis at all. The heathen was fighting itself. It was sad, to be sure, for the ruler Uzum Hasan, Trebizond’s Persian ally. But what could Trebizond do? Astorre, bounding from one listening-post to another in the vertical streets, puffing and grumbling, devoted a lot of his time to working out how strong Trebizond really was, and what the Emperor’s captains really thought of the war.
Julius, who enjoyed wars, did a good deal to help him. In between, he was prone to bouts of angry anxiety on behalf of Catherine de Charetty, who was mostly withdrawn from public view behind the walls of the Leoncastello. She did, as she had said, visit the women’s quarters in the Palace on occasion, and sometimes took part in their sport. But, as was predictable, she provided company for the Empress’s ladies rather than the Empress herself. Whether she had ever spent time with Violante of Naxos was so far unknown.
Tobie, too, had seen the small figure, pompously veiled, being escorted on muleback by her maid and her Genoese retinue; sometimes to the markets; sometimes to pay calls on the houses of other merchants to pass the time, one supposed, with their mistresses. Whether she yet realised their lack of status was also unknown. Doria himself was often absent in Imperial company. Nicholas, commanded to the hunt or the race or the wrestling match, had his excuses made for him on account of his illness and did not immediately discover that he had been invited at all. When he did, he sent John le Grant in his place, his hands full of plans. Reporting back to his fellows, the Aberdonian’s face was lightly flushed and his manner reticent to a degree. He merely told them, however, that, hearing of his experience with Serbian miners, the Emperor wished him to consult with his captains.
That was all he would say, despite some ribald attempts to get more from him. When Nicholas was seen to be near at hand, they stopped, or went out. Le Grant supposed he had overheard them. He also supposed that Nicholas recognised, as the others had not, that a man who could hold Donatello’s friendship but not his persuasions was unlikely to be worried by overtures. If he noted the flush, Nicholas was unlikely to comment. They were not alone. Le Grant said, walking across to the windowseat, “I took the plans and explained them. Had to go all over the place like a pedlar.”
“They like red hair,” Nicholas said, without moving. “One day they’ll make you into a wig. You’ll leave with your ears in a cup, bald as Tobie.”
Since his illness, Nicholas—the lion, the perpetual mimic—had never passed a light remark to either Tobie or Godscalc. Between these three lay something more than the complaints he had been told about. John le Grant didn’t give a damn what it was. All he was concerned about now was conveying a message. He had a report to make, and he wanted to make it in private.
He had, of course, taken the fortification designs to the Palace and been interviewed by every jumped-up commander from the Protospatharios downwards. Then he had gone to see Violante of Naxos. He had taken her plans as well, but of different kind.
It was Nicholas who had suggested that visit. If his colleagues found out, he would be in t
rouble. Communication with Nicholas was supposed to be by committee. That is, Astorre wouldn’t care. But even Astorre didn’t know he was seeing the lady. And he was not sure, now, that he was going to tell even Nicholas what had happened when he got to her chamber.
To begin with, she was different in private, with almost no paint on her face and a severe gown in the Venetian style instead of the Byzantine sheath. She had sent the eunuchs out, and kept only two women who, he supposed, were confidantes. He bowed three times approaching, but didn’t perform the Prostration which he had given Constantine, the Great Emperor, in the last days of Constantinople. She knew who he was, and offered him a seat at once. Then she said, “What is this illness?”
He had shown no surprise. “Nicholas, Despoina? A marsh fever. Nothing more.”
“He is subject?” she said. Her hair was netted clear of her neck, and her mouth curled when she spoke, like a tendril. She added, “It is a long illness, for a fever.”
It was a question. She was, of course, not to be trusted; but he was moved to see how far he could go. He said, “He is recovering, maybe a little quicker than some of us fancy. They’ve put a check on his movements.”
“Oh?” she said. She added, “He is too immature, after all? But do you have a successor? I have not met one.”
“Neither have I,” said John le Grant. “No. It’s government by consensus until he stops going his own way without consulting his officers. I shouldna be here, except that it’s not on company business.”
She said, “How has he gone his own way?”
“You’d need to ask him that,” said John le Grant. “He’s shown himself less than frank. And, of course, my lord Doria spread some tale about bath boys. You’ll have heard that.”
He stared at her. She looked unmovingly back. Whoever was immature, it wasn’t Violante of Naxos. She said, “You have forgotten, I think, where you are.”
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