The Spring of the Ram

by Dorothy Dunnett

  It was all right again. She saw that he was a man who was upset by discomfort, and who liked to win at the games he played. Perhaps he had not been quite sure that the Emperor liked him better than the Charetty company’s men. Which was silly, for they were nothing but salaried servants, and he was a lord. She remembered then, with vexation, that in one way the lord Pagano Doria was a salaried servant himself. It was a subject she had tried to discuss several times, without much success. Now, she said, “What did that man Simon want you to buy?”

  She sensed his irritation, but he replied, smiling as usual, “He left me a free hand. I’ll buy enough to make him some profit, sweetheart. Since he relied on me, I can hardly do less. But it is your fortune we are going to make, not my lord Simon’s.”

  “Won’t he be angry?” she said.

  “With Nicholas dead?” said her lord and husband. “Dear heart, no one could feel more for your mother than I do, but without Nicholas to compete with, my lord Simon will lose all interest in making his mark in Levantine trade. If he does little more than cover the costs of his voyage, he will be content. I am sure of it.”

  “You mean he wanted Nicholas dead,” Catherine said. In awkward conversations, instead of avoiding her eyes, he sometimes held them as now, his own big and open.

  Pagano said, “Whatever gave you that idea? The Scots lord thought him insolent, and decided to teach him a lesson by beating him at his own trade. I should never have agreed to anything else, even before you and I met. Nicholas took no harm from our sport. I am the one who suffered, trying to save him.”

  She hardly heard him. “You asked me once if I wanted to go home,” Catherine said. “You said we’d go home and leave Nicholas. I don’t see now how you could, if you still had to earn your money from Simon.”

  He touched her cheek as he used to. He said, “If you had wanted to go home, we’d have gone. Money is nothing. It can always be had, if you look for it. But you are my wife, and must be happy.”

  “I don’t feel like your wife,” Catherine said. She nearly didn’t say it, in case he abandoned her half-crazed like last time. But he had learned his lesson. She had hardly drawn breath before she found herself in her chamber, and his hands where she wanted them. This time, if he wanted to groan, he kept it to himself, except when she most enjoyed hearing it. And this time, it was as good as the finest proper marital act they had ever had. Lying there, as her breathing calmed down, she thought for the first time of her mother’s cold bed. But senses faded with age. What her mother had lost was far from this hunger and ecstasy. And besides, it was a second marriage; belated, self-indulgent, uncalled-for. She waited half an hour and then, although he was bleeding, got Pagano to make her his wife, triumphantly, all over again.

  As the treasure ships from the Orient sailed once a year into Bruges, so once a year in the spring the first camel trains from the East crossed the high steppes of Asia Minor and padded on cushioned feet through the valley of the Pyxitis to the Black Sea. Grey and brown, white and tawny and beige, the camels came headstall to tail, jangling with silver and seashells and the small bells of their harness; their necks rising and falling; their thick-lashed eyes set on the horizon. They each carried three hundred pounds’ weight of incomparable merchandise, and there were a thousand of them, with sixty armed men to guard them. For every roped string of beasts there were shepherds and drivers who swayed on their backs, uttering long whooping cries, or sending up to the sky paeans of improvised chanting while their breeched women jogged beside them on the packsaddles of mules, with waterskins and salt and yoghourt and babies in baskets, and goats jumping and running about them. The aristocrats: the riding camels with their fringed blankets and tassels; the dromedaries that could run a hundred miles in a day; the fine horses with their silken harness were the conveyances of the merchants, whose servants brought their own luxuries.

  Word of their coming ran far ahead, with the odour of musk and rancid milk and badly cured leather and toiling humankind. You could follow them, too, by the crows. What was folded inside the thick bales, three feet wide, two feet deep on each heaving flank was as secret as the contents of the crates in the suave gilded splendour of the Venetian galleys. Rank and dour and barbaric, this was the rough cup from which the élite of the West drank its elixir.

  Within a day’s ride of Trebizond, the messengers came from the city, avid and hopeful, to meet them. Reposing at Erzerum, the merchants of the caravan had had their entertainment, and their rewards, and their instructions. They dealt with the messengers as they had promised, and travelled on.

  In the Florentine fondaco, the mood was grimly determined. Astorre had not returned. Pagano Doria had come back, and had immediately associated himself with both the Venetians and the Palace. The men of the Charetty company had a choice: to believe Violante of Naxos, or to make their own dispositions. They chose to believe her, and acted accordingly. When, therefore, news of the caravan came, they sent no messengers and made no enquiries, although they watched the couriers ride off from the Venetian consulate and the Leoncastello. Bit by bit, working hard and silently, they had achieved all that Nicholas had asked of them in his testament, and all that the lady Violante had advised. Now they could only wait.

  They knew, going about their business, when the caravans were imminent, because of the excitement. As Bruges declared holiday, so Trebizond prepared for the exotic arrival of the source of its wealth. As for a feast day, market stalls were withdrawn and streets hung with cloths and garlands and banners. Within the walls of the City, the great caravanserai with its merchant rooms and storehouses and stabling was swept and sanded and readied, and the kitchens stocked with the wood, the oil, the meat, the bread that for three days the City would present to its guests. Outside, on the customary grazing, space was cleared for the camels and their shepherds and keepers, where the women would make fires and raise the low, hump-backed tents on their poles and sit talking and spinning while the camels lay with the familiar goats sprawled on their necks, and the claws of tick-hunting birds plucking their thick matted hair.

  The first warning came when they were barely up and preparing to dress; when the day porter of the Florentine fondaco, going to sweep out the yard and unlock the big double street doors, found they would not yield to his key. Then, opening the spyhole, he had seen that the street outside was filled with soldiers who turned and shouted at him and, when he yelled back, shook their swords at him grinning.

  Tobie, wakening to a sea and sky dyed rose with a Colchian sunrise, was struck by the commotion, and ran half-dressed out to the yard. Godscalc stood there already, his powerful feet astride in the dust, demanding redress and explanation. Beyond the grille, you could see cold steel and turbans. The Emperor’s guard. The Emperor’s personal guard. Then Godscalc turned and said, “We have been forbidden to leave the fondaco by Imperial order. We are locked in until the caravan leaves.”

  “Who says?” said Tobie. “Let me speak to them.”

  “Speak, then,” said Godscalc. “But it’s the captain of the Palace Guard, and he has written orders.”

  Tobie stared at him. He said, “How many?”

  Godscalc said, “What does it matter? You don’t imagine we can use force with them, do you?”

  “You don’t imagine we just give in, do you? I could get over the wall.”

  “They’re all round,” said Godscalc. “And if you could get out, what would you do? Go to the caravanserai and bid against Doria? Doria is head of the Trebizond branch of the Charetty company. That is what this means.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of bidding against him,” said Tobie.

  “I didn’t think you were. And what are you going to do to get rid of Catherine de Charetty?” Godscalc said. “You do remember that she’s the head of the company? I query if, as a widow, she would make a factor of her late husband’s murderer. She might, of course, but I doubt it.”

  “So we do nothing?” said Tobie.

  “We use our brains,” Godscalc s
aid. “The caravan has still to arrive. The buying has still to begin. We could send a petition, for example, to the Emperor. We could send a message to the lady Violante. We could advise Doria himself that, no matter what transaction he makes, we shall dispute it afterwards as the deputies appointed by Nicholas. We could go in and have something to eat and pick John le Grant’s brains. You’re indecent.”

  Tobie dragged down his shirt. “It reflects my state of mind,” he said. “So it was a waste of time, the elephant clock? What in God’s name does the Basileus see in Doria?”

  “Charm,” said Godscalc. “I shan’t malign him by imagining there are other reasons. We shan’t even see the procession. It goes along by the shore.”

  “What a pity,” said Tobie. “I was going to wave flags and kiss all the camels.”

  The sun rose, and began to burn. Standing at the shore gates to the City with her husband and the other merchants and the Treasurer Amiroutzes and his party, Catherine inhaled once more the special perfume of Trebizond, now so customary that she hardly heeded it; and wished that she could sit, like a child, on her husband’s silken shoulders and watch for the plumes and the banners that meant that the caravan had begun to pass along the shore to make its state entrance. They said a camel’s sense of smell was so keen that it could pick up a nut of ambergris left on the beach. They said that ghost trains of camels passed incessantly, taking the souls of the Faithful to Mecca. A trickle crawled down her spine with the heat. She was wearing her newest gown, silk over silk, with her earrings, and Pagano had on the Emperor’s coat. They were going to welcome the merchants, and sit and take refreshments while the bales were unloaded, and then go from room to room, buying and choosing. Pagano said the rubies came in little kid bags, and there were pearls as big as beans, and Baghdad silk woven with eagles and panthers, and fine camlet, warm as fur, made of silk and camel hair woven together.

  He hadn’t spoken of dyes. Perhaps he thought they were dull. But all her life she had heard her mother, and Henninc and the people who worked in the yard, talking wistfully of the beautiful kermes, the real insect dye of the Orient, which turned fine woollens blood-red or peach. What you could do with it! Add brasil, and there was old rose, or a brilliant scarlet. Add fustic, and the cloth came out in yolk-yellow folds, soft as daffodils.

  There would be indigo from Baghdad and the Gulf. The Duchess had ordered blue cloth from her mother last year. They had dyed it for her, of course, but hardly went into profit, even by charging three lire the piece. There was powdered lapis lazuli, now; the painter’s flower; sold in Bruges for a florin an ounce. She remembered Colard Mansion complaining about that, and the price of gall nuts for ink. They could buy all that cheap and sell it for a fine margin. If Pagano was purchasing for the Charetty company, he would have to buy dyes, and perhaps she could help him. Her family instincts, never fostered, stirred at the sight of the well-dressed men all about her, their clerks at their heels, discoursing in murmurs. Like Bruges, it was all done by bargaining and the handshake. It was when the chosen bales arrived on your doorstep that the yardstick came out, and the account books and the cash boxes. She said, “I don’t see my mother’s men after all.”

  “They stayed at home,” Pagano said. “The City thought it best, in the interests of order. I was sorry, because I could have done with their advice. But I’m sure we shall do quite well in spite of it. There’s the Venetian Bailie, with a fortune to spend on his spices. What would become of the bowels of the world without his rhubarb and ginger?” She thought it coarse of Pagano, but forgave his excessive high spirits. After all they had gone through, they had come to market at last. The treasure fleet, the Fleece, was arriving.

  She heard the drums beating first, and then the hoofbeats and shouting, and then the sound of flutes and strings being plucked, and then a shaking jingle like tambourines, and then a muffled tread, like cloth being trodden, mixed with deep and peculiar snores. Then the first beast came into view, looking down its nose like a bishop through eyelashes curled like a whore’s, and she clung to Pagano’s arm and jumped with delight, as she used to do at the carnival. She dropped his arm. The Bailie said, “Is that all?”

  Pagano didn’t reply. It never worried her, being short, but she could see that, for a man, it was frustrating. George Amiroutzes, in his big basket hat, was looking along the road also. He said, “No doubt the rest will come later.” The procession had halted, and several horsemen were coming forward and dismounting to receive the Imperial welcome. Some were bearded and some had flat yellow faces and some looked just like themselves. They all bowed. One of them was captain Astorre. Beside her, Pagano drew a short breath.

  The Treasurer, straightening from his own bow, recognised the captain as well. He stepped forward and spoke to him. “You have come with the caravan?”

  “Met it on the road,” said her mother’s captain. “Thought they would be none the worse of protection. Brigands about, as you know. Offering my services to interpret.”

  Behind him, when you looked, were other familiar faces in helmets. It was natural, when you gave it a thought. He had been searching the same road for the place of Pagano’s battle. She wanted to ask him what he had found, but he was busy making introductions. Soon, still dismounted, the leaders were taken ceremoniously into the City and along the short distance to the khan. The camels followed, and the merchants, including themselves. The Bailie said, “Two hundred. There are only two hundred. The rest must be following. If so, I’m going home till they come.”

  Pagano said, “You might miss a bargain.”

  “I might pay dear for something I could have got better later. No. Let’s find out what’s happened.”

  How to do this was not at all clear. Above their shoulders, camels continued to pass, forcing a way through onlookers and merchants. The last, a high-bred riding camel with silken reddish-brown flanks, paused beside her and she turned her head aside, having learned how men with shawled heads and robes dealt with women with uncovered faces. Then the rider said, “Houtch, houtch, houtch, houtch…” in an irritated voice, and the camel, restarting with a shiver of bells, took up its soft, dancing gait. As it passed, she saw the soft kid of the man’s boot was sewn all over with silk like a comfit-cake, and had a long tassel of gold at the heel. Then he disappeared in the crowd of his fellows.

  Dust rose and hung in the air. The caravanserai, when they reached it, was a jostling throng of men and horses and camels laboriously kneeling or rising, while their bales were loosed and carried off to the room of each owner. Pagano, with the Bailie at his side, pushed his way through to where the palace officials could be glimpsed, and a figure whose forked beard and tall black-draped hat proclaimed him a monk. Then he turned, and she saw he was the Archimandrite she had last seen with Violante of Naxos. He appeared to have come with the train, and indeed still held the reins of his horse. Then he turned and saw the Bailie. “Your excellency?”

  The Bailie wasted no words. “Where are the rest of the camels?”

  The Archimandrite’s Italian was excellent. He said, “Have no fear, your excellency. The consignment for Venice is safe. Because of the brigands, and the White Horde activities, the merchants took counsel at Erzerum and made your purchases there. They are on their way through to Bursa, from where they will cross to your agent at Pera, and then home. I have letters from your agent at Erzerum.” He turned to Pagano. “And I see the Genoese ambassador is here on the same bent. I can give him the same reassurance. The goods for Genoa, Messer Doria, were selected at Erzerum by Genoese agents and are on their way to Bursa as well.” He raised his brows. “I am not sure if I should have been so afraid of the journey to Trebizond but, although some tried, they would not be persuaded. And indeed, perhaps they are right. For his own sake, the Turk will protect the markets of Bursa, whereas the Turcoman hordes might not be so careful of merchandise. Hence, as you see, only two hundred of the thousand came here. But still. Sixty thousand pounds’ weight of prime stock is worth something. You
should go to see what there is, even if you cannot buy anything. There are some fine spices, they tell me—pepper and cinnamon, myrrh and spikenard. Bales of kermes. And some exceptional jewels. The lady your wife would be delighted to see them. Turquoises, of course. Balas rubies. And a hundred strings of magnificent pearls, with seventy-four to the string. Go and see them.”

  Catherine wanted to wait, in proper style, until his servants and her attendants had found them, but Pagano set off as soon as the Bailie stopped speaking and she would have lost him had she not broken into a run. A coil of hair broke from its careful binding. There were wooden steps, which caught the little heels on her slippers, and then she was in a small crowded room, where a cloth had been spread on the floor, and two men were unfastening a bale under the eye of its owner. To everyone who came in, he said, in broken Italian, “Later. Later. It is not unloaded yet.” She could see the gleam of silk, and lacquer boxes.

  The voice of Amiroutzes, behind them, said, “Is it not exquisite? The next room is full of our stock as well. Did you hear of the pearls? I could not have done better buying myself.”

  Doria didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, “I have heard of the pearls. Are they spoken for?”

  For a scholar, the Greek was inclined to be brusque. He said, “I have just said. The palace goods have already been chosen and purchased. At Erzerum, by the Archimandrite. A wise precaution, since the goods were so few, and there was bound to be a demand. If you wanted the pearls for yourself, I apologise. But there are other rooms. Ask. They will tell you which items are ours, and which are for sale to others.”