“He didn’t protect us. I told you. He killed Pagano Doria. He might have betrayed us as easily. But it was Catherine he resented, not us.”
It was still not very clear. “And Doria,” said Julius.
“No. He loved Doria. That was the trouble. You wouldn’t like to go and talk to Catherine?” Tobie said.
“No. I’ve had enough of Catherine,” had said Julius without hesitation.
The trouble there, of course, was that the girl wouldn’t stay with the other women. He hardly blamed her. They were mostly Venetian and unmarried, although there were plenty of babies about. After the first shock of departure, and the anxiety about the fate of their lovers or husbands, their spirits began, with hesitation, to rise as no immediate danger seemed to threaten. Ahead was Venice, and all it offered of civilised life and friends and comfort. The men with them too, pleased to have their merchandise under their feet, began to show their confidence, and indeed their over-confidence, if they happened to come across a Genoese.
It was the Genoese consul, after all, who had crossed to the Ottoman side and had been killed (so it was said) by this miraculous Niccolò, this young hero who had rescued them all. The traitor had received what he deserved, and they and their money were saved. And their merchandise. And, of course, the women and children. The few Genoese kept to themselves, and said little; for they had neither leader nor merchandise, and no landfall ahead that they looked forward to. Catherine, exiled from both camps, took to following Nicholas.
Then, three weeks on their journey, they reached the end of the Black Sea and faced its only exit: the waterway of the Bosphorus, lined by the guns of the Turks. They chose to sail through it in daylight. Catherine, hidden below, saw the threatening coast she had passed once already, content in Pagano’s arms. The ponderous Anadolu Hisari on the Asian shore and, on the right, the massive round towers of Boghasi-Kesen, its new partner. The throat-cutter, they called it; or the strait-cutter; because no ship could survive between the mouths of the two sets of cannon. They entered the Bosphorus, and the gun from Boghasi-Kesen fired.
In the open air it was without resonance; as if God had banged his fist. Where the ball fell, the water rose like white feathers. The round ship responded immediately; running down her flag, and then her sails, and manoeuvring into the wind, her captive galley backing cautiously beside her. They waited. In the distance, a boat was putting out from the shore. You could see the glitter of weapons. On the two ships, it was so quiet that you could hear the bullocks complaining from the pens of the galley; and the wind in the rigging; and the slap of the sea against wood. The sun beat down with the leaden heat of September so that sweat ran from the borrowed turbans of the seamen crowding the decks; and below, the refugees panted in the stifling air, their hands over the mouths of their children.
Nicholas appeared on deck, surrounded by men rolling barrels. He was laughing. He said, “Lord have mercy, are you holding your breath? You’ve thrashed the Christians; captured a galley; rammed every boy in the Black Sea; filled your sacks with church cups and carpets and candlesticks; and you’re going home to your wives rich for life and drunk with the liquor you’ve stolen. It’s against all the rules, but you don’t care. And when we’ve given them a barrel or two, the soldiers are not going to care very much either. Here. You and you and you. All of you with good Turkish. Talk. Sing. Shout. The rest of you, caper. Gianni: get up to the yardarm and show them a few acrobatics, and piss into the wind when they’re near enough to enjoy it. Now!”
Below, his was the first voice they heard, raised in song. It continued, interrupted by hiccoughs and mixed with the stamping of feet and the voices of other men singing and talking in Turkish, and laughing. A distinct smell of wine began to seep down through the closed hatches, followed presently by the creak and swish of a strong set of oars, coming nearer. There was a long shouted exchange, and then a lot of scrambling, followed by a series of bumps. After some time, the din, which had been considerable, started to lessen. Feet thudded on timber and the creak of oars started again, with some splashing and, after a while, became fainter. The hatch opened, and Nicholas slid down among them.
He was a little drunk; his eyes brilliant. He said, at the second attempt, “Who said Turks don’t drink?”
Catherine said, “You saved us.”
He looked at her. “Well, they’ve gone, anyway. And with any luck they’ll pass the word along to Stamboul, and they’ll let us straight through to Gallipoli. And at Gallipoli…Well, we just have to be quick, that’s all.” His gaze fell, and his face changed. He had seen Willequin. He said, “What happened?” without any slurring at all.
Catherine said, “He was barking.”
One of the women said, “It began to yap in the silence. Before we knew the noise didn’t matter. She just up and cut its throat. Just like that.”
Then he looked at her and said, “I’m so sorry. I know what it meant. Indeed, it might have saved us all, if things had been different. Thank you.”
“Her pet, he was,” someone said. You could hear, for the first time, a note of sympathy.
It didn’t reach Catherine. She was looking up at Nicholas, with tears in her eyes; and he was looking at no one but her. Then he said, “Poor Catherine. I’ll send someone to take him.” And, touching her lightly on the cheek, lifted himself up through the open hatch and into the sunlight. In a moment she heard his voice again, giving orders and breaking off now and then to laugh. Then the sails went up, and they got under way and he failed to come below again, although the German priest did. She sent him packing.
They passed Constantinople. Gaining confidence, they sailed from end to end of the Sea of Marmara. They reached Gallipoli, their supposed destination: the station of the absent fleet and the absent admiral which marked the western limit of Mehmet’s sea bases. There was no way they could trick their way out of a direct challenge here; or escape the guns if they invited them.
Nicholas made the run at night, with the skills of le Grant and Crackbene and his navigators to depend on. They were seen; and the guns fired, but they were not caught in the fire, for all the best gunners had gone with Kasim Pasha; and the big guns were at Constantinople and the Bosphorus now.
The day they came through the Dardanelles into the Aegean was the first day since she was small that Catherine had seen all her mother’s employees the worse for drink; even to the new chaplain, who had lectured her about lust. Surprisingly, Julius and Nicholas his young catechumen were among the first to succumb. In the old days, with Felix, they sometimes got drunk for several days when her mother had gone to Louvain; and they never seemed to lie down. But now, looking for Nicholas, she came across Julius first, fast asleep and smiling just outside the officers’ cabin; and when she went in, Nicholas was asleep on the floorboards inside; but not smiling. She was trying to rouse him when her mother’s doctor came in and told her to stop it. And when she persisted, took her by the arm and marched her out. She made a note of it. By now, she was making a note of everything. If Pagano had done that, he wouldn’t have lost all his money.
Next day, they all went about groaning, and she was glad. And in the days after that, with everyone freely on deck, they were all polite to her, as they should be; and friendly with one another, but not, of course, vulgarly triumphant. There was nothing triumphant about having to leave your post and rush home, even if you brought a lot of goods with you. And it was only right that they should remember that Pagano Doria, her husband, was dead. She had no material to make mourning clothes with, but some woman gave her black ribbon, and she wore it tied to the front of her dress. I am Caterina de Charetty negli Doria: widow. She said to Nicholas, “You remember the round ship is mine.”
They were just off Modon at the time, and he was standing staring at the island that closed the bay. He looked the way he had the morning after the celebration; although he had drunk nothing to speak of since then. John le Grant was with him. She repeated what she had said. Nicholas turned. “I’m
sending the round ship straight through to Porto Pisano. You can go with her if you like.”
She said, “Aren’t you going to Venice?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Then I’m coming to Venice,” said Catherine. It was like hewing rock.
Nicholas said nothing. It was John le Grant who said, “We may find letters here, demoiselle. Then we shall know better what to do.”
She walked away. Letters. Letters from her mother, complaining about her. That was what he was waiting for. And she had killed Willequin for him.
Chapter 40
IT WAS SO LONG AGO…It was in February, seven months ago, that he had last come to Modon. An interval long enough for a birth; or a still-birth; or the birth of a freak. He found he couldn’t bear the presence of Catherine; and asked everyone he could trust—Tobie, Loppe, Godscalc, Julius—to keep her entertained. Remembering, he needed no one to point out the irony of that.
It was the same Venetian castellan, Giovanni Bembo. Bowing before him in the little repainted room, before the same carefully preserved family silver, Nicholas remembered also the fatal supper, and saw it all now in a different light. In the Morea, too, Sultan Mehmet had moved from town to castle, intimating his intentions; and the governors of the Moreote fortresses had sent messages of surrender; and watched their kinsmen dragged off to repopulate Constantinople in their thousands. When the despot Thomas, useless brother of the useless Demetrius, had looked like resisting, the Bailie of Modon and his fellows had begged him, with offers of ships, to leave the country. Which had not saved the Venetians, when the Sultan rode up to the walls of Modon and put to death those inhabitants who thought to approach him under a trembling flag of truce. Modon was the creature of Turkey, as Pera, as Trebizond were the creatures; and all that preserved them was trade. So the Bailie served his spiced food, and indulged in the anodyne of light gossip, and looked over his shoulder.
The Bailie said, “My lord. This day, I have heard such news from my compatriots on board your vessel. How you saved their lives, and their merchandise. Your bravery under gunfire. Your ingenuity in trial. I have sent word to Venice: to my cousin Piero; and the Signory. They will know how to reward you.”
He had not remembered that the man was an idiot. The man was not an idiot. Nicholas said, “I hope you told them, too, how you enabled me to conceal my soldiers and sail to Trebizond in the first place. Your help after the fire has not been forgotten.”
He was given a great chair, and a footstool, and a goblet of wine. “I cannot forgive myself,” said the Bailie. “That invidious Genoese.”
“He was an appointed consul,” Nicholas said. “It would have been a fault to deny him the courtesies. Unfortunately, his business did not prosper.”
“That, too, I am transmitting,” said the Bailie. “Through your foresight. I have heard of it. News comes swiftly in these parts. From boat to boat. We heard of Trebizond before you arrived.”
“What have you heard?” Nicholas said. He lifted his wine to his lips and set it down again.
“When did you leave? The Sultan entered the City on the fifteenth day of August, and celebrated his triumph in the church of St Eugenios. The Panaghia Chrysokephalos is the Mosque of the Conqueror. The Janissaries rule the Citadel, a Mussulman colony of Azabs hold the Christian houses in the City; and the lord admiral Kasim Pasha rules from the Palace as supreme commander. The world of free Greece; the glorious Byzantine Empire is ended for ever, two hundred years to the day since the Emperor’s forefathers wrested Constantinople back from the Latins. I feel the shame of it,” said Giovanni Bembo. “Were they not Venetian troops who helped take it from them?”
“Your Bailie chose this time to stay in Trebizond,” Nicholas said. “He and some of his fellows. They are brave men.”
“They serve a great Signory,” said the Bailie with reverence. He fell into thought.
Nicholas said, “And has the Sultan been lenient?”
The Bailie recovered. “In Trebizond? To the Emperor, yes. The Emperor, his family, his kinsmen, his nobles have all been shipped to Constantinople. He has asked for the same pension as the despot Demetrius, and he will receive it. There was a young nephew, a page whom the Sultan wished to keep in his train, and the lady his mother, whom he has placed in his harem with the Emperor’s daughter.”
Alexios. Maria. Anna. Who else? “And the people?” Nicholas said.
“Shipped to Constantinople, of course, if their rank merited it. The rest, I fear, were enslaved. The most suitable women and children, as is usual, were divided between the Sultan and his ministers, and the residue otherwise placed. The Janissary corps alone received eight hundred boys to be reared, poor children, as unmarried converts. War is harsh,” the Bailie said. His voice was flat. He had seen it all, in the Morea. Nothing more could astonish him, although some things could frighten him still. After a while he said, “But what could anyone have done, my lord Niccolò? What mortal man can stand against this Sultan now? I have heard of no one who faced him in his tent as you did, so I heard; and killed the traitor as well.”
“No,” Nicholas said. “If you mean Pagano Doria. He didn’t die by my hand.”
“You are modest,” the Bailie said. “It is a tragedy. But, without tragedy, where would be valour, endurance, the tempering of the spirit? You must be weary. What may I offer you? There is water heating, should it please you to bathe. And supper presently. Your cup is not empty.”
“I have enough,” Nicholas said. “Your time here has been no less hard, but you have had news from the West, which has been denied us.”
“From the West? Fragments. Fragments,” said the Bailie. “The doge Prosper Adorno has been replaced in Genoa: you will have heard that. And the King of France is dead, and the Dauphin Louis is monarch. The Yorkists have prevailed in England, but the war still continues. And in Rome—ah, the sensation in Rome is the Pope’s new discovery.”
He was so tired that at first he made nothing of it. He was thinking of Louis of France; and the returned exiles; and Jordan de Ribérac. He was thinking, in fact, that soon he must shave off his beard. Then he said, “New discovery?”
“By his godson, Giovanni da Castro,” the Bailie said. “The dyemaster. He was in Constantinople this winter. An idle man, who consults the stars, and always boasted of making a fortune some day. Well, he has made it. He has discovered a new alum mine.”
“Then,” said Nicholas, “he is indeed fortunate. And very rich. Where is the mine?”
“It is the Pope who will be richer still,” the Bailie said. “The mine is in the Papal States, at a place they call Tolfa, in the hills inland from Civita Vecchia. From which, of course, the stuff can be shipped. And all the profits will go to the Curia. Or, as the Pope has proclaimed, to finance, at last, the crusade the world has been waiting for—the good Cardinal Bessarion has been praying for—the Eastern delegation under its humble and selfless Franciscan has been begging for.”
There was a pause. Nicholas said, “And so the Empire of Trebizond may rise again?”
There was another pause. The Bailie said, “It is not, of course, impossible. But with France and Burgundy face to face, and England busy with its own affairs…Nothing is impossible. But to Venice, you will understand, this news is of immediate significance. The Turk has starved the world of alum: you know this, of course. Six thousand ducats, the Sultan took in toll after Constantinople was his; and in the ensuing years ten thousand, thirty thousand. Now he controls all the mines, and even Venice must have failed to market his alum at the price he will now demand.”
“No,” Nicholas said. “It is more than timely, then, this new discovery. It occurs to me…”
“Yes?” said the Bailie, leaning forward.
“It occurs to me that there might be letters with more recent news perhaps waiting for me. Would you know of this?”
Giovanni Bembo slapped his knee. “Idiot! I had a message to deliver. Indeed, there were letters, but not to me. Last time you were here, yo
u met a gentleman?”
“Several,” Nicholas said. He felt, for the moment, that he would like to be dead; and sat calling, with silent ferocity, on what was left of his sense of the ridiculous.
“A great man; your friend I make no doubt. The lord Nicholai Giorgio de’ Acciajuoli.”
The Greek with the wooden leg. The oracle who had not joined the Argo; but had sent it on its way with a calmness one could never forgive; for calmness was something one did not have any more; or freedom. Nicholas said, “Is he here?”
“He is here, and asked if you would call on him before you sup with me. He has letters for you. They came to him, and not to me. He is where you found him before. I will send an escort with you.”
“No,” Nicholas said. “What protection do I need? And I know my way.” Which was not an irony this time; just a lie.
“So,” said the Greek, “it has all been too much for you. Romania has passed away: Romania is conquered. The Bailie has told you the figures at the bottom of your accounting, and you do not want to be responsible for them.”
Nicholai de’ Acciajuoli. He looked the same. A bearded man, no longer young, but with the dark good looks of his Florentine kinsmen which had been striking enough, two years ago on the quayside outside Bruges when the eighteen-year-old apprentice Claes had broken his wooden leg. And which had lost nothing of their command a year later when, still in Bruges, he had introduced Nicholas to Violante of Naxos and launched him on the journey that had taken him to Trebizond. Or here, seven months ago, after the fire on his ship, when the message had travelled to Constantinople which resulted in Doria’s unwanted ceremonial entrance. Nicholai Giorgio de’ Acciajuoli, brother of Zorzi the agent at Constantinople; and kinsman of Laudomia Acciajuoli, who had had the good taste to marry a Medici.
Nicholas said, “They’ve found Tolfa. How fortunate.”
“The best form of defence,” the Greek said. “Yes. Giovanni da Castro has found Tolfa, just as the last alum mine falls under Turkish control. Are you complaining? You did get to Sebinkarahisar? Your round ship is full of alum: the last, untaxed, high-quality alum in the world, which will serve the dyemasters of Europe until the mining of Tolfa begins, under a Medici franchise, with special rights reserved to my brother Zorzi?”
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