To Lie with Lions

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Gregorio said, ‘So what does this mean for the Bank? Nicholas?’

  ‘It means I don’t sell so many secrets to France,’ Nicholas said. ‘We keep Julius in Cologne, and Crackbene’s friends in Utrecht, and I cultivate all those charming officers of the Emperor whom I met in the Tyrol. Cardinal Bessarion talked to Frederick about us.’

  ‘So did the Patriarch of Antioch,’ said Gregorio. ‘The Emperor will suspect we are resuming our interest in the East.’

  ‘So we are, temporarily,’ Nicholas said. It was easy.

  Gelis was standing before him. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘That’s what I was about to explain. Because I’m going to Cyprus,’ Nicholas said. Jodi tugged at his doublet.

  Gregorio said, ‘What for, in God’s name? The spring attack on the Sultan is launched; the fleet has gone; the Venetian arms are on their way to Uzum Hasan and the Turcoman army.’

  ‘Paid for by our stolen gold,’ Nicholas said. The gold, pirated on its way home from Africa, was being claimed by the Knights of St John.

  Gregorio said, ‘Julius is on his way to plead that case now. You sent him yourself.’

  ‘Then perhaps I should join him,’ Nicholas said. ‘Rhodes is only two days from Cyprus. Yes, Jodi. I have observed that you are there. You shall sit beside me, and Mistress Clémence will tell us what you may eat.’

  ‘And what you may eat,’ Jodi said.

  ‘No doubt,’ Nicholas said. ‘No doubt I shall be force-fed with something before the day is much older.’

  Two days later he left, taking Alonse; and accompanied Mick Crackbene and a pallid-faced Tobie in a hard, brilliant sail of twenty-six days down the Gulf of Venice, and east to the farthest end of the Middle Sea.

  He had been force-fed with many reasons for not going: the only one that had given him pause was Jodi’s face. Gelis had said nothing. He had promised her a resolution this year in the West, and he had reaffirmed the agreement. Only, on the eve of his departure, she had come to him as he stood on the balcony and said, ‘Would you take me with you to Cyprus?’

  The light from the water slipped over her skin and her hair and her breast, and made two translucent points of her eyes.

  He said, ‘How dare you? How dare you, after Famagusta?’ He stood, breathing quickly, staring after her as she left.

  He gave a different answer when Tobie put the same question later that night, in his room. Then, Nicholas lay in his own high-backed chair and contemplated the deep coffered ceiling and said, ignoring the question, ‘Did you put something into my drink? Why am I tired?’

  ‘Because you’ve seen the boy again, and don’t want to leave him,’ Tobie said. ‘Zacco has called you, I think.’

  He supposed it wasn’t a very hard guess. He said, ‘Either Zacco, or David de Salmeton.’

  It was quite athletic, the way Tobie sat up. ‘That little whore!’

  ‘That extremely able agent of the Vatachino, currently occupying a position at Zacco’s right hand, or even possibly at both Zacco’s hands.’

  Tobie digested that. He said, ‘But Zacco has a queen now. I mean he’s married to Catherine Corner and she’s pregnant.’ He stopped again and said, ‘Or is all this in reality about David de Salmeton? He half drowned you in Cairo, and you propose to gratify yourself by making him pay for it?’

  ‘You were closer the first time,’ Nicholas said. ‘I don’t think the message was false. I think it was real. Do you want to come with me?’

  ‘No,’ said Tobie. ‘But I will.’

  At first glance, James de Lusignan, King of Jerusalem, Cyprus and Armenia, seemed unchanged; nine years after their first meeting, the febrile beauty, the loose waving hair and measuring eyes still stopped the heart. He wore light, expensive French dress; he might equally have chosen Arab or Neapolitan or Venetian attire, or have received Nicholas in the old way, casually naked, half killing some horse. They were the same age. Today he was seated on his throne in his palace of Nicosia, and something was wrong.

  The surroundings were the same. Gold had been lavished on the royal apartments in recent years. Nicholas had noticed it three years ago on the brief visit which had seemed, then, to confirm his Bank’s share in the Crusade: the promise of an alliance with Zacco and Cairo, Venice and Rhodes which would have placed him at the spearhead of this attack on the Turk.

  It had not happened, because of Gelis and his son. He had assumed he had Zacco’s hatred, as he had received the vituperation of Ludovico da Bologna and Rhodes. He had mollified Venice with money and with his ships. It was as well, because Venice was here now in strength. Not the little Queen, seven months pregnant and unwelcome, he guessed, to Zacco’s fastidious eye. But all those Venetian noblemen whom Zacco had also married, his feline eyes open, his claws sheathed, because he had no alternative. He could fall to the Turk or to Venice. He had chosen Venice.

  The King said, ‘My lord of Beltrees. I am told this is your title. I am sure you have earned it. To what do I owe this great honour?’

  Zacco’s own language was French, or else Greek. He understood the tongue of his overlord of Egypt and Syria. He was speaking now in Venetian patois, the coarsened slur impressively accurate. Someone shifted behind him: the battle-scarred swarthy person of his Sicilian Chancellor, Rizzo di Marino. The Catalans and Sicilians of Zacco’s close inner circle had a better measure of the Venetian temper than had Zacco. For Zacco, there were seldom any half-measures: life was a stallion to be ridden bareback, kill or be killed, for the ecstasy. It was one of the reasons he and Nicholas had always understood one another.

  Nicholas said, ‘Sire, last time I called, you were gracious enough to lend me a horse. Since I was passing, I brought another, to replace it. Also a white gyrfalcon from Iceland.’

  ‘Since you were passing?’

  Nicholas said, ‘My notary has some business in Rhodes: a legal quibble which requires our attention. I merely wished to repay my debt, and congratulate your magnificence on your marriage to the lady Catherine Corner.’

  ‘Catherine Véneta,’ said the King. ‘The Queen has been adopted by the Republic. She is a Daughter of St Mark. The Bishop of Turin, a contemptible fool, has quipped that he never heard that St Mark had been married.’

  ‘A contemptible and an ignorant fool,’ Nicholas said. ‘Of course he was married. How could a man be a saint, who has fathered a child outside matrimony?’

  ‘We must discuss it some time,’ said the King. ‘It will please us to inspect this horse and this bird in the morning. We may decide to go hunting.’

  ‘I should be honoured, roi monseigneur,’ Nicholas said.

  Outside the audience chamber, seeking Tobie, he moved from group to group of men he had known: all guarded, all nervously welcoming. There were other men who did not approach him, some of them strangers. Among them was one face he could never forget: oval, cleft-chinned and delicate, with lustrous dark eyes and dark hair. The man had a page at his side, and both smelled of jasmine. Nicholas walked across.

  ‘I hoped,’ said David de Salmeton, ‘that you would come to me. Zacco is so very much married these days that life has become perfectly tedious. You have left the lovely Gelis behind?’

  ‘Are you still interested?’ Nicholas said. ‘I must tell her. Perhaps you should change places with Martin. But you would hardly expect her to break off with King James on your account. And Martin might not do so well here. I believe the Vatachino are positively flourishing in Cyprus and Rhodes. And, of course, Anselm Adorne.’

  ‘It was kind of you to desert the field. I fear,’ de Salmeton said, ‘that it is too late to forge an opening now. They have even given me the Kouklia sugarfields.’

  ‘And, I trust, some of the vineyards,’ Nicholas said. ‘And a ship to replace the Unicorn? All that exquisite claret. I did have some regrets about that.’

  ‘It sank off La Rochelle,’ de Salmeton said.

  ‘But they saved me a bottle,’ Nicholas said. ‘I have it for you in my luggage. Too late to forg
e an opening, you think? Perhaps we should see.’ He nodded and walked away, followed by the eyes of the boy. He wondered, as he often wondered, what he would do without Crackbene.

  It had been obvious from the moment of his arrival that he was not going to be lodged in the Palace, and he had sent Alonse to make arrangements with the Venetian Bailie. It would have been correct – and he wished to be correct – for Messer Pasqualigo to invite him to stay. Instead, he found himself escorted, with Tobie, to the palatial villa next door, with which he was very familiar.

  Tobie said, ‘Isn’t this where you went to your meeting three years ago? Isn’t this where the Queen’s Venetian family lives?’

  It was, of course. It was the home of the Lord Auditor Andrea Corner, the uncle of Catherine and the most powerful Venetian on Cyprus. It was the home of young Marco her cousin, and of Marco’s namesake and uncle her father, when called from his sugar estates in the south. It was also home, on occasion, to those three remarkable princesses, the little Queen’s mother and aunts, with two of whom he had been memorably intimate.

  He could feel Tobie walking bristling beside him as they were led in. He could feel Tobie’s disapproval become outrage when the voice that greeted them, sweetly feminine, proved to be that of a beautiful boy. Nerio, well-born exile of Trebizond, had shamed Adorne’s son in Venice and embellished the court of Duke Charles in Bruges and Brussels and had found himself a singular protector, by all accounts, in the house of Bessarion in Rome.

  Nicholas said, ‘How surprising. And is the lord Nicholai Giorgio de’ Acciajuoli present also?’

  The painted eyes fluttered. ‘Should I have allowed him to come? But he is sensitive, and such tendresses, as you know, can breed jealousy. He is waiting in Modon. But I am to see to your comfort, and to apologise for the lord Andrea and his nephew, who have been called away. I hope, however, that you remember your Greek. And this is your charming doctor. I remember him well.’

  ‘I remember you,’ Tobie said.

  Alone with Nicholas he said, as he had said all through the voyage, ‘Achille told you. The Vatachino have all the contracts. There is nothing for you here now, or for the army. John and Astorre wasted their time defending a cesspool of plotting and decadence. Why are we here?’

  ‘To be seduced in Greek,’ Nicholas said.

  ‘By that scented boy?’

  ‘It wasn’t his scent,’ Nicholas said. ‘Come to the balcony.’

  Below, the trees of the garden were heavy with dust, and urns of flowers threw their black shadows on the pavement beside the rim of a fountain. By the fountain stood a man they both knew: a man in a turban, talking to a woman seated below him.

  The man was Hadji Mehmet, the far-travelled envoy of Uzum Hasan, the Turcoman ruler of Persia. The woman was Violante, the golden princess of Naxos whose small, plump niece was Zacco’s queen.

  Tobie said, ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’ Nicholas said. ‘He’s the pill, she’s the … palliative. The Turk must be stopped. Uzum Hasan can stop him. In other words, if you can’t help, don’t hinder.’

  He had been right. When, refreshed, they both descended, the lady and the envoy were waiting to greet them, and the encounter proceeded, fluently, on predictable lines. He found he rather enjoyed meeting Violante, for once, on something like his own terms. He paid her far more attention than he did Uzum’s envoy.

  In public, neither he nor Hadji Mehmet had ever betrayed anything but the courtesy due from merchant banker to senior ambassador. In fact, they had now met many times, and understood each other very well. Behind his slow tongue and stately manner, the Persian concealed a quick wit and a grasp of alien languages which had served his lord over many years, not least when leading his hundred-strong delegation to Venice two years ago, or at a seminal meeting in this very house some months before that.

  With him then had been someone else: the Latin Patriarch of Antioch, who had so understandably wished to place Katelijne Sersanders in a convent, and whom Tobie had met in Urbino. Uzum Hasan made use of the Latin Church, as he employed any tool in a war that might lose him his country. Just as the Latin Church – in the person of the late Cardinal Bessarion, and his agent Ludovico da Bologna – had been and was using him. Nicholas thought of Ludovico da Bologna, and wondered where he was.

  He saw Tobie glance at him, and realised that his own manner had become rather less weighty, and Tobie thought he knew why. Probably Violante with her silk gown and ivory skin and high-arched slippers of birdskin thought so too. And of course, he was not without some susceptibility. Any man would long to unfold her hair, discarding the jewels into some warm handy niche, to be recovered quite soon. He realised, ruefully, that most of the time Tobie’s suspicions were right.

  They supped in the garden, and were joined by the youth Nerio, who played his lute for them and sang, seated at the princess’s knee. The songs, in the clear sexless voice, passed from language to language, at first amusingly daring, and then unashamedly erotic. Tobie had flushed. The woman, her eyes on those of the boy, was smiling a little, her breathing heightened. The Ambassador sipped the water that was in fact wine, with the peaceful expression of incomprehension that Nicholas now knew so well. And Nicholas, sighing, drank his wine which was in fact water and summoning all his own well-worn skills, blocked the words and music out of his thoughts. He hoped the boy and Violante were enjoying them.

  They retired at length, without the Auditor or his nephew having made an appearance. Tomorrow, Nicholas was to hunt with the King. He and Tobie had been given separate rooms, which suited him well. The note he had half expected was slipped into the sleeve of his night-robe; he took it with him into the privy to read. He had already studied his sumptuous little room, with the great bed and the painted walls and the devotional tabernacle with its almost invisible peep-hole, high on the wall. He didn’t mind. He had never minded giving a performance. He had never slept dressed, either, and wasn’t going to start now.

  He was in bed although not asleep when the scratch came to his door, and Violante entered, the candlelight burnishing her brow and cheekbones and breast. Her hair was already over her shoulders, and she wore one garment more than he did. He sat up, embracing his sheeted knees. ‘Highness, forgive me. I would come and kiss your hand, were it seemly.’

  She laid down the candle and allowed her high, pencilled brows to express amazement. ‘How impolite. The man I once knew could not have refrained, seemly or not.’

  ‘I hoped you’d say that,’ he said, and came to her, lifting her fingers. She wore little rings on each one, and long earrings, which mixed with the screws of gilt hair that lay against her tinted cheeks. In Cyprus, she painted her lips, her eyes, her fingertips as if she felt close to home – to Byzantium, to the Trapezuntine empire of her grandfather which now belonged to the Turks. But she had married a Venetian nobleman, Caterino Zeno, who even now was with Uzum Hasan, and who had founded the fortunes of Nicholas and his Bank with an alum deal.

  She also painted the tips of her breasts. Or so it now seemed.

  Twelve years ago he had returned from Trebizond to find his wife dead, and this woman had offered herself as a vehicle for his pain, his mourning, his remorse, his self-hatred, his oblivion. He had no illusions about her, but he did not and never would forget that.

  Then, aged twenty, he had known no mean between a caring love, merry or tender, and the violence which had to be its opposite. Now he had experienced a thousand variants, and could choose. He could offer no genuine love, but would not insult her by taking her lightly. He guessed that, no longer young, she could still have what or whom she desired. She would demand respect, but in her heart longed for excitement.

  He made sure that she had what she wanted, and at a pace that suited the voracious girl she had been rather than what she was now. And although he never for a moment forgot the pious saint high on the wall, he acted as if it were not there. He had obtained from Tobie, without explanation, the potion that would put her to sle
ep, but she hardly needed it, although he lifted her at length from the floor, and laid her on the bed, her breath slowing, and helped her to drink. Then he put the candle out and waited until he heard the click of a door and soft footsteps retreating. He knew where her chamber was, and carried her there without incident, covering her in her bed. He had cut off a doublet button, a ruby, and left her fingers curled round it.

  Half an hour later, dressed, he slipped out of the villa and found the door left unlocked in the garden. Very soon after, he stopped at another gate, and spoke a password, and was admitted into a building whose door closed behind him in darkness. He felt someone standing beside him. Then two arms closed round his shoulders: different arms, in a different way. They tightened, then dropped. A lamp glowed.

  ‘Oh mon Dieu,’ Zacco said. ‘You reek of her. See, I am weeping. See, you whore, you turd, you Flemish cow-sucker, how I am weeping, because you did this for me. Did you finish her? She deserved it.’

  He was weeping, his face screwed with manic laughter. An old cap bulged with his hair, and his clothes were ill-fitting and smelled. He said, ‘See: Zacco, King of Jerusalem, Cyprus and Armenia. My lady mother said I could not escape from the Palace, but I did. It was she who said you would come back if I sent for you. And the Patriarch, when he was here. My mother said you would come for love of me and hatred of David de Salmeton. The Patriarch said you might come, but would only stay if we put Caterino Zeno’s wife into your bed. Without, of course, allowing her to know that we wished her to go there. She thought she was fornicating for Venice. You know there is a spyhole in that room?’

  ‘Nerio was watching,’ Nicholas said. ‘So I made my best efforts. I am supposed to be a whore and a turd?’ He found he was following Zacco into a lit room containing two people. One was the black-eyed veiled person of Marietta of Patras, the King’s mother. The other was the man he had just had supper with, Hadji Mehmet, the Persian envoy.