Caprice and Rondo (59 page)

The daughter of Anna von Hanseyck performed a neat curtsey, briskly sweeping her toe. ‘The day my mother comes home will be the happiest, I think, of my life.’ She lifted her lashes to Gelis. ‘Except, of course, for the day when I wed my young husband. That will be happier still.’

‘How many good things,’ said Gelis, ‘there are to look forward to. And you have Jordan’s father to meet. That must be arranged. You will surprise one another.’

‘He surprised my stepfather Julius,’ said Bonne.

Shaken, Gelis departed. If you were to call the encounter a joust, the inmates of the convent had undoubtedly carried the day. It was only when reviewing it later that she began, with some admiration, to laugh. But by then she had written to Scotland: a cheerful message for Jodi; a direction for Clémence his nurse; and an urgent commission for Dr Tobias. And more important than any of these, a deceptive letter of friendly reassurance to Kathi, whose son, surely, was about to be born.

Chapter 23

I
N
D
ECEMBER
THAT
YEAR
, the Emperor Frederick, outraged by Cologne and encouraged by Louis of France, declared war on Duke Charles, and prepared his armies to march. His intention, after safeguarding his frontiers, was to filch Luxembourg and the Low Countries from Burgundy; France was to have Picardy, Artois and Burgundy itself. He was quite optimistic.

Julius of Bologna, recuperating with resolution in Poland, read the signs and received with beating heart the tender letters that found their way, all through that winter, from his lovely, his remarkable wife. He did not necessarily broadcast her news. He did not mention anything whatsoever about gold. But as time went on, he cheerfully reaffirmed to all his clients, his colleagues (and his creditors) his decision to set out for Caffa by spring.

And as winter ended, Anna von Hanseyck in Caffa was found by her Mameluke steward to be weeping over a letter from Bonne.

It should have been a day of light-hearted reunion, for Nicholas had been absent from Caffa for some time, on an unplanned fishing expedition led by Dymitr Wiśniowiecki and his friends from the Russian community. Anna, the least possessive of women, had hastened him on his way. Temporary stewards were easily found. And she recognised, none better, the frustration Nicholas had begun to experience, with every business avenue long since explored, and his leisure occupations confined to those places where it was safe for a man in Mameluke guise to appear. Which meant, in practical terms, the Russian or Muslim quarters, the Franciscan monastery, or the house which she shared.

She had resolved, in her calm way, to provide a form of companionship with music, with poetry, with books, which he might find undemanding and familiar; and was pleased when she was able to tempt him to sing, or take the lute or the viol, or talk. In his turn, although she — so much in demand — could have filled her days with her own new-found friends, Nicholas set aside time to introduce her to a side of Caffa she
might otherwise have missed: encounters with men and women and children who were not Genoese or Polish or German, and who held to different customs. She always tried to do as he wished, although sometimes, smiling, she had to confess that the Patriarch had already accompanied her to this salutary convocation or that. And Nicholas would then laugh unabashed, and remark that if she would only do as she was told they would make her, between them, the first lady Patriarch in Christendom.

She understood, she thought, what occasioned these explorations. She understood the insatiable curiosity which penetrated far beyond everyday life. She understood the hunger to share it. But after her first visit to the Caffa medrese when, crosslegged in muffling robes, she listened in silence to the teachings of a man she did not know, in a language in which she was not expert, she refused, gently, to accede to Nicholas’s infatuation with the imam they called Ibrahiim. But when he challenged her, next, to visit the Greeks in their enclave, she did so as willingly, if only once, because later, he would talk to her. She thought that he needed to talk.

She was not sorry, however, when the fishing expedition was mooted, although she was amazed (although not quite as transfixed as Nicholas) when the Patriarch of Antioch elected to join it. There was some sense in the casual exodus. The dispute over the next Tartar Governor of Caffa was becoming daily more serious and, having done what they could, outsiders should now stand aside. As for the gold, nothing could happen until Ochoa’s ship came in the spring. And if by any chance, said Nicholas smiling, Ochoa managed to sail under the ice into Caffa, he knew he could depend upon Anna to act for them both.

She had returned the smile with a freedom never seen by her noble Hanseyck kinsmen, who thought it ill-bred to show any emotion, far less happiness. Now, she took pleasure in observing her moods reflected in Nicholas’s pensive grey eyes. This winter, she had set herself to know him, and every day taught her more of the cast of his mind, at once bright and dark, and never simple. The eloquent voice of the imam, the harmonious chant of the Koran readers, had meant little to her compared with the physical profile of Nicholas listening: the heavy, black-bearded heel of his jaw; the substantial cheek; the thin, contradictory nose with its quaintly fastidious nostril; the rounded lips sheltering one another; the stark, unwavering gaze. She remembered the same open gaze resting on her. But then the lips had parted a little, as he drew breath.

When, leaving the medrese, he had talked to her of what they had heard, she had at first fallen silent, rather than confess that it was not the teaching that had absorbed her, but his interest in the imam, connected as it must be with his past in West Africa, and Umar, the jurist and friend who had died there. Yet when, at length, she asked him frankly about it,
he had not mentioned Timbuktu in his answer, although he hesitated a moment, as if examining the question in his own mind. ‘Why should I concern myself with Muslim philosophy? Do you never wonder why you choose one course of action in place of another? My divining seems to tell me that however much I strive, the future cannot be altered. And I don’t wish to believe that.’

And ‘Why not?’ she had said. ‘If it is true, it relieves us of great responsibilities. But do we not always follow our desires, whatever punishment threatens in this world or the next?’

‘Not always,’ he said. ‘Surely, one learns from one’s errors. One learns, whether from fear or from conscience, that there are other people in the world who deserve to live out their lives, whatever their failings.’

‘Such as the people of Scotland?’ she had dared to say, softly. And when he bent his head, she had added, ‘And do you need an imam, Nicholas, to tell you how to make peace with yourself? To remind you what part of your boyhood your mistakes, your agonising, your conscience all spring from? Nicholas, how did your mother die?’

He had risen, and she had thought for a moment that he might reply. But he had said only, ‘Not today. But the next time you ask, I shall tell you.’ Then, a few days after that, he had left.

For Nicholas himself, the expedition that took him from Caffa was a strange adventure: an interregnum quite different from the hearty, drunken escapades with Paúel Benecke, although he was not always sober, and often quite as close to risking his life. It had more in common with Iceland, but with no shuddering springs, and with Ludovico da Bologna in place of Katla and Hekla. Kathi and Robin were also missing, having business of a more adult and permanent nature to prosecute, a long way away.

It was the climate, of course, which reminded him. The unusual winter, bringing stinging rain and wet snow even to the palmy shores of the Crim, had frozen the steppes of the north and iced its rivers, so that, in place of mud-swaddled oxen, canopied sledges skimmed over the whiteness, swallowing space as if it were smoke. He had seen them burst through the sunlight of morning in a dazzle of spume; men and sledges and horses encrusted with sparkling frost; beards and manes sheathed and flashing like mirrors.

He had heard tales of the fishing here since he was an apprentice in Bruges: seamen’s accounts of the mythical four-hundredweight sturgeon of the River Yaik, forging up from the Caspian to breed; and of the beluga eighteen feet long, white as veal, sweet as marrow, that could hardly be carried by thirty strong men from the Dnieper. In the spring, men would launch boats to spear them, and to gather in carp and pike bream and chub as they swarmed to their nets. In winter, as now, the fishing
was done from holes hewn in the ice by men who travelled in caravans of powerful sledges, with the great frozen rivers their highway.

The tales of these were cautionary too: of unskilled steering which could overturn horse and sledge on clear ice; of the fights between rival fishermen, and the chance attacks from war-bands of Tartars, come to unearth the salt and caviare buried under the snow, and — timber-starved — to burst apart the boxes, the barrels, the temporary shacks and take them away to make houses and wagons.

With Dymitr Wiśniowiecki there was not much fear of that, although the sledges carried weapons, as well as twenty men and their servants, food and drink and utensils, fuel and stoves, and their fishing and hunting equipment, with their spare horses and dogs running beside. To a man of Dymitr’s race, the frozen marshes and steppes to the north were familiar ground, and his practices were already half Tartar. His had not been the inept party which, travelling from Moscow, had lost Anna her furs — although, like his fellow merchants, he was the poorer for it.

No one troubled to speak of that; there was no time. Already, exploring the country, Nicholas had found his way to some of its rivers, and to the channel which led from the sterile Black Sea to the vast stretch of the Sea of Azov, Palus Maeotis: so rich in fish that both Venice and Genoa had chosen to command it from its northernmost point, where the walled double city of Tana lay on the banks of the Don. But Nicholas knew it only from the soft time of the year, when the Genoese ships crowded the havens, ready to enter and cross the Black Sea with their cargoes of fish and honey and furs, and the traffic in slaves was at its height. The traffic which, of course, Ochoa de Marchena was engaged in.

No ships moved now, but there was life on the steppes: elk and deer and high-leaping wild sheep to be shot, and fat birds to fall to their falcons, and later shrivel and brown on the spit. They ate as they travelled, as Tartars did, until they came to the fish: then they gorged as they worked on mighty salmon, cooked in the gloss of near-life, with the curd thick as cream between the pink flakes of flesh. And of course they wrestled, and roared out their ballads, and flung themselves into violent, joint-wrenching dances, howling over the wheeze of the pipes (they had learned a dirty song about bagpipes) and the twang of someone’s chipped, eight-stringed lute. And naturally, they drank. But it reminded Nicholas of that other country in the north because among the badinage, the talk was not without purpose: it was concerned with the land and its bounty, and the ways of the people who lived on the land. And at night, round the crackling blue fire in the makeshift shelters they found or created, they would fall silent and listen to the ruminative, rumbling voice of the elderly priest from Bologna, who passed the days enthroned like Perun on his sledge, chewing meat and bellowing orders, but brought to
the lit circle at night stories such as even they had never heard, for he had been further than any of them and seen, it seemed, all that there was to see.

And even though the servants crowded in, and the chance might seem irresistible, Ludovico da Bologna said nothing at all of either the Latin church or the Orthodox one they belonged to; only rattled off, at bedtime, the routine benediction you would expect from any master at the close of the day. But if a man asked to see him apart, he would take him off silently, and he would bind a wound, testily, or set a leg if he had to, striking the man if he yelled without cause. After they had been away for ten days, someone asked him about Roman practices. He replied in three sentences, but showed no anxiety to continue, although he would consider a question if asked. Some days after that, Nicholas sought him out.

‘So this is how you do it?’

‘What?’ The Patriarch, in the process of going to bed, wore two robes over two pairs of quilted trousers and boots made of horse-hide lined with bear fur. His blanket, which was also his cloak, was a vast and noisome collage of black sheepskins, which he was currently binding himself into with rope. He showed no interest in Nicholas. He had shown intense interest in the account Nicholas had given him of Mengli-Girey and Abdan Khan and Brother Lorenzo. He was responsible, very likely, for the appearance of the imam Ibrahiim in the Crimea. He showed no curiosity whatever about Nicholas’s spiritual condition, which, of course, suited Nicholas very well.

Nicholas said, ‘So this is how you go fishing.’

‘It depends,’ the Patriarch said, ‘upon whether I’m after sturgeon or anchovies. I hear you’ve found a taste for profound theological issues since you started travelling from Poland. If your divining scares you so much, why not stop it?’

‘Anna has been to see you?’ Nicholas said. Extreme irritation filled him once more. His hands were in gloves, and far too cold to show weals. He didn’t know how the old man could have noticed.

The Patriarch’s bulbous features creased. ‘I told her you weren’t even an anchovy. Anyway, what advice could I give you that Cardinal Bessarion didn’t?’

His voice was prosaic, delivering a truth with no trace of false modesty. If he knew of that grave, private meeting in France three summers before, he knew that Nicholas had already heard, at first hand, the finest Christian teaching from the dying Bessarion, the Greek who had devoted his life to reconciling the Latin and Orthodox churches. It had not, of course, saved him from any of his blunders. Nicholas said, ‘I’m sure Anna will think of something. I hear you meet quite a lot.’

‘She worries,’ said Father Ludovico. ‘I told her to start praying for Caffa, not you. The Genoese are pressing the Khan to refuse to keep Eminek as Tudun. They say Eminek holds secret talks with the Turks.’