Caprice and Rondo (60 page)

‘He probably does,’ Nicholas said.

The Patriarch sat down on his mat. ‘Dear Lord, of course they all do, Mengli-Girey included. They’re not fools: they need to sound out the enemy, otherwise they’ll never know when to change sides. Fortunately, Turkey isn’t much interested in the Crimea: the Sultan’s just sent his stepmother to Venice to ask for a truce, which of course — if he gets it — will let him rest and regroup so that he can attack the Venetians in Crete in the summer.’

‘You think so?’ Nicholas said.

‘Venice expects it. They’ve diverted to Crete all the artillery they promised Uzum. But that is next summer. The present issue is whether Mengli-Girey will now succeed in appointing your clever friend Karaï, or whether he’ll be forced to agree to the idiot Sertak. Have they been giving you trouble?’

‘The Genoese? Squarciafico brought me in twice for questioning, but Anna invites him to rich German suppers and he goes away mollified. So what are your plans?’

‘The same,’ the Patriarch said. ‘You and I can’t do more than we have. We’re leaving for Persia as soon as the weather allows. The end of next month, if we’re lucky. That is, you are still coming, with the lady Contessa?’

‘Oh yes,’ Nicholas said with conviction. He supposed he was coming. It was part of his self-imposed task, to provide mercantile outlets for Anna and Julius and he was aware that, with gold to spend, Anna was planning to accompany him. Also, his conscience told him, inconveniently, that he owed something to both Uzum Hasan and the Patriarch. He added aloud, ‘Anna should have her furs soon. Sinbaldo will look after the business while she is away, and Julius, if he arrives. Unless Julius wants to follow us to Tabriz.’

‘He’d be too late. Uzum Hasan may not be at Tabriz,’ the Patriarch said. ‘One of his sons staged a revolt in the south, and Uzum marched his troops down to Shiraz. He’s spending the winter at Qom surrounded by desperate Venetian envoys, waiting to find out whether he’s going to make war on his sons or the Turk. I want to know, too, so you and the lady can expect a long trip to wherever they are if you want to do business. Unless, of course, you’d rather go back to the West. What about this man Ochoa and your gold?’

‘Leave Ochoa to me,’ Nicholas said. ‘I am not tempted to go back, and I am not tempted to send for my family. Perhaps you can convince Anna of that, since I can’t.’

‘Oh, I believe you,’ the Patriarch said. ‘But your army might join you now of their own accord. I hear they share Julius’s forgiving nature. And the war over Cologne appears extraordinarily confused.’

Nicholas stood up. ‘Have you sent for them?’

‘I thought of it, but without a letter from you, they wouldn’t move. I still think you should invite them to Persia. You’d enjoy playing patron again. Would you put the candle out as you go? And take that with you. You really shouldn’t leave it lying about.’

‘Nikita!’
someone bawled from outside. Dymitr, anxious to gamble. Nicholas looked from the priest, indistinguishable from the sheepskin that wrapped him, to the object to which he referred. He said, ‘Where did you get it?’

‘In your tent,’ said the old ruffian blandly. ‘If Dymitr had seen it, he would have started to wonder.’

Staring at him, Nicholas swore under his breath. Then, snuffing the candle, he rammed the object under his cloak and left the shelter. Behind him, Father Ludovico pronounced a small benediction from his sheepskin. Nicholas crossed to his tent, then joined the others in the big wattle cabin for a night of gaming and drinking and trials of strength. When at length he was free to retire, he sat for a while alone in the light of his candle before he rose to take something out of his purse, and to pick up and bring back the article that Ludovico da Bologna had borrowed.

Unrolled, it revealed itself to be a broad-brimmed straw hat, swathed in ribbons and attached to a streamer of chiffon. He held it on his knee with one hand, while he took the cord of his pendulum in the other. It began to circle almost at once.

He left the camp at first light the next day, to the baffled displeasure of Wiśniowiecki, and a complacent silence on the part of the Patriarch. Then, with four strongly armed men and spare horses, Nicholas de Fleury set off on the long sledge ride back to the Peninsula. And this time, gliding over the sparkling wastes, he was seized with a mindless and untrammelled pleasure, born of the joys of the present and the promise of what lay ahead. To the alarm of his companions, he sang.

I
N
WINTER
, no one ever approached Soldaia unseen: the waterlogged valleys behind were impassable, and the precipitous routes by the coast were too few. As for the sea, nothing moved in the bay or the river-mouth without being watched from the fortress. Nicomack ibn Abdallah was therefore observed, as he approached the town walls, having long since sent back first his sledge, then his escort. There was, however, no reason to spurn a Mameluke steward from Caffa, properly arrived before curfew, and the gate-keepers allowed him to enter, with his single horse and
his saddlebag. These days, Caffa and Soldaia were both licensed Genoese towns, with only a day’s ride between them in summer. They had a long enough history. The uncle of Marco Polo had had a house here.

Nicholas had been in Soldaia before. He had even climbed the landward slope to the separate city, the vast sea-cliff domain, encircled by towers and walls, which contained the Genoese garrison and their servants. But this time, he had come on purely family business: being invited to visit his cousin, who lived with his Egyptian wife in the leafy quarter of the Muslim slave-traders. He had no cousin, but it was still a clever device: Genoese merchants made half their profit from slaves, and the consul seldom troubled this district. It was why Ochoa had chosen it, and described it accurately in the message he sent.

Ochoa was not yet here. There was no trace in this simple white house, with its luxurious furnishings, of the Spanish pirate whom Nicholas had hired long ago to help him buy African gold, and who later had been waylaid by the Knights of St John and captured with all his precious cargo. The Knights, friends of Genoa, had forced Ochoa de Marchena to work for them in Rhodes, until he escaped. Venturing into Soldaia now, he risked recapture and hanging.

‘Yet, for Messer Niccolò of Bruges, he would do it,’ explained the unknown Circassian cousin, a handsome, well-nourished man in his forties. Reclining at ease on the floor, he waved Nicholas to another pile of deep cushions. ‘I am to hear as soon as he comes, upon which he desired me to call you from Caffa. But you say you suspect he is coming already?’ He accepted a cup from his wife, a dark-eyed nymph veiled like Salome, who came, stooping, to offer another to Nicholas. He smiled at her, answering.

‘I thought it best to come early in case. Since I had cause to visit the Khan, the Treasurer and his friends interest themselves in my movements.’

The girl, who had half risen, stopped, but composed herself when the Circassian spoke to her soothingly. After she had slipped from the room, he turned to Nicholas. ‘That strutting cock of a Squarciafico!’

Nicholas gazed at his cup. ‘It is an old family, as you know. They have administered Chios and Caffa as long as the Genoese ruled there.’

‘And think every native their whore! A Squarciafico calls with his friend on a Tartar and, drawing aside the man’s wife, he pulls out her breast for his companion to finger. Then, when her husband has gone, he sits himself down and bids the wife search his underlinen for lice, which, kneeling, she does, with all the respect she has been taught. It has happened. My wife knows of such a case.’

‘Franks bring wealth,’ Nicholas said.

‘So do the Circassian Mamelukes in Egypt,’ his host said. ‘And competent
rule for a time. Then comes insolence, and its fellow, revolt, and next, a new master is welcomed, because he offers wealth with respect. For a time.’

‘Your imam does not preach revolt,’ Nicholas said. ‘In the medreses of Soldaia or Caffa.’

‘The scholar Ibrahiim? He says the same of your friend, the Frankish priest, the Pope’s envoy. He says he asks men to look for the truth, and what is best for their country as well as their souls. Otherwise you would not be here. Everyone with friends in the Maghgrib knows Ochoa, but we do not all do as he asks.’

‘I am beholden,’ said Nicholas.

Word came in two days. No shipmaster came to the house. Instead Nicholas, mildly resistant, was given into the hands of a servant and, blindfolded at night, was pulled up and down steep muddy alleys and finally thrust through a low doorway and left.

The atmosphere, warmly rank, was familiar and, when you thought of it, not so surprising: Ochoa de Marchena spent a long time at sea. Nicholas said aloud, ‘Well, have you got two for me? Or do we have to make do with each other?’ And the next moment his eyes had been freed and, embraced by his shipmaster, he was being led into an empty room in the best seafront brothel in Soldaia.

Nicholas had been almost twenty-four years of age when he had hired a Spanish pirate at Lagos in Portugal, and placed him in charge of the
Ghost
, one of the little fleet of two ships with which he had sailed down the west coast of Africa. With Gelis. With Bel. With Diniz. With the priest Godscalc, now dead, whose dream had been to reach Ethiopia, but who had not been equipped with the brutal qualities of a Ludovico da Bologna.

In ten years, Ochoa had hardly altered at all. The pock-marked face, toothless, elastic as wax, was pleated into the same patterns of joyous enthusiasm; the black eyes snapped; the voice swooped; the hands, relieving Nicholas of his outer clothing, probed the new-crusted scars and the plentiful corrugations of the old ones. ‘And they said you were a banker, my dear!’

‘The girls find it exciting,’ said Nicholas. He viewed the captain. ‘What about you?’

Ochoa cast a glance at his clothing. ‘The wool cap, the sheepskin, the boots? The merest expediency, in crossing from Bielogrod. Let me once get to my boxes, and you will soon see the old Ochoa.’

‘I am pleased enough to see the new one,’ Nicholas said.

He let the interview set its own pace, putting ten years of experience into the handling of it. To an ebullient free spirit like Ochoa, subservience to the Knights of St John had been embarrassing. He had, Nicholas
deduced, made several unsuccessful attempts to escape before at last winning his present precarious freedom. Plied with rich food and wine, paid for by Nicholas, he found his greatest satisfaction at first in relating the successes of the past years: the conquests he had made for the Knights, but also the happy occasions on which he had totally misled that worthy Christian foundation, to their detriment. No one mentioned gold.

Some time later, further fortified, the captain had progressed to boasting of his recent adventure with the Sicilian mercenaries on the Dniester, when King Stephen had achieved a great victory over the Turks, with the consequence to Mánkup which Señor Niccolò would of course know.

Nicholas was waiting, with patience, to hear of his gold. Instead, he found himself learning of an upheaval in Mánkup, the mountain fortress of Isáac of Gothia, in whom the shadow of the empire of Trebizond persisted still. But Stephen, King of Moldavia, was building his own empire on the west coast of the Black Sea and, friend of Poland and arch-enemy of the Turks, was suspicious of Isaac.

‘Of course, the lovely prince Isáac was exchanging sweet messages with the Turks — who is not? — but King Stephen, a nervous man, apparently thought that he was about to surrender. Such a hot-head! At any rate, he sent Isáac’s brother Aleksandre to Mánkup with my friends, the three hundred Sicilians (one of them was my cousin). Aleksandre obligingly murdered his brother and will now rule as prince in his place. Gothia is secure from the Turks. Are you pleased?’

‘Not especially What happened to Abdan Khan?’

‘Isáac’s Circassian general? He survived. They need him. The mountain Mamelukes were all trained in Cairo, and share the Sultan’s hatred of Turkey. Anyway, you should be pleased. Your Ochoa is here, because his friends helped him to cross the Peninsula. And now you will hear what I have done for you.’

They had been speaking before in Italian. Now, for safety, Ochoa turned mostly to Spanish. It was the story Nicholas had already received, in gist, through Brother Lorenzo. At the end, Nicholas stared at him thoughtfully. ‘Of course, you should never have allowed yourself to be captured by the Knights in the first place. All you had to do was sail home with my gold. Slovenly seamanship …’

Ochoa jumped to his feet, his bared gums a short seam in their gusset. ‘I told you! The storm!’

‘And then all those years working for them before you actually managed to escape and make the effort to find me. But since you did, I owe you something,’ Nicholas said. ‘Even though you would have walked off with the extra had you been able to. How did you persuade the Knights that they had everything?’

‘I am very persuasive,’ said Ochoa. ‘And so how much do you owe me?’

‘Your wages, I suppose. As for the gold, I have to get it yet,’ Nicholas said. ‘And as you tell me yourself, nothing can be done until the seas open. The trouble is, I have to travel south with the Patriarch next month.’

‘And the pretty woman?’ said the shipmaster. ‘I hear about the pretty woman. But surely you will go and get the gold first? You know I cannot do it.’ He brightened suddenly. ‘Perhaps the pretty woman could get it. She and I, while you go south.’

‘Her name is the Gräfin von Hanseyck,’ Nicholas said. ‘And she is someone else’s pretty woman. Do I take it, then, that you are going to stay here until spring?’

‘Why, it is kind of you to suggest it,’ said Ochoa. ‘It is a little expensive, but there might be somewhere cheaper nearby, and it would be worth the outlay to you, I am sure. I could ask my cousin, but then he would insist on sharing the gold, which would only spoil him.’

He could never keep a straight face with Ochoa. ‘But it wouldn’t spoil you?’ Nicholas said. ‘What will you do with your share? When I have decided, that is, what it will be.’

The toothless face expressed exaggerated surprise. ‘But what you and Paúeli decided. A third each, and the use of the
Peter
.’