Caprice and Rondo (69 page)

‘I hope so,’ said Nicholas automatically.

This time, as guests of the Shah, they were not compelled to lodge in the austere recesses of the Armenian church of St Mary’s, but were led towards the Palace itself, to those quarters overlooking the Meidan set apart for visiting envoys. Since their first encounter with Uzum Hasan, they had not yet been called for a second audience. It was understandable. The son’s revolt was an increasing embarrassment, and any consequent reversal of policy would be best announced in the full theatre of state. As for the Shah’s private discussions, secrecy could be better guaranteed behind walls than in tents. After the recent charade, Nicholas was looking forward to watching Uzum Hasan and the Patriarch together.

The procession ended. Porters carried the Patriarch’s meagre boxes through night-scented gardens and set open the doors of the spacious chamber which, it appeared, Nicholas and the Patriarch were to share. As he was not unaccustomed to doing, Nicholas directed the unpacking for both of them, with the admiring help of Brother Orazio, who later departed. They were offered food. They were not offered, but received, a double guard at their doors. They were finally alone, and the Patriarch was saying his prayers, when harsh voices erupted outside and Nicholas, who had been standing motionless at the window, his fingers pinching the cord at his throat, turned his head. Then the doors opened, and a visitor was announced.

The Patriarch broke off and rose. Nicholas moved. Their eyes met, and Nicholas laid hands on his cloak. But it was not an olive-skinned royal clerk, come in robe and slippers and turban to take them at last to his master. This was a clean-shaven, muscular man in rich clothes, in rich
western
clothes, who strode in and stood surveying them both with an athletic zest that still recalled his years as a soldier.

‘Well, Nicholas,’ the newcomer remarked. ‘And you thought you’d contrived to get rid of me. So where is she? What have you done with my wife, you young goat?’

Julius.

Chapter 28

‘
J
ULIUS
.’

Trained to dissemble — caught, indeed, in the act of sustaining one of the most difficult deceptions of his life — Nicholas brought out the name with a flatness he could not prevent, his brain having no surplus capacity. Then the flood of calculation was over, and he was able to register the bonhomie on Julius’s face, and the cheerfulness in his voice, and produce words of his own that sounded normal.

‘Julius, you bastard! I thought you were going to Caffa? Anna isn’t here: she decided to wait for you. Come in and sit. Are you better?’

And as Julius, entering fully, eased himself grinning down to the cushions, Nicholas added, ‘I don’t seem to have made a very good job of getting rid of you. You look well enough for another ten years, if you give up competition archery’ And Julius, agreeing amiably, hit him a reasonably painful blow in return. After which, Nicholas opened the wine, and kept pouring.

Julius did in fact look little different. Perhaps the high cheek-bones were sharper, the handsome body less mobile, but the oblique stare was the same, if a little more lingering. He was rested, for he had been here for several days. He’d come to Tabriz the day after Nicholas left, but decided to wait for him. My God, Nicholas was well in with the prince: he should see where Julius was staying, in the stinking
canosta
. But of course, Nicholas had the benefit of his spiritual friend: how was Father Ludovico?

Father Ludovico, who had after all given Julius’s wife his protection all through Julius’s absence, and helped her establish in Caffa, opined that it was late, he was tired, and they would no doubt encounter one another next day. He then returned to his prie-dieu while Julius, half rising, sat down again beside Nicholas in a temporary fashion, refilled his cup in an absent manner and said, ‘All right, I’m going, but tell me. You’re about to get hold of the gold, and Anna says you’ll invest it with us? I won’t say I’m not pleased — business hasn’t done as well as I’d
hoped — but you did owe me something, you murdering brat. I was only hoping it would come in time for Anna to join us. But I suppose she’s better staying in Caffa. I’d rather get the gold home overland than trust it to the Middle Sea and all those bloody bandits.’

‘Such as the Knights of St John,’ Nicholas said. ‘You heard Ochoa died?’ He emptied and filled his own cup, to keep level.

‘He was always going to die. Like Benecke,’ Julius said. ‘You should be glad Anna made you see sense and go east with her. She’s all right? She’s a good business-woman. You’ll have noticed.’

‘I’m surprised she let you come to Tabriz on your own,’ Nicholas said. ‘What are you supposed to be doing? Supervising my deals with Uzum Hasan?’

‘Have you made any? Anna reckons,’ Julius said, ‘that he’s going to need weapons if he’s going to face an attack from this son. And he won’t get them from Venice: not for a family quarrel, and when Venice needs them herself. Whereas I can get them with a much better margin from the Tyrol and Germany, unless Venice stops the delivery.’

‘They won’t,’ Nicholas said. The Patriarch, his eyes glaring, was praying louder.

‘Why not?’ asked Julius. He gave an intent grin, and got up.

‘Because they don’t want Uzum to give way before a Turkish army with his own son helping to lead it. It’s what Caterino Zeno was afraid of. That’s why I was bribed to come and sell non-Venetian arms to Uzum against the wishes of Venetian arms merchants. You don’t need to do any deals with Uzum Hasan: you just leave that to me.’

Julius’s face looked, for a moment, the way Nicholas had felt half an hour before. Julius said, ‘So when are you seeing him?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Nicholas.

He accompanied Julius to the door, exchanging scraps of news mixed with banter: of Anna’s conquests in Caffa, and Nicholas’s ridiculous life as a Mameluke. Julius, straying on to the subject of the lunacy of Duke Charles at Neuss, thought to add, with a display of his fine upper teeth, ‘Of course, if they’d listened to Gelis and Astorre, the siege would have ended before it began. You know she’s practically enrolled as a mercenary? They may knight her in the field: you’ll get her helmet and spurs if she’s killed. But the boy is all right. Jordan? Jodi? She sent him to Scotland with Kathi.’

They were actually standing within the half-open doors. Gauzy insects blundered over their shoulders, lured by the Patriarch’s lamp. Outside, the scent of roses and jasmine mingled with the other, libidinous odours so reviled by the Patriarch, and somewhere, a beguiling trickle of water was exchanging notes with a nimbly played harp. Nicholas became aware that he hadn’t yet: spoken. ‘And Kathi?’ he enquired. It sounded quite cordial, as he intended.

‘Oh, she’s produced. I heard just as I left. To that poor little sod Robin of Berecrofts. Between them, they’ve managed a daughter. They’re calling it Margaret.’

Nicholas heard him; but from his desert, his morass, his sea of moral squalor, found himself this time rendered irreparably dumb. Julius, oblivious, took his leave and was met and guided out of the grounds, walking erratically. He had drunk quite a lot. They had both drunk quite a lot. It was like old times. Nicholas stood for a while, and then went in and joined the Patriarch, who had finished praying and was preparing for bed.

The Patriarch looked up, leered, and then gave a nod towards the now-vacant cushion. ‘Does everyone know he’s a
koekoek
?’

In the Netherlands, it meant ‘willing cuckold.’ ‘He isn’t,’ Nicholas said.

‘Isn’t a cuckold, or doesn’t know it?’ the Patriarch asked.

‘You decide.’ Nicholas was half stripped already.

The Patriarch gazed at him with a kind of contentment. ‘You’d like me to be soft. I expect you confided in Godscalc. Nearly unmanned you, didn’t he, Julius, talking of your lady wife and your little son and Katelijne Sersanders?’

‘But you’ve braced me again,’ Nicholas said. He went out, got rid of the wine, and came back.

The chamber was dark, but the Patriarch’s voice continued to flow, sonorously, as if nothing had happened. ‘You want someone soft because you can’t stand isolation. You’ve got the brains, but you haven’t the guts, to make a good friar.’

‘If you say so,’ Nicholas said, from his bed, carefully.

‘Oh, I say so, and correctly, or how else have I made you spitting angry? A youth finds a priest or a doctor and dribbles out all that ails him. A thinking man keeps his own counsel, listens to teachers, and applies what he learns to himself. In private. With due humility, with unrelenting honesty, and in private. So don’t try to piss your woes over me.’

Nicholas closed his eyes, anchored his breathing, and spoke succinctly into the darkness. ‘And how are you going to stop me? The night is young, and I’ve got them all written out, with spaces ready for guidance and blessings. I can remember them even with the light out.’

There was a rumbling sound from the other pallet. ‘A good effort,’ the Patriarch said. ‘We’ll toughen you yet. You might even be able to stand up to what’s lying ahead of you.’

There was a silence. ‘I thought you didn’t know, or want to know, anything about my affairs,’ Nicholas said. He had straightened his neck from the pillow.

‘Oh, I don’t,’ said the Patriarch cheerfully. ‘But I shall tell you something
of note. The Shah’s advisers will not invite Master Julius to their negotiations; only you, who are known from past dealings. You will be able to speak for your unfortunate victim, and with better success, I am sure. You may redeem yourself yet.’

‘Julius won’t like it,’ Nicholas said. He dropped back his head with an unequivocal thump, and hoped the Patriarch heard it. It made his skull ache.

H
E
SAW
QUITE
A
BIT
of Julius in the six days that followed, and gleaned all the news of the city from without the airy heights of the Palace of Hesht Behesht, the Eight Heavens. He was aware that Julius, catching sight of glimmering walls and ribbed domes and towering cedarwood doors worked with mother of pearl and silver and gold, considered Nicholas to be overprivileged. Nevertheless the lawyer was kind enough, as his elder and tutor, to share his superior acquaintance with the city, hurrying Nicholas through the shadowy maze of bazaars to investigate the retail price for ginger and indigo; paying aggressive calls on the weavers of silk carpets and embarking on inquisitions in the billowing heat around the kilns where thin tiles were sawn into their intricate shapes, and glazed, and fired, and laid face down on the faintly lined, age-old cartoons to receive their backing of plaster. Tabrizi tiles clothed the great mosque at Bursa. Tabrizi ceramists had become masters in Cairo, in Damascus. Astonished, Julius inspected, from the outside, the vast red-brick bulk of the citadel. He even got into the hospital, and examined the herb garden and pharmacy which he reported, with mystification, to be as good as that of the Knights of St John.

Nicholas obliged him by letting him do it, and experienced thankfulness mixed with contrition when, attending the great marketplace of the Meidan, Julius did not have to be deterred from leaping into the stadium with the wrestlers, or taking the place of the men tussling with wolves, but watched from the side, not far from the gallery used by Uzum Hasan’s younger sons, too small as yet for rebellion. His daughters, his two unmarried Christian daughters, were absent with their Christian mother at Kharput. No other Venetian envoy was about to observe her in bed with her husband.

It was obvious, then, that Julius was not quite the man that had been. He declared as much, without words, by inviting Nicholas to the bathhouse he favoured, so that the other man might admire, along with his trim, well-preserved body, the ragged scar, scarlet and angry, that marred it. But Julius, sleek with massage and bath-oils, seemed actually to hold no grudge over that, and if, strolling home pink and scented, he took care to leave a certain space between himself and his dimpled companion, it
was only because of the other young men who walked, hand in hand, in that district.

He had asked, several times, whether or not Nicholas had yet had his audience, and Nicholas had assured him that he hadn’t. It was not strictly true. In fact it was not at all true. Within that short time, Nicholas had been summoned twice to secret enclave in the Palace: once to see a chamberlain he knew well at second hand, and the second time to answer to the Persian ruler himself.

That meeting had not taken place among the gold cushions and flowering carpets of the divine royal kiosk with its twining rivulet of sweet running water. Uzum Hasan received this alien merchant beneath the dome of a carved timber room, sheltered by awnings and set apart under a spread of ancient elms. His chief minister and a clerk were also present, but no singers or dancers accompanied them, or the liquid voices of poets, intoning the love-crazed nightingale’s songs of Hafiz. Only somewhere, disembodied by distance, a man’s voice seemed to be singing, perhaps in melancholy, perhaps lulling another to sleep.

Nicholas de Fleury lowered his eyes and performed, without haste, the sequence of obeisances which brought him kneeling at length before this old man, leader and warrior, whom even Zacco had esteemed. A man whose oldest son wished to kill him. Nicholas uttered the conventional greeting, ‘
Salam aleikom
,’ and received the tart rejoinder due to Franks: ‘Peace be with those who follow the right path.’ He lifted his head.

As he knew already, the face he saw was not that of the cast of magnificent Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes or Alexander who conquered the world. Their civilisations had been followed by six hundred years of Arab rule, and then another two hundred of Mongol devastation by Genghis Khan and his successors. This was the lord of a Turcoman state who had managed to conquer and hold the western part of a great land mass which the West regarded as Persia, and you could see his inheritance in the slight Mongolian cast of the lids, the Eastern tinge in the skin round the broken-veined cheeks.

But he had conquered. And he had built on what he had conquered. So the lord Hasan, nicknamed Uzum for his height as Timur had been nicknamed Tamurlane for his limp, looked at him and said, ‘Rise. Sit. I am told you have a proposition to place before us.’