To Lie with Lions (92 page)

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 sleep, 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.

Nicholas knelt at the lady’s feet and kissed her hand, meeting the considering gaze. He rose and spoke to the envoy in resigned Greek. ‘What did they expect
you
to do?’

The man was smiling. ‘Fortunately, I am not required to live in the villa, my entourage is too large. It was simple to leave. I left the note in your room.’

‘Enough,’ said Marietta of Patras. She pointed to a seat at her side, and Nicholas sat. Even in age, and a woman, she dominated the room, as she had pushed, beguiled and dominated her son through all his charmed, wilful life. She had been a King’s mistress and also a beauty, until the rightful Queen bit off her nose. Now the veil hid the scar, but not the power.

‘Enough. This is dangerous for the King. We must speak and then go. My lord Mehmet.’

‘No. I will speak,’ Zacco said. He had flung himself down. Now he pulled off his cap and jumped up, to begin prowling back and forth. He said, ‘Nikko, listen. Venice is becoming too powerful. You know my dilemma. I must pay tribute to Cairo, or the Mamelukes may again overwhelm me. If Cairo and I are too weak, the Ottoman Sultan will have me. Venice offered to save me from that, and so I made this marriage. Now it is Venice, Venice, Venice and I may be worse off than before.’

‘How?’ said Nicholas.

Hadji Mehmet spoke in his measured voice. ‘Unless he receives the promised help from the West, my lord the prince Uzum Hasan may not succeed in his plan to regain his lands of Karamania, and push the Sultan’s land forces north. The Christian fleets have done nothing this year but make simple forays and quarrel. The promised arms and experts are delayed. If my prince fails from no fault of his own, we fear, and the King fears, that Venice will make a shameful peace with the Sultan for the sake of her trade. Thus the prince Uzum Hasan will be rendered helpless –’

‘And so shall we,’ Zacco said. ‘And so too will the Knights of Rhodes, and the Sultan at Cairo. All need Venice but fear her and hate her. There was a rising here against ourselves and the Venetians last autumn.’

‘It was put down,’ said the King’s mother. ‘But then my son, my sweet lord lost his head when the Venetians tried to bring their ships and arms into Famagusta in April. What did you say, my son James, to Messer Barbaro? That if all the galleys did not leave in two hours, you would see that they were blasted out of the harbour? That if any
men were found afterwards on land, you would make them so much dead meat?’

‘Nikko understands,’ Zacco said. He came to rest before him, his face set. ‘We are the slave of the Sultan of Egypt. If Uzum Hasan fails, no Christian power is going to save us. We dared not let these galleys enter our harbour and anger the Sultan. However much Venice may object, we are compelled to send hackbutters to Cairo if the Mamelukes demand them, just as we must resist the Signoria when she tries to impress our soldiers for her galleys. And Venice must look out for herself. Cairo is tired of her, and may very well drive out her traders and replace them in Syria with Genoese.’

He didn’t say
with Anselm Adorne
. He didn’t have to. ‘I see,’ Nicholas said. ‘So that you, roi monseigneur, and my lord Hadji Mehmet, troubled about the present dominance and future intentions of Venice, have been looking at other alliances? Always excluding, of course, the King’s half-sister Carlotta in Rhodes.’

‘The Knights are finding her tiresome,’ said the King’s mother. ‘The Patriarch is there; he has told us. Once we feared Milan and Genoa with some cause, but now we cannot afford to close doors. Once too, I believe, you were kind enough, Ser Niccolò, to try to forward my son’s marriage with a daughter of the royal house of Naples. Mischief-making perhaps, but there, too, circumstances have altered the case. Our Archbishop is in Naples now, arranging a contract of marriage between the King’s natural son and our grand-daughter Charla.’

Charla was six, the oldest of Zacco’s four natural children, of whom he was carelessly fond. The other Charlotte, his first and his favourite, would have been sixteen had she survived. She died, poisoned, it was said, by Andrea Corner the Queen’s uncle. Venice, Venice.

Nicholas said, ‘You must at least congratulate me on not having tied you to the princess Zoe, now in Muscovy.’

‘Have you met my wife?’ Zacco said. ‘The happiest day of my life was the one when she confessed she was pregnant. I have never performed a harder month’s work. I have had to ask Master Gentile to explain to her how the waxing belly may suffer from intercourse. My bed is barely my own, even now.’

Nicholas said, ‘The King should have married the lady Margaret of Denmark. So what do you fear?’