Race of Scorpions (17 page)

Her eyes opened. ‘Would you?’ She lifted her head from her hand and, stretching her arm, ran her fingers down his bare arm. She said, ‘I said you were young. I can look after myself. What happens to me is not your affair.’

‘But you wouldn’t leave with me?’ Nicholas said.

She smiled, and moved the track of her fingers. ‘You don’t want me. We share an appetite, and satisfy it as well together as any man and woman could do. But your mind is set on war, and I need a great household to live in.’

He bridged her hand with his fingertips, stilling it. He said, ‘But you were willing to stay with me in Cyprus?’

She looked at the silent embargo, but made no effort to break it. ‘Because you would have earned a great household,’ she said. ‘I won’t deceive you. I tease you over your youth, but you have in you the fire of success. I should profit from that, as you would profit from – what you have just had. I shall ask you something. Why have we been made to share a chamber like this?’

‘I thought we knew,’ Nicholas said. ‘To exhaust me into docility.’

‘So once we reach Cyprus, I am not needed,’ she said. ‘Unless there is another reason for making us lovers.’

Of course, she was far from simple. She had wondered about this, as he had. He had not talked about it. They might have been thrown together for the sake of prurience. Even at second hand, such things could excite men’s imagination. But of course, it was not only that. He said, ‘Perhaps they are uncertain of both of us, and hope passion will solve all their problems. If I elect to serve King James on Cyprus, you will reject Carlotta for ever and stay with me. If I leave, you will go with me and will not remain to betray them.’

She became very still. ‘I am not a spy. I am not Carlotta’s agent.’

‘They don’t know that,’ he said.

He saw her relax, bit by bit. Her lips curved, the little creases of irony deepening. She said, ‘They don’t fear, then, that I shall seduce you to Carlotta’s side?’

‘I suppose,’ Nicholas said, ‘that I have given proof of resistance. I left you in Ghent.’

‘And paid for my freedom,’ she said. ‘Do you think I had forgotten that?’

He said, ‘A freedom you didn’t take.’

‘A freedom I did not want,’ she said. After a moment, ‘At the time, there was nothing for me in Italy. As I told you, I have certain requirements. It is a profession, like any other.’

A freedom I did not want
. He pursued it only obliquely. He said, ‘Where will you go, then, when I leave Cyprus? If I am right, and they won’t let you stay?’

‘I shall tell you,’ she said, ‘when you leave Cyprus. Make your decision. Niccolò, Niccolò, I am not your concern.’

Her eyes smiled, with a small frown between them. He turned, and made her his concern with tenderness, as if they had been truly lovers. It was the last such conversation they held before they reached Cyprus.

Nicholas vander Poele had seen, in recent years, many beautiful islands and the empire of Trebizond, the gold and ivory relict of Byzantium. Byzantium had once reigned over this island too. Before that, Cyprus had been part of the Hellene kingdom of Egypt, whose coast was so near to her shores. Then Rome had come, with her shrines to Apollo and Venus, and after Byzantium, the isle had been seized by Crusaders. Rich, lovely Cyprus: a floating fortress in the Levant, so conveniently close to Asia, Africa, Europe: a strategic prize for any red-blooded soldier.

On his way to the Third Crusade, King Richard of England had stopped to marry there, and later presented the island to that grasping Crusader Guy de Lusignan, son of a French count and last Latin King of Jerusalem. The English King could hardly have foreseen how tenacious, how fertile the family Lusignan were to be, once uprooted and planted in Cyprus. Their descendants still reigned there, and still called themselves Kings of Jerusalem. But that kingdom, long since, had been in infidel hands.

For nearly three hundred years then, the Lusignan family had ruled over Cyprus, bringing Latin landowners, bishops and nobles to a place whose natives spoke Greek, not French or Italian; and whose worship used the ritual of Orthodox Greece. The Latins built themselves great mountain fortresses, and gave fortifications
and holdings to the Knights of St John, stocked from their neighbouring island of Rhodes. Nor did the people of Cyprus find it better when the Lusignan rule became weak. Then the Genoese jumped in, and seized the best town and harbour for trading. And later, worse than that, the Mameluke rulers of Egypt threatened the kings so successfully that, for a generation now, the Christian rulers of Cyprus had been paying craven tribute to the Muslim rulers of Egypt, and taking oath to behave as their vassals.

All this, Nicholas knew. It was as a Lusignan queen, married to her own cousin, that Carlotta was scouring the world, begging money and troops to drive the Muslim interests out of her island. And it was as an ally and protégé of infidel Egypt that James, her bastard brother, had invaded Cyprus, capturing all but the patch in the north to which the Queen and her consort had fled. Carlotta possessed Kyrenia, and had the use of Famagusta, the port where the Genoese ruled. All the rest belonged to James, and the Egyptian army. It was a beautiful land ripped asunder, and Nicholas vander Poele wanted nothing to do with it.

He stood, as the round ship drew close, and saw with impassive eyes the green mountains, the creaming ocean, the rosy bastions of rock that fringed the seashores. Here was the birthplace of Venus; the prize of royal Alexander; the love-gift of the Roman Mark Antony to Cleopatra of Egypt.

Beside him stood Primaflora. She said, ‘Have you heard of the grapes of Cyprus? Do you know the Song of Songs? Over there are the vineyards of Engedi.’

He said nothing aloud. His mind said, without reason,
I wish I were dead, and had sown no seed, and had left no one to suffer
. He thought, not of the usurping royal bastard and his Egyptian hordes, but of a Greek with a wooden leg listening somewhere, amused. And of his grandfather, Jordan. He didn’t know why he thought of them. He turned without speaking and went below, and stayed there until he was called to the boat that would land him on Cyprus.

In the event, they took their prize to the south coast of Cyprus at night; standing off the bay called Episkopi long after the sun had sunk to their left. Ahead in the darkness spread the land conquered and held by James the Bastard, who had had Nicholas brought here by force. Beyond the seas at his back lay Beirut and Damascus and the Syrian coast. Below, on the water, the ship’s boat had been lowered for its passengers. The September night was sticky with warmth. Nevertheless, leaving the
Doria
, Nicholas had been given a cowled cloak to put on, and so, he saw, had Primaflora and the woman her servant. The maid looked frightened. Primaflora descended into the skiff like a court lady entertaining the poor. He
had seen her brace herself for the rôle, withdrawing even from him. He thought she was afraid, but was too wise to console her. In the boat, he did try to speak once, but instead of answering she glanced over her shoulder to where the seigneurs from the cabin were ensconced. The boat-master said, ‘You will be silent.’

He could make nothing of it and sat weaponless, his hands clasping his knees, thinking of Crackbene, who was not present and who must therefore still be on board. But Crackbene, like Astorre, was a thorough professional, and would be treated well no matter who employed him. And, unlike Astorre, he had no prior allegiance to the Charetty company. Crackbene was unlikely to do anything rash, even had he had enough men to support him. Nicholas was therefore alone, he and Primaflora, in the hold of the Bastard. Should Nicholas decline to co-operate, he had been told, the Bastard James in his mercy would free him. Nicholas had learned, with some pain, never to believe what he was told, especially by strangers.

The skiff laboured on. At first, it seemed to make for the river where he had heard the Corner jetty lay. Then it turned south and east and instead, rounded the whole squat peninsula that lay between Episkopi and the hamlet of Limassol. In Limassol was a castle, and the seat of the bishop who had been James’s envoy in Rome, and perhaps even James’s agent at Silla. But once more, instead of going to Limassol, the boat turned, and the journey suddenly ended. They had been brought to shore just round the cape, at a place where the beach receded to shadowy flats and a glimmering cluster of lights told of some group of low buildings far inland. He was made to exchange the boat for a firm timber jetty, and the fresh air of the sea for the miasma of land, warm and rank and smelling of citrus and brine. A sea bird cried and was answered by a low mellow sound, whispering over the sands. Across the pale rise of the beach a shadow fled, dark as a shred on the eyeball, to be followed by several others. He stopped, and somebody chuckled. ‘There is nothing to fear, Messer Niccolò. You do not know the name of this cape?’

It was the voice of his interviewer from the cabin, come in a rustle of silk to his elbow. Today he wore a round hat of cut velvet, below which sweat was trickling. ‘I don’t know it,’ said Nicholas.

‘You will find out. We are taking you to a place where your name-saint has been honoured for eleven hundred years. Over there is the monastery of Ayios Nikolaos, where the abbot has spread us a feast.’ His voice was encouraging. ‘You have been patient. Soon you will learn what is wanted of you.’

There was a vague path of sand mixed with dust, pale in the moonlight, and chequered with the shadows of men who led the way without torches. The remaining two from the cabin walked
behind him in silence – one surly as before, and the other uneasy, Nicholas thought. Behind that, Primaflora trod the soft ground in her pattens; at the rear, other men followed closely. Nicholas saw they didn’t wear swords. They had no fear, now, that he could escape. It was something else that made secrecy necessary. What it was, he had to find out. Then he smelled lemons again, and a scent that could have been spices or incense, and saw a high wall appear, with a lamp in a niche. There was a basin, made from the capital of a Corinthian column. Nicholas turned to his captor. ‘Am I to meet James de Lusignan here?’

A bearded man robed in black had appeared at a gate, preparing to welcome them. The man beside Nicholas replied with what seemed to be his natural briskness. ‘No. The lord King is in Nicosia, his capital. You will ride there. An escort will come to this place soon to fetch you. Tonight, very likely.’

‘Tonight?’ Nicholas said.

The man said, ‘It is two days’ journey away, and better to travel in coolness. Save your questions. There will be time enough.’ They stepped through the gate, and Primaflora’s face glimmered like pearl in the lamplight.

It was an old monastery, and blessed, in these flat lands, with space for its orchards and gardens, its church and its cloisters, its cells and its stables and offices, all thick-walled, rounded and white, and fragrant with incense and woodsmoke. There was a smell of fruit and risen bread and cooked meat and, behind all these, the coarse odour of brine and something acid which was harder to place. In the centre of the yard was a well and a washing place, both of weathered carved marble of an age much before that of the monastery. Nicholas caught, again, a glimpse of fleeting dark shapes but said nothing of it.

His curiosity, buried by anger, had sprung to life again. He felt little fear or anxiety, but an awakening of his faculties, a clarity that always came with the prospect of competition. Perhaps what lay before him was something so overwhelming, so final, so crude that no kind of ingenuity would serve him. But he could try, and if he survived, he could learn from it. Since Troia he had been nobody: a collection of assorted reactions. He began, quite suddenly, to feel like a person again.

He saw the servants had gone. Alone with Primaflora and the three men who had abducted him, he stepped through an archway into an ancient cloister, with lamps which afforded a glimpse of bold furzy flowers, and the scarlet of hibiscus, and the shadow of vines. There stood before him a man with the veiled hat, the black robes and the beard of an Orthodox abbot, a nun at his side. The woman, smiling, advanced and took Primaflora by the hand. The man said, ‘We have long awaited you. My daughter, be welcome.
Your room is prepared, and Sister Eudocia will see to your comfort.’ The abbot watched her leave, then gave his attention to Nicholas. His eyes were long-sighted and clear, like those of a sportsman. He said, ‘They tell me you are a child of my Saint. Be welcome, be happy, be worthy of him. Come and gave thanks for your journey.’ He had spoken in Greek. He turned, as if refusal were inconceivable, and led the way into the church.

Primaflora had gone. Beside him, his senior abductor was smiling. He said, ‘I can see that you hesitate. But the good abbot believes you have volunteered, of your kindness, to help us. It will do no harm, surely, to thank the Almighty for your safety?’

Nicholas said, ‘I thought I was sponsored by Allah.’

The seigneur seemed undisturbed. ‘King James,’ he said, ‘makes no demands on the conscience of those who choose to work for him. Pray to whom you please, or to no one.’

Since the abbot was waiting, he went in. It was a small church, dimly lit, and the brethren themselves already half filled it. The scented haze round the lamps revived an unwanted memory: of the moving fog in Marian’s office, just before her daughters set their men to attack him. And if he turned his back on the lamps, there appeared something else from his past: the iconostasis: the wall of worked gold that screened the sanctuary, throwing its light into the deep coloured bowl of the dome, and illuminating the thick, painted pillars like sunlight. He had seen that, too, last year, before he left Trebizond. He had stood in the church of St Eugenios beside the Emperor David, and Amiroutzes, the chancellor who had betrayed him; beside Violante of Naxos who, out of the coolest expediency, had given him the use of her body in Venice; beside the Imperial children who now, with their parents, lived in luxury under the Ottoman Sultan – the reward the Emperor had claimed for his surrender.