Race of Scorpions (26 page)

Diniz said, ‘Why didn’t he?’

Nicholas said, ‘I suppose he thought slavery for all his people was better than death for some or even most of them. He may not have considered what his people might want. Often a ruler can’t imagine the full effect of the orders he gives. He sees only his friends and his family. He doesn’t see the man who makes his shoes, and kills his beef, and brings his water from the well. The soldiers he calls in see all this. They can take their money and do as he says. Or they can refuse. If I had to choose between King James and Queen Carlotta, it wouldn’t be easy.’

He didn’t look at Tristão, but it was to Tristão he was speaking. Diniz said, ‘But she is the rightful Queen! There is no question.’

Nicholas said, ‘Where a bastard is better, he governs. Haven’t you noticed? You don’t look at birth. You say, “Cyprus is my dear home. Who best can rule it?” ’

Diniz said, ‘I should say, “Who best can protect it from Sultan Mehmet?” ’

‘And who is that?’ Nicholas said. ‘The Pope has to see King Ferrante finally on the throne of Naples, and Malatesta of Rimini finally conquered before he can think of a crusade. The Duke of Burgundy is sick and failing, and fending off Louis of France. France is threatened by England, and England is torn in the war between York and Lancaster. Genoa would take over Cyprus, as a colony. So would Venice. So would Cairo. The only traditional rulers in Cyprus are the Lusignan family, and they are divided: King Zacco supported by Venice and Queen Carlotta by the
Genoese. Is it really clear who should rule? Is it really clear who can best fend off the Turks?’

‘You don’t agree it is Carlotta?’ said the boy.

‘I think Carlotta will lose,’ Nicholas said. ‘All I can tell you is that the people of Cyprus won’t win, whatever happens.’

‘Then Zacco or the Turk would be as bad as Carlotta?’ said the boy.

Nicholas smiled across his head at his father. He said, ‘You have a lawyer there. No, they are not equal. I meant that the island has such importance that whoever rules, the land is always a battlefield, and it is the men of the fields and the hamlets who suffer. Nor should I place Sultan Mehmet over a Christian people.’

Tristão Vasquez spoke. ‘But of the other two, you think more highly of Zacco?’

Nicholas said, ‘I didn’t say that. I said I thought that Zacco would win. What, do you suppose, is that vessel?’

The boat was a round ship of unspecified origin which, appearing out of the rain, turned its shining guns broadside and hailed them. Tristão Vasquez, turning, said, ‘I wonder. Trouble?’

‘Surely not,’ Nicholas said, lying flat. The explosion, following the puff of smoke, rattled the rigging. A gush of seawater beat on the deck. ‘But it seems,’ Nicholas said, ‘they want us to do something. Are they Mamelukes?’

The boy said, ‘They are talking Italian. They want to board us. The lady must be protected.’

‘That is true,’ ‘Nicholas said. ‘I shall go and protect her. Do you have valuable baggage?’

‘Yes,’ said Diniz.

‘No,’ said his father. ‘Agricultural specimens, that is all. What are our officers doing? Knights of the Order, submitting?’

‘Only one Knight, and he knows superior fire power when he sees it. He may lose his cargo, but he won’t lose his galley at least. The round ship
is
boarding.’

‘They want the wine,’ Diniz said. His young mouth sneered.

‘I would rather they had the wine than my blood,’ Nicholas said. ‘Or that of the lady Primaflora. Here they come to open the hatches. Pirates. How do they sniff out their prey?’

Flank to flank, the galley and round ship ground buffers together, held by irons for as long as it took to transfer the cargo. They took the wine, and also the chests that filled all one hold. Diniz said, ‘Are these valuable?’

‘Who knows?’ Nicholas said. ‘Gold thread, or dyed silk, or ducats. The Knights are rich. Nothing worth perishing for. No! Look out!’ His cry followed Diniz, who had burst through the cordon restraining them and run to one of the hatches, exclaiming. As his father attempted to follow, one of the boarders raised a club and struck the boy down. The father shouted.

Nicholas jumped to grasp Tristão Vasquez by the arm. ‘Don’t provoke them. The child will recover. He was brave, but no one can stop them that way.’

The Portuguese strained against his grip, then subsided. The boy lay still. The man who had struck him bent aside and continued to hand out fresh articles from the hold. They consisted now of deep trays, filled with earth and small plants. They passed from hand to hand until they reached the ship’s rail, at which point they were halted by one of the pirates. He peered, snorted, and turned his thumb down. The bearer of the first tray stepped to the side and dropped over his burden. The other trays followed.

The face of Tristão Vasquez was stony. Nicholas said, ‘I’m sorry. That was where you had buried your gold. You would have done better, like me, to make a stomacher of it for some lady.’

‘They respect that?’ said Tristão.

‘Not necessarily,’ Nicholas said. ‘But finding it, they might spare the lady.’ He felt, for the first time for a while, and despite everything, surprisingly happy.

It was dark before the round ship pulled away, and the galley, shaken, continued its course towards Rhodes. The master, his checking done, came to rehearse the tragedy with his four guests. ‘They have taken all of value. You would say they knew what we carried.’

‘I can vouch that they didn’t,’ said the older Portuguese with disgust. ‘They knew the value of nothing.’

‘They took the wine,’ the master said. ‘And the sugar.’

‘That is the least of it,’ the Portuguese said. Nicholas said,

‘The sugar? What sugar?’

‘The sugar for Rhodes,’ said the master. ‘You’re from Kolossi. You ought to know. Eight hundred quintals of sugar, less fourteen for the use of the Commander. They’re expecting it. It’s arranged for. They’ll have the skin off my back for not bringing it.’

Primaflora looked at Nicholas and Nicholas did not return the look. He said, ‘I thought the sugar harvest went to Episkopi to wait for the annual Venetian galley.’

The master shrugged. ‘Who knows? In normal times, maybe.’

‘I thought,’ Nicholas said, ‘that the Venetians had paid in advance for the right to sell the Kolossi sugar? For many years in advance?’

The master looked Nicholas up and down. ‘Are you saying Queen Carlotta should suffer because the Venetians are greedy? If we had done nothing, the sugar would have gone to Episkopi, and straight to the pockets of the Martini brothers. Of Venice. Of those who secretly promote James de Lusignan. This way, it goes where it belongs. To Rhodes, to be sold by the Knights. The Knights on whom Queen Carlotta relies for her ships and her funds.’

‘And what will the pirates do with it?’ Nicholas said.

‘Who knows? Eat it,’ said the master. ‘Drink the wine, eat the sugar and, if God is good, die of the flux. Excuse me. I have to prepare myself. I have to prepare myself to meet the Treasurer of the Order and explain.’

Later, pushing him surprised over her threshold, Primaflora confronted Nicholas in her hitherto solitary cabin. ‘What do you think the pirates will do?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Sail to Crete, probably,’ Nicholas said. He assumed the face of an owl. ‘The other Martini brother is there.’

‘So they knew the Order was going to cheat?’

‘It seems likely,’ Nicholas said. He allowed his face to unpucker. ‘Carlotta’s consort cheated last year with the royal crop. Smuggled it out from Kyrenia and tried to sell it. That belonged to the Martini brothers as well. But you know that. You were with Queen Carlotta.’

‘The sugar she took to Bologna?’

‘The sugar she tried to take to Bologna,’ he corrected musically. ‘She couldn’t sell it in Venice, because it belonged to the Martini. She found Bologna had started refining, and went to sell it there. But of course Zacco’s men tried to stop her. Did they ever find out, I wonder, that the chests in the river held snow? And what happened to all your fine candy men?’

‘She sold them to the Vatachino. Bologna refiners. They beat her down because the sugar was extremely impure. She left in the eyeballs and buttons. You went to Episkopi yesterday.’

‘Of course. I had to find John of Kinloch.’

‘Of course. And now we know that what John de Kinloch said was correct. You chose the opposite side from the Queen for personal reasons, not because you think she is wrong. Perhaps, too, you are nervous of capable women.’

‘I was married to one,’ Nicholas said.

‘Yes. But she was not twenty-four.’

‘I think,’ Nicholas said, ‘you have put your finger on it. I felt at ease with Cropnose at once. And, of course, with you; but you are incapable. On present evidence. Well, with the door open. Perhaps even now, with the door shut. Or really, it is all these garments that get in the way.’

All her grown life, she had known how to stop a conversation. She had never in all her grown life found it so hard to get one started again. And when, since he wouldn’t leave otherwise, she had indulged him, he dressed at once and departed, in case his absence caused remark, or so he said. And for the rest of the voyage he moved about, helping the master with the wounded men, for they had no doctor on board, and ending in Vasquez’s cabin, salving and rebinding the wound on young Diniz’s head.

Discovering him there, Primaflora stood in the doorway and watched, while the boy’s father said, ‘You are knowledgeable. You are not a Hospitaller?’

‘No,’ Nicholas said. He laid back the boy’s head, and received a wan smile. ‘I had the benefit of watching a very good army doctor. A nephew of Ferrari da Grado.’

The father looked up. ‘The Professor? King Louis, the Duke of Milan are his patients. What is his nephew doing – I beg your pardon.’

Both dimples appeared. ‘With me? You would have to meet Tobie to understand. He worships Urbino and fought Malatesta on principle. He follows armies and hates war. His uncle despises him, but he is not all he seems. He has taught me not to make easy judgements. I hope sometimes that people likewise do not believe all they might hear of me.’

‘But nothing but good, I am sure,’ said Senhor Tristão. His voice was warmer than Primaflora had heard it, and so was his smile.

Nicholas, on the contrary, was not smiling. ‘You think not?’ he said. ‘Well. Don’t let’s take a wager on it. I’ll leave him. He’ll do now.’ And touching the boy, he turned and left the cabin, the woman following.

She said, ‘You have purloined my disciple.’

‘A temporary aberration,’ Nicholas said. ‘You’ll get back his devotion tomorrow.’

He had told her what to expect. She said, ‘When they learn who you are from friend Simon? They will both be distressed. You don’t want to tell them yourself?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘And you still expect to be seized and executed as a servant of Zacco’s? Is your man Simon so powerful? Without proof, I don’t see how the Queen or the Order can harm you.’

‘What would you do,’ he said, ‘if you were the Queen, or the Grand Master of the Order?’
What would the other man do
. Always, always the question.

She thought. ‘If I knew you were coming, but not when? I should give orders to meet all ships from Cyprus. I should still hope to win you to Carlotta, so I should treat you politely, but keep you under some sort of restraint until your loyalty could be proved beyond question. Then, if I found you were Zacco’s, I should kill you.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Nicholas said.

‘And so? How would you deal with it?’

‘Oh,’ said Nicholas. ‘I should join Carlotta immediately. There is really no other course.’

‘I suppose not,’ she said. Soon she left him, and he didn’t see her
again until the drums beat for landfall. Then they stood on deck, with their coffers piled about them, and watched the blue outline of mountains come nearer, and the two harbours with their forts and their long lines of windmills, and behind those, the rising ground that contained, within its thick bulwark and walls, the houses, churches and palaces of the capital of the Rhodian isle, the isle of Helios and Hyacynthos, the island of roses, the home of the Knights of St John.

On their flank was the Hospitallers’ war fleet, in the harbour called Mandraki with the chain locking its entrance. South of that was the trading harbour of Rhodes, full of shipping. On a long pier at its end, a new fortification was being built. ‘The bastion of St Nicholas,’ said Primaflora. Excitement or fear had given her skin a glow normally concealed by her art; her eyes were alight. Today, too, she had replaced her sombre clothes with the style of the court. Her sleeves were ribboned under her mantle which itself had a trimming of ermine, and her hair was concealed by a high rounded hat that displayed the pure lines of her face. He had felt the same impulse to make a gesture, and had dressed finely, for once, to escort her. She appreciated it, but it also amused her. She pursued the question of the new bastion. ‘Are you proud of your saint’s work? See how the ship bows as it passes. Built with the Duke of Burgundy’s money. He vowed to launch the world’s greatest crusade, but in the end, it was easier to build a new tower for Rhodes.’ She paused. ‘What is this man Simon like?’

Nicholas, too, had been watching the jetty come nearer, and was scanning the crowds on its length. A band of Knights, naturally, to greet the ship and its officers, and receive the report of its master. The Brethren whose business was imports. The merchants looking out for their cargo. The dock workers, the cranemen, the lighter-men. The customs officers and the searchers and the harbourmaster and his officials. And beyond, by the walls, the stalls of the scribes and the moneychangers. The hawkers of bread and fruit and tavern accommodation. The friends and families of the crew, looking for presents and wages before it all got drunk. An emissary perhaps of Luis, King-Consort of Cyprus, come to inspect the illicit goods which had been spirited off under the noses of Zacco and the Venetians. An emissary of the Queen or the Order, come to see what else of Zacco’s might have arrived.

And presumably, somewhere, Simon de St Pol of Kilmirren, come to greet his wife’s brother and his half-Portuguese nephew Diniz. And, one fervently hoped, nowhere at all, Astorre or Thomas or Tobie, to share in the moment when Simon looked up and saw, grown to hated manhood, the child born to his wife who called himself Nicholas vander Poele.