Race of Scorpions (58 page)

The thing on the table moved. Following her eyes, Nicholas picked up a napkin and, leaning forward, placed it over the live moth and pressed on it. He said, ‘I don’t destroy everyone who hurts me. You know that better than most. I don’t even know whether the Zorzi wish me well or the opposite.’ He lifted his hand, leaving the crumpled cloth on the table. Nothing moved. He said, ‘What do you think?’ to the Venetian.

‘I think it’s dead,’ said Jacopo Zorzi, ‘whether it harmed you or not. And the Zorzi family? You blame us, I cannot think why, for the loss of your alum monopoly. Because I am a friend of Giovanni da Castro, does it mean he finds mines with my help? And today, I know of no insidious plot against you, nor will you think it likely once you’re sober. Bartolomeo is making a gold mine for you out of the dyeworks. Nicholai, cripple that he is, can hardly be an opponent. And I – I merely live in Cyprus and work honestly in my vineyards. You must come and visit them some time.’

‘Are they near?’ Katelina said. She tried and failed to capture Zorzi’s eyes. He had offered help of a kind against Nicholas. She had had no idea then that some real quarrel existed between them.

Zorzi said, smiling not at her, but at Nicholas, ‘Not too far. In the hills, at a place called Engedi. You have heard it sung of, in the sweetest words in the world.’ He stopped, and waited. Distantly, someone plucked a stringed instrument and voices spoke, idly, over the courtyard. The supper tables were empty and, for a moment, around them was silence.

Nicholas said, ‘I shall send …’ and stopped.

‘Go on,’ said Zorzi softly. She moved, and without speaking, the dark man reached and restrained her.

Nicholas said, ‘I shall send gems of lapis lazuli: I shall make her fields into vineyards, and the field of her love into orchards. My beloved …’ He stopped again. It was, Katelina thought, as if he were remembering something from long ago, or listening to someone telling him something he had not known. Nicholas said, ‘My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi …’ He stopped again, and said, ‘My beloved is dead.’

Zorzi lifted the lamp. By its flame she saw the face of Nicholas vander Poele, and it had no identity. Then he said, ‘I must see to my guests,’ and walked away.

Katelina found she was standing, looking after him. Zorzi’s hand dropped and, turning, he laid the lamp slowly back on the table. Then he drew breath and looked at her, his unprepossessing, half-shaven face full of thought. He said, ‘My beloved is dead? Who?’

Katelina said, ‘No one. I know of no one.’ She thought, disjointedly, of the life of Claes, and the life of Nicholas.
He is young, and greedy for women
. Perhaps. But none of his lovers was dead.

Jacopo Zorzi said, ‘But surely. He has lost his wife?’

The Song of Songs, and Marian de Charetty. She found tears had filled her eyes – of fear, of pain, of disbelief. Zorzi saw them and said, ‘Demoiselle. I’m sorry. We frightened you. One forgets. Wine acts quickly after an illness. He was not himself.’ He was smiling; his face blotted and crawling with shadows from the insects that covered the lamp. Katelina said something and, stumbling, fled.

The other guests spent their final hour in the gardens. Pleading weariness, Katelina passed it indoors, in darkness.
I shall make her fields into vineyards, and the field of her love into orchards. Here, washed clean of blood stood the altar and here, obedient to the goddess, maidens came once a year … How tedious we are, talking of love!

Katelina van Borselen had taught herself not to talk or think of love. She had thought so much of it, once, that she had refused the man her parents had chosen as husband. Because it had not come to her as she wanted – noble, adoring, irresistible – she had, from a kind of fear, a kind of defiance, bought herself the experience. That is, she had – twice – laid a small part of her pride in the blue-stained hands of a decent, trustworthy workman. But the workman had betrayed her, and she had resorted to the least of all the choices she now knew she had had. She had married a sulky Adonis who had dragged her into a land of mean landscapes, not the high peaks of delight and adventure.

She lay breathing quickly in the hot, infested darkness, but what she wanted was not Simon, or the careless traffic of a Cypriot night.

She sat up when someone knocked on her door, and after waiting a man came in bearing a torch. The doctor. The doctor who had been moved to stride from the table in anger. Who was not the dupe of Nicholas, as the others were. The man said, ‘Nicholas. Do you know where he is?’

‘No,’ said Katelina.

The doctor remained, looking at her. He had resumed his professional hat. He said, ‘It was an extremely severe injury. On occasion …’

‘He was drunk but not helpless,’ Katelina said. ‘I don’t know where he went.’

He left. After a while she went out herself and, avoiding the torches, sought the cool air where, on the horizon, an indigo band met a paler one, and the scent of the roses was paired with the salt of the sea.

Between herself and the sea stood tall pillars, an arch and a cornice, underlit by a herbaceous glow, pink as peonies. She sensed warmth, and an odour newly familiar. But she was not in the sugar yards. She stood on the pictured pagan terrazzo of the Sanctuary of Venus, where sweet oils were fetched by the Graces to cauldrons like the ones she now saw, wreathed in silvery vapour, glowing apple-gold from the fires of their hearths.

The coals were real. The fires throbbed, like the fires of Hephaistos. In their light she saw the white broken steps and the avenues and the pale half-hidden plinths, with their curious statues bending, kneeling, formally upright. Venus in the arms of the crippled god. Venus couched with her lover Adonis. She could
hear the island speaking under her feet, and trembled, listening to it.

Without a plinth, a god with a pure, Attic body stood, his curling head bent. Sweet in the night, a man’s voice murmured in Greek. ‘Who dare pasture his cattle in the lord’s fold?’ The fires flickered. The sea breathed in the distance. The same voice said, ‘Whose then is the sacrifice? Male blood is all the altar will drink.’ Then softly: ‘Don’t speak.’

Katelina knew by then whose the voice was; but could only guess who reclined at his feet. Then a woman said, ‘You are foolish. First, my dear, you must learn. Marco and Luigi Martini are in dispute. The Knights and Martini have diverted the Kouris.’

‘How sad,’ Nicholas said, still in Greek. The glow from the fire lit his skin, and the linen draped over his shoulder and the still, classical line of his body. He said, ‘You should have rope in your hair. Aphrodite will not accept it.’

‘It is not, I hope, being offered to Aphrodite,’ said Fiorenza of Naxos.

Chapter 29

N
EXT MORNING
, Nicholas received the rough awakening that no doubt he deserved. The second time, Loppe made quite sure that he couldn’t remain on his mattress so he got up, and made with his eyes shut for the privy, and was sick; which presumably made everyone happy. Then he went back and slid himself into linen breeches and a loose tunic with a scarf round his waist, and a sleeveless robe over that, which was all his skin could bear without buckling. There was some blood about, where his newly-healed wound had come apart, not surprisingly under the circumstances. He said nothing about it and neither did Loppe. Tobie made no appearance. A little later, John le Grant arrived, an event he had forgotten to prepare for and about which no one had reminded him. By then he was sitting with Loppe in his office, going over essential figures for the day’s work. John came in like a red-headed sparrow and said, ‘Well? How did it go?’ He looked again and said, ‘Christ. It turned into an orgy?’

‘You might say that,’ said Nicholas carefully. He began to pull himself together, in order to forestall anyone doing it for him. Some time ago, he had finally realised that he was irredeemably alone. Up till then, the others had deferred to his special skills and allowed him therefore to lead them, but the old companionship had remained, and the hare-brained exploits; and the times of ease, when he was teased and indulged and insulted as a boy among men.

But since then, others had joined him. John le Grant had never known the apprentice in Flanders; neither had Crackbene. The Venetians among whom he was working; the Mamelukes; the Lusignan court all took him for what he was now, and he couldn’t revert, if he was to carry the company forward. Zacco had seen that, before he did. Zacco, conducting his own subtle enquiry for his own ends, had said to him, in one of those curious sickbed visits in Nicosia: ‘Why do you not take your own advice? If I have
erred, you have erred also. You have brought your company to follow the happy meteor that is Niccolò, instead of a cause, or a target, or a purpose. They come for money, of course; for adventure perhaps; but for you most of all. And thus you demean them, you make of them nurses. What is your doctor, but a man who acts as your mother? What is your negro, but a man whom you will one day have to turn off, or else make your lover? Is it that you do not have a true purpose, Niccolò? Is it that all this is just a means to surround yourself with a family?’

He was clever, Zacco. At the time, Nicholas had laughed and then said, ‘My lord, you mean well; but you haven’t met all my company. I doubt if my lawyer or my priest think of themselves as my nurses. But I understand what you say. It is something to be avoided.’

To which Zacco had merely said, ‘If you can avoid it. If you can do without it. There are many men, otherwise strong, who cannot face bitter winds without lovebands. Consider those you have bound. Consider what they lose if you fall, or you stumble.’

He had made some answer and, having time, had considered it for several nights until Tobie, in his motherly role, had shown anxiety. Despite Zacco’s personal bias, there was truth in what he said. For ten months Nicholas had been alone, owing responsibility to no one. Then he had rejoined his community, and found it comfortable. Months ago, he had realised what was happening. He had just been slow to stop it. Perhaps because, in the long run, he did have a purpose.

Now, outfacing le Grant’s mild freckled leer, Nicholas said, ‘The visit was a brilliant success. We showed Little Venice all over Stavros. I couldn’t stop Loppe exaggerating. Corner, Loredano and Zorzi came, and they’ll tell the other Venetians about it. They took away the impression that we are efficient, well-equipped and liable to be extremely productive.’

‘The Martini?’ said le Grant.

‘Weren’t there. I gather,’ Nicholas said, ‘that they and Episkopi are having some difference of opinion over water rights.’

‘Fancy,’ said John le Grant. He rubbed his nose, leaving it shining. He said, ‘Well, they got the right impression then; but for God’s sake, let’s keep friendly with Zacco. What did you decide about the new pounding mill?’

‘To do it,’ Nicholas said. ‘Or with a crop yield like this, we’ll be burning our surplus, unless the Martini burn it first.’

Loppe said, in his velvet voice, ‘We know we’ll get a bottleneck at the refinery stage, but expansion there will have to come later.’

‘Running out of money?’ said John.

‘No,’ said Nicholas. ‘But fuel, vats, skilled sugar boilers and, of course, time. We’ll have to farm out some of the refining or start
throwing out juice. It can be done. We’ve found two places that will process the next lot. Next year, it’ll all be in tune. Are you coming to Stavros? In an hour I’m going to look at the madder crop for the dyeyards, and then see a man about wine for the army. How is the army?’

‘I’m glad you asked,’ said John le Grant. ‘You’d better go and look at your madder and leave Loppe to look after the wine. King James wants you back.’

‘And when he decreeth a matter, he doth but say unto it “Be!” and it is. Why?’ said Nicholas. ‘I sent Crackbene up. The siege ought to be biting.’

‘Well, they’ve run out of cod roe and pork titbits and the best sorts of sausage,’ le Grant said, ‘but they’re not eating the cats yet, despite what one hears. The castle’s well stocked. I’ve cast the gun, thanks to Crackbene and your timber. Zacco wants to use it.’

‘I can imagine. He’s bored, he wants a quick end, and he wants to get on to Famagusta. What did you tell him?’

‘The truth,’ said John le Grant. ‘It’s a nice big gun. If you rolled it up under the walls, it’d blow a hole through, and you could send Astorre through yelling murder. But the castle isn’t St Hilarion. It’s got a lot of food, and hundreds of highly trained soldiers, a lot of them Knights of the Order. There’s no way he can get that gun near enough to shoot through a wall. It has to be out of reach and constantly battering while the rations get low. Nothing dramatic. Just misery. Then they surrender. You hope.’

Nicholas said, ‘How did he take it?’

‘Zacco? He has to hear it from you. He won’t believe the blockade was so bad through the winter, and he won’t believe it is absolute now. But it is. You haven’t seen a town being starved?’ John le Grant said.

‘For Carlotta? I’ll be most impressed if they do,’ Nicholas said. ‘That’s what your gun is for. Saving the face. Kyrenia’ll give in. The nasty one is going to be Famagusta. The Genoese won’t die for Carlotta, but they’ll let themselves be blown to bits before they’ll give up their port and their property. I reckon we’ll be investing Famagusta just about the time the next cane harvest comes in, so the sugar plans had better be perfect. And the dyeworks. Did you call at Nicosia? How is jasmine-breasted Diniz?’

‘I’ve brought you a report from Bartolomeo,’ said le Grant. ‘And another from Venice. Why don’t you let that little fool go? Zorzi says you’ve bought and paid for him.’

‘I’m waiting until I get over my temper,’ Nicholas said. ‘A report from
Venice
? How?’

‘From Gregorio. I’ve opened it. It was coming by galley, and one of Crackbene’s boats intercepted it. You know Crackbene’s
been hired by Zacco? He’s running two royal galleys as well as our round ship.’

Unfolding the paper, Nicholas nodded and ran his eye down. It was addressed to the company, so contained nothing personal, naturally. News of the Bank, which looked promising, and which he would read in detail later. News of movements of loans dictated by national happenings. Venice was at war with the Ottomans: a short analysis warning him what that meant. Scotland was sheltering the English Lancastrian King and Queen; the Flemish Queen Mother was less powerful; the Bishop Kennedy more so. In Brussels, Duke Philip was better though aged, and Michael Alighieri of Trebizond, miraculously, was there as his chamberlain.