Race of Scorpions (62 page)

The mule was slow and steady, like a bored man, and, climbing, followed unseen tracks among rocks whose hot dust rose into the still air about them. Sometimes they came to a level place and broke into a trot between thickets of thorn, or heath or broom; sometimes they skirted a dark forest of pine or cypress or oak, or descended to wind among olive trees and across a dry stream. Goats rustled and the mule shuddered at the squawk of a frightened bird. Moths passed like thistledown and he smelt a fox, once. After the steepest part he stopped to rest the animal, and the boy produced cheese and a flask from a saddlebag, and they sat and shared it, speaking almost not at all. The boy seemed uneasy, or frightened, or perhaps merely apprehensive of what the big stranger might do. After obtaining a few unwilling answers, Nicholas left him alone, although he never let him out of his sight. If the plan had been to run away, the grandson of Yiannis was given no chance. Then they resumed their silent journey.

Soon after that, Nicholas became conscious of the first change. The thick warmth of the night seemed here and there diluted, veined with something like freshness, and ahead, for the first time, he thought he could distinguish hill from hill, earth from sky; sky from something else.

He saw they had crossed the island. A single line, fine as a scribe’s, ran across his vision, and sharpened. Above and below it hung something that was not colour at all, except perhaps a deep pigeon-grey; or grey mixed with mother of pearl, or pearl mixed with rose madder, or all of that mixed with shearings of silver and gold.… Mixed, thickened, ribboned, oh God, with vermilion. By God, Who could afford all that vermilion, as He could afford ultramarine, and love, and revenge, and never get hurt.

The boy said nothing. Below where they had halted, the hills ran unevenly down to the coast. Against the luminous veil of the sea stood a headland crowned with steep rock, and upon the crown floated a palace made of fine columns, pink as the light on the face of the boy riding behind him; pink as the insubstantial light on his hands, on the path, on the boulders about them. ‘That is Lindos!’ said the boy, loudly and clearly.

And immediately, it seemed, the rocks about them grew figures, black against the pellucid vapours behind – for, of course, now that he could see clearly, so he could be seen. Three men or four, and another below, holding horses. They threw themselves at him together. He fought in silence, with bitterness, but they said nothing, except to mutter directions among themselves as they flung a blanket over his head and, dragging him from his mount, wrapped him in it. Then, tied at elbow and knee, he was slung over someone’s tall horse, and was held there, a broad hand on his back, as the animal jolted its way down the hill. Above and behind, he heard the light scramble of the little mule’s feet, and the boy’s voice, receding. The boy who, of course, had made no effort to help him.

Before very long, he felt his mount reach level ground, and then move from baked earth to something man-set that gave back discreet echoes. A slight difference in sound and in temperature told him he was among buildings; and then the hand on his back tightened as they began climbing again, steeply this time. When his horse turned abruptly, he was all but shaken off: the hand that shoved him this time came from behind. He realised that he had passed through a gateway, and that the small cavalcade had quietly come to a halt. A cock crew distantly and a dog barked somewhere twice. Nearer at hand, someone dismounted and he heard low voices, indistinguishable through the cloth. Then the hand on his back was replaced by many hands, heaving, rolling and lifting. He was half carried, half dragged across a carpet of pebbles, and then allowed to drop on a floor, which did his bruises no good but which at least felt smooth and appeared clean and might not be full of fleas. Someone cut the rope at his knees and his elbows, and someone else grabbed the blanket and tugged it off him. Their boots retreated, and were replaced by a small, high-arched slipper,
and a knee draped with extremely fine taffeta and a hand, which stretched out and touched him. Above was a face that he knew, painted with art, and framed in hair half loosened today, in informal style, and half pleated into its little jewelled caul. ‘Well, my dear?’ said Primaflora.

He closed his eyes from sheer relief, and then opened them and began to laugh, for the same reason. He raised his own hand, with some trouble, and fingering hers, kissed and held it. She said, keeping the initiative, ‘Did you think Carlotta had captured you? Or the Knights?’

The men who brought him had gone. He was lying in the inner hall chamber of a modest if well-to-do house, its plaster walls and timber ceiling painted; its windows open on greenery. He said, ‘No. They were too quiet. And they didn’t climb high enough. Why didn’t you send me a message?’

‘Would you have believed it?’ she said. He sat up and, rising in turn, she drew him to his feet and stood, both hands in his, her head to one side. She said, ‘Goats? Fish, certainly. And perhaps lice as well as fleas. I think, my Niccolò, I shall send you back.’

‘Water is all that it needs,’ Nicholas said. ‘You knew I should come for you.’

She smiled and dropped her hands. ‘I knew you would come when your contract was finished. When I heard your Flemish demoiselle had appeared, I thought you might come before that. Did Boulaki charge you a great deal?’

He laughed suddenly, thinking. ‘Probably half as much as he charged you. You arranged it?’

‘I know those boats plying to Cyprus. He was told, if you hired him, to bring you to Lindos.’

‘He would have, eventually,’ Nicholas said. ‘But his mother wanted a cut from the Knights. I suppose Yiannis was in on it, too. It’s as well the sugar crop flourished this year, since we’ve ended up financing the natives of Apolakia. I’m too stiff to bath myself.’

‘I thought of that,’ said Primaflora. ‘Two of the men who brought you will help you. Afterwards, I shall bring you some oils. Are you hungry?’

‘Yes,’ said Nicholas.

The smile was in her eyes, not her lips. She had not changed, that he could see. She said, ‘Amid the plenty of Cyprus?’

He said, ‘If you know the boats plying to Cyprus, you will have that news too.’

The smile had sunk from her eyes. She said, ‘Yes. But until I saw your face, I didn’t believe it.’ She turned. ‘There is my servant. Follow him. I shall come when you are clean.’ He wondered, obeying, what it was about him that gave that away. It irked him, because unless he knew, he could never simulate it.

Behind the low house was a garden too small for a fountain, but full of dark, watered earth and heavy flowers in strange marble troughs and the scent of fruit from the trees and the vines whose shadows lay on the couch where they brought him. It was still so early that the air felt like milk against his odourless skin, bare above virginal, darnfree white towels. He laid his brow on his pillowing arms and closed his eyes, waiting. Normally sparing of sleep, he knew he had had not quite enough to clear his head from the wine. Since it was not a good idea to think he let himself drift, aware of the small stirring sounds of awakening households; of the twitter of sparrows; of a ground-bass of bees. Somewhere, a good way off, a young child was crying. Primaflora said, ‘Stay where you are. Have I done this for you before? The oils come from Alexandria.’ Drops fell from her palms, teasing him. The liquid was warm, and contained scents he didn’t know. Random trails, slow as raindrops, started to contour his body unattended. Where her shadow had been was blank and dazzling sunlight. She said, ‘He did that? And you let him?’

There were five good stories he told in rotation about the wound on his shoulder. He realised she might have heard about an accident in the dyeworks. He saw that, of course, she knew the truth, because Katelina would have no reason, now, to conceal it. He said, ‘You heard?’ It seemed better to turn round and sit cross-legged, while the oil trickled down to his waist.

Her own palms were glossy and spilling. She leaned forward and smoothed their burden over his chest and his back, her eyes on the wound. She said, ‘Yes. It was the first thing the demoiselle told the Queen. How her brave nephew had tried to kill the mercenary leader who had sold himself to Zacco.’

Nicholas made considering shapes with his cheeks and his chin. ‘I didn’t exactly let him,’ he said. ‘He was a quick learner.’

‘But you didn’t tell Zacco. The demoiselle says that you meant to, once you’d humiliated the young man enough. Or perhaps you had another humiliation in mind.’

He followed her thought. He said, ‘Now that’s really tortuous, and you know what a simple Fleming I am. Anyway, he wouldn’t get to kill Tzani-bey. Where is the boy, anyway?’

‘In Portugal, I assume,’ said Primaflora. ‘He certainly told his aunt so, and he’s certainly not still in Cyprus, or she would never have left. I wondered, myself, why he abandoned her, but she says Zacco promised to free her at the end of the summer anyway. You know, of course, that she sent us reports on all that Zacco was doing?’

‘I thought she might. Then why did she leave?’ Nicholas said. She touched his good shoulder and turned him as he was speaking and he pressed his face again on his arms, smelling the oil as she opened the bottle.

‘She was frightened,’ Primaflora said. ‘Perhaps you frightened her. Perhaps she gave up all hope of getting rid of you. Perhaps she thought Simon needed her, or that alone she couldn’t break down you or your business. Perhaps she knew that Zacco would force her to leave empty-handed, and the Genoese would be more sympathetic.’

Empty-handed. Her small hands eased and pressed over his skin, and the fumes hung in his brain. His eyes suddenly opened.

Primaflora laughed. ‘Are you so tired? The sugarcane cuttings, my dear, that are going to ruin your business and Zacco’s. That was why she threw herself on the mercy of the Genoese. They are all up there, in the castle at Lindos, being watered daily by order of Imperiale Doria until a ship comes to take her to Portugal. Why else are you here?’

‘For you,’ he said. ‘If you will come.’

The hands smoothed and smoothed without faltering. She said, ‘As your mistress?’

His eyes remained open, lowered on his own hands. ‘As my wife,’ he said. ‘If that did not demean you.’

The hands stopped. She said. ‘Niccolò?’

He turned and the sun, catching his body, dazzled into his eyes. She stood in a thumbprint of light and said, ‘There is no need.’

He lay, his arms at his sides and said, ‘I must go back. Zacco would honour you. Only the plants must be destroyed, and the Flemish woman made free to leave on the first boat that arrives. Otherwise her husband will come, and cause trouble.’

She opened her rouged palms above him, and let the supple fingers drift down, wayward as the trickling oil. She said, ‘For this?’

He moved involuntarily; and stilled; and smiled with tightened lids. ‘Lady? Of course.’

She said, ‘I require no fee of marriage. I shall come back with you to Cyprus.’

‘When?’ he said, selecting a breath. He opened his eyes.

She withdrew her slow, trailing hands and stood, studying him. ‘When you are less indolent, my dear,’ said Primaflora. ‘When you have done what you came to do. I can guide you into the castle. I can find you a boat to take us to Cyprus, once the demoiselle has sailed for home. But that may take a long time.’

‘Guide me to the castle,’ Nicholas said. ‘And when I am less indolent, find us a boat to take us to Cyprus. Katelina can find her own way home.’

By then, he knew he could expect nothing more, having given her, he thought, what she wanted. He turned on his face when she left him, and in time his body obeyed him; and he lay as still as if
he were sick in a pawnshop in Sluys, and had just met Simon of Kilmirren, and had just been introduced to a punishment from which there seemed no release.

Chapter 31

I
T WAS TRUE
that Katelina van Borselen was frightened. Her fear had followed her here, to the sea crag at Lindos where the Castle of the Knights of St John shared its perch with the stones of Byzantium and the temple blocks of the Sanctuary of Athene, which were more ancient still. Her fear was not for Simon, or Diniz, or the destiny of her child. She was afraid of the black cone in the sanctuary of Paphos, and of what she had felt there.

Now Fate had set before her another altar. There, in the sunlight alone, while the Knights slumbered or prayed and the sounds from the village below hardly rose above the hiss of the cicadas, Katelina gazed down the gnarled rock to the sea, and wondered how either Athene or Aphrodite would have fared with a sharp-tongued mother she hated; and a sullen sister, and a hot-tempered, infertile husband. It would have reduced Aphrodite, for a start.

To her right, past the boat-crowded pool of St Paul, the sea stretched blue to the next misty headland and disappeared south into haze. Below the rock on her left lay the white scimitar of a strand, with beached boats cocked along it, and antlike figures asleep in their shade with the floss of netting around them. The sea, seen from above, was of a blue deep enough to be purple, paling as it washed to the beach over patches of grape-coloured rock. In other places, it was blue-green as malachite. A dyer’s labourer would know how to mix up the colour. A trickle of sweat reminded her why she was here and she turned to go down the glassy, worn steps from the temple. She saw, as she lifted her skirt, that the marble was heaped, thick as needles, with lizards; and when she began to walk quickly she caught sight of another, big as a dragon, on the crumbling roof of the stoa above her, its head stiffly erect, its throat gulping. It fled before she did.

In the shed where the plants were it was stifling, despite the open windows and the awning the Genoese squires had helped her put up. The trays would have been better deep in the palace, but
Imperiale Doria was away, and the other brethren cared more for Kolossi than for saving the vineyards and sugarcane fields of other Knights in the colonial west. Without her, the duty of watering would have been little attended to.

Today, someone for once had forestalled her. The rich smell of soaked earth and warm steaming leaves pressed upon her as she stepped into shade, and when she lifted the casting-bottle, her thumb over the top, she saw it was damp still, but empty. A voice said, ‘I’ve given them all they need. Don’t be afraid, Katelina. I want to speak to you, nothing more.’