Race of Scorpions (70 page)

Then he thudded back to Nicosia again.

Primaflora was absent when he arrived at the villa and when she returned, an hour later, she was wearing a girdle and a left sleeve he had never seen before, and a jewelled coif with a curled feather in it. She stood in the portico of his chamber and gravely allowed him to admire her. He cogitated, his head on one side. ‘Cropnose has made you one of her ladies? No. A better guess. Zacco is back in the Palace, and has agreed that you stay?’

Then she gave one of her small, pleated smiles and said, ‘It pleased him, I think, to rob his sister. Even the sleeve came from her. And he has realised that he had nothing to lose even if I am spying for Carlotta. But these, of course, are not his main reasons. I am to stay for your sake. He is fond of you.’

‘And you think I am fond of him?’ Nicholas said. ‘I would ask you to come in and sit down, but you are wearing so many clothes.’

‘I can still come in and sit down,’ Primaflora said, doing so.
‘Yes, I think you are fond of him. But I believe you would be fond of him if he looked like your camel. It is your nature. I think you have grown fond even of Tzani-bey.’

She had said that once before, surprising him, on the voyage from Rhodes. He said now, ‘Tzani-bey, I assure you, has not grown fond of me. As I told you, the present war rules us both. He is only waiting, as I am, until Famagusta is taken.’

‘So?’ she said. ‘And that will be next week? The week after? It’s a year since you sailed to Cape Gata. Nine months since you came back from Rhodes, and then deserted Cyprus again. You promised Zacco his kingdom this summer, and he is still waiting. He said so this morning. Also, I had to give him news. After four years, the Queen his half-sister is carrying.’

And Zacco was not married. She didn’t have to say so. Her conversation, full of spice and amazements, was always different from other people’s. He said, ‘Famagusta will fall, and with luck, before the rain comes.’

‘With luck? Did you win Kyrenia with luck? Or has Famagusta heard what the Mamelukes did?’ asked Primaflora.

‘Are those the rumours?’ Nicholas said. ‘The Mamelukes did nothing to the hurt of Kyrenia, because the King stopped them. The Brethren of the Order were set free to go to Kolossi. The Queen’s Marshal and all her associates – Montolif, Pardo, de Bon – were allowed to take ship for Rhodes.’

‘But they surrendered because they were starving?’ said Primaflora. Her voice, for once, was a trifle sharp. ‘Eating dogs, cats and mice? An egg sold, we heard, for a hyperper?’

‘They certainly didn’t have any pork,’ Nicholas said. ‘But I think a few rats did survive. Kyrenia surrendered because the commander Sor de Naves had been promised wealth, estates, the office of Constable and the hand, when she is out of napkins, of Charlotte, the elder daughter of Zacco. But it was necessary, of course, for the garrison to experience discomfort first. Unfortunately, the other daughter is a little too young, and I don’t think Zacco wants a Genoese good-son.’

He always enjoyed her silences, because he knew she was trying to read him. Sometimes, she succeeded. Now she said, ‘Why is Famagusta so difficult?’

‘Because it’s Genoese,’ Nicholas said. ‘And they are not going to give it up. Also, it’s not simply a garrison, it’s a fortified city; with damned great walls and ditches and bastions built on three sides of it, and the sea to defend it on the fourth.’

She said, ‘A place of that size must contain thousands; and must have to feed thousands. Or have they all left but the soldiers?’

‘No,’ said Nicholas. ‘The children have gone, and the sick, and the older women and men. The rest are all still there, because the
blockade was not very efficient till recently. We found two underground passages, one to the sea and one to the landward side. It’s how they got supplies in, among other means. We have sealed them.’

‘But they will have stockpiled all the food and wine, the grain and livestock and powder that they could? What about water?’

‘They have some brackish wells, and some very deep ones. Until recently, they had water,’ Nicholas said.

‘But you have stopped it? In some way you have stopped it? I see,’ she said slowly. ‘I see why you hope for surrender before the rain comes to refill their cisterns. Or they may linger on, starving all winter, to the shame of Zacco; inviting Christian rescue? What if there is a Crusade, and Cyprus is still divided? Venice, Burgundy, Bohemia, the Pope longing to throw out the Egyptians and reinstate Carlotta?’

Nicholas said, ‘There can’t be a Crusade before next summer. And by that time, if Cyprus is still divided, then I shall be too. But it won’t be. Famagusta will fall, and the Pope will regard Cyprus as a unified, Christian kingdom.’

‘So you may even join his Crusade?’ said Primaflora, surprising him again.

He laughed. ‘The Crusade he’ll pay for from papal alum? As it happens, there’d be a certain rough justice if I got a wage from it. But no. Even if my fighting contract has ended I shall still, I hope, have my sugar franchise. Only if I lost that would I have to take my little warband elsewhere. Unless you think I should? Are you tired of Cyprus?’

She rose, and crossed the room and, taking a cushion, knelt at his feet, gathering his hands in hers. She said, ‘Sometimes you wonder, I know. Sometimes you believe that, with the first change in fortune, I shall go back to Carlotta. Sometimes I think you suspect me of many things. But don’t suspect me of wanting to leave you. I didn’t tell you this, for if you loved Zacco it might make you dislike him; or change the dealings you have with his mother. While you were in the north, his mother spoke to me.’

‘I remember,’ he said. Her hands were cool, in spite of the heat. His hands were cold.

She said, ‘I kept to myself what she said. She said, under pain of death, I was to leave you, for I interfered with her son and his lover.’

Her eyes, unshadowed, intelligent, were unmoving on his. He said, ‘Did you believe her?’

‘I believed she hoped it would happen,’ said Primaflora. ‘Perhaps I was wrong in what I then did. I said you and I were man and wife, and to lose me would break or damage your bond with the King. I asked her to let me put the matter to Zacco himself, and let the King decide. I said that, if need be, I would share you.’

Her gaze remained direct; her body still, but the fingers between his were rigid. Nicholas withdrew his own hands and placed them lightly on her two shoulders. He said, ‘And today, the King himself exacted this promise, and you gave it?’

‘I am used to sharing,’ she said; and laid her cheek in fondness, or in weariness, or in sorrow, on his knee while he stroked her hair, his head bent, and then kissed it.

Nicholas said, ‘He has always had hopes. They are always going to be disappointed. Primaflora, now he will blame you.’

She lifted her wet face, smiling at last. She said, ‘What is this? You want me to urge you to submit to him? No. All I am saying, my dear, is that you have another reason to end this war quickly. When he is truly King, he will find other favourites, and no reason to keep you or me at his side. But quickly! Quickly!’

And he didn’t tease her, or court her, or divert her, because what she had done was risk death, which was a thing better honoured by abstinence. Only, next day, he rode to Famagusta with less than a light heart, to lead his men to the end of the game.

Chapter 35

T
HE HOT CYPRUS
autumn moved from one week to the next, and Zacco prepared for his forthcoming triumph by installing himself in the moated citadel built by his great-grandfather at Sigouri, ten miles west of the besieged Famagusta.

This was not to say that he didn’t spend time with the army, lending vigorous help as the trains of oxen dragged the batteries into position, and the wagonloads of food and fodder, weapons and powder bumped fifty miles south-east from Kyrenia to where Famagusta lay, lodged in its bay, divided by ninety broad sea miles from Syria.

As the cannon arrived, so the masons prepared the stone shot, meeting the carts that arrived every day from the agora and temples of Salamis, tipping fluted cylinders and marble capitals and Egyptian granite into the yards. Camels, horses and oxen ground the dried earth to powder, and the deposits of sheep and cattle and goats, pigs and poultry added their stench to that of human and vegetable waste. The physicians were busy, and Nicholas seldom saw Tobie or Abul, spending two-thirds of his time with Astorre and Thomas and John, and the rest at Sigouri, with Zacco.

Here, there was no ambiguity; no difficulty over marriage or courtship; no women at all but the camp-followers, or the whores who were for sale, with other merchandise, from the second, vagabond camp that stood as a fringe to the first. It was at that time like wine to be in the presence of the Lusignan Bastard, ebullient, assured of success, glowing with pride in himself and his army. ‘The Feast of St Nicholas!’ he had cried, slapping Nicholas one day on the back. ‘We shall give you a celebration on your Feast Day, Niccolino, in the place best fitted for it. A Mass in the Cathedral of St Nicholas in Famagusta itself, and a feast in my Palace to follow!’

The Feast of St Nicholas was in the first week of December; a
month away. Until the age of seven, Nicholas had received a treat every year on the Feast Day of his patron; and from the age of ten he grew to know that the day would generally be marked for him in some way or another – in many different ways, although not every year – until, of course, his wife Marian died. Now, as if it had never happened before, Nicholas thanked the King, but not as the King wanted.

Later, John le Grant got Nicholas away from Sigouri, put him in a tent and said, ‘Right. We’re not going to do this in four weeks.’

‘I’ve heard Astorre say that too. So long as neither of you says it aloud. We’re not going to do it at all if the King loses interest too early.’

He kept his voice as reasonable as he always did, since there was no point in anyone becoming heated. They had both hoped for a classic siege manoeuvre: a complete blockade of supplies, followed when the city was weak by an assault over ditches infilled by themselves, and preceded by feints, night attacks and heavy bombardment. To this end, a deep trench had been begun long ago: deep enough to bring a file of men and their weapons in safety close under the walls. But, baked by summer, the earth and rock round Famagusta had resisted digging, and the sappers themselves had been depleted by storms of arrows from longbows and crossbows; by the methodical firing of handguns and serpentines. The trench was only three-quarters finished, and wouldn’t progress until the rains came. The rain which would turn their campground to mud, and fill the cisterns of Famagusta.

So there faded their hopes of a final assault before winter. That left deprivation. Nicholas said, ‘There’s still a very good chance they’ll surrender. They haven’t used their bows or their guns for four days. We know their food is low. You’ve drained the water table and their wells are either dry or running salt water. The only drink they have left is wine, diluted with whatever is still in the cisterns. They’ve used all their timber stores and cut up every bucket and table and door to make all those fighting platforms and towers, so they can hardly have plugs for their cannon, and they won’t have any fuel except dung. They haven’t made a cavalry sortie for three weeks, even though the cannon weren’t in place yet: they must be killing and curing the horses. The only missiles they’re using are stones. John: they’re going to give up before they actually starve. And they’re going to give up before that if they’ve run out of arrows and powder.’

‘No, they’re not,’ John le Grant said. It was hard, sometimes, to be reasonable with John le Grant.

Nicholas said, ‘So, why?’

The engineer pursed his face and scraped the sandy bristles on his chin. He said, ‘Someone came over the wall. They do, now and then, and our Egyptian friends usually cut out their tongues and
their livers. We got to this one in time. A Jew, who thought their quarrel wasn’t his quarrel, and was likely right. He knew more than most: the stores and the munitions are locked, and only the Genoese in the castle know how the supplies really go. But this fellow had helped with the stocktaking.’

‘And they’re living off fresh-cooked lamb and white bread and sweet Commanderie?’ Nicholas said.

‘They’re living off beans and cheese and horse and ass-meat if they can pay for it, but even the price of dogs and cats is getting on the high side. Their cattle are finished: they made the last batch of bread with oxblood to save what’s left of the water, and they drink that mixed with wine, of which there isn’t all that much, either. They’re reduced to five thousand with short commons and sickness, and the extra irony is that a cargo ship diverted from Chios got in just before the port closed. It had a big crew and a full commercial load – wax and mastic and wormwood seed, six bales of carpets and eighty baskets of sulphur, fifty bundles of silk and five hundred oxhides, two hundred barrels of saltpetre and a hundred bales of Syrian soda. Three cases of our very own sugar. Oh, and sixteen tons of alum that must have been left over from Phocoea.’ He stopped, his unwinking blue eyes on Nicholas. He had his own sense of drama, John le Grant, as well as a very good memory.

Nicholas said, ‘God’s left big toe,’ in a sad voice.

John le Grant said, ‘Precisely. Nothing to eat, of course, excepting the sugar, which will scour the inside out of their stomachs. The ship wasn’t even properly victualled for the crew: they’d been going to take food on at Crete. But enough saltpetre and sulphur to keep those guns firing for ever.’

‘And alum and oxhides,’ said Nicholas slowly. ‘That’s why the galleries weren’t burning. But charcoal? They’d need charcoal.’

‘They have it, he says,’ said John le Grant in his sensible voice. ‘Or if they didn’t, they could always burn the ship, couldn’t they? They’ve no beasts to work the powder mill, but men could do it, if they aren’t too weak. Or they could mill it by hand. Lacking the piss of a wine-drinking man, the poor sods will have to do without granules. But these two nice bombards that bastard Sor de Naves presented them with? They’ve got gunpowder enough to keep the whole battery firing for ever. That’s why they pretended to stop. They knew by now we’d think they’d run out. They were hoping against hope we’d attack them.’