Caprice and Rondo (64 page)

The imam said, ‘Such devotion deserves its rewards but I think, my son, that the Governor awaits us.’ And Nicholas rose creakily from his knees and followed him out of the room.

Ochoa, when he limped into the commander’s office, looked the way Nicholas felt, with a suffused eye and a lot of rags here and there with dried blood on them. He was not wearing one of his hats, but a common seaman’s woollen cap, jammed on, nevertheless, with panache. His lips were pursed, stretching his rubbery skin into chasms and awnings between the short bones of his face. At sight of Nicholas, his gums made a hole.

Nicholas muttered. The imam, hearing him, replied sharply in Arabic. The Governor, a youngish man in a smart feathered hat and engraved cuirass, said, ‘What? You will kindly speak Genoese in this room.’

The imam bowed. ‘Lord, excuse us. The man Nicomack was complaining that the size of his fee had not been discussed. I have told him that it is sufficient for him, a Mameluke servant, to do his utmost to please you. I have said that, if he interprets with skill, I am sure your lordship will be liberal.’

‘And if he does not, he will suffer for it,’ said the Governor. He looked at Nicholas. ‘I want you to question this dog. Ask him whether he is not Ochoa de Marchena, former seamaster and pirate, escaped from lifetime service to the Knights Hospitaller of St John at Rhodes. Ask, if he denies it, what is his business in Soldaia, and why was he hiding. Ask who helped him come to Soldaia. Ask the name of his master.’

There was a pause.

‘
Well?
’ said the Governor.

‘Lord. I am sorry, lord. But I cannot remember so many questions,’ said Nicholas piteously; and jumped as the Governor brought his stick down with a crack.

‘Why am I surrounded by idiots? An interpreter who is a fool, and a criminal who cannot understand simple Italian. How did the Knights communicate with you?’ demanded the Commander.

Ochoa de Marchena, who spoke seven languages, gazed at him helplessly. Nicholas, ranging himself hurriedly on the side of authority, translated the question into Catalan and repeated it loudly in faithful copy of the commander’s bullying tone. It contained a little addendum in the same language. ‘You stupid bastard, how did they trace you? How do you suppose we can get you out?’

Ochoa glared at him. The volley of Catalan, when it came, nearly overturned his own vocabulary. Nicholas turned to the Governor. ‘There is a Spanish Langue, and Spanish sailors on Rhodes. He asks how many tongues the Governor has.’

‘He asks for a flogging,’ said the Governor. ‘Put the questions.’

What followed represented, in its macabre way, the funniest piece of theatre for which Nicholas had ever invented a script, with Ochoa de Marchena, of the scowling, toothless face and ferocious invention, as his unreliable partner. The Governor, slightly pink, put the questions.

Nicholas, having no need to translate them, put a number of questions of his own in convoluted Spanish to Ochoa, adding, as the fancy took him, some convenient insults. Ochoa replied with equally unseemly comments about Nicholas, about the Governor, and about the individual soldiers of the garrison who had incurred his displeasure. He dispensed, at intervals, nuggets of information about the routine of the garrison and the exact disposition of his cell. He expressed the opinion that Nicholas would have made a mess of lifting Moses out of his basket, and might as well go back to his pretty woman and leave Ochoa to escape on his own, which he could in the blink of an eye if someone would slip him a knife. Nicholas said irritably that he didn’t have a knife, and Ochoa was to do nothing at all until he heard from him.

To the Governor, who was understandably keen to take some share in this torrent of Spanish, Nicholas reported that the man said he was not Ochoa de Marchena but a man who took orders for parrots; that he had just crossed the Straits of Kerch on a camel, but the camel had died, and so had his parrots, and he had been forced to conceal himself from his creditors. As soon as spring came, he would travel back to Seville and return with a fresh batch of birds.

‘And if he has no money, how does he pay for this travel?’ asked the Governor.

‘He awaits friends,’ Nicholas explained, at the end of a tirade. He hoped Ochoa was listening. ‘He has two friends arriving soon in Soldaia. They will vouch for him, and they bring money, he says. He says he has committed no crime, but would be prepared to give you or your family a free parrot, when he returns.’

‘Is this true?’ the Governor said.

The imam said nothing. Ochoa said (in Catalan), ‘Is the poor man expected to believe this? Could you not have invented something more likely? Parrots! My darling Nicholas, I would sell you a slave, but a parrot?’

‘You’d sell me your mother, and she would be a parrot,’ said Nicholas. And switching to Genoese: ‘Lord, it seems to be true. Ask this man anything about parrots, and he will tell you. What do they eat, when do they lay, how do you teach them to speak. His mother and his mother’s mother kept parrots. Ask anything.’

‘Bastard!’ said Ochoa. ‘My life hangs in the balance, and I am to talk about parrots?’

‘What does he say?’ said the Governor.

‘Alas!’ Nicholas said. ‘He mourns his dead birds, his camel. He says the Genoese may as well take his life. He wishes to leave his hats to his friends. They will be here in two weeks. The friends. If I may use my lord’s paper, I shall write down their names.’

Ochoa peered. ‘You have spelled that one wrongly,’ he said. For once, he looked impressed.

Nicholas glared at him and handed the names of the prisoner’s friends to the Governor. They were, so far as he could remember, those of two of the highest commanders in the Order of St John.

The Governor said, ‘A man who takes orders for parrots? How can he know people such as these?’

‘Did I say he only sells parrots, lord?’ Nicholas said. ‘He sells parrots. He travels. He spies for the Knights. I suppose they will not be happy to learn that he is here, a condemned prisoner.’

‘He is lying,’ said the Governor.

‘It is possible, my lord,’ Nicholas said. ‘In two weeks, one will know.’

He looked at Ochoa. The Governor, silent, was thinking. Ochoa’s lips, drawing back, revealed the smile he didn’t have. It reached to his ears. Then with the greatest delicacy, he spat. ‘That’s a promise,’ he said. ‘Get me out. Get yourself out. And then we’re going off together. You and me and Paúli — no one would touch us.’

‘No one would want to,’ said Nicholas with distaste, and watched the guards, summoned, come forward and propel Ochoa, with a blow, to the door. His voice, imitating a parrot, faded into the distance, syncopated by the cuffs of his handlers.

The imam said, ‘I am expected at the mosque. Will there be further interrogations? Do you wish this man to remain?’

They required Nicomack ibn Abdallah to remain. He was given a pallet, and found, to his embarrassment, that the jurist was to share the small chamber. Between then and nightfall, the hilarity of the episode faded. Once he and imam Ibrahiim were alone, Nicholas apologised. ‘You incurred danger, lending yourself to this scheme, and Ochoa and I acted like children.’

‘It is his nature, you can see that. It is perhaps why you are drawn to him. He behaved thus when you first met?’

‘Wilful, crazy, respectful of no one. He deserved to be caught by the Genoese.’

‘Well, you have bought him two weeks: the Governor will do nothing until these problematical great gentlemen arrive. Do they exist?’

‘Oh, yes. But so far as I know, they are in Rhodes,’ Nicholas said, ‘and have no intention of coming to the Crimea. I shall have got him out before then. With all that information, I can hardly fail. But you must leave first.’

‘Perhaps. You are not afraid for yourself?’ the imam said. ‘For you, as for Señor Ochoa, this is sport?’

‘I suppose it is,’ Nicholas said. He saw the imam was already in bed, and put his own candle out. Darkness fell.

‘You are not, then, afraid of death?’ continued the musical voice, in its courtly Arabic. ‘But only of discussing it. Yet it is a worthy thing, to contemplate one’s end with tranquillity; without recoil, and equally without pusillanimous eagerness. It is less meritorious to be unable to accept the dying of others. In that case, it is our own loss we dread, or we mourn.’

‘We may be so selfish,’ Nicholas said. ‘But may we not also mourn the loss to others — to friends, family, even the world, of someone cut off at the height of his powers?’

‘We may feel sorrow, of course,’ said the imam. ‘But there are many such, and we cannot spend our lives in impassioned grief for them all. Your St Bernard allowed human grief, but preached Christian forbearance. The Stoics respected their consolers. And even the anguish of personal loss is relieved by the passage of time. If it does not diminish, if it still cannot be spoken about, then it has not been confronted, it has not been given the exorcism through pain that is its due. And that, my son, is an insult to the person who has perished.
You are in paradise
, you say to the loved one.
You are in paradise, but how dare you leave me!
’

‘And when children die?’ Nicholas said.

‘Ah, the unfulfilled lives! The young, gone to the other world in their blond childhood! How much ink, how much agony has been lavished on these! Why do you ask me, a Muslim, when you have heard the philosophers; when you have read the urging of Cicero, who wrote that destiny is unavoidable, and often cruel, but that it is the task of human beings to conquer?’

He paused. ‘Niqula, you ask me questions to which you already know all the possible answers. You are not untaught. You have heard these matters debated many times, in many countries, in many voices. You have read. You have listened to some of the wisest men of the age. Yet you clutch your ills to your heart; you will not submit to the light of reason what is troubling you. No man can hope to find purpose until he is at peace with his past.’

‘I see,’ said Nicholas, ‘that I owe something to Ludovico da Bologna.’

‘Not, certainly, his courage,’ the imam said.

Nicholas fell silent. Presently, in the darkness, he allowed himself a wry rebuttal. ‘I am talking to you.’

The imam’s voice held no levity. ‘As you talked, I am told, to the Cardinal Bessarion. How angry you will be when I, too, meet my death,’ said imam Ibrahiim. ‘But it will excuse you from thinking. Until your excellent intelligence awakes once again, and you are driven again to seek advice, and again find yourself prevented, by your delicate sensibilities, from taking it. I am wasting my breath,’ said the imam.

The silence that followed was long. Then Nicholas said, ‘You are probably right.’

And this time, the imam forbore to reply; perhaps because he distinguished in a man, in the darkness, what an angry doctor had once glimpsed in a boy.

O
BERTO
S
QUARCIAFICO
, the consul’s Treasurer, arrived the following day. The disturbance of it echoed from the great vaulted fort of the gate through all the sloping ways of the fortress, interrupting the blows of the armourer, the roar of the market, the staccato commands from the exercise ground. There were twenty armed men trotting uphill behind him.

Afterwards, it was seen to be no coincidence that the renegade Mameluke steward was in the garrison mosque, cynically inviting Allah to preserve his black soul while the Governor’s murderous Spanish prisoner staged his escape, as if the presence of the lord Squarciafico in the citadel would provide a distraction. But, of course, the soldiers of the citadel of Soldaia were far from fools, and the alarm was raised even while the man was skulking in the crowd, incompetently disguised in the tattered high-buttoned tunic and trousers of a Muslim servant, with a felt cap over his hair and a scarf wrapped about his miserable mouth. The renegade, called to the steps of the mosque by the uproar, was therefore able to witness the pirate Ochoa de Marchena start from the grasp of his captors and set off between the buildings, fast as a monkey, until the whole hill-top had been alerted to the chase, and there was no way out for him but the ladders which led to the heights of the buttress nearest to him.

One would never know what was in the lunatic’s head: whether he thought he could climb to the outward wall and descend somehow into the chasm beyond. At any rate, he was not given the chance, for he had not reached the second storey when someone with a ready-strung bow aimed and shot the little brute clean through the eye. He hung for a while, and then dropped.

Nicholas saw it. So, crowding behind him, did his fellow worshippers from the mosque, and the imam. Nicholas said, without looking round at any one person, ‘
Get back, and leave
.’ Then he walked down the steps.

So great was the blow, he hardly knew what he was doing. Because of him Ochoa was dead: the happy insouciant scoundrel who had trusted him with his life. Nicholas could not imagine why, after all the hilarious, meticulous planning, the captain should have made this inept dash, but he scented treachery somewhere. The Genoese, among others, wanted
rid of Ochoa. Nicholas should have foreseen it. He knew Ochoa. He knew that, had it been possible to purloin the gold for himself, Ochoa would have done it — but that was not the point. Nicholas should have protected him. He should have done something.

There was nothing he could have done.

Nicholas did not, at the time, give much thought to himself. The imam and the Papal Nuncio between them had apparently passed him off as Ochoa’s interpreter, and this had been accepted. He might be questioned about Ochoa’s escape, but he could hardly be blamed for it, or so he thought. He was conscious, at the back of his mind, that a danger of another kind might be hovering, but he could not bring himself to dwell on it. Despite recent lectures, he was beginning to wonder if anything mattered.

He was prepared, therefore, to be met by soldiers as soon as he set foot on the ground, and to be hustled up the long incline into the keep, with inquisitive faces around him. He was less prepared, entering the Governor’s room, to find himself in the crippling grasp of two guards who, thrusting him forward, cast him headlong at the feet of the Governor, with Oberto Squarciafico at his side.