Caprice and Rondo (68 page)

He could have done with knowing more about this family rebellion and the course it was likely to take. It had begun, they said, with a Kurdish rumour to the effect that Uzum Hasan had died. He was in his seventies
now and, given the existence of sons of all ages by four different mothers (one of them Kurdish), there was liable to be the same sort of murderous falling-out that had been prompted in Caffa, for example, by the old Tudun’s widow and her bribes on behalf of her son.

They managed things better in the West. Philip of Burgundy had possessed just as many sons, but without having married their mothers, and had brought them up to be strong and confident allies with no need to usurp him. The merchant empires of Medici and Strozzi depended on the loyalty of fond, hard-working, highly trained offspring. Further back, of course, western kings had behaved as Uzum’s sons and the brethren of Gothia were doing, and simply got rid of their rivals. Certainly, it could prevent civil war and save time and expense and distress: look at Scotland and the struggle between James and his brothers. Yet a sufficient supply of sons and daughters was necessary — daughters for useful alliances, and sons (speaking of course without bias), outside marriage as well as within it, to ensure the survival of somebody competent. Principalities organised their successions in the way that their people condoned and their religion allowed and experience had shown to be best at the time. The secret was to know when to change.

Someone should tell Jordan de Ribérac.

They were nearly at the central pavilion. He already knew that there were few people here he would recognise. He had never met Uzum Hasan, although he had had trade dealings for a long time with his officials, and owed a long-standing debt to his late mother. His other friend of fourteen years, Uzum’s principal envoy Hadji Mehmet, had already returned to the West, but his reports to his master of Nicholas also spanned fourteen years. If the Banco di Niccolò had not always supported Uzum Hasan, its reasons would be understood. In any case, that was past history. Nicholas was being taken round Tartar and Turcoman princes in order to make mercantile offers which would increase their dependence on the West. It happened to suit him, and so he conformed. He was also attached to the Patriarch’s angelic skirts because — as the Patriarch had gone to the trouble of finding out — he had an army which, although no longer his, was still loyal to him. Nevertheless, although Nicholas de Fleury might be acceptable to Uzum Hasan, and the Patriarch of Antioch could almost be termed his familiar, none of this would necessarily be reflected in public. For their initial audience (they were reminded), diplomacy demanded a certain formality. Later, there would be room for something more personal.

‘Isn’t that a slight?’ Nicholas had enquired innocently after the source of this news had departed.

The Patriarch had merely grunted. A cool reception was nothing, if it was strategically necessary. It would have been more of a slight had the Patriarch appeared in full battered feather as triple nuncio of the Pope,
the Holy Roman Emperor and Charles, Duke of Burgundy, which in the absence of Adorne, he was entitled to do. He was not, however, a fool. In the presence of two Venetian envoys and a Russian ambassador, it was best to forget the Pope (at present offended by Venice) and the Emperor Frederick (at present at war with the Duke). The Patriarch felt it sufficient to present himself simply as legate of Charles, Duke of Burgundy, who, in return for the dukedom of Guelders, had promised ten thousand soldiers to combat the Turk. When they were available. If they were needed.

‘And am I slighted too?’ Nicholas had persisted, to receive the full glare beneath poisonous eyebrows.

‘Slighted? You do not exist. You are part of my train. You produce the gifts. You fraternise with the underlings.’

‘Which ones?’ Nicholas had asked.

‘Holy God! Which side paid you to come here? The Venetians! The Venetians! I can’t do it, but you can. And the Russians. Marco Rosso, envoy of Duke Ivan of Moscow. A bustling rat masquerading as beaver. Barbaro lived in the Rosso family house all those years he was fishing from Tana. I’m talking of the Venetian consul Josaphat Barbaro. If you didn’t meet him in Venice, you probably came across him in Cyprus. You’ll get on with him. He knows the Crimea like the back of his mistress, speaks the language, and was picked by the Signoria to bring all that arsenal over to Uzum two years ago. Then Zacco died, and Barbaro was made to stay over in Cyprus till the uproar subsided and the summer campaign collapsed, and then they took all the arms and the presents and sent them to Crete instead of on to Uzum. It says a lot for his character that he came to Court none the less, and Uzum has kept him since April last year. I think there are times when they are both sick of Venice.’

‘I shall get on with him,’ Nicholas said. He spoke politely. ‘And the other Venetian? A newcomer?’ He ran through his mind all the names he had heard.

‘I’ll leave you to find out for yourself,’ the Patriarch said. ‘Just be nice to him.’

T
HE
B
URGUNDIAN
TRIBUTE
of cloth of gold, crimson velvet and violet, which Nicholas had carried sewn into his bedroll all the way from Fasso, was adequate in its splendour, although outmatched by the hangings of Uzum Hasan’s travelling pavilion of scarlet felt within which, neatened up for the occasion, the Italian Franciscan Ludovico de Severi da Bologna, Patriarch of Antioch, presented, with an inclination of the head, his Latin letters of credence and then proceeded, on a nod from the throne, to deliver the greetings and prayers of his lord.

The Duke of Burgundy, so far as Nicholas could gather, had been
remarkably vague in his exhortations and remarkably prolix in his expression of them. The Patriarch, whose native ripeness of language had affronted half Europe, discovered, droning, fifteen tedious ways of appealing to the Lord Uzum Hasan to attack his brother the Turk. The interpreter’s voice obediently followed, and the lord Uzum Hasan listened with grace but no visible interest. Tall as his nickname suggested, the old man sat erect on his cushions with one hand on the jewels of his scimitar, the other teasing the chin of his hound. Within the worked golden headgear of ceremony, the prince’s features were dish-shaped and gamboge: the willowy moustaches and beard drooped among the blue pebbled chains of raw turquoises. His nobles, coated with chased and ribbed metal, provided the vast red pavilion with a motionless lining of ruby.

Among them, the ambassadors, glimmering uneasily, identified themselves to Nicholas’s large and disengaged eye. Short Marco Rosso, the Venetian rat turned Muscovite beaver: a man in his thirties, with a black Russian moustache and spade beard above a long buttoned coat in pale damask. Josaphat Barbaro, whom he was expected to like, in the red hat and robe of a well-bred Venetian; his narrow face lined with the marks of thirty-five years in the Levant; his eyes, brown as topazes, moving between the Patriarch and the passive bulk of Nicholas, his anonymous henchman. And the third man, also the spokesman of Venice, whom Nicholas had never seen before, but whom he felt instantly that he knew: knew the pale, fretful face and broad nose and the shaving scar on the neck under the fashionable bulk of the hairline, displayed by the very tall hat.

At first, it didn’t seem possible. The man in question had passed south the previous summer, and would surely have gone before now. But when the Patriarch’s lecture had ended, and the prince had replied with the necessary courtesies and a promise to consider the matter, the first person to file out beside Nicholas was the barbered envoy. ‘Do I gather that you speak the Venetian tongue?’ said the gentleman.

‘I do my best,’ Nicholas said. ‘I have the honour of addressing a nobleman of that Republic?’

‘Indeed,’ said the gentleman, halting and raising his large, lidded eyes. ‘My name is Ambrogio Contarini, son of Messer Benedetto, and ambassador of the Illustrious Signoria to the magnificent lord Uzum Hasan. And you are the Franciscan friar’s secretary? Or the Patriarch, are we invited to call him? Although I thought the title now held by another.’

‘I am honoured,’ said Nicholas. ‘His secretary, no. Some men profess to think writing important, yet what is it but chicken marks on a skin? I care for his camels. He lets me carry his pyx. He sometimes allows me to sing the responses. Orpheus the Thracian Wizard, they call me.’

The face below him turned pink. ‘Or Nicholas de Fleury of Beltrees, formerly of the Banco di Niccolò,’ said a chiding voice from behind. ‘Ambrogio, he is joking with you. This is a merchant companion of the Patriarch, and one who knows that Father Ludovico is too diplomatic, perhaps, to insist upon his full ecclesiastical title today. My name is Josaphat Barbaro, Messer Niccolò. You may not remember me. But we three strangers would be honoured if you and the Patriarch would join us in our pavilion. We are permitted wine.’

‘Even the lord Uzum Hasan is permitted wine,’ said Ambrogio Contarini, surveying Nicholas narrowly. ‘Too much of it, some of us think.’

‘Is it possible?’ Nicholas said, a little thickly. But before he could amuse himself further, the Patriarch strode swirling over, executed a volley of greetings and benisons, and swept him away. ‘Have you no sense?’

‘The situation didn’t call for any,’ said Nicholas. ‘He’s an ass.’

‘He’s Venetian,’ the Patriarch said. ‘A Venetian ass isn’t the same as a Flemish one. Its ears are bigger. And don’t: add what I am sure you are longing to add,’

‘I shouldn’t dare,’ Nicholas said. The Patriarch was, of course, right. He had been a fool. He had been a fool because he did not want to think about what he was doing.

He tried to put matters right, as was only fair, on the trek back to Tabriz, which was made in the company of the entire royal migration. Ambassador Contarini still didn’t know what to make of an ex-banker who (it was true) carried a pyx on a double-humped camel; but the small Veneto-Russian was amenable and Ambassador Barbaro, who chose to ride with him, turned out to be agreeably informative. It appeared that the Persian ruler’s rebellious son had fled with his family to the Turks after giving up Shiraz, which was still a frontier town and vital because of its armourers, even though the caravans no longer poured up from the Gulf with their jewels and their spice and their indigo.

In the days when Marco Polo rode through, the Tabriz fondacos had been full of the merchants and consuls of Venice and Genoa. Now, fine though it was — M. de Fleury had seen it — the place was largely a staging post for Caspian silk going through to Aleppo in Syria, just as Caffa had become an entrepôt for slaves and grain and preserved fish and furs instead of an emporium for the mighty caravans crossing from Astrakhan. The way to Cathay was blocked; the spice route through the Black Sea had become throttled by Turks; but traders regrouped and forced their way through somewhere else: they always did. When they found a way to circumnavigate Africa, that would be a different challenge again.

At that point, the pleasant voice paused, but not necessarily to invite speech. Nicholas nevertheless accepted the invitation. ‘Yes, I remember your excellency,’ he said. ‘Four years ago, at the time of our meetings in
Venice, when my Bank decided not to invest in the Levant. And then later in Cyprus, when the King died.’ He looked round, and met Barbaro’s eyes.

The Venetian said, ‘Zacco held you in high regard. We were not enemies, either, he and I, although he made me his whipping-horse often enough. It was the Captain-General, Mocenigo, none of us had patience with. Cruel and unnecessary destruction.’

‘Smyrna burned to the ground, and two hundred and fifteen Turkish heads pronged on the yards of his ship,’ Nicholas said. ‘And he hanged the ringleaders of the rising in Cyprus. Who killed Zacco?’

He spoke through his scarf, as the other did: the dust and the noise lashed against them.

Barbaro said, ‘A Venetian, of course. I don’t know which. It was not I. I was at his funeral Mass. I was present when his son was baptised. They were fools. They could have ruled through him. You could have helped us all, once. The other, the artistic young man, was too vain. David de Salmeton. You had him thrown out.’

‘You have spoken to Hadji Mehmet,’ Nicholas said.

‘We travelled from Venice together. He is discreet. And so am I,’ observed Josaphat Barbaro, coughing into his veil. ‘Indeed, in this climate, who wants to be talkative?’

Tabriz was under garrison, as it had been when they had passed through: as in Bruges, as in most towns these days, the hardworking inhabitants were not necessarily about to take arms and rush to extract their revered ruler from whatever silly mess he had got himself into elsewhere. Uzum Hasan did not try to compel them, but left a round thousand soldiers to make sure that his son didn’t rush in and capture Tabriz while he was gone.

In other respects, the city was not much like Bruges. Set in its high, mountain-girt plain, deep in snow through the winter, seared by sun through all the long summer, Tabriz had no need of walls; owned no windmills. Its irrigation was underground, from the little two-forked river, the Adschy Tchai, which emptied itself far away into the long barren sump of a salt lake, home of wild duck and flamingos and arid, sulphurous fish. But water Tabriz possessed, and therefore gardens, and the population of merchants, administrators, artisans which required this array of glittering edifices, twenty miles in circumference: the domes, the minarets, the silken awnings and carved, gilded wood; the porcelain tiles that glowed in the high, clear sunlight of early summer.

Then when the sun sank, as now, when the Shah came to enter his city, the lamps bloomed within, tinselling the chain mail and helms of his soldiers lining the streets; illuminating the white tulip-heads of his kneeling people, rousing the dim gold of archways and doors as the
echoes were roused by flute and bagpipe and drum, and the thud of horses’ feet, and the unctuous padding of camels. Ahead, the Blue Mosque stood aflame like a ship, bright as St Sophia, whose thousand lamps could be seen twenty miles off at sea. There was a smell of dung and spiced meat, flowers and horses, sweat and urine and bath-oils. There were wandering whiffs of something that made the Patriarch’s ready lip curl. ‘Luxury, debauchery and defilement.’