Caprice and Rondo (77 page)

Gelis gazed at him.
The beginning of June
. Three months ago. No wonder she had had no further messages. No wonder Nicholas had not sensed de Salmeton’s attempt to seize Jodi; had not apparently followed the move from Scotland to Bruges, or anything that had happened since. He was dead.

Then she thought: I would know.

She said, ‘Can I go and find out?’

Robin’s face was full of pity and pain. He said, ‘The Crimea is full of Ottoman soldiers. No one can get in. The news came through Moldavia. Of course, there will be formal representations: Genoa and the Pope will send diplomats, especially if the Patriarch is still there.’ He stopped and said, ‘I wanted to go, but they made me see that it would be useless. It’s over. We killed him. We killed him by turning him out.’

She could not see his face now. He had come to comfort her, but
instead, she felt his tears fall on her hands. She said, ‘He’s alive. Robin, I know.’

He looked up then, with a guarded hope that she, too, had briefly felt. They talked, and when in the end she sent him away, he was half convinced that Nicholas might indeed be alive. She was, sure of it. It had given her comfort, too, until she remembered who might be with him.

She must tell Tobie and the rest. She sat for a long time, without weeping, before she rose and picked up the notes from her desk to tear them into small pieces. There was no point, now, in completing them. Now, no warnings could pass, either way.

Chapter 32

T
HAT
A
UGUST
, Nicholas de Fleury was alive simply because he had not yet got himself back into Caffa.

A boat had to be found to take him, with Julius. And once found, it had to be bought, since no one would lease or charter a vessel which would certainly never return. It was, astonishingly, Ludovico da Bologna who bade Orazio open the rat-trap of his purse and help buy it, and his acquaintances from the Greek Christian community who found local fishermen who would crew it, provided that they sailed it one way, and thereafter kept the boat itself as their fee. They would land two crazy Franks on the coast, but they weren’t going to wait for them.

Rosso, the Muscovite envoy, paid no attention, being deep in his own dogged plans to leave the Black Sea and find another safe route north to Moscow. Contarini, having begged to go with him, gasped with horror when told his itinerary and took to his bed, overcome by what he feared was the plague, but which might have been simply a bad attack of the flux.

Ludovico da Bologna, having hitherto kept the party safely together by his bullying, now made a number of simple, efficient plans, and departed from Fasso before anybody. To the Venetian envoy’s accusing shrieks, he had merely stated that it was time for each of them to care for his own safety. With him, he carried Uzum Hasan’s envoy, loaded with presents for Charles of Burgundy, in recognition of the Duke’s unremitting attention to the struggle against the Turk in the Levant.

The Patriarch was travelling home by way of Moscow, as was Rosso. Only, unlike Rosso, Ludovico da Bologna was taking a route twice as dangerous, for which there were no guides, and which would have been impossible for anyone without prior knowledge. The Patriarch was travelling by boat and by horse up the eastern coast of the Black Sea, where the cliffs grudgingly gave way now and then to the shore, and the small mixed communities harboured Christians from the Patriarch’s strange, far-flung parish. It would bring him, in the end, to the river which would
launch him towards Moscow. It would also bring him to the Straits of Kerch, the doorway to the Sea of Azov, and the one safe crossing which fleeing refugees from the Crimea might use. That summer, the eastern shore of the Black Sea was where penniless bands of Genoese and Venetians would be in need of succour.

‘He might find Anna!’ Julius had said; but Nicholas thought it unlikely. The Genoese who were Anna’s patrons would have been the first to be captured or killed. She was not a part of the working community of Caffa, which, given a chance, would know where to go. In any case, from what he heard, not many had been given a chance. The same was true, of course, of the Russians; and of the imam Ibrahiim who, to some Turks, represented the Sultan Qayt Bey more than he represented Allah.

The voyage, when it came, was one of the worst Nicholas ever remembered. The Black Sea, over five hundred miles from east to west, made its own storms, even in August, and was known as a graveyard of vessels. They worked the ship, stripped to their dark Turkish breeches, and the rest of the time slept exhausted in corners; he and Julius hardly spoke. On the first day, when the enormity of what had happened smote them in Fasso, Julius had looked up at Nicholas eventually and said, ‘The gold. I suppose this is the end of the gold. If it came, the Turks have it. And the furs.’

And Nicholas had said, ‘You have lost the furs, certainly. As for the gold, it may have turned back, if the carrier saw what had happened in time.’ And then, as Julius’s sceptical gaze darkened, Nicholas had said, ‘No. I suppose it has gone.’

‘But you still think you can find Anna?’

He had been plain, offering facts rather than hopes. ‘I have Circassian friends in Soldaia. If they are still there, they may know what has happened. If she’s alive, if she hasn’t been caught, she’ll have gone to the hills where I found Father Lorenzo. The Greeks would know of it, and the Franciscans, if they got out. It’s a chance.’ He thought Julius looked sick. It was the way he felt himself. He felt so ill sometimes, it made him afraid.

They landed quietly by night at Soldaia, the heights above them darkening the stars, which winked instead through the ragged holes in the crenellated walls that still crowned them. Below the mount, everything was wrecked. The slave-traders’ quarter was a mess of buckled rubbish, where porcelain crackled under the feet, and scarf-ends fluttered, and the broken neck of the pipe which once linked the hill springs with the citadel was jammed with the buzzing carcass of a dog, its stench at one with the sweet smell of decay that hung everywhere. The house of Nicholas’s Circassian cousin did not exist, except as a heap of black stone and burnt wood. Of all the Genoese towns, Soldaia had withstood the
Turks longest. After all the rest had surrendered, Soldaia had fought on for a month, and had been punished for it.

All the same, the town was not empty. Specks of light glinted in other quarters, among what had been the massed houses of the port, now sparsely occupied by reliable citizens, or new settlers perhaps. The artisan districts appeared as an irregular stain, lightless and silent, where wooden workshops once stood. Here and there, voices thinly echoed, either in pairs, or in faint bursts of sociable dispute, or raucous singing. He guessed there was some sort of a garrison, although there must be little to guard and nowhere to house them: the citadel showed a sprinkling of lights, but was mostly in darkness. It was only a few weeks since the conquest. The flies, leaving the dog, fussed about him.

There was no point in risking both their lives. In the shell of this quarter, Julius was safe. Nicholas left him there, and went on his errand.

For a big man, he moved very quietly, as a Danziger pirate had once observed, and his shabby robe and dark cap discouraged notice. Slipping through broken spaces and along shadowed walls, he made his way down to the seafront, and found the one establishment which, although damaged, could be counted on to have survived the invasion. The music and laughter within were enough to cover his movements, although it was some time before he managed to attract the attention of the particular girl he was hoping for. His transaction with her took place in the dark and was quick, but less expensive than usual, since all he wanted was information and she happened to remember and like Ochoa de Marchena. ‘The devil!’ she said, her voice fond. ‘That soft mouth he had, and what he could do with it!’

After that, instead of returning to Julius, he made his way, sinuous as a cat, through the hacked piles of carved stone and painted plaster, the wrack of gilt wood and cracked marble, until he came to the lower reaches of the vast, irregular crag upon which the citadel had been built. Then he began, in silence, to climb.

Julius was asleep when he found him again, and would have cried out, if Nicholas had not sealed his mouth with his palm. His peace offering was a napkin of food and a bottle of exceptional wine. ‘The Turks didn’t want it,’ Nicholas said. ‘I’ve bought two mules for us. We get out of town now, and they bring them to a rendezvous tomorrow. Come on. We can’t talk here. We’ll eat once we’re safe.’

‘Tell me now,’ Julius said. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’

‘I’m sorry. I should have told you at once. She did get out, Julius. The Turks found the house empty. She apparently didn’t go north, so they think she went inland and south.’

‘To the caves?’

‘To the caves,’ Nicholas said. ‘At least, that is where we are going.’

‘And what about the imam?’ Julius said. Nicholas hadn’t thought he would remember.

‘Oh, he died,’ Nicholas said.

They spent the rest of the night out of sight of the town, in a vineyard. Someone had stripped all the grapes With rough hands, breaking the vines which had filled the wagons, just a year ago, with their tender, sun-glowing loads. There was no reason to speak of it. By then, Nicholas had told as much as he wanted of what he had discovered.

The fleet had been quite irresistible. Under Gedik Ahmed Pasha, the Grand Vizier, nearly five hundred warships and transports had sailed to attack the Crimea, with artillery capable of breaking through the stone walls of Caffa, new and old, with their twenty-six towers, and sealing off Soldaia to the point of starvation. Even before the towns surrendered, hundreds had died.

The Poles, the Russians, the Georgians, the Wallachians had been the first to be sold as slaves or imprisoned, all their wealth being seized. Next had come the selection of young men and girls for the Sultan, three thousand in all. Finally, there had come a demand for an accounting from all those remaining — Italians, Armenians, Greeks and Jews, with torture for those who tried to conceal what they had. Then, after the mulcting, the Grand Vizier had let it be known that all Italians were required to pack their remaining goods, and board Turkish transports for Constantinople. The fate of the Genoese consul was not known, but Oberto Squarciafico had been among those compelled to sail for Turkey, having backed the wrong candidate without lasting benefit from the widow’s two thousand ducats.

Eminek, the chosen Tudun, stayed in Caffa in triumph, as Tartar Governor under the Ottomans. The brothers of the Khan Mengli-Girey had been freed, the elder to rule in his place. The Khan himself had been taken to Constantinople by command of the Sultan: his fate, and that of his wise adviser Karaï Mirza, had not yet been heard. No one knew what had happened to Sinbaldo di Manfredo, Straube’s agent, or to the Circassian, or to Dymitr Wiśniowiecki and his Russians. Probably no one would ever know. It was believed — but he did not tell Julius — that some Genoese had escaped across the Straits of Kerch to Kabardia. The Patriarch’s faith had been justified.

He had wondered, for a while, whether Anna might have fled to Mánkup, until he learned that mountain Gothia, with its thirty thousand families, its fifteen thousand fighting men and three hundred Sicilians under the usurping, militant brother Aleksandre, prince of Theodoro, had been under siege by the Turkish troops of Ahmed Pasha ever since the coastal towns gave in, and was still holding out. None of his friends could be there, whereas they might be in the caves he had told Julius
about. Julius would try to go there in any case, so he might as well take him. If the Turks were there already, it couldn’t be helped.

Lying beside Julius, cocooned in cloth, with the gnats whining about them, Nicholas allowed his mind, for the first time, to dwell upon death.

It is a worthy thing, to contemplate one’s end with tranquillity; without recoil, and equally without pusillanimous eagerness
.

How angry you will be when I, too, meet my death. But it will excuse you from thinking
.

The imam had prepared him for his own end. Yet he had not known, he had not had an inkling of how he would die.

Tonight, Nicholas had climbed to the citadel of Soldaia and, stepping silently through the breached walls, had walked from one familiar place to the next in the desolate grounds. There were windows lit within the jagged outline of the former Governor’s buildings on the ridge, and in the Little Eye, the four-man watchtower on the high peak beyond it. There were lights, also, in the old Venetian customs building which the Genoese had turned into a guardroom. The Venetians, too, had been thrown out of Soldaia in their day; and had complained about it. There was no one else around. There was no reason why there should be.

The Turkish guns had smashed through the perimeter, but the garrison buildings within were intact. Nicholas moved in their shadows, easing his foot now and then from some object or other dropped during the pillaging. There were no stalls in the marketplace. Even the grass under his feet was new, replacing what had been eaten, along with the dogs, and the cats, and the rats. He knew what it was like. He saw the vast, rectangular roof of the sunken cistern, dry now, whose care was committed afresh to each new Governor, as he arrived, bright and confident, on the first day of March every year.

Nicholas remembered the man — Cristoforo? — who had interviewed him: youngish, easily angered; and wondered if he had laid the foundations of his statutory tower before the Turkish cannon were trained on it. Most of the tall, three-walled bulwarks were shattered, their bracing-timbers awry in the starlight. They were made of juniper wood, which hardened with age. He knew the groves it had been cut from, and the quarry where the dull yellow stone had been hewn. He walked to the tower where Ochoa had died, but couldn’t see whether the plaque was still there, unread, bearing the name of Adorne.

They had smashed the Armenian church. The mosque looked whole, but he knew it was not, and could not bring himself to go in, and look again at the mihrab, and the painted Genoese coats of arms. He turned downhill and back, past the empty warehouses and food stores, until he reached the Christian church.