Caprice and Rondo (78 page)

The girl at the brothel, telling him about it, had said that the Governor had been quite right to do what he did. The attackers, angered by the
long resistance, had broken loose from their officers and had swept killing, burning, pillaging through the town. It had been wise to leave the broken castle and take cover; to allow the Turkish soldiery to indulge in their passions below, and to wait until Gedik Ahmed Pasha or someone with sufficient authority brought an official troop up the hill to meet the Governor, and receive his formal surrender.

‘And?’ Nicholas had said.

‘And so the Governor marshalled all his men, many hundreds of them, in the church of St Mary’s. Without arms, to show they offered no resistance. They expected, of course, to be taken to Constantinople. They did not expect to be freed.’

He had asked, then, about the imam Ibrahiim, and the girl had pulled a face. ‘The Governor would not let him join them in the church. He was an infidel, like the Turk, and the Turk would deal with him, they said. If he chose to serve the wrong sultan, it was not the Governor’s fault.’

And so Gedik Ahmed Pasha’s men had climbed to the citadel, and had found the imam Ibrahiim praying in the mosque, and had killed him, but not before attempting to extract from him, by torture, anything he might have to say about Cairo. Later, his pupils took him to Caffa for burial.

And the Governor and his garrison?

The Governor was here, where Nicholas also was standing, high above the sea on a hot August night, with the flies and the cicadas buzzing. Here by these blackened buildings where, despite the hot summer sun, the stink of burning, the stench of carnage persisted. The Turks had sealed the windows and doors of the church, and set fire to it, killing the hundreds within it. Their remains were still there.

May we not also mourn the loss to others?

We may feel sorrow, of course. But even the anguish of personal loss is relieved by the passage of time. If it does not diminish, then it has not been confronted
.

The imam had counselled him before death. His friend Umar had not. Umar had left, saying nothing, to go to face a terrible end. Perhaps he believed Nicholas self-sufficient, requiring no admonitions, no comfort. Gelis had thought so.

Or perhaps, all the time they were together, Umar had been conveying something, and he had not understood. The imam had said the same.
I am wasting my breath
. His own friends had given up, too.

As the imam said, it deserved thought. There would never be a better time for it.

B
AÇI
S
ARAY
WAS
EMPTY
. The broad plain was dust, which once held the summer pavilions of the Khan, surrounded by the wagons, the herds,
the strange cylindrical tents of his people. The shaman had gone. Cure thyself.

There had been fighting in the ravine. Before the Turks came, Mengli-Girey had sent his people away, and had ridden to join the forces in Caffa with fifteen hundred loyal men. Since then, the mountain fortress must have seemed to offer refuge to those few Genoese who escaped, or who found themselves outside the walls of their city at the time of its investment. But Ahmed Pasha, of course, had forestalled them. The bodies they passed, as they rode up the crooked, overhung path between precipices, had been stripped down to the boots: you could only tell their race because of their colouring, and the absence of beards, and the length of their hair. Occasionally, when the dress had been so hacked it was not worth removing, you could tell from that, too.

Some time ago, Julius had stopped speaking. There had been no women’s corpses, so far. Nicholas had thought of reassuring him: the caves were not easy to find, and their labyrinthine depths offered infinite perils from ambush. A small troop of Turks, unwilling to linger for nothing, might well not trouble to stay. Certainly, there was none remaining here now.

On the other hand, before they went, they might have had hardihood enough to explore. They might have found what they were looking for, including Anna. Or they might have found her too late. It was three months since the Turks entered Caffa, and there was no longer a beneficent Khan to send a bag of meal or some dried fish from the fortress. That Khan was in Constantinople, and his brother ruled, with his new Tudun, in Caffa.

The monastery of the Dormition had been looted, and the odour of incense had been replaced by other, stale smells signifying contempt. The chalky saints, staring imperviously down through the trees, appeared unimpressed. So far, they had met no one alive. As the path grew narrow and steeper, they dismounted and led their horses quietly. They were both soaked with sweat, and sleeplessness, rarely of consequence to Nicholas, seemed to be clogging his limbs, already stiff from their night on the ground. He felt disembodied, and its reverse. He felt the way he had done at his last meeting with Anna, when the wine had spread through the warp and weft of her dress, and stained her skin underneath, as with cherries.
You will not give me a child? Then lie still, and I will take one
.

If Julius were dead, would you love me?

Dear Christ.

The boulder crashed upon them at the next bend. It came from high on the rock-face above them, tearing its way through the trees and knocking them both off their feet. Nicholas lay, hearing one of the horses
screaming, and was for a moment unable to stir. Then he heard Julius cursing, and found that the broken branch that had pinned him was movable. Nicholas was scrambling up, and Julius was half on his feet with his sword out, when the second boulder arrived, followed by the thud of bodies descending, and an angular implosion of clubs, distorted like light-beams through trees. Nicholas regarded them, hollow-eyed, from his fresco, and was not entirely sorry when one of them put him to sleep.

When he awoke, someone was apologising in Russian. The relief was so great that, despite a crashing headache, he laughed. ‘Dymitr, you
bastard
!’

The cave was dim, as he remembered. The row of cocky hats, of course, was no longer there: he had abstracted them himself, and the owner would no longer need them. He saw, hanging above him instead, the broad, thick-skinned faces of the men he had played chess with, and bought furs from, and in whose presence he had first been introduced to the Cairene justiciar Ibrahiim. Dymitr Wiśniowiecki said, ‘We are sorry. There have been many brigands, as well as Turks. But how were we to know, you fool, that you would come back?’

He could not see beyond the circle of faces. He began, ‘My merchant friend Julius —’ and was interrupted by lascivious groans.

‘Ah! We know now why you both came. Look! The love birds! Is it not beautiful?’

They leaned back to afford him a view, and he raised himself on one elbow.

It was, he supposed, beautiful. Julius, stripped to the waist, was lying on the other side of the cave on a pallet. Although the cloth round his diaphragm was stained with red, his eyes were open. They were open, and soft, and gazing up into the eyes of his wife, the Gräfin Anna von Hanseyck, who knelt at his side. She looked up and over to Nicholas. ‘God is good,’ she said simply. ‘He has brought you both safely back to me.’ Her voice shook a little, as might be expected.

‘See. She is alive,’ Julius said. And after a moment, smiling, ‘You are as stunned as I was! Have you nothing to say?’

His head throbbed. ‘No. Yes,’ Nicholas said. His weighted lids, descending, concentrated his gaze on the place where it had last rested in Caffa: where her gown opened, or was pulled fully open. In Anna’s white face, thin with privation, a flush rose. Nicholas added blearily, ‘God is good.’

‘You’re half awake, man,’ Julius said. ‘Well, you’d better get yourself some rest. We’re getting out of the Crimea. We’re going back to the Baltic. We’re going as far as Moscow with Dymitr here.’

‘You’re hurt?’ Nicholas said.

‘Some billy-goat shot me last year, and another banged me on the
wound. It’s nothing,’ Julius said. ‘They’ve got horses coming. They say we can travel by the end of the week.’

It was not a good idea. Nicholas spoke to Dymitr. ‘No. We’ll reduce your chances.’

As he expected, Julius’s irritated disclaimer clashed with Dymitr’s. The Russian said, ‘It will make little difference.’

‘Then let us split into two parties,’ Nicholas said. He said it with difficulty, because his teeth wanted to chatter. He wished someone would light a fire.

Again, Dymitr’s voice spoke in tandem with that of Julius. There was a long way to travel. They would go together.

‘But—’ Nicholas said, and got no further. He heard a movement, and understood that Julius had got himself up, and was bending over him.

‘What?’ Dymitr was saying. Nicholas looked up at him soulfully.

‘He’s got marsh-fever,’ said Julius irritably. ‘We’ll have to wait for him.’

But in the end, they left separately after all, because the symptoms Nicholas developed were not entirely those of marsh-fever, but appeared to have quite a lot in common with the complaint of the Magnifico Messer Ambrogio Contarini, which might or might not have been the flux. The main body of the Russians left with Anna and Julius, the latter carefully strapped on his horse, and issuing worried and angry directions to Dymitr who remained, with three other bold souls, to care for Nicholas.

Half a day later Nicholas, who did have marsh-fever but did not have the flux, left in the same direction but by a different route, in a wagon drawn by two camels, with the four Russians riding grinning beside him. ‘Although why you cannot tell the poor man that you are being seduced by his wife, I do not know,’ Dymitr said. ‘If she offers herself to you, take her! If you want to marry her, tell your friend! Or are you a man with tastes you have not told us? Did you create these interesting drawings on the walls?’

But fortunately Nicholas, shaking and sweating, was excused from answering. Indeed, having forced himself to make the necessary arrangements, he saw very little of his departure from the Crimea, from the land of the Genoese and the Tartars, where three hundred and fifty years of Italian trading had ended, because of a mother’s blind championship of her son.

He saw something of the journey, for marsh-fever has its own clock, and between bouts he was sane for a while. He knew when Dymitr told him that Julius and his friends had been overtaken, although, asleep in some humble monastery, they did not know it. When the deep snow came, he survived in his wagon, wrapped in furs like the rest, and he was
well enough to ride his own horse when the forests parted, and he saw for the first time the carpet of snow-capped wooden cabins, the glimpse of grey river-ice, the slivers of yellow-grey walls enclosing the modest mound of stouter buildings that represented the Kremlin, the princely domain of the ruler of Moscow.

He had known he would not find, here, the tall painted gables of Danzig, or the barbaric glitter of the Tartar and Turcoman tribes; the broken colonnades of Alexandria, or the secret gardens and bright domes of Cairo. The soaring churches and palaces of Rome, Venice, Florence seemed no more here than the dream-cities that swam in the air above the glaciers of Iceland.

For a moment, thinking of Iceland, he was brushed by a sensation he had also felt there, and was at a loss to account for it. There was nothing white and gold here: the snow was shadowed blue, and trampled into sepia. He had seen no eagles as yet. A vision of a woman entered his mind, but she was not Gelis, or Kathi, or Anna, although her hair was densely black. She was far more powerful than any of these. Like Violante, perhaps. Then the fevered shadows cleared from his mind, for they were entering the first of the portals, and Dymitr was receiving a welcome. A moment later, the whole train was passing through, and on to the greatest of the fortified monasteries where hospitality was dispensed.

They were in Muscovy. He had escaped from the Crimea with his life. He had won, at the very least, a breathing space in which to resolve what to do. From here, he could go anywhere.

He was weak, and apprehensive, and at the same time, mysteriously happy — even before he entered a room and the person within addressed him not in Russian or Italian or Latin, but in Bolognese French.

‘Well, to God’s praise and reverence, you are here! And what are we going to do with you now?’ said Ludovico da Bologna. ‘Warm of head, tender of heart and eager to commend yourself, I am sure, to the other foreigners in Moscow, such as the Grand Duchess Sophia herself, whom Rome knew as Zoe, ward of Cardinal Bessarion. I hear she was once mistaken for the Gräfin Anna in Rome. Did you ever meet her?’

‘I heard that story,’ Nicholas said. Julius had told him. It involved that young rascal Nerio.

‘Quite,’ the Patriarch said. ‘She has brought her friends. Moscow contains so many familiar faces that you will feel you are living in Florence, or Bologna, or among the lady’s Greek-Florentine kinsmen in the Morea. They tell me you have had the plague and are better again. How convenient.’

‘As you say. And this is your lodging?’ said Nicholas, looking about.

‘Not exactly. This is my prison,’ said the Patriarch affably. ‘And yours also, now.’

A
S
EVER
, news from the four quarters of the world travelled at its own private pace, so that where it passed, like some ancient comet, men were left struggling to adjust to its retarded burden. Astrologers were brought in, not only to predict events that still lay in the future, but to surmise the effects of events which had already occurred. Fleets and envoys were diverted. Consignments of arms and placatory gifts were recycled.

After it was known that Caffa had fallen, the Curia waited a month to discover the fate of the Patriarch of Antioch, and learned it so soon only because the tidings came from Tabriz before Caffa was conquered. First to bring the news from Rome was the Bastard Anthony, the Duke of Burgundy’s famous half-brother, who carried it, with his new-gathered mercenary army, to Lorraine, where the Duke was currently fighting. It reached Bruges, brought by John le Grant, in September.