The Unicorn Hunt (57 page)

‘No,’ said the priest. It had the weight of a command.

‘It comes from God,’ said the Duchess Eleanor. ‘Do you doubt it?’

‘I have seen it done,’ said John le Grant. ‘But why Nicholas?’

‘Either of you might have had the same power. Many do. I suspect,’ said the Duchess Eleanor, ‘that it might have been more convenient for the House of Niccolò to discover such a gift in one of its clerks, rather than the man at its head. But you have him. And he is valuable. So let’s go up and get warm and talk this over.’

Nicholas said, ‘You said you have a plumb line?’

He saw the flash of her teeth as she smiled. Below and above, servants were waiting with torches. She said, ‘A canny man, your Nicholas de Fleury. Aye. There you are.’

The object she produced from her cloak was a toy: a ball of hazelwood on the end of a long hempen string. With a little work, it would have made a good
farmuk
. Nicholas took the string between finger and thumb and let the thing dangle at arm’s length, the ball at its end swaying gently. It gleamed faintly in the dim torchlight, its shadow lost in the blackness of theirs. He watched, keeping still.

The ball was increasing its swing. The cord rocked in his grasp: he tightened his grip of it. The swing became stronger and wilder. Now it described not a line but an oval, a circle. The ball cast itself outwards, dragging, leaping, and began to gyrate in a large ragged ring with a power that made his arm crack and began to flay the skin from his finger. It made a moaning sound, circling:
Oh mill! Oh mill! Oh mill! Oh mill! Oh mill!

It throbbed and growled:
What hast thou ground?

Nicholas hurled the thing from him.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well, you’re as well to know. Come. We’ll be catching our deaths.’

Chapter 27

I
FORBID IT
,’ said Father Moriz. ‘Whatever my secular training, I have your souls in my charge. The Duke defied the Church; now the Duchess dabbles in wickedness. You will refuse, or I leave.’

The German gnome had turned into a firebrand. Fortunately, Nicholas thought, they had been given some time alone, he and John and the priest, before the Duchess commanded their company. The lodge being small, they were crowded into a room the size of a garderobe, but at least they weren’t outside under canvas. He felt as if he had either just been very ill, or was about to be. He said, ‘All right, I agree. I don’t do that again.’ He sucked his forefinger, which kept bleeding.

‘Well, we know why,’ said John. ‘You were scared bloodless, admit it. Of a bob on a string? All right: I’ve never seen it done that way before, but divining-rods aren’t new. The Queen of Sheba walked in on her webbed feet and gave the secret to Solomon.’

‘I suppose it’s a precedent,’ Nicholas said.

John calmed. He said, ‘Well, you suffered a shock. But, Father, the finding of water can’t be a sin? Moses did it.’

‘The Lord God is speaking through Nicholas?’ the priest said. ‘Or just through Eleanor of Scotland’s webbed boots?’

Nicholas said, ‘I don’t think you can fault her private life or her faith. The Tyrol needs silver. It argues courage to seek it in this way.’

‘She let you take the risk,’ said Father Moriz. ‘What happened to the diviner she spoke of?’

‘He died,’ Nicholas said. ‘She didn’t hide anything. She arranged for you, a priest, to attend. We are not being compelled to do this.’

‘But we’ll lose our chance at the mines,’ said le Grant. ‘Moriz, if
we used a rod and found another Tolfa in Italy, would the Holy Father condemn us?’

Father Moriz put his hands on his knees. He said, ‘The Pope is in Rome. Nicholas is here, and in danger. If the Pope endorses the divining practice, then I might change my mind. On the other hand, I might not.’

‘Moriz!’ said John. ‘Such uncanonical pride! What would the Cardinal say?’

‘Nothing,’ said Nicholas. ‘He’s dead, after an acrimonious dispute with the Duke over silver mines. Do you suppose Nicholas of Cusa used rods?’

‘I thought you didn’t want this,’ said the priest. His face, coarse as a tuber, was attentive and his eyebrows stood out like brushes. He said, ‘I saw what happened.’

John said nothing. Nicholas said, ‘I may not want it, but I shan’t stand in your way. It is for you and John to argue it out.’

‘But you must have some view,’ the priest said.

Nicholas said, ‘It is a mystery. The end product is potentially good. If I felt physically threatened, perhaps I simply wasn’t prepared. It was also a … vivid experience in other ways. One would have to learn to control it.’

‘You could pray,’ said the priest.

John said, ‘You could pray with him. The rod could be blessed. Surely this is a life-giving mystery, not an evil one. Confined to the wilds of the mountains it threatens no one; no one but our employers will know of it. You have faith. You have studied the God-given stores that lie under the ground. You must believe this miraculous key to their whereabouts will do nothing but good?’

There was no need, really, for Nicholas to speak any more. Between then and their audience with the Duchess Eleanor, John did all the persuading for him.

Hence, when in due course they took their places before her, the Duchess Eleanor was pleased to learn that the discreet use of the divining-rod, closely supervised by Mother Church, had been added to the services the Bank was about to propose. They discussed these in detail, and also their journey to her castle of Brixen, and the explorations they would make in the south. What that entailed was left unspoken.

The discussion reverted last of all to the Duke, and the strategy to be followed (the word was not used) when the lord of the Tyrol finally summoned them. ‘It may not be,’ said the Duchess, ‘for a week or two. He is in a district he especially favours, and the hunting is good. Also, he has business to transact with some
broker. You may know him. A man called Martin, representing the Vatachino company of merchants.’

She was sewing again. The silence was quite brief. Nicholas said, ‘Our paths cross, from time to time. In fact, the Vatachino interests coincide sometimes with ours.’

‘So Master Cavalli was saying. He is with the Duke,’ said the Duke’s lady. ‘He knows my mind. He will see that nothing is settled unwisely.’

She laid down her needle, licked her finger and, reaching for a new length of yarn, picked up the needle and forcibly fed it. When she held the thread taut, the needle hung like a very thin poacher. She looked up and smiled.

‘So,’ she said, ‘you must be glad that you have something unique to offer as well. A cup of wine, now, to help the three of you sleep on it?’

The wine proved to be ordinary and Nicholas, who had refused it, felt cheated. Back in their room, John le Grant manufactured outrage by the bale.

‘I thought she said she didn’t know where the Duke was?
The hunting is good
. I’ll wager it is. I wager she knows every mistress and every bastard; we’ll probably find half of them guests at Brixen. But the bitch! Not telling us …’

They had been over it five times already. ‘… Not telling us about the Vatachino,’ Nicholas supplied. ‘Well, there’s a lot we didn’t tell her. And she says they won’t have concluded a deal. And I believe her.’

‘Yes! Because now she knows our terms, she’ll use that to push down –’

‘John?’ said Father Moriz from his pallet. ‘Could we have some rest, do you think? It has been a long day.’

It had. A day Nicholas would rather not have had. No. One did not run away, however devastating the revelation had been. John had been partly right. It was loss of personal control that he feared; and the happenings today, part illusion, part reality, had combined two manifestations of it. He had not wanted to go on.

Well, now he was compelled to. And although he had tried to deny they existed, he had early started to realise that he would have to confront the episodes in his life he did not understand, and try to deal with them.

He did not envisage switching from numbers to prayers, but need not say so. Like John, he wanted Father Moriz to stay. It occurred to him that Father Moriz had a very good idea to what
degree his various skills and doctrines were held in esteem. It further occurred to him that Father Moriz was bent on changing those proportions, and very likely had had no intention of leaving at all. This German was a man of conviction. One did not have to make allowances for Father Moriz.

John, half undressed, was still up and still talking. Nicholas slammed over and struck out the light. There was an astonished roar.

He wished he had taken the wine.

The castle of Brixen, when they reached it, was as crowded as every other home of the Duke’s at which, by that time, they had stayed. By that time it was evident on what Sigismond of the Tyrol was exhausting his inheritance. The palace-fortresses were the work of a nervous man, never sure of his countrymen, and of a vain man, cousin to the Emperor of the West, who liked to carry from castle to castle a scholarly entourage, a continuous stream of eminent guests, a herd of countless liveried servants.

John, attempting to assess his expenditure, had based his guess on the size and quality of the Duchess’s hunting-party, on the magnificence of its hounds and its horses, its birds and its weapons and the priceless harness of its mounts.

Now they were familiar with painted chapels dressed with silver and gold, with libraries of singular books, with chests and shelves which carried, still, the remains of the ancient treasures the House of Habsburg had acquired or been given: the silk dalmatics, the sabres, the crowns with their jewels and enamels, the crystal goblets and altar-frontals, the caskets and relics.

In Brixen, significant and well escorted as they were, the company of the Banco di Niccolò merged into a community of many hundreds, of which the Duchess, lately their apparently sole companion, was the hub. In their daily excursions abroad, there were others now to guide them. And once they were in the hills, there was no longer any pretence that their business was hunting.

They visited mines, and the mountain slopes beside mines. In the Tyrol, the word for a miner and for a mountaineer was the same. And Nicholas used both the pendulum and the hazel rod he had been given and found silver twice in a week. The first time, it was a bag of coins concealed underground. The second time, it was genuine. An hour with pickaxes showed what they had discovered.

Each time, wet and exhausted, they came back to the warmth and bustle of the town and the castle and, retiring, wrote out their reports, once in code for themselves and once in edited form for
the Duchess. These were carried to her by Lindsay. All the rest of their entertainment lay in the hands of noblemen who were her household officials, who introduced them to the sweating halls, packed with people and dogs, where the castle’s lesser guests and resident household supped; and conveyed them to the quarters where the other guests of great estate, with their retinues, received them in rooms equally packed.

There was a great deal of noise: so much that even the clamour of the Cathedral bells hardly penetrated the walls of the castle. It was at Brixen also that they discovered the Duchess’s pipers. She employed three, as well as a number of trumpets. Nicholas slept very little and, when he did, kept senselessly dreaming of Kerasous, once in the empire of Trebizond. He couldn’t imagine a reason, unless it had to do with alum or Amazons, both of which Kerasous and the Tyrol had in common. At the end of the first week, the mistress of the Duchess’s ladies took him in hand, appearing at his side in the hall when a gambling dispute between Teutonic princelings was reaching its height, and both the singers and the dogs had become inaudible.

In the quiet of her chamber, he thanked her. Her name was Gertrude. A graceful woman, no longer young, she had been in attendance all through his first expedition with Eleanor of Scotland. Here, she was in charge of the cohort of young, well-born maidens who formed the Duchess’s retinue. Most of them had been educated at Sonnenberg, the convent whose laxity had so enraged the late Cardinal Bishop of Brixen. It reminded Nicholas, briefly, of Haddington, which reminded him in turn of other things. The woman said, ‘I know you prefer water, but the wine is weak, and has nothing in it that will harm you. Sit down. Close your eyes, if you wish.’

‘That would be ungracious,’ Nicholas said.

She said, ‘I brought you here for your own sake, not mine.’ She was thin as a gazelle, with a long face and deep eyes below her elaborate headdress. The jewelled bands on her sleeves were very fine. She poured a goblet for herself and sat opposite, the cup in her hands. She said, ‘Her grace means you well, and has told you the risks. But it is greedy, the pendulum.’

‘Greedy?’

‘Of life. Of energy. It is German, I think.’ She smiled.

He said, ‘Why do you say that?’ Presumably she had been told to do this. He could not guess, yet, what she wanted.

‘Because the civilised world regards us as boors. We think it a banquet to lay a plain cloth and put on it a dish of poached and
boiled eggs, a plate of minnows, a bowl of turnips and a platter of peas in the pod.’

‘You are quoting?’

‘From the Burgundian envoys recently entertained by the Duke. They were offered bread on the point of a knife, and wine from two brimming silver-gilt cups, the squire holding the lid of each cup under Duke Sigismond’s chin as he drank. The Duke wore a robe he had already appeared in at Arras.’

He summoned his energy. ‘They must eat heartily, who inhabit fierce lands. They hunt in France and Scotland and Italy, but face only the beasts.’

‘Other travellers have been less generous,’ the lady said. ‘Our nauseating food, our bitter wine, our coarse customs, our unsafe roads and disputatious, turbulent unlettered peoples – that is how the German States are regarded by those from softer countries. Cardinal Bessarion is godfather to the Emperor’s only son, but was thankful to leave. Prosper de Camulio – do you know him? – thought us barbarians. And Pope Pius! How he hated Vienna, and his time as the Emperor’s secretary.’ She paused. ‘Aeneas Piccolomini, he was. He came twice to the Tyrol. Duke Sigismond took him stag-hunting.’