The Unicorn Hunt (66 page)

‘Oh, I know him,’ said his metallurgical priest. ‘We spoke a few times in Bruges.’

‘Did you?’ said Nicholas. He was aware of saying it sourly, for it explained a number of things. The rest of his mind was on the other problem.

John le Grant was thinking on the same lines, it seemed. He said, ‘You say your lady’s still with Adorne?’

‘They’re spending Easter in Rome. After that, instead of sailing from there, they propose to come north and take ship from Genoa. Adorne has a programme of calls he means to make on the way to the Holy Land. Corsica, Sardinia, Tunis – the voyage could take seven or eight weeks.’

‘What will she do?’ le Grant said.

‘Stay with her party,’ said Father Moriz unexpectedly. ‘For if
she comes here, no doubt she knows you will attempt to obstruct her.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Nicholas said. It surprised him that anyone else had worked it out. He could, of course, send persuasive friends to try to separate her from Adorne and bring her back home. He could go himself. But even if he contrived to get her away, it was hard to know how to keep her from going to Egypt, unless pinned down in irons. And that was not – not yet – part of the game. Anyway, as soon as she was alone, she’d take ship somehow. He had resigned himself to that.

He decided to leave Venice before April was finished. He had some business to do in Florence. If he got to Alexandria in June, he could keep ahead of her all the way if he wished. He could vanish.

He made his final calls. He had not avoided the homes of those Venetian merchants who had married the sisters from Naxos, but he had not, as it happened, spent any time with the princesses alone. One of them was the mother of Catherine, the girl married on paper to Zacco. The future Queen of Cyprus was sixteen and Zacco, of course, was his own age exactly. Nicholas happened not to encounter the girl, but received a box of Greek sweetmeats and a sugary farewell from the exquisite Fiorenza her mother.

Although her kiss was deep, his response – once automatic, overwhelming – was reliably absent. He wondered if, at twenty-nine, this was usual. First the years of natural joy; then the rule of passion closely confined by society; and finally conjunction to order, as with Sigismond’s whores. If he had to, he could become the lover of Fiorenza or Violante once more, but he was no longer driven by appetite. It seemed likely he never would be again.

Which was convenient. Nicholas left Venice satisfied, no matter how he left the Venetians.

The elderly galley
Ciaretti
, highly taxed (as privately owned galleys properly were) and loaded by Livornese boatmen (as was the rule) moved out of her own Porto Pisano at the end of May, bound for Alexandria. With her she carried her patron, Nicholas de Fleury, Knight of the Unicorn, and for sailing-master she had John le Grant, fulfilling again the role he had occupied at his first meeting with Nicholas. Or half the role. Then, he had also been sailing-instructor.

Nine years before, his first ship, she had carried Nicholas and his company to all that awaited him in Trebizond. Now she was expendable. He had lent his better ships, for one reason or another, to the Signoria. They were well insured. He disliked both of them.

Behind in Venice, the Bank under Moriz, Julius and Cefo was
primed to subside into its usual routine, but with more than its normal vigour.

Behind in Florence remained a number of satisfied merchants, a busy agent, and various amused or astonished representatives of the families Medici and Strozzi. A week before their departure, Alessandra, purveyor of spectacles and mother of Lorenzo Strozzi, had let Nicholas take her hand, lying back in her chair attended by the sisters Antonia, the future wife of her son Lorenzo, and Maria, bride but not yet bedded wife of Tommaso Portinari of Bruges.

Alessandra had said, ‘Marietta would never have done.’

The sisters looked down. ‘No,’ Nicholas had agreed. Everyone knew whom Lorenzo’s first choice had been, and why it had been firmly scotched.

‘I have to tell you,’ Alessandra had continued, ‘that I fear that you, too, have been irresponsible in your selection.’

‘You disapproved of my wife,’ Nicholas had said. ‘But a van Borselen is not to be sneezed at.’

The matriarch of the Strozzi family had almost smiled. ‘I am unlikely to disagree. I assumed, for that reason, that you would wish to keep her, although her precipitate arrival last autumn seemed childish. It is clear, having spoken to her, that she is so far from childish that she poses a problem.’

He had released her gnarled hand and sat back, displaying amusement. ‘I am used to capable women, madonna.’ The girls peeped at one another, and away.

She said, ‘Oh yes, you see me, a widow, managing my possessions. You saw your first wife, also a widow, do likewise. I daresay the same applies even to courtesans.’ Her spectacles slanted. Her mantled head, lifted, brought the cords of her neck into view. ‘A married woman who runs after power, signor de Fleury, may end as a rival to her husband, instead of a partner. You should have asked the good Duchess Isabelle to pick you a bride. Sweet maids like Antonia and Maria ask nothing more than the arms of a good husband about them, and to experience the joy that many handsome children will bring.

‘There is no happiness like it,’ had continued Monna Alessandra, bestowing a fond if absent smile on each of the sisters. ‘Those who pretend otherwise are misguided, and must depend on a good man’s love to correct them.’

It had been an extraordinary conversation, too good to keep to himself. He couldn’t tell anyone. What she was saying was,
Get her to bed
.

*

The last message to reach him from Venice began so ominously that John le Grant enquired what it was. Nicholas read the gist of it aloud.

Instead of proceeding to take the slow-moving great ship from Genoa, half of the Baron Cortachy’s party had elected to travel instead by one of the faster pilgrim galleys from Venice. They had arrived in Venice. They had even called at the Bank. They wanted spectator seats on a boat for the Ascension Day ceremony.

‘Gelis?’ had said John le Grant at that point.

‘Wait. No,’ Nicholas had said. ‘The monk, the Duke of Burgundy’s chaplain and Daniel Colebrant. Only three went to Venice. The rest stayed with Adorne.’

‘Taking the leisurely trip via Tunis,’ le Grant said. ‘So you’ll be in Egypt before your lady, right enough. But she’ll be expecting you. Are you going to let on that you knew she was coming?’

‘Oh, she knows that,’ Nicholas said. ‘She knows I’d be tracking Adorne. I was bound to be told she was with him.’

John said, ‘So what has she done with the boy? Left him with Margot in Bruges?’

‘The Patriarch didn’t say so,’ Nicholas said. If Margot was in Bruges, then certainly she came there alone. He added, ‘It’ll be all right. There are nurses.’ As always, John left the subject as soon as its interest had faded. He never had to check John.

They made only one call of note before finally leaving the Italian mainland. Lorenzo Strozzi, thirty-seven years old and a little plump and a little naked of hair, was waiting in person at Naples to embrace Claes his young playmate from Bruges, and sweep them to his sumptuous mansion.

Plied with comfits and Candian wine, they congratulated Lorenzo on the beauty of Antonia his betrothed and conveyed the salutations of his lady mother Alessandra, and found themselves launched with remarkable speed on an agenda of solid business exchanges to do with spectacles, the Catalan market, and several agencies which they shared.

As befitted the company advisor to King Ferrante of Naples, Lorenzo knew all the gossip of Naples and a good deal of the gossip of Rome as it referred to the affairs of Bruges and the Tyrol, and Venice, and Scotland. About the gossip of Cyprus he was even more forthcoming.

‘It’s true. Zacco doesn’t feel committed to his little Venetian Queen: they’re only married by proxy. Rome has had overtures from him. So have we. We had a message from Zacco last week. If he repudiated Catherine and married our King’s lady daughter, what would Naples do for him in return?’

‘A lot, I imagine,’ Nicholas said. ‘It might come cheaper for Zacco than Venice. Why don’t you put together a nice dowry with a lot of ships and soldiers and trading concessions wrapped in it, and see what he says?’

‘Is that your considered opinion?’ The Charetty army had once fought for King Ferrante of Naples. Naples respected the Banco di Niccolò, not least because of its political acumen.

‘Unless the girl has two heads. You’d get a good bargain. And a jumping-off place in the Levant, with some luck. We spoke of alum.’

‘Yes.’ When they talked about money, Lorenzo’s eyes always shone. He said, ‘You’re going to send an offer to Persia? To Uzum Hasan?’

‘And put a proposition to the Sultan in Cairo. The possibilities,’ Nicholas said, ‘are infinite.’

‘And I take it you think that it’s safe?’ Lorenzo said. ‘Your going to Egypt?’

‘Since I helped kill the Mameluke commander in Cyprus? I think it’s quite safe,’ Nicholas said. ‘It’s a new Sultan now. They didn’t close down our agency even when Khushcadam still ruled, and John has been accepted for years. They need our trade.’

‘Everyone does,’ said Lorenzo Strozzi, a touch smugly.

‘What was all that about?’ said John le Grant later, in his new, neutral tone of enquiry.

‘Just to see if he would rise to something,’ Nicholas said. ‘Isn’t he
rich
?’

The rest of the voyage was less tiresome than Nicholas had expected. On board ship, there was always something to do, especially when, as now, she was heavily armed, with bowmen and gunners to exercise. The
Ciaretti
was his ship, intimately known to him from several glorious voyages: he could do anything that he wanted, day or night.

Between Naples and Alexandria they fired no guns in anger and lost only one man: a page wasted with sickness. That was a tribute to excellent provisioning, because the ship made few calls, steering clear of the Venetian islands. In normal times a trading galley like this, well supplied with fresh water and food, could be kept virtually free of disease. The pilgrim galleys were different. With their foul crowded holds and mixed races, the passenger galleys were breeding-beds for bloody fluxes and fevers, their wakes pierced by sinking bodies shackled with stones and packed with rank ballast sand in their shrouds.

That would be why Anselm Adorne was hiring his own roomy vessel from Genoa, instead of choosing the galley from Venice. Or such, at least, would be one of his reasons. Adorne would learn, too, soon enough, which of his companions succumbed when at sea. Gelis would not be one of them.

Once, Nicholas had taken a sea-chart below and spent time with it, until his shipmaster took it away. The attempt to divine that way had failed, although he had imagined a faint stir on the map about Tunis – but that might be because he expected it. There was no sensation at all from Alexandria. He desisted then, thinking it more satisfying to employ his ordinary powers of reasoning, and to project what he knew of his wife’s. She had several options, depending on why she was doing this. His mind, roving through all his neatly developing conflicts, kept returning to base; reviewing the fulcrum, the axle, the crab of the whole complex structure.

He would spend his second wedding anniversary in Alexandria. Wherever she was, Gelis, too, might recall what the date marked. Godscalc had died two days before the last one. Two years was not a very long time. Even a decade was not too long, if you were enjoying yourself.

The African coast then was not very far off. Nicholas watched for it, mostly from somewhere high in the rigging. Working the ship, he went barefoot in shirt and drawers, which no one had liked much at first: a patron should look like a patron, and not only when going ashore. He had fifty seamen and a hundred rowers, three to a bench. None of them was a slave. He had bowmen, helmsmen, trumpets. Ships’ officers and crew changed all the time, and he knew none of these well, but had established an easy enough way with them all. He joked now, up in the mast-basket, looking over the sea.

The Egyptian coast, being alluvial, was always hard to pick out. Further east, you could tell the mouth of the Nile by the brown stain and the fresh-tasting water. But Alexandria, according to John, was nothing like the dramatic amphitheatre of Trebizond: just a long rim of limestone and sand and two spits. If you were fifteen hundred years old, you would have seen the palace of Cleopatra on one of them, and the great beacon had once stood on the other, four hundred feet high, with its flaming, glittering eye scanning forty miles of the ocean. Eunostos, Port of Safe Return, they had called it.

Now there was just a bonfire stuck on its base to guide mariners into the harbour, with a clutter of mosques and towers and a battery of bombards below it. Cleopatra’s palace had gone, although
there was an obelisk (said John) which would tell him where the Emir’s palace now was. And he would see minarets and a couple of watch-hills and, visible from a long way, a tall red pillar where the Temple of Serapis and the Citadel of Rhakotis had been.

But Alexander, if he still rested in the city he was never to see, encased in gold in his coffin of glass, lay fathoms under some mosque, and there were tumbledown ruins and pillars where the Mouseion and its library had been. Al-Iskandariyya, eighteen hundred years old, for a thousand years a capital city and chief source of learning, was now shrunk to this, a trading port of the Mameluke Sultans of Cairo. And the remains of St Mark, the pride of present-day Venice, had been smuggled out pickled in a barrel of pork.

Sic transit
. Everything changed. The sun was piercingly hot, but he was ready for that; for all of that. Below, he saw John le Grant neutrally watching him.

Thirty miles from Alexandria the Emir’s ship came, as was the custom, to board them; to take details of their names and their cargo and send these by pigeon to the governor, who would fly the news by the same means to Cairo. This wasn’t the Tyrol. By the time the
Ciaretti
reached Alexandria their reception, one way or the other, would be assured.