Caprice and Rondo

  ‘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, recta
ngular 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.

  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.

  BAÇI SARAY 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. A
nd 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.