Race of Scorpions

  ‘Well, he’s lost the woman he had,’ said John le Grant. ‘Primaflora’s on her way back to Carlotta. He has his own way, has Zacco, with the competition.’

  ‘Good riddance,’ said Thomas.

  ‘Well, that depends,’ Tobie said. ‘Have I got it right? Following some artful footwork between the eighth and ninth courses, it’s been agreed that the dazzling Diniz is no longer to be anyone’s page, but will be found an occupation, until ransomed, in Nicosia. Likewise the gentle Katelina, whom the King will confide to his very own mother. Meanwhile, you and I and the rest of us start earning our keep as the saviours of Cyprus. What I want to know is, shall we be accompanied by Zacco and Nicholas?’

  ‘In spirit, I’m sure,’ said the engineer. ‘I’d rather know, to tell the truth, where Tzani-bey al-Ablak will be. That dressing-down our emir got from the King? I don’t believe it. You look at what happened. No one told us Loppe’s message got through, and the Mamelukes treated us as if it hadn’t. Damn them, they wanted us scared.’

  ‘What?’ said Astorre.

  Tobie said, ‘I recognised the quotation. The King had an informer at Salines.’

  ‘At Salines?’ said le Grant with some grimness. ‘I’ll give you a wager that, from the moment our ship was waylaid, that same King was behind all that happened. That bullying wasn’t planned by the Mamelukes. It’s your bonny Zacco’s trick. Fear as a weapon.’

  ‘And love,’ Tobie said. ‘An arsenal to beware of. Do you think Nicholas has seen through it? Or is bewitched? Or isn’t bewitched, and will yearn after Primaflora and arrange, with ingenious traps, to bring about the deaths of Diniz and his much-hated aunt Katelina?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Astorre. He was under his blanket. ‘We’re here to fight. He likes fighting.’

  ‘I think,’ said John le Grant, ‘that that is what Tobie is saying. And we ought none of us to forget. He likes meddling in business as well. Whatever is selling in Cyprus, you can expect Nicholas to corner it soon.’

  Tobie grunted, and rolled into bed. ‘It looks to me,’ said the doctor, ‘as if Nicholas has been offered it free. But I’m damned sure it’s not a monopoly.’

  Chapter 23

  TO BE ALONE and sick among enemies wouldn’t trouble a man: it should not trouble, therefore, a woman of twenty-two years with a bastard son and a profligate husband. Nevertheless Katelina van Borselen came to consciousness to lie, her eyes closed, struggling with a remembrance of fear. Fear, and an enemy’s voice saying, ‘We are not far away.’ The voice of Nicholas. Claes.

  Where had she heard it? On board ship, she supposed. Even here, in her cabin, since she had never left it. She recalled the storm on leaving Rhodes, and some of the subsequent misery. She remembered the small shock of finding herself in the care of the courtesan Primaflora whose attentions, unhesitating and detached, might (conceivably) have been those of a humane-minded mistress of Nicholas, or (if Fortune were kind) those of a spy of the Queen, concerned for the health of an ally. Katelina knew that Nicholas was being sent, heavily monitored, to fight for Carlotta. She understood, but at the time hardly cared, that there had been a sea battle. She didn’t know what had resulted. But she was presently awake, and in bed, and unmolested. So, whatever the outcome, the ship was proceeding calmly enough on its way, and she was recovering. And if Nicholas was near, she would, somehow, protect herself. She dozed. Her hearing brought her the slight, rumpled beat of a moth, and the kindred fizzings of sound that suggested that it was night, and that candles were burning. Or lamps. On a ship, as a rule, there were lamps.

  She was not on a ship. The bed beneath her was still. Moreover, in winter the light drew no moths. Not yet alarmed, Katelina opened her eyes. She was in a firelit room, well proportioned and furnished, whose casement transmitted the paleness of a cool and overcast day. The chamber was warm, quiet and clean, and apparently empty. A convent. A hospice. The home of Genoese well-wishers, perhaps. A haven far away, she could hope, from the threatening presence of Nicholas. She closed her lids and lay thinking.

  Always she had hated the sea, whether sailing to Scotland or south with her husband to Portugal. At sea, she lost Simon’s attention. On land, she had worn him down with her passionate desire for a second child. At first, he had partnered her avidly. Then, bit by bit, he had resumed the old ways of debauchery which came so easily to a man of his looks. A system of barren debauchery, she had discovered, which had never been known to bear harvest.

  Of course, women had ways to check pregnancy. But Katelina came to understand, too, that the women Simon patronised were not unwilling to bear to her beautiful husband, and that it was a surprise and a disappointment that they did not. Observing his persistent philandering, she slowly realised that her husband’s virility was the point at issue; that their common infertility must be in origin his; and that the blight, whatever it was, must have struck him since his first fruitful marriage. They never discussed it. For him, such a flaw was inconceivable, and she gave thanks, every day, for his vanity. But for that, he might ask himself, and then her, who had fathered the heir she had given him. At the thought, her lips parted and, abruptly, she stirred in bed and tried to change her position.

  ‘She is not cured, sister,’ a man’s voice announced crossly. It was thick, and used adequate Greek-flavoured French. ‘We do not want her corpse here. Send her to Famagusta to die.’ Hastily, Katelina re-opened her eyes.

  Against the light, the speaker looked bulky: a grizzled man in golden-badged velvet, his jowls infilled by untidy whiskers which he scratched with one nail, looking down at her. Beyond him in a painted panel-back chair was the person he spoke to: an auburn-haired girl, who moved a fan like a wing between her jewels and the flash of the firelight.

  The fan whickered and stopped; the buzzing breath produced bolts of invective. ‘She moves?’ The young woman rose to her feet. ‘She is awake? Depart, idiot. She will speak to me. Seasickness kills no one. Especially not herring-fed Flemings.’

  The man’s form disappeared and was replaced by that of the speaker who bestowed herself, with some briskness, at her bedside. She leaned forward. Seen close at hand, the woman’s face no longer seemed young. The hair beneath the stiff headdress was dyed, the lips and eyelids skilfully coloured, the skin of the straight nose and high cheekbones more pink than in nature. The woman said, ‘You are Katelina van Borselen, whose husband Simon loves Genoese, and co-trades with the Vasquez in Portugal. Do you know where you are?’

  The voice, the words, the manner told her she was in no friendly palace or hospice. ‘With his enemies,’ Katelina said. Her head ached. She lifted herself, as best she could, on her pillows.

  ‘You are weak, but good food will cure you. After all,’ said the woman, ‘we cannot ransom you if you are dead.’

  Ransom! She heard the word, and could make nothing of it. In desperation, she had to prevaricate. ‘We are not landed people.’

  Where the eyebrows were drawn, the skin hoisted. ‘According to Markios my brother, the van Borselen are married to royalty. And your husband’s father, I hear, is a magnate. Between them, they might afford to redeem you and your nephew?’

  Katelina said, ‘I am on the island of Cyprus?’

  ‘It is better,’ said the woman, ‘than being in Cairo. Yes. Your ship fell into Cypriot hands. You were landed at Salines. You have been brought from Salines to the capital. You, demoiselle, are in Nicosia, in the hands of James, a Christian monarch. You will remain until your ransom is settled. You will not find us harsh jailers. Here are ladies of culture, who serve us and tend the royal nursery. The King’s children are well-reared and biddable. When he takes a wife, they will never disgrace him. You have given your husband many fine progeny, I imagine?’

  ‘I have a son,’ said Katelina. The woman knew that already: she sensed it. Knew her to be twenty-two, and productive of a single accouchement, and ageing.

  ‘My commiserations,’ said the woman. ‘But your husband, perhaps, will have others. He will wish, no d
oubt, to reclaim you. Until he responds you are welcome to stay, as I have said, with the ladies. Or I can offer a cell with the Clares?’

  A cloister, or the suite of the royal mistresses and their bastards. Katelina felt herself flushing. She said coldly, ‘A convent would be to my taste. Where, may I ask, are those who were with me on shipboard?’

  ‘The Genoese, the merchants, the Athletes of Christ? All dispersed without harm, and their ship sent back to Rhodes. As I said, our King is Christian and merciful. The trader Niccolò and his mischievous warband faced, of course, a different destiny.’

  Katelina sat up. The fire glowed red and hot. Her skin was damp; a trickle of sweat divided her breasts. She drew her nightrobe closed and smoothed its edges. She said, ‘So I should suppose. He sold himself to the Queen for a knighthood.’

  ‘Foolish knave,’ the woman said. ‘But it was, of course, the simplest way to leave safely. Now he is here, as he planned. King James has reinvested him in the same Order, and gifted him rights and acres which more than exceed Carlotta’s dream charters. Madame suffers?’

  Katelina felt suddenly dizzy. The sweat on her skin had turned chill, and her tormentor’s face blurred like a junket. She said, ‘Nicholas and his men are alive?’

  ‘Of course,’ emitted the shimmering features. ‘The young man sent a message from Rhodes. It promised his service. It let the King meet his ship; seize its cargo. You admire Carlotta, it seems. That young scoundrel does not.’

  She felt as sick as she had done at sea. We are not far away. It was true. He had threatened her. She said, ‘My nephew Diniz. Where is he?’

  The pink, liquid face made a tolerant smile. ‘Where he can be useful. In the fields, it may be, digging and burying.’

  ‘Burying?’

  ‘Digging pits and burying hoppers. The young and eggs of the locust. Unless they die, the crops will be ruined.’ She made a pause, and perhaps an assessment, and perhaps a decision. She said, ‘You have never seen this? The eggs are gathered in handfuls. They swell and crackle, madame. They fight to fabricate legs and wings and fly in the face of their handler. Peasants fear to collect them. We save the task for our captives. You. Your nephew. Your servants. You wish to ask me anything else?’

  In the voice was deliberate malice. Who had told this woman her weakness? Her maidservant? Katelina felt the blood drain from her skin, and a shivering fit overcame her. She said, ‘I don’t understand what has happened.’

  ‘To the locusts?’ said the woman, amused, ‘Or no. The Ascension of Niccolò? Of course, he was treated harshly on board. Had he not been, neither he nor his men would have escaped the Genoese swords, or the Order. A brave schemer, that Niccolò. Indeed, your nephew might do worse than cultivate him. He is well placed to do so.’

  ‘Where?’ said Katelina. She returned, like an automaton, to the one question it was her duty to ask. ‘Where is Diniz?’

  ‘Here. In Nicosia. In Messer Niccolò’s villa, much admired and well guarded. Nor will he spend all his time among locusts. The city boasts a royal dyeworks, much damaged. Messer Niccolò is setting your nephew to work there. So what next have I said? I have made you ill. The thought of Messer Niccolò makes you ill. I find him a witty young man.’

  Katelina quelled the pulse in her throat. She said, ‘He knelt. He gave Carlotta his sworn oath of fealty.’

  The woman looked at her. ‘So did you,’ the woman said. ‘And you meant it. What then should I do to you? Skin you as the Mamelukes do, and make hawsers out of the peelings?’

  Her voice had warped into something outlandish. The firelight glistened. The fan whirred and the shutters thudded and creaked as if belaboured by flocks of live locusts. The woman’s face sagged and yawned in the heat, and her nose crawled like a tongue through her lip-paint.

  The woman put up one hand and grasping a mess of pink blubbered skin dragged it all from her face. Behind it was the snout of a pig: a twisted hull of dead flesh with two holes in it. A double bore of spiced wind struck the pillow. ‘Carlotta?’ remarked the wheezing, snuffling voice. ‘Carlotta’s dam bit the nose from my face. I did not retch then or now. I did not whine then or now. I may offer you charity, my weak-stomached Fleming, but sympathy is not in my cure.’

  The door closed with immaculate quietness behind her, leaving the storm, the vertiginous storm, inside the chamber.

  A few days later, the demoiselle Katelina van Borselen entered the gracious closed-house of the Clares, where she had her own rooms and where, from time to time, she was allowed to receive the stained and unkempt youth, coldly purposeful, who had been the susceptible and civilised Diniz.

  The noseless woman had spoken the truth. Diniz was in their enemy’s grasp. Diniz had been set to work, as once Nicholas had been set to work, as a dyers’ apprentice. Soaked and weary, he toiled in the pitted yard and shabby buildings of the royal dyeworks in Nicosia. He didn’t resist when forced to drag their cloth through the vats or weigh their alum or shiver over their badly-kept ledgers. He used his limited freedom. He talked to the slaves and the Cypriots, the house-women, the menials, the half-trained lazy men who were all that were left in the business. Thereby he learned of events and prayed to be able, one day, to turn the knowledge to his advantage. What information he got, he brought to Katelina, his uncle’s stern wife. For Diniz wished only three things. To free himself and his aunt, and kill Nicholas.

  Nicholas himself was in the north, and for a month was out of reach of his victims. Instead, he passed these first weeks undergoing a series of trials which Diniz Vasquez would have been hard put to it to equal. The trials were perpetrated by Zacco, and their aim was to kill or to captivate.

  All winter, Zacco’s tents had occupied those plains in the north that spread from Nicosia towards the enemy forts on the coastline. Before the turn of the year the King, or so Nicholas suspected, had spent much of his time at the Palace, leaving to his Mameluke army a half-hearted blockade of the shore towns. Now, sweeping Nicholas with him, a reinvigorated Zacco led out Astorre and his men to the encampment; gave them horses, provisions and tents, and made them acquainted with the land and their fellows.

  To such sensible practices, the King added, on whim, his own wayward pleasures. Having called for a council, he would cast his papers brusquely aside, demand his leopards, and sweep his companions for days to the mountains, flying hawks on the pinnacles and hunting the powerful wild sheep called moufflon among the snow-laden pines of the valleys. The leopards, packed snarling and blindfold in ox carts, were subject to the same whims as their master, who alternately struck their gold-harnessed muzzles and kissed them. Nicholas, quick as any to learn, was still novice enough to begin with, and brought back an upper arm rutted with claw marks. It was deadly play, if not without logic in moments of leisure. At such times, some of the Lusignan’s soldiers would die, or be maimed: there would be rivalries. But from such escapades men emerged hardened; exposed to rough weather; experienced in seeking food and adopting crude quarters. Those who failed were discarded. Those who survived were given other tests, more severe and more sudden, until they triumphed, or died, or were moved to rebellion.

  Nicholas chose to rebel. Roused nightly to service some exploit – to capture a mule-train, set fire to a renegade’s house; judge a fierce, drunken horse race by torchlight – Nicholas didn’t return from the last to his tent but, without gown or armour, stood bareheaded in his plain pourpoint outside that of Zacco and requested admission.

  He didn’t need the gleam of men’s eyes in the firelight to know who had seen, who was watching. His own corps would, to be sure, be among them. Chosen companion for weeks of this young and dazzling King, Nicholas had shared his sport, his forays, his pleasures, but he had not shared his bed. James de Lusignan gave himself to those lovers he had, of both sexes, and issued no new invitations. Nicholas, who also knew how to wait, had been glad of it, although his air of willing neutrality was misleading. Primaflora had gone, sent to Rhodes despite all he could do. Her physical loss
had unsettled him to a degree he had not enjoyed or expected, but since then, he had taken no partners. Celibacy was a test, a reminder, a punishment, and he kept his bargain quite well with himself, with the aid now and then of the wine cask. Astorre liked it when he was in a carousing mood; Loppe did not.

  Now, tonight he was sober as he entered the royal campaign tent, its brocade alcoves disfigured with overturned stools and spilled food and wry candles. The horse race had sprung from an argument here, so they said. Now there was no one within but the King, his long-lidded stare curtained by tangled, waving brown hair, his young-boned wrist poised on the arm of his seat with a painted map hung from its fingers. Zacco looked: the servant who had brought Nicholas vanished. Zacco said, ‘Well, Niccolò. You have come to resign?’

  He had not been asked to sit, so Nicholas stood. ‘Do they all do that?’ he said. ‘My lord Zacco?’

  The King’s eyes were like a Cathay’s, half open. He said, ‘Sometimes they shout, and throw down their shields. They are seen to talk in corners with priests, or the lords of my army. The lords, of course, listen and tell me. I am lenient in the death I give little men. Their error is simple, as yours is. They forget who is King of this country.’

  ‘It is to be regretted,’ Nicholas said. ‘It is my duty and perhaps even yours to make sure that they cannot forget it.’

  There was a silence he did not like. Then, ‘Go on. If you think it wise,’ Zacco said.

  Nicholas spoke carefully. ‘If I want an engine, my lord, first I design it, and then I fashion the tools for its making. You are training men without knowing what you will need them for. You don’t need to bind them first. They will follow you anyway, and if you give them a goal, they will stay with you.’

  ‘For what I can give them?’ said Zacco.

  ‘For what you are,’ Nicholas said. ‘Why doubt it now?’

  ‘You tell me,’ said Zacco.