Race of Scorpions

  There was a stable with straw where the burned and dying were brought, and Tobie and Abul set up their trestles. In time some wounded arrived, but none of consequence. What resistance Zacco had found on the heights had clearly been small. As the doctors worked, the noise outside dwindled to sobbing, with the occasional command, the thud of lumber, and the sharp voices of men working in crisis. The cisterns were brought into use. There came the sound of water trickling, and the random hiss of flames being doused in the thatched roofs and storehouses; the vats of grain and powder and oil. The hiss of a goffering iron, turned in gnarled hands in the laundry of his mother’s home in Pavia. Above the stench of singed hair and hide and charred wood rose the scent of roast flesh. The hiss of a basket of scorpions. After a long time, Tobie walked to the door of the stable and stood, looking dully about him.

  The fires were out. Around him, the lower ward was singed but intact, and part of the sector above. Above that were soot-blackened buildings and a haze of dark smoke, pierced by plumes of dazzling steam. Here and there, against the grey sky, an object glowed crimson: a shank of wood; a roll of felt heaped with red spangles. The dome of the church was half gold and half black. Outside it stood Nicholas, small in the distance. Transfixed, Tobie drew breath and shouted.

  Nicholas turned, but made no audible answer. Tobie shouted again, rising to shrillness. Abul, unexpectedly near, said, ‘They are counting the dead. Go up, if you wish him to hear you. Go. There is little more to be done.’

  The wind had risen. The sea wind, that had forced the flames down from the north. Tobie climbed to the church. Nicholas stood where he had first seen him, his face expressionless. He smelled of singeing, and was covered with soot and abrasions, but was neither wounded nor burned. Tobie cleared his throat, an official and orderly sound, as at the opening of a tribunal. He said, ‘Your men made an assault up the back cliff?’

  It was not, certainly, what Nicholas had expected. He paused, then replied with equal formality. ‘It was the plan. The goats were sent up last night, to disarm them. Today the climbers were men. We sent them up the back wall while Zacco drew their fire from the front.’ In the black and red face, his eyes were large, bright and clean.

  Tobie said, ‘The climbers were Mamelukes. What were their orders precisely?’

  Nicholas said, ‘To get in at any cost. Some of them fell. Some of them got in and died. We have taken the castle.’

  ‘I am sure you have,’ Tobie said. ‘You must show me your dead. Then I will take and show you my dying.’ He paused and then said, ‘How could you do this? Even you?’

  Nicholas said slowly, ‘I didn’t order the naphtha.’

  ‘No. But you knew Arabs used it. You must have known the Mamelukes had the ingredients. You took no steps to forbid it. You let Saracen dogs burn women and children to death. How many?’

  Nicholas turned his head, again slowly. He said, ‘They are all in there. You can’t help them. Later, talk to me.’

  ‘Now,’ said Tobie. He walked past Nicholas and entered the church.

  Already five hundred years old, the Byzantine church of St Hilarion had long outlived the monks it once served but, under Carlotta’s favouring rule, the worked gold of an iconostastis sparkled still in front of its altar. Above, Christ Pantocrator looked down with the hosts of his angels, and the Prophets guarded the drum of the dome. Saints walked round the walls, done in ochre, madder and gold, and there were angels booted in scarlet, and dressed in the style of the Ushers in Trebizond. In the style of the Imperial Ushers who had abandoned the Empire of Trebizond, with the Emperor.

  There were eight pillars, painted with partridges, between which stretched a mosaic floor covered with pallets. On each, lying in death, was a body. There were six children among them, and many women. None of them was burned. Tobie stood, his lips shut. Then he moved from pallet to pallet and bent, stiffly, to examine what lay there. Eventually, he reached the altar. It was very quiet, for Nicholas had remained at the door, and the church contained no one else living. Once, he heard footsteps passing the church, and once, a brief exchange between Nicholas and someone else, who did not remain. After a time, Tobie turned and came back.

  Nicholas was leaning, head bent, where he had left him, slowly scrubbing his face with a towel. The fabric was black: becoming aware of it, he let it drop and looked up at Tobie’s footsteps. His face was still grimy. Tobie walked past him and stopped. Nicholas said, ‘My dying; your dead. Don’t blame Abul. It is in the nature of Arabs.’

  Buckthorn, heliotrope, cyclamen tubers. Not a griping dose, as he’d thought, but a killing dose, which had killed. After a space, Tobie said, ‘Did Zacco know?’

  ‘I expect so,’ Nicholas said. ‘And Tzani-bey. They don’t have much patience with games. They thought it safer to poison the garrison, or as many as chance would allow. They are waiting for us. When they see us walk down, they will look for weakness, and use it.’

  Tobie spoke without turning his head. ‘We condone this? In front of John, Astorre, our own men?’

  ‘We are heroes,’ said Nicholas. ‘That is war. You chose to heal soldiers. I elected to fight one campaign in order to leave war behind. I ask you again to come with me to Kouklia. I have won my franchise. I have taken St Hilarion. Sing ye to the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously.’

  ‘You don’t want to leave war behind,’ Tobie said. ‘You want both. Adventure of body and mind.’

  ‘So do you,’ Nicholas said. ‘I don’t want you to fall out with Abul. I want you to ask him a question. Why does sugar kill?’

  ‘Sugar?’ said Tobie. He moved out, into the acrid air that was sweet after what was inside. His stomach churned.

  ‘Yes. Loppe has been reporting to me from the cane fields. I sent for six experts from Sicily. One of them sleeps half the day, and one acts as if drunk. Loppe experienced this in Granada. He says they die.’

  It should have been no surprise. Courting Zacco, preparing for battle, Nicholas had long since taken the reins of his business in secret. And Loppe, the Guinea slave with Portuguese owners, had been his factor. Tobie said, ‘I suppose you have the dyeworks running as well?’

  ‘Not as well,’ Nicholas said. ‘Until now, we’ve been without management. But now I have hopes of a solution. I have someone to see.’

  ‘When?’ Tobie said. He stopped at the door of the stable.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Nicholas said. ‘I’m going back to Nicosia tomorrow with Zacco. We control the Pass; they can start the blockade now without me. When they have the ships and the cannon, they can break Kyrenia down.’

  ‘Or burn it out,’ Tobie said. He halted, painfully. He said, ‘I have work to do.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Nicholas. ‘But when it’s done, think of what I have said. I’ll go straight from my house to Kouklia. Unless, that is, something grisly turns up.’

  ‘Because of Zacco?’ said Tobie.

  ‘Because of Katelina van Borselen,’ Nicholas said, ‘whose hands are two equal swords, and who should be in Portugal.’

  Chapter 25

  IT WAS NOT, however, the two equal swords of Katelina van Borselen that Nicholas found waiting for him on his return, at long last, to the capital. Before night fell on the cooling ashes of St Hilarion, victory bells began to clang in Nicosia, and news of the triumph reached Diniz Vasquez, toiling in the mud and stink of the Lusignan dyeworks.

  A prisoner of war has nothing to celebrate, and is wise to display no emotion when, from isolation, he hears his friends have been beaten. They said the Bastard would come back tomorrow, and before nightfall would proceed to give public thanks at the Cathedral. If the Bastard returned, he would bring Niccolò vander Poele with him. And vander Poele, surely, would come to his house, which was also the prison of Diniz.

  As a place of confinement, it was not wholly unpleasant. Diniz was allowed in the kitchen and garden. He had even explored the master apartments, with the notion of returning one night with a hammer. It would give the bastard a well-merited
shock to find his marble wall panels cracked, his flooring smashed, his inlaid Syrian couches all splintered, with their embroidered silk cushions in tatters. On mature reflection, however, he decided the dyeworks first deserved his attention. With the discreet advice of the under-manager, who resented his new employer but, being inefficient, stayed with him, Diniz had learned very quickly the vulnerable parts of the dyeing process and how to attack them: how to pollute a boiling, or lower the temperature of a vat, or crack a pipe or a cooling vessel.

  Then, without warning, the under-manager had been removed, and the two or three habitual troublemakers who had been happy to help him, and a new man was brought in, a Florentine with an interest in gold thread who knew little enough about dyeing, but could tell well enough when trouble was threatening, and stop it. Then Diniz realised that if he went to extremes, he risked being shut up altogether, or removed from the house to a place of much less advantage. So, although from time to time he wandered through his enemy’s rooms, and opened his chests, and turned over, with contempt, his fine clothing, Diniz applied his excellent brain to studying the work in the yard, learning what the old slaves and workmen could tell him, and lifting himself thereby from the menial tending of tubs to the preparing of dyes, the timing of fine operations, the mastery, finally, of the ledgers where, in time, the damage he could inflict promised to be invisible, and wholly satisfactory.

  Now the days passed, he found, much more quickly. He learned the patois of the trade, and the mixture of terms, part Arab, part Italian, part Greek, that made up common intercourse, on top of the tongues he already had – the French, the Flemish, the Scots of Lucia his mother, and the Portuguese of his father, who would never again teach him or take him travelling.

  His father had made several countries his home, and had been respected and made welcome everywhere. Once, he had stayed briefly in Scotland and, of course, had found there his bride. He no doubt had hoped, as any man would, for many sons from his golden Lucia, but only Diniz the first-born had lived. Some years later, his father had made occasion to take him back to the land of his mother. Of the King, Diniz had no recollection; but he had brought back from Scotland a child’s dazzled impression of his mother’s brother, fair and slim in the tiltyard. He had, as a boy, worshipped Simon his uncle. It was the duel between his uncle Simon and the scheming brute vander Poele that had caused the death of Tristão Vasquez, for which Niccolò vander Poele was to pay. Payment was due, also, for other acts of inhumanity. For the betrayal of Carlotta, to whom the Fleming had pretended to give his allegiance. And for the seduction of the lady Primaflora, whose fate, in other hands, might have been very different. Diniz dreamed, very often, about Primaflora.

  Since being brought to Nicosia, Diniz had seldom set eyes on his adversary, either in the house or the yard. The swine’s movements were well enough known, as were the Bastard’s. With the Bastard to cling to, vander Poele was unlikely to bother himself over a house, a business, a prisoner. Once or twice people talked about seeing a man wandering about in the yards late or early, in darkness, and lamps had been found warm in the sheds. The slaves who slept there even claimed to have talked to him. But it was hardly likely to be vander Poele himself, who would come, if he came at all, with a club, in daylight, and bullying.

  In any case, it was not easy to enter or leave Nicosia at night. Once, Diniz himself had escaped over the walls of the villa and tried to leave with the throng through the western gate, but the guard had stopped him immediately, for his clothes had given him away, and the stains on his hands. His yellow clothes, and his blue hands. After that, they escorted him everywhere, but he had already realised how slim was his chance of escaping. Thirty-four open miles, ringed with troops, lay between him and Famagusta. He had no money, and the nuns had none either, although his aunt Katelina had begged them to help.

  He was sorry for his aunt Katelina, but also annoyed with her over the fuss she made about the girl in the kitchens and the other one who came with ash to the yard. As it turned out, he caught nothing and Andrea the new under-manager, less bigoted than he thought, got him a clean little whore to the house. Once he took her through to Niccolò’s chamber and engaged her several times just as she liked until her pretty skin was pink, front and back. The quilt was white silk brocade. Afterwards, he went back and smoothed it, ashamed. The stolen knife in his room was a worthy instrument of his vengeance, not this.

  On the morning after the bells, no one worked as they should except himself, for the man they liked to call King James had arrived, so they said, and was to ride to the Cathedral with his captains that afternoon. Already those who could afford carpets had hung them out of their windows, and picked spring flowers to throw. Diniz saw them as he helped carry ladders out to the street, to hoist the strings of dyed cloth higher than normal, as the law demanded during processions. He wondered if he might try to get away then, but Andrea’s man had a grip on his elbow. At noon they parted for dinner, and he was escorted back, as usual, to the villa.

  He saw, as soon as he got near, that the gates were open, and there were sumpter-mules in the yard, and several horses, one of them with the brand of the Lusignan stud. They seemed restive. Then he heard a shiver of bells and saw that against a far wall another animal stood, moving delicately into its tether. He saw a flank like spun silk, and four spindle-fine legs and a neck like the arch of a longbow. A racing-camel. A dream of a racing-camel. It looked at him in disdain, lashes lowered.

  So he had come. Only one man could own that.

  Diniz walked into the house, his face white. The house was empty. Dust on the terrazzo showed where spurred feet had trod, and in the inner court lay some saddlebags. From the private apartments there came a faint odour of horseflesh, and burned wool, and sweat. Prompted by distant noise, and wavering lines of spilled water and the sound of hurrying feet, Diniz turned and made for the kitchens.

  The household staff were all there, and the tables were heaped with raw food. He stepped back from the heat into the arms of the new steward, the man who had come after the negro freeman had left. The new steward, who answered to the French name of Galiot, remarked, ‘You’ll eat well tonight. As you see, Messer Niccolò has returned.’

  ‘I don’t see him,’ said Diniz.

  ‘He’s in the cooking-pot,’ cried one of the women, without stopping work.

  The man Galiot said, ‘He’s with the King. He’ll be back. Find yourself something. There’s bread, and a cheese.’

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ Diniz said. He knew that, from pale, he had flushed. He said, ‘The yard is closed. I can stay.’

  The steward paused. Then he said, ‘If they told you that, they were wrong. My lord has left orders. You are to return to the yard after dinner and work there.’

  ‘My lord?’ said Diniz. ‘Who is this? I know a Flemish base-born apprentice called Niccolò.’

  The steward stiffened. The woman who had spoken before scooped up the bread and the cheese and, turning to Diniz, thrust them into his arms. She said, ‘Go and eat, son, and do as you’re told. Lord or ’prentice, I wouldn’t cross that Flemish brute after what he’s done in St Hilarion.’

  ‘And that’s good advice,’ Galiot said. ‘Over there. Find a place to eat over there. Here, they’re busy.’

  Diniz moved, but not very quickly. He said, ‘I thought the castle surrendered.’

  ‘Over there,’ said the steward again. ‘Yes, it surrendered.’ The Frenchman pushed him out of the door, a jug of watered wine in one hand. The woman followed him with a cup. She said, ‘Aye, you would surrender if your women and children were poisoned, and your men burned to cinders with naphtha. He made sure, that young heathen, that those poor mites would never fight for Carlotta.’ She gave him the cup. She said, ‘If he says go back to the dyeyard, go back. And if he comes, say please and thank you and lick the salt from his toes if he asks you.’

  Diniz found she had gone, and he was still standing. The steward said, ‘They’re frightened. I’ve met hi
m. He’s no worse than anyone else. Eat your food. You’d better get to the yard before the procession starts.’

  ‘The victory procession,’ Diniz said.

  It needed two of them to push a way for him back to the yard, the press was so great. There they closed and locked the yard gates behind him. It was a big enclosure, with sheds and an office and scaffolded shelters over the winches and dyevats. He had never seen it deserted before: an oasis of quiet, while the crowd roared like the sea outside all the walls. The King … the Bastard must have ridden out with his train from the Palace. If he stood on a ladder, he might see the tops of his officers’ heads as they went down the road to St Sofia.

  The biggest space in the yard was occupied by the well with its wheel, and the cistern. The ground was always swilling. He went to the shelf where the clogs were and strapped them under his shoes. Before the Venetians came, the cold steeping had been done in clay-lined pits just sunk in the ground, and every winter flood water diluted them. Now they had copper vats. This morning, they had let the under-fires die, since they needed long tending if the colour was not to spoil.

  He remembered his first days in the yard, and the havoc he had created. If there was a part of him that had enjoyed it, as the young louts who helped him enjoyed it, he had grown out of that now. He was seventeen, and a man who stood, now, for his aunt and his father. He wondered what Niccolò vander Poele – my lord – might be wearing. Cloth of gold, no doubt, and silver armour, and harness and plumes set with diamonds. They would throw roses to him, and comfits. The clergy would wait, in their robes, at the Cathedral and the cheering would stop, and the chanting, the prayers begin. He would know by the silence when they entered the church.