VOLUME II: The Spring of the Ram
Simon de St Pol, the overshadowed son of Jordan de Ribérac, husband of the bitter Katelina, father of the secretly illegitimate Henry, has clearly had his spirit poisoned long since by the powerful and malignant de Ribérac, and is as much pitied as loathed by Nicholas vander Poele, who sees in Simon something of his own deracinated brilliance. Looking to find a sphere of activity where Simon and Nicholas can no longer injure each other, Marian de Charetty, now the wife of Nicholas, persuades her husband to take up an exciting and dangerous project: to trade in Trebizond, last outpost of the ancient empire of Byzantium.
It is less than a decade since Sultan Mehmet took Constantinople, and the several forces of Islam—Mehmet’s Ottomans, Uzum Hassan’s Turcomans, Kushcadam’s Egyptian Mamelukes—ring the Christian outpost while delegates from the Greek Orthodox East, led by the very earthy and autocratic Franciscan friar Ludovico de Severi da Bologna, scour the Latin West for money and troops to mount still another crusade. With Medici backing and Church approval, Nicholas sets out for Trebizond to trade as Florentine consul, bringing his skilled mercenaries as a show of support from the West—a show that will soon turn real as the Sultan moves against the city more quickly than anyone had anticipated.
Nicholas’ rival, and in some ways alter ago, is the gifted, charming, and amoral Pagano Doria, trading for Genoa, gaming with Venice’s Nicholas in a series of brilliant pranks and tricks which include, terribly, the seduction of the thirteen-year-old Catherine de Charetty, one of Nicholas’ two rebellious stepdaughters. Pagano, who is secretly financed by Nicholas’ enemy Simon de St Pol, has invited the adolescent Catherine to challenge her stepfather, and no pleas or arguments from Nicholas, her mother’s officers, or the new figures joining the Company—the priest Godscalc and the engineer John le Grant—can sway her.
In Trebizond, Nicholas deploys his trading skills while he assesses Byzantine culture, once spiritually and politically supreme, now calcified in routine, crumbling in self-indulgence. Nicholas must resist the Emperor David’s languidly amorous overtures while he takes the lead in preparing the city for, and then withstanding, the siege of the Sultan. The city, however, is betrayed by its Emperor and his scheming Chancellor, and Pagano Doria suffers his own fall, killed by a black page whom he carelessly loved and then sold to the Sultan. Nicholas has willed neither fall, yet has set in motion some of the psychopolitical “engineering” which has triggered these disasters, and he carries, with Father Godscalc’s reflective help and the more robust assistance of Tobie and le Grant, part of the moral burden of them.
The burden weighs even during the triumphant trip back to Venice with a rescued if still recalcitrant Catherine and a fortune in silk, gold, alum, and Eastern manuscripts, the “golden fleece” which this Jason looks to lay at the feet of his beloved wife. A final skirmish with Simon, angry at the failure of his agent Doria, ends the novel abruptly, with news which destroys all the remaining dream of homecoming: Marian de Charetty, traveling through Burgundy in her husband’s absence, has died.
VOLUME III: Race of Scorpions
Rich and courted, yet emotionally drained and subconsciously enraged, Nicholas seeks a new shape for his life after visiting his wife’s grave, establishing his still-resentful stepdaughters in business themselves, and allowing his associates to form the Trading Company and Bank of Niccolò in Venice. Determined to avoid the long arm of Venetian policy, attracted to the military life not precisely for its sanction of killing but for the “sensation of living through danger” it offers, Nicholas returns from Bruges to the war over Naples in which he had, years before, lost Marian’s son Felix and contracted a marsh fever which revisits him in moments of stress. When he is kidnapped in mid-battle, he at first supposes it to be by order of his personal enemies, Simon and Katelina; but in fact it is Venice which wants him and his mercantile and military skills in another theater of war, Cyprus.
The brilliant and charismatic but erratic James de Lusignan and his Egyptian Mameluke allies have taken two-thirds of the sugar-rich island of Cyprus from his legitimate Lusignan sister, the clever and energetic Carlotta, and her allies, the Christian Knights of St. John and the Genoese, who hold the great commercial port of Famagusta. Sensing that, of the two Lusignan “scorpions,” James holds the winning edge, Nicholas agrees to enter his service. He intends to design the game this time, not be its pawn, but he doesn’t reckon with the enmity of Katelina, who comes to Rhodes to warn Carlotta against him, or the sudden presence of Simon’s Portuguese brother-in-law Tristão Vasquez and Vasquez’s naïve sixteen-year-old son Diniz, all three of whom do become pawns.
Nicholas is now the lover of Carlotta’s courtesan, the beautiful Primaflora, whose games he also thinks he can control, and he recognizes a crisis of countermanipulations brewing between Katelina and Primaflora. Only at the end of the novel, after Katelina’s love/hate for Nicholas has been manipulated to bring Tristão to his death and Diniz to captivity under James, after Nicholas and Katelina rediscover intimacy and establish the truth of their relationship, after a brilliant and deadly campaign waged by Nicholas for James has brought him to ultimate tragedy—the siege of Famagusta which he planned and executed has resulted, without his knowledge, in the death of Katelina and the near-death of Diniz, trapped in the starving city—only at the end does Nicholas fully admit even to himself that much of this has been planned or sanctioned by Primaflora, intent on securing her own future.
In the end, too, the determinedly rational Nicholas gives vent to his rage. Punishment for the pain of the complex desires and denials in his private and public history cannot be visited upon the complex and only half-guilty figures of his family or his trading and political rivals and clients. But in this novel, for the first time, he finds a person he can gladly kill, the unspeakably cruel Mameluke Emir Tzani-bey al-Ablak, whom he fatally mutilates in single combat while James, unknown to him, has the Emir’s four-hundred-man army massacred in a preemptive strike carrying all the glory and damnation of Renaissance kingship.
Like Pagano Doria, like Nicholas himself, Primaflora is a “modern” type, a talented and alienated “self-made” person. Unlike the other two, Nicholas has the memory of family in which to ground a wary, half-reluctant, but genuine adult existence in the community. At the same time, however, he avoids close relationships: he has established the Bank of Niccolò as a company, not a family. But, resisting and insisting, the members of the company forge bonds of varying intimacy with Nicholas, especially the priest Godscalc and the physician Tobie, who alone at this point know the secret of Katelina’s baby and carry the dying woman’s written affirmation of Nicholas’ paternity.
Nicholas’ only true intimate, however, is a man of a different race entirely, the African who came to Bruges as a slave and was befriended by the servant Claes, who first communicated the secret of the alum deposit, who traveled with him to Trebizond to run the trading household, and to Cyprus to organize and under Nicholas reinvent the sugar industry there. His African name is as yet unknown, his Portuguese name is Lopez, his company name Loppe. Now a major figure in the company, and the family, he listens at the end of the novel as both Nicholas and his new rival, the broker of the mysterious Vatachino company, look to the Gold Coast of Africa as the next place of questing and testing.
Judith Wilt
Chapter 1
TO THOSE WHO remembered him, it was typical that Nicholas should sail into Venice just as the latest news reached the Rialto, causing the ducat to fall below fifty groats and dip against the écu. Instead of leading the welcome party, Gregorio sent Cristoffels to St Mark’s Basin instead, with a group of senior officials who didn’t know Nicholas. He hoped Cristoffels remembered what his employer looked like.
The word, of course, had spread to the Exchange that vander Poele’s ship had passed the bar and was on its way to the anchorage. In the midst of the flurry – affirming deals, sending off couriers with drafts and remittances – Gregorio suffered s
natches of good-humoured banter. For more than two years he had run the Bank of Niccolò in place of its founder, and his fellow lawyers and brokers liked to claim he lived in dread of the coming accounting. It might have been funnier if it hadn’t, in its way, been correct.
He had posted a couple of runners between St Mark’s and the Rialto. When the cry came from the Bridge, he was reasonably ready to leave. It meant only that the ship’s boat from the Adorno had reached the Foscari bend, and he could still achieve the Bank building before it. The Grand Canal was a long, busy waterway lined with palaces; and the roundship’s crew, long at sea, would scarcely speed with a heavy craft laden with luggage.
Nevertheless, Gregorio went immediately to the Bridge, throwing instructions to a scurrying junior. It was too hot for his doublet and gown, even considering the occasion; even considering what Margot thought about it. He let his servant, trotting, button him into his pourpoint and shed his clerk at the steps, although he turned to call after him: ‘And remember, purchase at usance!’ Then he fought to the rail at the top of the drawbridge and paused for a sight of the Grand Canal stretching before him.
The sun, admitted tax-free between the palaces of two of his clients, struck the water and blinded him. He pulled down the brim of his hat until it met his unhandsome nose, and trained his middle-aged eyes, which were thirty-two like the rest of him, on the confusion of intermeshed oars belonging to passenger skiffs, heavy barges and lighters, vessels laden with fish and with vegetables passing up and down and across on their daily purposes. A two-pole gondola came towards him, gilded and tasselled and managed by liveried Negroes wearing the badge of the family Loredano. It slid under the Bridge, making way for a jolting boatful of overnight revellers in carnival mantles and masks. They passed, screaming into the dazzle.
Beyond them stood his Bank, a third of the way between the Bridge and the bend. His Bank, his office, his warehouse, his home. The Casa di Niccolò, all now to reside in the hands of a man whose script on the outside of a letter-packet made him feel faint.
He should hurry. Clattering down the far side of the Bridge, Gregorio turned right and set off quickly along his own bank, striding up and down bridges and passing between the rocking gondolas and noble façades of the richest side of the richest highway in Venice. Glancing from time to time at the canal, he saw some altercation had jammed it. He had seldom seen its traffic so thick or so sluggish. He slackened his pace. Nothing was going to row very fast at this rate.
Now he could see the jutting edge of his Bank, its red and white patterned wall washed over with light from the side-canal and a crowd grouped on the Grand Canal frontage before it. His household and clerks, out to catch a first glimpse of their master.
Margot wouldn’t be there, she would be watching upstairs on the balcony. Margot, to whom he was not married and whom he would trust before anyone, had read the last reports written by Nicholas before sailing to Venice from Cyprus. In these Nicholas had set down, for the eye of his lawyer alone, his private reasons for leaving the island. They had been brief, and contained neither excuse nor apology. Nor had he indicated what he intended to do once he reached Venice. Gregorio, much disturbed, didn’t know what to expect of this meeting.
He did intend, however, to arrive first at the Bank. It looked as if he would. The mooring posts before the double doors of the Ca’ Niccolò were still empty; he had had his freight vessels moved round to the side. He had also sent a few extra men to the Basin. Robbers were not very likely, but Nicholas had achieved notorious success for himself and his Bank while in Cyprus. In business, Nicholas was unerring, and merciless, if not caught in time.
And now he was here. The great boat from the roundship was suddenly visible: an ugly, well-painted vessel, low in the water with coffers and men, and lying athwart the crowded canal as it waited to cross to its mooring. The rowers were the Adorno’s own marines, dressed in caps and clean tunics. Packed among them were the Bank’s envoys, and servants.
Distinguishable from them all were the two principal passengers, seated aft and robed as for the elaborate charade of their landing. One he knew at once by his colour and size: Loppe, by God! Lopez, the gifted African who managed what could be managed in Nicholas’s aberrant life, including his sugar estates.
And the other, his equal in towering brawn, was Nicholas vander Poele, Flemish merchant, shading his eyes as he scanned the congestion. The sun flashed on a ring at his knuckle.
He had made some concessions to heat: his short coat was of silk, and his twisted headgear, concealing all but some tufts of brown hair, was stitched from the thinnest of linen. His face below it was baked brown and smooth as a biscuit and his eyes, grossly large, gave his concentrated gaze an aspect of innocence which the curve of his lips contradicted. Gregorio, standing in shade, thought to call and then didn’t. Lopez sat, looking about him and once, Gregorio noticed, leaned to murmur to Nicholas, who glanced briefly upwards.
The oars idled, unable to progress. Watermen shouted. The cause of the blockage, abruptly revealed, proved to be a single craft ineptly managed upstream, its passage marked by the drumming of timber and a chorus of curses accompanied by outbursts of bibulous laughter. A boatload, it appeared, of shouting, carolling revellers, its sides furrowed and scraped, its oars scarred, its bow and blades gouging for it a battering passage. As it rampaged through the water, the sun glinted on a handful of fur and a mask.
It was the carnival boat he had noticed. The situation of the ducat in relation to the groat and the mark abandoned its place in Gregorio’s consciousness.
The Adorno’s boat, in midstream, waited with whatever patience men had, within sight of the end of a voyage. Nicholas looked about him, listening to Lopez, and stooping to grope for some possession or other beneath him. The festive boat blundered closer, and those endangered hastened, with shouts, to move further off. With professional competence, the Adorno’s rowers dug in their oars and swung their great boat aside from its passage.
Now the party-goers were plain: the wide-brimmed black hats of the oarsmen, the painted chins and lurid masks of the twelve burly men they were carrying. The leader stood cloaked in the prow, one foot on the gunwale, one flamboyant fist cocked on its knee. On his head was the mask of a goose and below the cloak his other hand, like those of his comrades, was hidden.
It could not have been by chance that, this time, the carnival craft suddenly found the application and skill to avoid every boat in its path. It was not by chance that, instead of stumbling from vessel to vessel, it adroitly slipped through each watery space until, conducted smoothly and well, it came shooting suddenly forward, the ramming prow aimed straight for the laden ship’s boat from Cyprus.
Gregorio’s shout was one of a chorus of warning. The mariners dug in their oars, changing angle to lessen the impact. The expected crash didn’t come. Just before the two boats collided, the pursuing oarsmen feathered their blades. The masked figure bent down, and, lifting something heavy and small, threw it hard. It fell within the ship’s boat, clicked and held. It was a grappling iron. As the two boats whipped together, the man in the goose mask threw himself from his own boat to the other, and his companions followed.
Gregorio saw the mariners half rise and stagger; saw Cristoffels and the rest use their fists, saw the flood of revellers pour down the big vessel, fending off blows, to where the coffers were piled. The boat rocked. At the farthest end, Lopez sprang to his feet. Nicholas gathered what he was holding and rose, his right arm drawing painfully back. In his grasp was a bow, short and ornate and powerful, its arrow trained on the leader.
He said, ‘Turn back your cloaks, and drop your weapons into the water.’
The man in the goose mask cried out. He screamed, ‘Monseigneur, don’t shoot! Wait! Have mercy! My lords, we beg for our lives!’ With frantic hands he unfastened his cloak, his gaze piteous. Hastily he cast off the garment and lifting the object he bore, extended it trembling to Nicholas. Then, with a whistle of devilish laughter, he
tossed it aloft.
It hung, with the eyes of everyone on it: a carnival wand made of paper, with a grotesque, gilded head at one end. Then it began to descend in a spiral of unravelling ribbon. Someone started to laugh. Squealing, cackling and booing, the men in motley joined in the hilarity and, thrusting their hands from their cloaks, each produced an identical baton, brightly ribboned, with fantastic knobs of goblins and dragons with which they set about slapping their victims. They carried no weapons at all.
Around the two boats, a chuckle arose. On the other side of the canal, people thrust forward to see what was happening, and faces appeared at grand windows. On the open gallery of the Palazzo Barzizza, directly opposite, there was a sudden, short movement.
Lopez said, ‘Ser Niccolò.’
It was so brief and so quiet that Gregorio wouldn’t have caught it except that all his attention was on them. The revellers continued to caper. Nicholas turned, the strung bow swinging through ninety degrees with him. The man in the goose mask had let down his points and was preparing a final, copious gesture.
The Negro stretched across Nicholas, and, seizing the man like a dribbling sack, lifted and set him down standing before them. The man, surprised, gave a howl. The floating audience, now on its feet, grasped one another and laughed, even when the man howled again. Then the laughter started to die as those closest saw his falling arms swing at the elbows, and blood cascade frothing and red from the slackening mouth under the mask. Driven hard through his chest was an arrow.