Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [172]
In ten years, Ochoa had hardly altered at all. The pock-marked face, toothless, elastic as wax, was pleated into the same patterns of joyous enthusiasm; the black eyes snapped; the voice swooped; the hands, relieving Nicholas of his outer clothing, probed the new-crusted scars and the plentiful corrugations of the old ones. ‘And they said you were a banker, my dear!’
‘The girls find it exciting,’ said Nicholas. He viewed the captain. ‘What about you?’
Ochoa cast a glance at his clothing. ‘The wool cap, the sheepskin, the boots? The merest expediency, in crossing from Bielogrod. Let me once get to my boxes, and you will soon see the old Ochoa.’
‘I am pleased enough to see the new one,’ Nicholas said.
He let the interview set its own pace, putting ten years of experience into the handling of it. To an ebullient free spirit like Ochoa, subservience to the Knights of St John had been embarrassing. He had, Nicholas deduced, made several unsuccessful attempts to escape before at last winning his present precarious freedom. Plied with rich food and wine, paid for by Nicholas, he found his greatest satisfaction at first in relating the successes of the past years: the conquests he had made for the Knights, but also the happy occasions on which he had totally misled that worthy Christian foundation, to their detriment. No one mentioned gold.
Some time later, further fortified, the captain had progressed to boasting of his recent adventure with the Sicilian mercenaries on the Dniester, when King Stephen had achieved a great victory over the Turks, with the consequence to Mánkup which Señor Niccolò would of course know.
Nicholas was waiting, with patience, to hear of his gold. Instead, he found himself learning of an upheaval in Mánkup, the mountain fortress of Isáac of Gothia, in whom the shadow of the empire of Trebizond persisted still. But Stephen, King of Moldavia, was building his own empire on the west coast of the Black Sea and, friend of Poland and arch-enemy of the Turks, was suspicious of Isaac.
‘Of course, the lovely prince Isáac was exchanging sweet messages with the Turks — who is not? — but King Stephen, a nervous man, apparently thought that he was about to surrender. Such a hot-head! At any rate, he sent Isáac’s brother Aleksandre to Mánkup with my friends, the three hundred Sicilians (one of them was my cousin). Aleksandre obligingly murdered his brother and will now rule as prince in his place. Gothia is secure from the Turks. Are you pleased?’
‘Not especially What happened to Abdan Khan?’
‘Isáac’s Circassian general? He survived. They need him. The mountain Mamelukes were all trained in Cairo, and share the Sultan’s hatred of Turkey. Anyway, you should be pleased. Your Ochoa is here, because his friends helped him to cross the Peninsula. And now you will hear what I have done for you.’
They had been speaking before in Italian. Now, for safety, Ochoa turned mostly to Spanish. It was the story Nicholas had already received, in gist, through Brother Lorenzo. At the end, Nicholas stared at him thoughtfully. ‘Of course, you should never have allowed yourself to be captured by the Knights in the first place. All you had to do was sail home with my gold. Slovenly seamanship …’
Ochoa jumped to his feet, his bared gums a short seam in their gusset. ‘I told you! The storm!’
‘And then all those years working for them before you actually managed to escape and make the effort to find me. But since you did, I owe you something,’ Nicholas said. ‘Even though you would have walked off with the extra had you been able to. How did you persuade the Knights that they had everything?’
‘I am very persuasive,’ said Ochoa. ‘And so how much do you owe me?’
‘Your wages, I suppose. As for the gold, I have to get it yet,’ Nicholas said. ‘And as you tell