Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [199]
‘I shall get on with him,’ Nicholas said. He spoke politely. ‘And the other Venetian? A newcomer?’ He ran through his mind all the names he had heard.
‘I’ll leave you to find out for yourself,’ the Patriarch said. ‘Just be nice to him.’
THE BURGUNDIAN TRIBUTE of cloth of gold, crimson velvet and violet, which Nicholas had carried sewn into his bedroll all the way from Fasso, was adequate in its splendour, although outmatched by the hangings of Uzum Hasan’s travelling pavilion of scarlet felt within which, neatened up for the occasion, the Italian Franciscan Ludovico de Severi da Bologna, Patriarch of Antioch, presented, with an inclination of the head, his Latin letters of credence and then proceeded, on a nod from the throne, to deliver the greetings and prayers of his lord.
The Duke of Burgundy, so far as Nicholas could gather, had been remarkably vague in his exhortations and remarkably prolix in his expression of them. The Patriarch, whose native ripeness of language had affronted half Europe, discovered, droning, fifteen tedious ways of appealing to the Lord Uzum Hasan to attack his brother the Turk. The interpreter’s voice obediently followed, and the lord Uzum Hasan listened with grace but no visible interest. Tall as his nickname suggested, the old man sat erect on his cushions with one hand on the jewels of his scimitar, the other teasing the chin of his hound. Within the worked golden headgear of ceremony, the prince’s features were dish-shaped and gamboge: the willowy moustaches and beard drooped among the blue pebbled chains of raw turquoises. His nobles, coated with chased and ribbed metal, provided the vast red pavilion with a motionless lining of ruby.
Among them, the ambassadors, glimmering uneasily, identified themselves to Nicholas’s large and disengaged eye. Short Marco Rosso, the Venetian rat turned Muscovite beaver: a man in his thirties, with a black Russian moustache and spade beard above a long buttoned coat in pale damask. Josaphat Barbaro, whom he was expected to like, in the red hat and robe of a well-bred Venetian; his narrow face lined with the marks of thirty-five years in the Levant; his eyes, brown as topazes, moving between the Patriarch and the passive bulk of Nicholas, his anonymous henchman. And the third man, also the spokesman of Venice, whom Nicholas had never seen before, but whom he felt instantly that he knew: knew the pale, fretful face and broad nose and the shaving scar on the neck under the fashionable bulk of the hairline, displayed by the very tall hat.
At first, it didn’t seem possible. The man in question had passed south the previous summer, and would surely have gone before now. But when the Patriarch’s lecture had ended, and the prince had replied with the necessary courtesies and a promise to consider the matter, the first person to file out beside Nicholas was the barbered envoy. ‘Do I gather that you speak the Venetian tongue?’ said the gentleman.
‘I do my best,’ Nicholas said. ‘I have the honour of addressing a nobleman of that Republic?’
‘Indeed,’ said the gentleman, halting and raising his large, lidded eyes. ‘My name is Ambrogio Contarini, son of Messer Benedetto, and ambassador of the Illustrious Signoria to the magnificent lord Uzum Hasan. And you are the Franciscan friar’s secretary? Or the Patriarch, are we invited to call him? Although I thought the title now held by another.’
‘I am honoured,’ said Nicholas. ‘His secretary, no. Some men profess