Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [200]
The face below him turned pink. ‘Or Nicholas de Fleury of Beltrees, formerly of the Banco di Niccolò,’ said a chiding voice from behind. ‘Ambrogio, he is joking with you. This is a merchant companion of the Patriarch, and one who knows that Father Ludovico is too diplomatic, perhaps, to insist upon his full ecclesiastical title today. My name is Josaphat Barbaro, Messer Niccolò. You may not remember me. But we three strangers would be honoured if you and the Patriarch would join us in our pavilion. We are permitted wine.’
‘Even the lord Uzum Hasan is permitted wine,’ said Ambrogio Contarini, surveying Nicholas narrowly. ‘Too much of it, some of us think.’
‘Is it possible?’ Nicholas said, a little thickly. But before he could amuse himself further, the Patriarch strode swirling over, executed a volley of greetings and benisons, and swept him away. ‘Have you no sense?’
‘The situation didn’t call for any,’ said Nicholas. ‘He’s an ass.’
‘He’s Venetian,’ the Patriarch said. ‘A Venetian ass isn’t the same as a Flemish one. Its ears are bigger. And don’t: add what I am sure you are longing to add,’
‘I shouldn’t dare,’ Nicholas said. The Patriarch was, of course, right. He had been a fool. He had been a fool because he did not want to think about what he was doing.
He tried to put matters right, as was only fair, on the trek back to Tabriz, which was made in the company of the entire royal migration. Ambassador Contarini still didn’t know what to make of an ex-banker who (it was true) carried a pyx on a double-humped camel; but the small Veneto-Russian was amenable and Ambassador Barbaro, who chose to ride with him, turned out to be agreeably informative. It appeared that the Persian ruler’s rebellious son had fled with his family to the Turks after giving up Shiraz, which was still a frontier town and vital because of its armourers, even though the caravans no longer poured up from the Gulf with their jewels and their spice and their indigo.
In the days when Marco Polo rode through, the Tabriz fondacos had been full of the merchants and consuls of Venice and Genoa. Now, fine though it was — M. de Fleury had seen it — the place was largely a staging post for Caspian silk going through to Aleppo in Syria, just as Caffa had become an entrepôt for slaves and grain and preserved fish and furs instead of an emporium for the mighty caravans crossing from Astrakhan. The way to Cathay was blocked; the spice route through the Black Sea had become throttled by Turks; but traders regrouped and forced their way through somewhere else: they always did. When they found a way to circumnavigate Africa, that would be a different challenge again.
At that point, the pleasant voice paused, but not necessarily to invite speech. Nicholas nevertheless accepted the invitation. ‘Yes, I remember your excellency,’ he said. ‘Four years ago, at the time of our meetings in Venice, when my Bank decided not to invest in the Levant. And then later in Cyprus, when the King died.’ He looked round, and met Barbaro’s eyes.
The Venetian said, ‘Zacco held you in high regard. We were not enemies, either, he and I, although he made me his whipping-horse often enough. It was the Captain-General, Mocenigo, none of us had patience with. Cruel and unnecessary destruction.’
‘Smyrna burned to the ground, and two hundred and fifteen Turkish heads pronged on the yards of his ship,’ Nicholas said. ‘And he hanged the ringleaders of the rising in Cyprus. Who killed Zacco?’
He spoke through his scarf, as the other did: the dust and the noise lashed against them.
Barbaro said, ‘A Venetian, of course. I don’t know which. It was not I. I was at his funeral Mass. I was present when his son was baptised. They were fools. They could have ruled through him. You could have helped us all, once. The other, the artistic young man, was too vain. David de Salmeton. You had