Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [211]
‘I am sorry,’ Nicholas said. With the part of his mind that was not numb, he wished he could convey the fact that he distrusted Venice, and yet regretted the decline in its glory for the sake of men such as this: the adventurers, the pioneers, the inquisitive merchants. All through his journey in Persia, Josaphat Barbaro had observed and filed what he saw, from the black oil of the Caspian, which could be lit but not drunk, to the smallest detail of the places and people he had encountered.
He had done the same in the years spent as Venetian consul in Tana. From his own perspective of one solitary winter in disguise. Nicholas had worn several nights through with the Venetian, recreating that strange Crimean society, half icy, half tropical; discussing, conjecturing; sharing knowledge. Thirty-seven years ago, Tana had been a Venetian colony, and Barbaro had befriended the Tartars who came there. They suffered, he said, from sore mouths caused, they claimed, by lack of salt. But Barbaro had seen mouths like that among seamen, and it was not caused by an absence of salt.
Then, Nicholas had said nothing of Ochoa, as he said nothing, up to that point, about gold. Barbaro’s tales were not about achievements or money. One of the best had to do with his mortifying endeavour (for a bet) to dig for Carpathian gold in a burial mound, hacking through frozen sub-soil with crews of sceptical labourers, to uncover no more than you would on a rubbish heap. It was in the wake of that lugubrious story that Barbaro suddenly said, ‘But you know, of course, that there is treasure in Cyprus. Or was.’
He could be silent, or pretend. Instead, Nicholas said, ‘I know of Zacco’s will, which referred to it. It may well have gone by now. I do not have it.’
Barbaro said, ‘The story ran that it was yours.’
‘It was put there by a man called Ochoa, with Zacco’s collusion. Zacco did not like the Knights of St John.’
‘They were claiming it? I do not like them myself,’ Barbaro said. ‘I hope the right person receives it, and that the recipient does not prove to be the small, scented person I once mentioned.’
‘David de Salmeton? He could not return,’ Nicholas said. ‘Your Venetians would kill him.’
‘We Venetians like money,’ Barbaro said. ‘Which reminds me. I have brought my own dice, much better loaded than yours. What shall we play, and what shall we play for?’
He had a store of good bawdy songs, from the long winter nights in the fishing-grounds, and knew all the verses of some of those the Russians sang. The bagpipe ditty had become an unspoken favourite, launched upon at a certain stage of the night when Contarini was not within hearing, and reaching its last two lines, and refrain, with a shout:
… De cop de cotel
Fu sa muse perchie …
Cibalala du riaus du riaus
Cibalala durie.
Their parting, when it came, was brisk and friendly, as befitted men who were not boon companions.
On that, the final day with the prince, his guests were treated to a ceremonial parade of his army, viewed from a pavilion raised on a bluff. Contarini, anxiously calculating, counted ten thousand foot and twenty-five thousand cavalry passing below them. Rosso and Barbaro said nothing. Nicholas stared at them unseeing, blinded by the dazzle on helmets and cuirasses, the brilliant harness; the housings on horses and camels; the intricate work on the round silken shields. The tall standards crowded like hollyhocks and the sun flashed from raised swords. The prince was marching upon his son, or upon the Turk: no one was quite certain which. Or if they were, they did not say.
On Wednesday, the twenty-eighth day of June, the envoys left Uzum Hasan for the last time. Two Persian legates went with them. For some — the Patriarch, Rosso — it was the end of one of several such visits, and carried no significance beyond what was obvious: the prince, in age, was striving after twenty-two years to hold