Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [214]
‘I wonder if Adelina has,’ Julius said. ‘Gelis is trying to find her.’ He rose, and stretched, and stood smiling. ‘But what’s that to us? Are you going to sit there all day? We are going to Caffa!’
Cibalala du riaus du riaus
Cibalala durie.
IN FASSO, there was shipping, and news. The hibernation, the isolation, the incubation was over; the odyssey which had started in March was ending now, in the last days of July, its adventurers alive, unharmed, ready to take their place again in the busy highways washed by the sea.
Their guide discovered the Circassian’s house, but no one within it to greet them. Inside, they found familiar baggage. Contarini and Rosso had arrived, so it seemed, and gone out. Julius, too eager to wait, strode off to find them. The Patriarch, who was expected elsewhere, decided to linger. Brother Orazio and the servants went off, leaving Nicholas and Father Ludovico together. The Patriarch said, ‘Are you not eager, also, for news?’
‘No,’ said Nicholas.
‘Because you fear for your friends? The lord Uzum Hasan, if the Turkish fleet has passed down the coast and its armies are invading his country? Or Brother Lorenzo and his fellows on Crete, where the monks of Mount Sinai have a monastery? Or does everything seem uninteresting to you but the pleasures of returning to Caffa?’
‘You do not want to hear my troubles,’ Nicholas said.
‘I don’t ask to hear your troubles, you fool,’ the Patriarch said. ‘I ask about your hopes.’
‘They are the same thing,’ Nicholas said.
Soon after that, they heard the sound of running footsteps, and calling. The Venetian ambassador would never run, although they heard his shrill voice in the clamour; Rosso’s grating tones also. But it was Julius who burst in through the door and stood gasping against it, his high-boned face smeared with tears, and mucus, and sweat. And it was Julius who uttered the news.
‘We can’t join Anna in Caffa. There is no Caffa. There hasn’t been for seven weeks. The Turkish fleet wasn’t going to Crete; it was coming to the Crimea. It landed its guns, and its armies, and mastered it all. The Peninsula is a graveyard; every foreigner killed or enslaved; every town, every fortress demolished. And none of us was there.’
The Patriarch’s hand closed on his crucifix. He said, ‘Do you think we could have stopped it? Is there any news of your wife?’
Nicholas shut his eyes.
Julius said, ‘How could there be? At best, she’ll be in some — some Turkish hothouse.’ He choked.
‘Perhaps not,’ Nicholas said. He did not entirely believe what he was saying. Women generally received the fate Julius feared. He understood all Julius felt about Anna mainly because he felt it himself, about some stubborn Russians who would not heed advice, and a great Cairene teacher who, whatever threatened, would not abandon his flock. He said, ‘You might find her.’
Julius had become very still. He said, ‘Then I am going to Caffa.’
‘You can’t,’ said Rosso. It was contemptuous.
‘I can. I will,’ Julius said. He had quietened; looking at no one; preoccupied with his thoughts.
There was a space. The Patriarch looked at Nicholas, saying nothing.
Nicholas said, ‘Then I go with you. For if Anna has escaped, I know where to find her.’
Chapter 30
PLUNGED INTO ITS OWN summer wars, the West did not hear of the shocking events in the Levant until the end of the season. When Venice relayed the warning that something nasty was brewing in retaliation for the Turkish defeat in Moldavia, Caffa had already fallen. No one knew it. The Black Sea, now a Turkish lake, let nothing leak out in summer but anchovies. And even if it had, nothing would have been done about it. Among the Christian nations that summer there were few issues as important — how could there be? — as the King of England’s invasion of France. The better-known pirates, in particular, were flocking to Gascony.
Gelis, now a military veteran, found a macabre enjoyment