Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [230]
She must tell Tobie and the rest. She sat for a long time, without weeping, before she rose and picked up the notes from her desk to tear them into small pieces. There was no point, now, in completing them. Now, no warnings could pass, either way.
Chapter 32
THAT AUGUST, Nicholas de Fleury was alive simply because he had not yet got himself back into Caffa.
A boat had to be found to take him, with Julius. And once found, it had to be bought, since no one would lease or charter a vessel which would certainly never return. It was, astonishingly, Ludovico da Bologna who bade Orazio open the rat-trap of his purse and help buy it, and his acquaintances from the Greek Christian community who found local fishermen who would crew it, provided that they sailed it one way, and thereafter kept the boat itself as their fee. They would land two crazy Franks on the coast, but they weren’t going to wait for them.
Rosso, the Muscovite envoy, paid no attention, being deep in his own dogged plans to leave the Black Sea and find another safe route north to Moscow. Contarini, having begged to go with him, gasped with horror when told his itinerary and took to his bed, overcome by what he feared was the plague, but which might have been simply a bad attack of the flux.
Ludovico da Bologna, having hitherto kept the party safely together by his bullying, now made a number of simple, efficient plans, and departed from Fasso before anybody. To the Venetian envoy’s accusing shrieks, he had merely stated that it was time for each of them to care for his own safety. With him, he carried Uzum Hasan’s envoy, loaded with presents for Charles of Burgundy, in recognition of the Duke’s unremitting attention to the struggle against the Turk in the Levant.
The Patriarch was travelling home by way of Moscow, as was Rosso. Only, unlike Rosso, Ludovico da Bologna was taking a route twice as dangerous, for which there were no guides, and which would have been impossible for anyone without prior knowledge. The Patriarch was travelling by boat and by horse up the eastern coast of the Black Sea, where the cliffs grudgingly gave way now and then to the shore, and the small mixed communities harboured Christians from the Patriarch’s strange, far-flung parish. It would bring him, in the end, to the river which would launch him towards Moscow. It would also bring him to the Straits of Kerch, the doorway to the Sea of Azov, and the one safe crossing which fleeing refugees from the Crimea might use. That summer, the eastern shore of the Black Sea was where penniless bands of Genoese and Venetians would be in need of succour.
‘He might find Anna!’ Julius had said; but Nicholas thought it unlikely. The Genoese who were Anna’s patrons would have been the first to be captured or killed. She was not a part of the working community of Caffa, which, given a chance, would know where to go. In any case, from what he heard, not many had been given a chance. The same was true, of course, of the Russians; and of the imam Ibrahiim who, to some Turks, represented the Sultan Qayt Bey more than he represented Allah.
The voyage, when it came, was one of the worst Nicholas ever remembered. The Black Sea, over five hundred miles from east to west, made its own storms, even in August, and was known as a graveyard of vessels. They worked the ship, stripped to their dark Turkish breeches, and the rest of the time slept exhausted in corners; he and Julius hardly spoke. On the first day, when the enormity of what had happened smote them in Fasso, Julius had looked up at Nicholas eventually and said, ‘The gold. I suppose this is the end of the gold. If it came, the Turks have it. And the furs.’
And Nicholas had said, ‘You have lost the furs, certainly. As for the gold, it may have turned back, if the carrier saw what had happened in time.’ And then,