Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [232]
‘Oh, he died,’ Nicholas said.
They spent the rest of the night out of sight of the town, in a vineyard. Someone had stripped all the grapes With rough hands, breaking the vines which had filled the wagons, just a year ago, with their tender, sun-glowing loads. There was no reason to speak of it. By then, Nicholas had told as much as he wanted of what he had discovered.
The fleet had been quite irresistible. Under Gedik Ahmed Pasha, the Grand Vizier, nearly five hundred warships and transports had sailed to attack the Crimea, with artillery capable of breaking through the stone walls of Caffa, new and old, with their twenty-six towers, and sealing off Soldaia to the point of starvation. Even before the towns surrendered, hundreds had died.
The Poles, the Russians, the Georgians, the Wallachians had been the first to be sold as slaves or imprisoned, all their wealth being seized. Next had come the selection of young men and girls for the Sultan, three thousand in all. Finally, there had come a demand for an accounting from all those remaining — Italians, Armenians, Greeks and Jews, with torture for those who tried to conceal what they had. Then, after the mulcting, the Grand Vizier had let it be known that all Italians were required to pack their remaining goods, and board Turkish transports for Constantinople. The fate of the Genoese consul was not known, but Oberto Squarciafico had been among those compelled to sail for Turkey, having backed the wrong candidate without lasting benefit from the widow’s two thousand ducats.
Eminek, the chosen Tudun, stayed in Caffa in triumph, as Tartar Governor under the Ottomans. The brothers of the Khan Mengli-Girey had been freed, the elder to rule in his place. The Khan himself had been taken to Constantinople by command of the Sultan: his fate, and that of his wise adviser Karaï Mirza, had not yet been heard. No one knew what had happened to Sinbaldo di Manfredo, Straube’s agent, or to the Circassian, or to Dymitr Wiśniowiecki and his Russians. Probably no one would ever know. It was believed — but he did not tell Julius — that some Genoese had escaped across the Straits of Kerch to Kabardia. The Patriarch’s faith had been justified.
He had wondered, for a while, whether Anna might have fled to Mánkup, until he learned that mountain Gothia, with its thirty thousand families, its fifteen thousand fighting men and three hundred Sicilians under the usurping, militant brother Aleksandre, prince of Theodoro, had been under siege by the Turkish troops of Ahmed Pasha ever since the coastal towns gave in, and was still holding out. None of his friends could be there, whereas they might be in the caves he had told Julius about. Julius would try to go there in any case, so he might as well take him. If the Turks were there already, it couldn’t be helped.
Lying beside Julius, cocooned in cloth, with the gnats whining about them, Nicholas allowed his mind, for the first time, to dwell upon death.
It is a worthy thing, to contemplate one’s end with tranquillity; without recoil, and equally without pusillanimous eagerness.
How angry you will be when I, too, meet my death. But it will excuse you from thinking.
The imam had prepared him for his own end. Yet he had not known, he had not had an inkling of how he would die.
Tonight, Nicholas had climbed to the citadel of Soldaia and, stepping silently through the breached walls, had walked from one familiar place to the next in the desolate grounds. There were windows lit within the jagged outline of the former Governor’s buildings on the ridge, and in the Little Eye, the four-man watchtower on the high peak beyond it. There were lights, also, in the old Venetian customs building which the Genoese had turned into a guardroom. The Venetians, too, had been thrown out of Soldaia in their day; and had complained about it. There was no one else around. There was no reason why there should be.
The Turkish guns had smashed through the perimeter, but the garrison buildings within were intact.