Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [250]
‘That is a good sign,’ said the Florentine. His long-nosed face was blue in the wind, and his beard almost white. Below the costly black fox of his hat, he looked like an ikon, or a figure by Rublev from one of the pulverised frescoes shovelled up over there; an eye and two fingers admonishing from an old barrow.
‘A good sign that I was thinking?’ Nicholas said. ‘But then, I thought how much cheaper it would be if they paid their own expenses to come all the way here. And the advantages. Egidia could manage the house, Marfa the Mayoress, and the boy would keep us all merry. He must be seven; old enough to be taught to watch out for your leg.’ He smiled generously.
‘You have decided,’ Acciajuoli said, ‘to be tiresome. Very well. I merely wondered, now that we know what we do, whether you had elected to spend your future in Russia.’
Now that we know what we do. Nicholas had thought of spending his future in Caffa, or with Uzum Hasan. Uzum Hasan had not spent the winter preparing to go to war with the Turk. He had marched north, as a show of strength against those rulers who might have aided his rebel son; then he had returned to his base. Barbaro was still with him, but only because his routes home were all closed. For the foreseeable future, the ruler of Persia would be battling against his own family, not the Turk.
And the Crimea, of course, was quite closed, although there was some news he had heard with mixed feelings. Oberto Squarciafico, carried to Constantinople with the Genoese he had betrayed, had been instantly executed by the Turks. The ousted Khan Mengli-Girey, on the other hand, had been shown clemency by the Sultan and freed, ready to return one day as Khan of the Crimea.
Nicholas did not find it hard to believe. He was prepared to hear that even Karaï Mirza had been spared. For, of course, the Turks had not invaded Caffa uninvited, after the widow’s son had been imposed as Tudun. Enraged by Genoese interference, the well-born supporters of the two deposed candidates had combined to invite the Ottoman Sultan to intervene. Which he had done, to effect. The channels between Qirq-yer and Constantinople had always been open, as Nicholas had known.
So, plot within plot, thread within thread, the Crimean conspiracy had played itself out, with the wisest and coolest heads winning. Nothing had quite been as it appeared; he had known that. But Squarciafico, thank God, had lost, with the widow’s ducats spilled from his satchel, and the widow herself could cause no more dissent, or her son. Nicholas wondered whether the same, one day, would come to be said of Zoe-Sophia, this formidable Duchess who some time, for sure, would have sons, and who would eye the young, shambling Ivan her step-son, so much their inferior. Some mothers, some timid mothers failed to fight for their sons, and gave up. Some gave up, it might even be, because they glimpsed the harm it might cause. But Nicholas would put nothing past Zoe.
Now he turned to Acciajuoli and said, ‘Why? Do you think I should stay?’
And the man had said, without his customary irony, ‘It depends, does it not, on your reasons? It happens, sometimes, that a country and a man come together at the right moment: that the man’s imagination is gripped, and he sees not what is before him, but what could be there. Might this happen to you?’ The large, dark eyes held his own, as if the question were of consummate importance.
It came to Nicholas, strangely, that to Acciajuoli, it was: that this was why the Greek from Florence was here; that to receive this answer was his only reason for coming to Muscovy. And then he saw beyond that, to the significance of the question itself, which he had never considered. For Nicholas had no interest in the future of Muscovy, any more than he had felt for the Crimea and Persia; any more indeed than he had felt for Bruges and for Venice, except