Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [41]
She said, “He’s grown in some ways. I don’t want trouble with Claes until the galleys are in. Then I’ll tell him.”
“As you like.” Astorre was unworried. He went out to get the rest of the boxes and she watched him. She thought it very likely that Claes had already guessed what she was going to do with him. And if he hadn’t, he would soon sniff it out, among all those other yards and kitchens and offices where he ran his messages, and was always made welcome.
He would sniff it out, but he would do nothing until she told him publicly. She could rely on that as she could rely on nothing else in her life. She thought of Claes defending Julius, and Julius defending Claes, and was aware of a shadow of jealousy.
Chapter 7
“I’LL KEEP OUT of my lord Simon’s way,” Claes had promised.
Marian de Charetty saw that he did. She placed him under house arrest, and did the same for her breezy son Felix. She did not think, unfortunately, of restraining her mercenary captain Astorre, whom she considered an adult. When, a few days later, the merchant galleys sailed in from Venice, it seemed to the head of the Charetty company that her household was under control, and she had nothing now to distract her from her business. At first, she was right.
Without Claes or Felix, the fifty thousand people of Bruges, more or less, covered by foot or by rowboat the few miles to the harbour at Sluys, there to see the two slender ships from Venice move in and drop anchor.
It was never less than marvellous, every year. To see the sun-glow slide through the silk of the banners, and the blaze as the oars unscrolled every one from the water and stood erect on each side like two combs. To hear the flagship begin to make music: first the drums and pipes with a rattle and chirrup, and then the burping of trumps from the poop. Above the flash of the brass, the fringe would blow and wink on the canopy where you would see, each year different, the thick sprawling embroidery of the commander’s device.
And across the water, you would swear you could sniff it all; the cinnamon and the cloves, the frankincense and the honey and the liquorice, the nutmeg and citrons, the myrrh and the rosewater from Persia in keg upon keg. You would think you could glimpse, heaped and glimmering, the sapphires and the emeralds and the gauzes woven with gold, the ostrich feathers and the elephant tusks, the gums and the ginger and the coral buttons mynheer Goswin the clerk of the Hanse might be wearing on his jacket next week.
It was a trick, that was for sure, like the Duke’s performers at Carnival time. It was no accident that the galleys always downed sails and entered harbour in daylight, with the decks sluiced and the rowers and sailing-masters in livery and the noblemen commanding each ship in a stiffened gown in the crazy Venetian mode, their beards newly trimmed, with perhaps a chained marmoset on one shoulder.
It wasn’t a difficult trick. The Flanders galleys never spent nights at sea like the round ships, getting dirty with no time to put things to rights before landing. The Flanders galleys put into harbour every night in their highly-paid voyage from Venice, fanned down the Adriatic by the thick summer airs, drifting into Corfu and Otranto, nosing into and out of Sicily and round the heel of Italy as far as Naples; blowing handsomely across the western gulf to Majorca, and then to the north African coast, and up and round Spain and Portugal, dropping off the small, lucrative loads which were not needed for Bruges; taking on board a little olive oil, some candied orange peel, some scented leather, a trifle of plate and a parrot, some sugar loaves.
But never anything crude, or bulky, or coarse. The Republic’s Flanders galleys were the princes of Venice’s fleet, expensively manned and expensively