Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [79]
Astorre’s only concession was to reload all the merchandise on to pack horses and mules, and muffle the four gift horses in blankets. As an afterthought, Loppe got a blanket too, above which his broad black face rose like a smoothly-buffed moulding. He was unhappy.
The roping and packing was assigned to Claes, who had proved in the journey from Bruges to be an instinctive expert in the distribution of weight, and who could design knots like a sailor. Although the snow glistened on the Jura mountains on their left and the Alps on their right, the lakeside was still green and without the carts they moved briskly, the harsh bitter wind bending and whipping their standards and the new-dyed plumes on Astorre’s shining helmet.
Four days, they reckoned to take, from Geneva to the St Bernard’s hospice on the top of Mount Jove, and, with luck, no snow until they had left the lake and climbed as far as St Pierre. In fact, they achieved it in three, because traffic to and from the Pope’s Crusading Congress had squashed down the snow and given the inns and monasteries a reason for being warm and well-plenished and lucratively efficient.
There were, of course, other ways of crossing into Italy. Armies went by the Brenner Pass, which was gentler and good for supplies. Germans such as Sigismund of the Tyrol went by the St Gotthard. French and Flemings and English who didn’t want to travel by Lake Geneva could ship their goods south on the river Rhone to Marseilles, and in the sailing season, make for Genoa.
But it wasn’t the sailing season, and in any case, Genoa was controlled by the French. So, his frilled ear blue and his beard spiked with frost, the captain led his little company through Savoy, which was controlled by the French as well, in the sense that King Charles told the Duke of Savoy what to do. But then, as everyone knew, the Duke’s wife and all her relations from Cyprus also told the Duke what to do.
Facing all ways, that was the Duke of Savoy. His father the Pope, who had died eight years before, had at least known what he wanted, and how to get it, if not how to look it in the eye. A cross-eyed monkey, the present Pontiff had been heard to call the late Pope Felix, in Latin naturally. Gossip about Pius the present Pope lingered, discreet and titillating, in all the inns and monasteries Astorre’s company called at.
It might seem a delicate topic, but there were others more dangerous. There was an English party at St Maurice, stiff with armorial bearings, and you wouldn’t choose to talk to them about their idiot Lancastrian king and his Yorkist rebels. Or about their French queen, whose brother you were actually going to Naples to fight. It was safer to chat about the Pope’s fearful visit to Scotland nearly twenty-five years since, and its well-known consequences. A half-Scottish bastard, soon perished, for one. And a barefoot pilgrimage for another, which had afflicted the feet of Pius Aeneas ever afterwards. You would have thought that Papal feet would have interested this great doctor Tobias. But he just sat and drank, and watched Claes a lot. Astorre noticed him.
At the next meal, a Milanese on his way north deafened them on the same topic till Meester Julius felt roused to put in a word for the Pontiff. “All right. He’s had a couple of bastards,” said the notary. “Then why should this poetic home-wrecker take Holy Orders, become Pope, and then devote all that energy to a campaign to retake Constantinople?”
“Met him, have you?” said the Milanese. “Well, some say it was a change of heart. Myself, I might do the same, with his conscience. At any rate, my Duke’s not complaining. No crusade is going to leave while there’s a war going