Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [160]
She felt as sick as she had done at sea. We are not far away. It was true. He had threatened her. She said, ‘My nephew Diniz. Where is he?’
The pink, liquid face made a tolerant smile. ‘Where he can be useful. In the fields, it may be, digging and burying.’
‘Burying?’
‘Digging pits and burying hoppers. The young and eggs of the locust. Unless they die, the crops will be ruined.’ She made a pause, and perhaps an assessment, and perhaps a decision. She said, ‘You have never seen this? The eggs are gathered in handfuls. They swell and crackle, madame. They fight to fabricate legs and wings and fly in the face of their handler. Peasants fear to collect them. We save the task for our captives. You. Your nephew. Your servants. You wish to ask me anything else?’
In the voice was deliberate malice. Who had told this woman her weakness? Her maidservant? Katelina felt the blood drain from her skin, and a shivering fit overcame her. She said, ‘I don’t understand what has happened.’
‘To the locusts?’ said the woman, amused, ‘Or no. The Ascension of Niccolò? Of course, he was treated harshly on board. Had he not been, neither he nor his men would have escaped the Genoese swords, or the Order. A brave schemer, that Niccolò. Indeed, your nephew might do worse than cultivate him. He is well placed to do so.’
‘Where?’ said Katelina. She returned, like an automaton, to the one question it was her duty to ask. ‘Where is Diniz?’
‘Here. In Nicosia. In Messer Niccolò’s villa, much admired and well guarded. Nor will he spend all his time among locusts. The city boasts a royal dyeworks, much damaged. Messer Niccolò is setting your nephew to work there. So what next have I said? I have made you ill. The thought of Messer Niccolò makes you ill. I find him a witty young man.’
Katelina quelled the pulse in her throat. She said, ‘He knelt. He gave Carlotta his sworn oath of fealty.’
The woman looked at her. ‘So did you,’ the woman said. ‘And you meant it. What then should I do to you? Skin you as the Mamelukes do, and make hawsers out of the peelings?’
Her voice had warped into something outlandish. The firelight glistened. The fan whirred and the shutters thudded and creaked as if belaboured by flocks of live locusts. The woman’s face sagged and yawned in the heat, and her nose crawled like a tongue through her lip-paint.
The woman put up one hand and grasping a mess of pink blubbered skin dragged it all from her face. Behind it was the snout of a pig: a twisted hull of dead flesh with two holes in it. A double bore of spiced wind struck the pillow. ‘Carlotta?’ remarked the wheezing, snuffling voice. ‘Carlotta’s dam bit the nose from my face. I did not retch then or now. I did not whine then or now. I may offer you charity, my weak-stomached Fleming, but sympathy is not in my cure.’
The door closed with immaculate quietness behind her, leaving the storm, the vertiginous storm, inside the chamber.
A few days later, the demoiselle Katelina van Borselen entered the gracious closed-house of the Clares, where she had her own rooms and where, from time to time, she was allowed to receive the stained and unkempt youth, coldly purposeful, who had been the susceptible and civilised Diniz.
The noseless woman had spoken the truth. Diniz was in their enemy’s grasp. Diniz had been set to work, as once Nicholas had been set to work, as a dyers’ apprentice. Soaked and weary, he toiled in the pitted yard and shabby buildings of the royal dyeworks in Nicosia. He didn’t resist when forced to drag their cloth through the vats or weigh their alum or shiver over their badly-kept ledgers. He used his limited freedom. He talked to the slaves and the Cypriots, the house-women, the menials, the half-trained lazy men who were all that were left in the business. Thereby he learned of events and prayed to be able, one day, to turn the knowledge to his advantage. What information he got, he brought to Katelina, his uncle’s stern wife. For Diniz wished only