Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [199]
She was seated nowhere near Nicholas, who was properly in the centre, between the princesses. He was wearing an unusual expression which seemed to change with undue rapidity. Catching the sound of his voice, she realised he was relating some sort of tale involving mimicry. A cry broke from Fiorenza. It seemed to be of laughter.
‘He has set to work,’ said Jacopo Zorzi on her right. ‘You were surprised today? You were not so surprised as our Venetian friends were on shipboard. That unlikely young man attracts women.’
‘On shipboard?’ Katelina said. On her other side, a man in physician’s dress turned, and she saw it was the doctor whose saddle she had shared during a desperate evening in Rhodes. The man who had betrayed, in Nicosia, that he knew her secret.
Zorzi’s face, darkened with stubble, smiled at her and continued to talk about Nicholas. ‘Vanni and Paul Erizzo met our host for the first time on shipboard,’ he said. ‘Travelling with a lady they call Primaflora. You know the lady Primaflora?’
‘We do,’ said the doctor, speaking across her. ‘The lady Primaflora, happily, has gone back to Rhodes. You mean you thought she’d have Nicholas begging, and instead it was the other way round?’
Zorzi’s smile grew broader. He said, ‘It’s a crude way of putting it.’
‘I’m a crude man,’ said the doctor. ‘I don’t agree with you. I think she was a spy for Carlotta. Zacco got rid of her.’
Jacopo Zorzi observed a short silence, then said, ‘Yes. Well, of course. Gossip, demoiselle Katelina. In the Levant we all thrive on it. I wish I could be concealed in the chamber, for instance, when you and the ladies Valenza and Fiorenza dissect us. But you are acquainted with the princesses, Master Tobias? You met their sister in Trebizond.’
The doctor had curious, curled nostrils which he now inflated, and pale eyes like an innocent cat. He said, ‘Before that, in Bruges with her husband and later, on shipboard with her priest. I assure you, we all observed the niceties.’
‘And of course, in Trebizond, there was another King Zacco. How sad,’ said Jacopo Zorzi, ‘to hear the news from Adrianople. Is your Niccolò deeply distressed?’
‘What news?’ said the doctor. Katelina, in the middle, turned her head from one to the other.
Zorzi looked surprised. ‘You haven’t heard? David of Trebizond has been thrown in prison with all his young children. You recall, of course, that he surrendered the Empire in return for safe exile under the Sultan. Now, it seems, the Sultan has accused him of treason on the word of his false friend and former chancellor Amiroutzes.’
‘George Amiroutzes!’ hissed the doctor. Katelina gazed at him. He pulled off his cap, an unseemly gesture in company, and revealed a bald head congested with pink. He compressed lips equally pink and declaimed, ‘The bastard!’
From the place occupied by Nicholas, an amused voice said, ‘Tobie!’
The doctor made no effort to replace his cap. He said, loudly, ‘That turd Amiroutzes has got the Emperor David flung into prison. And his family.’
‘I hear, six children,’ said Zorzi helpfully. ‘And their cousin, Alexios. His daughter Anna, of course, went as a concubine to the governor of Macedonia. The sons were all put in chains except for the three-year-old, George. Wasn’t it Amiroutzes who engineered the Emperor’s surrender?’
Across the table, Katelina saw the eyes of the negro, Loppe, meet those of the doctor who, in turn, engaged the apparently resistant attention of Nicholas. The doctor said, with the same pointed belligerence, ‘We were all in Trebizond when Amiroutzes was Chancellor. How, Messer Jacopo, did you hear of all this?’
Jacopo Zorzi betrayed, and indeed rather overdid, an air of surprise. He said, ‘Of course, from my cousin Bartolomeo who came