Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [243]
In any case, he was busy. If he felt, sometimes, that he had heard too little of that interview of Primaflora’s, and that there was something of desperation now in her love-making, he didn’t pursue it for once; and even the matter of Katelina remained only as an anxiety held well in check. The Levant was in arms: there was danger in every voyage, and no way of telling how a half-Portuguese youth or a Flemish woman would contrive safely to make their way home. From his days as a courier, Nicholas had many sources of information, and had asked them all to report. Venice and Ancona, Naples and Sicily, Florence and Bruges would watch and listen and notify him in due course of their passage, as well as of other things. His Western network for other news was wider even than that, not to mention the other more extravagant system he had discussed with no one except, of course, Loppe. But, of course, there had not been time yet for anyone to report on Katelina, even had shipping been normal. Venice had placed an embargo on Bosphorus trade and was hesitant even over her Alexandria fleet. The Order would keep its vessels for safety at Rhodes. Florence would also be circumspect. It affected his own supplies, as well as the carriage of news, and forced him to make secondary plans, among other things, for the sale of his new sugar crop. But planning was what he liked, and he had contingency plans, too, for whatever news he had in the end of Katelina, good or bad. He had, now, friends in many places, or people who owed him a favour.
He worked through his programme meticulously yet with the flamboyance that entranced Zacco, and invigorated even the sluggish. He somehow managed to pound down to Kouklia on Chennaa, half by night and half by blazing day, and crossing the island was able to see for himself that it had been a more settled and prosperous year. Smitten by war, the plains of Kyrenia were barren, and the sponge-divers of the Karpass had made barely a living. But cistern-drenched wheat and barley had burst yellow over the plain of the Messaoria, and the sickles twinkled and chimed as, booted and belled, harvesters strode to their work among serpents.
The pods of the carob trees dangled, black and leaking rank gum, ripe for cropping. There were pomegranates in baskets and gourds drying on roof-tops. In every village, it seemed, a donkey circled its trough of crushed olives, and the press thudded down, helped by many brown arms, as the mash yielded its oozings through wicker. Where the scent of orange had deadened the senses in March, the resinous odour of olives weighed down the humid, hot air of this journey. Instead of flower-infused silence, the air was filled with the clamour of autumn: the cries, the chaffing, the folksongs, the team-songs of the villages; the chinking of blades; the rumble of flint-studded boards driven over the threshing-ground. The objecting bray of working donkeys. The shuddering tramp of the oxen spinning the Persian wheels set over every deep well, so that the jars came up, roped with pomegranate wood withies, and tossed their icy water into the stone channels that fed the fields and the housewife’s wood buckets. Vines and almonds, lemons and oranges, pomegranates and sugar. In the fields around Kouklia and Akhelia his second crop of cane was strong and healthy and promising; the men in good heart; Loppe full of plans. For a moment Nicholas, too, saw the future as something splendid and bright; a fertile island, well run and blooming, and owing nothing to all the nations that warred round about it. Then he stopped himself and Loppe and said, ‘I am glad. This is what we all wanted. But we are not alone on this island. And of all the lands of the world, this is a place armies covet.’
‘This and your land,’ Loppe had added, after a silence.
‘Bruges?’ he had surmised solemnly after a moment.
‘I was thinking of Simon’s island,’ had said Loppe.