Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [291]
Zacco shouted. They could hear his great cry, and see the flash of his hat flung in the air, and the brown silk of his hair whipping free as a flag against his glistening eyes, and the bright joy-stained red of his cheeks. He swept his friends into his arms and the shouting multiplied and reverberated on and on, up and down the beach and through the distant war-broken theatre of Salamis. John le Grant’s powerful fingers dug themselves into Tobie’s arm. He said, ‘That’s it. That’s the only ship that’s ever going to arrive here. Come the end of the fourteen days, Famagusta surrenders. Nicholas emerges. We get paid. We can go if we want to.’
Tobie was watching Loppe, who had suddenly disappeared to the shore, and was now coming back rather more slowly. He said, arriving, ‘The Doria’s put off a skiff with a message. The Genoese ship has surrendered. With the King’s leave, Master Crackbene takes the captured ship and his prisoners to Salines. Six are dead. The rest will be dispatched north to Nicosia, to coincide with the official surrender.’ He broke off and stepped back, for the King had broken free of his friends, and was running alone down the strand to the messenger. He passed beside them all, seeing no one, his eyes fixed on the sea and the skiff, and the two great ships and the galleys beyond, all of them flying the Lusignan flag.
He had been weeping. He let the tears lie on his cheeks, and men cheered as he passed them, their young golden King who had won his crown at last. Who had seen enacted before him the last skirmish in the war which had now given him his own longed-for kingdom of Cyprus.
Loppe watched him go. Loppe turned his eyes from the victorious, the vibrant, the magnificent figure and looked instead towards the chill, battered walls of Famagusta. He said, ‘I would not like to be a man in that city tonight.’
Chapter 42
PRIDE HELD SHUT the gates of Famagusta until the fourteenth day after Epiphany had expired without bringing rescue. That night, they dug away the earth and drew the nails from the planks and removed the great bars that had closed all the formal entrances into the city, and completed the bridging of the ditch that led to the land gate. The next morning, in solemn cavalcade, James, King of Cyprus rode in to receive the keys of his city, and the flag of St George and the Dragon was dropped from the walls.
The company of Nicholas were among those who rode with him. This was not the triumphal procession which one day would beat a noisy and brilliant path to a swept and garnished city, but a military operation, to do with the handing over of power. Riding through the battered gates, unarmed, with nothing but the richness of his furs to identify him, James of Lusignan looked like a King, with the youth gone from his face along with the high-spirited waywardness.
Prepared as they were, the reality of what had happened to Famagusta struck silence from them all. The tumbled buildings. The abandoned houses. The places blackened with fire. The intact ghosts, deeper into the city, of the splendid Frankish villas and lodgings and trading loggias, the fine-cut bulk of the church of St Peter and St Paul, the towering buttresses of the great convent of St Francis, with its empty gardens and cloisters. The disused markets. The silent streets of the craftsmen. And over all, the smell of sickness and death.
To wait for their enemy, the ordinary