Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [305]
The Mameluke was yellow-white, but he laughed. ‘How? Have I tried to assassinate you? I am alone.’
‘That was not your plan,’ the King said. He looked up. The Sicilian Rizzo di Marino dismounted, mud-covered, and came to stand beside him.
The chamberlain said, ‘Why is he living?’
‘Only to hear your news,’ the King said.
Nicholas thought his voice sounded peculiar. He felt extremely cold and oddly isolated. It came to him that all the voices around him sounded strange, and that his eyes were closed. He opened them. Astorre, behind him, said, ‘It wasn’t bad, but you were stupid to take that one in your side. Go on. Keep standing. I’ve got you.’
The kneeling man he had maimed said, ‘What news?’ in clear French, not Arabic.
Rizzo di Marino said, ‘Oh, you can guess. I’ve just come from your camp. I took with me my whole force from Nicosia. You had learned – I shall not ask how – that the King knew of your plot to overthrow him. You cancelled their march to attack Famagusta, and your men were still complaining because of it. It was dark. They hardly heard us arriving.’
‘You’ve raided my camp? Taken my soldiers?’ said Tzani-bey.
‘Taken them? In a sense,’ said Zacco’s chancellor. ‘In the sense that none of them got to escape us. Two hundred Mamelukes and two hundred foot. They’d have caused quite a battle if you’d changed your mind, and they’d attacked Famagusta.’
‘But they didn’t,’ the emir said.
‘No, they couldn’t,’ said Rizzo di Marino. ‘They really couldn’t. Not then, or any other day. We killed them all. Every last man is dead.’ He turned and said, ‘He’s heard the news now.’
‘So he has,’ said the King. He looked at Nicholas. ‘Nikko? It is your privilege. You suffered the insult. Abul Ismail was your friend.’
On the face of the emir Tzani-bey al-Ablak was only contempt. ‘No,’ he said. ‘If there has been a massacre, I should guess your little lord Niccolò must be thanked for it. I should guess none of this would have happened without him. Your Nikko will not strike my head off. You will have to do that. But his is the blood that will pay for it.’
He spoke to the King, but his eyes were on Nicholas still, and remained there before and during and after the slash with which the King cut off his head.
Chapter 44
IT WAS EXTRAORDINARY, after that, how difficult it was to leave Famagusta for Nicosia, which Nicholas had fled, to the risk of his life, nearly two months before.
To begin with, of course, he couldn’t ride. Indeed, they took him straight from the field to the Franciscan monastery, where he was received with cries of dismay and admiration by the loving, gaunt, familiar faces. Now, the wards where he had served were half empty, and the store cupboards full, and the gardens outside the cloisters green with grass and weeds growing together, and the first waxen petals of cyclamen opening under the bushes.
Infected Famagusta was not the best place for the healing of wounds, but they had fresh ointments and bandaging, and their sutures were nearly as good as Tobie’s or Abul’s. It was the friars of St Francis who found for him the sundered body of the Arab physician, and took it into their care until it could be committed to the soil of his own land.
Astorre came to see him, and Thomas, and John. Philip Pesaro was among the first, and there were other captains. They tended to talk boisterously of the fight, but not of its implications. It was as if the breaking of a hundred years of Genoese rule in Famagusta had happened in a way that could not be assimilated. As if, occupying itself with bursts of familiar activity, the army which had striven so long to conquer the island was unable to comprehend what had happened. And to this had been added an event of primaeval ferocity. The Mameluke force supplied them by the Sultan at Cairo had been annihilated, and the repercussions of that, in Cairo, in Venice, in Constantinople, had still to be faced.
James of Lusignan came to the convent of the Franciscans later than most, and brought the Archbishop William Goneme with him. There