Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [55]
She became very still. ‘I am not a spy. I am not Carlotta’s agent.’
‘They don’t know that,’ he said.
He saw her relax, bit by bit. Her lips curved, the little creases of irony deepening. She said, ‘They don’t fear, then, that I shall seduce you to Carlotta’s side?’
‘I suppose,’ Nicholas said, ‘that I have given proof of resistance. I left you in Ghent.’
‘And paid for my freedom,’ she said. ‘Do you think I had forgotten that?’
He said, ‘A freedom you didn’t take.’
‘A freedom I did not want,’ she said. After a moment, ‘At the time, there was nothing for me in Italy. As I told you, I have certain requirements. It is a profession, like any other.’
A freedom I did not want. He pursued it only obliquely. He said, ‘Where will you go, then, when I leave Cyprus? If I am right, and they won’t let you stay?’
‘I shall tell you,’ she said, ‘when you leave Cyprus. Make your decision. Niccolò, Niccolò, I am not your concern.’
Her eyes smiled, with a small frown between them. He turned, and made her his concern with tenderness, as if they had been truly lovers. It was the last such conversation they held before they reached Cyprus.
Nicholas vander Poele had seen, in recent years, many beautiful islands and the empire of Trebizond, the gold and ivory relict of Byzantium. Byzantium had once reigned over this island too. Before that, Cyprus had been part of the Hellene kingdom of Egypt, whose coast was so near to her shores. Then Rome had come, with her shrines to Apollo and Venus, and after Byzantium, the isle had been seized by Crusaders. Rich, lovely Cyprus: a floating fortress in the Levant, so conveniently close to Asia, Africa, Europe: a strategic prize for any red-blooded soldier.
On his way to the Third Crusade, King Richard of England had stopped to marry there, and later presented the island to that grasping Crusader Guy de Lusignan, son of a French count and last Latin King of Jerusalem. The English King could hardly have foreseen how tenacious, how fertile the family Lusignan were to be, once uprooted and planted in Cyprus. Their descendants still reigned there, and still called themselves Kings of Jerusalem. But that kingdom, long since, had been in infidel hands.
For nearly three hundred years then, the Lusignan family had ruled over Cyprus, bringing Latin landowners, bishops and nobles to a place whose natives spoke Greek, not French or Italian; and whose worship used the ritual of Orthodox Greece. The Latins built themselves great mountain fortresses, and gave fortifications and holdings to the Knights of St John, stocked from their neighbouring island of Rhodes. Nor did the people of Cyprus find it better when the Lusignan rule became weak. Then the Genoese jumped in, and seized the best town and harbour for trading. And later, worse than that, the Mameluke rulers of Egypt threatened the kings so successfully that, for a generation now, the Christian rulers of Cyprus had been paying craven tribute to the Muslim rulers of Egypt, and taking oath to behave as their vassals.
All this, Nicholas knew. It was as a Lusignan queen, married to her own cousin, that Carlotta was scouring the world, begging money and troops to drive the Muslim interests out of her island. And it was as an ally and protégé of infidel Egypt that James, her bastard brother, had invaded Cyprus, capturing all but the patch in the north to which the Queen and her consort had fled. Carlotta possessed Kyrenia, and had the use of Famagusta, the port where the Genoese ruled. All the rest belonged to James, and the Egyptian army. It was a beautiful land ripped asunder, and Nicholas vander Poele wanted nothing to do with it.
He stood, as the round ship drew close, and saw with impassive eyes the green mountains, the creaming ocean, the rosy bastions of rock that fringed the seashores. Here was the birthplace of Venus; the prize of royal Alexander; the love-gift of the Roman Mark Antony to Cleopatra of Egypt.
Beside him stood Primaflora. She said, ‘Have you heard of the grapes of Cyprus? Do you know the Song of Songs? Over there are