Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [62]
Smoke and silver and black, cream and tortoiseshell, orange and butter, the children of St Nicholas lay, a carpet of silk on the marble. On the top, still the leader, lay the powerful cat, white as ermine, called Otto. ‘Skins for the winter,’ the Mameluke said. ‘Pets are for women, and catamites. Your saint gave you cats to divert you from mounting each other. Everyone knows this is true. There are no vipers so vicious on Cyprus. It is the Christians; it is the serpent of Melusine; it is the Lusignan’s sting you must fear.’
He pulled Nicholas through the door and whipped him idly before him with the flat of his sword. Behind him in the room there was horror on the girl’s face, and calculation in Erizzo’s, and doubt in the look of Loredano. And tears, shamed, uncontrollable tears in the eyes of the monk.
It is the Lusignan’s sting you must fear.
Chapter 10
THE ABSENCES of Zacco their King were not entirely mourned by the folk of his capital. Within the seven crumbling miles of its walls, the Greeks and Franks who lived and worked in Nicosia were reasonably pleased to be allowed to continue making shoes, beating silver, working copper, weaving linen and operating the markets which, as an inland capital, the town employed to disperse its wares. The husbandmen tended the fig and olive and mulberry trees, the oranges, the lemons, the pomegranates that grew in the thousand walled gardens, and in the flat lands round the city; and saw to the vines and the barley and the herds of heavy-rumped sheep. The irrigation wheels turned; the smiths hammered; the cooks and butchers attended to their ovens and work-blocks. Those churchmen who had not fled to the Queen continued their rounds unmolested, and under their new lords, the great households continued to demand food and service and pay for it, even if the old barons were all off to Kyrenia to huddle there with the Queen and her consort.
The new owners were the Sicilians and the Aragonese and the Catalans who had come two years ago, when Zacco conquered Nicosia and three-quarters of Cyprus. Zacco, the Venetians called him, the latter Z requiring less effort than J, and the nickname had stuck. The new lords spent as much time fighting for Zacco as the old spent at hunting, only they came back with bales of cloth and sacks of silk and boxes of iron they’d looted from the houses of Carlotta’s supporters. They flattened the vines round about Famagusta, which did no harm to the grape prices everywhere else. They captured ships and brought men back in chains who were glad to pay for their freedom. Or if not, King Zacco cut off their heads and stuck them on the Bridge of the Pillory. And, of course, they hemmed in the Queen’s men at Kyrenia, killing their forage parties, diverting their food and making sure that neither she nor her consort would ever get back to the capital.
Not that the people of Nicosia had anything much against Queen Carlotta who was, if you thought of it, the legitimate Lusignan heir, and spoke Greek, even if she worshipped in the Latin way. She had to, didn’t she? Only the Latin church could call on Christian rulers to hold off the Turks; only the Latin church could rely on the help of the Knights of the Order in Rhodes. Zacco didn’t have that advantage, even though his loving father made him Archbishop of Nicosia when he was thirteen: four years, that was, before he had his loving father’s chamberlain murdered. Zacco didn’t have that advantage because he called in the Mamelukes instead of the Pope, and filled Cyprus with hordes of crooked-sword Saracens. But while it was all very well to say that Carlotta and the Pope could perhaps hold off the Turks, the fact was that the Turks weren’t here yet, but the Mamelukes were, and someone had to control them. Someone like Zacco.
He took the Egyptians along with him, too,