Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [74]
Through the night, checking over all the moves he would make if he were Zacco, or Carlotta, or a Venetian, or even an unpleasant Mameluke from the Sultanate, he had been gathering himself to decide whether or not to take part in the game, since now he was free, and a player. Loredano had been shocked by his rapacity, and his seeming frivolity. Loredano did not know that he, too, was already part of a game begun in Bruges three years ago, or perhaps even before. And that the invisible players included a man with a wooden leg, and a woman who had invited Nicholas to do what the courtesan Primaflora would never have expected, or demanded, or allowed. Knowing that, you either escaped, or you let it frighten you, or you treated it as a game.
He had escaped for ten months, and had been brought back. He didn’t like the way he had been brought back. He intended to do something about it, even while he knew – he knew as if the Greek had told him, or Violante – that the violence used on him, the provocation offered at every stage had been quite deliberate. He realised, without being proud of it, that he no longer preferred, in any case, to be regarded by the world at large as a precocious apprentice. He was nearly twenty-two, and grown, with a great deal of experience, now. He should be equal, at least, to demonstrating that he did not care to be meddled with. After that, he might choose his own course, if only he knew what it was.
Meanwhile, he had made known to Giovanni Loredano the concessions he wanted from Venice before he would consider staying with Zacco. Loredano would report these to his fellow-Venetians, who wouldn’t be happy. He thought Erizzo the Bailie was strong enough to overrule them. Since the concessions referred to royal property, the other half of the equation depended, of course, on the King’s readiness to accede. Presently Nicholas intended to ride to the Dominicans’, and raise these matters with Zacco, and request the King’s written permission to send a message to Rhodes and thereafter, if he wished, to join Astorre there. Then he would leave for Kolossi Castle and make his first, tentative throw in the game the Venetians thought they were playing. Whether it was his game or not, remained to be seen.
The Knights of St John at Kolossi, vowed to chastity, had no idea they were housing a courtesan. Since the days of the Crusades, the Knights had had a presence there. When Acre fell, and there was no longer a Holy Land whose pilgrims needed Hospitallers to care for them and Knights to defend them, the Order had made Cyprus its conventual centre for twenty years before moving to Rhodes. Cyprus it kept as a high military base, opposing the Turks from the third largest island of the Middle Sea, and one of the most fertile. The Commanderie of Cyprus was the richest of all the Order’s possessions, pouring thousands of ducats a year into the treasurer’s coffers at Rhodes from the sales of its wheat and its cotton, its oil and its wine and, above all, its sugar. And of all the Order’s properties on Cyprus, the estate of Kolossi was the largest, with its sixty villages and its acres of vineyards and sugarcane fields.
There had always been a citadel, supplied with deep wells and watered by the River Kouris, with good flat ground for the stables and offices, the guest houses and gardens, and the little Byzantine church of St Eustathios which was open-minded enough to serve the knights for their worship. There had been sugar, too, for a very long time, brought by the Arabs before the days of the Knights. The crop had not always been successful and, in later years, the Knights had found it expedient to share out the costs. That is, a so-called Magnifico from some Venetian firm of growers and dealers would buy the crops for several years in advance, pay for their packing and transport to harbour, and see to all the troublesome business of shipping and selling.
So when Constantinople fell to the Turks and the