Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [23]
Loppe didn’t answer. After a moment, Nicholas said, ‘I don’t expect to be long,’ and walked towards the gates, where he saw someone coming to meet him. He held down his breathing, and sought in his memory for all he had picked up of Latin. Then he went forward smiling. One made a plan, and one held to it.
Above him, a bell started to toll, and the din of the Arsenal floated over the water.
Chapter 4
THROUGH THE CENTURIES, many men of religion had found retreat in one or other of the islands of the lagoon, but the monks of the Camaldolite monastery of San Michele tilled their plots and walked their cloisters and sang and prayed in their church within shouting distance of the mercantile heart of the world. They made a virtue of it. When the time came, the great Cardinal Bessarion would leave his priceless Greek books to St Mark’s and not to them; but they in their turn had found their own source of spiritual and secular riches; had identified a channel into which the streams of their learning might be turned to the benefit of both mankind and God. They drew maps.
The room to which they took Nicholas was the one where their cartographers worked; where until his death five years before the greatest of them all had drawn together, from manuscripts, from old and new sailing charts, from stories brought him by travellers, all that was known of the world, and used it to make his great planisphere.
The original of the map was here, now; and the abbot, waiting beside it to greet him. And beside the abbot, the Venetian trader who had sailed into Bruges on the Flanders galleys when Nicholas was a boy of fourteen, and who had since found out more about some parts of the world than Fra Mauro had ever been able to put in his map.
The abbot said, ‘My lord Niccolò. I have the Cardinal Patriarch’s word that you go on God’s work, but in secrecy. We also know and trust the Patriarch of Antioch, Ludovico da Bologna your friend, who has laboured for God between the four points of the compass. Because of them, we have received you here so that you may have some sense of the precious map we possess, and may make yourself known to our guest. He has agreed to talk with you briefly. It is for him to say whether or not you may look for more than that. Meanwhile, speak your minds to each other. Learn. And put it to such work that you will be blessed.’
He left. The Venetian merchant looked after him, and then turned back to Nicholas. He said, ‘They are good people.’
‘It is true,’ Nicholas said. ‘Such men may be too confiding. But the map was sponsored by Portugal. The King has been sent an exact copy. I shall do no less for the Church than Portugal did. Or yourself.’ He made a small pause. ‘Today, at severe cost to my Bank, I have also agreed to grant the Republic a loan which may well ease the lot of her citizens.’
‘My father would thank you,’ said Signor Alvise da Ca’ da Mosto. ‘But the journey you contemplate is not, I trust, one of necessity. There is no guaranteed outcome, material or other, in such a venture.’
‘It would be folly, certainly, to go unprepared,’ Nicholas said. ‘I am told that only here on this map may one inspect the interior of Ethiopia in detail, whether one means to travel from the east or the west.’
‘I can tell you nothing about Ethiopia,’ the nobleman said. ‘Prince Henry did not go there.’
‘Tell me where he went,’ Nicholas said. ‘The abbot is right. I have a great deal to learn.’
What he did not have was time. Fra Mauro had elected to draw his planisphere upside down, with Ethiopia at the top and England at the bottom. Nicholas scanned the map while he was listening, reading the cramped Italian legends and committing the place names to memory. He asked few questions. What he wanted, and worked to receive,