Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [64]
He had begun to doubt, even, if he had come to kill Moors. The Portuguese, the Ghenters, the Burgundians fought for the greater glory of God, Christ against Antichrist, as well as for personal redemption. Diniz, son of a trader, had been reared to believe the division less arbitrary. Before coming here, he had fuelled his hatred with the deeds of one Egyptian Mameluke. Now he remembered a great Arab doctor, serving the Christian sick in the horror of Famagusta, with Nicholas at his side. And how in Trebizond, he had been told, Nicholas had taken arms against Turks, but the Turcoman Uzum Hasan had been his ally.
His unseeing eyes found they were watching a galley making heavy weather of crossing the narrows. The Spanish port of Algeciras lay behind her and, once past the Rock, the wind and the current were pushing her east. From the efforts she made to adjust, he saw that she was trying to come into Ceuta.
Afterwards, he remembered asking Ernoul if they were expecting a victualling ship, and being told that they were. It meant casks of arrows, and supplies of powder at least for the bombards, and pikes and bows and crates for the smiths and the armourers. And, usually, a nice selection of fresh fish and meat and some fruit. He helped unload if he had to. It made him feel sick.
Today, being on duty elsewhere, he didn’t have to; and by the time the galley arrived and found a place to drop anchor, Diniz was free and on his way down to the sea-moat and the isthmus, threading past the old souks and crumbling palaces in order to eat and play dice at the castle with a couple of bowmen from Lisbon. The galley’s captain went by, on his way up the stairs to the governor, followed by his clerk with his inkhorn and papers. The captain, he’d heard, was a Ragusan. The scribe was double the size that scribes usually were, and what his cap left uncovered was obscured by the whorls of two grandiloquent eyeglasses. They glinted at Diniz.
Diniz had to get up at midnight to take his turn at the watch on the walls. He had been there an hour when he became aware that the ship’s clerk was standing beside him. The starlight glimmered on glass, and a voice he had missed for six months addressed him in almost inaudible French. ‘How much did you lose? The man you had on your left is notorious in twenty-five cities.’
Diniz turned, his throat closed. ‘Ah no,’ Nicholas said, and laid a large, calm hand over his. ‘Don’t give me away. Or, if you remember, we shall both be arrested for sodomy.’
He always went to the heart of the trouble. Diniz produced a sound which began as a laugh. He said, ‘It was awful. They made me. I wouldn’t have left you.’
‘I know,’ Nicholas said. ‘Master Michael Crackbene and I have had a conversation about that. Did your grandfather make you come here?’
This time, he managed a proper laugh, although quietly. ‘It was the last thing he wanted.’ And then, with sudden anxiety, ‘They wouldn’t believe me. Have you seen them?’
‘Your grandfather and Simon? No. They’ve both gone. I’ve seen your mother. And Gelis van Borselen is at Lagos.’ The calming grip loosened, and Nicholas, taking off the affair on his nose, settled his arms on the parapet, holding the glass in one hand. A bird cried in the night. He said, ‘So you’ve found your vocation? You are taking the Cross?’
Taking the Cross. It was the sort of thing the Lalaing brothers were in the habit of saying. Diniz said, ‘Why are you here?’
‘Not because your mother sent me,’ Nicholas said. ‘She seemed … seemed to think I was lying as well. No. I had a call to make anyway. And I wondered if you knew that David de Salmeton was at Lagos? The Vatachino want to buy out your company.’
Doubts about beauty, and doubts about faith. David de Salmeton of the silken hair and feminine hands, annexing