The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [106]
“No. You are imagining it,” said Gregorio. “Sit, demoiselle. I am going to give you some wine. Demoiselle…”
She said, “I am sorry. It is just that I am tired.” She paused and then said, “I have longed only that he should be happy. As he used to be, always.”
“Men who have such a blessing rarely lose it,” Gregorio said. “He needed a bigger arena, whether Venice opened the door or anyone else. And whatever happens, he will deal with it, and come home to you safely.” He didn’t know if she believed him, but she gave the appearance of doing so. Calmer, she accepted the wine and sipped it presently, talking of trifles. Then she picked up her cloak and her letter, and carried them both to her room.
After that, they were never in private. The day she left, all the arrangements perfected, he and the other officers of the company rode with her retinue as far as the city gate, and the senior guild members and fellow merchants came, cloaked and hooded and hatted, to wish her Godspeed.
She had taken Tilde on her horse as far as the gate. The girl and the handsome small woman made a single shape of wrapped fur and velvet, with the woman’s rich glove on the reins and the girl’s fine, shining hair falling over her shoulder. At the gate they clung, and parted, and Adorne lifted the girl to his saddle.
Tani, of the Medici company, had black ribbon pinned to his cloak. Taking leave of him, Marian sought out the reason.
“Madonna, I thank you. The death is not in my family, but in the house of my master in Florence. A child, barely six, but bitterly mourned. Cosimino, the little grandchild of my lord of Medici.”
She said what was right, and rode on; but her heart was with a child of thirteen who had lost not her life but her childhood in Florence. And a happy innocent—surely happy, surely innocent—who, through none of his doing, might by now have sacrificed both.
Chapter 17
THREE THOUSAND MILES east of Bruges, the child Catherine and the youth Nicholas were close to their destination, and almost within sight of each other. As with most young when parted from their agonised elders, each was confronting known dangers with inherent hardihood. Which was not to say that Marian de Charetty was wrong in her fears for them.
The Black Sea, although salt, was more like a great inland lake, joined to the Middle Sea by one channel. From Constantinople to the Caucasus Mountains at its far end, it stretched for seven hundred miles. Its northern, black-bouldered shores gave on to the Khanate of the Crim Tartars, with the fur lands of Muscovy to the north of it. The Genoese, wily traders, had fixed on the Crimean coast their station called Caffa, big as Seville, and bursting free, at this moment, from the long winter’s ice.
On the south coast of the Black Sea rose the mountains of Asia Minor: thickly forested where they plunged to the dark iron sands of the sea, with stout forts on the headlands and ancient Greek towns built half on the mild, fertile shores and half fitted into the mountains behind them. Beyond the mountains lay the rocks and plains of Anatolia, Persia, Syria, and the caravan routes to Baghdad and the East. It was its position at the end of the Silk Road that had made Trebizond the emporium of Asia, older than Rome or Byzantium. Now it stood, the solitary gem in the empty Imperial crown: the last unconquered outpost of the Byzantine Greeks.
Towards it sailed the Doria (once the Ribérac) and the Ciaretti, sometimes abreast; sometimes overtaking or passing each other. The winds, always freakish in March, blew one way in the morning and another when the sun passed its height, sometimes favouring the round ship and sometimes the galley. Of the two, the galley made, perhaps, the more memorable voyage. For one thing, she was still in the hands of her workmen, as the smiths and carpenters began to strip out the