The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [119]
Julius sat down, rather carefully. He still looked pleased with himself. “When did all this happen?”
“You just missed the Emperor’s envoy, bearing gifts and Imperial messages. Between the church and the festival, I have to go to the Palace with my credentials. And return, I hope, with the privileges we were promised.”
“You alone? Not the rest of us?”
“They only want one of us to begin with,” Nicholas said. “Then they line the rest of us up, and let the women choose who goes tomorrow. What’s the rush? You’re going to be here until you’re middle-aged, if we’re lucky.”
“It’ll be too late when he’s middle-aged,” said Tobie, from habit. You had to admit it. Most times, Nicholas knew what he was doing. It made it interesting, waiting to see what he was going to fail at.
To Pagano Doria there arrived on that Sunday the same envoy bearing the same invitations, in addition to a silk brocade coat, subtly dyed the dull green of carnations. It was for Pagano, not Catherine; although she did receive a length of embroidered cloth and a cushion. There was no mention of rubies.
The summons to audience was not for her either. All she would see of the Emperor would be a glimpse as he went in and out of some church, and another glimpse as he sat in his box watching horsemen and jugglers. There wasn’t even a tournament. They didn’t have tournaments in Trebizond. She brooded, until Pagano reminded her that she would see the City at last, and the other merchants. She could wear her best dress, and her earrings.
She brightened. She said, “Do you think Nicholas will be at the church?” She saw Pagano stop what he was doing, as if the thought was new, or in some way unwelcome.
“Perhaps,” Pagano said. “All the foreign merchants, all the guilds will be there. On the other hand, the Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans is fastidious, and may have learned by that time to distinguish between myself and his consul for Florence. Poor Niccolino. The Treasurer feared for him.”
Sailing from Pera, the man Amiroutzes had taken pains, she was aware, to instruct Pagano in the ways of the court. They thought Nicholas ignorant. She had assumed so herself until she had noticed, by chance, a cloaked and unrecognisable figure disembarking from the Florentine ship. Leaving the Florentine ship, and stepping into a gilded state barge.
Dragged too late to the window, Pagano questioned if any member of the Imperial household would choose to travel with the Ciaretti; unless perhaps some clerk with an errand. She had been offended to have her theory dismissed. She was still offended. She said now, “Nicholas? He’s always been sly. Sometimes he can surprise you.”
But Pagano only warmed her cheek with a laugh. “You should have seen him at Modon,” he said. And then, drawing away, smiled into her face, his eyes sparkling. “But, of course, you did see him at Modon. One ought not to mock. But after the fright he gave you in Pera, I doubt if I shall be civil in Trebizond. If I tease him, will you forgive me?”
“He isn’t my father,” said Catherine.
Next day they left with their retinue, she and Pagano, and rode uphill through the wide streets of the suburb, past the stadium of the Meidan and over the narrow eastern bridge to the City; and the moist, heavy air pressed upon them its serpentine odours.
The City was long and narrow and secure behind walls that had been modelled on the walls of Constantinople. It was built on an irregular table of rock whose surface inclined steeply upwards as it joined the foothills of the mountains behind. At its highest point was the Upper Citadel, with the Palace within it. In the middle, among the houses and orchards, was the monastery and church of the Chrysokephalos, the Imperial basilica, to which the bridge led them. The Lower Citadel sloped down to the shore, from which it was separated by the vast ochre brick wall of its double ramparts.
The wall