The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [134]
The passage led to another, and then a series which became dryer and grander and eventually, he guessed, took him back to one of the lower courts of the Palace. He asked nothing and the eunuch was silent. The mark on the man’s arm was dusky red, with a line of blood where the nail had pierced through. Whatever was about to happen, the range of possibilities was not large. He was Florentine consul, and life and limb were not in danger. Unless, of course, he met someone who did more than pinch when frustrated.
When they came at length to a door, he was hardly surprised when the eunuch scratched and, setting it open, left him to enter and face the occupant of the room himself. It was Violante, the Emperor’s great-niece. He said, “You missed my Prostration.”
“I thought I had prevented it,” she said. She wore her robe of ceremony and her diadem, and was seated in the same heavy chair she had used when on shipboard, with her servants about her. To one side, as on shipboard, was the black-robed figure of the Archimandrite Diadochos. Everyone was fully clothed but himself. Inside his single garment the sweat trickled down his wet skin and, but for the cotton, would have pooled at his bare feet. She added, “We have embarrassed you? I am sorry. I have been instructed by the Emperor to present you with a mark of his favour, that is all. It is here.”
It was a velvet-covered box which, when opened, proved to contain two manuscripts, one on top of the other. He put in his hands and unwrapped the first from the cloth which held it together. It was unbound and very old. He opened it carefully, and then stopped at what he saw. The lady said, “Sit and turn the pages. I want you to see what you have.”
The Greek was hard to make out, but not the diagrams. Nicholas said, “Who wrote this, Despoina?”
“You know what you have?” she said.
“A book of automata. Of machines. Yes,” he said.
“Could you make them?”
“Yes, highness,” he said.
“I think you probably could,” said Violante of Naxos. “It is a book of mechanical devices, written many generations ago by an engineer of Diyarbekr. I had it from my aunt, who married the lord Uzum Hasan. You will know. His family have been princes of Diyarbekr since before Timur the Lame.”
“It is too precious. It is yours,” Nicholas said.
“Then perhaps, some day, you will give me a copy,” said Violante of Naxos. “Meanwhile, there is nothing that would please his magnificence the Emperor more than to have realised one or more of these devices. I have told him you will discuss it with him.”
He hardly heard her, turning the pages. She said, “Messer Niccolò! Do you thank me?”
Then he looked up, his face burning. He said, “I lack the means, Despoina. This is truly generous.”
She said, “Then look at the other. It is my payment for another length of the red and rose silk I have heard of. In return, I expect you to be generous.”
He laid aside the book of drawings and picked up the other. After a moment he said, “Despoina: are there other books of this kind?”
“A great many,” she said. “You have never heard of Gregorios Chionides? He was chief physician to one of the Emperor’s forebears. He brought many such books back from Persia, and summarised them in Greek. We have a book on mathematics and clocks by Master Fusoris. And there are the philosophers. But I hardly expect that you ask on your own account. You wish to know if the Emperor would be willing to barter?”
“Our silks find favour with him, I notice,” said Nicholas. “If he preferred other payment, the Medici would arrange it. Yes, I could sell such books in the West, bought or copied. But perhaps the Emperor has in mind a library of his own, and would prefer not to deplete it.”
“As you say, they can be copied,” observed the lady. She was sitting so still that the gems in her diadem hardly flashed. He gave up the books to be restored to their box and sat with his hands firmly clasped, quelling discomfort until the negotiation should be drawn to an end. For it was, of course, a negotiation. The Emperor had a menagerie, but no library, although he did,