The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [154]
The children clamoured. Adorne held out his hand and the girl, hesitating, took back the toy. Gregorio said, “And what was he like, the envoy of Uzum Hasan?”
The children had seen all the delegation. The envoy Mahon was as tall as that window, and old, with a white beard and a white cloth wound round his head. The envoy from the King of Georgia had been big and handsome, for a man living on the edge of the world. The delegate from Prester John in Ethiopia was an impostor, because he was brown and not black. And there was a man with a very tall hat; and one with rings in his ears and a face and a beard like a monkey, although he had shaved all the hair on his head but a tuft. That one ate twenty pounds of meat in a day. Someone had said so.
“From the Atabeg of Imeretia in Georgia,” Anselm Adorne interpolated. “I should say that the envoy from Ethiopia, impostor or not, was discovered to be a theologian and an astronomer. Maurat, the Armenian envoy, can play several instruments as well as possessing a very tall hat. Alighieri, of course, is an educated Florentine merchant who happens to be familiar with Trebizond. However exotic, the delegates are not, therefore, unendowed, although they all carry credentials, I am told, of a curious Latin uniformity. Even the Muslim lord Uzum Hasan writes to bid us all ‘Vale in Christo’. Nevertheless, the Holy Father received them in Rome, and honoured them profusely with banquets. Duke Philip means to do the same in St Omer. After that, they pass to the King of France, who might support a crusade, they imagine, to ease his mortal departure.”
His voice was dry. Yet Adorne’s own father and uncle had been on pilgrimage, twice, to the Holy Land. Gregorio said, “What is it? You don’t think Fra Ludovico’s mission is genuine?”
Adorne looked at him. “The friar himself believes in it,” he said. “He is a powerful man, who rules his delegation with invocations of sulphur. But he is calling himself Antioch, against the Pope’s explicit wishes. And he shows little sense, scouring Europe for money and armies at present. As for the rulers whose envoys go with him, I sometimes wonder what they expect. As I said, they are not savages. They may be more sophisticated, in some things, than Fra Ludovico. I wonder what Nicholas made of them? I hear he got his contract in Florence.”
There had been no secret about that. As soon as Nicholas had sent the news, Gregorio had announced it in Bruges. A group from the Charetty company was to trade for itself and for Florence in Trebizond. It pleased him to speak of it now to someone of Adorne’s experience. There was no need to be explicit about the terms, which had turned out to be all that they hoped. It only remained for the Emperor to ratify them. There was no need either to repeat precisely what Nicholas had said about Fra Ludovico and the delegation and Julius. It had included an instruction to find Michael Alighieri if possible and talk to him. Already, in Florence, Nicholas and Alighieri of Trebizond had reached a rapport over future trade dealings. Everything, it seemed, was happening to the advantage of the Charetty company which, if its persecutors gave it the chance, could only become bigger and richer. Adorne talked, and Gregorio wondered, as he wondered every day, how Nicholas was managing.
The girl, apparently absorbed, had begun to unreel the farmuk, to the ecstasy of the children. Gregorio watched, as he listened. Did she, too, hear the gossip about the Charetty company, as distinct from its commercial transactions? Monna Alessandra, severest of hostesses, had kept her son in Bruges daily apprised of the shortcomings of her house-guests in Florence. Lorenzo Strozzi had read passages of her letters out aloud in all his favourite taverns: Tilde no doubt had heard extracts. Not that there had been anything crude reported of Nicholas, apart from his deplorable