The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [170]
Chapter 25
FOR SOME LITTLE TIME after the fever broke, Nicholas was too limp for anything except, perhaps, thinking. Remarkably soon after that, however, he was up and about: cheerful, biddable, and co-operative. From servants and men he received a tacit welcome and the same rough goodwill they had shown him before. The name of Simon of Kilmirren meant nothing to them: they didn’t care who was paying Doria.
It meant very little either to Captain Astorre, whose contempt for my lord Simon was immaculate, or to John le Grant, who had never heard of him. There remained the trio of Julius, Godscalc and Tobie, whose manner to their scheming junior had substantially changed. To Julius, the disclosure of his further duplicity was a personal insult. It not only increased his hatred of Doria, it made him even more angry and suspicious of Nicholas who, with double his motives, had failed to confront Doria, man to man; or allow Julius to do so. For the others, who knew the abomination he had forced upon Simon, they saw now revealed what was ugly as well as what was engaging about Nicholas.
For his part, Nicholas acted as if he observed nothing; attended assiduously all the policy meetings called by Julius and tramped alongside whatever delegation issued as a result to call on probable buyers or possible sellers, to identify orders and to argue through some problem of money exchanges. He spent quite a lot of time on his own. As they had threatened, his colleagues had withdrawn from him both his freedom of action and movement. Although still publicly head of the station, in practice he was powerless.
Anything to do with Astorre’s men, Julius saw to. Le Grant was given charge of matters to do with the repair and overhaul of the galley and the concerns of the seamen. The provisioning and control of the household passed into the efficient black hands of Loppe, who proved to be the best domestic bursar in anyone’s experience. This freed Godscalc and Tobie, helped again by le Grant to proceed with the modified torture of wresting out of Treasurer Amiroutzes the wherewithal for the new Florentine compound. In between meetings, Godscalc made a round of all the monastic churches in the district, bought what texts he could, and set a large number of scribes to profitable work. Julius, avoiding Nicholas, promoted a clerk called Patou to countercheck his calculations.
They all became familiar with Trebizond. Deepening spring brought more rain and an increasing warmth which clothed shore and mountain in shining and vigorous green, and devoured every space with opulent flowers. Waxen petals, fuddled with scent, crammed through tall, pillared windows. Drifts of cherry and pear blossom filled the furrows of doublets and straw hats; tree-vines burst into clubbable leaf. Markets turned into empires. A street of carpenters would wake to find itself choked by watermelons, or cheeses, or chickens.
Nothing, in fact, was quite as orderly as might have been expected of the Imperial family of the Hellenes: the Autocracy of all the East, the Iberias and the Transmarine Provinces. The unshaven hill men who came through the passes wearing hair tunics and leggings and driving goats or panniered pack-ponies owed nothing to classical harmony; nor did the dark-faced men jangling with gold who rode in with foot-trains of armed servants to take their ease in the baths and the brothels. They had money to spend and lived in castles, some of them. They earned their keep by exacting tolls and protection money from those who picked their way through the mountains. They brought news, of a sort. It was true what they said about the Sultan. He was already in Asia, in Ankara. His army, under Mahmud Pasha, was in Bursa and ready to move. Where, he was keeping a secret. If a hair in his beard knew, he had announced, he would tear it out and cast it into the fire.
In Trebizond, the