The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [171]
The court, in a state of spiritual well-being, was able to spare some time for leisure. It took heed of its athletic prowess, engaging in spear-throwing and archery and playing vindictive cavalry games at the Tzukanisterion; none of it with particular style. It filed south into the mountains and ceremoniously went hunting and hawking. It held small, select feasts and patronised the company of men of learning who might beguile its tedium with intellectual discourse. It gambled prodigiously. It listened to music. It read, or was read to. It diverted itself with performers of many kinds; with dwarves and with animals; and witnessed processions of prisoners who had had their teeth hammered out and were wearing the intestines of oxen and sheep on their brows. These might be land-hungry nomads, or brigands caught raiding villages for stores, cooking-pots or children to sell to the whorehouses.
The court spent much of the day making itself beautiful, in order to spend much of the rest of the day in a state of physical gratification. It lay under silk awnings in the Summer Palace, engaging in minor intrigues, and in gossip. It was the Burgundian court compressed into a single trapezium, instead of spread half over a continent. It was a feminine version of the Burgundian court, producing carnivorous blooms on a leaf-bed of tradition that went back to Homer.
The memory of Byzantine battles remained still in its soldiery but, unlike Burgundy, it had created no orders of chivalry to foster the skills of its knights nor, until now, had it considered hiring the capability that it had failed to preserve. From the narrow strip of its lands and its wellwishers inland, it could count, on a good day, on two thousand foot and horse. The grandiose figures for fleet and army quoted during the Emperor’s last appeal to the West seemed to have been forgotten. The present little crisis was different: was not a crisis at all. The heathen was fighting itself. It was sad, to be sure, for the ruler Uzum Hasan, Trebizond’s Persian ally. But what could Trebizond do? Astorre, bounding from one listening-post to another in the vertical streets, puffing and grumbling, devoted a lot of his time to working out how strong Trebizond really was, and what the Emperor’s captains really thought of the war.
Julius, who enjoyed wars, did a good deal to help him. In between, he was prone to bouts of angry anxiety on behalf of Catherine de Charetty, who was mostly withdrawn from public view behind the walls of the Leoncastello. She did, as she had said, visit the women’s quarters in the Palace on occasion, and sometimes took part in their sport. But, as was predictable, she provided company for the Empress’s ladies rather than the Empress herself. Whether she had ever spent time with Violante of Naxos was so far unknown.
Tobie, too, had seen the small figure, pompously veiled, being escorted on muleback by her maid and her Genoese retinue; sometimes to the markets; sometimes to pay calls on the houses of other merchants to pass the time, one supposed, with their mistresses. Whether she yet realised their lack of status was also unknown. Doria himself was often absent in Imperial company. Nicholas, commanded to the hunt or the race or the wrestling match, had his excuses made for him on account of his illness and did not immediately discover that he had been invited at all. When he did, he sent John le Grant in his place, his hands full of plans. Reporting back to his fellows, the Aberdonian’s face was lightly flushed and his manner reticent to a degree. He merely told them, however, that, hearing of his experience with Serbian miners, the Emperor wished him