The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [206]
“For example?” said the doctor.
She knew the Florentine prices, and made sure this was better. They could have little quarrel with that. She said, “I don’t ask you to decide now. You will be given an audience. I have told the Empress that, even if you refuse, your silence can be trusted. She would hope to see you in any case when you bring the completed work to the Emperor.”
“What completed work?” said the doctor.
She looked at the engineer. He said, “They don’t know. It didn’t seem worth mentioning now.”
“Mentioning what?” the doctor said. He looked annoyed.
The engineer got up. “What Nicholas was working at in his room. I gave him a hand with some of the parts. He left notes to help me go on with it. As a present. A gift for the Emperor. It was to go to the Palace when finished.”
“When what was finished?” said the doctor.
She waited, watching them all: sure, now, of her diagnosis. She was pleased, now, that she had troubled to do this herself. Le Grant; the doctor; the slave, of course, whom the young man had used, she believed, as some sort of confidant. And the chaplain? So far, she could not tell what he thought. The bald doctor asked all the questions, but the priest listened, and watched. Watched her, as she was watching him.
Now, le Grant stood, and caught the eye of the negro, and then turned to the rest. He said, “You might as well come and see. The lady, too, if she wishes. We kept the door locked.”
They remembered to let her go first. As they walked, she spoke to the doctor. “I thought Messer Niccolò had shown you the manuscripts.”
The doctor was staring at John le Grant, not at her. “He brought some medical books from the Palace.”
Le Grant answered the doctor, not her. “It was nothing that mattered. It filled the time. It could have been useful. It had to do with one of the manuscripts from the same source as yours. The Byzantines copied old Greek treatises, and the Arabs got hold of them and translated them into something different; and then they come back to the Greeks as presents or booty. There was an Arab engineer in Diyarbekr, though, who wrote an original work a couple of hundred years ago on mechanical devices. It seems a copy turned up in the Palace. Nicholas saw it, and built something from it. That’s all.”
“The Basileus was amused to discover and foster Messer Niccolò’s special talents.” she said. She could hear them thinking. She added, “And where, then, is the confection?”
“Here, highness,” said the engineer; and opened a door.
She had seen the drawings which were, of course, fantastical nonsense. However, it was a nonsense that tickled the Emperor’s fancy, and there was no reason why an ingenious man, good with his hands and well-stocked with artisan’s patience, should not make, from straw paper and wood, the kind of simulacrum that the Emperor would be pleased with. An ancient mechanical jest, reproduced in another dimension.
What she saw, as she went forward, was the image of the nonsensical drawing. An ancient mechanical jest now transformed into an object of art which was also, in its gentle, affectionate way, a tribute to the bright, merry soul of its Arab inventor. And more than that, the essence, you would say, of the man now gone: the man who had made it.
On the floor stood a rubicund elephant. Behind its Indian driver a maiden sat within a tall canopied howdah, intricately painted and tasselled. A bird sat on the roof of the howdah, with a turbanned Arab fixed to a valance below him. From inside the roof hung a dragon, its coiling neck and stretched jaws leaning upwards. The dragon glistened with rude, childish malice. The maiden looked coy. The Indian driver gazed furiously at his hatchet. The elephant appeared uncertain and also deeply preoccupied. The enamels glittered and glowed on all the smooth, fashioned surfaces. The lady Violante looked round. Priest and doctor, shipmaster and negro: each face had