The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [210]
She hardly heard him. “You asked me once if I wanted to go home,” Catherine said. “You said we’d go home and leave Nicholas. I don’t see now how you could, if you still had to earn your money from Simon.”
He touched her cheek as he used to. He said, “If you had wanted to go home, we’d have gone. Money is nothing. It can always be had, if you look for it. But you are my wife, and must be happy.”
“I don’t feel like your wife,” Catherine said. She nearly didn’t say it, in case he abandoned her half-crazed like last time. But he had learned his lesson. She had hardly drawn breath before she found herself in her chamber, and his hands where she wanted them. This time, if he wanted to groan, he kept it to himself, except when she most enjoyed hearing it. And this time, it was as good as the finest proper marital act they had ever had. Lying there, as her breathing calmed down, she thought for the first time of her mother’s cold bed. But senses faded with age. What her mother had lost was far from this hunger and ecstasy. And besides, it was a second marriage; belated, self-indulgent, uncalled-for. She waited half an hour and then, although he was bleeding, got Pagano to make her his wife, triumphantly, all over again.
As the treasure ships from the Orient sailed once a year into Bruges, so once a year in the spring the first camel trains from the East crossed the high steppes of Asia Minor and padded on cushioned feet through the valley of the Pyxitis to the Black Sea. Grey and brown, white and tawny and beige, the camels came headstall to tail, jangling with silver and seashells and the small bells of their harness; their necks rising and falling; their thick-lashed eyes set on the horizon. They each carried three hundred pounds’ weight of incomparable merchandise, and there were a thousand of them, with sixty armed men to guard them. For every roped string of beasts there were shepherds and drivers who swayed on their backs, uttering long whooping cries, or sending up to the sky paeans of improvised chanting while their breeched women jogged beside them on the packsaddles of mules, with waterskins and salt and yoghourt and babies in baskets, and goats jumping and running about them. The aristocrats: the riding camels with their fringed blankets and tassels; the dromedaries that could run a hundred miles in a day; the fine horses with their silken harness were the conveyances of the merchants, whose servants brought their own luxuries.
Word of their coming ran far ahead, with the odour of musk and rancid milk and badly cured leather and toiling humankind. You could follow them, too, by the crows. What was folded inside the thick bales, three feet wide, two feet deep on each heaving flank was as secret as the contents of the crates in the suave gilded splendour of the Venetian galleys. Rank and dour and barbaric, this was the rough cup from which the élite of the West drank its elixir.
Within a day’s ride of Trebizond, the messengers came from the city, avid and hopeful, to meet them. Reposing at Erzerum, the merchants of the caravan had had their entertainment, and their rewards, and their instructions. They dealt with the messengers as they had promised, and travelled on.
In the Florentine fondaco, the mood was grimly determined. Astorre had not returned. Pagano Doria had come back, and had immediately associated himself with both the Venetians and the Palace. The men of the Charetty company had a choice: to believe Violante of Naxos, or to make their own dispositions. They chose to believe her, and acted accordingly. When, therefore, news of the caravan came, they sent no messengers and made no enquiries, although they watched the couriers ride off from the Venetian consulate and the Leoncastello. Bit by bit, working hard and silently, they had achieved all that Nicholas had asked of them in his testament, and all that the lady Violante had advised. Now they could only wait.
They knew, going about their business, when the caravans were imminent, because of the excitement. As Bruges declared holiday,