The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [275]
“He is the man who saved you from Trebizond.” said her mother’s chaplain. “You will neither speak to him nor will you restrain him in anything that he chooses to do. I told you to stand. Stand. I have something to say to you.”
She stood and listened, flushed and shaking with temper at the cruel things he was saying to her: about her disregard for her mother; her self-interest; what he called her childish lust for sensual pleasure. She ceased to listen. He was a prig and a bully: a snivelling priest straight from the cloister who would faint from envy if he knew—if he dreamed what a man and a woman did when they were together…What they did, over and over, when they were together.
Then her loss came to her, in a hysterical salvo of grief that tore her throat, so that she collapsed on the bed and sat, her eyes closed, her mouth open, and the tears pouring and the mucus streaking her face unregarded. She heard her own voice barking, and Willequin’s; and couldn’t tell which frenzy was which.
Then the priest put his arms round her, and held her, and spoke to her until she was quiet.
Swifter than that, the story had spread through Kerasous of what Nicholas had done. Nicholas himself, no one could catch: he was up on the hilltop with Astorre, interviewing the governor and the garrison; he was out on the island, talking to John and the monks; he was checking the inventories of the cargo with Julius and Patou; he was on the round ship with Crackbene and watching her beginning to load. He had bought horses, they said, and was designing a place for their stowing. Told about the fate of his camel, he had asked a question or two, and then changed the subject. When next noticed, he was with the clerks checking the provender: the beasts and the biscuit, the water, the fruit and the poultry; the gunpowder and the shot. There were sheds full of bales which he spent a full hour examining. The galley was now in the water and loading. Soon the men and women and children would go.
From Tobie and Godscalc, over a hurried meal, Julius heard what happened before and after the visit to Skylolimne; the little marsh from which Nicholas had not brought back a fever, but, it seemed, the secret of perpetual motion. Of that, too, Godscalc and Tobie bore the marks; or perhaps they were caused by the month-long siege, the other events in the three months since their parting. He heard, but did not at first believe, how they had made their escape. Julius said, “How in God’s name did you manage to dress up as Turks?”
“I thought Nicholas told you. The bales the mules brought from Erzerum were filled with Turcoman clothing.”
“He said cloths,” Julius said. “Padded out to look like raw silk.” He was astonished. He said, “Did the old woman arrange it? She would know, in a siege, it was the only way to move people. A supposed squad from the Sultan, with orders to sail the captured ship back to Stamboul. Genius. Genius. No one would question them.”
“It wasn’t quite without event,” Godscalc said. After a bit he said, “We got most of the families out. The Venetian Bailie elected to stay; and some of the Genoese. The round ship seamen all came. And the Genoese women and children. The families from the Venetian compound had left already.”
It was John le Grant who had said then, “And Paraskeuas?”
Godscalc said, “Paraskeuas was given the chance. He refused.”
“And the other Greeks in Trebizond?” John le Grant had said. He was a persistent man, who asked questions.
“What about the Greeks?” Nicholas had said, coming suddenly into the room. Julius turned, keenly interested. The Nicholas who had landed miraculously at Kerasous from the Doria was not the battered comrade he had left in May on the road from Erzerum. He was longing to examine the change. He watched his immense former servant lean over, raiding the table and, with bread and meat in one hand, pause beside John le Grant. “Deaf?” he said.
John le Grant said, “No. Nothing. Idle curiosity. I thought I saw a few Greeks get