The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [288]
It was not far, Martelli had said. The servants made a way for them, and a few people turned to look, while some looked less openly. It would be known who they were. But until the Doge had received him, he was not officially here. Although this afternoon the chairman of the Collegio would ask him questions, and he intended to give him some answers.
Narrow alleys, with doors and archways, grilles and shutters; walls covered piecemeal with frescoes and roundels and crests. Belvederes buttressed with lions and monkeys, and loggias with flowerpots in them. Glimpses of small-leafed trees, and well-heads, and fountains, and walls still smothered in creeper. Roses, too, in October. Seagulls mourning on rooftops, big as geese on the thick terracotta. Through an archway a man sat, shaping a paddle.
They came to a stepped bridge over a canal, and then another. Their footsteps going over had the familiar echo, and from under came the thudding, sucking litany of moored barges rising and jostling. The smell, too, was home-like: raw and cool and hinting at decayed wood and wet fur and mosses. And something different. Olive oil, and woodsmoke, and spices. Every town had its scent. At the next bridge, a woman coming up the other side slipped, and let spill her basket of lemons. The Medici men sprang to help her. One lifted her up while another two chased the lemons down the steps and along the canal edge. Someone took Nicholas hard by the waist and the throat and pulled him back, across the top of the bridge and down the steps he had just climbed.
He shouted as loudly as he could. He kicked someone very deftly behind the knee and struck someone else across the nape of the neck and had nearly got free when five others jumped on him, and trapped his wrists and tried to stop him shouting. He closed his teeth on a hand till it was torn away and someone gave him a strong, careful punch in the belly and another one, lower. When he had stopped retching, he was among a mob of them, under the bridge, and they were trying to force him into a boat. He didn’t know what was happening. He had nothing on him: no jewels; no money. All he possessed was by now safe in storage. If they wanted to ransom him, they were fools.
They were not fools enough to wait until the men pounding back over the bridge leaped down among them. They pushed the boat off and flung him into it. There was someone or something there already, wrapped in a cloak. He fell, striking whatever it was, and took his chance and rolled over the far side as the others landed beside him. He fell half into the water and half by the pole of a jetty. It led to a strip of paving, which stopped. There was a water gate just beyond, but it was locked. Above was a wooden gallery jutting out over the water, with a fence beside it. They caught his foot as he jumped for the fence, but he kicked, and reached the gallery, which was locked and bolted. He handed his way across and saw the pavement started again on the other side, and that there was a row of marble pillars framing a covered passage leading away from the water. He started along it, and someone caught up with him and heeled him and hit him hard when he staggered. He turned on the man and snatched his arm and steadied him for an extremely successful blow on the jaw. The man fell to the ground. He thought it was time to get his sword out. Three other men came at him and he turned instead and began to run hard up the passage. Catherine’s voice screamed from the boat and he stopped.
The pillars and the roof and everything else became blotted out by lunging bodies. He landed some blows, but mostly he received them, in all the places Astorre had taught him were the best. Or the worst, depending on your viewpoint. Then he was in a heap in the boat with his hair close to the water, which was surfing by as two men took the poles and sent the boat lunging round the next corner, and then along another, smaller canal, and into a network of waterways narrow as drains. The