The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [4]
It is a pity that, intelligent as he is, Niccolò should have made so many mistakes while living in Bruges. The worst has threatened his wife and her business. He has antagonised a powerful Scottish nobleman, and must leave Bruges until the danger has lessened. But for me, he would have joined his wife’s mercenary troop somewhere in Italy. It is I who have placed before him another prospect, brilliant as the Fleece, and in the same far-off country of legend.
Seven years ago, Constantinople fell before the Sultan Mehmet, and its Byzantine Emperor died. The other European lands of Byzantium were all in time overrun by these Ottoman Turks, my own Greek possessions included. There remained only one spangle of the exquisite culture which had survived for so long at the meeting-place of the West and the Orient, preserving the finest of both. This was the Empire of Trebizond, a garden on the southern coast of the Black Sea, no more than forty miles deep and the worth of three to four days journeying from one end to the other. There ruled the Emperor David of the Byzantine family of the Comneni, a dynasty of legendary beauty and wealth which had survived for two hundred years against the enemy tribes at its frontiers, sometimes through war; sometimes through diplomacy; sometimes through marriage.
The Emperor David of Trebizond, reports said, was sending a merchant to the West seeking Florentine trade, and offering to house a Florentine agency. I put it to Niccolò, whom the Flemings call Nicholas: what had he to lose? He required to leave Bruges. He required to put his talents to use, otherwise his wife and her business would suffer. Where better than Trebizond? At least, he should take some companions and go to Florence and meet the Emperor’s emissary.
He agreed. He has, I believe, no idea what is really going to happen. He may arrive in Florence and decide the longer journey is not worth the trouble. He may prove to be less exceptional than I think him to be. He may be more than I think him, and defeat me. But no. That is impossible.
Let us see, then—beginning with an event which appears to have very little to do with him at all. I shall not address you again, although I shall be present. I am still present, in the Registrum Magni Sigilli Regum Scotorum, The Register of the Great Seal of Scotland, where they call me Nicholai Georgei de Arcassoune, Grecus cum pede ligneo. My name is in fact Nicholai Giorgio de’ Acciajuoli. I have a wooden leg. Niccolò broke it at our first meeting. He is making amends.
Chapter 1
CATHERINE DE CHARETTY, having chosen a lover just after the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (a festival highly regarded in Bruges), was much put out to learn that, at nearly thirteen, she did not possess all the required qualifications. She began immediately praying for puberty. She prayed through her plans for elopement and, indeed, for a quite inconvenient period afterwards. The power of prayer, she had been taught, was invincible. By the time she and Messer Pagano Doria were beyond the reach of her mother, she would be (but surely) all woman.
Messer Pagano Doria thought she was one already. That had emerged at a critical stage of his courtship, and was one of the many things she liked him for. Another was his long eyelashes. Another was his regular teeth. Another was the expensive handkerchief he always tucked in the belt of his doublet, but never blew his nose on. She liked him for all these things even before he began calling on her aunt’s house at Brussels, and then started asking her aunt and uncle and her cousins and herself out for supper, or to fish with him, or to join a party for fowling.
Sometimes he brought his own hounds and his