The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [52]
And so they were sailing, with the oars shipped and the cables formed in their whorls, and men, excited and bright-faced, jostling, talking together. His men. His ship. His risk. His success, or his failure. No, Marian’s.
He knew, better than anyone there, the size of the task he had chosen. He knew he had to make the crew his, before Trebizond. Or at least give them a pride in themselves, and their owner. He believed he could do it. But deep-sea sailing was new, although he had spent half his life at a seaport. He emerged from his winter congested with study. He went to sea: the earth fell away and instead there was space, into which he sprang vividly whole.
Julius watched, like the rest, as Nicholas overran the ship like a wave, making it his own from the hold to the mast-basket. Passing Tobie his bucket, he said, “He’s taken to it.” Tobie groaned. He had taken to it; but in many ways he was isolated still by his ignorance. The mechanics of sailing were simple—a matter of opposing forces, of stress, of angles, of pure mathematics. The weather was not simple at all, nor the pattern of human effort he had—through John le Grant—to control and depend on. At sea, even material things—wood, rope and canvas—changed their character; and had to be studied afresh. He could not judge, as yet, either his boat or his men. When, suddenly, the sea ahead turned rough and dark and the sky blackened, it was John le Grant and his seamen who tested the strength of the coming squall and saved time and effort by risking staying at sea instead of rushing for shelter. Already, le Grant had the respect of Astorre and the crew. On such occasions as these, Nicholas was a silent observer, with nothing to contribute.
There remained another unconquered dimension. Driving past Elba and Corsica, witnessing unreel on his left the coastline of Italy, Nicholas became aware of a limitation. He knew the political divisions of Italy: without that much, you could hardly organise trade, or a courier service, or plan to contract out an army. He knew where the lands of the Republic of Florence gave way to the lands of the city state of Siena; and where that in turn met the Papal States. Putting in to the harbour of Civita Vecchia, he pulled Tobie unwillingly to his feet to show him the hills on the horizon where, the year before, Tobie had confirmed the discovery which had made this venture possible. There, under the scrub and the turf, was the superb deposit of alum which Venice was paying the Charetty company to say nothing about. Sooner or later, of course, someone else would make all the deductions and find it. But by then…perhaps he would have found compensations.
That, so far, had been the extent of his interest and knowledge. It was the same when Rome had been passed, and the southern boundary of the Pope gave way to the frontier of the disputed Kingdom of Naples, where last year Astorre and the army had fought for King Ferrante against the French-supported John of Calabria. He thought he knew all about the Italian coast, although he had never seen it before. Then he caught snatches of conversation between Pavia-educated Tobie and Godscalc the priest, his sick-visitor.
Serving Julius and Felix in Louvain, Nicholas had learned to understand Latin. To a mind that absorbed and retained, its grammar was easy. But Godscalc and Tobie were quoting poems; recalling legends; speaking of great civilisations as if they mattered today. It had not occurred to Nicholas to wonder who had possessed these lands before, or what mistakes they had made, or what successes they had had. The world today held enough of wonder