The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [76]
He had rested his hands at her girdle. When he rearranged them she recognised, with complacency, that she had won. “Well,” he said; and he was smiling. “I shall be away for a little more of the evening, until we are ready to leave. But after that, there will be the whole night, and tomorrow, and many days and nights after that to make up for it. And then I shall show you Constantinople, Queen of Cities.”
They smiled. He joined her below decks, and they mined pleasure out of each other, warm and blind and enclosed, as long as the seam yielded gold. He fell asleep with the last gleaning half reached for. She didn’t hold it against him, but lay stroking his hair between her two, new, blue-veined breasts, round and swollen as Tilde’s.
Her mind wandered to Nicholas, and the way he had looked when she had surprised him on shore. She had the impression that Pagano didn’t mind so much, now, if Nicholas followed them. She was glad. She wanted Nicholas to see her being received, properly dressed, at the Imperial Byzantine court at Trebizond. She wished he could see her now, being kind to Pagano. Then he could go home and think about it, in Bruges with her mother.
Far from launching an idyll, that night was the last she and Pagano were to share for some considerable time. First, bad weather struck. Then, the small gift of God, once so longed-for, made its second appearance: an inevitability which no one had reminded her of. Her new and plain women were less practical than the old nurse, and also less shrewd. They called her affliction the Curse, without reverence; and smiled behind their hands at her angry resentment. (This—this!—was a bodily insult she must now expect to contend with for most of her life.) Of course, they slyly remarked, Madonna might get her husband to remedy it. She learned what her husband had to do with it, and became very thoughtful, hugging her hot brick as she clung first to one side of the mattress and then the other, while her head and feet changed heights continually.
When she did come on deck, Pagano said they were in the Aegean Sea, and if the clouds cleared they could look behind and see the clouds on Mount Athos. He quite often produced names of places as if she had been here before, and ought to know them. Mount Olympus. He had been boring about Mount Olympus, and he was even boring when he talked about Jason and the Golden Fleece. When she told him so, he switched to Helen of Troy, which was better.
The Charetty household had not been a great place for stories, and Felix’s tutor had never tried to teach geography at the same time. She had also seen plenty of seagulls at Bruges, and fish, for that matter. The sea was full of islands and rocks, and the coast was just cliffs and rocks too, with fishing huts no bigger than pebbles. During the day there were plenty of boats about, moving from island to island, and Pagano thought she might want to look for their flags, but she didn’t. None was as big as their own although she saw two smaller cogs sailing ahead, on the same route as themselves. They passed flocks of fishing boats every night, with their flickering torches and the men in the bows with their tridents. The boats, when you saw them in daylight, were loaded with wriggling objects like cockroaches. Pagano asked if she preferred squid or octopus. She was meant to know he was joking. If they were selling fish, she thought they must be in a poor way of business to have to rely on passing ships for their market. Pagano, when she opened the subject, wasn’t interested. Pagano liked the sort of business you did over a pitcher of wine, with gold changing hands, and other men handling the cargo. For a sea prince that was, of course, as it should be.
In fact, the Doria didn’t stop anywhere until they reached Gallipoli and even then it was only to satisfy the Turkish governor, who was also an admiral. The harbour and shipyards were full and they were not allowed on shore. When she complained, Pagano said they were in a hurry, because