The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [77]
The noise, too, was frightful. The wood squealed and creaked and the stays throbbed and whined and everything banged and rattled all through the night. On top of that, the crew talked all the time, shouting because of the wind, or sang, or barked responses to orders. They hailed other ships, exchanging news about events, and the weather. At the slightest change of sail, the thud of their feet on deck was like a landslide. And, like everybody else, they stank worse than the cattle below. They didn’t shout greetings to her, because of Pagano, but they eyed her, and some of their chants made her uneasy. So she stayed mostly below, not enjoying her food, especially when the joggling started. That, Pagano said, was because they were in the Hellespont, and it was like going up a wide river with the current against you. The river led to the Sea of Marmara, which the Greeks called the Propontis, and which would be smoother unless it was squally. And after that, the channel narrowed again, to take them to Constantinople. Their final call before the Black Sea.
Catherine retired to bed, and asked to be called when they got to Constantinople.
A lint field, they say, is a troublesome crop; but a maidenhead can be worse, for less profit. Pagano Doria did not, after all, wake his bride as the cog entered the Bosphorus, the stream that washed Europe and Asia. On his left was the base of the triangle that formed Constantinople. It was marked by a wall: a long, towered wall set on sea rocks and broken by tall crested gates and the slipways and moles of old palaces. Behind it, thrust upwards by steep, hilly ground and the debris of two thousand years were the scattered houses and pillars, cisterns, amphitheatres and basilicas of the half-empty city which had once been the capital of the world, and was now the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman.
Doria studied it, to see what might be useful. The stories he had tried to tell Catherine were only pastimes: he knew how to talk of the past, but found it of limited interest. The changed city over the wall struck from him no pity, no anguish, no nostalgia. He had been here a long time ago, and had made some money, he couldn’t remember quite how; and had made acquaintance with a new form of luxury, he remembered very well how. Thinking, he smiled at young Noah who, in a new turban and glistening gold buttons, smiled joyfully back.
Refinement of sensual pleasure was what many people had sought and found in Byzantium, once a little Greek trading colony. A thousand years after that, as part of the Roman province of Asia, it had become the Constantinople whose temples for both worship and pleasure were there, in ruins, over the wall. Then the Western crusaders had arrived; the Byzantines had fled elsewhere; had returned; had given way to the Turks. And throughout, of course, the hedonists had needed decent traders to serve them. His own Genoese had built their merchant station at Pera, across the Golden Horn inlet, to look after that.
They had, of course, dug their own graves. They had been arrogant and then rash, both before and during and after the Turks’ conquest of Constantinople. When the smoke cleared away, it was the Venetians who were allowed to replace their Bailie in Pera; the Venetians who had the franchise of the Phocoea alum mines and the privileges, while the Genoese were allowed a low-rank Elder to look after their diminished affairs. The Sultan, like the Emperor, had lost patience with Genoa.
It would be amusing, therefore, to see what the Doria charm and the Doria wits could do for him against those sort of odds. His ship turned, sails bellying, into the Golden Horn and, rounding the point of the triangle, dropped anchor in