The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [249]
John said, ‘You were in a Greek church, not a Latin or Coptic one. And this is a Christian purse, indicating maybe another church, or a shrine or a monastery.’ He paused. ‘There is a Greek church at Tor. That’s where the parrot was brought from.’ In the silence, he visualised the Red Sea and small, clamorous Tor, with its brackish wells and its palms and its harbour; the place where the camel caravans gathered to bring the Indian merchandise north. Cairo was eight days north of Tor. He said, ‘There’s a monastery there.’ A flourishing monastery, he remembered, with a plantation of two thousand date palms. They would have a place to hide gold.
‘Not Tor,’ Nicholas said. His voice expressed more than the words.
John took a long breath. Then he said, ‘Sinai.’ If it sounded grim, it was the way he felt.
‘Yes,’ Nicholas said. ‘Not Tor but its mother-house, set in the heart of twenty-four thousand square miles of wilderness, and reached by many days of excruciating travel, most of it vertical. Like Moses, we have been called to Mount Sinai.’
There was a pause, filled with breathing. ‘You can’t take Gelis there,’ John said.
‘I don’t propose taking Gelis anywhere,’ Nicholas answered.
John left, supposedly for Damietta, in ten days. He had several important errands in Cairo, one of which was to locate the whereabouts of David de Salmeton, whose rooms in Alexandria they had so recently and stickily raided. Left to himself, Nicholas settled down and, concentrating on the agency, began to fill twenty hours with work every day. At the end of a week of it, he fulfilled a long-standing engagement and called at the fondaco of Cyprus.
The agent had once worked in the Treasurer’s office: Nicholas knew him. Gradually, impoverished by Cairene tributes and failed harvests and general turmoil, James, King of Cyprus – Zacco – had lost the power to pay the army Nicholas had provided him with, and one by one had withdrawn his substantial privileges. There had been other reasons for the schism as well.
Since his return from Africa, the reports from the Bank’s agents in Alexandria and Damascus had indicated a change. Nothing direct – no messages, for example, from the King himself or Marietta, his cropnosed mother – but a hint here and there that matters were open to adjustment. Nicholas had instructed John to ignore them. He did not want to pick up the life or the friendships of seven years ago. He was pleasant, therefore, to this man and his clerks, but did not tell them what they were striving to learn – whether, as a man of independent wealth, he sided now with Venice or Cairo.
Zacco was married, by proxy, to the daughter of Marco Corner of Venice and, until she had children, Venice itself was her heir. She had no children, because Zacco had not yet met her. Zacco had not yet met her because, very patently, he couldn’t stand the idea of becoming a Venetian colony. Something which Lorenzo Strozzi of Naples, for example, had understood very well.
If Venice took over Cyprus, she would establish her warehouses there, and the Mameluke Sultan of Cairo would lose both his direct trade and his tribute. If Negroponte fell, the Ottoman Sultan of Constantinople would possibly move into Cyprus before anyone, causing his fellow Muslims in Cairo equal pain. Nicholas said, ‘What’s the news from Negroponte?’
He knew already it was hopeful. Paul Erizzo had discovered a traitor, and employed the knowledge to mislead his enemy. As a result, fifteen thousand Turks had been killed. ‘All the same,’ the agent said. ‘Constantinople fell to those guns. The walls of the capital cannot survive such a pounding. Signor Paul has sent to beg the ships of Venice, the ships of the Religion, to make haste from Crete.’
One of the ships which would come to the Captain’s aid was the Ghost, once the Doria: the same vessel Paul Erizzo had used long ago to help capture Nicholas and take him to Cyprus. Venice had wished to acquire credit