The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [346]
‘And that’s what happens when you climb to the top of Mount Sinai,’ Julius said. ‘You come down with a lot of commandments.’
‘I know. He didn’t notice the balloons,’ Tobie said.
Julius made a grimace of good-humoured acknowledgement and flung himself down. ‘Well, it is Carnival-time.’
Tobie said, ‘Oh, come on. There are two weeks of it left. I’m sure you’ll manage some of your banquets and balls.’ He stooped and picked up Julius’s hand, with all the rings on it. Having examined it, he let it drop back.
‘Mind you, I don’t understand the Serenissima’s serenity. By all accounts they were cutting their throats after Negroponte – bringing the Captain-General home in chains hardly helped. All their credit and glory departed; nothing left in the East but Crete and a few bits of islands, and the Duke of Milan about to march over here, and deprive them of Crema and Brescia. What are they having a Carnival for?’
‘Because Moses de Reedy is going to take care of it all,’ Julius said. ‘Or he will, if all goes well at the conference. What do you mean, what are they having a Carnival for? It’s Carnival-time.’
‘Then I’d better go and put my funny face on,’ observed Tobie with acidity; and went to find his fellow conspirators.
John was with Gregorio, who appeared sunk in doubt. ‘I don’t think you should tell Nicholas what we’ve done. He hasn’t asked, anyway.’
‘Don’t you look at his face? He doesn’t need to ask, he divines,’ Tobie said. ‘He knows Gelis isn’t here. She doesn’t have to come until after the meeting. The morning after. That was the pact with the Patriarch.’
‘So she won’t do anything until after the conference is held,’ Gregorio said. ‘So don’t tell him.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ said John le Grant. ‘The way he is now, he’d hardly register a small thing like a family.’
‘The way he is now,’ Tobie said, ‘he’d fly apart like a spring-loaded shield. Wait for ten days. Wait till after we’ve seen Hadji Mehmet and the Knights and the Senate and it’s all resolved, one way or another.’
Five days after that, in a downpour, Anselm Adorne, Baron Cortachy, made a consciously impressive arrival by hired boat from Chioggia and put up with friends at the Ca’ Giustinian on the Grand Canal, since the rooms of the Knights of St John were already spoken for. With him was his promising son Jan, shortly to join the papal household, and his niece Katelijne Sersanders.
Two days after that, on a Wednesday, his niece took a hired maid and a page, and had herself poled across the Canal to the large, square building, fronted with mooring posts, which everyone referred to as the Ca’ Niccolò.
She wore a cloak and gown from Rome and a mask she had bought in Ferrara after she had begun to suspect what Venice was going to be like. She knew already that the buildings would be more refined and highly decorated than in Bruges, and that its network of waterways was infinitely more splendid and dense, and that the Carnival would be more aristocratic than the ones she was used to.
It had occurred to her that her uncle’s patron James, King of Scotland, would probably rather have an account of the Carnival than a blow-by-blow description of the Tomb of Lazarus, but she had been wise enough not to suggest it. She sat with her gaze fixed away from her gondolier, whose lissom body was unclothed from the waist downwards except by coloured hose, and whose eyes, beneath his feathered cap, kept sliding sideways in the manner depicted, for different reasons, in ikons.
Up till now, similarities to Egypt rather than Bruges had kept coming to mind: the pattern of moving light on the underside of bridges and the wind-patterns of sand; the ranges of structures inlaid and banded with white and gnarled with protuberances like the mountains of Sinai. Water, swollen and flooding, coursed through the canals like an animal; like the water released at the Abundance. Even the pillared magnificence of the Doge’s Palace, glimpsed from afar, had the look of a woven reed village, its cabins on stilts.
But she was in