To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [324]
It had been very well planned. It was only strange, to his mind, that he had not been unbound and fed, as one would do if expecting a ransom; or tortured, as one might be pleased to do to an enemy; or killed, as might be a convenient way to deal with a rival.
As time went on, he saw that simple neglect would achieve much on its own. As a human being and a man accustomed to armies, he knew that in a crisis, cleanliness equated with vanity: if one inescapably stank, then one stank. The thirst was something again. He was surely not far from water. He was lying in a chamber of the old grinding hall, outdated now by the new one at Stavros, built to acommodate John’s wonderful Syrian mill. In his day there had been a well-ordered viaduct, with troughs and channels, including one under this floor.
He could hear no water now. He wondered if the copper cauldrons were even still there, or had fallen to Zacco’s great melt-down programme, a defiant attempt to repair his fortunes with copper coinage. Zacco was never passive; he always tried to do something. He bought what help he could, with land where he couldn’t pay money. And the new owners looked for short-term profit, like this, but made no investments, for they knew how precarious his kingdom was.
Darkness came, and then light. It was, Nicholas thought, his second dawn here, which would make it four days since he was captured, and the last day in June. He hoped the grandson or granddaughter of St Mark hadn’t got itself born in his absence. Babies of seven months were viable, Tobie said. Tobie claimed to have seen one cut alive from its mother.
A pang ran through him, indistinguishable from the pangs of cramp and of hunger. He had been trussed as extravagantly as if someone were going to weave from him: nothing he could do would shift the cords, and he had been reduced to bad-tempered movements to try and keep his muscles from deadening. He had got rid of the gag, but not the chain which manacled him to the wall. And now, his voice dried to a croak, he could not shout. He wished very badly that he could reach his pendulum, and had fingers to work it. And all the time he was sending exhortations, mingled with impatient curses, to the absent Mick Crackbene.
His visitor came that afternoon, with a footfall so soft that he almost missed it. Then he smelt the jasmine, pervading even the horse sweat.
Which?
He opened his eyes. ‘Ah. Filipe,’ he said.
On the fourth day of Zacco’s illness, the clamour in the royal antechamber in Famagusta was such that the Venetians could no longer bar the way, and the door of the sickroom was burst open.
Five minutes later, Rizzo di Marino pushed his way out and called. ‘Dr Tobias!’
The tone of his voice was enough, even had Tobie not heard the change in the chorus from within: the ragged shift from anger, jubilation, greeting, to muted distress, and then silence. He walked through the door as the circle round the bed shrank, muttering.
Gabriel Gentile said, ‘I asked for no other physician.’
‘No,’ said Rizzo di Marino. ‘But you have one.’ The servant Jorgin stood at his side, his eyes running with tears.
James the Second of Lusignan, King of Cyprus, lay, his eyes closed, upon silken sheets stained with blood, in an atmosphere in which pastilles of scent strove with the smells of ordure, of blood and of vomit. On the pillow, the tangled yellow-brown hair was dark with sweat and the bronze skin was yellow and shadowed, the imperious nose jutting, the mobile lips slack. The physician Gentile, in his stained apron, was breathing quickly.
Tobie said, ‘I have no wish to usurp you. Only I have had long experience of the bloody flux in the field, and there are different ways of treating it. Allow me to help you.’
It was not only the flux. He was almost sure of it. But he did not want to alienate this frightened man, who had seen the sickness from