To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [339]
On bad days, he faced the reality. She might turn it down. She might insist on the original agreement. She might even now be on her way to Bruges, and he would have to wait suspended like this, until the end of the year. Suspended; bound as in Kouklia; while all the harvest, the sweetness might wither and die.
He should have stopped sooner. He could have stopped early this summer, but it would not have given her a fair chance. And there had been other things he must do.
The Duke came before she did, and the Emperor rode out from the city to meet him. His procession, rank upon rank, proceeded between cheering crowds along the main street of Trèves, sumptuously draped and beflagged by courtesy of Nicholas de Fleury and Tommaso Portinari and the Duke. The chevaliers pranced in the van in their glittering armour; after them marched the crossbowmen, followed by the trumpets, the heralds, the drums. The princes. The yellow-haired Archduke Maximilian side by side with the sallow young Ottoman princeling. The Prince Electors of Mayence and Trèves and behind them, his naked sword raised, the Marshal of the Empire, preceding the Emperor himself, astride a magnificent white stallion, and followed by the bishops and the rest of the nobles.
The Emperor was dressed like a Turk, in a golden robe embroidered with pearls, and bore what appeared to be a nesting swan on his head. Seeing him emerge from the Palace, Nicholas and Julius, ready to mount, had simply turned and silently shaken each other by the hand.
‘That’s my boy,’ Julius said, quoting Astorre. Then they fitted themselves into the procession.
They were therefore among the first to emerge from the city and see, coming towards them, the procession of the Emperor’s humble subject Charles, Duke of Burgundy. It was quite hard to discern detail at first, because the sunlight shone blindingly upon what appeared to be a river of mercury: fifteen thousand solidly helmeted men to the Emperor’s lightly clad twenty-five hundred. Before them trotted an angel throng of a hundred handsome blond pages in blue and cream doublets, followed by a phalanx of silken-clad trumpeters and a body of the archers of the Duke’s guard in their livery. After that came the fourteen sapphire-crowned heralds, a cavalcade of prelates, ambassadors and Knights of the Golden Fleece in cloth-of-gold robes, and finally, an escort of six thousand horse, followed by interminable lines of baggage and guns. The horse-cloths were gold, and fringes of bells on the harness were shocked into a fury of tinkling every time the trumpets gave tongue.
The Grand Duke rode in the middle, glistening in a golden cuirass and a black velvet cloak starred with jewels whose worth, at a quick calculation, amounted to a hundred thousand florins at today’s rates.
The cavalcades stopped; the principals dismounted; the Duke knelt and was raised by His Imperial Majesty, who embraced him. They entered the city together, and spent half an hour in the marketplace, hats doffed, disputing gallantly over who was to escort whom to where. Eventually, the Duke left for St Maximin’s.
Nicholas and Astorre, Julius and John repaired at last to their lodgings and were able to give voice to their feelings. John was the first to frame actual words.
‘Man! Man! It was like two cooks selling meat on the causeway! All as sweet as you like, until the one fetches the other a blow on the haffet! His hat! His curly-toed slippers! Oh!’
‘And the Duke’s diamonds,’ said Julius. ‘Christ, Nicholas. Did no one know how to stop him?’
‘With Tommaso there selling?’ Nicholas said. ‘And it’s worse than you think. He’s brought the Crown of Light, and the Golden Lily with the True Cross, and the twelve statues of the Apostles in gold, and the four angels and the ten jewelled crosses, and all the tapestries. It’s got a hint of a message, of course: “Look how rich you might be when your Maximilian has married my Marie.” At