To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [365]
This was the ship. In its interior the Emperor and his son, so far as Nicholas knew, were peacefully sleeping, far from the incandescent rage of his vassal, who had expended three months, fifteen thousand men and a fortune upon nothing, unless you counted a minor duchy which he already possessed.
The Emperor had abandoned the Duke, but he had not abandoned the Duke’s adviser and banker. Nicholas had expressed a willingness to serve the Imperial court: the Duke in his own interests had sanctioned it. It had not been envisaged, at the time, that the Emperor was about to make Burgundy the buffoon of Europe. But Nicholas could not be blamed. He was here, by permission of Besse.
By permission, of course, of the Patriarch of Antioch. Others had had a part in his silent abstraction: faces floated in his unreliable memory; his wound had received expert attention. He had wondered, vaguely, why he was considered to be worth the expenditure. He supposed that he knew.
Ludovico da Bologna, Patriarch of Antioch, had left Rhodes to come to the west to raise men and funds for the next Crusade, the next onslaught, the next attack on the Turks. The Pope had renewed his commission. The Duke of Burgundy, receiving Guelders, had offered gold and ten thousand men to lead a Crusade to the East, and had made the Patriarch his ducal counsellor and representative. The Emperor was now receiving his solicitations. The Emperor and Nicholas de Fleury.
Nicholas lay, watching fish. They approached, touched the glass, and swam off, scowling. The Emperor’s barge always held tanks of live fish.
His injury, and how he received it, would have been of no interest to the Patriarch. The Patriarch wouldn’t know, any more than the Emperor, that he had endangered his Bank for the sake of an obsession, or that he had lost the allegiance of all his chief officers. On the other hand, he had gold in the East. And Julius wouldn’t mind what he had done. Nor, he supposed, would the patrician Anna.
It was not all, surely, so terrible. Roger could go back to England, Adorne’s kinsfolk to Bruges. Hamilton would take care of Mary. Bel had connections abroad. Henry was safe.
He would never live with Jodi and Gelis again. He had always been sure, whatever happened, that Gelis would stay. He had been wrong.
‘Well?’ said the Patriarch, leaning above him. ‘Well? Have you got rid of them?’
‘It was rather the other way round,’ Nicholas said.
‘But you’ve thought of what I said? The Golden Horde are the key. You don’t get anywhere by pinning your flag to the Genoese or the Venetians or the Muscovites, or to Naples or to Uzum or to the Knights or to the Tartars alone. You pander to everybody.’
‘What makes you think I’m good at that?’ Nicholas said.
‘I knew you’d agree in the end,’ said the Patriarch.
He wondered how the Patriarch knew, when it had been such a surprise to him. It was as curious as the way he had regained Umar recently, while in the haunted place where Umar had been, there was a child, and a girl. Jodi. Egidia.
They had been well matched as a pair, he and Gelis. Matched in a taste for intrigue, for numbers, for puzzles, for business and, to a degree, in the transmission of pain. It had not been a pretty war, but he had persevered, sure enough of the outcome – impatient, at last, for the outcome. And confident, too, that he would watch this son grow, as the other had not, at his hearth.
He had thrown all that away. Oblivious to all but his creation, he had been unprepared for the final awakening, and the revulsion which his schemes would evoke. And yet he should have been ready. It had all happened before. Intent upon his objective, he could set aside all human feeling, in the same way that he barricaded his mind against psalmody. As a result, men and women had died, and others had left him, as Gelis had. He would hear of her, of course, as they reared Jodi between them. He would hear of his other friends, as they