Race of Scorpions (55 page)

He did not blink, or move a hand or a foot. He said, ‘Greetings, Highness. No, Highness.’

The veil skipped, and a snuffle emerged. The King’s mother said, ‘It is the art of the fisherman. You engage your prey. The pleasure lies in the dalliance, in the uncertainty. Once it is trapped, it is trapped. I commend you.’

‘Madam. I thought you were commending your son,’ Nicholas said.

The veil blew, but not unduly. The eyes watching him over it were almost lazy. She said, ‘You have a penchant for dangerous conversations. I remember. But Tzani-bey had no trouble teaching you manners. Is he still somewhat crude? Is this why you escape to the south?’

‘Certainly,’ Nicholas said, ‘I found he had no more to teach me. But he has my lord King for company, while I serve the same King in the south. For that reason, I asked for an audience.’

She laid her clasped hands on the table and opened her eyes. She said, ‘You are directing this interview?’

Nicholas produced a face contorted with thought. He said, ‘Highness. All the topics so far chosen are yours.’

‘And you wish to escape them?’ she said.

‘Both of them?’ Nicholas said. He reduced, politely, the surprise in his voice. He said, ‘Highness. I have tried to explain. I am going south only on business.’

He did not know why he was treading this knife-edge, except that he sensed she liked a challenge, and was bored and wanted, too, a mirror through which to watch her son. He had not misjudged her. She said, ‘Why do you think I will tolerate this sort of talk?’

‘Because you can end it whenever you wish, Highness,’ he said.

‘Well?’ said the woman called Cropnose.

And Nicholas smiled suddenly, so that both dimples showed, and said, ‘You have forbidden me to choose a topic. Do we return to fishing, or not?’

‘We do not return to insolence,’ she said. She did not look disturbed. She said, ‘You ask permission to buy some supplies from me.’

‘From the villages your Highness owns. I am told there is a surplus. Your factor has agreed a price he thinks is generous. I have to receive your Highness’s imprimatur.’

‘And you require these for my son’s business?’ she said.

Nicholas lowered his lids, in lieu of inclining his head. He said, ‘Without them, it cannot be successful.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘Well, Messer Niccolò, I have decided to take advice. I have asked the opinion of your neighbour in Episkopi.’ She rang a bell. The door opened. She said, ‘Messer Loredano and Messer Erizzo may enter.’

Without stirring, Nicholas heaved a great sigh. Then he got to his feet. The one prudent step denied him by Diniz’s axe was the renewal of his commerce with the Venetians. By now, he had assumed they were all in the south but for the Bailie. He had planned to call on Erizzo tomorrow. But here he was, the representative of the Serenissima here in Cyprus: the bluff man who had kept him prisoner on the
Doria
, and whom he had last seen among the cats of Ayios Nikolaos, on the night that Tzani-bey called.

With the Bailie was Vanni Loredano, who had, of course, been on the ship and in the monastery and even in the Venetian house in Nicosia, where he and Nicholas had talked about sugar. That had been after Tzani-bey’s small intervention. Nicholas recalled Loredano’s dismay. Loredano thought, very likely, that he spent all his time being beaten. Nicholas bowed from the waist and Erizzo said, ‘You are better. We were distressed: an unfortunate accident. It will leave no ill effects?’

‘None, I am told. You sent the kindest of messages. They reached me. I am most grateful,’ Nicholas said. They both looked affable. Stools were brought, and they sat. A number of the Queen’s household entered and took their usual positions, and wine began to come round. Nicholas scratched his ear, and then took what was offered.

They were talking about the climate, a topic introduced by their hostess. Wives and children were mentioned, whose company was so delightful before the weather turned hot. The Bailie, Paul Erizzo, had a daughter called Anna. Marco Corner’s daughter Catherine was with her dear parents at Episkopi. Vanni Loredano (who was Marco’s factor as well as Erizzo’s deputy) had been
joined on the same estate by his wife and their little son Matthew. Nicholas listened, not lifting his wine-cup. He remembered, with a tremendous suddenness, who the mothers of Catherine and Matthew must be.

The King’s mother said, ‘But we are not here to waste time. Messer Niccolò has brought a proposition. He wishes to buy up all the surplus eggs from my farms, and transport them to the royal cane fields in Kouklia. He also wishes a number of good laying hens and some cockerels. The request is not out of order. It is our practice, however, when a commodity is in short supply, to make sure that the Republic, our good friend, does not suffer. You, Messer Loredano, manage the neighbouring cane fields for the Corner. Would the Corner find this transaction disadvantageous?’

An involuntary smile crossed Erizzo’s face, and vanished. To Vanni Loredano, life was more serious. He looked at Nicholas, at the Bailie, and at the floor. Then he said, ‘Highness, to my recollection we have enough hens, and they are laying. We should not deprive the lord King of what is necessary.’

The woman’s veil blew in and out with quiet regularity. She looked speculatively at him, and then remarked ‘Good! And Messer Erizzo?’

The Bailie coughed. He said, ‘I believe the present number of birds to be quite sufficient for those already in business, Highness. It is true, however, that the flocks in Kouklia have been … depleted. We shall be delighted to help, of course, with anything that will assist the lord King’s estate to become profitable.’

‘Excellent!’ said the woman. ‘Now, Messer Niccolò, I am able to give you your answer. My secretary will draw up and sign the papers required, and the birds will be delivered as and when you desire them. You dislike my wine?’

‘Highness …’ Nicholas said.

‘Then pray drink it. We propose a salute to your new venture. Your new venture, and your new neighbours. You have heard that Messer Marco and his wife are already in residence?’

‘In Episkopi. Yes, Highness,’ said Nicholas.

‘And with them, of course, Messer Vanni here and his family also. And, of course, their charming guest, your compatriot.’

‘Guest?’ said Nicholas. He held the cup to his lips and gave a good imitation of sipping.

‘The demoiselle Katelina van Borselen,’ the King’s mother said. ‘She does not go home until autumn, and Nicosia is trying in summer. She will enjoy Episkopi, the garden of Cyprus; the home of Apollo and sacred to foam-born Aphrodite. You can supply her with eggs.’

‘I told you not to,’ said Tobie. ‘If one glass does that, thank God they didn’t give you a refill.’

‘It wasn’t only the wine,’ Nicholas said, while maintaining the ceiling in focus. ‘It was the wine and the news.’

‘You didn’t get the hens,’ Tobie said, wringing cloths.

‘I got the hens,’ Nicholas said. ‘I also got Katelina van Borselen in the next house all summer, in company with two of the Naxos princesses. Diniz knew what he was doing. I tell you, Diniz had the right idea from the beginning.’

Chapter 28

N
ICHOLAS MOVED
to the sea, and was glad to trade the oppression of Nicosia for the bewitching attractions of business. Katelina van Borselen, forced to abandon the Clares and enter a high Venetian household at Episkopi, exchanged a cell for a honeycomb, and found herself drowning in sweetness.

The villa of Marco Corner was white-painted, airy and full of delicious apartments of which Katelina and her servant had one, the Imperial sisters another. In a twitter of crystalline Greek, or Greek-French, or Greek-Italian, the wife of Marco Corner and the wife of Vanni Loredano fled across the cool inlaid floors and between the delicate furniture and out among the blossoming lemon trees, bearing their Flemish guest with them.

By day, their oval Byzantine faces glowing beneath enchanting straw hats, the ladies Fiorenza and Valenza would take her fowling: cantering through clouds of wild lavender to the saltflats. Or they would press through meadows of poppies to the white-pillared groves where Apollo (admirer of Ganymede) was himself anciently worshipped; or climb through anemones to scented forests of pine and fine cedar. Or they would stroll by the shore, and eat curds and sesame bread by the red rocks where Venus was born (without embarrassment, effort or afterbirth) out of the sea that foamed over the sand, with no more than an antiseptic odour of brine to taint the scent of crushed myrtle and narcissus. Lucky Venus. Lucky Venus’s mother.

Towards evening, when the swifts darted and screamed, they took her indoors and played checkers or dice or backgammon, or made music, or read poetry or talked among their Venetian or Saracen friends. Sometimes their husbands were present; but not always. In the afternoons, when even the children were sleeping, other footsteps were heard, and at night also. The husbands, if they knew of them, made no remark. Like the fine clothes, the
exquisite furnishings, the corps of servants who accompanied them everywhere, such things were accepted in the household, part Syrian, part Greek, part Byzantine, in which she was an unwilling visitor.

They were at pains to put Katelina at ease: they had exquisite manners. It was only at night, when the frogs pulsed, and the lizards hung on the walls and obscure flying creatures prodded the bed-veils, that Katelina, freed from the silvery feminine speech, heard breathing about her the ancient voice of the island. Beneath the prettiness, the chivalry, the conceits and scratchings of miniature war, the older gods were still there, threads in the earth, still brooding, still to be pacified.

The shrine of Venus was here. The Byzantine voices, quoting, laughing, singing, spoke of it every evening. Here Paphian Aphrodite was born – not sweetly from the foam, said the voices, but from the gouting member of her sky-father Ouranos, scythed off and cast in the sea by his own monstrous son. Here, on the hill above her birthplace, was the great Sanctuary where the rites of the goddess were performed; to which her wreathed adorers made their way from the strand in torchlit, chanting procession. Here she was worshipped as Aphrodite, as Paphia, as Wanassa the Mistress; as Kypris, or the Lady of Copper; as goddess of Love, Beauty, Fertility; as, further back still, the divine Phoenician Astarte. Here, washed clean of its blood, stood the altar, and here, obedient to the goddess, maidens came once a year and settled like doves on the marble, crowned with hemp, bound to give themselves to whatever stranger brought his gold and his manhood to the myriad courts of her shrine.

Here were set the bubbling cauldrons to which were fetched aromatic herbs from the gardens of Erythrea, mingled with oils and Assyrian flowers.
‘And there the Graces bathed her with heavenly oil such as blooms upon the bodies of gods. And laughter-loving Aphrodite put on all her rich clothes, and leaving sweet-smelling Cyprus, went in haste towards Troy –
where, of course,’ had said the voice of Valenza that evening, ‘she was the cause of the Trojan war. How beautiful the poems are! She passes over the land in her golden chariot; she rides the waves between Naxos and Cyprus. She takes as lover perfect Adonis, whose father Cinyras was richer than Midas or Croesus. And Cinyras, Ovid says, was the son of the founder of Paphos, born of Pygmalion and his warm-blooded statue. To the west – I shall take you there – was her fountain, where she bathed after giving herself to the crippled god Hephaistos … But we must stop! How tedious we are, talking of love! When would you like to see over the sugar mills?’ had said Valenza. The twittering voices of Valenza and Fiorenza, children of Naxos, granddaughters of John, Emperor of Trebizond, saying what they did not mean.

When, next day, Valenza repeated, warmly, her invitation to traverse the sugar estates of Episkopi, Katelina accepted. Somewhere in Cyprus, in a sugar-growing manor called Kouklia, Nicholas vander Poele was pursuing his desire to become rich as Croesus, rich as Cinyras who begot his fine son Adonis on his own daughter. What was his business was also hers.

She was taken, on foot and on horse, by Marco Corner himself, gross in build, domineering in manner except, she noted, when in the presence of the princess Fiorenza his wife. The great-grandfather of Marco Corner had been Doge of Venice, and for three generations the gilt star and red horn of the family had been attached to their palaces on the Rialto and here. Four hundred souls, black, white and brown, worked in Corner’s Cypriot fields, and he was their unquestioned master. She remembered her father, in Bruges, talking wryly about Marco Corner.

The sun, now, was losing its mildness. After the welcome green shade of the reeds, the yards shimmered with heat from the boiling-hearths. Shadow-streamers of steam wandered over the dust, crossed by the capering shadows of workers. In caps and drawers, tunics and aprons, men and children loaded and carried and dragged. Bent over the long wooden tables, the fish-muscled backs of the cutters gathered and flowed as if buttered. The staccato flash of their blades made her think of war-fleets and armies. Slit and chopped, the cane was carried from there to the presses. She followed, with Marco.

The hot air vibrated with noise: of shouting, hammering, grinding; the thunder of wheels and of barrels; the dashing of water; the hissing of steam. From the rollers exuded the smell, dense and herbal, that enveloped the villa some evenings, along with wafts of sugar and sweat and fogs of sweet orange blossom. Here, the juice spat and shuddered in dented wood-handled vats. Sunlight flashed from the copper as men leaned on the tilt-blocks to pour, their hide aprons stiff, their arms rose-coloured with perennial scorching. Clusters of flies stuck to their skin and hovered over the cauldrons: the veil Katelina wore over her hat was taut with the grasp of her hands. A child with a switch walked at her back, beating the wasps that sizzled about them.

There were bees and wasps, flies and gnats in the houses of pouring as well, where the boiled juice sagged and settled in conical moulds, steaming up from long benches like mangers. The place smelled of rank wood and straw, of the molasses filling the under-pots and the flat odour of clay, from the stacks of red funnels and vases. Marco Corner opened the door of a warehouse and let Katelina see the precious white cones of crystal sugar, the wealth of Cyprus, the costly indulgence of kings. Katelina praised them,
as she had praised everything. She said, ‘Who can equal the Corner in the making of sugar? Yet the royal estates are in other hands. That surprises me.’