Race of Scorpions (63 page)

She didn’t need to strain her sun-dazzled eyes to put a name to the speaker. After a moment she saw him, or his fuzzed mess of damp hair, and the peeled-open whites of his eyes, and his broad, accommodating shoulders draped today in anonymous black. He stood against the farthest wall of the shed, beyond the trestles of green, and barred by them from the door. The clay of the bottle cracked between her two hands. He said, ‘Watch. You’ll break it. How can I harm you? You’ve only to call, and I’m dead.’

First, the shock of finding Nicholas, here. Then the shock when she saw the truth of his words. She said, ‘Then I’ll call.’ Her heart thudded.

He said, ‘Give me five minutes first. I had no need to leave Cyprus. I had no need to come here.’

She said, ‘Five minutes, why? Diniz is safe. He’s on his way home. I’m going home, too.’

‘Is he safe?’ Nicholas said. ‘Are you sure?’

A wash of fright, anger, nausea, swept over her. She said, ‘Do you think I’d leave Cyprus before I was sure? I heard he had gone. The man who helped him sent a message. They found him a ship going west.’

‘Who?’ said Nicholas.

She said, ‘Is that why you came? To find out?’

‘To find out if he was safe, that was all. He should have stayed. So should you. I would have seen that you got home, Katelina,’ he said. He drew a breath and didn’t use it.

She said, ‘You were going to say, Wherever home is?’

‘No,’ he said sharply. After a moment he said, ‘I was going to say, Unless you were anxious to wait for Simon. Didn’t you know he was planning to come for you?’

She laughed. ‘I don’t believe it.’ Then she said, ‘Or no, I do. He found out we were captured because of you. Is that why you want to make sure you’ve got rid of us?’

He was collected again. ‘You’ve guessed it,’ he said. ‘And by the time your husband could arrive on Cyprus, the Genoese will be the King’s prisoners and it might be difficult to get you both away. Or all of you, if Diniz had stayed.’

The plants dripped: the air was thick as pulped mash. She laid
down the bottle and leaned her hands on it. ‘You really think the Genoese will surrender? You should talk to Imperiale Doria. He has ships. He has money. The Dominican friars gave the Queen all their plate and Piozasque pledged it to Doria for silver.’

‘Did he?’ said Nicholas. ‘The rumour I heard was that Doria himself was having to borrow.’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But he has security, and he uses reliable bankers. A firm who are ready with money enough, when it suits them.’

The bitterness must have showed. ‘But not for St Pol & Vasquez?’ said Nicholas slowly. ‘Are the bankers called Vatachino?’

Despite the heat, her terror lessened. She said, ‘Ah! You, too!’

‘I knew that would please you,’ said Nicholas. He ran his fingers over the plants, his eyes following them. ‘Is Simon in trouble, Katelina? The death of Tristão, how difficult will that be?’

‘As difficult as you meant it to be, I suppose,’ she said. ‘You know Simon. You met Tristão. Lucia is frightened of her own shadow. Which would you choose to kill, if you wanted to weaken a business?’

His eyes lifted. He said, ‘I’m in Rhodes, among other things, to find out who did kill Tristão. If someone tries to spoil my business, I don’t mind retaliating. But not in that way. And if I’d known it would happen, there are some things I would have done differently. As it is, the best asset Simon could have is yourself. You’re free. Go home quickly. Go home and take Tristão’s place.’

She gazed at him. He spoke as if nothing lay between them; with the earnestness of a brother giving advice. He had left Zacco in Cyprus to come where he would be killed in a moment if recognised. And he had come here, where she was, as if he had nothing to fear. As if he thought she believed all those protestations made on his sickbed in Nicosia just before Zacco came and bent over him. Zacco, who had sent her to Episkopi from which it had proved so simple to escape. Zacco, who had disliked, perhaps, the fact that Nicholas had paid Diniz’s ransom. Zacco, who had got rid of Primaflora …

Katelina said, ‘Why did you come to Rhodes?’

And he said, as if in direct response to her thoughts, ‘Primaflora is here.’

It was too pat. She recognised, now, that all Primaflora had told her in the merchants’ basilica had been false. Primaflora had abandoned the Queen to escape to Cyprus with Nicholas, and but for Zacco’s jealousy they would be together in Cyprus now. But Katelina knew, if anyone did, that Nicholas was not the slave of a courtesan. She heard again the murmur of the cauldrons, and saw the steam, and saw the wife of Marco Corner move into his arms. Katelina said, ‘But you have been taught to love men.’

He had been about to say something else, and stopped short. Then he said, ‘James of Lusignan?’

‘And David of Trebizond,’ said Katelina. ‘I saw your men’s faces, when they heard the news of his capture. You make use of women, that’s all. At Kouklia, you wanted to show Marco Corner who was master. You continued to prove yourself master in ways he would never even know. You made him a victim, like Simon. If Fiorenza has a child, I suppose it will pass as Corner’s?’

Outside in the courtyard the cicadas hissed in the broken shade of the colonnades, and the olives and date palms stood still in the heat. Nicholas drew a short breath. He said, ‘You’re not as unworldly as that, Katelina. The princesses of Naxos play games, and the games require partners. And I doubt if it’s your concern, but I am not the King’s lover.’

He was angry. She looked at him bemused, because he was not only angry, but had failed to conceal it. She said stubbornly, ‘But he wishes you to be.’

He had begun to recover. In one cheek a dent appeared, of exasperation, perhaps, or self-mockery. He said, ‘Perhaps. But his mother doesn’t. You were not sent to Episkopi in the hope that you would escape. Don’t you know it yet? I was supposed to take advantage of you, not Fiorenza of Naxos, at Kouklia.’

She gazed at him, feeling sick, her eyes filmed. He moved impulsively and she flinched. He said, standing still, ‘You’re unwell. It’s the heat, I’m sorry. I’ll go. I just wanted to be sure you were safe, and the boy. And to tell you to go home as soon as you can. You’ve nothing to fear from me, Katelina. Nothing. Nothing.’ And, perhaps feeling that his words had been too intense, he smiled suddenly and said, ‘Anyway, you shouldn’t water plants until evening. Didn’t they tell you?’

She remembered that comforting smile. Claes. Claikine, Marian his wife used to call him, before she became his wife; when she was just his employer. Around the smile, his face glittered with drops from the screws of his hair. The garment he wore, swung by the movement, offered a glimpse of a scratched and sun-coloured forearm, shaped and rounded by labour, the hairs on it bleached like boar-bristles. The young and powerful arms, and the hands, and the broad shoulders. Her mind emptied, until all that was left was an echo. She shivered, and found the echo still there.

You shouldn’t water plants until evening
. But he had given them water, from the casting-bottle he had made her lay down, and from which rose a slight acrid odour, barely evident. There was another scent, too. It came from his skin: a tinge of costly sweet oils she had met only once, on a woman.

A black cone, and sweet oil, and sugar. She had nothing to fear from him, it was true. She said, ‘I told someone to come for me. Wait. I’ll send them away.’

Outside, the white pillars swam in the heat. She had, of course,
tried to water the plants in the evening, but only once. Her servant had brought her a lamp, and the Hospitallers had come, black and white, treading two by two from the church of St John, so that incense and myrtle mingled in the acropolis, and taper light touched all its columns. There, where Athene, born of a hatchet-blow, had once received sacrifice, she had been invited to stand with the Knights to observe the birth of the moon from the sea. In their robes, they had watched it in silence, from the appearance of the first unlikely rim until the whole monstrous disc floated up, gold and washed-grey and rust in a night of no colour. When it hung high, a moon-path appeared on the water, with chains of glittering wave-light swirling across it, sensual as Nubian dancers wrapped in gold tissues. Dancers ravishing as a princess of Naxos, or a scion of Trebizond, or James, King of Cyprus, King of Scorpions. And round the lamps, other dancers had fluttered.

But today the sea was blue, and the sun burned as she went on her errand. She thought, when she went back, to find the shed empty, although she had been gone for no more than a moment, but he was still there, his eyes scanning her face. He wore, as she had already guessed, a stolen robe of the Knights of St John. She said, ‘Why did you stay?’ in both anger and anguish.

And Nicholas, stirring, said, ‘In case you had wanted me. But you don’t.’

She had betrayed him, and another man perhaps would have struck her. But there was no anger now on his face; only the aspects of thought translating itself into action. There had been, for a moment, a shadow that was more wistful than bitter. She stepped aside to let him pass, running silently, although she knew that by now he would never escape. Already, in the Commander’s palace below, men had roused to the alarm she had given. There was only one way out of the citadel, and that was down through the castle, and past the guard at the drawbridge, and down the staircase to the exedra with its ancient carved ship and its notice, vouchsafing to Hagesandros son of Mikion the privilege of a front seat at festivals for services rendered. It seemed likely that Nicholas son of nobody was about to receive a front seat at this rite for nothing.

He had gone only a short way when she saw a sword flash in the sun and a guard leaped out from a doorway in his path. Only one man, but armed. Then she saw that Nicholas, too, had steel in one hand: a knife he must have worn under the robes and which he gripped in his left hand and not his right so that the stab, when it came, took the soldier quite by surprise. The man staggered and fell. As he did so, Nicholas wrenched the sword from his grasp and ran on.

By now, the shouting below drilled through the air: rattling Greek from the garrison; loud, careful Greek from as many of the
twelve Knights as were on their feet, with their swords out of the scabbard. She had intended to deliver her tormentor to the jurisdiction of the Order. She had intended to shut the door somehow, for ever, between Nicholas and herself. It struck her, now, that any excited soldier would be forgiven for executing his own summary justice. She stood transfixed under the eaves of the church with their whitened plaster of nests and glimpsed Nicholas vander Poele as he raced down the steps, and heard the challenge, and then the clatter of swords, now out of her view. Heard shouting, heard running footsteps, heard more swordplay and then, for a long time, nothing but shouting. The sound seemed to weave backwards and forwards in the lower reaches of the castle, sometimes nearer, sometimes further away. Katelina stood, staring across the baked and dazzling ruins and saw that already the lizards were flickering back to their glassy arena, and the cicadas’ buzz had resumed. A man, living, had stood here. Now he was out of their way. Even when something moved, it was so far off that the scene hardly altered. Between the ranked columns a bare-legged servant in white bounded up the glittering span of the celestial staircase to the propylaeum. Beyond was the terrace, and the altar, and the temple enclosing Athene goddess of war, Athene goddess of goldsmiths, Athene goddess of wisdom, who killed her own father. Beyond that was the precipice edge, and the sea. Unless he wished to commit suicide, there was nothing to take a lone labourer there.

She waited, but no one came back and when, much later, she walked slowly up the same staircase, there was nobody to be seen. They found her there, to tell her that the spy of the Lusignan had somehow escaped. She returned to the castle in their company, and without looking over the wall, then or later.

The Knights’ castle at Pharaclos occupied a squat grassy hill to the north. Its battlements had a remarkably clear view, if distant, of Lindos; and far too clear a view, in the opinion of Nicholas, of the red clay roofs of the cabins that littered the landward side of Pharaclos Castle, safely out of view of the shore. Once he had limped past the cows and the dogs and the goats, the mules and the poultry, the melon patches, the beans and the well, it was not hard to find the house of Persefoni, the woman with the best roasting-ovens in Pharaclos. She was not pleased to see him.

‘Boulaki! Boulaki sent you, you go back to Boulaki. A foul, fornicating fisherman who starves his own mother.’

‘I bought his boat,’ Nicholas said. ‘He says you are an angel as his mother is a devil. I need to hide until I can walk. And I need information.’

She didn’t ask what was wrong with him, because she could see
the bone of his shin. He kept his arms behind his back too, in case she expected him to dance on his hands. She said, ‘How much?’ And he said, ‘Boulaki’s boat and as much again as I paid for it, to keep for Yiannis’s grandson.’

‘Ah!’ she said. ‘He trusted you with the boy?’

‘He got paid for it,’ said Nicholas. ‘Twice over.’

She shot a look at him. He hoped he looked as he felt, which was resigned, reasonably acquiescent and in some breath-shortening but not life-endangering pain. He knew, as well as she knew, that if he carried that amount on him, he could be killed and robbed in five minutes. He said, ‘I can give you half. The rest will be paid by a lady in Lindos. I have to meet her in two weeks on the west coast. Boulaki will speak for us both.’

‘Limboulaki,’ she said. ‘Little boatman. His true name is George. Well, come in. How did you come by all this? You climbed out of her window?’

‘It was a very high window,’ he said. The fires were all lit under the roasting-ovens, and the shacks, the yard, the cabin shimmered and reeked with the heat. He saw, without protest, that she was opening the door to a hay shed.

She said, ‘As you see, no neighbours want to build close to this house. You can stay. There is a bucket. The boy will bring you some food. Show me your hands.’