‘Really, Michael? That doesn’t seem very likely. The Church never gives up, as you’ve just been assuring me.’
‘We shall see. Innocent has already run off to Lyon. But now I must run off as well.’ He reached out and took my hand, turning it over as if he would read my palm. ‘It has been lovely to see you, Petroc. I believe I told you we should meet again.’
‘Yes, you did: in Venice. Christ, that would be ten years past,’ I said. ‘But …’ I peered under his cowl. Grey eyes gazed back at me. The hairs on the nape of my neck pricked: the man looked no older, I would have sworn it. And I realised that I had not been very surprised to see him, up on the hill, as if we were friends who strolled together all the time. ‘Time behaves strangely around you, Doctor Scotus,’ I muttered, stepping back, though he still held on to my hand. ‘Ten years … I have changed, haven’t I? The years have been gnawing at me like rats. And you, you’re no older, though surely …’
Michael laughed softly. ‘And no younger, my friend, no younger. Now I am going to advise you, and advice from the necromancer …’ He smiled, and again my neck-hairs stood up.
‘My warning you’ve heard. My advice: go home. Mourn Isaac. Your time is coming, Petroc. You have grown very great – a tall, tall tree in this thicket of fools. When the storm comes, you will feel it, never fear, no matter if you have chosen one side, or the other, or none. Prepare yourself, my old friend. Make sure your roots go deep. Wrap them round ancient stone, or better still, anchor them on love. And trust. Hold these things close, if you have them, and if you do not, find them quickly. You do not have much time.’
He released me, and turning, slipped into the crowd that, naptime over, had surged out into the yellowing light of a waning day. He was gone in a moment: his grey cowl, which I thought to see bobbing away above the river of heads, for Doctor Scotus was unbowed, however many years were upon his shoulders, was nowhere to be seen.
I breathed in the rich air of creation and decay that is a summer city: food, rubbish, shit. And looking round, saw that I was just across the street from the shoemaker I had set out to find so many days ago, though I had thought we were in quite another quarter of the city. I saw a sheet of leather the colour of ragged-robin flowers, and found myself wondering if Iselda would like it.
Chapter Five
I took Michael Scotus’s advice. As if the old man had drawn the rage from my body, I found myself too sad, too tired for revenge. It could wait. Let John of Toledo be comfortable. I could kill him if I chose, with nothing more than quill and ink. That day I went back to Isaac’s grave, the next day I bought shoes for Iselda, and the day after that I left Florence for home.
I left young Blasius in charge of the bank, though I had not had any time to teach him the finer points of the business. He, on the other hand, was eager to see me gone, for he had changed from the whey-faced cleric I had known to a hard-eyed, tight-lipped man with a certain bounce in his step that should have annoyed me but instead I rather liked. Ambitious, stubborn, certainly devious, as his eventual solution to the Genoese loan showed – yes indeed, I did like him. So rather to my surprise, when I set out from Florence on the Bologna road, I was easy in my mind so far as what I left behind me was concerned.
No, it was that which lay ahead, beyond the high ridge of the Apennines, beyond the miles and miles of bad, steep roads. I wanted nothing more, now, than to see Iselda again, but after that the future began to tremble and distort, to fade into the grotesqueries and repetition of a fever dream. As I climbed up towards the Futa Pass, where the land of the Tuscans meets that of the Emilians, I tried to keep my mind empty and serene, which I usually found easy in that high country of pines and ravens. But instead it kept returning, like a skulking, guilty dog, to the advice I had received, unasked, from an enemy: get married.
Marriage. What did Iselda and I care about marriage? We lived as man and wife quite openly in the Ca’ Kanzir, and anyone who cared to pry into our affairs (and as we lived in Venice, where prying is the favourite pastime of rich and poor alike, there were plenty who did) had known this for years. How many of even the most respectable Venetians had been married by a priest? Not all of them, not even most of them. We were hardly different in our own arrangement. In as much as we believed in anything of heaven and hell, we believed what Iselda’s father had taught us: that God is not interested in our fleshly exploits one way or the other. Neither blessed nor damned, we did what pleased us. And we were happy.
So why should the pope care? What business was it of Frederick von Hohenstaufen? I was a banker, and that meant I was hardly respectable in any case. One step up from a Jew, as Isaac was fond of reminding me. Well, that suited me. Having lived from hand to mouth for so long, and travelled so far with no home at all, I found it a small miracle that the same faces greeted me every day at the Ca’ Kanzir. Not very ambitious for a man of my stature, but now that I could have whatever I desired I found I did not want much more than that.
I did not care to be wed – fine. But as my horse trudged up the rough road, as chestnut trees gave way to pines around me, I began to wonder about Iselda, and then I started to become uneasy. Had I ever asked her what she wanted? Had she perhaps told me and I hadn’t heard, hadn’t paid attention? Christ, it was possible.
It had been the captain’s dying wish, laid out in letters and legal devices, that Iselda, his natural daughter, and I, his adopted son, should inherit all of his possessions, his wealth and his business interests. And when we sat down at last in his chamber in the Ca’ Kanzir and took stock of our inheritance, we found that we were rich as kings. Exactly that – indeed we were far richer than many. Iselda was my business partner, as the captain had intended. At first there had still been some relics to sell and to buy – or translate, as we said, so that the Church could not arrest us for simony – and Iselda seemed to enjoy that as much as I did myself. It was devious and underhanded and fun, selling fakes to rich cardinals, and every time we took their money and set them to worshipping some old bit of withered monkey leg or leper’s skull we felt a tiny pinch of satisfaction, as the captain would have done, for shooting one more little poisoned dart into the corrupt flesh of Mother Church. But as time went on, it was the bank that brought in our money and took up our time, and as for the captain’s old trade, it seemed that I was finished with the relic business.
It was Iselda’s misfortune to have a quick and ordered mind, and to her horror she discovered a hidden talent for keeping accounts and divining the ebb and flow of trade in the endless lines of ink that ran through our ledgers and our lives. She was beautiful and charming, of course, and that did no harm, but the truth was that she found it easy to keep clearly in her head the great tangle of trades and accountings, incomings and outgoings and all the other abstractions to which the Company of the Cormaran had been reduced. I suspected it was because of long years spent memorising songs and poems that she could store up all these dry, disjointed facts and figures and bring them forth exactly as needed; a skill it had taken me half a lifetime to master, and then badly.
That was why I travelled alone these days. Every year I would make at least two journeys to Florence to check on the bank, and sometimes I would be called to Rome or even to Lyon. Iselda craved the freedom of travel, but now when I travelled she stayed in Venice, dealing with the business there. As I always did, before I had set off on this journey I had begged her to come with me.
‘You know I can’t,’ she had said. I had found her in one of the storerooms, checking an inventory. ‘One of us has to stay here.’
‘All right, why don’t you go instead of me?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, my love.’ With a flick of her wrist, she had cut open a hemp sack and thrust her hand inside, drawing out a handful of long pepper spikes. ‘Look at this.’ She held it up for me to smell. It was dusty, tarry, and then the scent opened up as her hand warmed the fruit. ‘So beautiful. It comes from Kodungallur. Do you know where that is?’
I shook my hea
d. ‘India,’ I said. ‘But where in India, I don’t know.’
‘India is vast – that’s what the traders say.’ Iselda breathed in the pepper and let it trickle back into its sack. ‘If you were going to Kodungallur, I would come with you, dearest. But Lyon? I’ve been there. Go soon and come back quickly.’
Apart from the exotic consolations of spice and silks, she hated the business as much as I did, but the customers and clients adored her, and it was Iselda who they wished to deal with, while I was forced to journey alone. And without her for company, I found that, more and more, my travels up and down the lands of Italy did not delight me as they might have done before. When I was away from Iselda I longed only for the day when we would be together again.
Meanwhile, the more Iselda learned, the more she grew trapped, for it was our misfortune that the captain had created, whether he had meant to or not, a business that had grown into a great organisation spread over twenty or more realms and domains, all held together with gold and with ink, until we were caught like weak spiders in their own web. We could not escape. We didn’t dare to. And that was it: when I caught sight of myself in the silver mirrors of our palace I saw a man who was ageing well, though much scarred by life, but in his eyes something I did not like to name, for I was afraid that it was cowardice.
I reached the Furta Pass and began the long descent towards the plains of Emilia and Lombardy, lost beneath a golden haze of fog in the mornings and dust at the day’s end. I was travelling alone, which was my habit. I was not carrying any gold, and the important papers had been sent by courier ahead of me. I had long since stopped worrying about bandits, and in those years the trouble between Rome and the emperor had put many soldiers on the roads, and the robbers had either joined them or slunk off into the chestnut forests. I reached Bologna in good time, stayed for an indulgent dinner and set out the next morning with my liver chiding me for all that I had subjected it to. But one cannot pass through Bologna without testing one’s digestion, so I calmed it with one of the vile herbal tinctures they make in those parts and worried, for a while, that I was getting old.
My habit, and as I had made this journey many times in the past few years it was a habit indeed, was to ride north from Bologna to Ferrara, from there to Rovigo and then head east to Chioggia, where I would take a boat across the Lagoon to Venice. But when I reached Ferrara I heard that there was trouble in the flat country south of the Lagoon, and so I decided, reluctantly, to make for Padua and come to Venice by way of Mestre. It was late September by then, and the weather was fair and golden, so this did not seem like much of a hardship. Padua was a stronghold of the emperor, but that was of no concern to me. I had clients there and all over Lombardy, and I had always come and gone as I pleased. So when I rode into Padua I went straight to my usual lodgings, a welcoming tavern near the river with good food and linen that was almost always free of vermin. The innkeeper, a somewhat cadaverous man with thinning black hair and large, jutting ears, gave me the best room in the place and called, loudly, for the best goose to be killed in my honour.
It was late afternoon. I knew of a respectable bathhouse nearby where I would not be bothered by whores or ganymedes, and there I passed a drowsy hour, scrubbing days of road dust and horse-sweat from my body. I could afford to have a tub to myself, and I basked in the deep, hot water, idly stretching out the stiffness from my limbs. I noticed, with a twinge of something I could not put a name to, that my waist was growing thicker, and the familiar terrain of muscle had, without my realising it, been swallowed up by a smug layer of fat. My chest, too: there was a drooping, not much but still a surprise. And, God! How white I was! But what had I expected to see? The lad who had slept on the deck of the Cormaran in all weathers? The man who had criss-crossed the mountains again and again, homeless as a petrel, carrying gold and promises between Constantinople and Paris; or the wretch who had endured the endless winter of Montségur’s death? I saw none of them. I was getting old, that was all.
Not very old, I told myself, ducking my head underwater and scratching out the nits who had jumped aboard my scalp in a drab way-station at Monselice. By my reckoning I had lived through thirty-two years, many of them better forgotten, and if I had let the good life add a bit of ballast to my belly, hadn’t I earned it? But I didn’t feel entirely settled within myself as I dried off and put on my clean clothes. What was I going to be fed tonight? Goose? With gruel, cheese and endless porky confections, no doubt. At least I still had some of the repulsive tonic I had bought in Bologna.
I strolled back to the tavern through the gathering dusk, the light turning amber and the cats beginning to stretch themselves on walls and window sills. Inside, I nodded to the innkeeper, not really noticing him, and wandered towards the big room where dinner was no doubt waiting. But as I reached the doorway there was a wild outburst of throat-clearing behind me and I turned, expecting to see the innkeeper choking on a fishbone.
But instead I found myself looking at four big men in the red and white livery of the city guards. They wore leather hauberks under their surcoats and their hands were on their sword hilts. They were not smiling, and neither was the innkeeper, who had gone as pale as an eel’s belly and was pulling on his fingers as if they were a goat’s udders.
‘Petrus Zennorius?’ The shortest man, who was taller than me, stubble-headed and beady-eyed, spat my name. Someone or something appeared to have been chewing on his ears, and they throbbed, redly. I looked him up and down and, though I didn’t like what I saw, nodded with reluctant politeness.
‘Come with us, please.’
‘What for?’ I had no reason to expect trouble, and I could not for the life of me imagine why I was being taken by the guards. But I was not very worried, for no doubt a coin or two would smooth this ripple in a rather comfortable day. I reached for my purse absently, and at once two of the men lunged at me and grabbed my arms hard just above the elbows, while the stubble-headed one relieved me of my knife.
‘As I said, come with us.’ No please this time. Hard fingers were digging into my arm muscles, and I could feel my shoulder sockets beginning to protest.
‘I am coming,’ I said, with all the haughty indignation I could dredge up. ‘And you’d better have other ways to earn your living, my lads, for I’ll see you slung out of the guards.’ The fingers dug deeper, but the leader narrowed his eyes, pursed his cracked and wine-stained lips and gave a grudging nod. His mates let go and I shook the blood back into my arms. ‘Did you cook my dinner yet?’ I asked the innkeeper. He shook his head, looking as if he badly needed to go to the privy. ‘Then keep it for me.’ I handed him a couple of silver pieces. ‘And take care of my horse.’
So I retraced my steps through the narrow streets, darker now, a wall of cloud bearing down from the mountains to the north, more people about, slinking out of our path and spitting behind us as we passed. The city guards, then, were not the favourite sons of Padua. Guards are never loved, but in Padua there was good reason to keep out of their way, for these walking sides of meat in their red and white surcoats that made them look like misplaced crusaders served a man called Ezzelino da Romano, and even in those days mothers were scaring their children with that name. Eat your supper, or Ezzelino will get you. Well, apparently he had got me.
Ezzelino da Romano, podestà of Padua, was Frederick von Hohenstaufen’s most powerful lieutenant in his endless wars on the plains of Lombardy. Ten years ago I had seen the smoke rising across the Venetian Lagoon when Ezzelino’s army had ravaged the country between Treviso and Chioggia, and heard the stories of atrocity and shame wailed in the wine shops and marketplaces. The man was a byword for torture and massacre – if you were of the Guelph persuasion, that is. Ghibbelines liked to call him a liberator and a paragon of justice. Being neither, but having learned long ago that paragons are usually monsters anyway, I felt less and less happy the closer we got to the palace.
I had expected to at least be given a chance to pay my bribes, but instead I was taken
up a narrow stone staircase, up and up, the big men starting to pant and sweat malodorously, to a small landing under the beams of the roof, and shoved through an open door into a small room. The door slammed behind me and a key was turned impatiently in the lock, and when I turned I saw nothing but old oak and rusty iron bands. Sounding very far away, the guards were swearing their way back downstairs. I looked around the cell. It had a low-beamed ceiling, a tiled floor and bare stone walls. There was a small window covered with a crude lattice of ironwork. A pallet of straw lay against one wall, and there was a three-legged stool such as you might find in a barn, and a bucket. ‘Where’s the cow?’ I said aloud, but the stone made my voice sound hollow and tinny. I jiggled the door handle. Locked tight. Feeling as though the walls were watching me, I sat down reluctantly upon the milking stool, but it was too low and I stood up again. There was a sudden soft noise from outside. It had begun to rain.
A fat, pallid moth hung above the narrow window of the podestà’s dungeon, pumping its flaccid grey-pink body as it waited for the night to come. Outside, Padua seemed to crouch under a cold drizzle that had swept down like a winding sheet from the mountains. The insect was a hawk moth. He had hatched too late, and tonight he would either freeze to death or end up in a bat’s stomach. I watched him as the light failed, and after a while I decided that he already knew his fate and was making the most of these idle hours, enjoying his blood as it coursed through his brand-new body while he had the chance. I closed my eyes and listened to the knocking of my own heart and wondered what fate intended for me.
I would never have let the emperor kidnap me had I not been softened up by good fortune. Like tough meat in a bath of wine, the river of gold that had carried me along through the winter and into spring had marinated me in its warm luxury until I was as tender as a milk-fed calf. And like a calf I had trotted smiling into unlooked-for disaster.
The Fools’ Crusade Page 7
