Race of Scorpions by Dorothy Dunnett

Author:Dorothy Dunnett
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307762382
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-12T10:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

IT WAS NOT, however, the two equal swords of Katelina van Borselen that Nicholas found waiting for him on his return, at long last, to the capital. Before night fell on the cooling ashes of St Hilarion, victory bells began to clang in Nicosia, and news of the triumph reached Diniz Vasquez, toiling in the mud and stink of the Lusignan dyeworks.

A prisoner of war has nothing to celebrate, and is wise to display no emotion when, from isolation, he hears his friends have been beaten. They said the Bastard would come back tomorrow, and before nightfall would proceed to give public thanks at the Cathedral. If the Bastard returned, he would bring Niccolò vander Poele with him. And vander Poele, surely, would come to his house, which was also the prison of Diniz.

As a place of confinement, it was not wholly unpleasant. Diniz was allowed in the kitchen and garden. He had even explored the master apartments, with the notion of returning one night with a hammer. It would give the bastard a well-merited shock to find his marble wall panels cracked, his flooring smashed, his inlaid Syrian couches all splintered, with their embroidered silk cushions in tatters. On mature reflection, however, he decided the dyeworks first deserved his attention. With the discreet advice of the under-manager, who resented his new employer but, being inefficient, stayed with him, Diniz had learned very quickly the vulnerable parts of the dyeing process and how to attack them: how to pollute a boiling, or lower the temperature of a vat, or crack a pipe or a cooling vessel.

Then, without warning, the under-manager had been removed, and the two or three habitual troublemakers who had been happy to help him, and a new man was brought in, a Florentine with an interest in gold thread who knew little enough about dyeing, but could tell well enough when trouble was threatening, and stop it. Then Diniz realised that if he went to extremes, he risked being shut up altogether, or removed from the house to a place of much less advantage. So, although from time to time he wandered through his enemy’s rooms, and opened his chests, and turned over, with contempt, his fine clothing, Diniz applied his excellent brain to studying the work in the yard, learning what the old slaves and workmen could tell him, and lifting himself thereby from the menial tending of tubs to the preparing of dyes, the timing of fine operations, the mastery, finally, of the ledgers where, in time, the damage he could inflict promised to be invisible, and wholly satisfactory.

Now the days passed, he found, much more quickly. He learned the patois of the trade, and the mixture of terms, part Arab, part Italian, part Greek, that made up common intercourse, on top of the tongues he already had – the French, the Flemish, the Scots of Lucia his mother, and the Portuguese of his father, who would never again teach him or take him travelling.

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