On the way to his marriage bed, the climax and reward of years of struggle, Nicholas is stunned by two blows which will undermine all the spiritual balance he has achieved in his African journey. He learns that Umar—his teacher, his other self—is dead in primitive battle, together with most of the gentle scholars of Timbuktu and their children. And on the heels of that news his bride Gelis, fierce, unreadable, looses the punishment she has prepared for him all these months: she tells him how she has deliberately conceived a child with Nicholas’ enemy Simon, to duplicate in reverse—out of what hatred he cannot conceive—the tragedy of Katelina. As the novel closes, we know that he is planning to accept the child as his own, and that he is going to Scotland.
How Nicholas will be affected by the double betrayal—the involuntary death, the act of willful cruelty—is not yet clear. There is a shield half in place, but Umar, the man of faith who helped him create it, is gone. Nicholas’ own spiritual experience, deeply guarded, has had to do with the intersection of mathematics and beauty, with the mind-cleansing horizons of sea and sky and desert, and with the display in friend and foe alike of the compelling qualities of valor and joy and empathy: the spiritual maturity with which he accepts the blows of fate here may be real, but he has taken his revenge in devious ways before. More mysteriously still, the maturity is accompanied by a curious susceptibility he cannot yet understand, a gift or a disability which teases his mind with unknown events, unvisited places, thoughts that are not his. As much as his markets, his politics, or his half-hidden domestic desires, these thoughts seem to draw him North.
VOLUME V: The Unicorn Hunt
Thinner, preoccupied, dressed in a suave and expensive black pitched between melodrama and satire, between grief and devilry, our protagonist enters his family’s homeland bearing his mother’s name. Now Nicholas de Fleury, he comes to Scotland with two projects in hand: to recover the child his pregnant wife says is Simon’s and to build in that energetic and unpredictable northern backwater a new edifice of cultural, political, and economic power. Nicholas brings artists and craftsmen to Scotland as well as money and entrepreneurial skill, making himself indispensable to yet another royal James. But are his productions there—the splendid wedding feasts and frolics for James III and Danish Margaret, the escape of the king’s sister with the traitor Thomas Boyd, the skillful exploitation of natural resources—the glory they seem? Or are they the hand-set maggot mound, buzzing with destruction, of Gregorio’s inexplicable first vision of Nicholas’ handsome estate of Beltrees? Is Nicholas the vulnerable and magical beast whose image he wins in knightly combat—or the ruthless hunter of the Unicorn?
The priest Father Godscalc, for one, fears Nicholas’ purposes in Scotland. Loving Nicholas and Gelis, knowing the secret of Katelina van Borselen’s child, guessing the cruel punishment which her sister has planned for Nicholas, the dying Godscalc brings Nicholas back to Bruges and extracts a promise that he will stay out of Scotland for two years, and so remove himself from the morally perilous proximity of Simon, the father-figure whom he seeks to punish, and Henry, the secret son who hates him more with every effort he makes to help him. Nicholas agrees, and turns to other business, mining silver and alum in the Tyrol, settling the eastern arm of his banking business in Alexandria, tracking a large missing shipment of gold from the African adventure from Cairo to Sinai to Cyprus. These enterprises occupy only half his mind, however, for the carefully spent time in Scotland has confirmed what he suspects, that the still-impotent Simon could not in fact be the father of the child whom Gelis has in secret borne and hidden, and who, dead or alive, is the real object of his quest. In a stunning dawn climax on the burning rocks of Mount Sinai, Nicholas and Gelis, equivocal pilgrims, challenge each other with the truth of the birth and of their love and enmity, and the conflict heightens.
The duel between husband and wife finds them evenly matched in business acumen and foresightful intrigue, tragically equal in their capacity to detect the places of the other’s deepest hurt and vulnerability. But Nicholas is the more experienced of the two, and wields in addition, or is wielded by, a deep and dangerous power. One part of that power makes him a “diviner,” who vibrates to the presence of water or precious metals under the earth, his body receiving also, by way of personal talismans, the signals through space of a desperately sought living object, his newborn son. The other part of the power whirls him periodically into the currents of time, his mind aflame with the sights and sounds of another life whose focus is in his name, the name he has abandoned—the vander Poele/St Pol surname whose Scottish form, Semple, is startlingly familiar to readers of the Lymond Chronicles, Dorothy Dunnett’s first historical series.
The professionals Nicholas has assembled around him have always tried to control their leader’s mental and psychic powers; now a new group of acute and prescient friends strives to fathom and to guard him, from his enemies and from his own cleverness. Chief among these new friends is the fourteen-year-old niece of Anselm Adorne, the needle-witted and compassionate Katelijne Sersanders, who finds some way to share all his pilgrimages as she pushes adventurously past the barriers of her age and gender. The musician Willie Roger, the metallurgical priest Father Moriz, and the enigmatic physician and mystic Dr Andreas of Vesalia add their fascinated and critical advice as Nicholas pursues his gold and his son through the intricate course, beckoning and thwarting, prepared by Gelis van Borselen. In the endgame, as Venetian carnivale reaches its height, this devoted father, moving the one necessary step ahead of the mother’s game, finds, takes, and disappears with the child-pawn whose face, seen at last, is the image of his own.
Yet there is a Lenten edge to this thundering Martidi Grasso success. Why has Nicholas turned his back on the politics of the crusade in the East to pursue projects in Burgundy and Scotland? Who directs the activities of the Vatachino mercantile company, whose agents have brought Nicholas close to death more than once? Have we still more ambiguous things to learn about the knightly pilgrim and ruthless competitor Anselm Adorne? What secrets, even in her defeat, is the complexly embittered Gelis still withholding? Above all, what atonements can avert the fatalities we see gathering around the fathers and sons, bound in a knot of briars, of the house of St Pol?
VOLUME VI: To Lie With Lions
Nicholas de Fleury goes from success to success, expertly operating large structures by the nice application of invisible pressure, as the craftsmen do in the miracle plays in which he has from time to time taken part. Within the theatre of family he has produced the convincing illusion of harmony between himself and Gelis, his estranged wife, for the sake of their beloved, acknowledgeable son Jodi. Within the circus of statecraft, where the lions of Burgundy and France, Venice and Cyprus, England and Scotland, Islam and Christendom stalk and snarl, the Banco de Niccolò wields a valued whip. Its padrone is a cosmopolitan, virtually stateless man, intellectually drawn to the puzzle of history in the making, but not visibly compelled by the roots of race—although, to be sure, some of his enemies think him motivated mainly by the passion of revenge on his own family.
Free now to enlarge and complete projects in the small, unsteady country of Scotland—which the priest Godscalc, half guessing his intent, had compelled him to abandon for two years—Nicholas carries out two coups de théatre which have consequences and resonances unexpected by their designer. He spends ruinously of his time and the kingdom’s money on a nativity play whose single performance, a glory of thought, feeling, and art which makes transcendence of all its illusions and momentarily unites its fractured community, hints at the strength and value of the wounded spirit who has devised it. And he mounts a merchant expedition to the fish-fertile waters of Iceland, whence he lures and bests his old rivals the Adornes and the Vatachino company, as well as a new one, the Danziger pirate Pauel Benecke.
Sharing this adventure are Kathi Sersanders and Robin of Berecrofts, a Scottish youth whose courage, and desire to break free of the bounds of his sturdy mercantile heritage, bri
ng him to the magnetic Nicholas as an admiring squire. Together they explore the new world of the north, learn from the hardy generosities of the Icelanders, and, transformed in the end from actors and designers to spectators, experience in awe and humility Nature’s own nativity play, the re-creation of a continent in the double explosions of Katla and Hekla, the volcanoes of Iceland.
Nicholas’ well-wishers will need this glimpse of his humanity. For in the matters he controls, Nicholas’ plans are coming to dark fruition. Gelis has a climactic announcement to make—she has won the war between them because she has secretly been working for years for the Vatachino. But Jorden de St Pol, whose painfully rebuilt career in France Nicholas has undermined once again, brings a devastating illumination: Nicholas knew of Gelis’ connection with the Vatachino and skillfully played with it; further, all his projects in Scotland, from the nativity play and the Iceland expedition which brought him a barony, to more secret investments of the bank’s and the country’s money in worthless mines, poisoned grains, and debased coinage, were meant in fact to financially wreck the country whose gentry, the St Pol/Semples, had terrified and rejected Nicholas’ mother, and Nicholas himself, thirty years before.
He has carried out this plan because he could: he could not draw back from it because it was his. In this final spectacle, the work of an angry child, of an obsessed artist, even his friends believe they see the death of Nicholas’ soul, and desert him. Stunned by his own dire success, Nicholas agrees with them: as the novel ends and the abandoned and pitiless banker allows himself to be carried East by the newly ascendant emperor of Germany, he seems ready for burial. Or, possibly, resurrection.
If he seeks his grave, there is no lack of deadly alternatives available: the perils of ruthless private enterprise with pirates like Paúel Benecke, or of the ever-beckoning Eastern Crusade which was the dream of another of Nicholas’ mentors, Cardinal Bessarion, now dead, and the latter’s hairy acolyte Friar Ludovico. If there is to be a renewal of spirit, there are incentives to this as well. The alienated but still beloved family of Gelis and Jodi, who are still endangered by the St Pols. The now-engaged young people, Kathi and Robin, who remember stubbornly that the Machiavellian Nicholas did, after all, momentarily desert his Scottish plans and the Scottish King James, whom he did not love, to go, tragically too late, to the side of the Venice-threatened Cypriot King James, whom he did love. The handsome and exasperating Julius and the Countess Anna, his loving and beautiful wife. Or perhaps renewal will be triggered by a more mysterious set of forces, crystallized in the mystics and astrologers drawn to Nicholas and in the sometimes devastating shafts of foreknowledge through which Nicholas seems to be excavating the buried trauma of his own nativity.
Judith Wilt
Boston, 1997
Part I
POLONAISE
Chapter 1
THE WIND BLEW from the north, from Siberia, and the clatter of hail on his shutters woke the captain. He had only been in bed for an hour, but land noises disturbed him. He grunted, considered, then dragged on his robe and, without taking a lamp, made his way to the leeward side of the villa. He had built this one only last year, and put in a brick chimney-wall: warmth from the stove below mellowed the air and his mood, although his throat was wrung dry, and he was still wearing his wrinkled day shirt and hose, as when he had dropped — or been dropped — on his bed. The sleeping rooms creaked and groaned as he passed them: his house was always full. Only the single chamber, as he half expected, was empty; the door ajar, the window unshuttered. Through it he could see a paring of moon, coarse as pomegranate. He walked over and looked down below, at the blood on the snow. Then he looked beyond his gates, at the city in which his fine house was set. At the walls, the watchtowers and the icy huddle of dwellings, above which reared the stiff-necked herd of her churches, scanning the west. Danzig, at four hours after midnight in the deep cold of January, 1474.
There were others awake. Beneath the congealed thatches there glimmered jointed hair-lines of light, fine as lettering. A squat figure, forced by the wind, plunged across a cake of pink light and disappeared. Here, the alleys were snow-filled and crooked. In the New Town, there were more lamps than shrines. In the New Town, the streets built by the Knights drove across and down to the river like prison-grilles, their crowns rutted and black with wheeled traffic. The Knights, the bastards. He was still celebrating Danzig’s victory over the Knights. Everyone was celebrating.
Within the room, the quality of the air underwent a change. He smiled. He said, his back to the door, ‘So, how was she?’
‘Whetting her claws,’ Colà said. He was the only man known to the captain who could move as silently as himself, despite his height. They engaged in these exercises sometimes, stalking one another, testing, deceiving. It was part of the return the captain compelled from his guests. In winter, a seaman required to be entertained. Der harte Seevogel, Tough Seabird, they called him.
Colà said, ‘Is there some problem? You need a friend to help with your buttons?’ He had picked up tinder, and was lighting the lamp by his bed. Paúel closed the shutters and turned.
‘I was contemplating the scene of the slaughter. You look as if the girl got to you first, then the father.’
Colà blinked. His eyes were like pewter platters, and his real name was not Colà. The captain knew what it was, and had called him by it throughout the campaign in the north, where they had met. Then, after the better part of two years, a merchant’s train coming in from the west had insisted on bringing their friend to the guild hall, even though they had only just met him in Lübeck two weeks ago — such a lively, remarkable fellow was he. Name of Colà z Brugge. A one-time merchant who had decided to let his business go hang and see the world. And Captain Paúel Benecke, looking up at this bland, bristle-chinned figure, had said slowly, ‘Oh, yes? Decided to give up your business?’
‘Yes,’ had said the newcomer meekly.
‘And come to Poland?’
‘Why not?’ had said the big man in a reasonable voice. ‘I could see, from the little experience I had, that its people needed advice. Some hints about etiquette. A touch of help as to manners and culture. A bit of —’
Here, he had been forced to desist by the pack of genial, hard-fisted arms that rose and fell on him: it had evidently happened often before, and he accepted it amiably. When, at last, the two were alone, the captain had set himself to pin the newcomer down in another way. ‘So, what’s the point of all this? Of course they will find out who you are. You have an agent here, haven’t you?’
‘Straube, yes. He’s gone to Portugal for the winter. Oh, they’ll find out,’ said the man they called Colà. ‘But they’ll also know by the time he comes back that he isn’t my agent any more. I’ve retired from my company.’
‘Why?’ had said Benecke. He remembered trying to kill this man once. He remembered that the first time they met, this man had broken his arm, and later his leg.
‘Why do you think?’ the newcomer had said.
Benecke considered. So far as he knew, the fellow had been good at his job. The business had prospered. If he’d cheated, he hadn’t been found out. That left only women. There had been two: a harridan of a wife, so he’d heard, and a little virgin who thought she was a boy. That is, there had been a lot more than two, but none spoken of seriously. The captain said, ‘I think you just wanted some fun. But since you ask, I’ll guess you killed the wife and raped the little girl-brother Kathi. I liked her,’ said the captain with a catch in his voice. ‘If you’ve raped her, I’ll kill you.’ They were both, by this time, quite full of ale.
‘You think you could?’ Colà said; and ducked as the captain got out his knife. Someone took it from him quite soon, and they settled to drink again. Eventually Paúel had to ask. ‘So what happened?’
‘You weren’t far wrong,’ Colà had said. ‘The wife flung me out, and the girl married somebody else. So I thought I’d get out.’
‘So why here?’
‘I thought I’d get out to where somebody owed me a favour. Are you busy this winter?’
The captain sat up. ‘You want a job?’ There were no jobs in winter. Danzig was sealed in by ice. There would be no ships in the port until March.
‘No,’ said Colà. ‘Or not until spring. Or not until I decide where I’m going. I just want to pass an entertaining winter with my inferiors.’
Ten minutes later, picking themselves up from the snow outside the Artushof: ‘They’ll never let you back in,’ Benecke said.
‘Yes, they will. Anyway, you started the fight, and they’ll forgive you. Do I get a bed?’
‘No,’ had said Paúel Benecke. ‘You’d spoil my winter complaining about your women.’
‘I shouldn’t,’ said Colà.
‘You’d get into bed with my women.’
‘Of course,’ had said Colà. ‘You couldn’t stop me. That’s why you don’t want me to come.’
That time, no one separated them, and it was three days before either of them could talk without lisping. Colà had been living in his house ever since, and Danzig would never forget him, nor would Paúel Benecke. He would never have to forget him. He was going to keep him in Danzig for the rest of his life. Despite the blood on the snow.
Now he said, ‘So where have you left her?’
‘Never mind. Anyway, she’s not yours, she’s mine. I got a doctor to see to the boy.’
‘I thought his arm was going to come off. You ought to be chained up and put in a lazar house.’
‘Come on,’ Colà said. ‘I’m going to tame her. Then I’m going to sell her to you.’
‘Before or after you pay me for your lodging?’ Paúel Benecke said. He gazed with fascination at the scratches all over the other man’s neck and arms. He said, ‘What if she’s diseased?’