“Not much,” Giuliano said. Pietro had been nagging him to marry for some time. Even the thought of it made him feel trapped. Lucrezia was fun, warm, and generous, at least physically-but she was also cloying at times. The thought of committing himself to her was like locking a door that trapped him inside.
He put his empty glass on the table and stood up. He would enjoy being with Lucrezia. He had bought a gold filigree necklace to take her as a gift. He had chosen it with care, and he knew she would love it. He would miss her, her quiet laughter, the softness of her touch. But it still would not be hard to leave in the morning.
Giuliano found Naples a frightening and disturbingly beautiful place, full of unexpected impressions. The city had a vitality that excited him, as if the people tasted both the joy and the tragedy of life with a wholehearted intensity greater than that of others.
It had been founded by the Greeks, hence its name-Neapolis, New City-and the narrow streets followed a pattern like a grid, which the Greeks had formed. Many of them were well over a thousand years old, steep and shadowed by high houses. Giuliano listened to the laughter and the quarrels, the haggling over olives and fruit and fish, the splashing of fountains and the rattle of wheels. He smelled cooking and clogged drains, the perfume of bright trailing vines and flowers, and human and animal waste. He watched women scrubbing laundry by the fountains, gossiping with one another, laughing, scolding their children. Their loyalty was to life, not to any king, Italian or French.
The sun was bright and hotter than he was accustomed to. He was familiar with light on water, but the burning blue of the Bay of Naples, stretching to the horizon, had a brilliance to it that dazzled his eyes, yet he was drawn again and again to stand and stare at it.
But always intruding into his mind was the ominous presence of Mount Vesuvius looming behind the city to the south, now and then sending a breath of smoke up gently into the glittering peace of the sky. Looking at it, Giuliano could see so easily how it could drive people mad with the hunger for life, the craving that would make you seize everything, gorging on every taste, in case tomorrow was too late.
He was in a deeply contemplative mood when finally he approached the palace and was invited into the presence of the Frenchman who ruled as king. Giuliano knew of his considerable military successes, particularly in the war with Genoa, barely over, and his victories in the East that had made him king of Albania as well as of the Two Sicilies. He expected a warrior, a man a little drunk with the triumph of his own violence. And he thought all Franks were unsophisticated compared with any Latin, never mind a Venetian who had so much of the delicate subtlety of Byzantium as well as his native love of beauty.
Giuliano found a large, barrel-chested man in his late forties, olive-skinned, dark-eyed, his powerful face dominated by an enormous nose. His dress was quite modest; nothing marked him out from those around him except the restless energy of his manner and the confidence that burned through even in the moments when he stood in repose.
When he was commanded to speak, Giuliano introduced himself as a sailor familiar with most of the ports of the eastern Mediterranean and currently an emissary of the doge of Venice.
Charles welcomed him and invited him to sit at the table, which was richly set with food and drink. It seemed like an order, so Giuliano obeyed. But instead of eating, Charles paced back and forth in vigorous strides, firing questions at him.
“Dandolo, you said?”
“Yes, sire.”
“A great name! A great name indeed. And you know the East? Cyprus? Rhodes? Crete? Acre? Do you know Acre?”
Giuliano briefly described these places to him.
Charles surely knew them already. Presumably he was comparing one account with another. Only occasionally did he pick up a leg of roast fowl and a piece of bread or fruit and bite into it, and he took little wine. Now and again he gave orders, and there seemed to be scribes taking them down in notes all over the place, as if he required three copies of everything. Giuliano was impressed that he seemed able to think of so many things at once.
His grasp of politics in Europe was encyclopedic, and he knew much of North Africa and the Holy Land and beyond, as far as the Mongol Empire. Giuliano found himself dazzled and had to struggle to keep up, quickly coming to the decision that to admit his limitations would be not only more courteous, but wiser in the presence of one who would take only moments to realize the relative ignorance of somebody who was younger and less experienced.
Should he ask about ships for a coming crusade? It was what Tiepolo had sent him for.
“It would need a great fleet,” Giuliano observed.
Charles laughed, a rich sound of amusement. “Always the Venetian. Of course it will. Much money and many pilgrims. Are you going to offer me a bargain?”
Giuliano leaned back a little and smiled. “We could bargain. Much timber would be needed, far more than usual. All our shipyards would be engaged, possibly day and night.”
“In a holy cause,” Charles pointed out.
“Conquest or profit?” Giuliano asked.
Charles roared with laughter and slapped him on the shoulder, a blow that jarred his teeth. “I could like you, Dandolo,” he said heartily. “We’ll talk numbers, and money, in a little while. Have another glass of wine.”
Three hours later Giuliano left with his mind whirling, walking back through the halls hardly less ornate than the Doge’s Palace in Venice, although the courtiers were less sophisticated, even coarse in their habits by comparison.
Some said Charles was stern but fair, others that he taxed his subjects into penury, almost to starvation, and that he had neither love for nor interest in the people of Italy.
Yet for ambition’s sake, he chose to have his court so often here in Naples, passionately, intensely, almost madly alive and placed like a jewel on the side of a sleeping dragon whose smoke even now scarred the horizon. Charles too was a force of nature that might destroy those who took him too lightly.
Guiliano must learn a great deal more, study, listen, watch, and take intense care as to exactly what he reported back to the doge. He went down the steps into the blinding sunlight, and the heat from the stones embraced him.
When Charles moved his court from Naples south to Messina on the island of Sicily, Giuliano followed after him a week later. As in Naples, he watched and listened. The talk was of the reconquest of Outremer, as the old kingdom of Christian Palestine was known.
“Just the beginning,” one sailor said cheerfully, drinking down half a pint of wine and water with gusto. “More than time we took the war back to the Muslims. They’re all over the place, and spreading.”
“Time we got our own back,” another said savagely. He was a big man with a red beard. “Fifteen years ago they killed a hundred and fifty Teutonic knights at Durbe. Then all the people in Osel apostatized and slaughtered every Christian in their territory.”
“At least they stopped the Mongols going into Egypt,” Giuliano volunteered, interested to see their answer to that. “Better the Muslims fight them than we have to.”
“Let the Mongols soften them up for us,” the first man rejoined. “Then we’ll finish them. I’m not choosy who’s on my side.” He guffawed with laughter.
“Clearly,” a small man with a pointed beard put in.
The red-haired man slammed his tankard on the tabletop. “And what the hell is that supposed to mean?” he challenged, his face flushing with anger.
“It is supposed to mean that if you had ever seen an army of Mongol horsemen, you’d be damn glad to have the Muslims between you and them,” the other rejoined.