Scales of Gold Read Free Page A

countermanipulations brewing between Katelina and Primaflora. Only at the end of the novel, after Katelina’s love/hate for Nicholas has been manipulated to bring Tristão to his death and Diniz to captivity under James, after Nicholas and Katelina rediscover intimacy and establish the truth of their relationship, after a brilliant and deadly campaign waged by Nicholas for James has brought him to ultimate tragedy—the siege of Famagusta which he planned and executed has resulted, without his knowledge, in the death of Katelina and the near-death of Diniz, trapped in the starving city—only at theend does Nicholas fully admit even to himself that much of this has been planned or sanctioned by Primaflora, intent on securing her own future.
    In the end, too, the determinedly rational Nicholas gives vent to his rage. Punishment for the pain of the complex desires and denials in his private and public history cannot be visited upon the complex and only half-guilty figures of his family or his trading and political rivals and clients. But in this novel, for the first time, he finds a person he can gladly kill, the unspeakably cruel Mameluke Emir Tzani-bey al-Ablak, whom he fatally mutilates in single combat while James, unknown to him, has the Emir’s four-hundred-man army massacred in a preemptive strike carrying all the glory and damnation of Renaissance kingship.
    Like Pagano Doria, like Nicholas himself, Primaflora is a “modern” type, a talented and alienated “self-made” person. Unlike the other two, Nicholas has the memory of family in which to ground a wary, half-reluctant, but genuine adult existence in the community. At the same time, however, he avoids close relationships: he has established the Bank of Niccolò as a company, not a family. But, resisting and insisting, the members of the company forge bonds of varying intimacy with Nicholas, especially the priest Godscalc and the physician Tobie, who alone at this point know the secret of Katelina’s baby and carry the dying woman’s written affirmation of Nicholas’ paternity.
    Nicholas’ only true intimate, however, is a man of a different race entirely, the African who came to Bruges as a slave and was befriended by the servant Claes, who first communicated the secret of the alum deposit, who traveled with him to Trebizond to run the trading household, and to Cyprus to organize and under Nicholas reinvent the sugar industry there. His African name is as yet unknown, his Portuguese name is Lopez, his company name Loppe. Now a major figure in the company, and the family, he listens at the end of the novel as both Nicholas and his new rival, the broker of the mysterious Vatachino company, look to the Gold Coast of Africa as the next place of questing and testing.
    Judith Wilt

Chapter 1
    T O THOSE WHO remembered him, it was typical that Nicholas should sail into Venice just as the latest news reached the Rialto, causing the ducat to fall below fifty groats and dip against the écu. Instead of leading the welcome party, Gregorio sent Cristoffels to St Mark’s Basin instead, with a group of senior officials who didn’t know Nicholas. He hoped Cristoffels remembered what his employer looked like.
    The word, of course, had spread to the Exchange that vander Poele’s ship had passed the bar and was on its way to the anchorage. In the midst of the flurry – affirming deals, sending off couriers with drafts and remittances – Gregorio suffered snatches of good-humoured banter. For more than two years he had run the Bank of Niccolò in place of its founder, and his fellow lawyers and brokers liked to claim he lived in dread of the coming accounting. It might have been funnier if it hadn’t, in its way, been correct.
    He had posted a couple of runners between St Mark’s and the Rialto. When the cry came from the Bridge, he was reasonably ready to leave. It meant only that the ship’s boat from the Adorno had reached the Foscari bend, and he could still