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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
    T HE 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.