What would a truthful man say? You are too honest to be trusted with some secrets. One slip of the tongue would have betrayed all I was working for. There are more threads in this web than you even know yet; more than you could understand; more than you would ever forgive.

I wonder how far I would have persisted with the ‘House of Niccolò’ books if I hadn’t already been convinced when I started them that Dorothy Dunnett is a great historical novelist. I wonder, now, how far that conviction will carry me — because the books themselves have so far failed to grip or move me. That’s not to say they haven’t interested me, or that I’m not impressed, over and over, at Dunnett’s remarkable ability to weave her intricate plots, to make deep research read like lived experience, to imagine people of great complexity. They are just demanding a kind of patience from me that, for all their own intricacies, the Lymond Chronicles never have.

I described both The Spring of the Ram and Niccolò Rising as having a slow burn, and the same is certainly true of Race of Scorpions — one of the reasons I do keep reading is that I know there will at some point be a pay-off for my attention. All three House of Niccolò books so far have paid off in climactic action, but I particularly appreciated that Race of Scorpions also paid off more personally, finally giving me more of a sense that I understand its wily and enigmatic protagonist and his motivations. In Race of Scorpions his vexed relationship with Katelina van Borselen, for instance, recovers its intensity and then reaches a poignant climax; and the introduction of Diniz Vasquez adds a dynamic that reminded me of Lymond and, say, Will Scott. More than the military campaigns and political maneuvers that make up the bulk of the novel, these threads woven through it seemed like signs of the kind of overarching pattern in Nicholas’s own development that could motivate me to read the rest of the series.

And I do need a bit more motivation, a bit of an incentive to go through another 500 pages of this kind of thing five more times. I already know, after all, that Dunnett can write passage after passage like this one, vibrant with sensory details:

The pods of the carob trees dangled, black and leaking rank gum, ripe for cropping. There were pomegranates in baskets and gourds drying on roof-tops. In every village, it seemed, a donkey circled its trough of crushed olives, and the press thudded down, helped by many brown arms, as the mash yielded its oozings through wicker. Where the scent of orange had deadened the senses in March, the resinous odour of olives weighed down the humid, hot air of this journey. Instead of flower-infused silence, the air was filled with the clamour of autumn; the cries, the chaffing, the folk-songs, the team-songs of the villages; the chinking of blades; the rumble of flint-studded boards driven over the threshing ground. The objecting bray of working donkeys. The shuddering tramp of the oxen spinning the Persian wheels set over every deep well, so that the jars came up, roped with pomegranate wood withies, and tossed their icy water into the stone channels that fed the fields and the housewife’s wood buckets. Vines and almonds, lemons and oranges, pomegranates and sugar.

I love that, but I’ve also seen it before, or very nearly. This time it’s Cyprus, but before it has been Bruges, or Venice, or Trebizond. The particulars vary, but the effect doesn’t, really. And we also get many examples of another kind of passage that to me is a lot less inviting — the kind that traces out the loyalties and lineages and special interests that are the warp and woof of Dunnett’s plots. I’ve admitted more than once that these very complicated plots are hard for me to follow. In the Lymond books, that has never bothered me much because the melodrama carries me along and because they are dominated by a few highly charismatic figures: Lymond himself, of course, Margaret Lennox, Gabriel, Philippa, Sybilla, Guzel. The supporting cast in Nicholas’s life is appealing, but not one of them really stands out to me at this point. (Greater familiarity with the series would probably change this perspective, as, perhaps, would reading the books closer together. I had trouble recalling who everybody was when I began Race of Scorpions, never mind what exactly they had been up to before.) By the end of this book, I had stopped even trying to grasp what exactly Nicholas is up to and why, besides whatever was immediate and obvious in the moment.

But that’s why the ending of this book felt so significant to me. For several pages, we are inside Nicholas’s head, intimate to an unusual degree with his thoughts and intentions — even his feelings. “He had chosen war, and had been oppressed by what he found,” Dunnett tells us, and he has experienced both love and loss; he has also found “responsibilities from which he couldn’t escape.” The literal explanations of convolutions in the action (that, characteristically for Dunnett, it turns out her protagonist has known all, or almost all, about all the while) are helpful in a practical way, but it was the orientation in Nicholas’s point of view that I valued the most. If I do read on in the series, it will be because I am curious to see where Dunnett takes him, what he grows into as this long, slow process of development and discovery continues.

This is not to say there weren’t some great, even thrilling moments in Race of Scorpions: Katelina and the moths, for example, which is a scene I’ll remember for a long time, or, in a more violent register, the long-deferred confrontation with Tzani-Bey (who did what, exactly, to Nicholas, by the way? am I right to infer that his “mistreatment” was sexual?). I was also struck — not for the first time — by the ease with which Dunnett’s world incorporates a range of sexualities. This is something that’s very prominent in Race of Scorpions, because of Zacco, but the variety and fluidity of desire is a feature of the Lymond books too. It’s certainly not typical of other mainstream historical novels I’ve read set in the Renaissance: they tend, overwhelmingly, to be organized around heterosexual romance plots, without even a hint of other possibilities. And something else that Race of Scorpions has in common with the Lymond series is an emphasis on powerful women — here, Marietta of Patras or, as she is less elegantly called, “Cropnose” (because hers has been bitten off), and her foil, at least in beauty, Primaflora. So often in Dunnett’s books, while it’s the men out in front taking action, seemingly in charge, it turns out to be the women who, behind the scenes, are pulling the strings, plotting — like Dunnett herself.

So: next up is Scales of Gold — or will be, if I read on. Once again I expect I will, though I don’t feel breathlessly impatient (as I did when first reading the Lymond books) to get my hands on it. Dunnett still hasn’t let me down — she’s too smart and skilled for that — but at this point in this series I’m also not feeling hooked.

The truth was, Tobie supposed, that some of them wanted more than a leader, so that disappointment came hard. Toys; toys for the pillow. It was true; they were wrong. A team was one thing; a family was bound by something quite different. What they had was, indeed, enough to be thankful for. Whatever it meant, they had Nicholas.

The Spring of the Ram is the second in Dorothy Dunnet’s ‘House of Niccolò’ series. After I read the first volume, Niccolò Rising, last summer, I wondered how far it was my fault that “I was so incapable of following the multiple threads that make up Dunnett’s incredibly intricate pattern.” I had even more trouble with that this time: indeed, it seemed to me that Dunnett was being more opaque and enigmatic even than usual, tossing out teasers and hints, having the characters share knowing glances or experience moments of insight that were not explicated on my behalf until the end of the novel. As I also realized reading Nicola Griffith’s Hild, though, in the hands of a skilled story-teller comprehension isn’t always necessary to appreciation: Dunnett has a genius for making the individual crises rise above the contextual chaos, so that even though I couldn’t grasp the nuances of motivation or political machination that lay behind Nicholas’s actions, my interest in their outcome rarely flagged. Like the “reveals” at the end of a Sherlock Holmes mystery, Dunnett’s denouements show us the hand and the mind of the master that has been at work the whole time — hers, and her protagonists’.

Like Niccolò Rising, The Spring of the Ram has a slow burn: Dunnett takes her time setting up her pieces, and she also luxuriates in detailing the world through which they will make their moves. For the patient reader, there are abundant readerly delights in this process. Open to almost any page in The Spring of the Ram and you’ll get vivid, tactile description that brings to life a foreign world — unfamiliar in color, sound, smell, texture, distant in both time and place — in this case, particularly Trebizond, center of the fading Byzantine Empire, its glories on display here for the celebration of Easter:

The standards were made of crimson satin, heavily fringed, and the standardbearers and musicians wore the same colour. The horses had manes white as silk, bound with ribbons and tassels; and golden harness and beaded caparisons, and saddles studded with silver. The riders wore crowns and diadems looped and strung and fringed with fine jewelled chains, and had shining hair in every colour from bright gold to black. Their robes, narrow as grave clothes, were armoured with precious stones; with gorgets and belts and bands of ancient gems, thick as crabs. Their backs were straight; their bodies were slender as dancers’; their faces were masks of symmetrical beauty. They reached the plateau of the monastery and began to pass round its walls, while the murmuring silence was pierced by the abrupt clamour of trumpets. There was a pauses. A body of scent began to move through the air, displacing the incense. Where it came from, you could see the gleam of cloth of gold, and a sparkle where drifts of jewels fathered in shadow. . . .

Heralds and standards came first; and then young boys and maidens throwing yellow spring flowers. A golden-haired boy of a beauty she had never imagined walked next, dressed in ivory silk, a gilded bow in his hand. Behind, pacing slowly between his confessors, was the Emperor. In the crook of his right arm the Imperial crosier lay like a lily. Over his left was wrapped a swathe of the long, elaborate pallium. Above the tunic, the dalmatica, the silken eagles woven in purple and gold, she saw a noble profile, calm and resolute beneath the tall stiffened gold of the mitra. From the rim of the crown, strings of light pearls fell to the jewelled yoke on his broad shoulders, and mixed with the loose curling gold of his hair and his beard. Behind him, the train of men and women and youths, of officials and nobles and churchmen stretched far off through the trees.

The action of the novel rises to its climax with the Siege of Trebizond by the Ottomans in 1461. This provides the ultimate occasion to display the emergent power of our hero Nicholas, who began the series as a raw, unruly apprentice but who by the end of this novel is taking a confident place among Dunnett’s pantheon of charismatic leaders. In some respects The Spring of the Ram is an intensely personal story about this development, played out against the malevolent will of the nasty scheming Simon St. Pol, who may be Nicholas’s father, as well as against the quietly moving story of Nicholas’s unlikely love for his wife, Marian de Charetty, left behind while he risks everything for her company and also for her wayward daughter. But Dunnett’s people are also always agents, or representatives, of historical forces, and by the end of The Spring of the Ram we understand that the decisions Nicholas has been making about where to bestow his loyalty, his gifts, and his trade affect not only himself, his business, and his family, and his allies, but also the rise and fall of empires and faiths. “For a few weeks he had the power to choose,” says one of his company, once the hand has been played;

The future of the last Roman emperor of the East. He was forced to put a value on one of the world’s great civilizations. The blend of Rome and the Orient and the Hellenes that will never happen again. The Byzantine world that preserved Roman government and classical culture all through the ages when the Latin empire lay in ruins and was reduced, now, to one small, silly court with its beauties and its bath boys and its philosophers. And against that, the Turcoman horde. And stronger than both, the Ottoman Empire, enemy of all the Christian Church ever believed in.

This is Dunnett’s vision of history: extraordinary individuals inexplicably and exultantly of their moment, embodying “the spirit of the age” and yet, in her expert handling, never seeming anything less than human. In getting to know them, in getting caught up with them in commerce and battle but also in poetry, art, and philosophy, we are caught up in the excitement of the Renaissance as Dunnett feels it: as she says in her Author’s Note, “the explosion of exploration and trade, high art and political duplicity, personal chivalry and violent warfare in which a young man with a genius for organization and numbers might find himself trusted by princes, loved by kings, and sought in marriage and out of it by clever women bent on power, or wealth, or revenge — or sometimes simply from fondness.”

It’s an exhilarating vision, and sometimes also an exhilarating reading experience, but I have to admit that the pay-off for persisting through my confusion wasn’t as great with The Spring of the Ram as I’d hoped. We are repeatedly reminded that Simon’s agent, Pagano Doria, is a short man, which eventually seemed too pat for me as a signal that (clever as he is) he lacks Nicholas’s stature — he is not the fearsome antagonist that, for example, Gabriel Reid Malett is for Francis Crawford in the Lymond series. And Nicholas himself still seems lesser – paler, duller — than Lymond: he lacks the dangerous charisma and mercurial brilliance that make Lymond so fascinating to watch. We have to take Nicholas’s exceptionality much more on faith, so far: he carries out nearly as many tricks as Lymond, but without nearly as much conspicuous melodrama, and without displaying nearly as much passion (however vexingly conflicted), for truth, for honor, or for other people. The characters surrounding Nicholas also seem less distinct and less exciting than Lymond’s supporting cast: than Will Scott, or Jerott Blyth, or Archie — or Christian Stewart, or Oonagh O’Dwyer, or, especially Philippa. With four volumes to go in the series, there’s time for the ensemble to live up to my expectations, but at this point (and I readily admit this may be an unavoidable side-effect of my 30-year love affair with the other series) for all Dunnett’s manifest gifts ‘The House of Niccolò’ still feels a bit flat, my reading of it a bit forced, in ways I never experienced with the Lymond Chronicles.