Niccolo Rising (House of Niccolo)

Spring of the Ram (House of Niccolo) 

Race of Scorpions (House of Niccolo)

Scales of Gold (House of Niccolo)

The Unicorn Hunt 

After the comparatively linear plotting of Scales of Gold, Dunnett's back to her wonderful tricks in this book. Niccolo and friends (and enemies) continue to tear about the known world, making modern day travelers envious (although we do wind up in fewer dungeons than the resilient Niccolo). This volume starts in Scotland, but the ferment in the Eastern Mediterranean is still the focus of the plot. Dunnett has an amazing ability to weave intricate plots, then resolve or dissolve them within a few paragraphs, leaving the reader breathless. She continues to capture the essence of each country that Niccolo explores. Her descriptions of Cairo can serve as a guide for modern travelers -- having visited Cairo, her descriptions of medieval Cairo evoked memories of the khans and citadel.

Among the other ideas she incorporates are the concepts of the pre-capitalist, pre-mercantilist kingdoms [in Bobbitt's terms, Princely states rather than Kingly states] where the 'monarch' might actually hold little land, and whose power relied on holding together an amalgam of territories that had no natural borders. Instead ties of tribal nature still held, while the mechanism was held together by new economic concepts like cash money:

Himself, Archbishop Luhel did not underestimate the Queen Mother either. Everyone dealing with trade and with money in Bruges and Arras and Rouen, in Mont St Michel and Tours, in Chaourse Flanders or Cahors Aquitaine, to the Count of which Emma sent, every year, some expensive trifle-everyone knew about Emma, widow of two Kings of England. And now, with Norman mercenaries becoming Norman dukes in Italy, everyone had a cousin or two where it mattered in Lombardy, and the network was becoming complete.

Nowadays, money was something all men had need of. The church required it, to pay armies to push the Saracens back in the Mediterranean; to fight off the heathenish tribes of the Baltic; to establish churches and send her missions abroad. Kings required it, to bribe their enemies and to pay their friends for services rendered where land was wanting or inappropriate; to hire fleets with, and foreign fighting-men; to buy the luxuries that their status demanded.

And since not every country could make money or, having made it, could protect the place where it was kept, a trade in money was always there: money that did not go rotten or stink or require great ships to carry it backwards and forwards, or fail altogether if the weather was bad or some tribe of ignorant savages wiped out the seed and the growers. Money which grew of its own accord: in Exeter, in Alston, in the Hertz mountains where the Emperor Henry had made his new'palace.

Money, which was power, which was the wheel upon which ran Emma the Queen Mother's heart.              '

Ten years ago, hiring himself and his ships, Thorfinn of Orkney had wanted adventure perhaps as much as money, if not more. He had his household to pay, and those men who, building his ships, had to raise their crops and herd their beasts using serf-labour. Now, as Macbeth of Alba, it would seem that riches lay to his hand within his new provinces and he had no call to look further to England or further south over the sea.

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