The Unicorn Hunt: The Fifth Book of the House of Niccolo

by Dorothy Dunnett

  He smiled back but did not, then, reply. On the shore were camels, buffalo, water-wheels. Because the water was low, the boat kept in mid-stream: once they were stuck on a shoal, and he wakened to find they were all being compelled to slide overboard and wade through the water. Katelijne was supporting his arm. He said, ‘What are you holding over your head?’

  ‘You’ve wakened!’ she said. She had become very brown, except over her chin where the veil went.

  He said, ‘Well, it seems to be daylight. It’s an ’ud.’

  ‘I told you he’d know it,’ said Tobie. ‘The prince of enchantment. She wants to teach herself, but she didn’t want to disturb you.’

  Then he looked about him: at the boat, at the river, at Tobie, and said, ‘What has happened?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Tobie. ‘What you needed to happen. There is Matariya. You can’t go to Cairo without calling there. So you might as well come.’

  It wasn’t quite true that he had no other means of getting to Cairo, but he was well enough pleased to remain. Tobie, he realised, had withdrawn whatever treatment he had been receiving. As the hours passed, Nicholas de Fleury came to himself.

  He had thought, once, to find truth in the desert, in that world of infinite space, of stark and painful simplicity that leads the mind and soul inwards.

  He had failed in that, and had found the failure terrible. Now, brought here by others, he was a convalescent in a different place. The scented gardens of Matariya – the airy pavilions, the profusion of sweet spring water sparkling in the hot sun, brimming in the wide, shady hall with its painted arcades where flowers and swimmers floated together – these healed not through the mind, but through the senses. Truth had been withheld, but he had been deemed worthy of comfort.

  The gardens belonged to the Sultan. Its custodians were well accustomed to the pilgrims who came to drink at the white marble basin from the well-spring touched into being by the Holy Family, fleeing from Herod. The distressed of all races came to the baths for relief. And in the innermost garden, the garden most jealously guarded, grew the vine-like balsam plants which the Queen of Sheba, it was said, had brought and given to Solomon. Their oils, envied by kings from their anointing to their entombment, were prepared in the Sultan’s own palace at Cairo and became gifts of diplomacy, or were sold in their ivory phials to the rich. Here, the breaking blossom soaked the air with its scent; and hair, skin, clothes were perfumed for nothing; for love.

  Katelijne bathed every day. He did not see her, nor wanted to. It was far from the Timbuktu-Koy’s palace, and the innocence of Umar’s wife Zuhra and the courage – or he had then thought it courage – of Gelis. Pictures entered his mind, now and then, of these moments which he had long driven out. They did not disturb him, or not in a way he was yet aware of. They fed a softer puzzlement that was now taking its place beside the anger and the misery. The haunting sense of bewilderment would, he supposed, never leave.

  To his surprise, he did not have much time to think. Tobie came with him when he swam, and challenged him to fierce races which upset the other bathers and did nothing to reduce the endearing slight pot of Tobie’s stomach. Then, girdled into damp robes, they would rejoin Kathi in their pavilion, with its open terrace full of fluttering birds. She was taming a crested bird with barred wings called an upapa. She was also making friends, in a determined way, with the water-wheel oxen. She was always doing something.

  They spoke Arabic a lot, because he was supposed to be their interpreter, and they both wanted to learn. Sometimes, when Tobie and the girl were together, he would hear them going over their lessons. It amused him to have Tobie, in this at least, as his pupil. It was he who suggested that the girl might also like to extend her Greek. It helped restore his own fluency. He was not sure if he was going to need it. Whatever plan he had conceived now seemed to have lost much of its point. If there was gold in Sinai, John could fetch it.

  For the rest, the daylight hours passed, all of them filled; all of them marked by the tread of the oxen and the creak and splash of the wheels, turning, turning, up-ending the cycle of water-jars to fill the veins, the canals that watered the balm-garden. Just as distantly on the Nile the river was beginning to rise, a foot every day as the sweet, life-giving water, sent by God, moved into Egypt on its sacred, annual journey. The blessings of water, which could give, and take away.

  Nicholas had never played the ’ud, the little lute she’d saved from the water, but he had seen it done, and he knew how the five courses should be tuned. He sat adjusting them before Tobie’s astonished gaze, announcing each one as it was done. By the time he got to the third, Tobie said, ‘How do you know that’s a D?’

  ‘He carries keys in his head,’ the girl said. ‘Didn’t you know?’ And to him, ‘Don’t you wish Whistle Willie were here?’

  ‘No,’ said Nicholas. ‘I don’t want him interfering: I want to set a Koranic chant in antiphony with a Gregorian one, and add in some tritones. Who would martyr us first?’

  ‘There are two wheels in the garden,’ said Kathi. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s a salamiyya. I bought it from a man at the baths. You blow into it.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ said Kathi. ‘Now tell me you don’t have a drum.’ She turned to Tobie. ‘He had to leave Scotland because of the way he beat drums. Did you have them in Africa?’

  The first direct question. Until later, he didn’t notice it. He said, ‘I’ve seen them used for sending messages. I could make one if you could saw me a log. We shouldn’t be popular. It can speak for forty miles from a river.’

  ‘You could send a message to John,’ said Tobie blandly.

  Nicholas said, ‘I could send one to you, if I thought you’d understand it. What’s all that?’ Within half a day, the girl had become surrounded by litter.

  ‘Flea paste,’ she said. ‘Dr Tobias found the ingredients. And that’s a sketch of the ostrich. Did you know there was an ostrich?’

  ‘No?’ said Nicholas, with one eye on Tobie.

  Tobie said, ‘I said all I have to say in Alexandria.’

  ‘Anyway, what was it like when you rode one in Bruges? What did you do with the water-wheels? There was a story –’

  Tobie said, ‘Stop it. I hear you. You’re feeling well. But stop it. Go on drawing.’

  ‘I could draw you,’ the girl said to Nicholas. She had lifted some paper.

  Without thinking, he rose to his feet. ‘No, thank you.’

  She tilted her head to one side. ‘I don’t blame you. It wouldn’t be very good. Have you been drawn before?’

  He thought of Colard Mansion and relaxed, smiling. ‘A few times. When they think they can get away without paying.’ Here and there, when he came to think of it, a sketch or two must still exist: a chart, a map of Claes vander Poele.

  A map. The simple sketches of Colard would never hurt him. Then he remembered a workshop in Florence and felt the blow of full understanding, rather than instinct. The after-blow was much worse.

  He sat down and said, politely, ‘I’m sorry. Of course I don’t mind. I’m sure it would be splendid.’ But she had put the paper away and, in doing so, had discovered the dice.

  It happened sometimes like that: he was not going to forget for very long. But the swimming relaxed him, and he slept for a few hours every night, even though he might lie awake for the rest. He assumed Tobie knew it, but he didn’t intrude. In arranging all this, Tobie had done all the prescribing he meant to do.

  The girl was fond of Tobie, which was good. Her conversation with himself, wholly haphazard, did not avoid the delicate subjects, but didn’t probe them. Mostly, it returned to their joint experience of Scotland. She seemed to take it for granted that, with Bruges and Venice too painful, he might consider settling there. ‘After all,’ as she pointed out finally, ‘presumably my uncle didn’t manage to obliterate everything you were doing, although he is very clever. There must be a house or two left?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said. They were
devising a surprise, without the knowledge of Tobie, for the drunken knights in the next pavilion. As the Nile filled it brought more boat-loads of pilgrims, some of them noisy.

  ‘Such as Beltrees? Near Kilmirren,’ she persisted. ‘You know you’ll have to do something about the boy Henry. He thinks he’s a reprieved murderer. And you like Bel. She would help. You’d find a lot of differences healed.’

  ‘They’d be sorry for me?’ he conjectured.

  ‘Oh, yes. It wouldn’t last long, so you’d have to make the most of it. Mind you,’ she said, ‘you must be wondering what to do about your own boy. Look at the mess Simon made, bringing up a child single-handed. You would probably ruin yours too. You’ve forgotten to fit that into that.’

  He had. He took it back and repaired the omission rather silently. The child. If there was a child. It was, indeed, the question he had not resolved. It would be seventeen, eighteen months old, if it existed. He had realised some time ago that Margot would feel free, when she heard of Gelis’s death, to tell him the truth. He thought she would write to Alexandria, or Gregorio for her.

  Meanwhile, of a certainty, Margot would find the child and take it into her keeping. Sustained by all Gelis had owned, it would want for nothing until he could reach it. And if it did not exist, she would surely write and tell him that, too.

  The question was whether he could bear to go back in advance of that letter. To go back to find nothing, possibly, but fresh cause for bitterness. And if he didn’t go back … If he stayed and made some effort to nurture his business it would be October, November before he would hear. Then, if he wanted, he could return on the last of the spice ships. He wouldn’t hold the Ciaretti so long. If the child was alive, it would have passed another three parentless months. But many boys did.

  He reached that point – the usual point – and realised the girl had continued to work quietly in silence. He stopped then, and looked at her. ‘More generous than a rooster, more loving than a camel. I haven’t thanked you.’

  ‘What?’ She knew just enough Arabic. She looked round, at first distracted, then rather pleased.

  He dropped back into French. ‘You and your Dr Tobias. I probably shan’t do what you think I should do, but it won’t be for want of help and companionship. And after all this, Kathi, what about you?’

  She conveyed a shrug by inclining her head. She was smiling. ‘Home, and marriage.’

  ‘You want marriage?’ he said.

  She looked surprised, and then laughed. ‘I don’t want a convent. Yes, of course. I’m fortunate. We can afford a good dowry: my family know all the men of my age who would suit. We are all linked together already.’

  Heel naturlijk. She spoke with her usual candour. There was wisdom behind it. She was, he saw, one of the few in whom the intellectual passions far outweighed any other; who, health allowing, would accept what her family proffered and become – on her own vivid terms – a fulfilled wife and mother. He envied her, for a moment, what he had never possessed. Then he said, ‘Christ, Thundering Poison is coming. Hurry, hurry. Hide it.’

  In Cairo, John le Grant, who had his own means of receiving news from Damietta, heard with some disquiet that Nicholas, instead of travelling alone, had left Alexandria with Tobie and Adorne’s own niece, Katelijne Sersanders, passing as their interpreter. He next heard, even more inexplicably, that the party had stopped at the Garden of Balm, and that Nicholas was still there. He learned the reason that evening, when entertaining some Maghgribian friends who had called to take the air in the small belvedere of the house he always leased, well north of the Citadel, between the University and the Turkish and Syrian and Turcoman khans.

  His guests brought with them a stranger, but one whose name he had cause to know: Abderrahman ibn Said, a trader who did business between Timbuktu and Tlemcen. When the others left, ibn Said remained behind. Then he spoke in Italian.

  By now, everyone knew that the Medici were trading with the Sahara, and that the ibn Said brothers were part of the chain. This man knew both Nicholas and his wife, whom he called the madonna Gelissa. He had shared Adorne’s ship to Alexandria, and he had spoken to Nicholas, who had entrusted him with His Excellency’s address.

  John said, ‘I am sure he can rely on your discretion. Western traders, as you know, are not permitted in Cairo.’

  ‘But you pass for a man from Tunisia: this is known, of course. One would not dream of betraying it, and Your Excellency’s beard is growing already. No,’ said Abderrahman ibn Said, stroking his own very fine whiskers, ‘your noble padrone confided in me because, then, it was agreed we should travel together. But alas, it was not to be so. You have heard the sad news of Negroponte?’

  It had reached Cairo by pigeon two weeks ago. John le Grant nodded.

  ‘Such a disaster for Venice. Florence weeps for her. Alexandria, you may imagine, was in a clamour. And then I had to impart to Ser Niccolò my information about his very dear friend Umar ibn Muhammed al-Kaburi. So piteous.’

  He was not an unfeeling man, ibn Said, and the terms he used, talking of the massacres at Timbuktu, were discreetly muted. But what he was relating was the manner of Loppe’s death. Loppe whom John le Grant, too, had known in Cyprus and Trebizond. All the perpetrators, of course, had been crazy for gold, and it was known that rich men often swallowed their jewels, or forced their children to eat them. They had found the last of Umar’s babies, in the end.

  He stopped speaking, Silence enveloped them. Then John said, ‘Forgive me,’ and rose and crossed to a table where the flagon of fenugreek stood. There he hesitated.

  The turbanned head turned. Ibn Said said, ‘When Florentines visit, I keep Florentine habits. If you have wine, I shall share it. I have more to tell you.’

  And so he heard about Gelis.

  He saw the man out himself and came back alone and sat at his darkened windows, looking down on the crowded souks of the city; the jostling turbans, white, blue and yellow; the hoods, the headcloths, the veils, the caps of children, random as fish-scales; the baskets, bundles, trays carried head-high like capitals in a river of text. The swifter passage of a mounted Mameluke, mace on shoulder, whip hand held high. The call as the Criers of the Nile began to approach, borne on horseback from distant souks: People of Misr! People of Misr! Praise Allah! Rejoice! The river has risen six marks since last night! The flood was close: you could sense the excitement, the expectancy in the air. He smelled hot meat, and ginger, and hashish. But his thoughts ran elsewhere.

  It was all too clear now what had happened to Nicholas. The only mercy was that Tobie had been there. And bringing the girl had enabled them all to leave Alexandria.

  He could not imagine what Nicholas would want to do. He was supposed to be joining John to travel to Sinai. But that was a journey to try a fit man, never mind one who was sick, or suicidal. He had arranged with ibn Said to visit the Garden of Balm as a Muslim. It was all he could do: see Nicholas, speak to him, and above all speak to Tobie. And Nicholas would have to be got out before Anselm Adorne came to find him. For any sympathy he had felt for Nicholas would have given way to something different by now.

  He went to Matariya next day on a ramshackle donkey, grimly suffering the punishing ride across the immense, bustling city to pass into the quiet green land of gardens and orchards that lay to its north, fringed with the great homes of the rich. Close to Matariya one could glimpse the walls and belvederes and flowering trees of still greater palaces, one of them the Qayt Bey’s own. The Garden was his, and sometimes the pilgrims were dismissed and sent to stay in the village, so that the Sultan’s men could set up their fine silken awnings and spread carpets and cushions, and load plates of silver and gold for some banquet.

  Arriving today at the Garden and showing his credentials, which represented him as one of those whom pilgrims hired to seek lodgings and permits, John thought for a moment that some such eviction was indeed occurring. Within the gates, a violent fracas seemed to be taking place. At the centre of it was a short figu
re with a slipping veil and a vocabulary which seemed to be a mixture of Latin and Arabic. The man looming beside her, garbed in a frayed robe with a striped cloth round his head, and translating in voluble Arabic, was Nicholas. His eyes, though unusually sunken, were ox-like with innocence. In the shadows behind them stood Tobie. John shuffled purposefully over and asked him for money.

  Tobie drew in his breath. Belligerently, John repeated the demand, while Tobie’s expression wavered between relief and apprehension. John said, in the same atrocious Italian, ‘Is that Katelijne Sersanders?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tobie. He gave an inappropriate scowl. ‘They’ve just offended the entire German nation, but I think they can talk their way out of it. Come indoors. She’s not supposed to see you.’

  ‘Adorne is here then?’ said John. He bent his head, scuffing at Tobie’s heels.

  ‘Not yet. I suppose she might tell him. But honestly,’ Tobie said, ‘I don’t think it matters.’ Inside, he pulled the covering over the doorway and led the way through to the terrace where he turned. He said, ‘You won’t know what has happened.’

  ‘I do,’ said John. ‘That’s why I’m here.’ He waited.

  ‘And you’re wondering what you’ve just seen?’ Tobie said. ‘It’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s the first stage after shock: a longing for any kind of distraction. She’s been magnificent. And he’s almost ready to think. Think rationally this time, I mean.’

  ‘To the extent of planning?’ John said. ‘Does he want to go home? Or would the other thing have some advantage? Would he be fit for it?’

  ‘Fit for what? Business in Cairo?’ Tobie said. Then he said, ‘Don’t be a fool. I’m not going to tell Adorne.’

  The voices continued, combatively, outside. John sat down. He said, ‘We got word of the gold. He’s been directed to St Catherine’s, Mount Sinai.’

  ‘You’re jesting,’ said Tobie. He sat down as well, staring at him. He looked as a doctor would, embarked on a long, testing case. After a moment he said, ‘No, you’re not. Yes, he could do it. I don’t think he could concentrate on very much else.’ His voice changed. ‘How did you hear about Gelis van Borselen?’