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

by Dorothy Dunnett

  He stepped aboard, his emirs and judges about him, and the glare of gold from the sail struck through the gathered silk roof of the cabin. Behind, the vast wooden carpet of boats changed pattern and raised their sails to steer close to the wind: quills of silk, quills of exquisite linen, quills of commonplace sacking. Music made itself heard. His barque, borne by the stream, proceeded half the length of the island before leaning gracefully to the turn which would carry it to his own Cairene shore and the Khalig. The crowds on the bank, garbed for holiday, looked like a ribbon of flowers; the trills of the women flocked over the river like swallows. He smiled, and turned to where the silk handkerchief lay.

  A communication was taking place between one of his ulama and a boy in the water. It ended. He saw the boy depart at great speed, dipping, scrambling to the shore, half by boat, half by swimming. On the way he flung an arm over the boatbuilders’ vessel, and seemed to call with some urgency.

  The alim was a professor he revered. He scorned to question him. Just before they touched the Khalig bank, the Sultan glanced behind and noted that the boatbuilders’ vessel had lost two of its passengers; and that the Frankish merchant he had recently favoured was nowhere to be seen. His professor of law, on the other hand, was firmly seated, a priestly hand on the shoulder of one of his flock. On the shoulder of the Chief Dragoman, who had been attempting to rise.

  Then the barque touched the bank and was secured, and amid a din that made his ears ring the prince Qayt Bey stepped ashore to the earthen mound that plugged the throat of the Khalig and called for prayer, and then for trumpets, and finally threw aloft the silk kerchief that signified the Act of the Breach; that signalled to the wielders of the scores of raised mattocks that the dam between the great canal and the Nile should be levelled, and the glorious Abundance permitted to surge into the cisterns, the gardens, the viaducts of this his city of Cairo.

  Jan Adorne said, ‘You’re crying! What are you crying for? I think it’s exciting!’

  John le Grant said, ‘He’s following. God damn him, he’s following. You go. I’ll stay and stop him.’

  ‘There isn’t time,’ Tobie said.

  The dam being earth, the trench that breached it, attacked by hundreds of mattocks, widened, deepened, and finally broke its way to the river. The onslaught of water, tossing high as a tree, horrified the Sultan’s white horse, and they had to calm it before he put his foot in the stirrup and prepared to ride back to the Citadel. Around him, the faces of his people shone like newly plucked dates.

  Some stayed to scream in the spray and plunge their hands in the volleying water. Some began to race the flow as it travelled, swift as translucent lava, furred with dust. Some ran to watch where the wheels, dragged into motion, had begun to heave the water up to the viaduct and the viaduct itself began to weep threads of moisture. Some ran to the thundering mouths, hazed with mist, where this branch or that tumbled into the underground cisterns, roaring so that the earth above shook.

  The rest of the people, singing, laughing, blowing whistles and drubbing their tambourines, poured through the souks to the taverns and markets whose stall-keepers, practised of old, had run ahead to spread out their wares.

  Tobie and John le Grant ran among them. It was a slow run, involving the exercise of persuasion and force upon an impacted mass of animals, wheelbarrows and insouciant persons travelling in unpredictable directions and disinclined to give way.

  The distance to the house they had been told of was not great, but the souks of the quarter were maze-like. Both men were scarlet and sodden with sweat when their method of progress began to meet with the disapproval of a group comprising the owners and clients of a pastry-shop in the Mida Alley. Standing before the two Franks, they issued an ultimatum which John unwisely rebuffed. The pastry-shop owner called aloud. Every able-bodied man in the vicinity came to his assistance. The last anyone saw of the two Franks, they were being driven forward with quail-sticks, the bells rattling and ringing with each blow; the assailants’ laughter rising raucous above them. The two men uselessly stumbled and fought. Their cries rose from distant streets, and then faded.

  Listening, David de Salmeton laughed. He didn’t underestimate this remarkable Flemish banker – that, indeed, was why he had kept the engineer and the doctor in sight. But de Fleury’s house was well guarded. No one could enter or leave without being seen. And soon it would matter no more. This was a game the Vatachino had won.

  Nicholas, who did not like losing games, would not at that point have agreed. He had, after all, passed several methodical hours putting his various theories to the test in those areas open to his unreliable physical resources. He had learned, from the sound of footsteps above, that all the premises over this chain of cells appeared to be occupied, but that voices did not seem to carry either way. He had found that there was no exit beyond the last room, whose door was studded with metal and locked. The commotion of rats was loudest there, and a smell that made him draw back.

  His hands and knees by now were painfully raw; they had stripped him of all but a breech-clout, and he would have to use that, too, if he wanted to stand. Later, rearranging his schedule, he settled patiently to dismantling what he could of the steps, and made himself a primitive mounting block, which he used to test other ceilings. He found one more trap-door and, kneeling, pushed against it with a plank. When nothing happened, he clenched his teeth and got to his feet, using his shoulders to wield his stock with more force until the agony made his senses swim. Just before he lost his balance, he gave the trap a great double blow that echoed through the whole chain of cells and could not fail to be heard above.

  What happened next he must have missed, lying at the foot of his jumble of wood. When he opened his eyes he was conscious of light and sniggering voices, and looking up saw the trap-door open and packed with dark grinning heads. When he moved, someone called out in Arabic and, lifting an arm, tossed down a streamer of fire which landed, crackling, upon the timber beside him.

  He roused himself. As he attempted to crush it, a burst of light announced that another was imminent. Then it hung in suspension, the voice of the thrower raised in noisy dispute. Abruptly, the second flame was withdrawn. The voices rose in a crescendo. Without warning, the trap-door thudded down once again, and the bolt was driven home.

  He was not meant, then, to burn. He saved, sluggishly, one flickering brand and somehow extinguished the rest. Cherished, his single torch showed him again the cellars from which he had come and, at the opposite end, the opening of the passage he had still to explore. He created a second brand as reserve and left it burning. Then he took the first and edged his way to the passage. The rats kept out of the way; hosts of green light in the dark, but now he saw the slither-marks, too, of his other companions. There had been more than he thought.

  There were no trap-doors or doors in the passage. After a while it turned sharply right, and became narrow. Like the cells, it had been paved. It ended at the point of junction with a much wider corridor, set at right angles to his, and equally dark. Barring the way was a grilled iron door, set with mortar and heavily locked.

  He believed, for a while, that he could break the door, but found he was wrong. Thrusting his torch through the bars, he saw that the other passage, too, was made of featureless brick, with no sign of doors to left or to right. The complex appeared to run the full length of the building, which he imagined to be some sort of warehouse, a secondary building used by the Dragoman for private dealings, or summary justice.

  He stayed at the grille for a while, banging it with a loose brick; making play with the brand and his voice to attract outside attention but without wasting much energy. If he had been close to anywhere public, they wouldn’t have opened even these few, useless doors. He wondered if David de Salmeton was reclining somewhere, sipping wine, smiling and listening. He felt sure that, before the end, David de Salmeton would come. He wished it had been Gelis instead, and that she had not escaped him to Sinai. It was what had kept his
mind awake, assembling all he wished to say, once, to Gelis.

  The flame was low. If he wanted to save it, he would have to return, depressingly, for fresh wood. He had already rejected the idea, once rather tempting, of setting fire to the heap under the trap-door to see what would happen. What would happen, he suspected, was that the watchers above would immediately quench it and he was not in any form to prevent them. Or to do anything involving rapid movement, much less acrobatics.

  He decided, all in all, to stay where he was, although it was unlikely that the ubiquitous John or Tobie would manage to find him. He gave it little thought: his interest in them, in all his former circle was slight. Adorne was going to Sinai, to Gelis; but he didn’t think John or Tobie would make for the gold without trying to find him. Of course, they might conclude that he had gone there without them. He had been known to do such things before.

  He dwelled, for an uncharacteristic moment, on the various things he had done since he became conscious that he could usually outguess other people. If those were his sins, then he had committed them. He wasn’t going to apologise now.

  The torch was nearly out. Upstairs, it might still be day: the trap-door had emitted, that last time, a flash of transient sunlight, and he had even heard sounds: the cloudy roar of some sort of festivity. Reminded, he stopped his desultory banging and listened.

  Silence, as always. The small stirrings of animals. The beat of his heart. And something else. Beyond the grille, to his left, a rumour of sound he was unable to place, a noble resonance in which, straining, he seemed to identify a tessitura of bowstrings, the sonority of an organ, the hollow reverberation of drums. He listened, the hairs pricking on his arms. Then, overlaying the single thundering chord, still sustained, a soft roll on the timpani that seemed close and becoming closer … that filled the channel outside with sound … and then abruptly translated itself into a heaving, tangible presence.

  A tide of rats erupted into his sight. They emerged from his left and poured past his grille in a frenzy, crowding back upon back, arching along either wall, spurting eventually through the iron apertures at his side to blunder past his shoulder and neck, racing into the dark of the passage behind him.

  Rats. Rats fleeing from the sound he had heard; the sound which now held the muted thunder of a storm building at sea; the sound a water-wall makes when it first meets resistance: the snap of splintering wood; the hollow thud of breached canvas; the clangour of bells. The sound of the element for which these cells, these passages, these corridors had been designed.

  He had not been locked into a prison. He had been trapped in the cisterns of Cairo. And what he heard was hound music.

  Chapter 39

  TO DAVID DE SALMETON, hastening through the crowds in his embroidered headcloth and exquisite galabiyya, every moment drew him nearer to the consummation of his magnificent plan. With the disappearance of the only two men he need fear, he could devote his attention to outpacing the water; to traversing those few souks and alleys which would take him back to the warehouse below which some malevolent person – the sister, was it, of the late emir Tzani-bey al-Ablak? – was wreaking her vengeance on this meddling Flemish merchant.

  He anticipated only the most minor delays. The crowd was nothing; mostly women and children bent on merry-making and easily made to give way. He found a group of pedlars more obstinate, strolling before him arm linked to arm, their laden platters roofing their caps. Accosted, these were at first deaf, and then astonished, and finally anxious to make him a customer. It cost him some moments.

  It was stupidity that confronted him next with a basket, pulleyed down from an upper mashrabiyya to be packed from a portable cook-shop. The oven stood smoking beside it; none could pass and the cooks paid no heed to the crowd dammed up behind them. Accosted, they invited him to jump over the oven, stirring up the flames with some glee for that purpose. A distended dog, stepping out of the basket, began relieving itself over the stew and then, taking more time for technique, over him. Losing patience he forced his way on, kicking over the basket. He turned a corner and broke into a run.

  The sound of water was audible now. It came from under his feet and from behind walls and echoed gurgling from the green of small parks and the courtyards of mosques; in the deepest wells it groaned like a mandrake. It would be approaching the warehouse. He would be too late to see the shock of its entry. He would be in plenty of time to witness the rest. He wanted to be sure, that was all.

  He was in the final stretch when he was brought to a halt by the camel and the crowds penned behind it. It was a large, indolent camel accompanied, it would seem, by a boy with a scoop in his hand. He pushed his way to the front, thinking that one man could pass. People laughed, and someone crowed like a cock. They didn’t know, the fools, who he was. He walked into the road.

  At first, he didn’t believe what he saw, for he left matters of provender to his cooks; had never heard the dawn calls, and had never troubled to visit a hatchery, where six hundred eggs would give birth in a day; from which six hundred chickens in due course would emerge to be led through the souks to the poultry market.

  Lacking a mother, the chicks adopted the boy whose broom swept their yard, and when the same boy swept them out of the yard, they followed him as they would a mother – and this despite the truth that many were no longer chickens. Hence the precaution – the camel – to tend the fruit of such accouchements as the journey might hasten. Its panniers were full of warm eggs.

  David de Salmeton had made no study of poultry. He observed, beyond the ship of the desert, a broad river of prickling movement from which floated a vocal floss of thin cheeping. He saw ahead a carved cedarwood doorway, but before he could pass, it was silted with chickens. A mosque presented itself, its doors prudently closed; a chirping drinking-trough offered no foothold; a stucco-grilled window was already crowded with daffodil feathers.

  They were only chickens. He stepped out, his resolve made, and saw the man ahead lift his broom in defence, and the boy run to the camel’s pannier.

  He could arrive late, or pelted with eggs. He dropped back. After all, de Fleury would wait.

  Nicholas met the water face to face at the grille, and held on long enough not to be hurled against brick by the first, towering crash of its fall. When he did lose his grip and drop under, he became part of a swirl that surged and sucked him back through the passage, bumping him as a branch might be bumped in a mill-sluice. He did not lose his senses, although he found himself coughing and choking, unable to keep his head out of water. He was swept back to the centre, and caught the remains of the ladder, and clung. The water poured and, as the level rose, he grasped higher and higher.

  His legs tossed, the pain from his feet reverberating in his loins. Creatures struggled and fluttered about him, furred and feathered and naked. The wings of a bat splashed and beat at his neck. Snakes were fluid, beautiful swimmers. He had seen an asp, in the last of the light, passing him loop by loop like a poem. Something struck him: a block from the steps, swirling and banging his shoulder. His shoulder was numb. A blow to the head, and he might lose his senses.

  What senses had he to lose?

  Et tes fils autour de ta table …

  What sons had he to lose?

  ‘Lord?’ someone said. The water washed over his face. ‘Lord? My master Nicomack ibn Abdallah?’ The voice came from far away. From the end of the passage. From the grille.

  He said in Arabic, ‘Yes? I am here.’

  Someone exclaimed. Above the noise of the water, quietening now, he seemed to hear several voices. There came a chime, and another. The sound of a tool on the grille. His hand slipped and, choking and retching, he gathered his strength and pulled himself higher, twining himself on the remains of the steps as David de Salmeton had done. There were three more steps above him: he had tested. Soon, the water would fill them. It didn’t matter. Someone had come.

  Then, grating above him, the bolt of the trap-door began to withdraw.


  He hissed a warning, and heard an answer, and dropped.

  The Mamelukes lifted the trap-door just in case, they remarked, the water was high and the Frank emerged to trouble the lord, which their master the Chief Dragoman would deplore. They used the derogatory term with an air of innocence: as a Frank himself, David de Salmeton knew he was there on sufferance. Nevertheless, he craned forward, holding the lantern, the perspiration dripping after his run.

  His first thought was how cool it appeared, the dark water lurching below with its glottal voice, its streams of light-gilded foam; the pleasant silvery sound of the fall in the distance. The level, steadily rising, was already well above the height of even the tallest of men.

  Then, his eyes opening to the dark, he saw how the glittering surface was marred with litter, and suddenly began to fear that he was too late, and that he would see nothing of the other man until the cistern was shut off and drained, and his body was left with the rats. Then he noticed something pale move, and laughed and said, ‘Come. Come to the ladder and tell me how you have decided to give your Bank and your gold to my friends.’

  ‘Then I may as well stay,’ said de Fleury. It was a visible effort to float: his head and shoulders rose and fell with the incoming flux and his face, leaving and entering the light, appeared plangent black upon white like a mask. Zacco should see him now.

  David de Salmeton said, ‘You find life isn’t worth living? How sad!’

  There was a pause. The water, ceasing to surge, was merely flickering. The other man said, ‘I object to the company.’