The Unicorn Hunt

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘I don’t know. You must be right,’ Nicholas said. ‘I ought, though, to see her at Sinai. Before Adorne and his niece can arrive.’

  Slowly, Tobie began to see light. He said, ‘It’s the gold. You think Adorne and she are in league? You think she has discovered something – perhaps she called at St Sabas? She knew your Captain Ochoa, who lost the gold from the Ghost. But, Nicholas, you made her rich yourself. She can’t be serious. She is playing a game.’

  ‘Games are for children,’ Nicholas said.

  ‘So she isn’t playing a game,’ said Tobie slowly. He looked at Nicholas, and saw what he should have seen all along. He said, ‘She is punishing you because of her sister … She is withholding your son in reprisal for Henry, the child you got on Katelina van Borselen? She married you to torment you? Is it possible?’

  ‘It is, for children,’ Nicholas said. ‘Sometimes they grow up. No one need worry. It is my affair; my particular skill if you like. I could learn to enjoy it.’

  Tobie stared at him. He said, ‘And when you thought she was dead …’

  ‘I was sorry,’ Nicholas said. ‘I had such good plans. But now I can reactivate them all again. Or, of course, make a definitive strike.’

  The journey to Sinai was bad, despite the Mameluke escort which browbeat the keepers of water-wheels and uplifted whatever it pleased of kid or lamb, and set about light-fingered Arabs with maces. So long as they were close to Suez and the Sultan’s influence the advantages were distinct; but the leaderless, warring tribes of the Bedouin were another matter, and once they had passed the Tor junction, the Mamelukes were afraid. Some of the soldiers were renegade Christians from Catalonia and Sicily; some from the Balkans. Tobie and John addressed them with careful politeness in several languages.

  Nicholas did not speak at all unless directly compelled. Under these conditions it was possible, at the start, to contemplate a ride of forty miles every day: on one occasion they covered fifty. In that frying wind, sleepless and beaten by sand, with nothing but thick, foul water to drink, it made the first part of the journey as punishing as the mountains no doubt would be, and what lay beyond. How he bore it was his affair.

  Halfway through, he began walking a little. By the fourth day he was able to dismount with the rest when, labouring over a plateau, they reached the edge of an escarpment too steep for a burdened animal to climb down. There was a track of sorts, winding down; and he did not have a chamois, this time, on his shoulders. He stood, before attempting the descent, and looked at the great panorama of mountains before him. The Mameluke captain was speaking to Tobie. ‘I remember the first time I stood here. I gave thanks to Allah. I do it again. Do you see them? That is Mount Sinai, and the mount of St Catherine is behind it. Don’t be deceived. They are not near: the clear air just makes you think so. Can your lord manage? Shall we carry him?’

  ‘He can manage,’ said Tobie. Sometimes – just sometimes – Tobie managed to say the right thing.

  The cliff took five hours to descend, in heat which was all but unbearable. At the bottom, sluggish with exhaustion, they prepared to make camp, putting up tents and foraging for fuel for the cooking-fires. Nicholas did his share but hardly ate when the time came, preferring to withdraw to his tent. Tobie followed him after a while.

  He had perhaps been lying down, but was now seated in the Moorish way that was habitual to him, facing inwards. The tension that surrounded him was like the air of a storm, muttering danger. Tobie said sharply, ‘Don’t use it again. Stop it. She is there. You know she is there.’

  The ring swayed and then stilled: Nicholas gathered it up with its cord and turned. All their faces had been altered in their fatigue. He said, ‘It’s a way of passing the time. She is there. And something to do with the gold. The ring isn’t perfectly sure. I’m not certain the ring is quite trustworthy.’

  Tobie came in and knelt, without touching the ring. Confiscating it wouldn’t help matters: he had been told as much one time before. He said, ‘What will you do? Why not end it; divorce her? The child is what matters.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Nicholas said. ‘Except that there you have the salient point. Just as the marriage was a pretence, the child seems to have been a figment as well. That is, it may not have been born. Or if born, it may not have survived, and another put in its place. It seems, in any case, increasingly likely that a child of Gelis doesn’t exist.’

  Tobie said, ‘I’ll find out whether it exists or not. In ten minutes. You needn’t be there.’

  Nicholas gave a laugh. He said, ‘Oh, I should like to be there. You don’t really know Gelis, do you? Or me?’

  Tobie looked at him thoughtfully. Then he grunted, and got up and left.

  There was no one he could discuss it with, without betraying the truth about Henry. He was not sorry. The chief virtue of John was his toughness, and the fact that with him you couldn’t sit and look at your navel. It was what made him so valuable to Nicholas.

  The journey continued. As the heat thickened towards evening, they deserted their stifling tents and sought shade between rocks, within fissures, in the shallow caves which lay, bubbles in cheese, along the smooth slopes. Then there came the chill of the night.

  They toiled among ranges of hills whorled and streaked in different colours. Mountains shone as if greased; wrinkled peaks reared red and purple on the horizon, then walls of rock closed about them again. They came, once, upon vast tumbled boulders, their sides carved with dates and names carefully spelled out in Latin. Pilgrims had passed this way. They had other evidence: the sun-dried corpses of four men and their camels. There was not enough grit to make them a grave.

  There was one moment of ease, when they were led to an oasis, bowered in date palms, where pretty girls brought their goats to the springs and a whole village ran out to greet them. They stayed an hour, for food and water, and hastened on.

  It seemed worse, after that. Even Tobie fell silent on the sixth day, the longest and worst, when winding passes took them as much away from their destination as towards it, and their guides did not speak. The camels swayed, their tread spaced and deliberate, soft as a man in his slippers. The dazzle of sun from the harness made him sneeze, and his lips cracked and bled.

  Then someone shouted, and he wiped his eyes and saw the defile was ending at last. Ahead, the sky had suddenly opened, blue and clear, and he could see an apron of stone, another plateau from which a track appeared to lead to lower ground. It was not until he reached the edge of the escarpment that he saw how high they had come.

  He looked down upon a vast, irregular plain whose floor was not ashen, but scattered with flowering bushes. Surrounding the plain were red mountains, reduced by the immense scale to shapes that were ruminant, submissive in line; lobed and rounded by wind and by snow; travelled over and over again by their own shadows, altering subtly through the millennia.

  The air was fresh as clear water, and carried the odours of honeys, of resins, of balm. He could see below the yellow of terebinth, and the fronds of the tamarisk bush which bleeds the sweet dew of manna. Sky, mountains and plain lay soundless before him: light, colour and scent all wrapped in absolute silence. The mountains leaned, humble under their heaven. Tobie sank to his knees.

  The Mamelukes had wandered apart, chewing, talking; their laughter hiding a note of awe, of relief. John was standing beside him, his unseeing gaze far ahead. Nicholas, who ought to be beside them, was not to be seen.

  Tobie said, ‘I might as well not have been born.’

  John stirred, and looked down.

  Tobie said, ‘There is the healing before us. And I am not a priest.’

  ‘Get your priorities right,’ said John le Grant. ‘A priest can’t do much with a corpse. You keep him alive; I’ll find a religious to sort him. There must be someone.’

  He waited, good-naturedly. After a while, the terebinth made Tobie sneeze; he blew his nose and got up. The next day, they arrived.

  To the eye of a bird, or an angel, the building wo
uld appear a charming toy set in the wilderness and furnished with a dainty and luxuriant garden; a miniature enceinte: a sturdy replica of four mighty walls, buttressed, battlemented, of the kind to shelter a doughty Order of Knights, the household of a powerful Pope, the bustling court of an Emperor. Those who lacked wings were forced to seek it in the recesses of a long, rocky gulley where it had been set by its builder against the lower slopes of the mountain they called Gebel Musa.

  To the bloodshot eye of Tobie, entering the gulley as the day ripened to sunset, the hoped-for shelter ahead was obscured by flashes of fire; by the glare of the broken ground up which the cavalcade climbed, led by its shadows; by the ineffable light from the mountain which fell, bathing their skins and their clothing like the lamps of Cairo at dusk in a fury of daffodil, madder and chalk. Gebel Musa, rising to God on his right, with the lamps of God glowing within like the flame on an altar.

  Then they saw the cypresses high in the valley, not childish at all, but standing like spears against the seams of waterless rock, half obscuring something that blazed just behind. Nearer still, the trees parted. They saw that the ruddy glare struck from towering masses of wall, sixty feet tall, thick as a man, formidable as the faith they defended. It was only the mountain which made them look small.

  It was then that Nicholas, a passenger all through the journey, rode up to his captain and issued his first and last order.

  It was his right: he was the man the Mamelukes were protecting. Impressed and startled by his Arabic and his absolute assumption of command, they would have obeyed him anyway, Tobie saw. John, his hair tangerine in the light, looked suddenly wary. The Arabic was not too hard to decipher.

  In essence, the lord Nicholas de Fleury wished the Mamelukes to remain where they were, while he and his friends approached and entered the monastery. They might, in the meantime, disengage the lord’s baggage. Presently, they would be told what to do. Then, rested and provided with fresh supplies, they could depart when it pleased them. The conclusion had to do with formal thanks for the company’s protection and the handing over of a small canvas bag, at which the captain’s face became very bright. Nicholas moved about, shaking hands.

  He was turning off his protection. It was the first Tobie had heard of it. He looked at John and, moving up, began, in turn, to take his leave of the soldiers. By the time he and John had finished their duty, Nicholas had begun to walk to the monastery. He was not using his stick. Tobie set off to follow, with John. Neither spoke. Soon they could hear nothing behind them: all sound extinguished by space and by silence.

  Nicholas walked. Behind him, Tobie could feel his own heart thudding heavily. It was densely warm, but at his back a feather of air touched his neck. A bee passed. Cicadas buzzed, and somewhere a camel-bell stirred. From a stand of dark trees on their right came the sound of trickling water and a rumour of perfume: the tang of fruit, the nectar of blossom, the root- and leaf-smell of herbs. From the walls blazing above them descended a teasing mélange of spiced bread and warm grapes and incense, mingled with a forgivable odour of normal humanity. Nicholas turned right, into a courtyard. It was as if he knew where to go, or was being summoned.

  The great main door, with its surround of ancient stonework, was sealed and barred. A postern stood to its left, also closed. There was a wall-walk above. Someone must have seen their arrival. Nicholas stood.

  Hens clucked. An inner door snapped. Far within, pigeon-script on the ear, two men argued and another repeated the same liturgical phrase over and over. Someone was hammering. The postern banged open suddenly and a priest came out in a determined way; not a Greek, but a man in the hat and robes, scuffed and stained, of a Patriarch of the Latin persuasion.

  ‘I thought,’ said Ludovico de Severi da Bologna, ‘that you weren’t coming. Now I see you walked all the way from the Tyrol. Where’s your escort? Bring them, bring them. Master John. Dr Tobias. And wait.’

  ‘Why?’ said Nicholas, returning his stare with one quite as inimical.

  ‘Because I don’t like the look of you,’ said the Patriarch of Antioch. Tobie, his stomach clenching, remembered him. His beard was as rough as a bearskin, and even his fingers sprouted hair.

  Nicholas said, ‘Then you will have to leave me outside, for this is how I am. Is my wife here?’

  ‘The Bedouin would strip you by midnight,’ said the Patriarch thoughtfully.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Nicholas. ‘I have a company of Mamelukes waiting down there. How many monks do you have?’

  ‘Is that a threat?’ said the priest.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Nicholas said. ‘I can wait until she comes out. I thought she wanted to see me.’

  Tobie moved forward. He said, ‘He has two guarantors, if you will accept them. Perhaps she will see me? If she is here?’

  Neither Nicholas nor the Patriarch gave him a glance. The Patriarch said, ‘He knows that she’s here. He communicates with the devil. The monks wouldn’t like that.’

  ‘But you haven’t told them,’ said Nicholas. ‘So you have a guarantee of my good behaviour. Don’t you find it hot?’

  ‘No,’ said the Patriarch. ‘You will, by the time you’ve got your men here and the baggage indoors. I’ll see you after Vespers.’ His beard shifted. He turned and began to go in.

  ‘And my wife?’ Nicholas said. He spoke very softly. Immediately after, a singing echo made itself heard from inside the monastery, revealing itself as a cascade of small muffled chimes, light as dance music played on a dulcimer.

  The Patriarch glanced over his shoulder. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘And where?’

  The call to Vespers had stopped. The Patriarch cast up his eyes. ‘How should I know? Where you will not be disturbed, I imagine.’ His voice was jocular. The door banged behind him.

  ‘Nicholas –’ Tobie began.

  Nicholas stirred. ‘It would be helpful,’ he said, ‘unexpected, but certainly helpful if, from now on, you would speak only when there seemed something worth saying?’

  He would have replied, but for John. John said, ‘Look at him. No.’

  Tobie pulled his arm free in annoyance. He wished, for a moment, he were back in the desert.

  In the monastery of St Catherine, built five centuries after Christ, there were three objects worthy of veneration: the church, with the remains of the saint; the chapel outside its choir, which contained the roots of the Bush; and the Library, in which reposed the most ancient ikons and manuscripts outside those held by the Holy Father himself.

  There was the well, beside which Moses met the daughter of Jethro. And there were also many small chapels, designed and painted by hands long forgotten. There was a mosque, hastily fashioned a few centuries before out of a guest-house, which ensured the spiritual comfort of the monastery’s Arab servants, and also the continued protection of the Sultan of Cairo. There was a Frankish church, a simple rectangle of wattle and mud which equally ensured that any adherents of Rome could preach and worship in a place which, because of its singular situation, had passed unscathed and unknowing through both the division of the East and West churches and the destruction of most of their images.

  As well as that, of course, there existed the cells of the monks, once four hundred, now forty; built small and meagre as swallows’ nests, one upon the other about a rigmarole of crooked balconies, half-secured ledges, cock-eyed awnings, bottomless courtyards and ribbons of steps within the eternal constancy of the walls. St Catherine’s represented the architectural accretions of nine centuries; their artefacts laid reposefully one on top of the other, mysterious in their lapses, in their ignorance, in their disconnected records and memories as any of the ancient relics of pagan Egypt. And to the guest-house, near to the Franciscan chapel, were the Venetian banker and his two partners led.

  They had travelled at racing-camel-pace for seven days, rarely stopping for more than three hours’ sleep at a time. They had been under constant threat of attack from warring Bedouin, and in danger of lo
sing the way. Despite all the power of the Sultan, they had been starved and parched, frozen and burned by that flaming sword, the sun’s heat. At the end of the unloading, their baggage piled in the guest-room they were to share, the three most recent pilgrims to the monastery of St Catherine washed themselves, exchanging their lice-ridden shirts for fresh ones, and were ready when the Patriarch called to take and present them to their host, the Abbot who ruled the independent bishopric of Sinai.

  He blessed them, and wished them repose, ordering a tray of fruit and some bread to be sent to their chamber. They were asleep before it arrived.

  Later, Tobie woke and stumbled out, his eyes swollen, to find the latrines. A lamp hung among vines showed him the steps. The air, innocent of wind, was fresh and scented, but with the warmth of the evening still lingering: the night was not more than half spent, he imagined. Comforted by the silence, he looked about.

  Within the black mass of the walls, the monastery had withdrawn into the secrecies of private vigil. Lamps flickered, masked by the leaves of a tree, or glimmered through trellises, or touched the white shell of a dome. There was a light, far below, under the northeastern wall that came, he thought, from the roof of the church. When he held his breath, he thought he could hear the murmur of chanting, or the whisper of someone in prayer. Far away outside the walls, he heard a thin, grisly wail that he knew for the call of a jackal. He stopped again, coming back, but could hear nothing, the lamps hanging in silence. He supposed they were extinguished at dawn.

  He left the chamber door open, so that he could take a moment to locate his mattress in the dim light. John was sleeping. Nicholas was not there at all.

  John, when he shook him, was at first angry. ‘You know what he’s like. He wakes, and can’t get back to sleep.’

  By then, Tobie had lit their own lamp. ‘So he dressed? Robe, cloak, boots? Satchel?’

  ‘Satchel?’

  ‘And stave,’ said Tobie, suddenly breathless. He sat down. ‘I thought at first he had some crazy idea about the gold. Then that he meant to find and break in on Gelis. Maybe –’ He broke off.