The Unicorn Hunt (70 page)

John had started to cry again.

‘We shouldn’t laugh,’ Katelijne said. ‘But it is rather funny. It’s Alexandrian. It’s like the jokes they used to play in the Mouseion. You know, rewriting the whole of the
Odyssey
without using the letter S. You couldn’t do that.’

‘I could if I had a lisp,’ Nicholas said. They had begun to walk quickly over the garden in the direction of the nearest door to the courtyard. ‘I suppose they called it the
Iliad
. I could do you a good
line in Ls.’ John was running behind, his hands held palm outwards like chicken-wings.

Katelijne started also to hurry. She said, ‘Mind the fountain, it’d make the glue run. The Mouseion produced some nice verses as well. ‘
Who sculptured Love and set him by the pool, Thinking with liquid such a flame to cool
. And take Callimachus.’

‘I’m trying to,’ said Nicholas. ‘Why are you holding up your hair?’

‘I can’t let go,’ she said. ‘Berenice was lucky. Were those your best hose? How do we open the door to the yard?’ She held the map in one hand by a corner.

‘I’ll do it,’ said John and, advancing, used an experienced elbow. The courtyard inside was filled, but no one stared at them. It was feeding-time for the animals. The Venetian Consul’s wife, wearing a fine beaded headdress and a gown with puffed shoulders, saw them and came over smiling to Nicholas. ‘What has happened! You have been throwing off ceremony, having successfully finished your audience! Then I see you are better suited than any of us to assist. There. That is for the hog.’

‘The hog,’ Nicholas said. It was not a query. Behind him, someone was choking.

The lady said, ‘You must have seen it. We keep it to annoy the wretched pagans. It is perfectly tame. Over there. Pour it into its trough.’ She smiled and walked away, leaving him standing looking after her. Attached to his hand was a bucket of pigswill. Katelijne said, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’

John was pale with emotion. He said, ‘Oh God, oh God, I can’t stand it, I have to go somewhere and –’

‘You can’t,’ Nicholas said. ‘Can you?’ He began to walk away. ‘On the other hand, I have this bucket of pigswill. No, on this hand, as it happens. Here’s a door. We take the pail to our rooms; you help me get it off, and I’ll help you put on your gloves. Katelijne, go away. Have a bath. We’ll come for you.’

Katelijne continued to nudge him. It wasn’t Katelijne. It was the hog, trying to get at the bucket. Katelijne was behind, kneeling on the fondaco’s tiled floor silently rocking herself, with one hand on top of her head and her forearm over her eyes.

John said, ‘That’s it.’

‘The pig won’t like it,’ said Nicholas.

The Jew said, ‘It is a poor map, but it will serve. You are looking for the great Alexander’s treasure?’ Below the obligatory yellow turban his face was broad rather than long, with a short black
beard and brown eyes from which all trace of irony had been banished. He gazed mildly at the three of them, and the girl. The girl shouldn’t be here. They couldn’t find a reason to exclude her.

‘Next time, perhaps,’ Nicholas said. ‘Is that what everybody does?’ The man was a scholar, said Tobie, and had come recommended by the Consul. Tobie had interviewed and appointed him. He had been teaching Katelijne for three weeks. Kathi, as Tobie called her.

Tobie was there now with John and the girl and himself, his small round nostrils inflated, his cap already dragged off his bald head. In a moment, he would start sneezing. The map on the table was not the original, but a copy hurriedly drawn up by John. The Jew said, ‘It saddens me to cause disappointment. You have, then, some other purpose?’

Nicholas said, ‘A friend has posed us a puzzle. It depends on the street names. These are the names we have been given.’

The Jew took the paper. He said, ‘What do you know of the city? The whorehouses? The markets? The houses where you can buy smuggled aphrodisiacs and jewels?’ He spoke in accented Tuscan, the language they had begun with.

Nicholas said, ‘Tell me, is it true? Sixteen hundred years ago, out there on Pharos, seventy rabbis in seventy huts translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek? Do you think no one read them?’

The Jew looked up. He said, ‘Your Greek is Trapezuntine.’

Nicholas said, still in Greek, ‘So I know, at least, the legends of the cities Byzantium ruled. There is the Canopic Way, leading to the Gate of the Sun and to Cairo. There is the Street of the Soma, crossing it. There were green silk awnings spread over both, and colonnades and mansions of white marble so dazzling, they said, that the men and women of Alexandria wore only black. There was the tomb of Alexander, there the Mouseion, with its observatories, studios, library; there the shrine to Hephaestion. I want no lecture,’ said Nicholas. ‘I want to know what I do not know, the names of the streets.’

The Jew said, ‘You do not want your companions to know.’

‘No,’ said Nicholas. Then he added, ‘Lack of knowledge will not harm them.’

There was a silence. Then the Jew said, ‘I believe you.’

Katelijne said, ‘Truly, we admire the city. You must forgive us if we are ignorant.’

‘Ser Niccolò has explained,’ said the Jew. He had returned to Tuscan. ‘I understand. Only I am not sure if I can help. These are
letters referring to obscure streets, whose whereabouts are not precisely known. I shall do what I can.’ He frowned, his pen working over the map. ‘There. Possibly there. And possibly there. Does that meet your expectations?’

They all gazed at the map. The streets he had marked were those the Vatachino had already identified. ‘It might do,’ said Nicholas. ‘Is that all?’

‘I do not know the three others,’ said the Jew. ‘I deeply regret. Of course, I shall exact no fee for such trifles.’

Nicholas walked out with him all the same, to engage him in friendly talk and persuade him to accept what was fitting, and was given in turn a painstaking receipt which he slipped into his purse. Returning, he found Katelijne gone, and John and Tobie glaring at each other. John said, ‘He’s told her what it’s about.’

Tobie’s handkerchief punished his nose. He withdrew it. He said, ‘You said yourself. Without her, you wouldn’t have known what to look for. Of course I told her.’

‘About Ochoa and the parrot,’ Nicholas said.

‘And the gold,’ John said grimly.

‘Then it’s just as well,’ Nicholas said, ‘that the Jew’s information was rubbish. If the streets are where he says they are, the directions mean nothing. Or the parrot was lying. Take your pick.’

They both gazed at him. He laid out the map and explained it. Tobie went away, finally, sneezing.

John said, ‘Well?’

Nicholas said, ‘You mean you still remember your Greek? All that time digging holes in Constantinople?’

‘And in Trebizond,’ John le Grant said. ‘She’s Adorne’s niece. I follow the reasoning. I wish you didn’t have to keep it from Tobie, that’s all. Anyway. What did you really find out?’

Nicholas took a paper out of his purse and, laying it beside the maligned map, opened the inkpot and took up his pen. He said, ‘Read them out, and I’ll mark them. Then read out the compass directions.’

John read, and he wrote. At the end, Nicholas laid down his pen. On the map was a cross. John said, ‘What can possibly be there? It’s to the east of the Soma. It’s a small street, but still near the centre. It could be rubble, occasional mansions, ramshackle cabins. How can we know what to look for?’

‘You have forgotten the rest of the message,’ Nicholas said. ‘I know what to look for. I shall tell you tomorrow when I have found it.’

*

One did not leave on such an errand dressed as a merchant, armed with a new permit, accompanied by servants and Mamelukes. That was for later, when the formal meetings took place. Nicholas slipped out of the fondaco on sandalled feet at sunrise next morning, as soon as the gates were unlocked, and emerged into a road already busy with the pent-up surge of countrymen bringing food into the city, and fishermen slippery with scales from the strand.

The camels, held up through the night, slouched their way through the slotted doorways in the double walls and the rising sun gleamed on the turbans of the guards on the same walls, and on the hill, and flashed upon this dome or that minaret. Above the clanking of bells, the shuffling, the sound of voices, the hoof-beat of a Mameluke’s horse, the braying of asses, came the first sonorous note of the morning invocation of the muezzin.

He had his prayer rug within his robe, and spread it and knelt, as everyone did, prostrating, fulfilling the ritual. No one looked at him twice: a man in a worn robe and cap, with his head and lower face wrapped in white cloth. He would have to begin to grow his beard very soon. The lightness of his eyes usually passed: they were common enough among Berbers. He broke off his prayers to curse, in fluent Arabic, as someone stepped on his hand. He needed to know this city, and this was the best way to do it.

He did not, therefore, go straight to the street with the cross. He acquainted himself with the poor quarters as well as the rich: the tall, fragile houses of driftwood and rags with their tattered awnings, set among vivid trees; the naked children; the women whose eyes glittered through almond holes cut in their headcloths, who walked erect beneath crowns of white napkins, green herbs, and red amphorae of oil or of water.

He stopped and bought a loaf of flat-bread at an oven and watched a dice game, chewing peacefully until, throwing a coin, he got himself an invitation to join, and squatted in the dust for a while, the dust being the board. The dice were cowrie shells. It was a game he was good at, but he lost more than he won, and joined in the jokes, and capped them, using the Arabic of the Maghgreb for safety. There clung about the place, faintly, a memory of last evening’s hashish. After a while, his nose twitching, he threw a coin to a boy stirring
ful madames
in a great pot still stuck with night-ashes, and bought them all bowls of bean porridge so thick he could eat it with his fingers, and did. It was three years since he had tasted it. He talked through it, half forgetting what he wanted to know, but not forgetting completely.

He learned that a man had to be careful, or the Mamelukes
would be there in a trice, two or three on their horses, whipping you back to your work, for how could the Mamelukes live in luxury unless common men slaved? They said the streets of Cairo were never safe: that women were raped in their beds, and men too; that bands of Mamelukes would stop anyone, strangers or Cairenes, demanding bribes, or wrenching the turbans from the heads of good men for the few dinars they kept in the folds. And what were they but foreigners themselves, the mongrels? Greeks, Circassians, Kurds, hardly able to understand what a man said? Was there no end to the rapacity of the Sultans and emirs? There was a man who died leaving a hundred and fifty parcels of bands and belts and robes of honour. There was the Vizier Abdallah b. Zanbur who, on his arrest, left behind him six thousand belts and six thousand Circassian kaluta-hats: had he six thousand bodies and heads? This Sultan Qayt Bey could not control them, even though he was once head of the army. The Mamelukes had elected him. He had been a slave to a Sultan himself. He had fetched fifty dinars.

‘We will be rich,’ Nicholas said, ‘when the Turk is rich. When the Ottoman fleet takes Negroponte, Modon, Crete, Corfu, Venice itself; when the Turkish army takes Vienna, all Muslims will be rich.’

They looked at him then, even though they had won all his money. ‘Art thou a fool?’ said the oldest. ‘Dost thou imagine the Mamelukes, their mouths greasy with the dripping of flesh-meat, will wish the Sultan Mehmet to come with his Janissaries and take their golden spurs and their sable coats from them? No. They will oppose one another, sword to sword, and it is we, the carriers of water, the workers in the bath-ovens, the fishermen who will suffer.’

‘Verily, thou speakest wisdom,’ Nicholas said. ‘But what is it to us? The drowning man is not troubled by rain.’

He was sorry to leave.

After that, he found himself half seeking familiar sights. He spent little time in the bazaars, where the Market Inspector patrolled, the scales borne before him, his sharp eyes watching the brass, the silver, the costly scents changing hands and the foreign merchants and their wives moving about in thin slippers, attended by their Mameluke guards. He lingered more in the commoner markets where the mats, the trays, the baskets were laden with other riches he had forgotten: not just the pomegranates, the figs, the pickled lemons small and fine as apricots, but the lean wild dates and the beans, the lettuce and watercress, the heaps of
sorghum and cucumbers, the furzy millet, and the frying cheese smelling of Tuareg. Passing, he abstracted a handful of roasted melon seeds, just to taste them on his tongue.

He left, after a while. This was not what he was here for. Not for this: not for the smell and sound of the camels, and the forgotten habit of running a rider’s eye over shoulder and haunch. Not for the impulse to click his teeth, and mount, and go. And be free to go.

His mind, taking charge at that point, put a stop to the mood and sent him on, briskly, about his proper business.

Fortunately, the city changed its character nearer the centre, where the streets were wider and straighter and there were traces still of the double columns that once lined the way, and the mansions of the wealthy Alexandrians stood in their chipped marble grandeur, a pole of lanterns before every door, the fine carpets and pieces of damask billowing from their balconies.

In Alexandria, everything fluttered and flapped near the sea. It was only when you followed the street of the Soma up the slow incline to the crossroads and then turned aside, into the Canopic Way, that the blessed north wind was shut out, and the smells of musk and dung and cooking-oil clothed you like flannel. The Mouseion and the temples had all been built on rising ground, within the embrace of the wind.

Soon, he was quite close to the street on the map. He had memorised all the roads; even in the wilderness of the suburbs he had been able to trace them, here and there, and give them the letters indicated by the Jew. He had made a point of visiting the prison of St Catherine of Alexandria, a sunken cell surrounded by railings with a Mameluke outside, noisily fleecing a group of threadbare pilgrims from Germany. There had been a chapel near by, with its door shut, surrounded by rustling trees.