The Unicorn Hunt (91 page)

‘I would take it,’ said Nicholas de Fleury. ‘But not without your consent. And I should pay for it.’

The Abbot smiled. ‘The price is one ducat,’ he said; and continued to smile, in a benign way, as the box, small as a button, was lifted out of the egg and placed in the other man’s palm.

Nicholas de Fleury said, but as a statement rather than as a question, ‘It is forbidden to tell me the donor.’

‘It is forbidden,’ said the Abbot in a friendly voice. ‘Nor can I distinguish what it contains. Your perception may be greater than mine.’

Detached from the blown egg and the mouldering sarcophagus, the little box lay confidingly, you would say, on the man’s broad, hardened palm. He touched the clasp and laid back the shell of the lid, revealing the phial to be empty but for a minute heap of transparent slivers. He smiled, without lifting his eyes.

‘The box is of gold,’ said Brother Lorenzo.

He had nowhere to go. Katelijne Sersanders, fierce in her concern, saw her uncle, unfamiliar in his distress, thread his way through the maze of alleys and arches, along the vaulted corridors, up the haphazard staircases of the community of anchorites, termites of Justinian’s monastery. Long before he arrived, she had pushed everyone out of his room and into the next.

She saw him pause on the threshold, seeing it empty, but he was too tired, she thought, to wonder why, and too grieved to wish it otherwise. Stepping softly behind, she saw he had crossed to the crucifix on the wall and knelt before it. Then he covered his eyes.

She drew the curtain over the door and backed away.

‘What?’ said his son. ‘God in heaven, what are you crying for
now
?’

‘Hunger,’ she said. ‘And if you’re not going to the Refectory, I am. Dr Tobias?’

He had been watching as well. ‘Yes. The Refectory, immediately,’ said Tobie.

When they came back, Anselm Adorne was lying still on his mattress. It was dark, and they would be required to rise not very long after midnight to hear Mass and to prepare for the climb. They would be away until nightfall next day, and had still to arrange for the food they would have to take with them.

Dr Tobias and M. le Grant had shown no enthusiasm for the expedition. M. de Fleury having once again vanished, no one knew of his intentions, but Dr Tobias thought that he, too, would remain. The meal had been uneasy, but in the presence of the monks and the Abbot, nothing untoward had been said.

Having several untoward things she wished to say, Katelijne Sersanders took a lantern and made her way, with discretion, to that small gallery high under the wall where she had once before found M. de Fleury.

He was not there. She walked from level to level, brushed by low devotional murmurs; touched by moths; accosted by whispers of prostitute fragrances. Above the walls, above the patchwork of roofs hung the sky, with St Catherine’s star and the dark, silent ring of the mountains.

Below the star, there was a light in St Catherine’s church of the Franks. It was the usual lamp, hung before the iconostasis beam with its four painted figures, but she sensed somewhere a shadow, and when she opened the door, the palm-leaf mats masked another sound, she thought, by their stirring. Then Nicholas de Fleury said, ‘Come in. I have found a remarkable poem.’

She had hoped to discover, through him, an understanding of her uncle’s condition. But if he had knelt it was to commune, not to weep; if he had sought solitude, it was not from personal agony. His voice was abstracted and sweet, as if music was not far away, but his mind had not yet had time to turn to it. She said, ‘What happened?’

‘A misunderstanding,’ he said. ‘Your uncle was convinced that the gold must be here, and the Abbot invited him to look for it. It isn’t, of course.’

She said, ‘You believed it was here.’ She hesitated and then said, ‘I thought it was yours.’

He had put on a kindly face. The dimples, the trenches in his face, in his beard even looked natural. He said, ‘It is, but people forget. Your uncle had some idea that it was meant for the Mamelukes, as part of a plot to invite them in strength to St Catherine’s. The Abbot explained that there were no stocks of gold and no plot, and when your uncle seemed unconvinced, invited him to search the monastery for the gold, if he liked.’

‘He was shamed,’ Katelijne said.

‘I am sorry,’ he said. He made it formal.

She said, ‘So am I. I had better go. We are climbing tomorrow.’

He seemed less interested, now, in deception. He said, ‘As you must guess, I have done my duty by Mount Sinai already. Take your uncle. Be careful. But it will help you and him.’

‘Did it help you?’ she said. She identified his expression. It was well intentioned, and absent.

He said, ‘I got what I deserved. And later, a prize I didn’t deserve. Sore feet, too.’

She said, ‘It was your wife?’ And when he looked at her, ‘They said the Patriarch of Antioch had been here, with a young man. Someone who worked for a while on the irrigation wheel.’

‘Did she?’ he said. ‘Yes, it was Gelis. She has gone. We have arranged to meet again, in proper gender.’

‘You thought she was dead,’ Kathi said. ‘She wanted you to meet on Mount Sinai.’

‘She has a touch for drama,’ he said. ‘Land of salt, land of manna, land of fauns and of satyrs. Place of temptation – oh, that.
To humble thee and to prove thee, I bring thee here
.’

She waited until he looked round. He said complainingly, ‘You are a very quiet child.’ Then he touched the poem. ‘Jan’s?’

Jan’s. The coat of arms, nicely painted, identified it. He had worked on it all through the desert. His father had told him to. Every pilgrim party was supposed to compose one. And studying it was the man Whistle Willie invited to lyrical battle.

Salve virgo Katherina

Salve quidem castissima

Stirpe regia regina

Fuisti nobilissima …

He didn’t read it aloud. He said eventually, ‘The last two verses scan.’

‘Good night,’ she said. Against her intentions she smiled, implying that she perceived and accepted the compliment, and was immediately filled with remorse. She crept into her chamber, and arranged herself behind her improvised screen, and considered with furious despair the prospect of a night and a day climbing mountains with Anselm Adorne and his son.

She fell asleep.

Coming back in the quiet of the night, Nicholas de Fleury found the lamp lit in his part of the guest-quarters, and his two business partners awaiting him. John le Grant said, ‘All right. Now you’re purified, sit down and tell us.’

‘About the gold,’ Nicholas said. He had hoped to have a moment with Tobie. But after all, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered too much.

‘That’s why we’re supposed to be here. But the St Sabas message was wrong, or out of date, or maybe the parrot was drunk. The gold isn’t here, only a puckle left in the tomb. Who did that? Ochoa?’

All the way to Sinai, the notion of a hard-swearing Catalonian sea captain immured in a monastery had confounded Nicholas. Now he laughed. ‘No. Ochoa hasn’t been here. Just the token dust in the egg, to lure us onwards.’

He spoke with confidence. It was true that the gold wasn’t here: he would have believed the Abbot, even if his pendulum hadn’t told him. His pendulum had told him, over and over, about a presence of power in the tomb. And of course, had been right.

John said, ‘Lure us here? Why?’

‘Or lure us beyond here?’ said Tobie. ‘Is that it?’

Sometime, he would have to talk to Tobie about Gelis, who had been the bait which had brought Nicholas to Mount Sinai. Gelis, and his discontent over Adorne. He knew, from John, that before Gelis walked out of the monastery she had been confronted by Tobie and treated to a barrage of questions which she had refused, with apparent indifference, to answer. He also knew that it was Gelis who had sent Ludovico da Bologna to look for him when he had failed to return from the mountain. She didn’t want the game to end before time.

Now he said to the others, ‘A lot of people are trying to push us about for various reasons: business, personal; because of the gold. The gold is what we came for: we haven’t got it; and Tobie’s feeling, last time we spoke, was that we ought to abandon it and go home. Meaning west. What do you think?’

Tobie’s face had altered. He said, ‘Home. As soon as may be. Diniz won’t mind. The Bank can stand it.’

‘Seconded,’ said John le Grant. ‘It’s getting too dangerous. If Adorne thinks he can plod on and find it, then I wish him good luck. We can aye pester him with some litigation, even if we’ve no chance of winning. He might even drop charges against you for half killing him.’

‘There is that,’ said Nicholas. Tobie looked at him. Nicholas said, ‘All right: we agree. Alexandria? The spice ships will be in: the Sultan’s goodwill should go quite some way to compensating for the gold. We’ll need camels and an escort to take us there: a few weeks of business, then back on the first ship to Venice. We could be there by November. Achille will have news of Scotland and the Tyrol.’

‘Scotland?’ said Tobie.

‘I can go there next year,’ Nicholas said.

They extinguished the lamp very soon. John fell asleep. Some time after midnight, mingled with the psalms of the night office, came the subdued sounds of stirring next door, as Adorne’s party prepared to visit their church before leaving. Nicholas, listening, became aware of movement much closer than that. Tobie, too, was quietly dressing.

For the sake of young Kathi, of course. Perhaps even to watch over Adorne, not yet restored to full health. In war, Tobie served like this, riding, walking, his box at his side; treating those he despised and those he hated, impartial with everyone. A good physician daily faced the great mysteries; it was not surprising that Tobie, too, might want to scale Mount Sinai, and stand on the peak of St Catherine.

John slept on and Nicholas lay, all his mind concentrated, like a spear, on one thought. After a while, when it was quiet, he rose and went to where the little box waited.

Chapter 43

K
ATELIJNE CAME TO
the end of her strength on the second mountain, the Mount of St Catherine, which was over eight thousand feet high, and took five hours to ascend and three to come down. Guided by Brother Lorenzo, they had already climbed Mount Sinai before dawn, and prayed with Father John in the chapel. From there they had descended the west side to reach the convent of the Forty Martyrs, which was ruined, but maintained its precious gardens, and where two monks in a hut brought them water and fruit.

There was no path up St Catherine, and although from the top they said they could see the Gulf of Aqaba and the Gulf of Suez, the Red Sea southwards to Tor, and the whole peninsula for as far as it would take six days to travel, Katelijne stuck halfway up, and Dr Tobias stayed with her.

When they came back at dusk, most of them were hardly able to walk, and the girl was in a camel-litter. Guiding her through the postern vault, Tobie heard the squabble inside the monastery at once.

Reduced by space, even voices upraised in anger remained slight, although it was evident that the sound came from above, where the monks’ galleried cells clung to the north wall. John was not in their room. Tobie got the girl settled quickly, and ran.

It was over by then: the cell empty, and only John standing outside, in a fury which he turned on Tobie at once.

‘So where were you? You knew he was doing this?’

The bloodied fingers, the deepening eyes: yes, he had known that Nicholas was divining. Tobie said, ‘They found him at it? Or someone told them?’

‘Both,’ said John. ‘For my money.’ His fist was split.

‘Kathi knew,’ Tobie said. ‘But she wouldn’t tell. Perhaps Gelis guessed, and told Adorne. What happened?’

‘The worst,’ said John. ‘Three silly monks, convinced they’d seen the devil conjuring spirits. If Brother Lorenzo had been here, it would never have happened. Anyway, they burst into exorcising prayers and wails, and when Nicholas got up, tried to snatch his pendulum and set fire to his maps. I don’t think he was in his proper senses: he’d been concentrating too long. At any rate, he fought back, and the fire caught their robes, and I got there in time to save them and sit on him.’

‘Heavily,’ suggested Tobie, who at times had some admiration for John.

‘My fist caught his jaw,’ admitted the engineer. ‘They’ve locked him up somewhere and gone off to report to the Abbot. Was it exciting on the two mountains?’

‘Five broken pilgrims,’ said Tobie. ‘And the girl in collapse, if you call that exciting.’

The anger left John. He said, ‘It was far too heavy a day. You were mad to allow her.’

‘It wasn’t physical,’ Tobie said. ‘Much the same kind of nervous overspill that sometimes afflicts Nicholas, I suspect. She knows more than most about what’s going on, but not quite enough to make sense of it. What was he divining?’

John looked surprised. ‘The rest of the gold, surely, damn him. Then he’d have reversed all our plans. He could never really bear to let Adorne find it.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Tobie. ‘Well, he’s lost his chance. They’ll fling us out now. Or put a stake through his heart. Or set fire to him.’ He waited for John’s heaviest grunt. They both knew it was serious.