The Unicorn Hunt (80 page)

‘Trouble with the Mamelukes?’ John le Grant said.

The large hazel eyes made him ashamed. She said, ‘I thought you were concerned about David de Salmeton.’

It was Tobie who said, ‘John, sit down. Kathi – come, sit, we are sorry. You say Sir Anselm has done nothing so far as you know, but Nicholas has disappeared, and you suspect the Vatachino and David? Is your uncle anxious about him?’

‘About
M. de Fleury
?’ she said.

‘No. Obviously not. But you are?’

She sighed. ‘Shall I go home? He’s a man. He has friends. He’s in trouble.
And I don’t want my uncle blamed
.’

‘Ah,’ said John le Grant.

‘Tell me, Kathi,’ said Tobie.

She held out something white. A small packet, sealed with waxed string, upon which an address had been written in an inept and straggling hand. She said, ‘I promised to have it delivered.’

‘Yes?’ said Tobie.

She said, ‘From the Pisan Consul’s wife. A lock of her hair.’

Tobie sat up. The girl said, ‘It is one step, that is all. If M. de Fleury has been trapped by a rival, you will have to find him. If he is being secretly held by the Mamelukes, that is more difficult. They won’t give him up to you, to a Frank. You would need help. Cairenes who are not Mamelukes. Do you know any? Does he?’

‘None we could trust,’ said John bluntly. It was true. Here, the Bank did business in limbo with the Sultan and his Mameluke emirs – when it did business at all. The Muslim traders did not like it. Even his boatbuilder would admit all he knew, were he asked.

‘Wait,’ said Tobie. ‘Nicholas may. John, you told me the open risks he was taking. Didn’t he mix with the doctors and the students?’

The girl said, ‘From the University? You mean from al-Azhar?’ Her eyes had opened: pools bottomed with gravel; the irises specked with sharp colour.

Tobie said, ‘Yes.’

The word struck John with its baldness. He looked at the girl. She had flushed. She said, ‘So.’

There was a silence, which seemingly impelled her at length to jump to her feet. She said, ‘I mustn’t keep you. I suppose you are leaving? My uncle means to set out for Sinai immediately after the Ceremony. Do you think it will be soon? The river rose thirteen more qirats last night.’

John’s eyes met those of Tobie. John said, ‘Are you bidden?’

Her teeth gleamed. ‘To Sultan Qayt Bey’s flotilla? Oh, no. We are pilgrims, taking our humble place in small skiffs and not required at the Nilometer, the banquet or even the Act of the Breach. But all of consequence in Cairo will be there.’

Her clear eyes studied John, and returned to search Tobie’s face. Tobie said, ‘Kathi –’

She was at the door. She moved as quicksilver moves. ‘No. He is my uncle,’ she said.

The nature of the fourth interrogation was such that Nicholas knew there would not be a fifth. For one thing, the Chief Dragoman had attended uncovered. And the questions, which had always been cursory, were now vacuous. They had always known who he was. It would have been convenient, no more, had he confessed to being an Ottoman spy, permitting them promptly to put him to death, publicly impaled by the al-Wazir Gate. Since he had not, they would dispose of him in secret, and John would not suffer.

There was no redress, for he had come to Cairo disguised and without sanction. No diplomatic crisis would follow his non-reappearance in Venice or Flanders. His would be one more unexplained disappearance of the many which occurred in the souks and alleys of Cairo; his body left stripped, his flesh masticated by curs.

He was being prepared for a second terminus, a mandatory departure; something he had never been disposed to arrange for himself but might be content to accept. (Gladly? Meekly? Infested by fatigue and stupidity, Bel would say. Bel …) Which he might or might not be content to accept, living as he did in a welter of pain, the focal point of hatred such as he had never imagined.

He had been incalculably wrong: all his senses, all his instincts proved worthless. (
An arrow shot across the wilderness within the wilderness must fall
.) Of course there was no child: he had lived in a fog of illusion. He lay as the Dragoman spoke and so distant had he become in his banishment from all that was warm and human and natural that he neither heard nor understood what was said. Soon the man left. Halfway up the ladder he stopped, and added something in anger, and laughed.

Presently, the others left too, repeating the laughter. Nicholas did not register its meaning or cause. Since he now spoke neither Arabic nor French, they had not carried out their threat, and his fingerbones – all his bones – were unbroken. With the part of his mind that was Arab he appreciated the humour. He could have moved, crawled, gripped with a few broken bones. He lay in the stifling darkness, uttering sounds until death or sleep overcame him.

He sneezed and, being still alive, opened his eyes. The trap-door was open, and the torch that hung below it was lit. The draught was not what had disturbed him: a fan, glinting with jewels, stroked his lip. ‘My dear man, how you stink!’ said David de Salmeton, disposed with the grace of a vine on the staircase.

Once, it had seemed a sin to doubt beauty; to think that anything less than goodness could dwell in a face and form such as this, or within Simon’s golden perfection. The childish belief clung all the longer in that it was allied to a morbid awareness, a misdoubting of envy. One should love beauty for its own sake, he believed. In time, he had learned to understand the impulse, and control it. It was one of the many worthless lessons he had learned.

He looked up, beyond the mouth of the trap-door, but Gelis did not seem to be there.

His rival said, ‘It is unseemly to gloat, but I wished you to meet your successor. We had planned to integrate the Vatachino with your Bank in twelve months, but you have run it down a little too quickly: we did not wish to take over a destitute house. Your flair – you had some flair – deserted you in your Scottish transactions.’ The charming voice made a pause. David de Salmeton had come, as a vain and clever man would, to make his victim aware of his fate; to hear him protest or plead.

Your Scottish transactions
. For a threadbare, ludicrous moment, Nicholas reviewed his Scottish transactions; summoned to mind the fierce and complex activity which had filled his every waking moment in Scotland and then, bridging the chasm of Godscalc’s death, in the Tyrol and Venice, in Florence, Naples, Alexandria, until the cable had snapped and all he had set in motion was stilled. Stilled now, in all its destruction, for ever.

He returned to de Salmeton’s words, and felt a pang of amusement. He did not show it. He had deliberately left no private instructions: for Scotland, for anything of the long, complicated design upon which he had been launched. When he died, the victory of his enemies would be half, perhaps three-quarters assured. His Bank would probably fall, to the triumph of the
Vatachino and Anselm Adorne, and Simon de St Pol of Kilmirren and his fat father Jordan. And, of course, Gelis.
I wished you to meet your successor
.

He had said nothing aloud. From malice, then, the man broached the same subject. ‘By the way, the lady your wife sends her regards, and wished me to assure you that she is in health, and all her friends and kinsfolk relieved of their premature mourning. She has gone to Mount Sinai. Something about a parrot, I gather?’ He smiled, his eyes attentive.

It was, of course, the first independent confirmation that Gelis lived. Nicholas believed it. The oblique reference to Margot was sufficient proof. He had convinced himself of it already although, he must now admit, his judgement was faulty. De Salmeton spoke again, bland as barbed fur. ‘What, Nicholas? So poor a spirit? The stable-boy sulks, but surely the knight dies with a quip on his tongue?’

Allah and the Hallows requite thee
.

‘Forgive me,’ Nicholas said. ‘They didn’t warn me your presence was lethal. The lady my wife, then, was too busy to call? I should have had her admitted.’

De Salmeton stirred, as if the tone of the remark had surprised him. Then he said, ‘Time passes when one is occupied, and pleasure makes one forgetful. We parted late, and she asked me to be her ambassador, as you see. I shall report our modest success.’ Despite its grace, the set of his body was wholly masculine. It was what had attracted Zacco, wayward Zacco. A woman, a starving, warm-blooded woman would find it hard to resist.

‘Do,’ said Nicholas. ‘You are staying, then, for the dénouement? The Dragoman may make a small charge. Or perhaps, on leaving, the lady paid you your wages?’

His mind, moving on, left his words behind. His lack of attention, being genuine, was not particularly intended to goad, but succeeded, causing his visitor to caress the plumes of his fan, and then to extend them in a slow, exotic gesture. Nicholas didn’t notice them until it was too late.

There was nothing much he could do. The cellar was small. He did move, with all the grace of a frog, lurching sideways to adhere to the furthermost wall. De Salmeton merely increased the range of his arm. The feather-tips floated down upon Nicholas, drifted along the distorted length of his limbs and, settling curled at his feet, began to caress the flaps and bubbles of membrane upon which, once, he had walked.

The initial screaming was quite automatic; no more to be
diminished or halted than any other act of uncontrolled Nature. De Salmeton seemed not to expect it, and dropped the fan. Nicholas, mutating to pitches lower and hoarser, was aware of nothing outside his immediate task except perhaps a shade of deathly contempt. He felt the other man watching; after a while de Salmeton said something and, lifting the fan, began to walk up the steps, having apparently found the entertainment too raw. Before he left, locking the trap-door behind him, he turned and looked lingeringly down, as if to imprint some choice scene on his mind.

A picture to describe to Gelis, no doubt. Nicholas wondered what torment she felt, to need comfort like that.

The pain, in time, returned to its habitual level, its progress marked by occasional sounds. His lips were paper, his tongue parched, but although desolate with hunger, he could not have swallowed. He drifted out of consciousness and returned.

De Salmeton had forgotten to put out the torch. It revealed the accumulated filth on the floor: his nose no longer distinguished the fetor. It also showed that, on two opposite walls, the doors had been unlocked and stood open.

He lay and looked at them from under his lids. One doorframe emitted dank air, and provided a glimpse of a passage. Beyond the other, receding into darkness, was what appeared to be a chain of other cells, each communicating with the next. All were open.

The rooms looked like his own, although he could not swear he saw steps. Still, there might be trap-doors in their ceilings with locks and frames weak enough to be forced. When he had first arrived, he had repeatedly tried and failed to break open this one. Now he lay for a long time, breathing irregularly. The truth was, he was unwilling to think. He found he resented this tampering with his options. He had conceded. Gelis ought to be satisfied.

In any case, there were other entirely practical obstacles to do with his feet. There was also the fact that he did not know which way to travel. Someone had opened the doors. If he waited, they would come for him. With a handcart, perhaps.

No one came. He woke from a long dream, uttering a name, and found the torch had gone out. He lay a while longer, entertaining some sort of internal dispute, after which he felt impelled to gather his limbs with distaste and drag himself clumsily forward. He made for the door to the cellars which, of course, he could no longer see. Matins of Darkness.

He drew himself across the threshold and lay, his head on his arms, listening to a distant chirping of rats, who. were presumably communicating with each other in archaic Egyptian, not French.
They squeaked over a range of three notes, the middle being a quarter tone up from B. He could not seem to find any numbers. He was a
sifr
. A zero. An empty space in a long, faint row of figures. He sank into a suspension of consciousness and became less than nothing.

He dreamed he met Osiris, God of the Afterworld, to whom he explained, against his better judgement, that he was not ambitious of the honour of martyrdom, and was therefore going home. Osiris called him an unthrifty, changeable hoor. They were both speaking Scots.

Look on the face of Love; that you may be properly a man
.

Do not, at least, run away.

Chapter 38

I
T WAS THE
fifteenth day of August, the day of the Feast of the Assumption, and the Nile, rising, stood at last at the Great Mark that meant harvest, and life.

Cairo, Metropolis of the Universe, lies between deserts, and the Ceremony of the Abundance of the Nile, the Wafa el-Nil, was the crown of its year, for it marked the moment when the mighty river, travelling for hundreds of days from its unknown source in the Earthly Paradise, delivered the mysterious summer inundation whose rich black mud, spreading into the fields, would nourish corn and cotton and sugarcane, bean and date palm, watermelon and cresses, and feed the children of Egypt that year.

The mud and the water which – dashing along aqueducts, rushing into cisterns and wells and springing through sluices and channels – turned the baked land into lakes and moated parterres and nielloes of dancing, glittering silver, of fresh sweet water come, like a miracle, in the parched height of summer.

When, on the fifteenth of August, the Watchers on the island of Roda saw the water had risen to fifteen cubits and sixteen qirats on the Nilometer, the thirty-two feet or
qefa
of tradition, they rode shouting and clashing their cymbals through the city and up to the Citadel, upon which the Sultan Qayt Bey caused it to be announced that the Ceremony of the Abundance of the Nile would take place that day. Retiring, he donned his ceremonial many-horned turban (known as the Syrian Water-Wheel), and prepared to ride out to his parade ground on his white horse with the golden saddle and stirrups, and his harness with the great pearls, and three rubies the size of fowls’ eggs upon his back saddle-bow. (Allah be praised.)