The Unicorn Hunt (87 page)

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 losing 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.

John said, ‘I don’t see it. He knew he was meeting Gelis tomorrow.’

‘Did he? That was what Ludovico da Bologna said. Do you trust Ludovico da Bologna?’

‘No. Nor would Nicholas. But he doesn’t tell absolute lies. He said tomorrow.’

Tobie said, ‘But today is tomorrow. The new day starts at sunset. It’s tomorrow.’

John gazed at him. He said, ‘So what else did he say? A place?
Where you will not be disturbed
.’

‘In a monastery?’ Tobie was thinking aloud. ‘She’ll be dressed as a man, it goes without saying; but hardly with a room of her own. Perhaps sharing one with the Patriarch, discreetly divided? Da Bologna could move out and let them meet there.’

‘But he didn’t say so,’ said John. Then he said, ‘He looked up. Tobie, da Bologna looked
up
. And Nicholas has taken a stave.’

They found Ludovico da Bologna in the Latin chapel, reading to himself by candlelight from a sheaf of cut, unbound vellum. Pinned to the coloured mats on the walls were papers of perhaps lesser authority: amateur poems to St Catherine, left by her visiting pilgrims. The door opened so violently that mats and poems fluttered and flapped.

The Patriarch said, ‘Shut the door, man. There’s wax everywhere.’ He turned round, keeping his place in the papers.

‘Where is she?’ said Tobie.

‘Where you think. Unlikely, isn’t it?’ said Ludovico da Bologna. ‘But if she was fool enough to climb, and he to follow, it’s their business, not yours.’

‘In the dark?’ John said.

‘It’ll be dawn before you could get there. Pilgrims climb in the dark. They sometimes stick. They sometimes lose heart halfway up and come back. They rarely fall off. Whatever was going to happen,’ said the Patriarch of Antioch, ‘will already have happened. Why not stay here, and I’ll put up a nice prayer?’

Chapter 41

O
NCE UP IN
the wind it was bitterly cold, and the chipped stars and faded moonlight chilled the spirit. She had been cold long before she set out.

She had climbed Gebel Musa twice already, in daylight. She knew the slow way, the path that camels and asses could take. She knew the direct, punishing way, the Sikket Sayidna Musa, the path of Moses which led through the steep ravine at the back of the monastery to the foot of the mountain, and then by graded inclines to the well – the water of Moses – where, in sunlight, the sweet water was desperately welcome. It gave strength for the next ascent, to the narrow plateau upon which had been built a stone chapel.

In the dark, now, she could hardly see it. But she had a good memory, and a sense of direction and of levels, and so far she had hardly stumbled. She rested a little, to keep her strength, then crossed the other ravine to the first of the gates. The tall stone archway at which, once, pilgrims were stopped to make their confession. There was no one there now.

After that, she was glad that she was light-footed and strong, for the stiff climb began. From this point there were steps, over three thousand of them, mounting steeply to the night sky between the towering, slabby walls of the mountain, chill on either side in the darkness. There was no resting place, then, until the second arch, which led to the broad grassy slope on which were set the triple chapels of St Marina the Virgin, Elisha, and Elijah. The last place one could stop was a ledge just before the summit, where she remained for a moment, listening.

There was no sound, before or behind. She was alone. She climbed the last hundred steps to the uneven spread of the pinnacle.

In daylight, one made this final step burned by the sun, drenched with sweat, aching and breathless from the climb, from fear of the height, from wonder at what one could see of the world laid below. The Mount inhabited by God and frequented by angels, where trumpets rang, and the Lord spoke unto Moses.

The Mount of the Law, to which men looked for justice.

It was not flat. There were boulders and recesses and an ancient chapel ritually used by the monks but now locked for security against the insults of rambling parties, as Ludovico da Bologna had warned. He had brought her to Sinai, because it suited him. It suited Anselm Adorne, it suited de Salmeton to know what was happening. They all had an interest in Nicholas de Fleury.

She had watched him walk into the monastery. With more patience than any lookout of old, beset by armies, she had crouched by the wall-walk and gazed, hour after hour, when she came back from her climbing. Long before the monastery servants, she saw the approaching dark smudge of the Mamelukes, sparkling with steel. She knew, when he stopped them out of sight, that he did not want St Catherine’s to guess how few they were, in case they refused him. Then she saw him walking up to the door.

She recognised the men with him, whom she had expected. The journey had changed them. His own face at first was unclear, although she watched him intently. When he arrived under her gaze and stood still, she saw, stripped in the light, at last, what the Patriarch saw. And her mind also spoke that single word of misgiving.

Wait.

Wait, before I open this door. This is not the man I expected. This is not the danger I expected. This is something unknown.

Now, the wind shrieked in the darkness, and around her was space, and the presence, unseen, of age-old rock and precipice. If Mount Sinai touched heaven, heaven was desolation. Desolation and anger were what she had brought. In both, she was expert. Gelis van Borselen, dame de Fleury, wrapped her cloak about her, and sat down, and waited.

The sound, when it came, was infinitesimal but she knew that what she had heard, far below her, was a small fall of rock. Presently she saw, in the blackness, a minute comma of fire swaying, bobbing: a brand in the distance. A comma; a sentence. He was coming.

She had a talisman. Nothing tangible: a series of words, a few scenes. Because of them, she had never lost her resolve, and would not lose it now. As the sounds of movement came closer, she stood.
One man’s footsteps, irregular because of the irregular rock, and interspersed with the click and thud of a stave. The brighter light of a brand; a burning brand, certainly consumed and therefore several times refreshed, and held by the same person: there was no guide, no servant here. And then, immense in the darkness, moving up the final few steps, streaming with fire and with shadow, her opponent. She heard his breathing.

At the top he came to rest, as if waiting. He had paused before; she had heard the delays. He was not in a hurry. She thought of stepping forward; forcing him into premature speech, but she knew him too well. Unless it suited him, he wouldn’t respond. And when he did respond, every word would have its place in the game. The resumed game. The different game.

All this time he was looking at her; one sexless, anonymous figure facing another across the limited space. When at length he moved, he merely walked forward two paces and stopped again. Then he lifted the torch, the sleeve falling back from the vertical line of his forearm. It was like the signal for the launch of a race, or for the start of a series of contests. The light sped across her face and his own, identifying them to each other. The face was the face of the man she had seen below; stony in its concentration. Then he drew back his arm, and hurled first the brand, then his stick into the darkness.

They dropped, the stick first, the other lumbering wrapped in its flame. Finally they both tilted and fell, jerked about in the wind like spent arrows. Fire-dust lingered in snatches, then went out, leaving absolute darkness, and cold.

He said, ‘C’est alors la fin? J’espère que oui.’

I take it this is the end? I hope so
.

She used the same elegant language they both spoke. ‘The end of what, mon époux? Of our match, after only two years? Of life? Hardly.’

The word was licked from her tongue by the wind. She could hear his uninflected voice through the bluster of sound. ‘Comme il te plaît. I am armed; so are you.’

The knife lay out of sight under her girdle. She said, ‘I protect myself. What other end do you mean?’

‘The end of deception,’ he said. He waited. ‘You have brought your wrongs here, and me to hear them.’

‘And then you will use your dagger?’ she said.

Until then, they had been standing. Now she saw, as the sky emptied behind him, that he had found a rock, and had lowered himself upon it. It was not far away, but not threatening. He said, ‘You wouldn’t have come if you thought that.’

‘I considered it,’ she said. She felt able, now, to move to a ledge and sit down herself. Her limbs trembled. She said, ‘But I have the child.’

‘So you say,’ he said. ‘Did Simon ask you to go back to Scotland?’

She had realised, in the last few moments, that it was possible that she was going to die. She had seen the change, as the Patriarch had, but had not understood it. She clenched her teeth to still them. Then she said evenly, ‘He usually does. As you see, I refuse.’

‘You should have gone,’ he said; and sounded amused. Then he said, ‘It’s cold. Let’s get it over with. Why the drowning in Cairo? Revenge for Lucia, of course. But why not the long game? Because you can’t pretend there’s a child any longer?’

‘Drowning?’ she said. Faintly, she could distinguish his features. The mask was not one she knew. He was holding something in his hand.

He said, still amused, ‘You know nothing of it. It was arranged by Tzani-bey’s sister. But you recognise this?’