The Unicorn Hunt: The Fifth Book of the House of Niccolo

by Dorothy Dunnett

  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.

  Katelijne had been here, with Tobie. Protected by a merchant fondaco, they would have paid less than the pilgrims and been better treated. It was a matter of Christian belief that here, in the third century after Christ, Catherine, daughter of a Cypriot governor and over-versed, perhaps, in the liberal arts, had been imprisoned for her faith and then exposed to a contraption involving four wooden wheels and some blades.

  Emerging scatheless from these, she had succumbed to the sword, but, beheaded, had vanished from sight, being translated by angels elsewhere. He knew the legend. It touched him that, having travelled so far, Katelijne should have found, it seemed, the health and contentment that she’d sought. He walked on, and emptied his mind.

  He had told John he knew what he was looking for. He scented it first in the air. He heard it next above the rumours of noise from the streets all about, in the silence of a narrow street containing little but rubble and houses reconstructed from rubble. The so
und of four voices, lifted in exultation. He stopped.

  The church was old, and so sunken that he climbed down a bank to its doors. The marble it was made of was pitted, but the gardens behind it were green, as was the burial ground. A Christian cemetery, although not a Latin one. Nevertheless, a Frank dying in Alexandria could be buried here, if his friends paid enough and if he didn’t mind Mamelukes shouldering his coffin. Tolerance was here also, at a price. Nicholas walked down and touched the carved doors.

  They gave before him. Inside was a young monk, bearded, robed and hatted in black. Nicholas spoke to him in Greek. ‘I am a Christian merchant, who would beg an interview with the head of your convent.’ He lifted aside his headcloth as he spoke, but made no move to thrust past.

  The young man said, ‘You are welcome, my lord. If my lord would wait, the closing hymn is being sung.’

  ‘I shall be glad to wait,’ Nicholas said.

  The garden within the cloisters was small, with some flowers and a fountain, and a few graceful birds he thought must be tame, because they came towards him as he sat. He remembered that in Timbuktu there had always been pets: monkeys, parrots, a songbird or two. In Timbuktu the markets had been full, like these, of innocent, cheerful, hard-working people leading a strenuous life, but not an unhappy one.

  In Timbuktu there had been the intellectual and physical wellbeing that comes from a flourishing trade, and the communal spirit that arises also from the perils deriving from man and from nature: the vagaries of the river; a sudden falling-out among tribes. But in Timbuktu one did not live and breathe commerce. One took what sufficed; and then walked the length of a street or a square and there would be a mosque, a school, a scholar’s home or a kutubi, a bookseller, where one would leave one’s slippers and enter, leaving commerce behind. Or that was what had been in Timbuktu.

  A man came into the garden; a man who walked with authority, black veil flying, a crucifix chain swinging beneath his grizzled beard. The singing had stopped.

  Nicholas turned towards the newcomer, and spoke. ‘My lord Abbot? I am Nicholas de Fleury of Bruges. I am told you have a message for me.’

  The Abbot looked at him. He said, ‘This is the Church of St Sabas the Sanctified. You are not Greek?’ He was elderly but not old, and looked stern. The young monk stood deferentially beside him.

  Nicholas said quickly, ‘I am told you have in your church the pillar St Catherine was chained to. I have a young friend who is sick. I would pray.’

  The Abbot said, ‘You should have said so. Come in.’

  The basilica was not large, and seemed dark even though, stepping down, Nicholas saw the sky through a high row of windows. Then he saw how the low-hanging lamps glowed on frescoed walls and glinted on the little, dark ikons which fronted the short line of chapels, and shone on the carved side of the pulpit, and lay red and warm on the thick granite pillars. The fragment of St Catherine’s marble, incised with the cross, was not very large, and a painting by St Luke was too blackened to convey very much.

  His companion made a sign, and there was a discreet movement as the two remaining choristers left. The Abbot looked directly at Nicholas. He said, ‘You speak Greek. You wear the robes of an infidel.’

  ‘I have lived in infidel countries,’ Nicholas said. ‘I have lived and traded by the Joliba, at the behest of Cardinal Bessarion, in whose care resides the family of the Despot Thomas, former prince of the Morea, at Rome. I have also heard your rites in Nicosia, and in Trebizond. I am, by upbringing, a Frank. My name is Nicholas de Fleury, Knight of the Sword to James, King of Cyprus. I hold his badge in my hand. C’est pour loïauté maintenir is its motto.’

  The Abbot took his hand and held it under the lamps, studying the fingers as much as the badge. He said, ‘And to whom do you keep loyalty, my lord Nikolaos?’

  ‘To those who are loyal to me,’ Nicholas said. ‘And those who, like the Blessed Saint Ekaterina, have suffered in prison. A bird brought me a sign. The sender will have rewards both material and spiritual, provided I leave here without hindrance.’

  The Abbot smiled. ‘What evil do you fear? We are monks; we are poor. We have our treasure already in heaven. You could kill us all with your fists: our nature is mild; we should not resist you. It has been enjoined on me only to see that the object entrusted to me is delivered.’

  ‘Have I given proof enough?’ Nicholas said.

  ‘I am satisfied,’ said the Abbot. ‘Come with me.’

  The object he spoke of was a leather scrip, of the stout, plain kind carried by pilgrims, already much worn. Inside was a wooden writing-tablet already prepared. Nothing was scored on the wood or incised on the wax, which was smooth and white and unblemished. There was no writing implement with it.

  ‘This is all?’ Nicholas said.

  ‘It is all. We are told,’ said the Abbot, ‘that nobility on earth may be earned by the sword, but nobility of the soul must be sought in stony ways and through hard endeavour. I have to tell you to rejoice that you have been chosen.’

  ‘I do,’ said Nicholas thoughtfully. He put the worn bag away, and drew out another, which was heavy with gold. The Abbot looked at it. The Abbot said, ‘You are generous. By honouring our church, you honour yourself. I will summon the brother best fitted to receive your donation.’

  It was one of the singers, cowled and soft-footed, who came to the sound of the bell and, on the Abbot’s instruction, stood before Nicholas and took possession of the bag with its coins. His eyes remained dropped; his words of thanks were pious and humble. His crucifix glittered, unduly exposed, for instead of a beard there rose above it a half-naked chin, from which a ragged black fringe still depended.

  ‘As I have said,’ the Abbot remarked, ‘our nature is mild. We do not resist. We have found that the Lord takes care of His own, and we praise Him.’

  Demurely the monk held the gold. A muscle twitched in his cheek.

  ‘Amen,’ Nicholas said. ‘I am ashamed. Does the Lord give receipts?’

  Chapter 34

  FINDING NICHOLAS GONE, John le Grant cursed, got hold of Achille, and set to work reassembling and apportioning his cargo. Tobie looked in on him once to mention that he and the girl were moving to the Genoese fondaco immediately. It annoyed John profoundly. He had counted on Tobie’s support in handling Nicholas de Fleury.

  He retreated thankfully to his chamber at noon and found Nicholas walking about, a rib of meat between his bared teeth, sorting out garments and flinging them over his shoulder. There was a powerful smell of hot candle grease.

  Told to put on his second-best coat, John said, ‘Be damned to that, I’m hungry. What happened?’

  He caught, just, the shank Nicholas threw at him. It looked as if it had come off a market-stall. ‘Tell you later,’ Nicholas said. ‘Hurry up. Meetings, meetings. We’re late for the Emir.’

  In fact they were not, and the ensuing conference at the palace covered all the pre-arranged ground and ended with some worthwhile concessions. It was the unscheduled conversation that followed that made John uneasy. Rejoining their cumbersome retinue, he was unable to remonstrate, being hauled in turn to the Persian and Syrian fondaci and the houses of two wealthy Egyptian merchants. He noticed that Nicholas, all of a sudden, seemed to have discovered his bearings.

  The business talks were reasonably successful, being with people John le Grant knew and regularly negotiated with. Nicholas acted as the padrone, evincing ignorance when it would serve, and using his weight when that would serve too. They worked well as a team. The topics were cotton and corn; the glass and sugar handled by their Damascus sub-agent; the raw silk that Turcoman merchants could send them. They discussed and apportioned their interest in the spice fleet, which would arrive in September.

  It came twice a year. Too big for the Red Sea and its shallows, Chinese junks and heavy Indian ships which had left Calcutta in February would unload their jewels, their silks, their spices, their perfumes and their parrots at Jeddah. From there, taxed and packaged, the s
acks would travel by fleets of small vessels to Tor, and thence by camel-train to Cairo and the north. No foreign traders, of course, were permitted in Cairo, the capital. Foreign traders dealt in Alexandria, or nowhere.

  Every meeting, having dealt with the spice, went on to wring its hands over the war which had half emptied the harbour. Across the sea two weeks ago, a Turkish fleet big enough to cover six miles of sea had sailed to Euboea, the prized island possession of Venice, and deposited soldiers there. Three days later the Ottoman Sultan himself had led an army to the opposite shore and was now confronting the capital, Negroponte.

  Negroponte was the chief naval base of the Venetian fleet in the Levant. Without it, merchantmen would have to beat their way to Modon and Corone; local rulers would riot; the Turks, owning the harbour, could use it to attack whom they pleased. What happened to Negroponte would affect every man’s business, every man’s country. Alexandria was full of rumours, and each day a new scare would run through the city – the Sultan had brought his heavy artillery, the straits to the island were bridged, and even greater armies were pouring across. Nicholas, listening, made soothing remarks about Venetian strength, but said little else. John was glad when the last meeting ended.

  On their way home, they passed the Tartar fondaco. Even at the fading of day, the slave market was busy and full, the sellers proclaiming, the handlers with their short sticks expertly tumbling, exposing, clinically presenting their wares at fifteen ducats apiece. The slaves were from the Black Sea and beyond, and of all shades from ochre to tawny.

  John ignored them. Nicholas said, ‘Krim Tartars. We’ll call there tomorrow. They sell them with exactly the same routine in Lagos. I suppose they have an intercontinental market phrasebook.’

  When he spoke like that, it was as well to ignore it. ‘Why call tomorrow?’ said John. ‘We don’t need to work every day. Adorne isn’t going to arrive any moment.’