Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [145]
The monk said, ‘They call Qirq-yer the fort of the Forty Fortifications, but I suspect they mean Martyrs. There were Christians here six hundred years ago. I am told you are destitute.’
‘Complaints are for martyrs,’ Nicholas said. ‘I am quite content. Why are you here?’
‘I travel, as do Latin monks and confessors,’ Lorenzo said. ‘The Patriarch of Antioch and I are both Christians, and concerned with halting the advance of the Ottoman Turks, to the extent of courting unorthodox allies — Uzum Hasan of Persia, the Sultan and jurists of Cairo, and even yourself.’
‘Thank you,’ Nicholas said.
‘Not at all. It seemed to the Patriarch and myself that, given some financial security, you might usefully be employed in these parts, and that I could, in passing, strengthen your credentials with the Greek community, as some visiting teacher from Cairo might commend you to those of the Muslim faith. Also, I would like both you and the Patriarch to know what Abdan Khan cannot or will not tell you about the Gothian strength at Mánkup.’
‘I should be interested in that,’ Nicholas said. ‘But am I worthy?’
‘It is a failing of Abdan Khan’s,’ said the monk, ‘that he resists advice. He is a first-class captain, who has grown up in awe of the heroes who trained him. Whereas you, I understand, have made your own mould. It is praiseworthy. The dangers are those of over-confidence, even of dogged entrenchment. You must work to avoid them. Now I shall give you some information which you will kindly pass to the Patriarch, and also ponder upon to the best of your ability’
Nicholas inhaled sharply, and then let it go. All right, he wasn’t a martyr. The monk gazed at him with a certain compassion, and then started to speak.
What he said was comprehensive, but of necessity brief: even if the Circassian had fallen asleep, the escort had not, and they had to reach their next station by nightfall. Having finished with Mánkup, Friar Lorenzo added his assessment of the wider campaigns against Turkey, as viewed from Cairo and Cyprus and Rhodes. When he ended, Nicholas found the grace to apologise, as well as to thank him.
The monk smiled, rising to his feet. ‘You are human. Wrong turnings may be beneficial. Tampering with magic is not. The Patriarch will be relieved to hear that you refused to divine.’
Nicholas smiled, but not very widely. His restraint was noted, he saw. He was over-confident enough, he wished to say, to change his mind and divine if he pleased, and to hell with the unintrenched Patriarch.
They passed a network of caves on the way from the chapel. The monk, holding a lantern, showed him one. ‘They run all through the hill. A man in trouble can live here a long time. The citadel knows when someone is present, but strangers would not notice the clues. There, if you look. The person who stayed here has gone, and someone will rub the mark out. One day, another will come. See. They can be made quite comfortable.’ And moving past the discreet mark on the wall, he raised the lamp.
It depended, of course, on what you called comfort. The movable furnishings had presumably gone, but a broken bucket remained, and a stone hearth and cistern, and a platform of flags with some straw. The walls were full of irregular holes, cut for storage, and in places the rock had been smoothed to receive imaginative charcoal drawings of saints mortifying the wives of deceived men, or men copulating without difficulty with well-drawn but unusual partners. ‘There is a well outside at the back,’ continued Friar Lorenzo. ‘And a fire gives light. There is plenty of fuel. And assuming the citadel approves, there will be a bag of meal from time to time, and some dried fish, perhaps. Their refugees rarely starve.’
‘No,’ Nicholas said. His attention was fixed on the back of the cavern where, taking shape in the brightening lamplight, there seemed to be —there were — some abandoned possessions, dumbly eloquent