Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [186]
‘And when children die?’ Nicholas said.
‘Ah, the unfulfilled lives! The young, gone to the other world in their blond childhood! How much ink, how much agony has been lavished on these! Why do you ask me, a Muslim, when you have heard the philosophers; when you have read the urging of Cicero, who wrote that destiny is unavoidable, and often cruel, but that it is the task of human beings to conquer?’
He paused. ‘Niqula, you ask me questions to which you already know all the possible answers. You are not untaught. You have heard these matters debated many times, in many countries, in many voices. You have read. You have listened to some of the wisest men of the age. Yet you clutch your ills to your heart; you will not submit to the light of reason what is troubling you. No man can hope to find purpose until he is at peace with his past.’
‘I see,’ said Nicholas, ‘that I owe something to Ludovico da Bologna.’
‘Not, certainly, his courage,’ the imam said.
Nicholas fell silent. Presently, in the darkness, he allowed himself a wry rebuttal. ‘I am talking to you.’
The imam’s voice held no levity. ‘As you talked, I am told, to the Cardinal Bessarion. How angry you will be when I, too, meet my death,’ said imam Ibrahiim. ‘But it will excuse you from thinking. Until your excellent intelligence awakes once again, and you are driven again to seek advice, and again find yourself prevented, by your delicate sensibilities, from taking it. I am wasting my breath,’ said the imam.
The silence that followed was long. Then Nicholas said, ‘You are probably right.’
And this time, the imam forbore to reply; perhaps because he distinguished in a man, in the darkness, what an angry doctor had once glimpsed in a boy.
OBERTO SQUARCIAFICO, the consul’s Treasurer, arrived the following day. The disturbance of it echoed from the great vaulted fort of the gate through all the sloping ways of the fortress, interrupting the blows of the armourer, the roar of the market, the staccato commands from the exercise ground. There were twenty armed men trotting uphill behind him.
Afterwards, it was seen to be no coincidence that the renegade Mameluke steward was in the garrison mosque, cynically inviting Allah to preserve his black soul while the Governor’s murderous Spanish prisoner staged his escape, as if the presence of the lord Squarciafico in the citadel would provide a distraction. But, of course, the soldiers of the citadel of Soldaia were far from fools, and the alarm was raised even while the man was skulking in the crowd, incompetently disguised in the tattered high-buttoned tunic and trousers of a Muslim servant, with a felt cap over his hair and a scarf wrapped about his miserable mouth. The renegade, called to the steps of the mosque by the uproar, was therefore able to witness the pirate Ochoa de Marchena start from the grasp of his captors and set off between the buildings, fast as a monkey, until the whole hill-top had been alerted to the chase, and there was no way out for him but the ladders which led to the heights of the buttress nearest to him.
One would never know what was in the lunatic’s head: whether he thought he could climb to the outward wall and descend somehow into the chasm beyond. At any rate, he was not given the chance, for he had not reached the second storey when someone with a ready-strung bow aimed and shot the little brute clean through the eye. He hung for a while, and then dropped.
Nicholas saw it. So, crowding behind him, did his fellow worshippers from the mosque, and the imam. Nicholas said, without looking round at any one person, ‘Get back, and leave.’ Then he walked down the steps.
So