The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [228]
That would be why Anselm Adorne was hiring his own roomy vessel from Genoa, instead of choosing the galley from Venice. Or such, at least, would be one of his reasons. Adorne would learn, too, soon enough, which of his companions succumbed when at sea. Gelis would not be one of them.
Once, Nicholas had taken a sea-chart below and spent time with it, until his shipmaster took it away. The attempt to divine that way had failed, although he had imagined a faint stir on the map about Tunis – but that might be because he expected it. There was no sensation at all from Alexandria. He desisted then, thinking it more satisfying to employ his ordinary powers of reasoning, and to project what he knew of his wife’s. She had several options, depending on why she was doing this. His mind, roving through all his neatly developing conflicts, kept returning to base; reviewing the fulcrum, the axle, the crab of the whole complex structure.
He would spend his second wedding anniversary in Alexandria. Wherever she was, Gelis, too, might recall what the date marked. Godscalc had died two days before the last one. Two years was not a very long time. Even a decade was not too long, if you were enjoying yourself.
The African coast then was not very far off. Nicholas watched for it, mostly from somewhere high in the rigging. Working the ship, he went barefoot in shirt and drawers, which no one had liked much at first: a patron should look like a patron, and not only when going ashore. He had fifty seamen and a hundred rowers, three to a bench. None of them was a slave. He had bowmen, helmsmen, trumpets. Ships’ officers and crew changed all the time, and he knew none of these well, but had established an easy enough way with them all. He joked now, up in the mast-basket, looking over the sea.
The Egyptian coast, being alluvial, was always hard to pick out. Further east, you could tell the mouth of the Nile by the brown stain and the fresh-tasting water. But Alexandria, according to John, was nothing like the dramatic amphitheatre of Trebizond: just a long rim of limestone and sand and two spits. If you were fifteen hundred years old, you would have seen the palace of Cleopatra on one of them, and the great beacon had once stood on the other, four hundred feet high, with its flaming, glittering eye scanning forty miles of the ocean. Eunostos, Port of Safe Return, they had called it.
Now there was just a bonfire stuck on its base to guide mariners into the harbour, with a clutter of mosques and towers and a battery of bombards below it. Cleopatra’s palace had gone, although there was an obelisk (said John) which would tell him where the Emir’s palace now was. And he would see minarets and a couple of watch-hills and, visible from a long way, a tall red pillar where the Temple of Serapis and the Citadel of Rhakotis had been.
But Alexander, if he still rested in the city he was never to see, encased in gold in his coffin of glass, lay fathoms under some mosque, and there were tumbledown ruins and pillars where the Mouseion and its library had been. Al-Iskandariyya, eighteen hundred years old, for a thousand years a capital city and chief source of learning, was now shrunk to this, a trading port of the Mameluke Sultans of Cairo. And the remains of St Mark, the pride of present-day Venice, had been smuggled out pickled in a barrel of pork.
Sic transit. Everything changed. The sun was piercingly hot, but he was ready for that; for all of that. Below,