The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [239]
The laughter left Nicholas suddenly. He said, ‘Yes. What reminds you of that?’
The girl said, ‘It spoke Greek. What did you make of it?’
John le Grant stared at them both. Nicholas said, after a moment, ‘Some was nonsense. The rest was a fragment of service from the Greek Orthodox ritual.’
She looked at him. Then she said, ‘Trebizond and Cyprus?’ and smiled. ‘I didn’t get that. I got something else.’
Nicholas said, ‘I thought you didn’t know Greek.’
‘There is this Jew,’ she said.
‘I thought he was teaching you Hebrew,’ said John le Grant.
‘That’s in the mornings. He teaches Greek in the afternoons. He has fifteen languages. How many do you have?’ she said to Nicholas.
‘Not enough for this,’ Nicholas said. ‘Talk quickly.’ Distant noise continued to emerge from the next fondaco. People were beginning to come towards them over the grass.
‘He says,’ said Katelijne, ‘that when the Greeks planned Alexandria, they named all the streets with a letter. Being Greeks, they laid out the whole place in rectangles. So, by naming the letters and the points of compass, you could describe any location you wished.’
Nicholas said, ‘The parrot said nothing of that.’
‘Not to you,’ Katelijne said. ‘It had to be drunk.’
John had begun smirking again. Nicholas said, ‘And?’
She said, ‘It sounded like gibberish. It wasn’t. It was street names and compass points based on the original highways. You know. Four thousand palaces, four thousand baths, one thousand two hundred greengrocers and forty thousand Jews. My Jew knows the old Greek names of the streets.’
Nicholas looked down at the map. ‘And the Vatachino knew three of them. How?’
‘I can’t imagine,’ she said. ‘But David de Salmeton is away, and you’re here. You can prove out the message. I can pretend I’m an idiot and hand the map back as if it were all a mistake. Unless, of course, there’s going to be a riot.’
He became aware, lifting his eyes, that the noise from the fondaco had greatly increased. Instead of dispersing, the inhabitants of the balconies had crowded even thicker. Their gaze was all trained in one way.
The balcony of the Vatachino company was still empty. The neighbouring balcony was wholly occupied by a kite in the shape of a frog. Nicholas wheeled. The stake with its reeled cord had gone. John said, ‘It pulled loose five minutes ago. I didn’t want to interrupt you.’ His freckled face gleamed. Nicholas looked up, and so did the girl.
The kite was not alone on the balcony. In fact it was being held by four or five people, all talking with great animation. Glued to the kite, they now saw, was the priest of the Orthodox church, still wearing his hat. He was talking as well. To one side of him, carefully snipping, a barber was detaching his beard. He completed the task as they gazed. The priest stood, his face naked, his manner as perplexed as that of a newly halved twin. The frog, disengaged, sprang to its full unfettered height and set out in the direction of India, wearing eighteen inches of beard and a spoon.
John had started to cry again.
‘We shouldn’t laugh,’ Katelijne said. ‘But it is rather funny. It’s Alexandrian. It’s like the jokes they used to play in the Mouseion. You know, rewriting the whole of the Odyssey without using the letter S. You couldn’t do that.’
‘I could if I had a lisp,’ Nicholas said. They had begun to walk quickly over the garden in the direction of the nearest door to the courtyard. ‘I suppose they called it the Iliad. I could do you a good line in Ls.’ John was running behind, his hands held palm outwards like chicken-wings.
Katelijne started also to hurry. She said, ‘Mind the fountain, it’d make the glue run. The Mouseion produced some nice verses as well. ‘Who sculptured Love and set him by the pool, Thinking with liquid such a flame to cool. And take Callimachus.’
‘I’m trying to,’ said Nicholas. ‘Why are you holding up your hair?’
‘I can’t let go,’ she said. ‘Berenice was lucky. Were those your best hose? How do we open the door to the yard?’ She held the map in one hand by a corner.
‘I’ll do