The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [240]
‘The hog,’ Nicholas said. It was not a query. Behind him, someone was choking.
The lady said, ‘You must have seen it. We keep it to annoy the wretched pagans. It is perfectly tame. Over there. Pour it into its trough.’ She smiled and walked away, leaving him standing looking after her. Attached to his hand was a bucket of pigswill. Katelijne said, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’
John was pale with emotion. He said, ‘Oh God, oh God, I can’t stand it, I have to go somewhere and –’
‘You can’t,’ Nicholas said. ‘Can you?’ He began to walk away. ‘On the other hand, I have this bucket of pigswill. No, on this hand, as it happens. Here’s a door. We take the pail to our rooms; you help me get it off, and I’ll help you put on your gloves. Katelijne, go away. Have a bath. We’ll come for you.’
Katelijne continued to nudge him. It wasn’t Katelijne. It was the hog, trying to get at the bucket. Katelijne was behind, kneeling on the fondaco’s tiled floor silently rocking herself, with one hand on top of her head and her forearm over her eyes.
John said, ‘That’s it.’
‘The pig won’t like it,’ said Nicholas.
The Jew said, ‘It is a poor map, but it will serve. You are looking for the great Alexander’s treasure?’ Below the obligatory yellow turban his face was broad rather than long, with a short black beard and brown eyes from which all trace of irony had been banished. He gazed mildly at the three of them, and the girl. The girl shouldn’t be here. They couldn’t find a reason to exclude her.
‘Next time, perhaps,’ Nicholas said. ‘Is that what everybody does?’ The man was a scholar, said Tobie, and had come recommended by the Consul. Tobie had interviewed and appointed him. He had been teaching Katelijne for three weeks. Kathi, as Tobie called her.
Tobie was there now with John and the girl and himself, his small round nostrils inflated, his cap already dragged off his bald head. In a moment, he would start sneezing. The map on the table was not the original, but a copy hurriedly drawn up by John. The Jew said, ‘It saddens me to cause disappointment. You have, then, some other purpose?’
Nicholas said, ‘A friend has posed us a puzzle. It depends on the street names. These are the names we have been given.’
The Jew took the paper. He said, ‘What do you know of the city? The whorehouses? The markets? The houses where you can buy smuggled aphrodisiacs and jewels?’ He spoke in accented Tuscan, the language they had begun with.
Nicholas said, ‘Tell me, is it true? Sixteen hundred years ago, out there on Pharos, seventy rabbis in seventy huts translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek? Do you think no one read them?’
The Jew looked up. He said, ‘Your Greek is Trapezuntine.’
Nicholas said, still in Greek, ‘So I know, at least, the legends of the cities Byzantium ruled. There is the Canopic Way, leading to the Gate of the Sun and to Cairo. There is the Street of the Soma, crossing it. There were green silk awnings spread over both, and colonnades and mansions of white marble so dazzling, they said, that the men and women of Alexandria wore only black. There was the tomb of Alexander, there the Mouseion, with its observatories, studios, library; there the shrine to Hephaestion. I want no lecture,’ said Nicholas. ‘I want to know what I do not know, the names of the streets.’
The Jew said, ‘You do not want your companions to know.’
‘No,’ said Nicholas. Then he added, ‘Lack of knowledge will not harm them.’
There was a silence. Then the Jew said, ‘I believe you.’
Katelijne said, ‘Truly, we admire the city. You must forgive us if we are ignorant.’
‘Ser Niccolò has explained,’ said