The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [241]
They all gazed at the map. The streets he had marked were those the Vatachino had already identified. ‘It might do,’ said Nicholas. ‘Is that all?’
‘I do not know the three others,’ said the Jew. ‘I deeply regret. Of course, I shall exact no fee for such trifles.’
Nicholas walked out with him all the same, to engage him in friendly talk and persuade him to accept what was fitting, and was given in turn a painstaking receipt which he slipped into his purse. Returning, he found Katelijne gone, and John and Tobie glaring at each other. John said, ‘He’s told her what it’s about.’
Tobie’s handkerchief punished his nose. He withdrew it. He said, ‘You said yourself. Without her, you wouldn’t have known what to look for. Of course I told her.’
‘About Ochoa and the parrot,’ Nicholas said.
‘And the gold,’ John said grimly.
‘Then it’s just as well,’ Nicholas said, ‘that the Jew’s information was rubbish. If the streets are where he says they are, the directions mean nothing. Or the parrot was lying. Take your pick.’
They both gazed at him. He laid out the map and explained it. Tobie went away, finally, sneezing.
John said, ‘Well?’
Nicholas said, ‘You mean you still remember your Greek? All that time digging holes in Constantinople?’
‘And in Trebizond,’ John le Grant said. ‘She’s Adorne’s niece. I follow the reasoning. I wish you didn’t have to keep it from Tobie, that’s all. Anyway. What did you really find out?’
Nicholas took a paper out of his purse and, laying it beside the maligned map, opened the inkpot and took up his pen. He said, ‘Read them out, and I’ll mark them. Then read out the compass directions.’
John read, and he wrote. At the end, Nicholas laid down his pen. On the map was a cross. John said, ‘What can possibly be there? It’s to the east of the Soma. It’s a small street, but still near the centre. It could be rubble, occasional mansions, ramshackle cabins. How can we know what to look for?’
‘You have forgotten the rest of the message,’ Nicholas said. ‘I know what to look for. I shall tell you tomorrow when I have found it.’
*
One did not leave on such an errand dressed as a merchant, armed with a new permit, accompanied by servants and Mamelukes. That was for later, when the formal meetings took place. Nicholas slipped out of the fondaco on sandalled feet at sunrise next morning, as soon as the gates were unlocked, and emerged into a road already busy with the pent-up surge of countrymen bringing food into the city, and fishermen slippery with scales from the strand.
The camels, held up through the night, slouched their way through the slotted doorways in the double walls and the rising sun gleamed on the turbans of the guards on the same walls, and on the hill, and flashed upon this dome or that minaret. Above the clanking of bells, the shuffling, the sound of voices, the hoof-beat of a Mameluke’s horse, the braying of asses, came the first sonorous note of the morning invocation of the muezzin.
He had his prayer rug within his robe, and spread it and knelt, as everyone did, prostrating, fulfilling the ritual. No one looked at him twice: a man in a worn robe and cap, with his head and lower face wrapped in white cloth. He would have to begin to grow his beard very soon. The lightness of his eyes usually passed: they were common enough among Berbers. He broke off his prayers to curse, in fluent Arabic, as someone stepped on his hand. He needed to know this city, and this was the best way to do it.
He did not, therefore, go straight to the street with the cross. He acquainted himself with the poor quarters as well as the rich: the tall, fragile houses of driftwood and rags with their tattered awnings, set among vivid trees; the naked children; the women whose eyes glittered through almond