The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [242]
He stopped and bought a loaf of flat-bread at an oven and watched a dice game, chewing peacefully until, throwing a coin, he got himself an invitation to join, and squatted in the dust for a while, the dust being the board. The dice were cowrie shells. It was a game he was good at, but he lost more than he won, and joined in the jokes, and capped them, using the Arabic of the Maghgreb for safety. There clung about the place, faintly, a memory of last evening’s hashish. After a while, his nose twitching, he threw a coin to a boy stirring ful madames in a great pot still stuck with night-ashes, and bought them all bowls of bean porridge so thick he could eat it with his fingers, and did. It was three years since he had tasted it. He talked through it, half forgetting what he wanted to know, but not forgetting completely.
He learned that a man had to be careful, or the Mamelukes would be there in a trice, two or three on their horses, whipping you back to your work, for how could the Mamelukes live in luxury unless common men slaved? They said the streets of Cairo were never safe: that women were raped in their beds, and men too; that bands of Mamelukes would stop anyone, strangers or Cairenes, demanding bribes, or wrenching the turbans from the heads of good men for the few dinars they kept in the folds. And what were they but foreigners themselves, the mongrels? Greeks, Circassians, Kurds, hardly able to understand what a man said? Was there no end to the rapacity of the Sultans and emirs? There was a man who died leaving a hundred and fifty parcels of bands and belts and robes of honour. There was the Vizier Abdallah b. Zanbur who, on his arrest, left behind him six thousand belts and six thousand Circassian kaluta-hats: had he six thousand bodies and heads? This Sultan Qayt Bey could not control them, even though he was once head of the army. The Mamelukes had elected him. He had been a slave to a Sultan himself. He had fetched fifty dinars.
‘We will be rich,’ Nicholas said, ‘when the Turk is rich. When the Ottoman fleet takes Negroponte, Modon, Crete, Corfu, Venice itself; when the Turkish army takes Vienna, all Muslims will be rich.’
They looked at him then, even though they had won all his money. ‘Art thou a fool?’ said the oldest. ‘Dost thou imagine the Mamelukes, their mouths greasy with the dripping of flesh-meat, will wish the Sultan Mehmet to come with his Janissaries and take their golden spurs and their sable coats from them? No. They will oppose one another, sword to sword, and it is we, the carriers of water, the workers in the bath-ovens, the fishermen who will suffer.’
‘Verily, thou speakest wisdom,’ Nicholas said. ‘But what is it to us? The drowning man is not troubled by rain.’
He was sorry to leave.
After that, he found himself half seeking familiar sights. He spent little time in the bazaars, where the Market Inspector patrolled, the scales borne before him, his sharp eyes watching the brass, the silver, the costly scents changing hands and the foreign merchants and their wives moving about in thin slippers, attended by their Mameluke guards. He lingered more in the commoner markets where the mats, the trays, the baskets were laden with other riches he had forgotten: not just the pomegranates, the figs, the pickled lemons small and fine as apricots, but the lean wild dates and the beans, the lettuce and watercress, the heaps of sorghum and cucumbers, the furzy millet, and the frying cheese smelling of Tuareg. Passing, he abstracted a handful of roasted melon seeds, just to taste them on his tongue.
He left, after a while. This was not what he was here for. Not for this: not for the smell and sound of the camels, and the forgotten habit of running a rider’s eye over shoulder and haunch. Not for the impulse to click his teeth, and mount, and go. And be free to go.
His mind, taking charge at that point, put a stop to the mood and sent him on, briskly, about his proper