The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [243]
Fortunately, the city changed its character nearer the centre, where the streets were wider and straighter and there were traces still of the double columns that once lined the way, and the mansions of the wealthy Alexandrians stood in their chipped marble grandeur, a pole of lanterns before every door, the fine carpets and pieces of damask billowing from their balconies.
In Alexandria, everything fluttered and flapped near the sea. It was only when you followed the street of the Soma up the slow incline to the crossroads and then turned aside, into the Canopic Way, that the blessed north wind was shut out, and the smells of musk and dung and cooking-oil clothed you like flannel. The Mouseion and the temples had all been built on rising ground, within the embrace of the wind.
Soon, he was quite close to the street on the map. He had memorised all the roads; even in the wilderness of the suburbs he had been able to trace them, here and there, and give them the letters indicated by the Jew. He had made a point of visiting the prison of St Catherine of Alexandria, a sunken cell surrounded by railings with a Mameluke outside, noisily fleecing a group of threadbare pilgrims from Germany. There had been a chapel near by, with its door shut, surrounded by rustling trees.
Katelijne had been here, with Tobie. Protected by a merchant fondaco, they would have paid less than the pilgrims and been better treated. It was a matter of Christian belief that here, in the third century after Christ, Catherine, daughter of a Cypriot governor and over-versed, perhaps, in the liberal arts, had been imprisoned for her faith and then exposed to a contraption involving four wooden wheels and some blades.
Emerging scatheless from these, she had succumbed to the sword, but, beheaded, had vanished from sight, being translated by angels elsewhere. He knew the legend. It touched him that, having travelled so far, Katelijne should have found, it seemed, the health and contentment that she’d sought. He walked on, and emptied his mind.
He had told John he knew what he was looking for. He scented it first in the air. He heard it next above the rumours of noise from the streets all about, in the silence of a narrow street containing little but rubble and houses reconstructed from rubble. The sound of four voices, lifted in exultation. He stopped.
The church was old, and so sunken that he climbed down a bank to its doors. The marble it was made of was pitted, but the gardens behind it were green, as was the burial ground. A Christian cemetery, although not a Latin one. Nevertheless, a Frank dying in Alexandria could be buried here, if his friends paid enough and if he didn’t mind Mamelukes shouldering his coffin. Tolerance was here also, at a price. Nicholas walked down and touched the carved doors.
They gave before him. Inside was a young monk, bearded, robed and hatted in black. Nicholas spoke to him in Greek. ‘I am a Christian merchant, who would beg an interview with the head of your convent.’ He lifted aside his headcloth as he spoke, but made no move to thrust past.
The young man said, ‘You are welcome, my lord. If my lord would wait, the closing hymn is being sung.’
‘I shall be glad to wait,’ Nicholas said.
The garden within the cloisters was small, with some flowers and a fountain, and a few graceful birds he thought must be tame, because they came towards him as he sat. He remembered that in Timbuktu there had always been pets: monkeys, parrots, a songbird or two. In Timbuktu the markets had been full, like these, of innocent, cheerful, hard-working people leading a strenuous life, but not an unhappy one.
In Timbuktu there had been the intellectual and physical wellbeing that comes from a flourishing trade, and the communal spirit that arises also from the perils deriving from man and from nature: the vagaries of the river; a sudden falling-out among tribes. But in Timbuktu one did not live and breathe commerce. One took what sufficed; and then walked the length of a street or a square and there would be a mosque, a school, a