The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [259]
The fiction that Nicholas intended to stay at Damietta seemed to have dissolved. The fact that he was on his way to Cairo appeared to be taken for granted. Since no one could now transmit the information to Adorne, he supposed it didn’t matter. The Garden of Balm being located at Matariya just short of Cairo, itself six days away, he assumed that he would part company there with the rest.
The days of the journey flowed past and were lost in much the same way that time, numbers, calculation sank from consciousness after his son – his son Henry – had tried to knife him to death. The presence of the girl Katelijne perhaps enhanced the illusion.
It all seemed remarkably simple. Tobie, the girl and their servants were dressed in the coarse robes of pilgrims; Nicholas, in a last flash of commonsense, as their dragoman, in the Arab clothes he had worn in Alexandria. He had not shaved since they left. He was not hungry, but the girl had brought baskets of delicacies: figs and melons, grapes and dates, and Tobie bartered for rice and plump quails, eggs and fish on the way. It was like the Joliba, except that Bel was not there.
The consonances were perpetually soothing. The honey-smell of bubbling sugar swam over the water so that he thought they were passing Episkopi, and he was charmed to notice sea-lizards stir by the shore, disturbed by the boatmen’s small tapping drums. On the Gambia, they rapped the wood of their boats with their oars. Gelis had done it for hours until she was exhausted. He wondered, drowsily, if there would be any orgies. Katelijne said, ‘What are you smiling about?’
He smiled back but did not, then, reply. On the shore were camels, buffalo, water-wheels. Because the water was low, the boat kept in mid-stream: once they were stuck on a shoal, and he wakened to find they were all being compelled to slide overboard and wade through the water. Katelijne was supporting his arm. He said, ‘What are you holding over your head?’
‘You’ve wakened!’ she said. She had become very brown, except over her chin where the veil went.
He said, ‘Well, it seems to be daylight. It’s an ’ud.’
‘I told you he’d know it,’ said Tobie. ‘The prince of enchantment. She wants to teach herself, but she didn’t want to disturb you.’
Then he looked about him: at the boat, at the river, at Tobie, and said, ‘What has happened?’
‘Nothing,’ said Tobie. ‘What you needed to happen. There is Matariya. You can’t go to Cairo without calling there. So you might as well come.’
It wasn’t quite true that he had no other means of getting to Cairo, but he was well enough pleased to remain. Tobie, he realised, had withdrawn whatever treatment he had been receiving. As the hours passed, Nicholas de Fleury came to himself.
He had thought, once, to find truth in the desert, in that world of infinite space, of stark and painful simplicity that leads the mind and soul inwards.
He had failed in that, and had found the failure terrible. Now, brought here by others, he was a convalescent in a different place. The scented gardens of Matariya – the airy pavilions, the profusion of sweet spring water sparkling in the hot sun, brimming in the wide, shady hall with its painted arcades where flowers and swimmers floated together – these healed not through the mind, but through the senses. Truth had been withheld, but he had been deemed worthy of comfort.
The gardens belonged to the Sultan. Its custodians were well accustomed to the pilgrims who came to drink at the white marble basin from the well-spring touched into being by the Holy Family, fleeing from Herod. The distressed of all races came to the baths for relief. And in the innermost garden, the garden most jealously guarded, grew the vine-like balsam plants which the Queen of Sheba, it was said, had brought and given to Solomon. Their oils, envied by kings from their anointing to their entombment, were prepared in the Sultan’s own palace at Cairo and became gifts of diplomacy,