The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [260]
Katelijne bathed every day. He did not see her, nor wanted to. It was far from the Timbuktu-Koy’s palace, and the innocence of Umar’s wife Zuhra and the courage – or he had then thought it courage – of Gelis. Pictures entered his mind, now and then, of these moments which he had long driven out. They did not disturb him, or not in a way he was yet aware of. They fed a softer puzzlement that was now taking its place beside the anger and the misery. The haunting sense of bewilderment would, he supposed, never leave.
To his surprise, he did not have much time to think. Tobie came with him when he swam, and challenged him to fierce races which upset the other bathers and did nothing to reduce the endearing slight pot of Tobie’s stomach. Then, girdled into damp robes, they would rejoin Kathi in their pavilion, with its open terrace full of fluttering birds. She was taming a crested bird with barred wings called an upapa. She was also making friends, in a determined way, with the water-wheel oxen. She was always doing something.
They spoke Arabic a lot, because he was supposed to be their interpreter, and they both wanted to learn. Sometimes, when Tobie and the girl were together, he would hear them going over their lessons. It amused him to have Tobie, in this at least, as his pupil. It was he who suggested that the girl might also like to extend her Greek. It helped restore his own fluency. He was not sure if he was going to need it. Whatever plan he had conceived now seemed to have lost much of its point. If there was gold in Sinai, John could fetch it.
For the rest, the daylight hours passed, all of them filled; all of them marked by the tread of the oxen and the creak and splash of the wheels, turning, turning, up-ending the cycle of water-jars to fill the veins, the canals that watered the balm-garden. Just as distantly on the Nile the river was beginning to rise, a foot every day as the sweet, life-giving water, sent by God, moved into Egypt on its sacred, annual journey. The blessings of water, which could give, and take away.
Nicholas had never played the ’ud, the little lute she’d saved from the water, but he had seen it done, and he knew how the five courses should be tuned. He sat adjusting them before Tobie’s astonished gaze, announcing each one as it was done. By the time he got to the third, Tobie said, ‘How do you know that’s a D?’
‘He carries keys in his head,’ the girl said. ‘Didn’t you know?’ And to him, ‘Don’t you wish Whistle Willie were here?’
‘No,’ said Nicholas. ‘I don’t want him interfering: I want to set a Koranic chant in antiphony with a Gregorian one, and add in some tritones. Who would martyr us first?’
‘There are two wheels in the garden,’ said Kathi. ‘What’s that?’
‘That’s a salamiyya. I bought it from a man at the baths. You blow into it.’
‘You surprise me,’ said Kathi. ‘Now tell me you don’t have a drum.’ She turned to Tobie. ‘He had to leave Scotland because of the way he beat drums. Did you have them in Africa?’
The first direct question. Until later, he didn’t notice it. He said, ‘I’ve seen them used for sending messages. I could make one if you could saw me a log. We shouldn’t be popular. It can speak for forty miles from a river.’
‘You could send a message to John,’ said Tobie blandly.
Nicholas said, ‘I could send one to you, if I thought you’d understand it. What’s all that?’ Within half a day, the girl had become surrounded by litter.
‘Flea paste,’ she said. ‘Dr Tobias found the ingredients. And that’s a sketch of the ostrich. Did you know there was an ostrich?’
‘No?’ said Nicholas, with one eye on Tobie.
Tobie said, ‘I said all I have to say in Alexandria.’
‘Anyway, what was it like when you rode one in Bruges? What did you do with the water-wheels? There was a story –’
Tobie said, ‘Stop it. I hear you. You’re feeling well. But stop it. Go on drawing.’
‘I could draw you,’ the girl said to Nicholas. She