The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [299]
Nicholas said, ‘Then you will have to leave me outside, for this is how I am. Is my wife here?’
‘The Bedouin would strip you by midnight,’ said the Patriarch thoughtfully.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Nicholas. ‘I have a company of Mamelukes waiting down there. How many monks do you have?’
‘Is that a threat?’ said the priest.
‘Not necessarily,’ Nicholas said. ‘I can wait until she comes out. I thought she wanted to see me.’
Tobie moved forward. He said, ‘He has two guarantors, if you will accept them. Perhaps she will see me? If she is here?’
Neither Nicholas nor the Patriarch gave him a glance. The Patriarch said, ‘He knows that she’s here. He communicates with the devil. The monks wouldn’t like that.’
‘But you haven’t told them,’ said Nicholas. ‘So you have a guarantee of my good behaviour. Don’t you find it hot?’
‘No,’ said the Patriarch. ‘You will, by the time you’ve got your men here and the baggage indoors. I’ll see you after Vespers.’ His beard shifted. He turned and began to go in.
‘And my wife?’ Nicholas said. He spoke very softly. Immediately after, a singing echo made itself heard from inside the monastery, revealing itself as a cascade of small muffled chimes, light as dance music played on a dulcimer.
The Patriarch glanced over his shoulder. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.
‘And where?’
The call to Vespers had stopped. The Patriarch cast up his eyes. ‘How should I know? Where you will not be disturbed, I imagine.’ His voice was jocular. The door banged behind him.
‘Nicholas –’ Tobie began.
Nicholas stirred. ‘It would be helpful,’ he said, ‘unexpected, but certainly helpful if, from now on, you would speak only when there seemed something worth saying?’
He would have replied, but for John. John said, ‘Look at him. No.’
Tobie pulled his arm free in annoyance. He wished, for a moment, he were back in the desert.
In the monastery of St Catherine, built five centuries after Christ, there were three objects worthy of veneration: the church, with the remains of the saint; the chapel outside its choir, which contained the roots of the Bush; and the Library, in which reposed the most ancient ikons and manuscripts outside those held by the Holy Father himself.
There was the well, beside which Moses met the daughter of Jethro. And there were also many small chapels, designed and painted by hands long forgotten. There was a mosque, hastily fashioned a few centuries before out of a guest-house, which ensured the spiritual comfort of the monastery’s Arab servants, and also the continued protection of the Sultan of Cairo. There was a Frankish church, a simple rectangle of wattle and mud which equally ensured that any adherents of Rome could preach and worship in a place which, because of its singular situation, had passed unscathed and unknowing through both the division of the East and West churches and the destruction of most of their images.
As well as that, of course, there existed the cells of the monks, once four hundred, now forty; built small and meagre as swallows’ nests, one upon the other about a rigmarole of crooked balconies, half-secured ledges, cock-eyed awnings, bottomless courtyards and ribbons of steps within the eternal constancy of the walls. St Catherine’s represented the architectural accretions of nine centuries; their artefacts laid reposefully one on top of the other, mysterious in their lapses, in their ignorance, in their disconnected records and memories as any of the ancient relics of pagan Egypt. And to the guest-house, near to the Franciscan chapel, were the Venetian banker and his two partners led.
They had travelled at racing-camel-pace for seven days, rarely stopping for more than three hours’ sleep at a time. They had been under constant threat of attack from warring Bedouin, and in danger of losing the way. Despite all the power of the Sultan, they had been starved and parched, frozen and burned by that flaming sword, the sun’s heat. At the end of the unloading, their baggage piled in the guest-room they were to share,