The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [306]
‘And Nicholas?’ John le Grant said.
‘I don’t know where he is. Neither do you,’ Tobie said.
She woke, remembering that she had come to the shrine of St Catherine. During the last third of the journey, when adventure had given way to something distressing and frightening and difficult, she had found herself forgetting the reason for it, although Father John and Brother Lorenzo said their offices, and her uncle read every night from the Gospels, as long as he could.
Today she opened her eyes upon an ikon set on a sunlit white wall, and to silence. By her bed was fresh water and a dish with bread and some grapes. When she put on her robe and opened the door, she looked upon green leaves and roof-tops and heard, here and there, the murmur of voices, and a beat too far off to be music. She looked up. Beyond the walls, all around her were immense mountains, made small by the infinite space of the sky.
She turned along to the neighbouring dormitory and scratched at the door. Her uncle’s voice spoke from inside. He was alone, lying hollow-cheeked and calm on his pillows. ‘I am better,’ he said. ‘They are in the Latin church. You and I will go there tomorrow.’ She kissed him, crying from simple happiness.
Because she was young, they let her wander. Jan had given her the boy’s name of Stephen, which had something to do with Ekaterina. She couldn’t pretend to be Greek, but she had enough of the tongue to speak, shyly, to the monks she met, and was ashamed when, taking her for a boy, they made her a friend.
The Rule of St Basil enjoined poverty. They had no suppers of duck and red wine, no flattering habits of luxurious fabrics, no music, no dancing, no opportunities to entertain the great of the land, or exchange with well-bred avidity the gossip of court. Their robes were patched and any shade, coarse as sacking. They ate once a day, alone in their cells after evening prayers. Eschewing meat, their fare consisted of rice and peas, soup from their own lentils, with the fruit from their orchards, and water from their two deep, sweet wells. They pressed their grapes and their olives and sold them, keeping only the oil for their lamps, and a little wine for half a glass on a feast day. The grain for their bread came, once a year, across the desert from Cairo.
They worked, priest and monk, from the Abbot himself down to the least of them. They had servants – the Bedouin who prayed in the mosque – but they themselves ordered everything. She stopped by the well Moses used and helped to fetch two buckets of water: one was holed, and she carried it to someone’s bench to be mended. She sat under a tattered awning cleaning lamps, and went down to the tables where they were sieving grit out of grain, and further down to the bakehouse, where they were loading loaf-pats on to racks and rolling dough into batons. A corn-mill grumbled, and someone was washing bread-stamps. When they were used, the Burning Bush would decorate every crust.
The oven was the biggest she’d ever seen, and they timed the batches by chanting. She mumbled Hail Marys through a generous dole of figs and soft bread, and produced a solo for biscuits. She peeped into chapels and found a scriptorium, full of ferocious smells, where two monks were painting and one was mixing colours. She stayed a long time, with her tongue out.
She went to look at her uncle, and found him tucked on a wooden bench outside his room, with a glass of milk and a platter empty but for some egg crumbs. He was asleep. Inside, Dr Tobias was also asleep, stretched on a mattress with his mouth open.
She went out to the gardens, and found John there, supervising a correction to one of the water-wheels. Caterina delle Ruote, patroness of wheelwrights and mechanics. There were vegetable beds and orchards and pasture, each section rooted in earth brought by camel-trains, and watered from channels led from wells, and from cisterns filled by precipitous snow-streams. The fruit trees were in parturition of small, rotund apples and