The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [321]
She had come through a land of drought and of the shadow of death; a land that no man passed through, and where no person dwelt. She understood the words of Jerome: ‘To me the city is a prison, the wilderness is paradise.’ She understood, but did not agree.
She remembered taking painful farewell of the Abbot and of the monks who had befriended her, and whom she felt she had deceived. She clung to Brother Lorenzo, who was coming with them. So, she learned, weeping, was Dr Tobias, who had rescued her once before from this limbo of weakness and confusion. John le Grant, whom she also knew and trusted, had come with him.
And, mysteriously, Nicholas de Fleury. The man with keys in his head, the horseman and swimmer of Leith, the singer, the owner of parrots and impresario of tournaments, of secret torments, of strange and terrible death in the snow. The man who could cause a princess to disappear, and laugh like a girl over a frog, and weep – so she had been told – at the feet of a wise man of another race, another religion. And weep and laugh for other causes as well, including near-death at the hand of a child. A man in whom she took a great interest.
She was ill, but not too ill to be gripped once again, as she was carried away, by the wonder of Sinai: by the stillness, the peace, the limitless silence. The awning swayed, and her eyes were drawn to the sky which hung, pellucid blue, from horizon to horizon; to the stacked, melting shapes of the mountains framing the tilting plain of Raha; the broad valley that led to the towering range of St Catherine; and then, as she lifted herself a little, to the sloping gulley of Wadi al Deir, the valley of the monastery she had left, whose walls were the incandescent face of Sinai and its opposite sisters, and where reposed – a dark pocket of green, a slip of red – the monastery of the Blessed St Catherine, to whom one brought one’s griefs and from which one departed with nothing so facile as perfect health or perfect contentment, for a scream in such space was a whisper. From which one departed perhaps with an infinitesimal portion of wisdom, and some understanding.
She thought, from something Dr Tobias had said, that the desert north of Timbuktu must have provided something like that. She thought of her uncle and M. de Fleury. You could complain, if you were talking to God, that it was hard to win to such peace and then find it ruined by anger and bitterness. God, who had probably been to Pavia, would simply retort that had they all collided anywhere else they would have not only quarrelled but killed one another. She lay discussing the matter with God.
For many hours; for a day and the better part of the next, the stillness remained with them; the majesty, the silence, the space; and the tamarisk sweetened the air. Then they were among the steep defiles, the dusty mountains, and drawing their weapons at the sight of a file of small horses racing towards them, or giving soft answers to the snarling men from a Bedouin encampment, or wakening by night, tent and clothes sodden with dew, to hear the jackal packs howl, and wonder if the guides had abandoned them.
She slept, and woke, and slept, and tossed in her fever of unrest over Jan and Lambert and poor Meester Pieter and Father John, whom she ought not to dislike. She thought her uncle sat and spoke, and then saw it was Dr Tobias sitting beside her, opening her shirt with practical fingers; clearing the parasites; scouring the bites with fresh lemon; combing her hair; feeding her with bread dipped in warm milk. And that the man he was chatting to was M. de Fleury, sitting on her other side tearing salt meat and producing a solemn and studied rendering of the conversation of the three monks who cleaned the latrines while reciting their daily offices which caused even Brother Lorenzo to choke.
She laughed too, and sometimes cried. No one seemed to mind.
The sea at Gaza was blue, the date palms green, and the magical pass Nicholas carried brought him the finest rooms in the khan and the assiduous