Perhaps the man was concerned for his niece; perhaps not. He wondered if Adorne ever thought of the strain imposed on a very young girl, set to travel with men, and pretending to be one of their kind. It could be done: you saw that, too, on campaign. Buckets, cloths, unremitting struggle and vigilance on top of the genderless joys of rough travel: plucking Pharaoh’s lice, big as almonds, from her clothes; vermin out of her hair. Gelis, too. He despised Gelis, but never doubted her courage.
Then he looked at Adorne, and thought that yes, he knew what he had asked of Katelijne, or she had begged him to allow. Below the civilised charm was the magistrate, the champion jouster of many hard fights. The man of conscience, but also the man of long sight and great ambition, despite all his protestations to Nicholas. Anselm Adorne, Baron Cortachy, was an antagonist whose steel was still only half felt.
Adorne said, ‘I cannot be pleased, after what I know of Nicholas, and the impressionability of my niece. But I have to say that, if you will be there, I should be grateful if you would help us escort Kathi as far as Gaza.’
Gold, thought Tobie, had a lot to answer for.
He found himself thinking again of camp life, and his time as an army physician. Between battles, you could discuss what you were doing – even with someone like Captain Astorre who might not understand, but who knew the cases, and recognised the importance of handling them properly.
The present situation felt much the same, but Tobie was alone. That is, he had John’s impersonal, professional help, but John wasn’t entangled in the miseries of his patron’s idyllic third marriage, or the problem of the ephemeral child. And without revealing the truth about Henry, it was hard to explain.
He carried to John, as a substitute, a business proposition. A caravan was gathering which could convey Adorne’s party and themselves as far as Gaza. From there, they could as well take ship west to Alexandria as suffer the tedious journey by land. They would be in time for the spice market, and the galleys sailing for home.
They were sitting, for privacy, in the empty Refectory. John said, ‘You’re getting better. It sounded quite plausible. As I see it, he’s been divining again for the gold, and he thinks it’s in Gaza?’
Driven to it, Tobie invented. ‘He didn’t intend to do anything. But he got a response somehow from Gaza, and once he gets there, there might be another sign. If the gold is there to pick up, he’ll do it.’
John said, ‘We agreed to go back.’
‘We are going back,’ Tobie said. ‘Do you want to carve your name?’
John looked up. The four arches, the end wall, every available space was covered with signatures. Anselmus Adournes and Jo. Adournes, 1470 had been engraved for posterity on the second archway nearest the door, Lambert Vander Walle had found a space on the third, and Pieter Reyphin van Vlaendren had spread himself along the outside frame of the window. Adorne, of course, was now a Knight of St Catherine, and able to add wheels and swords to his collection of badges. John doubted if Nicholas was. He said, ‘Beside all that? Do you fancy it? I’ve left my mark, if anyone cares, on the water-wheel.’
‘I’ve left mine on the mountain,’ said Tobie. ‘Two long skidmarks in the shape of a cross.’
He fell silent. Nicholas de Fleury had said much the same, lightly. I’ve left my soles on Mount Sinai.
It was brutally true: he had walked down the mountain in blood. He had climbed it only hours after the racking seven-day race to steal a march on Adorne, and little more than a week after the cisterns in Cairo. And he had climbed it to meet the person whom – surely – he had once loved, and who had very possibly ordained both the suffering and the attempt on his life.
That night, neither Tobie nor John had tried to follow him up Mount Sinai. Whatever was going to happen will already have happened, the Patriarch of Antioch had said; and they had left him in prayer. Waiting, John had fallen asleep and then Tobie himself. It had been the Patriarch of Antioch who had risen from his knees when, just before Terce, Gelis van Borselen had walked down from the mountain and come to show him that she was back, and had neither caused harm, nor taken any.
She would have expected to hear, of course, that Nicholas had already returned. Perhaps she had already been told at the door that this was not the case. By the time that, disregarding all propriety, she flung open the door of their chamber, rousing John and Tobie from sleep, Ludovico da Bologna was already outside the monastery, harrying servants and saddling camels and a mule.
Standing cloaked and wild-faced in the doorway, the rosy buildings, the sunlit mountains blazing behind her, her man’s hair stuck to her brow, her man’s dress dishevelled and stained, Gelis van Borselen showed her race, and none of her femininity. She said, ‘Where is he?’
Tobie sat up, and John stirred. The mattress beside them was empty. Tobie said, ‘He went to meet you. He hasn’t come back. What has happened?’
She said, ‘Do you care?’ and walked out. He scrambled after, half dressed, flinging on clothes. He caught her arm and she turned. She said, ‘We met on the mountain, and he came down before me. He hasn’t arrived. Go back to sleep: Father Ludovico will find him.’
Then, cursing, Tobie had pulled on the rest of his clothes and his boots, and with John had raced outside, where the Patriarch was already moving off. Gelis had made no effort to come. Looking back, Tobie saw she was standing outside the door, deep in shade, and surrounded, as in an ikon, by the archaic roundels and crosses cut in the wall against which her head rested. As he watched, she sank to the ground, her eyes on him.
She was still there when they came back with the litter. They had set off at speed. When the path at last became too precipitous, it was the Patriarch who had flung himself from his mount and, lifting his skirts, sprang aloft with great strides of his powerful legs, matted with hair thick as fir needles on the swell of his calves and his thighs. It was Ludovico da Bologna, too, who reached the three chapels first and sent the roar down the mountain that brought the servants hurrying up.
Sickened, Tobie and John had stumbled after, and caught the stretcher as it came down with Nicholas lying in it, unconscious. He had left the summit knowing, surely, that he could never walk down, and had found his way aside so that Gelis would pass. His feet were raw flesh, and his body less firm than the manna which hardens at night, and liquefies into dew in the sunshine.
A speck against the monastery door, Gelis rose to her feet as their cavalcade picked its way down from the slopes. The Patriarch gave a halloo to signify rescue, success. She waited until they arrived, and the servants had unshackled the litter and lowered it. Then she walked over. Tobie said, ‘He will be all right.’
For a moment, as the pallet lay on the ground, Gelis van Borselen knelt, one hand on its edge, and studied her husband. The page’s hair, tumbling over her cheekbones, revealed only the straight nose, the sweep of brown lashes, the mouth pulled small, with an effort that could be felt. Her fingers were white, but she did not uncramp them, or touch him.
She said something, very low. Then, as if too tired to move, she released her grip and, rising slowly, turned back and walked into the monastery.
Tobie stared after her. John said, ‘Well, you’re the doctor. You don’t expect wives to soil their hands on sick husbands, do you? What did she say? It wasn’t thank you for bringing him back, by any chance?’
‘I don’t know,’ Tobie had said. But he did.
Wearily, sardonically, inexplicably, she had said, Walk over with me.
John had not climbed the mountain again. Tobie had. So had Adorne, with some pains, and for no reason but to offer homage to God at the portals of Heaven. About his faith, at least, Anselm Adorne was not cynical. Unlike Nicholas, who, whatever penalty he had paid, had used the place as a circus. Exasperated, Tobie had caught himself saying as much. He said, ‘You don’t have much reverence, do you?’
That had been after the descent from St Marina, when Nicholas had begun to revive and Gelis, impervious, had left. ‘How do you know what
happened?’ Nicholas had said. ‘Intercessory prayers; a solemn renewal of the nuptial pledge. The oil of pardon, the oil of prayer. For every woman who makes herself a man shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. We believe, we confess, we give glory.’
‘Don’t,’ said Tobie.
‘Eve,’ continued Nicholas, ‘should display a body like unto his, but of marvellous diversity. I do endorse that. By sexual intercourse the world had its beginning, and by continence, it will receive its end. There is something to be said for that, too.’
Tobie said, ‘I’m not asking what happened. I told you.’
‘I don’t mind,’ Nicholas said. ‘Everybody comes down with something. Seven years of indulgences and seven quarantines, several times over. I get a bonus for St Marina.’
It came from fever and weakness, but it was time it was stopped. Tobie said, ‘You make it sound paltry. If there is anything paltry on that mountain-top, Nicholas, by God you and she took it with you.’
‘I expect we did,’ Nicholas had said. ‘And we brought it down again with us in sackfuls. And a couple of old tablets we found. Honour thy father and mother. They were cracked.’
‘They are not cracked for Jan Adorne,’ had said Tobie in sudden anger. ‘He has not always enjoyed this journey, or his father’s tongue, but he has taken care for him. He slept in a leaking skiff one whole night on the Nile, to give his father some rest. Does he write like a man full of spleen? Tant que je vivrai –’
‘Tant que je vive,’ Nicholas had contradicted. He had moved restlessly, the bitterness gone.
It had puzzled Tobie. ‘Have you read it? Jan’s tribute in his book to his father? “Ipse ego dum vivam et post dura fata sepultus, Serviet officio spiritus ipse tuo.” Tant que je vivrai, I’d have said, was the better –’
He broke off the argument, for Nicholas had simply continued to speak. Although the first words were the same, it was not a translation of Jan Adorne’s work and it was not, of a certainty, the sentiments of a son to a father:
‘Tant que je vive, mon cueur ne changera … Mon chois est fait, aultre ne se fera …’
Nicholas stopped.
‘Where did that come from?’ said Tobie. ‘That isn’t Jan’s.’
‘No. I don’t know,’ had said Nicholas. ‘It came into my head. Setting aside our fathers and uncles, could we get on with my feet?’
It had been the end of that exchange. Whatever had transpired on the mountain, Tobie was told no more of it then. Nor did he ever find out, in that place hallowed of God, whether Adorne’s reading was true and Nicholas had neither sought spiritual healing nor been able to find it. But whether or not they had left their mark on the mountain, it seemed to Tobie that none of them was likely to leave unmarked himself.
Chapter 44
KATELIJNE SERSANDERS never afterwards recalled much of her journey to Gaza, which occupied more than a week of her life. She had come to Sinai.
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 attention of the Emir and all his Mamelukes. He accepted it all as quite natural. Just at that time, he was like a man drunk on kif. For the sake of the girl, he made some effort to ensure that Adorne and his party of pilgrims were well housed and treated, although it was difficult. For two days, Tobie commuted between the two sets of lodgings. It was the second week in September, and Nicholas knew how to find what he wanted. Everything else would have to wait.
For a seigneur such as Nicholas de Fleury, advice in Gaza was there for the asking. Fishing vessels of many kinds plied between ports. Galleys and roundships abounded elsewhere, and passages could be bought for any destination my lord had in mind. There were maps, yes, of course. If my lord possessed a little silver, some coins, there were drawings to be found of all the islands, the coast, the land of the Grand Turks himself. My lord had only to ask.
The local agent, a Syrian, called the first morning, bringing packets from Damascus, and from Achille in Alexandria. All of them contained coded letters from Gregorio and Julius, duplicated to every factor on the African coast.
Nicholas handed them to John and to Tobie to read, gave the agent a number of fairly obvious instructions, and returned to what he was doing. John, as the Alexandria manager, read them through, made some notes, and then locked himself in a storeroom with Tobie. Th
e place smelled of carobs. Tobie sneezed. John said, ‘You’ve seen all the dispatches. I’m going to Alexandria. Now. If Nicholas doesn’t follow, I’ll have to leave there and go back to Venice.’
Tobie said, ‘You should probably go.’
He looked profoundly uneasy. Amidst his own annoyance, John felt sympathy for him. He had never envied the other man the half-intimacy which had always existed between the doctor and Nicholas. He had seen how one could find oneself drawn into the complexities that lay beneath the composure. He said, ‘I’ve heard the fairytale of the gold. Can’t you tell me anything?’
Tobie said, ‘Not much. Nicholas has something he has to do on one of the islands. After that, he’ll probably come.’ He scratched his nose and turned over a paper. ‘These results are all right. The Bank isn’t in trouble.’
‘It isn’t. But Nicholas specifically planned a short absence. He’ll have been away for four months. And we were cut off in the Tyrol last winter.’
‘Well,’ said Tobie. ‘He had the opportunity to exploit the Tyrol. Then Adorne threatened to usurp us in Cairo. And there was the chance of the gold.’
John said, ‘I’m not disputing the reasons. Meeting his wife at Sinai was another. But look at all this. Scotland ought to have proper attention: that estate is built, and needs to be run. If he’d installed me as he promised, they’d have engineers by now, trained in simple irrigation and drainage at least. What’s that expensive goldsmith up to? And how are they getting on in the Tyrol, with Moriz stuck in Venice because Nicholas isn’t there? And what’s worse, if they are managing to dig silver, what are they spending it on? If the Tyrol blows up in the Duke of Burgundy’s face because of Nicholas, what will happen to Diniz in Bruges?’ He paused and said, ‘That bloody parrot,’ in a voice he realised was fretful.
Tobie looked at him. He said, ‘He would only come back here as soon as he could. Best get it over with.’