In fact, the last two weeks we were at Rhodes the Turkish emirs of the coast hastened to send submissions and surrenders to the King of Cyprus and even to the Order. Fra Ricardo was heard to joke that the Order should gather a hundred ships every autumn because we had them scared. The naval victory in the north had paralysed the two largest Turkish emirs, and now the smaller fish were wriggling.
I went back to my friends and embraced them, one by one.
‘Leave some Turks for us,’ Fiore said.
I carried my harness down to the seaport in a state of inner confusion. I had not seen Emile. I was not taking my friends.
At the pier, Sabraham looked at the wicker hamper containing my harness and smiled, his teeth bright in the torch lit dark. ‘You won’t need that,’ he said. ‘I’ll see that it gets loaded onto the correct ship with your horse and the rest of your equipment.’ He nodded at Marc-Antonio. ‘Better yet, send your squire with your war gear. All you need is a dagger.’
We sailed in one of the Order’s own ships, a galliot or light galley commanded by a Brother Sergeant. She was a fine ship, and we had beautiful weather. We were two days at sea while Sabraham explained to me just how we would choose the beaches where we would land. I had John and no one else – my friends would sail with the main fleet.
We had no warhorses, no armour, no surcoats.
‘We will swim ashore,’ Sabraham said.
In private, he asked me if I trusted John.
‘No,’ I answered.
Sabraham smiled. ‘Then you can take him. Don’t trust him – never let him be more than an arm’s length away. You can swim?’ he asked again.
We swam by the ship while she rowed until Sabraham was satisfied and he taught me a few words of Arabic.
Six days at sea. We sighted Cyprus. My geography is stronger now than it was then, but I could see through a brick wall in time. I watched the coast of Cyprus growing larger for two days and then slipping astern as we weathered Cape Salamis.
My navigation was non-existent then, although Sabraham, who seemed to teach rather than talk, was showing me the rudiments of open water navigation, and I had begun to stand all of Brother Robert’s watches with him. Brother Robert had been a small English merchant until his wife died on pilgrimage. He was a fine seaman and my first real teacher about the sea – I suppose that Lord Contarini should have pride of place here, but Brother Robert was patient. He taught me well enough that a day after Cyprus went under the rim of the world, I turned to Sabraham at the edge of dark.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked. It had taken me two days to ask.
He looked forward to where Brother Robert was teaching John better Italian with the aid of a book of Psalms.
Then he frowned. ‘Alexandria,’ he said.
Alexandria. Founded by the conqueror. Some men said it was the greatest city in the world and Fra Peter said it had forty gates.
I had guessed the answer, and yet my breath caught in my throat.
Alexandria.
Alexandria is said to be the largest city in the world. Now, I have been to Baghdad and Constantinople, and Barcelona and London and Paris and Prague and a few other cities. Baghdad, they say, was much larger before the Mongols sacked it. Constantinople is perhaps the largest of all these cities, but it is almost empty – fifty thousand people inside walls that have held twenty times as many. Rome is a ruin of a ruin.
But Alexandria is mighty. It stretches all along the shore of the sea on a set of sand spits and islands, much like Venice, or I think it was when first laid down. Alexandria has a great double wall like Constantinople’s, pierced with more than forty drum-shaped gated towers, and each pair of towers at a gate was like a small fortress with a garrison, able to be locked away from the city and held. The city has two great harbours, which some men call the old and the new but we called Porto Vecchio and Porto Pharos, after the ancient lighthouse. Porto Pharos was defended by two superb castles, both so new that you could smell the mortar from a mile away – the Casteleto, the little castle, was on the eastern arm of the spit that defended the great harbour, and the Pharos Castle, which has an Egyptian name I never learned, guards the western spit and overawes the city which had more than a hundred mosques as well as twenty Christian churches for the various schismatics there – Nestorians and Gnostics and Greeks. The Porto Vecchio was full of ships, including Genoese and Cypriote ships while the Pharos harbour held privileged visitors and the Sultan’s navy.