Theodore made a signal and the ship turned south, deeper into the harbour. He appeared to mistake his anchorage, and passed the pilot boat. As we ran down wind, with the Arabic anger of the pilot boat in our ears, Sabraham gathered us in the stern. ‘The water under the keel will be less than two men deep,’ he said. ‘Swim up the beach and strip your clothes. We will be met.’
I touched the dagger at my belt. ‘If we are not met?’ I asked.
He frowned. ‘We improvise,’ he said.
He himself wore only a cheap wool gown over his braes, with a heavy basilard in his rope belt. I emulated him.
But the pilot boat had changed tack, and her rig was lighter and faster than ours.
Master Sabraham watched her in the dying light. ‘Too bad,’ he said. ‘We will have a long swim.’
Just then, the tubby fishing boat’s hull skidded on the sea’s bottom. We were a long way from shore; the city seemed close enough, with the lights of the taller buildings reflected in the still water of the Porto Vecchio, but those waters were still several hundred cloth yards wide.
Captain Theodore shouted commands in Greek and the helm was put up. Sabraham swore.
‘Look, we improvise,’ he said.
I was looking over the side. As we turned, I could see the bottom as clear in the failing light as I can see the floor of this room. It was right under our keel. Even as I looked, we touched, and Sabraham and I were thrown flat on the deck.
‘Shit,’ Sabraham said. Without any further imprecations, he rolled over the side into the water as the pilot boat came alongside with a swarm of Arabic imprecations.
The side at the waist was only three feet above the water, and the water was as warm as blood. But it stank of human excrement and dead fish. My hand brushed a dead cat floating like a bloated, matted fur hat, stinking of decay and I was all but paralysed with a kind of disgusted panic.
Fortunately, the water was shallow. It was so shallow that we were touching bottom before we were at a safe distance from our smack. Twice I had to force my face under the foul water to avoid detection, and by the time I was halfway to shore, I was only waist deep.
Despite that, I made it ashore. We all did. John spat and spat – I think that Kipchaks are very clean people – and two Alexandrines appeared out of the darkness. There was a muttered exchange of passwords and they provided us with gowns of linen and cotton.
Sabraham had spent the days of the passage briefing us, and I knew my role. It fitted my inclination and my training, so John and I left Sabraham almost immediately and walked along the beach front for more than an English mile, gazing with fascination at the sea wall above us. It was magnificent, as fine as the wall of Constantinople, tall, built of layers of pale stone that glowed like fine chamois in the dark and the sally gates we passed had marble lintels with Arabic inscriptions that neither John nor I could read.
The night was full of noise and foreign, intoxicating smells: smells of alien cookery, of plants, and spices, and garbage. The thin sounds of music, elfin, silvery and magical in the moonlight, slipped over the sea wall. Women laughed. Men laughed, too.
Over the walls towered the stele that marked the tomb of Alexander, and as we made our way west and south around the walls, we saw the twin pillars that Sabraham had pointed out from the sea – the columns of Pompey. We crossed the river at the great stone bridge, which was unguarded, to my astonishment, and made our way to the Cairo Gate, where Sabraham had ordered us.
It took us the better part of the night to walk around the city, and by the time we reached our first destination, I was drunk on the foreignness and the wonder of Alexandria. It was gargantuan – thrice the size of Florence, or so it seemed in the darkness.