‘The Mamluks are a kind of Turk, yes?’ I asked. I probably massacred the name, as he made me repeat it and the title that accompanied it. That was part of my lessons, too. I also learned to say ‘Allahu Akbar’ or ‘God is Great’.
‘The Mamluks are Kipchaks and Circassians,’ Sabraham said, ‘taken as slaves — sometimes as war captures, but sometimes sold by their own parents. The Genoese bring them by the hundred, and the Egyptians buy them as soldiers. Sometimes they are called “Ghulami” or “slaves”.’
‘If they are slaves, why do they fight at all?’ I asked. ‘Why don’t the Egyptians do their own fighting?’
Sabraham nodded. ‘Warfare demands horsemen, and Egypt is rich, but it is terrible country for horses — too hot, and too many insects. The rainy season kills horses by rotting their hooves and the dry season kills their forage and robs them of water. But the troubles in raising horses don’t effect the army horses — it is that there are not enough horses to raise a boy to riding from infancy. You cannot create a horse-archer overnight.’
I nodded my agreement. I knew how much effort it took to remain capable with a lance, or a longsword.
‘So they buy boys who were raised from birth with horses. Most of them are Kipchaks like your John. Some few are Turks, but they are not trusted with senior commands.’ He shrugged. ‘A Kipchak boy can rise to rule. All of them have fine armour, beautiful horses, superb weapons, any woman they want, and they live well.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m told that Kipchak boys have been known to compete to go to the slavers.’ He paused. ‘Do you know who Baybars was?’
It was like being asked who Satan was. ‘Yes!’ I exclaimed.
‘He was a Kipchak. You understand?’
I supposed that I did. I certainly understood why Sabraham was so pleased by John the Turk.
At any rate, Sabraham watched the shoreline as we approached; it was as flat as the fens around Boston and green as spring, even in early autumn. We made a rendezvous of which I had not been informed — Sabraham was very close with information about our meetings. Off a village to the west of Alexandria, we transferred, by prior arrangement, from the Order’s galliot to a Cypriote merchant of less than a hundred tonnes, a stubby, round-hulled ship with a crew of six men and holds that stank of fish guts.
Brother Robert saluted us and slipped away to the north, and Theodore, the captain of our new vessel, a Cypriote Greek, welcomed us aboard. It was immediately clear to me that he was in the pay of the Order or perhaps the king, but Sabraham insisted that the six of us — his own servant or squire, whose name was Abdul, his two silent soldiers, whose Christian names I had never learned, as well as John the Turk, Sabraham himself and I — stay well separate from the crew of the fishing smack. By his order we all wore our hoods at all times, and we bespoke no man.
In the last light of day, beautifully timed, I must say, Theodore entered the outer harbour under a shivering lateen very close-hauled. The broad harbour had four rows of ships anchored well off shore, but for some reason no vessel was anchored closer than a bowshot from the beach.
Our captain called to Sabraham and they had a brief conference.
Sabraham returned to me and shook his head. ‘He says the Porto Vecchio is so silted up that he cannot approach the shore. Why did he not tell me this earlier?’
‘I thought you had been here before?’ I asked.
‘Always from the land, with caravans,’ Sabraham said. He frowned.
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.
Eventually, we reached the gate that Sabraham had described and we lay down in a caravanserai with pilgrims and merchants and slept. I slept — I was young.
In the morning, we rose with the others. We made no pretence of being Moslems, which, if you consider, is odd, as John might easily have passed as one. But no one paid us any attention, and after their morning prayers, we purchased horses. They were the fine-headed Arab breed, and impossibly cheap; that is, in Italy I had never been able to afford an Arab, and in Egypt, despite the difficulty in raising them, they cost little more than a palfrey cost in France.