Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
Wearing his elegant doublet and pourpoint as a banker, Nicholas ought to have regretted the news, which represented a prestigious success for the Vatachino. It had been a piece of fine opportunism, which had taken some application and guts to achieve. He didn’t wish Martin well, but he could respect him.
Wearing quilted cotton and leather and sealskin, with a yellow beard and a round sheepskin hat on his head, Nicholas didn’t give a horsehair button for Martin, but experienced a juvenile pleasure in finding that he had sailed off without Sersanders and Kathi. That was when he learned that they had gone, but only out to hunt birds for amusement. They were both staying at Skálholt, with the bailiff.
The bailiff, a hearty, flushed man with a paunch, appeared a little confused by Benecke’s presence and, once he had recovered, extraordinarily anxious to explain. He spoke a form of tongue Benecke recognised, and at length, the Danzig captain broke in. ‘Herra Oddur, I know the Governor has many cares, and the Bishop’s door must be open to wayfarers. Had my ship been in Hafnarfjördur yesterday, perhaps the
Unicorn
would not have departed so easily. But it was not, and I don’t blame the Governor or the Bishop. Which way did the young people go?’
‘You would like to follow them?’ the bailiff said. He looked from one visitor to the other, and then glanced to one side at Glímu-Sveinn.
‘They have gone to seek falcons,’ said Glímu-Sveinn. ‘Or so your men tell us. Perhaps we should wait.’
‘It is a fine sport,’ said the bailiff. ‘There are horses. We had some trouble bringing them in, but they are here now. You could eat, and ride out to your prisoners. You will take them to Bergen, for avoiding taxes and trading unlicensed?’
There was a pause. The black-bearded visage of Paúel was grave. The Icelander shuffled. Now, Nicholas thought, one of them will mention that the Hanse captain Paúel is my captive, and the bailiff will have to decide what to do. He waited, his face as solemn as Paúel’s.
Glímu-Sveinn didn’t speak. Paúel Benecke said, ‘When I catch him, Martin will answer in Bergen. The brother and sister are not worth the trouble; we shall take them back to their homes on our ships. As for Síra Nikolás here, I owe him much, which I intend to repay.’
‘I guessed as much,’ Nicholas said.
‘I am sure of it,’ said Paúel Benecke. ‘Meanwhile, Herra Oddur, we should certainly enjoy a hunt for these birds.’
‘I shall send a man with you,’ said the bailiff.
‘I shall go,’ said Glímu-Sveinn. ‘Where were the gyrfalcons last seen? There is no better fellow than Tryggvi to find them.’
‘My own man is as good,’ said the bailiff. ‘Tryggvi and his son had to go home. I have sent Sigfús Helgason with the young man and his sister.’
‘He is a thorough man,’ the Icelander said. He was a man of few words, Glímu-Sveinn.
‘What do you think?’ Benecke said when, leaving Skálholt behind, they set out over the snow on fresh horses. It was an hour before midday.
‘That you’re a lying bastard,’ Nicholas said, ‘and so is he.’ He switched to Icelandic. ‘Glímu-Sveinn? Is Sigfús Helgason good?’
‘He is good for some things,’ said the man. ‘His thirst is best of all.’
Nicholas glanced at him. Loading the ponies at Skálholt, the Icelander had said very little. They had been given all they could carry in the way of food and drink and provender. Fetching it, with the eager help of the boys of the house, Nicholas had noticed the barrels of ale in the barns, the kegs standing stuffed full of moss, the piles of sacks bulging with meal. Some Icelanders, they said, had never tasted a loaf in their lives. The Bishop was rich.
They loaded, too, as was customary, what they must have for survival as well as for sport: tents and staves, rope and fuel, and the inevitable bags with the horse-shoes. There were only nine ponies, and Glímu-Sveinn had elected to send the horse-handler home.
He had kept the dog. In the yard, the dog had behaved as if tied to its master, standing with its eyes on his face, or trotting briefly away, and returning. Nicholas had called out to one of the boys. ‘What do you think? Can dogs foretell a change in the weather?’
The boy had laughed. ‘They won’t go out if there is a storm
coming, that’s for sure! They know the signs. Our house ravens as well. And the buntings sense when to come in and lie snug. We had a covey this morning: see there.’
Thinking of it, Nicholas now studied the sky as they rode. It was clear. They traversed the same butter-gold dreamland as before, the Icelander riding in front, and the voluble Paúel at his side. The dog kept the horses in line, swerving and scampering about, now on top, now shoulder-deep in the snow. The way the bailiff had indicated was east. ‘Towards Hruni. That is where Sigfús was proposing to take them. The white gyrfalcons follow the ptarmigan.’
Glímu-Sveinn had grunted. When questioned he had shrugged his wide shoulders. Like most of his race, he was thick-set and long in the trunk, bred from generations of riders and rowers. Ten generations or more. After a while he had observed, ‘There are rivers to cross. But for falcons, it is worth taking trouble.’
Far to the east, the sun gleamed on the glaciers. To the north, across the snows of the vale, lay a range of gnarled and sheared cliffs streaked and speckled with white, and garnished with mountainous boulders. To the south-east, a white mountain smoked and far beyond it, almost too far to be sure, there rose smoke from another.
‘Hekla and Katla, I am informed. Are you frozen with horror?’ said Paúel. ‘Because if so, look there and blench. We have come to the river.’
It was an unpleasant river: broad, and plated with grey and white at the edges. The running currents were not at once apparent; in places the surface was turgid, or mixed with the chopped and scurrying pools of the frustrated flow. There was a ferry, Glímu-Sveinn said, on the other side, which would come to their horn. The horses would swim.
‘The horses will float,’ Paúel Benecke said. ‘Mine is lighter than water, save for his spine, which is halving me like an Icelander’s saw or a cheese wire. They tell me they drowned a bishop nearby not so long ago.’
‘He didn’t understand the local customs,’ said Nicholas. ‘There are several methods of dropping a hint.’
The ferry was labouring over. It looked highly unsafe. It came closer. Nicholas said, ‘For example … What did you say about saws?’
Benecke looked at him. Glímu-Sveinn had already dismounted, and was leaping down to the river-bank, shouting. The ferry bumped and splashed its way into the shoals. There was one middle-aged man at the oars. The rest of the old boat was empty. But all he could see from above was blotched and stained and clotted with blood.
Paúel Benecke swore. Below, the Icelanders exchanged hasty words. At length Glímu-Sveinn came back. His face above the long beard was veined, and his shallow eyes bulged. He said, ‘Is the Frenchman a fool?’
‘He’s a Fleming. Sometimes. What has happened?’ Nicholas said. His chest eased.
‘The farmers had to butcher a horse and take it over. They found it disembowelled on the bank. I will help the boatman sluice out the ferry, but we ought to cross over at once.’
‘But what killed it?’ said Paúel. ‘Demons? Trolls? Those black dwarves who live underground and drag men to their red smoking caverns? And why is Sersanders a fool?’
‘Bear,’ said Glímu-Sveinn. ‘Every year the white bears arrive on the ice-floes from Greenland. They are spent with walking and hunger; many die. But if they are skilled and hunt well, they gain strength. Sigfús knows, if this Sersanders does not.’
‘What has he done?’ Nicholas asked.
‘Nothing yet,’ said the Icelander Glímu-Sveinn. ‘He is three hours ahead, to the north-east, with Sigfús and the maiden. The ferryman took them over. He told them of the tracks of the bear, and the tracks that showed that the bear had a cub. White bear-cubs are worth more than falcons. In some kingdoms, white bear-cubs command as much as a ship full of grain. They have gone to follow and take it.’
‘Do they have weapons?’ said Nicholas.
‘Bows, and nets and spears, I am told. And Sigfús never parts from his axe. It is still not enough.’
‘For a cub?’ Benecke said.
‘The cub is bad enough,’ said Glímu-Sveinn. ‘But if they take the cub, the she-bear will come for them. The ferryman says there have been white foxes about for a week. The white fox follows the bear as a scavenger. The bailiff should have heard the reports.’
He broke off. He said, ‘If they give Sigfús ale, he will do anything. If Sigfús dies because of the Flemings, I will kill them.’
Nicholas looked at him. He thought of their night together before Skálholt. He remembered how the man had risen at night, with his dog, to check that all was well. He had thought his concern was for the weather.
But he had not known that bears were in these parts. The bailiff had known that.
‘The bailiff must think
we
are fools,’ Nicholas said, ‘never mind Sersanders and his sister. I will not tell you what I think of him. But we are three grown men, one of us native. I will not ask either of you to risk your life for these people, but if you will help me track where they have gone, I will look after it.’
It was surprising how much Icelandic Benecke could understand now. He said, ‘A thousand-pound bear? My dear Nikolás, you do not need us for that. Thanks to you, I have lost the use of one arm. I am going to rest it.’
The Icelander stared at him. The dog, gazing up at his master, was growling. In a moment, Nicholas felt, the Icelander would start growling as well. He felt unalloyed gratitude to them both, even if they didn’t understand one another at all. He said to Glímu-Sveinn, ‘He doesn’t mean it. He’s coming,’ and after a further glare, the Icelander turned and went down to the boat.
Paúel Benecke said, ‘Don’t you understand a categorical refusal?’
‘No. And you can’t even spell it,’ Nicholas said. He led the way down, pulling horses behind him.
Benecke came with his own. He said, ‘This is really exceedingly dangerous.’ He sounded petulant.
‘Blame Herra Oddur, or the Bishop,’ Nicholas said. ‘They wanted you killed. Anyway, you can’t afford to run away now. Men would laugh at you.’
‘No, they wouldn’t,’ Benecke said. ‘There would be nobody left to tell them what happened.’
‘Not even you,’ Nicholas said. ‘If you go back without me, John will kill you. It’s white bears or nothing.’
They argued all the way over the river, while the horses wheezed and snorted at angles behind them, their eyes rimmed with white, their broad heads shoved into the current. In the boat, the dog shivered and whined. Nicholas was thinking about Glímu-Sveinn, all the time he was talking. Until now, he hadn’t been sure how far to trust him. Paúel represented authority, and by bartering fish for the dogger, Glímu-Sveinn had committed a crime. He owed something to Nicholas, but need not put himself out to preserve Benecke’s life any more than had the bailiff.
But it was more complex than that, as the outburst just now had revealed.
If Sigfús dies because of the Flemings, I will kill them
. Glímu-Sveinn despised Sigfús. He had no relationship, good or bad, with Sersanders. He was giving form to a sense of unease that now appeared to have a reason behind it. Benecke played no part in the equation at all.
Nicholas understood that, because he too had been aware of unfocused foreboding. He had experienced this manifestation of it often enough in the past: from Julius, complaining of some trouble Nicholas had got Felix into; from Tasse in Geneva, when he had lured another boy into mischief in an obstinate rebuttal of misery; from his mother, when he had dragged off her baby half-sister into some wild children’s
game. They had all exploded like that, until he had learned to do things on his own.
He had not felt like this when his mother died. He had had no foreboding at all. It was only in recent years that he had found himself beset by strange fears and premonitions; punishment for crossing some mystical threshold. He had felt the sense of danger again, ever since setting foot on the banks of Markarfljót. Now, like Glímu-Sveinn, he supposed that he had discovered the cause.
He put his gloved hand to his throat, and saw Benecke watching him, but in fact he felt better. Sersanders was sturdy and well trained and armed, and the guide was not surely a cipher. As for Kathi, she was probably match for any three bears. Despite himself, the excitement rose in his blood. Kathi had not wanted to miss this experience, and neither did he. It was the threat of the intangible which had shaken him. But of course he could not predict. He had not been able to predict the death of his mother.
Now there were practical things to be done, and they did them. The ferryman would not come with them, but helped them catch the ponies as they landed downriver and took the three men into his cabin for soup. It was wise, although they wanted to hurry. And the ponies had to be reloaded with the necessary gear ready to hand. Nicholas uncased two crossbows and, keeping one, gave the other with its forked bolts to Benecke. The Icelander already carried a spear and a knife and an axe: it would do.
When they left, the dog was put on a lead. It ran back and forth barking and no one attempted to silence it. At intervals, Glímu-Sveinn set his lips to his horn. The wind, which had risen a little, was blowing against them, but Sersanders might hear. There were no prints, or none yet, where they were riding, but Glímu-Sveinn seemed to know where to go. Between the bogs and the streams and the lava, there was probably not so much choice.
After they had been riding for some little while, they were surprised by a brief fall of snow; a shower so fine that it sparkled like dust in the sunshine. When it ceased, the distant landscape vanished, white as a veil, and then returned bit by bit, in coins of picturesque detail. In places, the sky was pewter and purple, flat as a plate, with the cones and glaciers dazzling below it. The wind strengthened. Presently Glímu-Sveinn stopped.
‘What?’ said Benecke.
‘They have doubled back to the north. They have gone to look for a ferry to recross the Hvita.’
‘Oh?’ said Benecke. ‘Where are their prints?’