Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
It happened twice more, the second time as they were fording a wide, shallow river. A short while before that, two of the ponies had fallen and been unable to rise, and of the nine they still had, none had strength for more than a short spell of riding, and all were weak-footed and worn. All of them baulked at the water and had to be beaten down the steep rocky bank to commit themselves to the stream. M. de Fleury said, ‘They have to be whipped, for their lives and ours. We have an hour to do it in, Kathi. Glímu-Sveinn says we are near.’ Then she helped him.
The snow came just as they entered the water. The two banks disappeared, and all that could be seen was the dark water racing, with the white snowflakes dancing above it. She had early been taught not to look at fast water, but there was nothing else to fix her eyes upon here, and the bottom was full of ruts and loose stones, threatening to turn her ankle as she felt her way over. The current coursed up to her knees and her thighs: she was already soaked to the waist, if not numbed. Glacial water would have been a really bad joke; the Bank said: ‘God be praised,
not
a jökulár river.’ She had expected the Hanse to respond, and he hadn’t. Now she called, ‘Where is Paúel?’
They were almost in midstream; Glímu-Sveinn, wading ahead, had his arms through the reins of two ponies and was roaring at three more who were plunging and scrabbling at his side. She had her own; behind, the Banco di Niccolò was dragging two more. Of Benecke, his horse and his bell there was no sign.
Glímu-Sveinn turned round, with difficulty. He bellowed, ‘Shout! He is probably over the river.’
‘I didn’t see him,’ said M. de Fleury.
‘Then leave him,’ said the Icelander. ‘You think this is bad? Wait until there is snow and no light.’
‘All right. Take the
junfrú
ahead and I’ll follow.’
‘We need you,’ said Kathi.
‘Not now. Hlídarendi is not far away. Even blind, Glímu-Sveinn can make his way from the river, he tells me. Anyway, I’ll be back before you get all the ponies to land. Take my two; let them swim. And if you find Benecke on the other side, shout.’
‘No!’ said Kathi sharply. Ahead, she could hear the Icelander cursing. Suddenly, there were two horses threshing about at her side and she could see nothing but a receding back, the snow closing about it. The Banco di Niccolò, ridiculously going back to trace and rescue the Hanse because, despite everything, he rather liked him.
Ahead, Glímu-Sveinn had discovered a shoal and was standing in it, the water up to his ankles. Five of the ponies were scrambling up, shaking, beside him. As she prepared to address him, she observed the water actually recede from his island, so that the Icelander was standing dry-shod, looking astonished. He looked astonished for a brief moment more; then with a roar he dived fully clad into the water. The horses jostled and scattered into the shallows.
Where they had been, with a rumbling crash a jet of steam rose in the air, almost as white as the snow-clouds. She was still looking at it when Glímu-Sveinn seized her ankles and, bringing her down under the water, pushed her with him, half under, half out of the river back to the bank they had left. There, taking her full weight in his arms, he wrestled her to the top of the slope where, choking and retching, she turned to look back.
Thick as the trunk of a tree, the cascade stood in the heart of the river. The steam, transformed into blistering rain, fell scalding back to the cold rushing water. She heard the screams of the ponies and the hissing splash as they plunged off downriver. Breathing harshly, Glímu-Sveinn was half sitting beside her. She looked up at him, gasping, and saw him staring over her head.
A single pony stood further along the same bank, its reins dangling, its drooping head turned from the snow. Below it, someone seemed to be sleeping. She saw it was M. de Fleury, his soaking coat already patched with red slush. She struggled to her feet and went over. He was not sleeping or dead, but had been knocked momentarily unconscious. As she watched, he started to stir. His knuckles were reddened.
A man shouted, in German. ‘Are we not lucky, dear maiden? Another moment, and we all might have boiled. As it is, you have come back to succour us.’
Paúel Benecke, who hadn’t crossed over. Paúel Benecke, seated not far away on the snow, his eyes bright, his bandages red with fresh blood.
She plodded up to him, dripping. ‘Do you think so? What happened?’ she said.
He raised his voice. ‘To poor M. de Fleury? It seems that my pony thought he must be a water-horse, and gave him a kicking. I expect he will live.’
She said, ‘The pony kicked you as well?’
‘We all became excited,’ he said. He had to shout over the roar of the water. He was yellow above the black beard, and for some reason, she perceived with satisfaction, he seemed unwilling to walk. She thought she knew what had happened. She also knew which patient most deserved her attention. She turned, ignoring Benecke’s plaintive mock protest, and expecting to see Glímu-Sveinn already helping M. de Fleury to sit.
Instead it was the reverse. The Icelander remained crouched where she had left him; motionless, his fixed gaze on the ground. And it was the injured man who was holding him, murmuring.
She could not hear what he said. The ground drummed under her feet; the air shook with the roar of the river, and the boom and hiss of the rocketing spout. Kathi stumbled down and knelt by the farmer. He looked the way a man looks when his heart has failed. She cried, ‘He carried me over.’
‘You couldn’t have stopped him,’ M. de Fleury said. His face was pale, and there was blood in his hair, but his voice was quite clear. ‘Glímu-Sveinn, what do you feel? Does it hurt?’
The beard lifted. It might have been a nod. His eyes turned up, and he made a sudden, lumbering movement that threatened to tear him out of their grasp, but M. de Fleury held firm, and together they laid him back on the ground. Kathi said, ‘Let me look.’
He was unconscious. She rested her hand at his neck and his wrist as he lay. She said, ‘His heart is beating. A flutter.’ She had seen enough doctors at work. She did what she had seen others do, and M. de Fleury sat back in silence and let her. She wondered, as she worked, whether they had done this for the poor throttled baby, Margriet’s baby. She was reminded, not for the first time, of the bear-cub under the snow and banished the thought, as before, to the recess where it properly ranked. M. de Fleury rose and limped across to the Danziger. Because of the noise, she could not hear what he
said. In a while he came back and dropped down with caution beside her, touching the cheek of the fallen man, and then his pulse. The beat was stronger.
He said, against the noise, ‘What do you think?’ There was no need to say more. They had a stricken man on their hands, perhaps a dying one.
She had begun to think, as he had. They had both hardened their voices, to carry. She said, ‘There’s one horse. You take it. I shall stay with him.’
‘No, you won’t,’ said M. de Fleury. ‘There is a cavern back there, in a boulder. I’m packing the bastard into that, with some comforts he doesn’t deserve. Then you and I get on our way.’
She scowled at him. ‘And Paúel Benecke? What happens to him?’
He stared at her in his turn. ‘Who in hell do you think I am talking about? Benecke, the bastard that just tried to kill me. He can’t walk – I can’t think why. He can wait in the cave till he’s rescued. The new geysir makes a fine landmark, and if another breaks out underneath him, they can boil him and serve him with garnishing. You’re riding the horse, and I’m going to strap this fellow on it behind you. All I wanted to know was if he was dying.’
‘And then you would have taken Benecke in his place?’
‘Are you joking?’ said M. de Fleury.
The snow had stopped. Duty sent her to visit Herra Paúel Benecke in his cave before she departed. To her prejudiced eye, he appeared to have many more comforts than he deserved, including a mattress and a garment of M. de Fleury’s own, but not the hide coat. He wore, in addition, an insolent grin.
Kathi said, ‘Whatever happened to you, you deserved it.’
‘It was worth trying,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t persuade him to put the old man in here, and take me?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘But you won’t forget to send someone back?’
‘If there is anyone left to send,’ Kathi said.
She said it jokingly. Furious though she was, she left without destroying his hopes with the truth. They had no guide from now on, only a senseless man strapped to her saddle. Now they had to rely on themselves to follow that primitive scratched map on the jacket; to distinguish the mountains of Thríhyrningur and Thórólfsfell and look out for the canyon of Bleiksárgljúfur; to make the appalling journey alone in failing light that would take them at least to Hlídarendi. Nor did she tell him the worst news of all. Robin of Berecrofts, said the pendulum, was no longer at the mouth of the delta.
It meant, at best, that the ships were standing off out of danger, and had taken him with them. It meant, at worst, that when they reached the coast, there would be nothing there.
They crossed the river lower down where, her companion said, the water promised to be pleasantly warm without skinning them. He guided the pony while she walked with the Icelander’s stave; and she helped haul the beast up the opposite bank. She was not sure when she had ever been so tired in her life, but there was no point in saying so.
There was no sign of the ponies. Steam drifted down from the spout, and the gulley carried its roar: they still had to speak with raised voices. Apart from one joke, neither mentioned the cascade again. If it could happen once, it could happen again under their feet. When they had at length reached the height of the bank, she did look across to the three peaks of Hekla. The smoke was still brown. It seemed to her that there was a glow at the base, but she might have been mistaken. Then they had to climb.
She knew then how tired he was, too. Glímu-Sveinn had brought them over the terrain, but it was the remorseless concentration of the diviner which had guided them through the fogs of blown snow, and kept them moving always surely south. She had already realised that, without Robin to act as his magnet, M. de Fleury would in future be powerless. But meantime the landmarks were there to be read, and they must do what they could.
She had never before embarked upon a sustained and dangerous trial in partnership with one person. Illness had taught her endurance, and her travels in Sinai had tested that same endurance in different ways. In the four years of her intermittent acquaintance with Nicholas de Fleury, she had observed and enjoyed his preferred methods of relieving boredom, or reassuring the insecure, or exposing to ridicule any obstacle unfortunate enough to stand in his way. It had not occurred to her that he would not work with a partner as he worked with a group, some of whom he wished to keep at a distance. She had competed with him in sport several times, and at games and in song. She had touched, mostly by accident, upon moments of both violence and tragedy in his life, including the death and presumed death of two women, and the recovery of his son. As a result (she had been told), he thought of her as a young brother.
In fact, he did not treat her as either young, or a brother. He talked as to a partner, and entirely about what they were doing. She saw that he had made a practical compound of their assets: her lightness and speed; his strength, so long as it lasted, and his experience from his
months in the Tyrol and from the mountains of Asia and Italy. She let herself fall into his way of discussion, light, economical, and to the point, which provided its own stimulation without any painstaking banter. Problems arose, and were solved.
She was able to ride very little. Burdened with the unconscious man, the pony had to be coaxed down the icy sides of a gorge, and up through the opposite ledges. It could step from rock to rock with precision, but would not jump over a chasm. At times, she protected the Icelander with her arms as the pony scrambled about, and wondered if he would not have been better off in the dark and peace of the cavern. But Paúel Benecke was not a man to waste time over a farmer and, given the chance, would see to his own safety first. She had little compunction over Paúel who, if he were found, could wield all the authority of the Hanse. And if Hekla burned, he would be as safe as they were.
They lost a great deal of time circumventing a bottomless creek which, alone, either of them could have bridged or leaped over. There were two streams to cross, neither as wide as a river, but fiercer. Early on, they had achieved a physical congruity not unlike, she thought, that of a small team of acrobats, from which the horse was not excluded. Their limbs, their shoulders, their combined motive power were all part of the machine they had assembled to take them alive through this journey.
Agile and slight as a marmoset, she explored for him, using him as a ladder, climbing over his shoulders to test some high crumbling spur. In his turn, when the leap was too great or the water too violent, he carried her in whatever unorthodox way allowed him to manage the pony. Their hands in their soaked gloves gripped and grasped one another and they smiled, even though it was painful to breathe. She was too tired to remember what she was to call him, and so called him nothing at all. She kept watching what his beard revealed of his face, but his eyes remained clear and intent, although their setting was chipped out of lava. He was extraordinarily even-tempered. As darkness began to come on, and over and over again they were baulked by some hazard, he simply evolved different plans, and she abetted him.
Soon it was apparent that they were not going to reach Hlídarendi. Also, as the snow around them grew dim, she saw something else. Beneath the seething smoke-clouds of Hekla, a smouldering glow had appeared in the vacant dark sky filled with silence. Very soon after that, like a monster disturbed, the ground beneath their feet grumbled and stirred, and was quiet. With one accord, then, they stopped.
He said, ‘So the secondary plan. We have ten minutes of light. We
gamble on reaching Hlídarendi, or we use the time to dig in where we can.’