Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
He didn’t have to expound. If an eruption took place, they would be as well or badly off here as at Hlídarendi. In any case, the farmhouse at Hlídarendi, though providing comfort, would be deserted. By now, everyone within reach of both mountains would have left. Robin had gone, and at least the ships had received some sort of warning, if not the one they had striven to bring them. Now they had no one to think of but themselves.
She said, ‘The pony is failing.’
He said, ‘Then we look for some shelter.’ On his own, he would have taken the gamble, she knew. So would she. But to lose was to find themselves caught in the cold and the dark with a sick man who could not survive it.
They found a place just in time: a flaw in the lava, half tunnel, half cavern, and dry beyond the drift of blown snow. As they were lifting the Icelander down from the pony, the animal dropped. She knelt beside it a moment, then unstrapped and brought over the saddle to where the sick man was lying. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing. When she came back with the saddle-turf, her partner had made the leather into a pillow,’ and laid his jacket over the man. She said, ‘We can burn the turf now.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Poor little pony. Well, now he has a life after death. He will make a warm bed, for a while. He will give blood to mix with our whey; we need the warmth and the nourishment. And if the lava entombs us, we can skin him and eat him before we start on each other.’
He had begun to move Glímu-Sveinn to lie in the curve of the horse’s round belly; she helped him. He said, ‘I’ll unpack and get stones. We’ll light the fire and block up the entrance, once the light goes.’
His coat had been stained with Paúel Benecke’s blood. His rough tunic beneath was also stained. She said, as they worked, ‘What did Benecke do?’
‘He thought I’d come back for him alone. He had a few stones, a bit bigger than this. It was to look like a drowning.’
‘He liked you,’ she said.
‘But he didn’t believe that I’d free him. He’s proud of his reputation.’
‘Vanitas,’
Kathi said. ‘So what did you do?’
‘I had a few stones as well. Now he is alone, and we are not, and that is all the difference, really, between us.’
His voice receded. He had walked to the mouth of the cavern, now
a deep purple-blue against the black of the walls. She sat where she was, on a bit of turf, because her legs didn’t want to walk any longer. She saw him in silhouette, leaning against the dark rock. She said, ‘Is he all right?’
His head turned, a change in the outline. ‘Who?’
‘Jordan,’ she said.
‘Oh. Yes,’ he said. ‘And Gelis.’
She said, ‘What is it like? When you concentrate?’
‘Exhausting,’ he said, with a half-smile she could hear. Then he said, ‘No. Warmth. I can feel him.’
She said nothing. He added, still with the half-smile, ‘With Gelis, it is just exhaustion. But that is because her thoughts are concentrated on me. Hard to circumvent.’
‘But she can’t tell where you are? Shouldn’t you teach her?’
‘Goodness, no. It’s my strongest weapon,’ he said.
She waited. If he wanted to speak, then he would. Later, he might come to be sorry. In the end he said nothing, but presently turned and made his way back to the invalid’s side. He lowered himself down beside him and took up the tinder. It was so dark they could barely see one another. He said, ‘There are things better unsaid. You never speak of your parents. May I ask?’
‘How we came to be with Uncle Adorne? It’s no secret. My mother fell ill when we were young. Not a family illness: the kind that comes with great pain, and destroys all the power to reason. She was like my uncle before that, fair and graceful and kind. My father couldn’t bear the change, or us, reminding him of her. It was best we leave Ghent.’
He said, ‘I don’t remember you. I remember Sersanders in Bruges.’
‘I wasn’t born when you first came to Bruges. I don’t remember you either. A name. Claes. It annoyed Sersanders, that you always seemed happy.’
‘I’m glad I annoyed him,’ he said.
After a while, she said, ‘What was your mother like?’
It sounded callow: the remark of a child. It was, she had long known, the most important question anyone could ask of Nicholas de Fleury. And she had earned the right to ask it.
Apparently he recognised that as well. He waited, but in the end he replied. ‘Loving. Terrified. Sad.’
‘Terrified?’
she said. She could hear her own horror.
He said, ‘You know Jordan de Ribérac’
She couldn’t ask any more. She knew Jordan de Ribérac, after whom his own son had been named. He did not speak again.
She closed her eyes. When she opened them, it was upon the ruddy light of a fire: sparkling buck-bean turf stuffed between a glowing
heap of small stones. There was a folded cloth between the dirt floor and her head, and her own coat, dry now, was tucked in around her. The light flickered on the shape of the horse, and the form of Glímu-Sveinn lying against it. She could hear his uneven breathing.
Closer than that was a hand, slowly stilling something bright on a cord. She said, ‘Don’t stop. If you must.’
He lifted his head. She wondered if he had slept, and thought not. She wondered whose minds and hearts he had been visiting. Did they know? Did Gelis ever feel her husband’s thoughts touching hers, day and night? He had said hers were on him, which made his task in some way more tiring. She wondered if he had ever had cause to trace herself, or Sersanders, or her uncle, and found the idea both unflattering and hurtful. She gave him credit for realising this.
He said, ‘I have something to tell you.’
She knew before he spoke, because she had heard it. ‘Katla?’ she said.
‘Yes. You can see the white of the steam, even from here. But something else.’
Glímu-Sveinn was alive. She said, ‘What?’
He lifted his hands. There was blood on one finger. He said, ‘I remembered to ask the right questions. Kathi, Robin is near.’
His face, his voice said it all, good and bad. The boy was alive. By coming to find them, the boy had thrown away his own chance of survival. She said, ‘How near?’
‘Quite close. Kathi, he can’t find us. I can find him.’
‘In the dark?’
‘It isn’t dark now,’ he said; and rose, wincing a little, to his feet. ‘Come and see.’
She went out. She faced west, and saw above her the ink-blue of night. She faced north, and a lantern hung in the sky; or it might have been the basket balefire of a castle, or a burning thicket of thorns that threw off a continuous low sparkle of red, but yet was not consumed. Above Hekla floated crimson-lined clouds. Below floated the shoulders and spires of snowy eminences, all frosted like sweetmeats with pink.
The south was different. In the south, a field of dazzling white champignons ripened and burst in the dark. Beneath them was a point of red light.
She said, ‘It has begun. How long before they erupt?’
‘I don’t know. I’d rather leave now. And I’ll be quicker alone.’
She said, ‘Well, at least you don’t have to bother with food. Take the stave. Take your jacket. Glímu-Sveinn will be warm enough now.’
He was going on foot. His special sense wouldn’t show him the route, it would simply take him direct as a bird to the boy. There were no birds to be heard now, unless the iron-beaked ravens were there, attentive and hovering. And although there was light, it was little enough to show the way to a man who could not fly. A man whose feet were torn with lava, like hers, and who was almost too tired to walk.
She prepared and gave him a stirrup-cup, with plenty of blood in it: the first genuine
hesta-skál
, he remarked, that he had ever been offered. Then he smiled at her and, bending, gave her the courteous Icelandic kiss on the lips.
‘Guds frida veri med ydr,’
he said. The peace of God be upon you. ‘I will be back.’ And he left.
Glímu-Sveinn snored. The fire burned for a while, and she used it to attend to his comfort and her own, and to warm some of the drink for herself. When the last flame flickered and died, she gave in at length to her anxieties and, wrapping well, slipped from the cave.
Outside was a wonder of light. One by one, the seams of Hekla’s dark garment were bursting apart to expose the living core. The flames, higher now, were both yellow and red, pushed about by the curdling smoke, and their light flickered and streamed over the ghostly beds of the snow. Now the air shook with the sound of muffled explosions; now there resounded a group of ringing reports, upon which the golden spray rocketed.
Colpito
, a hit.
If the north was crimson and gold, the south was a shimmering miasma of white, drifting steam shaken by sudden explosions, and stained with darker effusions shot with red. The distant concussion from both labouring mountains was almost continuous, as from a battery of John le Grant’s guns, or the noise of a crowd watching Florentine football, or of an audience roused by a play. There was thunder pealing in the steam above Katla, shot with blue light.
Thunder-makers need not be gods, other people could do it as well. Copper sheets; carbon powder. Vif argent for silver; pigments and resin and gouache for colour and glitter. White lead and red ochre; sheets of glass; gilded tin; turf to pack round the traps, or the geysirs. Two little bellows for Hell. Eleven innocent dolls for the Massacre.
She had read the bills of lading. They did not actually reproduce, in any play she had read, the scalding torrents that would presently flow; the rumbling ocean of fire that would appear on the ridges above her and crawl thickly down; the clouds of brilliant dust that would darken the stars, setting light to her clothes and her hair. But men could create them, of course, if they tried: Negroponte; Constantinople. A diadem for God, and wine for the actors.
She thought of the man who had left her, taking his own life in his hands to turn a boy back to safety. She was aware that he would not think in those terms: that before the spectacle of the night, he would be no more capable of reasoned thought than she was; but would be riveted, despite all the horror, by the greatest performance in which he would ever take part, with the gods themselves as Masters of Secrets. She guessed he wished there had been music.
She knew he would try to come back. She thought of the Icelandic:
All ills shall cease;
Baldur shall come …
So they said of the White God, Baldur the beautiful, destroyed by Loki and waiting through all eternity for the call that would summon him back. They didn’t say it of a clever enigma whose chief achievement was to have founded a Venetian bank. The word of his death would travel quickly: to Venice, to Rome and to Bruges, to Brussels and Brixen and Bourges. To Cyprus, where he had almost tamed a young king. To Timbuktu, and a tomb. To Edinburgh, where he had a son. The Banco di Niccolò is dead, and shall not come again.
She was standing there still, unware of the cold, when above the grandeur of unearthly percussion, she heard the rattle of harness, and turned.
Dark on the snow, jogging across the ridges below her, were ponies. A dozen, twenty; their riders cracking their whips, their torches streaming innocent light, Baldur-light.
One rider led. One rider, familiar with the route, came racing over the snow and drew his mount to a quick halt on seeing her.
Her reason told her it would be Robin. Then she saw that Robin was there, far behind, his face lit as bright as the torches. But the person who was standing hère in the snow was her friend.
She ran towards him then, surprising herself and probably him; impelled by a surge of heart-felt fervour which moved her to fling her arms round him and cling, her cheek deep in his stained sheepskin coat. She clasped him, and he in turn closed his own arms about her, her head under his chin. Swept together, they sank comfortably into one another, and she felt him for the first time profoundly relax, as a warm and loving friend might.
There was nothing to put into words. His embrace said it all: his safe, indestructible grasp, his secure hands. When in the stillness she began to draw breath, it was not to overwhelm him with speech; only to utter his name – so difficult, recently, to remember.
‘Oh,
Banco,’
she said.
She was so close, she felt the spasm that developed into a hiccough of laughter. His clasp broadened. Then he set her away from him, his palms on her shoulders. She laid her hands fast over his.
Somewhere in the sky to the north, there was a crackling roar, and their faces were lit by the flame-gush that followed. He released her softly and said, ‘We must hurry. Glímu-Sveinn? We have a litter, and men to take him.’
She said, ‘He’s still there. I’m so glad. What about Paúel?’
Robin had come. He said, ‘One of his own men is here. And two Icelanders, who have been offered a boat if they find him.’
‘A boat?’ Kathi said. ‘I thought all the yoles and doggers were spoken for.’ Her eyes were on her friend, her halting friend, who was pulling over a horse.
‘An
English
boat,’ Robin said. ‘Wait till we tell you.’
Katelijne Sersanders carried only a half-memory of the torchlit ride to the coast beneath the greatest display of pyrotechnics she was ever to see in her life. She was surrounded by familiar faces. When she could no longer bear to touch the ground or the saddle, they wrapped her in fleece and handed her from man to man through the night like – like a bear-cub. For seamen, they were uncommonly tender, but the grasp was never the one that she sought. When she asked, Robin said, ‘M. de Fleury is here. He is safe. He is quite tired as well.’ It made her sick, to think she could be so thoughtless. She didn’t ask for him again, although she looked about when they arrived at the shore and waded out to the skiffs that awaited them. One of the skiffs did not leave, because it was waiting for Paúel.
The Mouth of Hell opened when they were a long way out to sea, and the glacier over Katla lifted its city of ice into the sky. Rowing, they watched, and Kathi watched with them.