Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
Now, you could no longer diminish what was happening by translating it into human dimensions. This was not a play. This was the hurling into the sky of thousand-ton blocks of ice, glinting and roseate in the thundering night. This was the discharge of millions of gallons of boiling water, plunging down from the mountain in a wild dashing glitter, outrunning the billows of its own pink-flushed steam. This was a spectacle of red and gold flames, of spinning fire-balls, of swathes and columns of sparkling ashes and sand. This was the crack of thunder and the roar of explosions and the massive, evil susurration of the deluge, continuous as the hiss of the sea. This was the Twilight of the Gods.
Nicholas watched it begin from the strand, where he had forced them
to lay him until the last boat should leave. Kathi and Robin had gone. Glímu-Sveinn was safe, on his way by boat to where his family sheltered. He had wakened once, from the turf bed they had made for him, and had peered about, frowning and mumbling.
‘Well, old man,’ Nicholas said. ‘Odin heard you, or some other god. And there is a purse in your shirt, to show that foreigners can even be grateful. Get well. Ask your wife to forgive us.’
He did not know if he was understood, but he thought so. When his time came to go, the Icelander looked at him, moving his hand, and Nicholas stretched over, smiling, and took it in his own lava-flayed palm.
After that he lay still, drifting out of consciousness; awaking to the grinding cramps of his over-strained body, the burning pain of raw flesh in his hands, his limbs, the soles of his feet. Iceland and Egypt. His eyes were open when they brought Paúel Benecke down to the beach, the excited voices loud with relief in the reddening light. They carried him across in a cloak; he was yellow with pain but grinning crookedly still below the black beard. ‘Nikolás! I hoped never to see you again. Are you dying?’
‘Ask me tomorrow,’ Nicholas said. ‘If you can.’ The earth wavered and shook; he could hear the rumble of another explosion beginning.
Benecke turned his head. ‘I mustn’t keep you. You know, I didn’t expect you to save me? Why did you?’
‘I don’t know. I wanted a favour,’ Nicholas said. He watched them place Benecke in the skiff; then they came back for himself. As they left, the glacier rose into the sky, filling the air and the sea with its light, and the numbing roar followed.
There was a long way to row, for the
Svipa
had anchored many miles from the shore, the Hanse ship alongside. Benecke had fallen silent. Nicholas drifted into some form of awareness, his half-open eyes resting on the spreading glory before him.
In the presence of that, everything he had ever done appeared futile – even the music, the Play, the one private creation into which he had poured all that he had, for its own sake alone. Or so he had thought, until Gelis had shown him that it was only a refuge, that was all. And a tempting one, for someone brought up as he had been. An easy way to learn to love power. And so he had fled, seizing upon this venture in Iceland; this chance to return to the anonymity of the machine. He had destroyed all John’s pleasure, and Roger’s, by acting as if the Play had never been.
Iceland should have been simple: some hard work, some hard play, a little trickery, and he would have returned with his load, having executed his personal plan, and bested a rival or two. But Katelijne
had come, and he had had to place her and her brother in safety, and then go to recover them. Otherwise he would never have been on the mainland of Iceland at all, or here when this happened. Otherwise he wouldn’t have burned his fingers, yet again, on an instrument that was not meant for him; that was tuned too high, and too low, and demanded more than any human being could give. The music he wanted to live by was the safe, mediocre span in the middle, where nothing would tear him to pieces; neither a black country, nor a white. And even if he didn’t think so; even if he decided to burn and be damned, it was useless. Nothing, nothing in all the world could match the wonder of this.
There was no one to whom he could say that. Or no, perhaps one person: Katelijne Sersanders. He still would not say it. He smiled, as the journey ended and the ships loomed ahead. He knew what her first words would be, speaking in awe of tonight. There should have been music.
Part IV
Summer, 1472
THE MULTIPLICATION OF PAINS
Chapter 30
A
MONG THE RICHER
class of dealers and traders, the disappearance of the principal of a bank in search of profit is not a matter of immediate concern. His non-return, as weeks go by, creates anxiety. The owners of banks obviate this, where they can, by the dispatch of consoling reports to their agents. From Nicholas de Fleury came nothing for four wintry weeks. And the message that did come, in the end, was carried by no agent of man, but arrived as dust on the wind.
Nicholas had taken certain precautions, but it had not been his intention, setting out, to unsettle the market by dying, or by occasioning rumours of death. By the end of the first week in March, his own counting- house in Bruges knew where he had gone, and the news spread to the financial arms of the French and Burgundian and Angevin courts, and thence to their princes. Captain Astorre heard, and was impressed. Anselm Adorne learned of it as he stepped from his vessel at Sluys, but did not even reply to the man who hurried to tell him, however unexpected the threat to the
Unicorn
. He had other things on his mind.
The relatives of Gelis van Borselen wondered if she were about to become a rich widow, and whether they would be expected to find her a husband. The vicomte Jordan de Ribérac sent a message by one of his ships to Madeira. It said:
I think you may now come home. Your late wife’s good-brother would appear to be either lifeless or greatly subdued, and I should value your presence in Kilmirren
.
These reactions were however highly subjective, and the business of the Bank was not, in such a short time, disturbed. Indeed, the news had no time to reach Venice and activate the orders Nicholas had so judiciously sent there before he left Edinburgh. That is, Gregorio would have hesitated about carrying them out. Julius would have obeyed them regardless.
In Edinburgh, closer to events, the merchant class evinced a guarded interest in reports of the venture; interest which blossomed into a worldly-wise pessimism when members of the Berecrofts family were not within sight. The magnates, pursuing their own affairs and the affairs of the country, said little, although individuals tended, with the passage of time, to find themselves closeted in contentious dialogue with their King. Mistress Clémence de Coulanges, in the High Street, watched the lady Gelis respond to the waiting, while ushering the lady’s son, with a firm hand, through the character-threatening perils of convalescence.
Pasque, who had made herself reprehensibly absent during all the first stages of illness, recovered her nerve as soon as the spots began to disappear, and was to be found several times a day hopping, juggling or playing tunes on the comb for the edification of young Master Jodi as a kind of atonement. The offer to send her to Dean, where the Countess of Arran’s two children were equally smitten, had also had some effect. For a while, Mistress Clémence had expected to see Bel of Cuthilgurdy, the elderly lady who had a kindness for the sick boy. Instead, it turned out that the lady had generously offered her assistance to the Countess at Dean, where Mistress Sinclair, they said, was overworked and short-tempered these days.
Mistress Clémence listened to everything, and permitted the younger gentleman of Berecrofts to visit the sickroom when he came to call on the Lady. Jordan reminded him, she thought, of his son. Master Roger also came once, with a very small kettledrum. He was not invited again.
Then the
Unicorn
sailed into Leith, and Master Martin of the Vatachino rode into Edinburgh looking, they said, as if he had swum all the way from the North Pole himself, but openly triumphant. The Cologne merchant Reinholdt was with him. Naturally, they went to Adorne’s house to begin with, for Martin still had to make his report, even though Adorne was in Bruges, and his nephew Sersanders, it seemed, had elected to remain temporarily in Iceland.
After that, word of what had happened in Iceland did not take long to spread. First, that the Vatachino had achieved a brilliant if opportunist success, not only bringing back their great vessel against the most vicious odds, but having as cargo the finest quality of Icelandic sulphur, to be sold off in Bruges as soon as the ship was in a fit state to take it. The partners in the
Unicorn
venture were rich.
The rest of the story, picked up by Pasque and conveyed to Clémence, was one that merchants avoided when speaking to Gelis van Borselen, although the news would reach her eventually. Many people had seen Master Martin marching down to the Canongate to
burst into the Banco di Niccolò where, it was said, he had stormed at de Fleury’s man for an hour.
By nightfall, everyone knew what Nicholas de Fleury had been up to in Iceland: preserving his own illicit cargo, in return for exposing his fellow-Burgundian’s ship to the Hanse. Further, he had caused the
Unicorn
to run on the rocks, from which it had only saved itself by a miracle. The last seen of the same Nicholas de Fleury, Martin was happy to say, was gun to gun with the Hanse ship the
Maiden
, whose captain Paúel Benecke had a sharp way with a person who didn’t deliver.
‘And the little maiden? Katelijne Sersanders?’ had asked Mistress Clémence, hearing it all from the voluble Pasque.
‘Ah!’ said Pasque. When she said Ah! in that fashion, Mistress Clémence always wished she had not asked.
‘Ah, the poor silly child,’ said the woman. ‘They have attempted to hide it, you know. They would like you to think that she stayed with her brother. But the girl ran away on her own, and was with M. de Fleury for six days, before her brother went to persuade her to leave. He never returned. They are at the bottom of the sea with M. de Fleury. Will our terms of employment remain the same?’ Pasque said. ‘The Lady might even want to increase them.’
That was on Tuesday, the twenty-fourth day of March. For two days the lady Gelis stayed at home, save for one visit to the Bank at the Canongate, and one to the house of Adorne, where she heard the account, in person, of Master Martin. During that time, she behaved as she usually did, although her complexion was pale, her eyes darkened, and she could not disguise her disinclination for food. The household were proud of her stoicism and served her in whispers, even though it was not absolutely sure that M. de Fleury was dead.
On the third day, in a fashion no one had contemplated, the doubt was resolved. An English privateer, foundering off Dunbar, had been seized as a prize and brought into harbour, where it was discovered that this ship also was returning from Iceland. If the state of the
Unicorn
was bad, it was a wonder that the
Charity
had stayed afloat at all, with her strakes splintered with balls, her sails patched and both her boats missing.
Half her crew was missing as well. According to Jo Babbe, her master, she had sent two boats to make a peaceable landing on Iceland, when she had been set upon by the crews of two skiffs from the
Svipa
, the vessel of Nicholas de Fleury. After some severe fighting, the Englishmen had been tied up and handed to Icelanders, the two boats confiscated, and a message sent to the Hull ship advising her to get off at once, reinforced by some shots from a
cannon. Without a proper crew, they had been unable to respond and without boats they could hardly go fishing. They had turned and sailed off, intending to demand compensation from the Banco di Niccolò.
‘They’ll be lucky,’ had said Govaerts, arriving from the Bank to report to the lady Gelis. The words sounded more defiant than flippant. He was nervous. Mistress Clémence, who had been asked to remain in the room, saw her employer observe it and brace herself. The child was not present.
Then the lady Gelis said, ‘You did not come to tell me only that.’
‘No,’ Govaerts said. ‘I have more news. I should not have believed it, except that I went and saw for myself. The ship, the
Charity
, is covered with ash.’
‘It happens,’ Gelis said. ‘They use Greek fire in fighting.’
‘Covered
with ash,’ Govaerts said. ‘Not consumed. It began to fall as they sailed south, so heavily that the sky was black as night, and they could not see one another twelve inches apart. Before it fell, they saw the mountains of Iceland explode. The flames rose so high, Babbe says, that they saw them two hundred miles off. They fled because of that, not only because of the
Svipa.’
‘And the
Svipa?’
Gelis asked.
‘Remained behind with the Hanse ship, the
Pruss Maiden
. They were waiting, it seemed, for word from on shore.’
‘Both of them?’ Gelis said.
‘Babbe didn’t want to confess it, but apparently both the
Svipa
and the Hanse ship had sent to attack him on shore. Both ships were still in good order. If they had fought one another, the fight had been stopped, or resolved.’
There was only one question to ask, and for a long time, she did not ask it. Then she said, ‘For whom were they waiting?’
By then, Mistress Clémence knew that the reply was one that Govaerts was unwilling to give. She did not realise, until she heard it, how bad it was going to be.
Robin of Berecrofts had taken part in the fighting on shore and when it was done, had ridden inland with men from both ships. For M. de Fleury had not been on the
Svipa
, nor had the girl and her brother. All of them were in the interior of the mainland with the Hanseatic master Paúel Benecke. And they were still there when the mountains exploded.
‘I am sorry,’ Govaerts said. ‘But there has to be hope. The ships would not leave until M. de Fleury and the others were found.’