The Unicorn Hunt (24 page)

‘You’re going to itemise my wives?’ the other man said. ‘Let me do it for you. My first wife brought me the Charetty company, but I didn’t kill her. My second I gave away to Zacco of Cyprus, who is not renowned for keeping his mistresses, and indeed, I am told she is dead. My third you know about. Do you want to talk about Joneta?’

‘If you like. Or about Gelis and David de Salmeton. You do know about that? He was much less discreet than I was, but I think the poor girl was starved for companionship. Except for one purpose, you don’t care for young women, do you?’ He said it, thinking aloud: even thinking about something and someone else. He hardly saw the small reaction, but it was there. Simon held his breath, his mind racing. Then he said, ‘My father was right about Diniz. I suppose you realise that?’

‘Better,’ the other man said. His tone was approving. Instead of coming nearer he stooped and, lifting the rake, stepped up and began to draw it through the mixed liquid and cake of the cauldron. The salt began to pile up at the sides. He said, ‘Yes, better. I could become annoyed about that. Your fat father Jordan branded Diniz his grandson a sodomite. With whom, I can’t quite remember. With me? With David de Salmeton? Not with me. And as you were saying, David de Salmeton has orthodox tastes, if unwise ones.’

‘But so do you,’ Simon said. ‘Some men enjoy mixing their pleasures, and find marriage convenient. Diniz has a wife and a child on the way, so there has been no open scandal. Until now, that is.’

The rake continued to pass up and down slowly. ‘Well, go on,’ the other man said.

‘Letters came to the Castle from Bruges,’ Simon said. ‘From Tommaso Portinari to the King’s brother of Albany. They mentioned Diniz and the Charetty company. And Gregorio, your lawyer in Bruges. You know his mistress Margot has left him?’

The rake moved without cease. ‘So I believe,’ its handler said.

Simon showed his surprise. ‘A courier here? Ah, no. I see. The
Ghost
brought you a letter. So you have heard the news, too, about Diniz?’

The other man stood the rake upright and leaned on it. ‘I should like you to tell me,’ he said.

Simon said, ‘About Diniz’s lovers. There is no doubt at all that he has them. Men and boys. Mostly men, from the artisan class. He is a good-looking fellow, my nephew.’

‘Go on,’ the other man said. He threw the rake down and lifting
a basket, wedged it into the grid over the salt. Then he stepped down and brought up the shovel. It was, discommodingly, the one on which Simon’s eye had been fixed. Gripping it, de Fleury continued. ‘So how did it become known? They all sang the news in the streets?’

‘A letter,’ said Simon quickly. ‘A love letter. His wife found it, and almost miscarried.’

‘An artisan who could write?’ his captor said.

‘A scholar,’ said Simon.

‘From Bruges. Someone living in the same town who still felt impelled to risk a love letter?’

‘From outside Bruges. From his travels. He brought the letter back with him. From his travels in Africa. All those long days and nights of great heat. You know how it was, you and Gelis. She told me. I can imagine it. The soaked mattress and pillows, the sweating skin, the suffocation, the ecstasy. She told me. Diniz was desperate, too – didn’t you notice? But he found relief where you’d least expect it. In whose arms? Can you guess?’

‘You are going to tell me,’ said the man he had cuckolded. He stood peaceably on the bench, without breathing.

‘It was Umar. Umar your well-endowed negro,’ Simon said. ‘A magnificent fellow, as you know, and sensitive to other men’s wants.’

‘
Thank you
,’ the other man said.

It emerged distorted for, as he spoke, he had the shovel already upraised. Before Simon could get out of the way, the full spadeful of scalding salt hit him in the face where he sat. The pain made him grunt and the shock sent him lurching aside, but his wits didn’t leave him. Sprawling, he touched the rake, seized it, and was on his knees presenting it before the second steaming, winking block came flying towards him. It struck his neck and shoulder and tumbled and clung, a burning avalanche, a blistering poultice.

His searing anger hurt more. The young brute had the axe, and the key. But the axe was not a sword: it was short in haft and only deadly when close. Simon surged to his feet and drove the rake with both hands towards the other man’s face. For a moment, it seemed he would reach it. Then his adversary saved himself abruptly, swerving sideways and back.

The fellow hadn’t looked round. Being more cunning than once he was, he had committed to memory all the elements of their miniature, smoking arena; the greatest part of it taken up with the hooded bed of hot salt with its latticework of thick beams and hooks. To its right, on the deep, yielding floor of solidified scum,
stood the round bath of warm brine and the tub and dipper of blood, occupying most of the space between cauldron and wall.

To its left was the bench his captor had chosen as seat and later as step to the cauldron. The basket he had prepared remained tossed on its side on the grid while the others hung still from the roof, gently jostling in the updraught of the duel.

On that wall, the left, were the pegs for the implements. Some still hung there: a pair of ladles, a scoop, a mallet, some bowls, a set of tongs. On the floor below them lay a hoe, and the corner between fire-hood and wall was stacked with forked sticks for porterage and spare hooked bars to join lattice to cauldron. In the front, between the firebox and the locked door lay a poker, and the bar to open the firedoor.

These were, all of them, the arms for this contest. As much as a trial of strength, this was an exercise in improvisation, in strategy. Simon laughed with battle excitement. I have this rake; and you have an axe. What comes next? Of course: something long-shafted. The hoe. His opponent needed the hoe.

Bending at the end of his swerve, the other man almost had it when Simon clawed it away with his rake. Then Simon swore. It had been a feint. The rake was what his opponent wanted and got, wrenching it free and hurling it hard out of reach, while Simon himself was sent crashing on to the ground. Then, before he could rise, he was flattened under the full impact of the other man’s weight, as his adversary flung himself down.

For an instant, Simon experienced the power of heavy young muscle; heavier than his own, and more violent. For an instant, for the first time in their lives, the two were implexed flesh to flesh; stamped together body to wet, heated body. Then, like a brand-iron lifting, the younger man abruptly started away.

It was what Simon needed. The weight gone, he could breathe. He used his experience, twisting and kicking. And although de Fleury counter-attacked as one who had remembered quite distinctly what he was doing and why, the lapse had given Simon his chance; he fought himself free, disregarding blisters, bruises, the agony in his elbow. The glint of the other man’s axe caught his eye and as he scrambled up, he snatched at it.

He barely touched it, but it was enough to divert its owner’s gaze for an instant. Then Simon had the firebox bar concealed in his hand, and locked in the door of the furnace so that, when he sprang back and the other man followed him, the iron door, red with heat, caught his antagonist’s shin and the fire leaped out, brilliant in the dim light. Simon’s captor stumbled and swerved,
his hair brushing the cones, and a mesh of shadows swayed over the ground as the single torch streamed. By then, Simon was where he wanted to be, with his back to the wall where the tools hung. He snatched down the shears and held them before him.

‘Again!’ the other man said. Since that bitter
Thank you
he had not spoken. Nine years ago they had fought, and Claes had survived because of Marian de Charetty. But Marian de Charetty was dead.

So what now would he do? Step back, it seemed, to recover. Step back, always watching, feeling his way past the tubs. Simon followed, then stopped. It was too crude an invitation altogether. Claes might, but Nicholas de Fleury wouldn’t back himself into a trap. Now he was against the far wall.

The other man said, ‘You were right not to come,’ and pressed the wall with one shoulder. It gave. A broad door had been made in what now appeared to be only a partition between this and a third and last room in the pan-house. Inside the third room it was dark, but he could glimpse another bench, and a pile of pale cones and rectangular tablets, bedded on straw. The room was filled with pale smoke, and at the far end Simon perceived two small windows, very high, through which fresh snow was blowing. A drying chamber, and a vent from the furnace. The windows were too small to squeeze through.

If he had dashed forward, he would have been pushed through and cut down. For there, of course, must be hidden the sword and dagger de Fleury had worn in the Great Hall at Linlithgow.

He could still prevent him from lifting them. Clearing the tubs, Simon landed in front of the door, shears in one hand, iron bar in the other. The axe glittered in the other man’s grasp and for a moment his one weapon parried Simon’s two in a blaze of blue light. Then, still fighting, Simon’s foe slammed the door shut behind him and stretched up a hand.

There was no sword in his grasp, nor a dagger. Instead, he held a faggot of straw: held it pressed to the single poor tallow candle until it burst into flame. Simon backed. The young man laughed, his face bright as a lamp. Then lifting himself to the edge of the tub, he reached up and touched the first hanging basket.

Light bloomed. Simon jumped forward, and the axe glittered, and the fire flamed in his face. Then the Fleming touched off the second, the third. The straw, brittle and old, dashed into fire, flashing and crackling and hazing the air with sparks and needles of flame. The cords above glowed. The pan-room, once sombre, became a blaze of carnival lamps, whirling and dancing; the salt hissed, naked and dry in the pan; the blood-glazed floor shifted and glittered.

The pan was iron, the furnace salt and clay, the walls and ceiling luted and safe. Only the tubs were vulnerable to fire, and the wooden shovels and scoops, and themselves. Simon tracked his tormentor between the swaying cornucopias of flame, the heat approaching and leaving his face, his hair hissing and smouldering as he ducked and stooped. The other man was moving as quickly, retreating. After the last basket, he tossed the burned-out faggot aside. Then the baskets started to fall, and lay flaring. The heat was beyond belief.

It had to be ended. And now Simon knew how to do it. He said, ‘So you
were
Diniz’s lover. I didn’t know the negro had you as well.’

Upon which, with unforeseen accuracy, the other man hurled the axe at Simon’s head.

Chapter 11

T
HE BLOW SHOULD
have killed. At first, in the jumble of light, the perpetrator clearly assumed that it had. He stood motionless, his eyes wide, and then stumbled aside, his hand seeking the wall.

By that single, rash act, he had disarmed himself. And Simon, because of a single opportune movement, was alive. More, behind him, sunk in the wall, was the axe.

His chance had come, and would never be better. He exchanged the shears for the axe. The crackle of burning straw and the fizz of salt masked his steps; the chiaroscuro of light disguised the speed of his rush. He was upon his would-be killer, hatchet lifted, even as the other man turned, his eyes open again, his actor’s face split, too, into shards of darkness and light: agony, disbelief, wonder.

Its last expression was one of profound purpose. The movement with which he struck up Simon’s fist round the haft was so hard that the blade, losing power, barely sank to de Fleury’s own half-naked shoulder where for a moment it fitted into the scar of another wound. Then de Fleury used all his advantage of strength to drag himself apart and to kick, the way men kick when fighting for life on a battlefield, before bending to scoop up something at his feet.

A double-hooked bar, lying half under the fireball of straw which had felled it. It came towards Simon, clawing, its bent iron smoking and red, and Simon struck at it with the cold iron he, too, still held in one hand, and then swung the axe as his opponent backed, fencing. Behind him was the wall hung with tools, but the axe would get to him first. Then the axe itself glared a warning and Simon, alerted, had time to spring to one side as a dazzle of fire hurtled down and a basket, burning free, burst into a fireball of flame at his feet. By which time Nicholas de Fleury was again armed.

Now, no one spoke. In the struggle that followed Simon used most of the objects in the room, and had them used against him. The two men fell, sometimes, into the kind of close-gripped combat Simon preferred to avoid, but he held his own, although he received no more inconsequential advantages.

It worried Simon that, holding an axe, he could not immediately prevail. But then, as he had, de Fleury used long-shafted weapons against him. They both bore bleeding gashes and livid burns on their half-naked bodies and sometimes he remembered that he, the elder by fifteen years, had run a long way that evening. And the truth was that the other man was more of a match than he would ever have thought to be possible. Then his mind began to turn on the key.

He intended to win, and would win. But he was facing a man of strong passions; a man who had already tried to kill him tonight. He did not mean to die at his hand.

It was then, just over half an hour before midnight, as the fires were dying and the glow from the furnace burned low, that he began to plan his last strategy. Soon even the candle would be spent. Already the walls and floor were in darkness as they stalked one another, breathing quickly; attacked and dodged in the red light from the king-bed of salt and the dull, crimson hood at its end, its rim flushed, arch as a bonnet, from the glow of the strip of live, burning coals underneath. For the grid covered all of the salt, but not all of the fire.

Perhaps the other man, too, realised that his strength was not inexhaustible. It was easier to believe than that he had been waiting, measuring time, judging the moment when Simon would flag. Simon felt the change in his movements: an alteration in pace; a steadier rhythm of breathing. He knew that it was time, and he had to act now.