The Unicorn Hunt (88 page)

She was too wise to move. ‘Tell me.’

‘Your wedding ring. From David de Salmeton.’

‘Well, of course,’ she said. ‘I wanted you to know I was alive. I didn’t know you were going to give in. That is really what you mean? You can’t keep up? You want to end it?’

‘I am going to end it,’ he said. ‘But first, I want to know why you did it. I want to hear you admit there is no child. That is all.’

She could see his face. She could see the rocks growing distinct all about him. She could see the gold in his hand. He suddenly stood.

So did she. She said, ‘Then listen. My object is to remind you of pain, as often as possible, and for as long as possible. Barring accidents, therefore, I am not likely to shorten my programme. If Alessandra Strozzi writes to you, you will know that I have said so already. You may believe it.’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘I know you hate me. I thought you would want me to learn why.’

‘I think,’ she said, ‘that I shall tell you at another time, in another place. At the end of my choosing.’

‘And the child?’

She smiled. Always, the child. She said, ‘You doubt the existence of Jordan de Fleury, eighteen months old and walking? I brought you a lock of his hair. Give me the ring, and you may have it.’ She took the little pack from her sleeve and held it, unopened.

The sky was opal; the gable crosses of the little church outlined against it. She could see Nicholas some small distance away, standing with rock-like stillness as if in prayer, or awaiting a mystical experience, except that his hands were not joined, but placed hard over his arms.

‘
Univiva, unicuba et virginia
,’ he said. ‘My unsullied bride: no.’

The sky brightened. He did not move. He had guessed.

‘Then let the wind take it,’ she remarked; and slipping her fingers into the little pack, eased it open and held it aloft. The gesture was not unlike his own. The slip emptied, in a whiff of gold fluff.

His darkened eyes followed the sparkle, while his hand idly fingered the ring. He said, ‘And that is all the proof you have to offer, here on the mountain of law?’ The roof of the chapel behind him was rosy. Behind and below, like the seething, chopped tides of the sea, combers of violet and red were emerging.

She said, from a sudden fear which manifested itself as crude anger, ‘Should I have brought you his head?’

‘Whose head would you have brought, I wonder?’ Nicholas said; and bounced the ring in his palm. He closed his fist over it. ‘False to false. It would have been the right coinage.’

She said nothing. He was looking at her. He said, ‘If you know I can divine, you know that I couldn’t fail to recognise a deception.’

‘It was the boy’s hair,’ she said. ‘You have never seen him.’

‘It was not from any child born of you,’ Nicholas said. His voice, suspended in the great spaces about them, was quite calm. ‘So it means the child doesn’t exist. We have uncovered one truth, at least.’

The wind blew, and stirred her cut hair. She had to decide, now, quickly, whether she believed in his powers; and then how to play this hand he had dealt her. She said, ‘He does exist. I didn’t want you to trace him. I hoped you couldn’t divine.’

‘And yet you burned what I sent him?’ he said. He added, ‘It argues, certainly, that he existed last year. Or a substitute you didn’t want found.’ He paused. ‘Or again, if there was no child, there was no need for a toy.’

The song, faltering in the flames. How had he known? But of course, he had Simon followed. She said again, ‘He does exist.’

‘Yes,’ said Nicholas. He turned aside a little. She couldn’t tell whether it was in agreement, or caused by some other thought. He said, ‘You need him to appear to exist, to control me. Otherwise I should hardly be here, for example. But as you see, I am beginning to demand more proof than that. And if you really do have a son,
you will require to produce him at some time in any case, to bear my name and inherit my fortune. So why not now?’

‘To save him from you. You tried to kill Simon,’ she said.

The sun swam above the horizon. He stood, outlined in burning red, and looked down on her.

‘But he is not Simon’s son,’ Nicholas said.

She looked at him.

He sighed: perhaps in impatience; perhaps from something else. His voice when he spoke was still colourless. ‘I have some experience of women,’ he said. ‘I know about Simon: how he managed fatherhood in his youth but never again, despite all those years of assiduous profligacy. The birth of Henry restored all his confidence, but no successors have come. It is unbearable to him. He lies.’

‘He has admitted it to you?’ she said.

‘No.’ He turned, ‘It is not difficult to prove, if one takes trouble. He is sterile.’

‘He was my lover,’ she said. With an effort, she, too, kept her voice tranquil.

‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But the child you bore is my son, not Simon’s. You hoped at first that I’d harm it. When it was born, perhaps you found some pity for it. You have jewels enough.’

‘Jewels?’ she said.

‘I –’ he said, and stopped; she didn’t know why. Then he resumed, in the same voice as before. ‘If that is so, then let me reassure you. I know that he is my child.’

The sun, vast and red, had no heat in it. She didn’t refute it. There was no reason, now. She said musingly, ‘You knew all the time? Or suspected, and then testing, testing, became gradually certain. How typical, Nicholas. No one can tell, then, what you would have done to a true child of Simon’s. Drowned it, perhaps? Set the dogs on it?’

He said, ‘I could have forgiven you had it been Simon’s.’

The air they breathed was dyed red. Her throat closed. It made a sound, opening.

‘And now …?’ she said. ‘You came, you said, to make an end. But without me, you won’t find the boy. Not for years. By the time you find him, he will be someone else’s, like Henry.’

‘I might risk that,’ he said. But he had paused, for a moment, before speaking.

She spoke quickly, then. ‘What would you give, Nicholas, to share his childhood? Isn’t that what you are bargaining for, now that you know he is yours? And the stakes, surely, are higher. What would you give now to see him?’

He didn’t move. ‘I am sure you are going to tell me the price.’

‘Nothing impossible. The gold that you and Anselm Adorne think is here. You will, of course, have to find it before him; and remove it somehow from the monastery and transmit it to wherever I am.’

‘You are leaving?’

‘I thought the Patriarch would have told you. He and I are leaving this morning. Unless you take another decision.’

She watched him. Her life depended on what she had said, and how she had said it. On what he believed. On where they were.

He said, ‘I gave you half of all I have. I see that even that is not enough.’

Then he said, ‘I see you have bought time and, you hope, your life.’

She said, ‘I had a knife, too.’

‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘
I should never kill where I love. And only simpletons kill where they hate
. So I am to find Ochoa’s gold and give it to you? How should I find you?’

‘By the ring,’ she said. ‘But you would have to return it to me.’

He stood, his head bronzed, his face with the still, Celtic look she could not always remember. After a while he said, ‘Then give me your hand.’

Now it had come. Good or bad, the outcome was fixed. She stood while he crossed the short distance between them, and took her hand, and fitted the ring on her finger. The metal was cold. Then he said, ‘There was a ritual, the last time I did this.’

The embrace was all she expected: insult, threat, preliminary to what he had decided to do. His hands took hold of her back and her arm, forcing her close. She had started to pluck out her dagger but at this stage, it could be no more than a token. His grasp prevented a strike: she could do no more than maintain the point against the folds of his clothing. If she had wanted to kill him, she would have had to do it much earlier, in the dark.

His eyes were open. She held them; conveying all she felt of resistance without attempting to struggle against his continuing, altering touch. His remembered touch. By shape, by texture, by context she recognised one by one small familiarities to do with his hands, with his cheek, with his lips. In place of the intellectual game she was playing, a physical template suddenly locked sighingly into another; as if, lulled by instinct, this nerve or that muscle had begun to soften and sink. They stood, enclosed within an invisible mould, private to them, and sealed tight. The sky flamed and far below them, acre upon acre, the mountains flickered,
welling into the light. They were on the Mount of the Lord; and the edge was one step away.

Nicholas said, ‘Walk over with me.’

The air was gold. A bird soared below, also ethereal; golden. His breath had checked, like that of a swimmer about to glide under water. (Below the sea of Zeeland, that summer, the act of love over and over, hungry as sharks under water.)

She said, ‘Go alone. I have a child.’

He freed her.

She stood cold on the brink, looking down upon the flaming reservoir of the wilderness; looking out upon space; upon silence; on nothing.

He began to move slowly, in which direction she could not tell. Then she heard the sound of his footsteps receding. Pebbles tumbled below. He had no stave, but it was day. She had managed without one.
Canst thou bind the Unicorn with his band in the furrow?
Ludovico da Bologna had joked. She knew that she could. And she had.

In time, her shuddering ceased, and she made her own way down from Gebel Musa. By sunset, when Anselm Adorne arrived, she had long left the monastery.

Chapter 42

T
HIS TIME
, Jan Adorne gave the orders; beating the camel-drivers; shouting down Brother Lorenzo; berating the monks when they began to emerge from the door. His father was sick.

Tobias Beventini, who had his own reasons for feeling sick, ran down from staircase to staircase and met the party struggling through the third iron door: the priest; a middle-aged man bowed with weariness and two young men supporting an older one who was trying to walk. A child exclaimed, ‘
Dr
Tobias!
’

She made a believable boy, booted and slight, with half the length of her hair gone. The doctor in him wanted to respond to the note in her voice, but instead he clapped her shoulder and said, ‘Well, well. Can I help?’ And turning to the travel-stained monk who seemed to have been their guide: ‘I know the Baron. Let me give him a hand.’

There was only one other guest-dormitory, adjacent to theirs and, like theirs, mud-floored and empty. He bundled up his own mattress and carried it next door for Adorne as a temporary measure. With a certain ruthlessness, he took John’s as well. John was elsewhere, having expressed a violent antipathy to Anselm Adorne and all his friends except young Katelijne. Nicholas, of course, was also absent, but his mattress still showed all the blood. Tobie, swearing under his breath, got his medicine box and some basins and towels and started getting things into order next door.

‘It’s the flux,’ said Katelijne. ‘He had water with worms in it. We all had, but he used up his strength quicker than we did. And the last mountain, we all had to climb down but he couldn’t, and the camel stumbled and everything came over its head and Jan and Father John saved his life. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. We should have camped, but we came on instead. We haven’t stopped
since just after midnight. Friar Lorenzo wants to help, but he’s exhausted as well. Can you give Jan something?’

‘What?’ said Tobie. As the boxes and baskets arrived, she was stacking them in a far corner, unpacking some quickly, handing others to the boy Lambert and the merchant Pieter Reyphin, telling them what to do. John of Kinloch was praying.

Jan was outside, shouting at Friar Lorenzo. The sound reverberated through the silence of the evening and his father’s face, sunk in the pillow, turned uneasily. Katelijne said, ‘He nearly killed one of the guides in a temper. He needs to break down and cry.’

Tobie rose to his feet, a full cup in his hand. He said, ‘I’ll see to it. Do you think you can give this to your uncle? Then I think you should go next door while I look at him. It’s my room, but it’s empty.’

She was kneeling already, her hand lifting her uncle’s head. She said, ‘Is M. de Fleury with you? Is he all right?’

Tobie said, ‘They’re both here. John and Nicholas. I’ll be back in a moment.’

Outside, he sent the monks away, to Jan’s fury, and there was no witness to what he did next. But it solved the problem of Jan Adorne. He thought, sourly, that Jan Adorne was lucky.

John came back after Compline. Nicholas, as usual, did not come back at all. Tobie explained the situation in a murmur.

John turned and looked at the blankets screening the end of the room. ‘She’s in here?’

‘She’s had enough. They’re all sleeping. I’m going to spend the night by Adorne. We’ll see better what to do in the morning.’

He was treated to one of John’s pregnant silences. Then John said, ‘Did you tell them? That Gelis had been here?’

‘No,’ said Tobie. ‘I didn’t even tell them that Ludovico da Bologna had been here, although they’ll probably find that out from the monks.’

‘And Nicholas?’ John le Grant said.

‘I don’t know where he is. Neither do you,’ Tobie said.

She woke, remembering that she had come to the shrine of St Catherine. During the last third of the journey, when adventure had given way to something distressing and frightening and difficult, she had found herself forgetting the reason for it, although Father John and Brother Lorenzo said their offices, and her uncle read every night from the Gospels, as long as he could.

Today she opened her eyes upon an ikon set on a sunlit white
wall, and to silence. By her bed was fresh water and a dish with bread and some grapes. When she put on her robe and opened the door, she looked upon green leaves and roof-tops and heard, here and there, the murmur of voices, and a beat too far off to be music. She looked up. Beyond the walls, all around her were immense mountains, made small by the infinite space of the sky.