Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [272]
Prancing was, indeed, the only way to describe its astonishing gait. First it would break into a canter, then pause, shaking its mane and bowing to kick its hooves scything behind it. Then, whinnying, it would rear, before crashing down and resuming its erratic progress towards him. The trees of the forest threw back its squeals. Then, as Nicholas raced towards it, he heard the other high, searing, menacing sound, and saw what the approaching beast was bringing with it. Round its head, stuck to its flanks, streaming in loops and whorls all about it, was a death-cloud of bees.
He knew then what had happened, for it was not unknown among Russian villages. If you wish to discourage intruders, set the bees on them. He knew what it looked like. He had seen a beekeeper rouse a hive, rapping with the palms of his hands on the sides to induce it to swarm. There might be forty thousand bees in each hive; the number of hives would, of course, vary.
Now, he plunged into the forest, sweeping back to the road once the maddened animal and its cargo had passed. As he rode, he tied his reins and emptied his saddlebags, binding a scarf round his face and pulling his hooded cloak round him with hands thrust into gloves. The rest he tried to drape as an improvised horse-cloth. Before he had finished, the air was filling with bees. Instead of the occasional flick of orange or white from a butterfly’s wings, or a crane-fly’s spidery rattle and click, or the probing black and yellow cylinder of a wasp, there were single black bodies everywhere, of bees, once concentrated and now dispersed, distrait, uncertain of purpose. They did not attack him. A crashing in the forest told that another horse had been less fortunate.
Acciajuoli had had four servants with him, and there had been ten horses in all. That accounted for two of them. The bees swung about him, still singly, and as the road turned and the light of early evening descended from a circular opening in the trees, Nicholas saw that he had come as far as Acciajuoli had come, to a stretch of trampled earth, with a stream, a small planting of kitchen vegetables, a byre, a pile of manure, and a haphazard group of battered timber houses whose doors stood open, and from which issued no sound. In fact, as he slowed, there was nothing at all to be heard in the clearing but the hiss of the distant leaves, and the trickle of water, and the sharp crochets and diminishing minims of solitary bees, interrupted now and then by the snarl of an attacking cluster.
The victims were presumably the escaping horses, for there was nothing left here worth attacking. That had already been done. Nicholas, dismounting, led his horse forward to where lay the dark bodies of four lifeless Russians in leather tunics and breeches, and two horses, both dead. One had fallen and broken its neck. The other had been killed, presumably to prevent its rider from escaping. The rest, crazed, had patently fled like the one he had seen. They would soon be caught. Horses were valuable. The men, their faces blotched and swollen, had been stung half to death. Those who had looked like surviving had been killed. All the packs had been emptied.
He had seen everything but the one man he sought. Then he heard a sound.
Least able to control a rearing horse, Nicholai de’ Acciajuoli had lost his grip as soon as the maddened animal reared and, falling, had brought the beast down on himself. The horse had died. Its rider, less fortunate, had merely remained, trapped under its weight, with his head and torso and arms exposed to the venom that had felled him.
His hands were free. Although he might be numb from the waist down, the Greek had been able to drag about him his priceless, soiled ermine cloak, gift of the Grand Duchess Sophia, and turn his face into the ground. Racing to him, Nicholas thought that, left for dead, he might have a chance. Then he saw the blood on the cloak and the grey cast of the distorted face that turned slowly towards him. ‘Ah, Niccolò,’ said the Greek. ‘Do not trouble. I am dead.’
‘Not while I