Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [39]
The speaker was Nicholas. The lamp, swinging, glared upon his impatient face and the grinning mask of Paúel Benecke. Both were dishevelled. About them was a struggling mass which, confusingly, included some complaining women. Two she didn’t know. One was Gerta. She felt Robin stop, with a gasp. Then he turned aside, furling her cloak high about her, and holding her close carried her away from the blaze of the lamplight. Except that, as she now noticed, the blaze did not come from the lamp but from the brazier, overturned in the stampede, and now casting its translucent red embers across a deck composed of three thousand square feet of prime timber. Then the cabin caught fire, and the real screaming began, as men and women fled from it. She looked up at Robin, but he seemed not to care.
BY THE LIGHT of the blaze, Robin found a place in the dunes to conceal her. She was still as limp as a child. Sometimes a person woke with the mind of a child, after a shock such as that. He was not weeping now.
He wanted to take her away, but the shore was lit like a pageant, and swarming with Benecke’s crewmen, thundering down to rescue their vessel. On the raft, the cabin burned like an oriflamme, and all the flooring beyond was alight: the fiery lines of the logs were regular as the ridges of spring in-field planting.
Berecrofts, and all his love, and his hopes.
He wrapped her in her own cloak, and his own, and smoothed her brown hair back from her face. Her eyes were huge in the shadow. He watched the fire, holding her. Against the wall of light, men were fighting. No, men were swinging buckets over the side and emptying them into the fires. The water spewed out gleaming like fish, ruddy with the light of the fire, the puny, man-crafted fire. Kathi moaned and he hushed her as he watched. Then he saw that he had not been mistaken. On board, and now on shore, regardless of the fire and all that was happening, two men were fighting. And the two were Paúel Benecke and Nicholas.
He couldn’t ignore it; he couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened: he had to go. He wrapped the cloaks again tightly about her, murmuring in distraction, and got to his feet. ‘I shan’t be long. I’ll come back. I’ll come back directly.’ Then he ran, his hand on his scabbard.
At first, the heat drove him back. They had cut loose the neighbouring rafts and, commandeering small boats, were flooding the big craft with water. The centre was still alight, radiating heat on to the foreshore. Beyond its reach, the way was packed with spectators. Some were shouting advice to the fire-fighters. Others, turning away, formed part of a shifting audience cheering a different cause. Colà and Benecke, displaying their short tempers and their prowess yet again, in the way that turned a normal man cold.
No one attempted to stop them. The raft might be on fire, their future livelihood might depend on both that and the life of the captain, but a fight was a fight, and must be permitted to reach its conclusion. Someone exclaimed, ‘All that over a woman! Would you believe it?’ And someone else cried, ‘But what else did these two ever fight about?’ Robin heard them. They all but mentioned his wife, whose honour was his to defend. He threw himself forward.
Before he had taken two steps, rough arms pinioned him hard, and an admonishing voice was addressing him. ‘Hold there! Don’t you see there’s a fight?’ Beside him was the woman called Gerta, shaking her head in mock despair at his folly, even as her eyes darted back to the fighters. He saw the anxiety in them. He ceased struggling.
She had cause to be anxious. He had seen