Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [83]
Watching them, Anna spoke slowly. ‘I wonder how often they have done that before. They are reading one another’s intentions.’ And she added, half to herself, ‘I didn’t know.’
‘Perhaps they, too, had forgotten,’ Kathi said. She viewed the two laughing men, and Caterino Zeno, who was not laughing. She had seen Nicholas ride. She had seen him swim with a horse in the sea, and slide with one into a chasm of ice. She had heard from Dr Tobie of the games in the Meidan at Trebizond, where the hooves danced on cedar flour instead of thick mud, but where, nevertheless, Nicholas had been pitched to the ground. He had looked, arriving today, as if he had had just such a blow, and had tried to drink his way out of it. Then it came to her where she had seen that look before. She said aloud, ‘He has been divining.’
‘Nicholas?’ said Robin sharply. The field shooting had finished, and now they were about to end, as they had begun, with the papingo: this time the proper parrot in wood, with its five sections to be shot down, leaving the last and smallest core for the victor.
‘This is a country of silver and copper,’ Anna said. ‘I suppose his skills are worth a great deal, unless they exhaust him. You say that they do?’
‘He has recovered now,’ Kathi said. ‘If you call that kind of behaviour a recovery.’ Her eyes were on the field. The three riders, bows prepared, had taken their stance at intervals round the base of the mast. Receiving their signal, they had begun to set their horses in motion. As they gained speed, they fixed their gaze upwards, to the papingo at the top of the mast. For this time, they were to hit it at will, and as often and fast as they were able, until all the parts had been pierced and brought down. The rain beat on the contestants’ dirt-smeared features and the upturned faces of the spectators, and frothed on the grassy mud. The awning rattled and boomed, so that Anselm Adorne had to lift his voice when he spoke.
‘I am a little concerned. They have no protection.’
Jerzy Bock leaned over. ‘They are good marksmen.’
‘Even so. Shooting from all sides at once, it is dangerous. The arrows hit and rebound. We are safe enough, but they are not.’
But even as he spoke, a roar proclaimed that Zeno, his smile fixed, had repeated his own earlier feat and, shooting in reverse, had brought down the first part of the parrot. Then immediately, a second roar and a shout of laughter greeted the fall of a second part, brought down by Julius in an extraordinary shot which not only speared the wood, but caught it with a second arrow before it dropped on the ground. Then Julius himself yelled, for Nicholas, lowering his bow, had abandoned shooting the papingo in favour of firing his arrows, one after the other, around and sometimes into the upturned hooves of Julius’s horse as it galloped, mud flying, before him, while Julius wildly attempted to bring it back under control, cursing at the top of his voice. The crowd hooted and Robin, his face brilliant, said, ‘What about that!’
‘I don’t know about that, but Zeno is going to shoot Nicholas if he doesn’t begin to take this seriously,’ Kathi said. And just as she spoke, everything happened.
Zeno, his face showing his impatience, lifted his bow and released first one and then a second arrow into the papingo and then, taking a third, increased his speed until he had overtaken both Nicholas and his victim, coating them with mud in the passing. Nicholas spluttered, clawing mud out of his eyes, and Julius, yelling, brought his horse cantering back into its circuit and prepared to aim at the papingo again. Zeno, now on the opposite side, launched an arrow. Nicholas, his face still masked with mud, armed his bow and lifted it to do the same, just as his horse lost its footing.
Four arrows flew. One, from Zeno, whizzed straight for the papingo. The second, from an ecstatic Julius, crazily split