Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [322]
He found no friendly backwaters, and they did not wait for him. Instead, through the leaden gloom and the rain, there rose behind him a pillar of water higher than any before, which arched its glossy neck and crashed down in foam at his back, together with all it contained. It hurled him forward, and he hit rock after rock and went under. Rising, retching and coughing, once more, he saw the whitened water travelling onwards with its own grinding roar. The boom of it was like the boom of taut sails in a gale. But this ship was without crew and without rudder.
He sank again, and hit his last rock. He didn’t know, lurching backwards, that the afterwave was about to pick him up and throw him, half conscious, into just such a shallow lade as he had imagined. He lay there, half on silt, half in water. When he stirred, not long after, it was to find the rain had stopped; the water had loosened its grip; and the level was lower. Only the boughs of trees, high on the bank, showed where the last block of water had passed.
He did not think he could move, but he did; fanning into the water until the stream received him again, and he swam. He was close to the confluence when his gorged eyes perceived the cradle of boughs that had been cast up on the slope of one bank, and settled there, half out of the water.
Someone was sleeping there, lifted into it perhaps by a wave. Then he saw that there was not one person, but two.
It took a long time to reach them. He would think he had progressed; and then a surge would buffet his shoulders and snatch at his limbs and the nest would recede, so that he had to try all over again. When he touched the embankment, he could hardly climb to the ledge, and grasped at bushes as he made his way over and knelt. But by then, he knew what he would see.
Both men were fair, but he thought that nothing in life could ever approach the matchless purity of the young face, its fine bones upturned to the sky, the heavy lids closed, the soft lips parted a little, as if desiring to speak.
Simon lay on his breast, as he must have arrived, lifting himself with the last of his strength to gather the boy safe from harm; and then sinking down, his eyes open, to weep.
His eyes were still open, blue in the face which, at the last, had lost all its petulance. And Henry’s gilt hair, loosed and fallen over his shoulder, was interwoven and mixed with the fair hair of Simon de St Pol. Both were dead.
ANSELM ADORNE CLIMBED down before anyone else, and knelt in silence, his hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. Then, having permission, he signed for his men. He and his captain drew Simon from the place of his finest passage of arms: the act of chivalry completed not for his own glory, but for the sake of another. But only Nicholas laid tender hands on the boy, and lifted him, and carried him uphill himself, aided by steadying arms. At the top, there were litters.
Andro lay in one, his eyes closed, but breathing still. Two more, drawn well aside, received those who were not. Men brought cloaks to cover the crushed and torn bodies. You could tell how beautiful they had been. Fair; so fair.
Nicholas’s own clothing, too, was in shreds. As he knelt back from the pallet, he felt Adorne’s hands on his shoulders, moving lightly to explore the bloody hacks and gouges and misshapen contusions that he could see but not, as yet, feel. Then someone, coming with