Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [134]
If it was as thick as that everywhere. The lid, what about that? Wriggle. Breathe slowly. Lift one hand, then the other. Explore.
Not just wood, but a familiar smell. Not a rectangle. Not the smell of corruption. A smell as frail as the spoonful of air that brought it to him, with a crazy, commonplace association. With girls. With taverns. With good times in the past. The smell of malmsey wine. He wasn’t in a coffin. He was in a keg.
He wanted to laugh, but kept lapsing out of awareness. His brain said, “If …”
He forgot what he was thinking about.
He remembered. His brain said, “If it’s a keg …”
It was important, so he hung on to it. He clenched his hands. He took long, shallow breaths full of alcohol fumes, and wanted to laugh again, and stopped himself. If it was a keg, there ought to be a bung.
Feel. His stiff hands brushed over the wine-roughened curves. No bung. Move. That was harder. That meant shift, and half-sleep, and wake up, and shift again. When he slept, his head and his chest stopped hurting him. Why had he moved?
The reason eluded him. Trouble receded. He lay, gasping occasionally and pressing his hand on his chest. The back of his hand brushed against something. Against nothing. Against a hole.
The bung. That was what he was looking for.
He lifted his hand with enormous lethargy and pushed his fingers into the hole. Through the hole. Out through the other side of the barrel and into another body of wood. Not a bung. The side of another – another two barrels.
He was in a keg with an open hole in the side. But the keg was upside down among others and the open hole covered. He couldn’t break out. If he wanted air, he had to roll the cask over. Even if he rolled it over, other barrels above him might block the hole just the same. The effort of rolling it over might use up all the air he had. If he fainted for good, he would suffocate.
All right. If he was going to use air, why not shout with it? But how far would a shout carry from a pile of barrels? Were the barrels even in Bruges? Near passers-by? Near anyone? If he used the same energy to try to alter the way the keg was lying, the noise, perhaps, would be just as great?
It wasn’t thinking; it was more in the nature of a long, disconnected dream. He reached that point. Then, carefully, he drew into his lungs all that was left of air in his prison. And lifting himself, flung himself bodily against the curved walls of the barrel, sideways, downwards, with all the strength he could gather.
Wood boomed against wood. Inside his prison the noise echoed like Cambier’s cannon, exploding inside his ringing head. His teeth rattled with the jar of barrel meeting barrel and then rattled again as there was another echoing thud. His keg had struck its neighbour and had been hit by another.
A third collision followed, shaking him from side to side like a bird in its shell. His knees and shoulders hammered against the oaken staves and his split cheek suddenly took the brunt: even as he gasped, he realised what it meant. The keg had turned partly over.
Then he had no idea what was happening, because the keg was kicking and jolting in a succession of unbearable thuds like a tree being punished by axe-blows. His brain, deadened by pain and by airlessness, ceased to tell him anything. The movement, like a tree falling, became increasingly languid. The thuds, spaced out, became slower and heavier. The last, just above one of his shoulders, actually made itself felt through the demoiselle de Charetty’s blue cloth. The corner of another barrel had burst through his own, and come to rest on his shoulder.
His new blue jacket. She would have it mended. It would do for someone else. Or Felix’s dogbasket. He went to sleep. Poor Tilde. He woke.
He wasn’t gasping. His head ached, and his shoulder.