Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [136]
He had just reached this conclusion when the icefloe stopped, and the barrel tilted, dropped, and smacked into freezing water. It entered his barrel at one end and left at the other, drenching and nearly choking him and leaving him in a rocking pool. The barrel floated, bumping into the bank. No one lifted it up. No one had noticed it.
Claes considered, dizzily. Then he straightened his legs and pushed them through the broken base of the barrel. The cold of the water was numbing. He braced his elbows inside the barrel and, using his legs, propelled himself silently along the lee of the bank. Somewhere near was a watering-slope, an incline from bank to water used by horses. There he could slip from the barrel and merge with the crowd. Half-drunk and soaking wet, with two of his enemies a few yards away. And perhaps the person or persons who had paid them.
He was so cold by now he could hardly breathe. Another irony, but he had nothing left to laugh with. The barrel bumped on the incline he was seeking, and he felt for the ground with his feet, and found it, and tried, stupid with cold, to push the barrel from him and emerge from it. He was attempting to do this, at the bottom of the ramp, when the light from the top of his keg was cut off by moving figures and someone took hold of his barrel quite firmly in a two-handed grip and rammed it down on him again, wrenching off the lid a moment after.
Before he could see who it was, his entire head had been obliterated by an object crammed down on top of it. A familiar voice said, crossly, “Are we to meet this drunkard everywhere? You! Call yourself a friend of Poppe?” The voice of Katelina van Borselen.
Poppe. The gingerbread seller in the barrel.
She said, “Three of you. Look. He can’t even stand.”
She didn’t know if he could walk. Slowly, he got to his feet, his body enclosed in the barrel, his head emerging, wearing whatever she had put on top of it. A carnival mask. A lot of feathers. A man’s voice said, “I took Poppe home hours ago. I thought he was home.”
“Well, he’s got out again. Can’t you see?”
Christ. A child’s voice this time. The sister. The two van Borselen girls must be there.
Gelis. Of course. Gelis must have seen from the tower. And recognised the two pseudo-drunkards. And warned her elder sister not to give him away. But how were they going to explain Poppe soaking wet in a soaking-wet barrel? They didn’t need to explain it. Just to get him surrounded by a helpful crowd who thought he was Poppe. That way, no one could harm him. Until they got to Poppe’s house.
The barrel was incredibly heavy. Perhaps the punishment barrel had handles inside. Or a special lid, or rests for the shoulders. He had to half-carry this one, with people bumping into him on either side and behind. There seemed to be a small crowd willing to escort him. A popular fellow, Poppe. He wondered where he lived. He realised he was stumbling regularly and, but for the crowd, would be lurching all over the road. Occasionally, through the slits in his mask, he would glimpse the child’s unlovely face, pasty with worry. And sometimes the demoiselle’s, with a line between the black brows, but no worry. Rather a look of the fiercest concentration.
People were slowing. People were stopping. The house of Poppe. With Poppe asleep in bed no doubt inside, with his wife and family. Why was the demoiselle unworried? She had come to one side of him, he saw. And the child Gelis had come to the other. Someone said “Up!”
The barrel rose in the air and the demoiselle said, “Get out and run!”
It was more a case, he wished to submit, of ducking vaguely and falling