Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [266]
A calm, smiling, cruel master. A merchant who had tried to ruin the Charetty business and who, in his own extremity, was now intent on acquiring it. An unpleasant merchant with a sword in his hand, who wasted no words on him at all, but simply walked forward, with purpose, to kill him.
There was a hand gripping his arm, and a knife at his back. Both belonged to the man whose shoulder he’d stabbed. The grip on his arm was numbing in its strength. But the knife was in the grasp of the weakened hand.
Nicholas flung all his weight backwards, not forwards. His elbow ground into the man’s wounded shoulder. He felt the blade slide into his body, but there was no force behind it. The man holding him yelled, and let go. And as he yelled, Nicholas dragged the knife from his enemy’s hand and used it on him.
The man fell. Jaak de Fleury had a sword. His own weapon lay on the ground just beyond. Nicholas dived and got it, and swerved as Jaak de Fleury’s blade hissed over his head. He stood, sword in hand, as he had learned to hold it, and parried, and heard the orderly clash, as you heard it on the practice ground, over and over.
In this, as in everything else, he had no experience to set against the long lives of his betters. He had only his brain, which absorbed instruction and held it, for ever.
On the broken field where once he had struggled, his nails blue, to push virgin cloth in a vat, to nurture blithely the glories of the maligned urine tub, to share meat and ale and obscene and shattering jokes with his gossips, he was stepping, shifting, sliding, sword in hand, protecting himself as best he could from the great-uncle who was trying to kill him.
Who was thirty years older than he was.
“You would like to be able to fight him? To beat him? To overpower him?” Marian de Charetty had said.
And he had answered, “If I’m afraid of him, I’m afraid for all time.”
It was true. The fear beaten into him at seven would never go.
Despite the fever, despite the strain of that miserable journey, despite Jaak de Charetty’s powerful frame and trained, tutored grasp of his weapon, he, Nicholas was thirty years younger, and had been recently placed in possession of some very select tricks of swordsmanship. But what had that to do with it? If he killed Jaak de Fleury, he killed his own blood, his kinsman. And left untouched his fear.
He parried and parried again. He didn’t know what to do.
Jaak de Fleury, his face a shining confection of sweat, pink as sugar, saw it and, panting, smiled. He shifted position, agile, muscular. He fought without his robe, broad-shouldered in his splendid doublet. The puffed silken sleeves of his shirt swung against the great muscles of his upper arms, and the jewels on his high collar sparkled. The point of his sword arrived again and again. And again, Nicholas parried.
From the ruined house, far behind him, a man’s voice screamed at full pitch, and went on screaming, louder and nearer. Jaak de Fleury glanced round. In a moment Nicholas, too, looked over his shoulder.
The figure springing from the tumbled stones, red hair beating, was Lionetto. Lionetto! And the two figures running behind, drawing their swords, were Julius, blessed Julius, and Gregorio.
How had they found him?
The horse.
What in God’s name was Lionetto doing here? That was easy. Looking for Nicholas. Lionetto had good reason, too, to want to kill Nicholas. Only Nicholas hadn’t known that he knew it …
He couldn’t fight two men. He hadn’t the skill to defeat Lionetto by himself, never mind with Jaak at his side. And however fast they ran, Julius and Gregorio couldn’t get to him in time. So he was going to die. Not from a beating. From the adult equivalent of a beating, which you got when you meddled with adults’ affairs.
“Traitor!” Lionetto was shouting. “Whoreson! Rascally scum! Steal a soldier’s money, then! Break your trust! Empty his purse and betray him! Oh, yes. Do all of that. But not to Lionetto. Not to Lionetto, my friend.”
Captain Lionetto had arrived. He stood, sword in hand, the third point of a triangle formed by himself