Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [291]
The ostrich hissed back at him. It had a small, fuzzy head, a beak like a hinge and pale, hostile eyes that reminded him of Tobie. The head topped a long twitching neck like a bellrope. Both were being carried up and down the box by a pair of thick, stalking legs with powerful elbows. Between neck and legs was something like a large chicken joint crossed with a pincushion. A shell-pink naked flap depended from either flank.
The pincushion was its plucked body. The sore-looking rump, the silly flaps, were where forty snow-white plumes and a mantle of fine glossy black had once proudly been flaunted. Someone, in the night, had pruned the Duke of Milan’s present. The ostrich was there, but there wasn’t a feather left on it.
It danced on its strong legs. It darted its beak through the spars, its eyes flashing. Every now and then it would kick, and the side of the box would vibrate and echo. Nicholas, weeping with laughter, reached down with the hay-rake to prod it.
And the door of the ostrich-box opened.
Tommaso, lost in bitterness, didn’t notice. The boy whooped. Julius leaped but was far, far too late. Neck stretched, the bird took its first step outside, and then its second. Tommaso whirled round. The boy ran forward shouting. The ostrich delivered its low, booming roar. And Nicholas, just as it took its third step and swung a leg for its fourth, launched himself from his perch and landed fair and square on its back as it passed him.
Julius yelled, and started to run. Nicholas yelled too, but in a different way – in a crowing sort of way that was all too familiar. The ostrich burst from the stables, toed its way over the paving and sprang, like a haunch escaped from the oven, through the big double doors and into Vlamynck Straete, with Nicholas crazily bouncing and hugging it.
Julius gave a gasp. He raced for the street where the ostrich, not yet into its stride, was darting from side to side in a haphazard way, impeded by vehicles trundling down from the Waterhalle. The ostrich boomed. The street blossomed, like a garden of sunflowers, with pale, turning faces. Capped heads and white-coifed heads began to surge up steps on either side, vanish through doors, squeeze between houses. A man with two bales on his back staggered out of the way and found himself jammed under the jut of a building. A wheelbarrow, left overturned, disgorged a torrent of round, glossy cheeses. One of them struck the ostrich on the leg and the ostrich lifted its foot and kicked irritably. A cask of quicksilver, left at a trapdoor, began to spout a glittering stream of liquid which almost certainly spelled ruin for somebody. Nicholas, still clinging, looked round as it happened. His face was pink with effort and happiness.
Julius croaked. He turned and raced back into the stables, sending grooms staggering. He wrenched open stalls and jumped bareback on the first horse he found with a harness. Then, already followed by others, he made out into the street and after Nicholas. Claes. After another mad escapade.
By then the ostrich wasn’t in sight, but you could tell where it had been from the split bales and dropped parcels. Balconies sported a sequence of cropped vines and munched pot-flowers and, twice, empty bird-cages hung drunkenly open. A corner shrine had toppled, leaving only a vase with some stalks in it.
Julius turned his horse and rode for the canal and was in time to see the ostrich emerging from the Augustinians’ gateway with Nicholas still on its back. It was moving extremely fast but was now wearing some sort of rein. It looked, from the distance, like the cord from a cassock.
One of the reasons why it was moving so fast was that there were by now several dogs at its heels. Every now and then the ostrich would pause to kick, and the dogs would skid out of the way. Then the ostrich would set off again, hissing and cackling. Julius, still some way behind, could see Nicholas clinging on with one hand