Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [218]
‘She was frightened,’ Primaflora said. ‘Perhaps you frightened her. Perhaps she gave up all hope of getting rid of you. Perhaps she thought Simon needed her, or that alone she couldn’t break down you or your business. Perhaps she knew that Zacco would force her to leave empty-handed, and the Genoese would be more sympathetic.’
Empty-handed. Her small hands eased and pressed over his skin, and the fumes hung in his brain. His eyes suddenly opened.
Primaflora laughed. ‘Are you so tired? The sugarcane cuttings, my dear, that are going to ruin your business and Zacco’s. That was why she threw herself on the mercy of the Genoese. They are all up there, in the castle at Lindos, being watered daily by order of Imperiale Doria until a ship comes to take her to Portugal. Why else are you here?’
‘For you,’ he said. ‘If you will come.’
The hands smoothed and smoothed without faltering. She said, ‘As your mistress?’
His eyes remained open, lowered on his own hands. ‘As my wife,’ he said. ‘If that did not demean you.’
The hands stopped. She said. ‘Niccolò?’
He turned and the sun, catching his body, dazzled into his eyes. She stood in a thumbprint of light and said, ‘There is no need.’
He lay, his arms at his sides and said, ‘I must go back. Zacco would honour you. Only the plants must be destroyed, and the Flemish woman made free to leave on the first boat that arrives. Otherwise her husband will come, and cause trouble.’
She opened her rouged palms above him, and let the supple fingers drift down, wayward as the trickling oil. She said, ‘For this?’
He moved involuntarily; and stilled; and smiled with tightened lids. ‘Lady? Of course.’
She said, ‘I require no fee of marriage. I shall come back with you to Cyprus.’
‘When?’ he said, selecting a breath. He opened his eyes.
She withdrew her slow, trailing hands and stood, studying him. ‘When you are less indolent, my dear,’ said Primaflora. ‘When you have done what you came to do. I can guide you into the castle. I can find you a boat to take us to Cyprus, once the demoiselle has sailed for home. But that may take a long time.’
‘Guide me to the castle,’ Nicholas said. ‘And when I am less indolent, find us a boat to take us to Cyprus. Katelina can find her own way home.’
By then, he knew he could expect nothing more, having given her, he thought, what she wanted. He turned on his face when she left him, and in time his body obeyed him; and he lay as still as if he were sick in a pawnshop in Sluys, and had just met Simon of Kilmirren, and had just been introduced to a punishment from which there seemed no release.
Chapter 31
IT WAS TRUE that Katelina van Borselen was frightened. Her fear had followed her here, to the sea crag at Lindos where the Castle of the Knights of St John shared its perch with the stones of Byzantium and the temple blocks of the Sanctuary of Athene, which were more ancient still. Her fear was not for Simon, or Diniz, or the destiny of her child. She was afraid of the black cone in the sanctuary of Paphos, and of what she had felt there.
Now Fate had set before her another altar. There, in the sunlight alone, while the Knights slumbered or prayed and the sounds from the village below hardly rose above the hiss of the cicadas, Katelina gazed down the gnarled rock to the sea, and wondered how either Athene or Aphrodite would have fared with a sharp-tongued mother she hated; and a sullen sister, and a hot-tempered, infertile husband. It would have reduced Aphrodite, for a start.
To her right, past the boat-crowded pool of St Paul, the sea stretched blue to the next misty headland and disappeared south into haze. Below the rock on her left lay the white scimitar of a strand, with beached boats cocked along it, and antlike figures asleep in their shade with the floss of netting around them. The sea, seen from above, was of a blue deep enough to be purple, paling as it washed to the beach over patches of grape-coloured rock. In other places, it was blue-green as malachite. A dyer’s