Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [221]
You shouldn’t water plants until evening. But he had given them water, from the casting-bottle he had made her lay down, and from which rose a slight acrid odour, barely evident. There was another scent, too. It came from his skin: a tinge of costly sweet oils she had met only once, on a woman.
A black cone, and sweet oil, and sugar. She had nothing to fear from him, it was true. She said, ‘I told someone to come for me. Wait. I’ll send them away.’
Outside, the white pillars swam in the heat. She had, of course, tried to water the plants in the evening, but only once. Her servant had brought her a lamp, and the Hospitallers had come, black and white, treading two by two from the church of St John, so that incense and myrtle mingled in the acropolis, and taper light touched all its columns. There, where Athene, born of a hatchet-blow, had once received sacrifice, she had been invited to stand with the Knights to observe the birth of the moon from the sea. In their robes, they had watched it in silence, from the appearance of the first unlikely rim until the whole monstrous disc floated up, gold and washed-grey and rust in a night of no colour. When it hung high, a moon-path appeared on the water, with chains of glittering wave-light swirling across it, sensual as Nubian dancers wrapped in gold tissues. Dancers ravishing as a princess of Naxos, or a scion of Trebizond, or James, King of Cyprus, King of Scorpions. And round the lamps, other dancers had fluttered.
But today the sea was blue, and the sun burned as she went on her errand. She thought, when she went back, to find the shed empty, although she had been gone for no more than a moment, but he was still there, his eyes scanning her face. He wore, as she had already guessed, a stolen robe of the Knights of St John. She said, ‘Why did you stay?’ in both anger and anguish.
And Nicholas, stirring, said, ‘In case you had wanted me. But you don’t.’
She had betrayed him, and another man perhaps would have struck her. But there was no anger now on his face; only the aspects of thought translating itself into action. There had been, for a moment, a shadow that was more wistful than bitter. She stepped aside to let him pass, running silently, although she knew that by now he would never escape. Already, in the Commander’s palace below, men had roused to the alarm she had given. There was only one way out of the citadel, and that was down through the castle, and past the guard at the drawbridge, and down the staircase to the exedra with its ancient carved ship and its notice, vouchsafing to Hagesandros son of Mikion the privilege of a front seat at festivals for services rendered. It seemed likely that Nicholas son of nobody was about to receive a front seat at this rite for nothing.
He had gone only a short way when she saw a sword flash in the sun and a guard leaped out from a doorway in his path. Only one man, but armed. Then she saw that Nicholas, too, had steel in one hand: a knife he must have worn under the robes and which he gripped in his left hand and not his right so that the stab, when it came, took the soldier quite by surprise. The man staggered and fell. As he did so, Nicholas wrenched the sword from his grasp and ran on.
By now, the shouting below drilled through the air: rattling Greek from the garrison; loud, careful Greek from as many of the twelve Knights as were on their feet, with their swords out of the scabbard. She had intended to deliver her tormentor to the jurisdiction of the Order. She had intended to shut the door somehow, for ever, between Nicholas and herself. It struck her, now, that any excited soldier would be forgiven for executing his own summary justice. She stood transfixed under the eaves of the church with their whitened plaster of nests and glimpsed Nicholas vander Poele as he raced down the steps, and heard the challenge, and then the clatter of swords, now out of her view. Heard shouting, heard running footsteps, heard more swordplay and then, for a