Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [224]
Katelina had set out to ride there with four soldiers and no servant that could be detected. Waiting just outside Pharaclos, Nicholas let the small cavalcade pass and then followed, trotting easily on the horse which, after all, Boulaki’s aunt had managed to find for him. He suspected that, whatever the outcome, Boulaki’s aunt was sure of getting it back.
Not that Katelina’s escort made any secret, either, of their passage. They took the usual road north by the coast, passing through Malona and stopping at Arkhangelos. Only at Afandou, thirteen miles short of the City, did they turn west and begin the climb that would cross the ridge and lead down to Kalopetra. Nicholas wondered why Katelina had agreed to spend the night there. Perhaps her woman had been sent on ahead. Perhaps she had been told of a ship she must join. Perhaps, indeed, she had been induced to consider a pilgrimage. Going home to Tristão’s widow she could take a flower, a stone from his death-place. Well protected, in clear brilliant sunlight, the spot would hold no present terrors, and only a small debt of mourning.
It was a leisurely journey. Nicholas took his pace from the party he followed, and stopped when they did as the sun rose in the sky. Like them, he chose shade wherever possible, riding between olives and carobs, under massed and opulent lemons and the glossy leaves and choking perfume of oranges. He ate in a resinous pine grove, deep as fleece under his feet, and drowsed among cones, below an animal sheen of green needles. He put off time in a village, throwing dice in the shadow of yellow-green grapes, and bought a melon, and a plaited straw basket to hang from his saddle. He sat his horse talking to haymakers, and swished through dry grass in a rhythmical uproar of grasshoppers. He put up birds, and glimpsed sugarcane once, and identified the oil and incense of churches and finally came, as the sun stood past its zenith, to high places of silence, where he heard only the bray of an ass, and the remote, plodding clink of a bell and the soft, ruffled thud of his riding.
He knew by then that he was only one stage from his destination. He made his last stop, peeling off his soaked peasant’s shirt but not the knee-high leather boots that irked his ripped legs and feet. Then he withdrew his mind from its rest, and began to think again.
The ravine was half a mile long. He had seen it only in darkness, but he remembered where the ambush that had killed Tristão had been. They had shot him, and then had come down to look at the body. There could not be so many places in that particular gorge where mounted men could climb down at speed, and escape again. And Katelina would go there. They could depend on it.
He had no wish to come across the ambushers, or to disturb them. He believed what he had been told. They would not risk an attack on the girl. In case she survived, her guard would take care to act out the fiction. They would try to defend her, and fail, and be beaten off. Whatever danger she fell into then was not of their doing. He wondered how long it would be before they turned up at the gates of Kalopetra, nursing some spurious injuries. Not, he guessed, until nightfall. All the harder, by then, to find her or her body. In time, he resumed his dry shirt, and a sleeveless skin jacket given him by Boulaki’s aunt which might, she said sourly, just keep out a spent arrow. He had had to abandon the sword he had won at the castle, but he had a good skinning knife in his belt which would do very well, unless he was unlucky. He had also cut himself a stout switch. He didn’t expect to have trouble with men. His object was to arrive when the men had departed.
Ahead, the tracks of his quarry led downhill over slopes that in winter must have been slick with marsh-water and mud. Now they were patched with strong colour, shaded by trees and fed by the springs that combed down to unite