Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [225]
It was what Nicholas saw as swinging out from the start of the gorge, he approached its edge further down, where the thunder of water told him the waterfall was. His horse tied out of sight, he moved circumspectly to the side and looked over.
Chapter 32
HE HAD FORGOTTEN how vast the trees were, growing close in the long, winding chasm where the stream ran. Some had fallen, their gnarled boles swollen with scaly protuberances, their hollows hummocked with webs. Rafts of pebbles divided the stream: brilliant ferns grew at its edges; moss gloved everything like double-cut velvet, sheeting the walls of the ravine and weeping harp-music under the organ-voice of the fall. To his right, the ladder of water blocked his view. To the left, so far as the stream ran before turning into the trees, the valley seemed to be empty.
When Katelina’s party came, they would approach from the opposite side, where there was room for four men and a girl to lead their horses down to the small grassy strand where Diniz’s father had died. As for himself, the best hiding-place was down there, at the foot of the fall. Beyond the pool, it would be easy to cross.
That, of course, meant he had to climb down. Nicholas, sighing, turned and started to hand himself watchfully from rock to rock, the mist from the cascade acceptably beading his skin and the noise unacceptably deadening his hearing, so that he spent half the descent with his chin turned on his shoulder. No one came. He dug his fingers without pleasure into the caked earth by a clump of pale cyclamen, and a chaffinch rattled up, calling. Sunlight jumped in and out of his eyes, and tattooed his arms with a bright, fickle yellow. He persevered doggedly, swearing each time he dug in his toes and swearing again as he felt the pull on his shoulder and neck. After what seemed far too long he landed on the rocks by the edge of the fall, where the foam dashed and winked and, beyond, the pool lay still and green. Beyond that, the stream raced ahead on its business, winding into the green dappled gloom among boulders and bushes, creepers and the dark trunks of trees. Among the trees, someone was standing.
Katelina, alone. Which was impossible.
Katelina standing in silence, staring at him. Since he had just been performing in full public glare like a lizard, this was not surprising. Katelina staring at him and about to be joined, he assumed, by her four escorts, all prepared to be ambushed and chased off. This was disastrous.
She had betrayed him before, and there was every reason why she should betray him again. He gave a fast, despairing look at the cliff down which he had just climbed, and decided he was damned if he would climb it again. He thought, letting the waterfall rinse off his hands, that if he could wade over the pool, he might be able to escape round the fall on that side. He moved, and she put both hands up in terrified warning to stop him.
She put them up gradually, like a swimmer. Her face was pallid in the humid green dusk. She didn’t look venomous, she looked stricken. He cast a glance over her head. No sound; no movement. Well, no movement. Sound he could scarcely hear, where he was. He stared sightlessly at her, considering. No sight of her escort: but there should be, by now. No sign of their attackers, as he’d expected. But on the steep slope behind her, the slithering track where one person had escaped down from the brink, a track that ended where Katelina stood. And above on the skyline, a mess of broken boughs and tumbled clods as if a struggle had occurred beyond there between more than a few horsemen. And then, as he sought to decipher it all, he became aware of a vibration that was not a sound under his feet. The pounding of many hooves, making