Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [226]
The sound, he had to assume, of Katelina’s absconding escort. It had all happened as Persefoni foretold. Their sham fight had taken place while his ears had been closed by the waterfall. Katelina had been persuaded to run downhill to safety while her guards had met their expected attackers, and after some loud, harmless fighting they’d left. So she found herself alone, she thought, with the one man in the world who had good reason to hurt her.
He might be wrong, in which case he could hardly risk yelling a question. He might be right, and every step she took away from him would place her in danger. Nicholas turned his back on the roar of the waterfall and began, as calmly as possible, to walk down his side of the ravine towards her. All the time he was moving she repeated, with a sort of despair, the slow, urgent motion to halt him, and followed it with a finger to her lips.
Her fear was not connected with him; or not directly. She wanted silence. He halted, baffled. Mime seemed to be the only solution. He pointed uphill behind her, and unsheathing a non-existent sword, conducted a fight with it. He ended with his outspread hand frozen over his head, like a bad acrobat inviting applause, and raised his brows in wordless enquiry.
Across the stream, Katelina was not so far away. He could see now that her face was hollow with strain. She wore a scarlet silk cord round her head, binding a linen veil striped with embroidery, of the kind that Fiorenza and Valenza used as a cloak when they had the fancy to be taken for Greeks. Her grass-stained skirt, tied up at one side for riding, revealed pale woven hose and embroidered kid slippers, sunk among shadowy reeds. She herself seemed oblivious to the wet, uneven ground at her feet. She put her hands fearfully to the cloth at her ears, and again to her lips and finally, with another gradual gesture, turned towards the top of the cliff and pushed the air away from herself, shaking her head with dreamlike urgency.
So her escort and her assailants had gone – or else she wanted him to think that they had.
No, they had gone. No one could imitate the way she looked now. And if they were going when he first heard their hooves, they must be well out of earshot by now. Before he called to her, he thought it as well to listen. Away from the rush of the cataract the green tunnel they occupied seemed filled by a thunderous quiet. The stream produced glottal sounds in a hollow voice. Far out of sight, larksong trembled. Invisible grasshoppers buzzed. In the distance, water eased unctuously over the fall, dark as snail-oil, and dropped in grey and white streaks to the pool. Near at hand, a boulder lay in the water, split, misshapen, ochre-grey dappled with lichenous pebbles.
The atmosphere steamed as the plant-house at Lindos had done, releasing a fungoid smell of earth and leaves, of hidden flowers, of animal life; of decay. Among it all was a scent that he couldn’t identify, pungent yet sweet as molasses. For a brief, livid moment, he wondered what on earth he was doing here, and what was happening in Cyprus without him. He saw Katelina’s face, and thought she might faint, and then, concentrating at last, realised what she was staring at; what she was trying to tell him.
It had nothing to do with human danger, or soldiers. It had to do with this valley. The boulder he had thought scaled with growth was quilted with something other than lichen. The moss at his back was a speckled, smothering dun instead of emerald green. The bulbous trunk of the tree at his shoulder was dressed in a deep, ruffled garment of brown seamed with yellow, cut with layer on layer of dagging, fine as pastry, fine as shells made of organdie. The stuff clothed the tree to the top and, when he lifted his head, he saw that its leaves, too, were lined with clustering petals of brown heart-shaped silk, veined with chrome. Then he looked again, and saw that, as if heaped with lice, the soft speckled stuff on the tree and the rock and the boulder was full of small movements. There was a prickling