Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [227]
He looked at Katelina then, in absolute silence, for he knew why his presence meant nothing, except as a disturbance, and why the absence of her protectors meant less. He realised, too, something she didn’t know. If this valley bred moths, then it would attract and breed all the reptiles that fed on them. This was why men died; why Tristão, felled by a bite, became victim of a murderer’s arrow. Whoever planned this knew that Katelina was unlikely to survive. And as the thought came to him, he saw what already writhed about her slender kid slippers, the flowing shadows he had taken for reeds.
It was either one snake or two. He didn’t wait to find out. He plunged shouting towards her in a blizzard of spray, his knife out, his arm outflung in warning. He saw her jump back, her mouth open. Even then, she didn’t scream. She didn’t scream as he floundered out of the stream, and kicked one coiling green back while he stabbed the knife into a second reptile and killed it. Then he made a swift turn on his booted feet, to find the wounded snake upreared and facing him. The hairlike tongue quivered and threatened and the snake hissed and hissed.
He didn’t know, intent on his duel, that in inducing that hiss, he had released a signal of danger that would travel echoing through the whole valley. The gleaming, leathery head brushed his hand, darted up to his calves, coiled and uncoiled like a medal of rope. Even when he caught it again with his knife it lurched away, and he had to follow, cutting and stabbing until at length it lay at his feet. It was the only one left: if there were others, they had gone. As he looked down, a deep frilling sound filled the air; a sound of ghostly applause; a sound of ghostly alarm. He looked up. From every tree, leaf and bush the moths rose like goosefeathers sacked by the wind. They lifted, darkening and thickening until the green tunnel was roofed with brown, living insects, obscuring the green. Katelina began to scream, then.
The dark, trembling cloud overhead dyed the stream sullen and tawny: the twilight shadows about Katelina swung and darkened as the ceiling of insects responded, its instinct fine-tuned to her screams. Nicholas turned, sheathing his knife, disregarding the still, scaly bodies that, a moment ago, had seemed the real menace. As he did so, fragile outriders from above were descending, thickening, crowding, fanning his hair; alighting and clustering on his skin. Dry, fluttering wings entered his mouth and stuffed stifling into his nostrils. Katelina’s face, like his own, became a shell-mask of moths.
Her screams became spasmodic and clotted: he thought she was dying. He scoured her face clear with a single rough hand, his palm a mess of half-wings and hair feelers and bodies, while with the other he whipped closed the linen stuff of her veil, covering all of her, eyes, mouth and body so that her screams became stifled, then stopped. He ripped off his shirt and added that to her armoury, trapping her hands safely inside it. In a vibrating storm of brown taffeta, the whole body of moths now descended, first to the high trees, then the trunks, then lower, clasping and crowding each surface, mounded deep as fine shavings of tortoiseshell.
They settled on Katelina and on Nicholas, as he held her. They rustled into his lips and his hair, clustered into his eyes and the folds of his ears, heaped themselves, as if magnetised, on the fine banded linen