The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [159]
The slower sledges were sawing in front of him. He cracked his whip, passing one; and was nearly caught between the second and third as they veered blearily towards a collision. He saw, looking back, that the reindeer, with more sense than their drivers, had separated them. And looking ahead, that he had almost caught up with two others, but that the four flying sledges in front were farther off than they had ever been, and nearly at the spina, the turning-post of the race.
The animal pulling him, whip-cracking or not, had settled down to its gait, and although God knew it was as fast as he ever wanted to travel again, it was not fast enough. Diccon Chancellor, a decent and clear-thinking man, lifted the iron-shod stick in his hand, and jabbed the powerful, hairy beast in its haunches. The deer bucked and the sledge skidded, jumping and rocking; touched another and swung back once and then twice like a leadline; and finally shot forward, throwing him clean off his balance, and continued to race forward, as the reindeer took to his heels.
Chancellor lunged for the reins. His stick was gone. His ribs felt bruised on one side where he had fallen. He was aware of that not at all. His gaze was painfully ahead, at the dark huddle of sledges even now skimming up to the spina, a flash of white which was the Voevoda among them. He would never overtake them but sooner than he had hoped—in seconds—he would be face to face with them, and able to give Lymond his warning. A warning which now, half-way through the race began to seem faintly silly. A warning he might have killed himself just now in a feverish endeavour to give, when of course the whole notion was fantasy. Chancellor’s mind, at last taking control over his imagination, caused his grip of the taut reins to slacken, although the deer, alarmed and resentful, still galloped on.
And in that moment, high, unseen above that vast yellow moon, Slata Baba swept hunting down.
They did not know until later how hungry she was: how for days her food had been stinted. Or how angry; thrown from an inexpert fist from the dark lee of a shed on the island to rise one, two, three hundred feet into the moonbright searing cold of the night and hang, looking down at the white, frozen river, and the animals which fled across it, thick, long-legged and ungainly, their rhizomed shadows flowing beside them.
Deer. Her prey and her quarry, which she alone of the hunting birds had the power to attack; whose blood she would taste and whose flesh she would tear until the beast stumbled and fell and her master would come with his knife and throw her her portion. She picked the victim she wanted among the bunched animals in the front of the concourse, banked a little, her wings half open and rigid, and then, her talons cupped, fell like a knife.
In the last moments of her fall Lymond saw her and, shouting, swept his stick in the air. Had she been aiming for his deer, he might have diverted her. But she was not. As the men racing beside him glanced round there was a long, echoing hoot, followed by a chain of high, panting squeals mixed with a hissing and something else, like the sound of a cloak thrown about by the wind. The antlered head of the deer next to Lymond’s was invested with a demoniac presence, dark and vengeful as the Stymphalian Bird with wings, beak and claws of iron; piercing eye and brain with its spears; sucking out sense, air and life with the bat of its murderous pinions.
The deer screamed, tossing its head, bowed with the terrible weight and twisting, ran maddened straight across the course of the oncoming sledges. As it did so its own sledge overturned, throwing the Lapp it was carrying under the oncoming hooves. The sledge jumped, freed of its weight; cracking against the stamping legs round about it; throwing them off balance in turn while the reindeer, grunting and mewing, ran jarring directly into another beast’s shoulder.
The shock of it dislodged the eagle. As its victim crashed