The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [62]
“And you have the other with mine. What mistake?” Nicholas said.
This time, the silence was longer. The red light flashed from the steel into their eyes. The bodies and heads, pressing about, seemed suffused by it. The jewel in Pagano’s hat flashed and flashed again.
It was not, Julius saw, being lit by the fire or the knife blade. It was catching the light from the harbour. From, no doubt, the basket-light on its post at the mole.
It was not catching the light from the mole. It was throwing back fire from a fire on the water itself. From a ship on the water. From a great galley at anchor. From the Ciaretti, enfolded in crimson-shot smoke.
Their ship was in flames.
Chapter 10
BY THE TIME Julius drew breath, others had shouted, and men were turning, alarmed, towards the glare in the harbour. At first, no one seemed to move. Julius struggled, hammering with his fists on the shoulders of others until suddenly he was loosened as men started forward. The rest of the town had already roused. Fire was serious. Modon had seen fire often before. Trumpets blew from the walls. Men and women emerged from their houses. The ways down to the gates and the shore carried a growing concourse of people. Only Nicholas didn’t run. He stood, a boulder in a stampede, and stared over and beyond the moving heads of the crowd to a small figure just at its edge.
Julius saw him. Nicholas was staring at Doria’s page. At the black servant Noah. Or perhaps at the white who, Julius saw, broke away presently, grinning. The next moment, both pages had turned and, racing away from the crowd edge, had vanished. Then Nicholas started to run, but not to the shore. Head lowered, blunt as a ram, he drove across the thrust of the crowd, in the direction the pages had taken. It was, of course, senseless: a belabouring progress against close-packed, hurrying people that made no speed at all. Julius, making use of his wake, overtook him. He seized an elbow and roared. “Look! The Ciaretti’s on fire!”
Nicholas paid no attention. His eyes, fixed ahead, were searching the further side of the crowd. Julius struck him and Nicholas wheeled. Julius dropped his arms. Then, saying nothing, Nicholas turned and continued his incongruous charge in the same direction as before. Julius stood in the torchlight and stared after him, rocking under the impact of other men’s bodies. Tobie crashed into him, grabbed him and said, “I saw that.”
Julius said, “Saw him ready to kill me?”
Tobie got his hand up and, declaration of war, hauled off his cap. His hairless scalp glistened. “You go,” he said. “Leave him to the company doctor.”
A second passed, and then Julius said, “Yes,” and set off. Over his shoulder he saw Tobie begin, in his turn, to force his way after Nicholas. Who had lost his wits, or suffered a fit. Who had received notification, you might say, that hell existed and he was to prove it. Rarely fanciful, Julius didn’t like what he had seen in Nicholas’s face.
When Tobie caught him, Nicholas had struck beyond the last, busy pathway and was casting through alleys in the flickering darkness. The glare from the burning Ciaretti distorted everything. Leaping from one inky shadow to the next were goats which ought to be people; cats which were possibly children; men and women who showed their fear and resentment when a foreign giant dashed headlong between them and ran on in silence, followed by a smaller man without the price of a hat. When Nicholas began to slow, Tobie slowed also, hoping that matters were returning to normal. Against that, Nicholas had thrown not a glance towards the distant seawall, and the crawling column of red that disfigured the night sky beyond it.
Nicholas stopped. Breathing hard, Tobie advanced. He said, “What did you see?”
A man winded by effort will pant. Instead, Nicholas stood taking in air in erratic and terror-filled spasms, as if escaping from something rather than running towards it. He was also shaking.
Tobie walked round and stood firmly in front of him, scanning his face.