The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [146]
Since duty required it, he passed indoors with the rest. The goodwill of the Semples was essential but, as the afternoon waned, he saw that Nicholas was concealing impatience. They were close to Beltrees and the tower he was building. In the nature of things, he must be anxious to see it, for it was plain that his stay in Scotland was not going to be brief. He had said he was returning to Bruges. He had not said which month, or which year. Eventually he stood and made his excuses, and finally they all resumed their horses outside, and the last part of their journey began.
It was short. They rode along the south shore of the loch, the sinking sun flashing gold in the reeds and on the moorhen spinning furrows among them. Far away, fish were rising. Elliotstoun was a mile and more behind them when Oliver Semple turned his back on the water and put his horse to a flowery lane that meandered uphill between alder and thorn, winged with leaflets.
It was very quiet. Twice they smelled wood smoke and heard distant barking, and once a woman milking a cow turned her head slowly to watch them. Her face lay like a coin on sheared velvet. No one spoke. Above their heads a blackbird decided to make a declaration of joy and did so like one of Will Roger’s mellower clarions. The crowded houses of Bruges seemed by comparison a russet Necropolis. Poring over papers, exercising the legal, the actuarial skills, Gregorio had failed to allow for enchantment.
‘Wait,’ said Nicholas. He spoke as if he knew what Gregorio was thinking. He did not look round.
Wait.
The lane, ascending its last, indolent curve, began to bring them to the crown of the long, flanking ridge they had been climbing. For a moment, looking back in the leonine light, Gregorio saw loch and valley changed, as the woman had been, into something of Byzantine richness; water transmuted to satin; grass to fur, set with escarpments of topaz and onyx, studded with beads and blisters of gold. His heart filled, so that when his horse stumbled, he all but left the saddle. Oliver Semple lifted his voice. ‘And here we are. But you need to go canny, my masters. These God-damned carts fairly gut the fairway from under you.’
The lane had gone. Instead, in a welter of churned stones and mud, a wide black highway had taken its place, driving along the spine of the ridge from the west, torn-up bush and shorn stubs at its edges. Tracks from it ploughed down the slope at their feet, descending into a distant depression. And in the depression, hell had been re-created.
Sprawled before him, raw in the sun, Gregorio saw a seething carcass set on a smoke-blackened eminence. Vibrations of sound shook the air. The air itself had turned rotten; the stench made him cough. The shock made him dry-mouthed with nausea.
‘I knew you would like it,’ said Nicholas de Fleury.
The illusion, of course, lasted only a moment. Later, he was to wonder at his own strange reaction, and at the conviction he had that Nicholas had somehow brought it about. What he had seen was only a massive building in embryo. The ribs were scaffolding; the skeletal frieze printing the sky was formed of wheels and pulleys, cranes and windlasses; the maggots, in cap, hose and tunic, were workers.
The haze that wreathed it came from lime-dust and cook-fires and furnaces, and the smell from the turf huts, the shelters, the horse-lines and the stables that clustered below. The buzz was human conversation, rising above the squeak of windlass, the blows of hammer and chisel, the clack of tumbling stone. It included laughter and the voices of women. He could see two of them scaling the rise, a basket of washing between them, their skirts kirtled up to the thigh. He could see a third at the door of her hut, speaking round her raised, dimpled elbows