The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [304]
‘Jewels?’ she said.
‘I –’ he said, and stopped; she didn’t know why. Then he resumed, in the same voice as before. ‘If that is so, then let me reassure you. I know that he is my child.’
The sun, vast and red, had no heat in it. She didn’t refute it. There was no reason, now. She said musingly, ‘You knew all the time? Or suspected, and then testing, testing, became gradually certain. How typical, Nicholas. No one can tell, then, what you would have done to a true child of Simon’s. Drowned it, perhaps? Set the dogs on it?’
He said, ‘I could have forgiven you had it been Simon’s.’
The air they breathed was dyed red. Her throat closed. It made a sound, opening.
‘And now …?’ she said. ‘You came, you said, to make an end. But without me, you won’t find the boy. Not for years. By the time you find him, he will be someone else’s, like Henry.’
‘I might risk that,’ he said. But he had paused, for a moment, before speaking.
She spoke quickly, then. ‘What would you give, Nicholas, to share his childhood? Isn’t that what you are bargaining for, now that you know he is yours? And the stakes, surely, are higher. What would you give now to see him?’
He didn’t move. ‘I am sure you are going to tell me the price.’
‘Nothing impossible. The gold that you and Anselm Adorne think is here. You will, of course, have to find it before him; and remove it somehow from the monastery and transmit it to wherever I am.’
‘You are leaving?’
‘I thought the Patriarch would have told you. He and I are leaving this morning. Unless you take another decision.’
She watched him. Her life depended on what she had said, and how she had said it. On what he believed. On where they were.
He said, ‘I gave you half of all I have. I see that even that is not enough.’
Then he said, ‘I see you have bought time and, you hope, your life.’
She said, ‘I had a knife, too.’
‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘I should never kill where I love. And only simpletons kill where they hate. So I am to find Ochoa’s gold and give it to you? How should I find you?’
‘By the ring,’ she said. ‘But you would have to return it to me.’
He stood, his head bronzed, his face with the still, Celtic look she could not always remember. After a while he said, ‘Then give me your hand.’
Now it had come. Good or bad, the outcome was fixed. She stood while he crossed the short distance between them, and took her hand, and fitted the ring on her finger. The metal was cold. Then he said, ‘There was a ritual, the last time I did this.’
The embrace was all she expected: insult, threat, preliminary to what he had decided to do. His hands took hold of her back and her arm, forcing her close. She had started to pluck out her dagger but at this stage, it could be no more than a token. His grasp prevented a strike: she could do no more than maintain the point against the folds of his clothing. If she had wanted to kill him, she would have had to do it much earlier, in the dark.
His eyes were open. She held them; conveying all she felt of resistance without attempting to struggle against his continuing, altering touch. His remembered touch. By shape, by texture, by context she recognised one by one small familiarities to do with his hands, with his cheek, with his lips. In place of the intellectual game she was playing, a physical template suddenly locked sighingly into another; as if, lulled by instinct, this nerve or that muscle had begun to soften and sink. They stood, enclosed within an invisible mould, private to them, and sealed tight. The sky flamed and far below them, acre upon acre, the mountains flickered, welling into the light. They were on the Mount of the Lord; and the edge was one step away.
Nicholas said, ‘Walk over with me.’
The air was gold. A bird soared below, also ethereal; golden. His breath had checked, like that of a swimmer about to glide under water. (Below the sea of Zeeland, that summer, the act of love over and over, hungry as sharks under water.)
She said, ‘Go alone. I have a child.’
He freed her.
She stood cold on the brink, looking down upon the