The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [361]
The mild February sun glittered on everything. It glowed upon the drifting headdresses of chiffon, feathers and fur; upon the grandiloquent hats burgeoning aloft into tall sheaves of plumes; upon globes and hoops and castles of saye; whorls of satin, winged fantasies sparkling with sequins. It flashed upon foil and wire and ribbons of silver and gold; turned a wand of white gauze incandescent and played the shadows of giants and angels upon the silken white membranes of tents.
The noise echoed under the blue slots of sky in the alleys and expanded into the air of the piazzas: the roar of talking and laughter, the surge of music, the patter of drums. And scent and colour jostled together, strident as noise: musk and ultramarine and magenta, turquoise and amber, iris, cedar and emerald, frangipani and violet and rose.
Gelis said, ‘You can’t do it, can you? He’s gone.’
It was not, for once, the voice of challenge, of scorn. Nicholas said, ‘I am going to try.’ Then he said, ‘Why do you care?’ A child passed, asleep on someone’s shoulder, its garland cock-eyed. There had been a group of small boys on a bridge, being helped to pelt one another with rose-water eggs: the fallen shells conducted a long swaying dance in the water. There were children everywhere, winged like angels, padded like elves. But he felt nothing; nothing.
She said, ‘I care because he is mine.’
‘And I don’t?’ She had sent him to Cyprus.
She said, ‘I don’t know, Nicholas, what you want him for. I hope I never find out.’
They were in a crowded, shadowy lane. At the end, brilliant in sunshine, a masked youth leaned on the base of a pillar, one hand at the pipe in his mouth, the other tapping the little tambour which hung at his waist. As they came near he leaped down and led the way dancing, drawing the column of people behind him like an enchanter to the next play. From the curve of a bridge a tambourine suddenly rattled, and the strings of a guitar summoned, beckoned. The batocio stirred and flickered and turned but gave him no news. There were too many people. Holding his concentration, his senses sickened and swam. She put her hand surprisingly on his wrist and said, ‘Stop.’
There was a great panelled door at his side, and he stumbled and leaned back against it. She released his wrist and stopped, too. The crowd continued to pass: cloaks, sleeves, trains of damask and silver; fans and muffs. Beyond an arch was the thunder of noise from the Piazza San Marco: its rows of stages, its thousands of people; the basilica with its mosaics like wrinkled gold skin at the end. He kept his eyes open.
She said, ‘I could go on, but you can’t. Later, the crowds may be less. I have rooms here.’
He looked where she indicated. It was not the doorway he occupied, but a more modest one opposite. There was a small balcony up above, bound with ivy. She said, ‘I stayed here before I sailed, in the spring. David de Salmeton arranged it for me.’
His eyes had closed. He said, ‘Are you not afraid that I shall stop, when you say that?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Or walk away?’
‘I am fresher than you are. I am not offering you my bed or my sympathy,’ Gelis said. ‘Only the opportunity to recover so that you can do what I want you to do.’
‘And after that?’ Nicholas said. He merely wished to hear what she would say.
‘According to my information, you did not keep your part of the bargain,’ she said. ‘The child is still mine.’
He wondered what made her think that. Being the devil, he was equipped with a dagger. It was a real one. It occurred to him that he wouldn’t mind if David de Salmeton were in Gelis’s house.
In fact he was not. The rooms he climbed to were empty. She went to fetch him some wine, and he pulled off his hat and the mask, and pushed back the cowl. His hair clung wet round his neck. He let his lids close, because it was quiet and he felt rather ill, and he knew that whatever occurred, for a