The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [366]
On either bank, lamps strung along jetties threw blooms of peacock colour into the water. Streamers of mist veiled and unveiled the tinted window-lights studding the darkness: the gilded mooring posts faded and glinted and overhead the fireworks, when they began, seemed to hang behind films.
Katelijne watched them from under the flag of the Knights, and collected her thoughts, which kept straying. At the time of the Abundance in Cairo, every mosque and palace and tower was swagged and massy with light, and boats of joy moved like this through the water, bells tinkling, music rising, while fireworks flowered and spat. She remembered fireworks and the Unicorn knighthood, and the unobtrusive, deft actions by which Nicholas de Fleury had exiled two people, and caused her uncle to suffer the consequences.
Fireworks. Catherine wheels. What had she learned from her pilgrimage? She didn’t know; or not yet. Her uncle had brought back literal Catherine wheels, or their models. They were to decorate his magnificent house in another city built on canals. Everyone celebrated water. In Venice they married the sea. After the disaster at Negroponte, the Turks had laughed at the Venetian Envoy: ‘You can leave off wedding the sea. It is our turn, now.’
Jan bumped into her, knocking the jew’s trump out of her hand. She picked it up. He said, ‘What do you want that for?’ Without waiting for an answer, he walked unsteadily to the other side of the boat, the side next to the beautiful vessel she was pretending nonchalantly to ignore. The bissona flying the unicorn flag of the Banco di Niccolò.
Apprehension gripped her, turning to horror as she saw him lift one unsteady knee to the rail. She said quickly, ‘M. de Fleury isn’t there. What are you doing?’ He was dressed, pathetically, in cock’s feathers, with glass eyes and a stiff golden beak and a great ruff of iridescent blue and green plumage.
He paid no attention but continued to climb with the evident intention of crossing to the next boat. She wished they were not so close, or moving so slowly. For a young man, even when drunk, it was easy. Infuriatingly, all the people she knew – M. le Grant, Master Gregorio – seemed as yet unaware. Then she saw Dr Tobias step forward and hold a hand out to steady and stop him. There was an argument. Heads turned. She saw Dr Tobias shake his head and step back, while Jan fell inside the Bank’s boat and, righting himself, began to walk forwards. Dr Tobias glanced towards her, and she knew he had seen her, but he didn’t approach. A few feathers stuck to the gunwale.
She thought it was the end, but it wasn’t. Far, from wishing to join Dr Tobias, Jan had merely used his boat as a bridge. Reaching the opposite rail, he clambered over and dropped out of sight. Feathers rose, and he reappeared giggling. Kathi saw he was in the boat next to the Bank’s. Once in darkness, it was now lit and raucous with laughter. The voices seemed to belong mostly to women. A man emerged, his golden tunic adorned with a panther skin, and a wreath of ivy and vines in his hair. The costume exhibited the splendid symmetry of his body, but when he helped Jan aboard, you could see that the bare, cross-gartered leg was not that of a young man at all.
She realised suddenly whose boat it was. This time, Jan was staying aboard. When he disappeared under the awning, there was an outburst of feminine laughter.
Her uncle had not seen.
The fleet moved round the loop of the Canal, passing the Ca’ Foscari, the Palazzo Justinian. The loggias were full, the roof-tops crowded. Music fought against music from one house to the next, obliterated sometimes by drunken singing within. The heat from the massed torches warmed the dank night air of February; seagulls dipped and rose into fog. Their whining, thought Tobie fancifully, sounded like the souls of the dead; the shrill voice of the mask, of the