The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [73]
A naked man hatted with straw appeared in the distance, gazed, and moved on through the roseate dark as if blind. A spectral child followed, round of stomach, its hair on its shoulders. It looked at him, and continued to walk. Banners of vapour floated above sombre lattices made not of wicker, but fire. Beyond, he seemed to see a black meadow peopled by wraiths, men, women and children, stooping or upright, linked by yokes, holding tenuous shafts in their hands. Some were black; some red as blood, face, torso and limbs; some streaked, or white as himself. The red light glimmered through nets without fish and spotted the dark: red eyes glaring through silent black eyelets.
He did not want to go on. He slowed. He stopped. Now he drew a quick breath and turned.
A great hound, caught in silent mid-leap, was rising towards him. The shock, the close, warm odour paralysed him for a moment. Then Simon turned and hurtled down, towards Hell, for Hell could not be worse than a mastiff about to tear out his throat. The hound, with a snarl, followed after.
And now he was in the inferno, where heat and cold fought in the air, and his throat was choked with the stench of blood and sulphur. He raced, fell and raced, tricked by shadows, tripped by some strange arsenal of iron weapons, beset by fire-dust falling like stars, which sizzled into his hair and soaked doublet and pierced his chilled skin like gnats.
The hound followed, as if bewitched. Simon stumbled through a maze of undefined shapes, red and black, sloping and vertical, trying this way and that to escape, and saw three naked men standing watching him in a river of heat. His mouth was stopped, his arms lashed, his dress soaked and torn. He ran to their feet, and as soon as he did so they faded into the darkness behind them. And the hound followed him, and not them.
Behind the gag, his breath sobbed with exhaustion so that he did not even hear, until it was close, the uproar of the rest of the pack, and the horn, and the cracking of whips as men tried to control the King’s hounds. The King’s hounds, trained to kill, and set upon him by someone, through the bitter agency of his mistress Joneta.
Hatred saved him. He knew that justice would not. Only great power could have brought this about. Power and money; the capacity to bribe and to frighten. Someone of consequence had willed him to die, and he would not.
He turned. He forced himself to think. The hound was there, and the fading spiritous forms, but he was not in Hell; he was among the pan-houses of a salt-garden, and although their doors were shut and their denizens hostile, he would find shelter somehow. There, where a door was just closing. Where, if he used the last of his strength, he could hurl himself through, sending the timber shuddering back, even as the hound closed its teeth on his elbow and the heat struck him as fiercely.
For a moment he thought he had failed; had merely brought the beast into the furnace. He kicked, ramming the brute with his shoulder, and knew, although he hardly felt it, that its jaws had clenched deep in his flesh.
Then they opened. The wet, muscular body lifted. He heard a short whistle, of a special kind he had heard before, and the hound, releasing him entirely, swung its massive neck and stood, looking outwards. Then it bounded off.
He lay, gathering strength. The door, drifting back, came to rest by his leg. He moved his foot, and it continued to close. On the outside was painted the usual mark, bird or beast, which distinguished the salt-house of each master. This time the picture held three creatures: a stag and two ratchets.
The crest of St Pol.
He looked up. The only other man present, lightly dressed, leaned against the door till it shut, and then locked it.
‘And so,