The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [74]
Chapter 10
A SALT-HOUSE IS AS close to Hades as ignorant man could well devise: made of plastered wattle and shingle, it is divided into three rooms, of which the first is the fuel-store and the last an outlet for smoke and for drying.
In the centre room is the source of the heat: a floor furnace eight feet long and eight wide shaped of rock-salt and clay, and bearing above it on three immense hooks a lead rectangle full of brine from the estuary. In the lead receptacle, called the cauldron, the brine boils until it is reduced to white salt, which is then shovelled into cone baskets and cooled. In the same middle room is a bench, the blood-tub and the reserve tub of brine. It is hot enough to make the heart pound.
Simon de St Pol lay, his frayed clothes steaming, within a yard of the furnace in the middle room. He lay on his face, to which position he had been tossed, and felt the vibration, but nothing else, as his deadened arms were set free. Then the knot of his mouth-band was cut, and his dry tongue expelled the cloth and then sought to form words. He tried to roll on his back, placing his weight on one elbow, and was shocked into gasping with the pain of the savaging; with the pain of restored feeling in his body and limbs. But the measure of his anguish was as nothing to the measure of his amazed disbelief.
He blurted something incoherent out of that first emotion, and stopped. From it, he found the strength to thrust himself round and sit back on his heels. Anger rose and rose. He managed, finally, to repeat it with clarity as well as contempt. ‘Who are you working for?’
‘Who am I working for?’ the other man repeated. Then he sighed. He had chosen to dispose himself along the powdery bench, his smeared hands round one uplifted knee. The fire, dully red, whispered and murmured in its kingly bed, and the broth of salt popped and puttered above it.
Simon said, ‘Who? Whoever it is, he set the King’s dogs on me. Or Joneta did. You arranged it.’
‘You set your dog on me once,’ said the man on the bench dreamily. He spoke as the thugs had, in native French. The tongue of Simon’s first wife.
Simon frowned.
‘And had me captured, beaten and bound by hands quite as ungentle, I fear. You’ve forgotten that, too.’
Venice. Now he remembered. And the dogs in Bruges. That had been over Mabelie. His fury rose again. ‘You forced Joneta –’
‘After what you did to her? She needed no forcing. Have you been roughly handled? Once, you stabbed me.’
‘That!’ That had been long ago. ‘That was an accident.’
‘So was the mastiff just now. Have you noticed the heat? Once, you set my house on fire. My house and Marian’s.’
‘I didn’t,’ said Simon shortly. ‘Now I wish I had. What is this? A boy’s list of grudges?’ He stared at the other man, and slowly, outrage was added to anger. He said, ‘There is no one behind this but you! My God, you perpetrated all this!’
‘I am easily piqued,’ Nicholas de Fleury observed. ‘May I continue?’
‘No!’ Simon said. Now he knew, it was easy. And he was rested. Aching, but rested. He got to his feet.
‘Sit down,’ the other man said. Between his hands, conjured from air, was a hatchet. He added gently, ‘I don’t mind using this.’
‘Against an unarmed man?’ Simon said. He sat down again, temporarily, on the floor, which was sticky and yielding and left smears on his hose, now half dry. He had his eye on a shovel.
The mild voice replied, ‘You fought an unarmed man, near enough, when you fought me, and Gregorio.’
‘I wouldn’t quarrel with that,’ Simon said. ‘So what else have I done?’ He was listening for sounds. The hunt had been coming this way. Now he was safe from the dogs, they could get him out of the grip of this lunatic. He thought, now, he could hear them.
‘Let me think,’ said his captor. ‘Apart from claiming my ship, and attempting to steal the patrimony of your nephew Diniz? What about a sin of omission? The cartel you sent me in Venice, offering to fight me for my life and my business? Then you ran away.’
Simon said irritably, ‘Of course, the cat runs from