The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [75]
‘So I did,’ the other man said. ‘But then, I didn’t know all the facts. I didn’t know that you and my future wife were currently lovers. I do apologise,’ the unhurried voice added. ‘A boy’s list of grudges.’
He knew.
‘You owed me a girl,’ Simon said. He said it to cover the depth of his surprise; the breathlessness of a slow and stunning delight. De Fleury knew. All these months, he had known about Gelis. This was why he had come to Scotland; had tricked him and trapped him and, hiring four bullies, was now bent on some puerile accounting.
Everything was explained. At once Simon was relieved of the unreasonable fear he had felt out there under the sky, among ghostly watchers. Tonight he was in the hands of an aggrieved amateur, not a soldier; not the deadly and furious magnates whom he imagined de Ribérac had angered. His situation was perilous, but retrievable. And rendering it almost sweet was the knowledge that the other man had learned what he had done to Gelis van Borselen, and she with him, and would never cease to imagine it.
He, Simon, had effected a masterstroke of the bedchamber worth all the sneers of a Jordan de Ribérac. A stroke which repaid, in one blow, all the pin-pricks he had suffered from Claes; all the fury his very existence had caused him. Which almost surpassed, in its life-long implications, the bludgeon-blow attempted this evening. For which, in due course, he, Simon, would extract life itself for payment.
Simon smiled; and the other man, seeing the smile, said slowly, ‘Yes, of course. It had to be true.’ Then, hearing something, he lifted his head.
Simon’s lips parted. Clear through the walls came the barking of the mastiffs at last, swarming into the settlement, and the blare of the horn close at hand, and the cries of the hunt-servants, and the cracking of whips. Freedom. The King’s party, and freedom. He made to move.
Stupidly, he had been slow. His assailant – the cuckold, his attacker – was soundlessly on his knees beside him, the axe at his throat. De Fleury said, ‘I should prefer you not to call them.’ Simon reared, and the blade bit his neck. He lay still. It didn’t matter. Life and purpose had returned to his body. He was an expert. There would be other chances.
They stayed, without moving. They heard voices raised in enquiry, and other voices, answering. They heard the thud of bodies as the hounds belaboured the walls and the doors. Simon lay, his clothes, once sodden with snow, now again soaked with his own perspiration, and watched sweat streak the other man’s cheekbones from the darkened screws of his heavy, waterlogged hair; slide from his brows and his lashes down the thin channel of Jordan’s incision.
His hand on the axe-shaft was wet, but when Simon stirred, it tightened instantly. ‘No,’ said the man he had cuckolded.
Then, suddenly, the sounds began to grow fainter. Simon heard laughter. He heard a man’s voice distantly raised in a chant, and others joining, slurred with wine, and overlaid with diminished barking. He heard the nasal twang of a jew’s trump.
Above him, the other man’s breathing checked. An instant’s distraction was all Simon needed. He flung himself to one side, and then whined with pain as his captor swung his axe high and brought down the flat of its blade on the stob of his gnawed, bloodied elbow. The weapon returned to its place at his throat, where it stayed until all sound had vanished, upon which the other man rose and stepped back. Throughout, he had never appeared less than calm.
Simon said, ‘What are you going to do?’ He sat, holding the weight of his forearm. His injury throbbed.
‘Shed blood,’ said his captor. He was tall, with a long reach and broad shoulders, but carried too little flesh, as might a man fighting a long campaign or recently ill. Something inconvenient strayed into Simon’s mind. The other man, hooking the axe at his side, lifted a scoop by its ear and lowered it into a bucket.