The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [79]
The other man stood the rake upright and leaned on it. ‘I should like you to tell me,’ he said.
Simon said, ‘About Diniz’s lovers. There is no doubt at all that he has them. Men and boys. Mostly men, from the artisan class. He is a good-looking fellow, my nephew.’
‘Go on,’ the other man said. He threw the rake down and lifting a basket, wedged it into the grid over the salt. Then he stepped down and brought up the shovel. It was, discommodingly, the one on which Simon’s eye had been fixed. Gripping it, de Fleury continued. ‘So how did it become known? They all sang the news in the streets?’
‘A letter,’ said Simon quickly. ‘A love letter. His wife found it, and almost miscarried.’
‘An artisan who could write?’ his captor said.
‘A scholar,’ said Simon.
‘From Bruges. Someone living in the same town who still felt impelled to risk a love letter?’
‘From outside Bruges. From his travels. He brought the letter back with him. From his travels in Africa. All those long days and nights of great heat. You know how it was, you and Gelis. She told me. I can imagine it. The soaked mattress and pillows, the sweating skin, the suffocation, the ecstasy. She told me. Diniz was desperate, too – didn’t you notice? But he found relief where you’d least expect it. In whose arms? Can you guess?’
‘You are going to tell me,’ said the man he had cuckolded. He stood peaceably on the bench, without breathing.
‘It was Umar. Umar your well-endowed negro,’ Simon said. ‘A magnificent fellow, as you know, and sensitive to other men’s wants.’
‘Thank you,’ the other man said.
It emerged distorted for, as he spoke, he had the shovel already upraised. Before Simon could get out of the way, the full spadeful of scalding salt hit him in the face where he sat. The pain made him grunt and the shock sent him lurching aside, but his wits didn’t leave him. Sprawling, he touched the rake, seized it, and was on his knees presenting it before the second steaming, winking block came flying towards him. It struck his neck and shoulder and tumbled and clung, a burning avalanche, a blistering poultice.
His searing anger hurt more. The young brute had the axe, and the key. But the axe was not a sword: it was short in haft and only deadly when close. Simon surged to his feet and drove the rake with both hands towards the other man’s face. For a moment, it seemed he would reach it. Then his adversary saved himself abruptly, swerving sideways and back.
The fellow hadn’t looked round. Being more cunning than once he was, he had committed to memory all the elements of their miniature, smoking arena; the greatest part of it taken up with the hooded bed of hot salt with its latticework of thick beams and hooks. To its right, on the deep, yielding floor of solidified scum, stood the round bath of warm brine and the tub and dipper of blood, occupying most of the space between cauldron and wall.
To its left was the bench his captor had chosen as seat and later as step to the cauldron. The basket he had prepared remained tossed on its side on the grid while the others hung still from the roof, gently jostling in the updraught of the duel.
On that wall, the left, were the pegs for the implements. Some still hung there: a pair of ladles, a scoop, a mallet, some bowls, a set of tongs. On the floor below them lay a hoe, and the corner between fire-hood and wall was stacked with forked sticks for porterage and spare hooked bars to join lattice to cauldron. In the front, between the firebox and the locked door lay a poker, and the bar to open the firedoor.
These were, all of them, the arms for this contest. As much as a trial of strength, this was an exercise in improvisation, in strategy. Simon laughed with battle excitement. I have this rake; and you have an axe. What comes next? Of course: something long-shafted. The hoe. His opponent needed the hoe.
Bending at the end of his swerve, the other man almost had it when Simon clawed it away with his rake. Then Simon swore. It had been a feint. The rake was what his opponent wanted