The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [81]
It had to be ended. And now Simon knew how to do it. He said, ‘So you were Diniz’s lover. I didn’t know the negro had you as well.’
Upon which, with unforeseen accuracy, the other man hurled the axe at Simon’s head.
Chapter 11
THE BLOW SHOULD have killed. At first, in the jumble of light, the perpetrator clearly assumed that it had. He stood motionless, his eyes wide, and then stumbled aside, his hand seeking the wall.
By that single, rash act, he had disarmed himself. And Simon, because of a single opportune movement, was alive. More, behind him, sunk in the wall, was the axe.
His chance had come, and would never be better. He exchanged the shears for the axe. The crackle of burning straw and the fizz of salt masked his steps; the chiaroscuro of light disguised the speed of his rush. He was upon his would-be killer, hatchet lifted, even as the other man turned, his eyes open again, his actor’s face split, too, into shards of darkness and light: agony, disbelief, wonder.
Its last expression was one of profound purpose. The movement with which he struck up Simon’s fist round the haft was so hard that the blade, losing power, barely sank to de Fleury’s own half-naked shoulder where for a moment it fitted into the scar of another wound. Then de Fleury used all his advantage of strength to drag himself apart and to kick, the way men kick when fighting for life on a battlefield, before bending to scoop up something at his feet.
A double-hooked bar, lying half under the fireball of straw which had felled it. It came towards Simon, clawing, its bent iron smoking and red, and Simon struck at it with the cold iron he, too, still held in one hand, and then swung the axe as his opponent backed, fencing. Behind him was the wall hung with tools, but the axe would get to him first. Then the axe itself glared a warning and Simon, alerted, had time to spring to one side as a dazzle of fire hurtled down and a basket, burning free, burst into a fireball of flame at his feet. By which time Nicholas de Fleury was again armed.
Now, no one spoke. In the struggle that followed Simon used most of the objects in the room, and had them used against him. The two men fell, sometimes, into the kind of close-gripped combat Simon preferred to avoid, but he held his own, although he received no more inconsequential advantages.
It worried Simon that, holding an axe, he could not immediately prevail. But then, as he had, de Fleury used long-shafted weapons against him. They both bore bleeding gashes and livid burns on their half-naked bodies and sometimes he remembered that he, the elder by fifteen years, had run a long way that evening. And the truth was that the other man was more of a match than he would ever have thought to be possible. Then his mind began to turn on the key.
He intended to win, and would win. But he was facing a man of strong passions; a man who had already tried to kill him tonight. He did not mean to die at his hand.
It was then, just over half an hour before midnight, as the fires were dying and the glow from the furnace burned low, that he began to plan his last strategy. Soon even the candle would be spent. Already the walls and floor were in darkness as they stalked one another, breathing quickly; attacked and dodged in the red light from the king-bed of salt and the dull, crimson hood at its end, its rim flushed, arch as a bonnet, from the glow of the strip of live, burning coals underneath. For the grid covered all of the salt, but not all of the fire.
Perhaps the other man, too, realised that his strength was not inexhaustible. It was