The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [83]
‘He has the key,’ Simon said. It was an excuse, not a complaint. It was far from being a complaint. He did not, at this moment, want Anselm Adorne. He wanted time in which to kill the brute he was fighting. Otherwise he would be hostage to this man for life.
He heard Adorne say, ‘Nicholas, stop. One of you, open the door. You cannot go on, now I am here.’ His voice, without emotion, proclaimed a truth. The other man was a burgess of Bruges; Simon a Scot of reputation. It further proclaimed that he knew, or guessed, what was happening.
Nicholas de Fleury opened his hand. Simon, released, heaved himself painfully to the edge of the grid and let himself crash down in the red gloom to the bench, where he crouched. De Fleury had lifted a hand to his belt.
Simon said, ‘Give me the key.’ The smoke from the disturbed coals made him cough. He didn’t want the key. He wanted a moment’s respite, and then a throwing hold on the other man’s arm.
You could see he, too, was tired. He dragged himself up and, freeing raw fingers, tunnelled down and drew out the key. It lay in the palm of his hand, and he looked at it. Then he tossed it into the heart of the fire.
‘Does that suit you?’ he said; and came, a dark figure, heeling over the edge as Simon had done, to collide with him on the bench and then, grimly, drag him again to the floor.
It was Simon’s intention that only one of them would survive. He had made it clear enough; he knew the other recognised as much, as they locked limbs and wrestled, cheek to cheek and arm to arm, breathing in sobs. This time, the other didn’t slacken or check. This time, their concentration was such that they had no space to notice the eddy of cold air that touched their inferno, or hear the door from the third room pushed wide, or realise who, smaller than either, had managed to squeeze through the high window. Then Katelijne’s voice spoke, a quarter-octave higher than usual, and cutting. ‘The Ambassador my uncle says, if one of you kills, he will see the other hang.’ She stood, red-lit, her wet feet planted beside them. To move was to hit her.
Beaten by pulses, Simon stopped. The other, too, ceased to move, but did not free Simon; nor did Simon disengage. The agony of the lock continued for seconds. It came to Simon that he was not going to prevail. His strength, deliberately sapped at the beginning, was not enough to break the other man’s grip in this bout. He could not kill; yet he must. Well, to begin with, he could maim; and the girl would have to look out or shift. He drew on all his powers and thrust.
A panful of warm foetid water slapped full into his face and another drenched his opponent. Unable to breathe, Simon relaxed his grasp, retching and choking, and felt his body released as the other man, too, caught his breath. The girl, grim-faced, had another scoop almost ready. Simon, gasping, rolled aside and rose on his good elbow. Beside him, the Fleming did the opposite, dropping his head on his arm. He was shaking with what might have started as laughter.
‘The key,’ said the girl.
De Fleury said, ‘It is in the fire.’ Simon found he was trembling too.
The girl threw down the scoop and stepped back into the firelight. Barefoot and stripped to her soot-besmeared small-clothes, she appeared as voluptuous as the wick of a lamp. She gave them both one searching look and then, scrambling about in the dark, found the tongs and the rake, and sprang with them up to the bench where she began, cricket-elbowed, to rummage into the fire.
Where the rake had been, the blades of the shears flickered once, red in the new flames.
Simon sat up by degrees. The other man lay on his face, breathing fast as if spent. The low fire, reflected from the roof, showed the pale triangle of shoulder and waist, scrawled over by dirt and scorchmarks and blood and patterned with fissures through which the flesh showed merely black. His own was the same. They were well matched. But the other had taken care to create his advantage. No one else had ever had Simon dragged running