To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [211]
Paúel Benecke said, ‘What are you grinning at?’
‘Something Tryggvi-Sigurdsson taught me,’ she said. ‘Do you know the Icelanders make up lampoons they call nídvísur? Rude lampoons?’
‘Oh my God,’ said M. de Nicholas. ‘All right. You begin.’
At the end, Glímu-Sveinn unexpectedly broke into a guffaw of appreciation and without prompting, launched into another. She didn’t understand all the words, but she could tell M. de Fuf-Nicholas did. Halfway through, the skies emitted two loud reports, then a third, even louder. These were immediately followed by a flicker of horizontal blue light. Her pony laid back its ears and the one behind overtook her in a cloud of flying snow, stumbled, fell, and threw Paúel Benecke hard to the ground, thereafter tumbling itself and breaking a leg. Glímu-Sveinn got down and killed it, she didn’t see how. Then he hauled the shaken Danziger to his feet, and with M. de dammit began to redistribute the baggage. It was done very quickly.
‘Come on,’ said M. de Fleury. ‘The thunder’s moving north and we’re going south on our reversible hooves. It will be like Paradise in Hlídarendi.’
They remounted. Glímu-Sveinn placed the Danziger’s new pony behind him and Nicholas rode behind her with the bell, which he had announced was an E. There ensued a profound discussion on the Icelandic Scriptures, which held (Nicholas said) that all boys were born tuned to A, while baby girls emerged squealing in E. Twins, he added, required resolution. He went on to mention that the inventor of harmony was Nibal, brother of the smith Tubal-Cain.
‘Horse-shoes,’ said Benecke, out of consideration, no doubt, for his feminine company.
‘Nails,’ said Nicholas dreamily. ‘Five thousand, as I remember. No, I’m wrong. That was Tubal the Paralytic. Also Isachor, Architriclin and Eve. Eve, served straight from the rib with a fig-leaf. Glímu-Sveinn, I’m sorry.’
He shouted the last bit. He was sorry, it was all too clear, because he had allowed his pony to set feet on an ice slope. By the time his voice started to rise he had already failed to slew it round out of its slide, and it was slithering helplessly downwards. He fought for a few moments more, and then jumped for a pillow of snow, the reins still grasped tight in his hands. He held them as long as he could, then released them with a curse. It reached Kathi in an incomprehensible hiss like No mattresses.
Glímu-Sveinn, dismounting, ran forward. Kathi did the same and then stopped on the brink of what she found was the lip of a crevasse. The pony had slid to a halt on a ledge, and was peering upwards, its two forelegs scrabbling. Every now and then it licked at the rock as if hungry. Benecke said, ‘Is it worth it?’ Glímu-Sveinn, leaning down, had wrestled M. de Fleury to safety. Both their faces were blue.
‘I think so. It shouldn’t be hard,’ the rescued man said, and trudged off to unfasten the rope.
He was mistaken: it was hard, and all of them were breathing painfully before the pony was finally back above, shaking, and Nicholas had mounted another. He had been right: they had lost one horse already, and their lives might depend on these creatures. To her narrow gaze, M. de never mind seemed to have suffered no disabling injury; or none worse than his captive, who was grinning again. She wished to God she didn’t have to think what to call him.
They set off at a dangerous jog. The thunder delivered a sudden cannonade, and the lightning danced with reptilian flickers. She could hear it crackling. Above them, Hekla was releasing spurts of saffron and dusky brown smoke and, to a person of credulous disposition, appeared to be rhythmically changing its shape. Her head, but not her ears, received the impression of a cavernous sound: her throat was coated with sulphur. She turned her head to the Banco di Niccolò. ‘So you cried in E.’