To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [219]
‘He thought I’d come back for him alone. He had a few stones, a bit bigger than this. It was to look like a drowning.’
‘He liked you,’ she said.
‘But he didn’t believe that I’d free him. He’s proud of his reputation.’
‘Vanitas,’ Kathi said. ‘So what did you do?’
‘I had a few stones as well. Now he is alone, and we are not, and that is all the difference, really, between us.’
His voice receded. He had walked to the mouth of the cavern, now a deep purple-blue against the black of the walls. She sat where she was, on a bit of turf, because her legs didn’t want to walk any longer. She saw him in silhouette, leaning against the dark rock. She said, ‘Is he all right?’
His head turned, a change in the outline. ‘Who?’
‘Jordan,’ she said.
‘Oh. Yes,’ he said. ‘And Gelis.’
She said, ‘What is it like? When you concentrate?’
‘Exhausting,’ he said, with a half-smile she could hear. Then he said, ‘No. Warmth. I can feel him.’
She said nothing. He added, still with the half-smile, ‘With Gelis, it is just exhaustion. But that is because her thoughts are concentrated on me. Hard to circumvent.’
‘But she can’t tell where you are? Shouldn’t you teach her?’
‘Goodness, no. It’s my strongest weapon,’ he said.
She waited. If he wanted to speak, then he would. Later, he might come to be sorry. In the end he said nothing, but presently turned and made his way back to the invalid’s side. He lowered himself down beside him and took up the tinder. It was so dark they could barely see one another. He said, ‘There are things better unsaid. You never speak of your parents. May I ask?’
‘How we came to be with Uncle Adorne? It’s no secret. My mother fell ill when we were young. Not a family illness: the kind that comes with great pain, and destroys all the power to reason. She was like my uncle before that, fair and graceful and kind. My father couldn’t bear the change, or us, reminding him of her. It was best we leave Ghent.’
He said, ‘I don’t remember you. I remember Sersanders in Bruges.’
‘I wasn’t born when you first came to Bruges. I don’t remember you either. A name. Claes. It annoyed Sersanders, that you always seemed happy.’
‘I’m glad I annoyed him,’ he said.
After a while, she said, ‘What was your mother like?’
It sounded callow: the remark of a child. It was, she had long known, the most important question anyone could ask of Nicholas de Fleury. And she had earned the right to ask it.
Apparently he recognised that as well. He waited, but in the end he replied. ‘Loving. Terrified. Sad.’
‘Terrified?’ she said. She could hear her own horror.
He said, ‘You know Jordan de Ribérac’
She couldn’t ask any more. She knew Jordan de Ribérac, after whom his own son had been named. He did not speak again.
She closed her eyes. When she opened them, it was upon the ruddy light of a fire: sparkling buck-bean turf stuffed between a glowing heap of small stones. There was a folded cloth between the dirt floor and her head, and her own coat, dry now, was tucked in around her. The light flickered on the shape of the horse, and the form of Glímu-Sveinn lying against it. She could hear his uneven breathing.
Closer than that was a hand, slowly stilling something bright on a cord. She said, ‘Don’t stop. If you must.’
He lifted his head. She wondered if he had slept, and thought not. She wondered whose minds and hearts he had been visiting. Did they know? Did Gelis ever feel her husband’s thoughts touching hers, day and night? He had said hers were on him, which made his task in some way more tiring. She wondered if he had ever had cause to trace herself, or Sersanders, or her uncle, and found the idea both unflattering and hurtful. She gave him credit for realising this.
He said, ‘I have something to tell you.’
She knew before he spoke, because she had heard it. ‘Katla?’ she said.
‘Yes. You can see the white of the steam, even from here. But something else.’
Glímu-Sveinn was alive. She said, ‘What?’
He lifted his hands. There was blood on one finger. He said, ‘I remembered to ask the right questions. Kathi, Robin