To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [220]
His face, his voice said it all, good and bad. The boy was alive. By coming to find them, the boy had thrown away his own chance of survival. She said, ‘How near?’
‘Quite close. Kathi, he can’t find us. I can find him.’
‘In the dark?’
‘It isn’t dark now,’ he said; and rose, wincing a little, to his feet. ‘Come and see.’
She went out. She faced west, and saw above her the ink-blue of night. She faced north, and a lantern hung in the sky; or it might have been the basket balefire of a castle, or a burning thicket of thorns that threw off a continuous low sparkle of red, but yet was not consumed. Above Hekla floated crimson-lined clouds. Below floated the shoulders and spires of snowy eminences, all frosted like sweetmeats with pink.
The south was different. In the south, a field of dazzling white champignons ripened and burst in the dark. Beneath them was a point of red light.
She said, ‘It has begun. How long before they erupt?’
‘I don’t know. I’d rather leave now. And I’ll be quicker alone.’
She said, ‘Well, at least you don’t have to bother with food. Take the stave. Take your jacket. Glímu-Sveinn will be warm enough now.’
He was going on foot. His special sense wouldn’t show him the route, it would simply take him direct as a bird to the boy. There were no birds to be heard now, unless the iron-beaked ravens were there, attentive and hovering. And although there was light, it was little enough to show the way to a man who could not fly. A man whose feet were torn with lava, like hers, and who was almost too tired to walk.
She prepared and gave him a stirrup-cup, with plenty of blood in it: the first genuine hesta-skál, he remarked, that he had ever been offered. Then he smiled at her and, bending, gave her the courteous Icelandic kiss on the lips. ‘Guds frida veri med ydr,’ he said. The peace of God be upon you. ‘I will be back.’ And he left.
Glímu-Sveinn snored. The fire burned for a while, and she used it to attend to his comfort and her own, and to warm some of the drink for herself. When the last flame flickered and died, she gave in at length to her anxieties and, wrapping well, slipped from the cave.
Outside was a wonder of light. One by one, the seams of Hekla’s dark garment were bursting apart to expose the living core. The flames, higher now, were both yellow and red, pushed about by the curdling smoke, and their light flickered and streamed over the ghostly beds of the snow. Now the air shook with the sound of muffled explosions; now there resounded a group of ringing reports, upon which the golden spray rocketed. Colpito, a hit.
If the north was crimson and gold, the south was a shimmering miasma of white, drifting steam shaken by sudden explosions, and stained with darker effusions shot with red. The distant concussion from both labouring mountains was almost continuous, as from a battery of John le Grant’s guns, or the noise of a crowd watching Florentine football, or of an audience roused by a play. There was thunder pealing in the steam above Katla, shot with blue light.
Thunder-makers need not be gods, other people could do it as well. Copper sheets; carbon powder. Vif argent for silver; pigments and resin and gouache for colour and glitter. White lead and red ochre; sheets of glass; gilded tin; turf to pack round the traps, or the geysirs. Two little bellows for Hell. Eleven innocent dolls for the Massacre.
She had read the bills of lading. They did not actually reproduce, in any play she had read, the scalding torrents that would presently flow; the rumbling ocean of fire that would appear on the ridges above her and crawl thickly down; the clouds of brilliant dust that would darken the stars, setting light to her clothes and her hair. But men could create them, of course, if they tried: Negroponte; Constantinople. A diadem for God, and wine for the actors.
She thought of the man who had left her, taking his own life in his hands to turn a boy back to safety. She was aware that he would not think in those terms: that before the spectacle of the night, he would be no more capable