To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [221]
She knew he would try to come back. She thought of the Icelandic:
All ills shall cease;
Baldur shall come …
So they said of the White God, Baldur the beautiful, destroyed by Loki and waiting through all eternity for the call that would summon him back. They didn’t say it of a clever enigma whose chief achievement was to have founded a Venetian bank. The word of his death would travel quickly: to Venice, to Rome and to Bruges, to Brussels and Brixen and Bourges. To Cyprus, where he had almost tamed a young king. To Timbuktu, and a tomb. To Edinburgh, where he had a son. The Banco di Niccolò is dead, and shall not come again.
She was standing there still, unware of the cold, when above the grandeur of unearthly percussion, she heard the rattle of harness, and turned.
Dark on the snow, jogging across the ridges below her, were ponies. A dozen, twenty; their riders cracking their whips, their torches streaming innocent light, Baldur-light.
One rider led. One rider, familiar with the route, came racing over the snow and drew his mount to a quick halt on seeing her.
Her reason told her it would be Robin. Then she saw that Robin was there, far behind, his face lit as bright as the torches. But the person who was standing hère in the snow was her friend.
She ran towards him then, surprising herself and probably him; impelled by a surge of heart-felt fervour which moved her to fling her arms round him and cling, her cheek deep in his stained sheepskin coat. She clasped him, and he in turn closed his own arms about her, her head under his chin. Swept together, they sank comfortably into one another, and she felt him for the first time profoundly relax, as a warm and loving friend might.
There was nothing to put into words. His embrace said it all: his safe, indestructible grasp, his secure hands. When in the stillness she began to draw breath, it was not to overwhelm him with speech; only to utter his name – so difficult, recently, to remember.
‘Oh, Banco,’ she said.
She was so close, she felt the spasm that developed into a hiccough of laughter. His clasp broadened. Then he set her away from him, his palms on her shoulders. She laid her hands fast over his.
Somewhere in the sky to the north, there was a crackling roar, and their faces were lit by the flame-gush that followed. He released her softly and said, ‘We must hurry. Glímu-Sveinn? We have a litter, and men to take him.’
She said, ‘He’s still there. I’m so glad. What about Paúel?’
Robin had come. He said, ‘One of his own men is here. And two Icelanders, who have been offered a boat if they find him.’
‘A boat?’ Kathi said. ‘I thought all the yoles and doggers were spoken for.’ Her eyes were on her friend, her halting friend, who was pulling over a horse.
‘An English boat,’ Robin said. ‘Wait till we tell you.’
Katelijne Sersanders carried only a half-memory of the torchlit ride to the coast beneath the greatest display of pyrotechnics she was ever to see in her life. She was surrounded by familiar faces. When she could no longer bear to touch the ground or the saddle, they wrapped her in fleece and handed her from man to man through the night like – like a bear-cub. For seamen, they were uncommonly tender, but the grasp was never the one that she sought. When she asked, Robin said, ‘M. de Fleury is here. He is safe. He is quite tired as well.’ It made her sick, to think she could be so thoughtless. She didn’t ask for him again, although she looked about when they arrived at the shore and waded out to the skiffs that awaited them. One of the skiffs did not leave, because it was waiting for Paúel.
The Mouth of Hell opened when they were a long way out to sea, and the glacier over Katla lifted its city of ice into the sky. Rowing, they watched, and Kathi watched with them.
Now, you could no longer diminish what was happening