To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [222]
Nicholas watched it begin from the strand, where he had forced them to lay him until the last boat should leave. Kathi and Robin had gone. Glímu-Sveinn was safe, on his way by boat to where his family sheltered. He had wakened once, from the turf bed they had made for him, and had peered about, frowning and mumbling.
‘Well, old man,’ Nicholas said. ‘Odin heard you, or some other god. And there is a purse in your shirt, to show that foreigners can even be grateful. Get well. Ask your wife to forgive us.’
He did not know if he was understood, but he thought so. When his time came to go, the Icelander looked at him, moving his hand, and Nicholas stretched over, smiling, and took it in his own lava-flayed palm.
After that he lay still, drifting out of consciousness; awaking to the grinding cramps of his over-strained body, the burning pain of raw flesh in his hands, his limbs, the soles of his feet. Iceland and Egypt. His eyes were open when they brought Paúel Benecke down to the beach, the excited voices loud with relief in the reddening light. They carried him across in a cloak; he was yellow with pain but grinning crookedly still below the black beard. ‘Nikolás! I hoped never to see you again. Are you dying?’
‘Ask me tomorrow,’ Nicholas said. ‘If you can.’ The earth wavered and shook; he could hear the rumble of another explosion beginning.
Benecke turned his head. ‘I mustn’t keep you. You know, I didn’t expect you to save me? Why did you?’
‘I don’t know. I wanted a favour,’ Nicholas said. He watched them place Benecke in the skiff; then they came back for himself. As they left, the glacier rose into the sky, filling the air and the sea with its light, and the numbing roar followed.
There was a long way to row, for the Svipa had anchored many miles from the shore, the Hanse ship alongside. Benecke had fallen silent. Nicholas drifted into some form of awareness, his half-open eyes resting on the spreading glory before him.
In the presence of that, everything he had ever done appeared futile – even the music, the Play, the one private creation into which he had poured all that he had, for its own sake alone. Or so he had thought, until Gelis had shown him that it was only a refuge, that was all. And a tempting one, for someone brought up as he had been. An easy way to learn to love power. And so he had fled, seizing upon this venture in Iceland; this chance to return to the anonymity of the machine. He had destroyed all John’s pleasure, and Roger’s, by acting as if the Play had never been.
Iceland should have been simple: some hard work, some hard play, a little trickery, and he would have returned with his load, having executed his personal plan, and bested a rival or two. But Katelijne had come, and he had had to place her and her brother in safety, and then go to recover them. Otherwise he would never have been on the mainland of Iceland at all, or here when this happened. Otherwise he wouldn’t have burned his fingers, yet again, on an instrument that was not meant for him; that was tuned too high, and too low, and demanded more than any human being could give. The music he wanted to live by was the safe, mediocre span in the middle, where nothing would tear him to pieces; neither a black country, nor a white. And even if he didn’t think so; even if he decided to burn and be damned, it was useless. Nothing, nothing in all the world could match the wonder of this.
There was no