To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [305]
She saw her assailant looming above her, black against the dark sky, and then the boot came down again, and there was nothing but darkness.
*
Tobie and his inappropriate partner had the best view of the disrupted column. They heard the singing procession approach, and saw the horses abruptly break pace to prance and to neigh and to struggle apart. Before the first traces broke, Tobie had made to rush to the west, and Mistress Clémence had stopped him.
It infuriated him that she could; that she was taller and fitter than he was. She said, ‘The Berecrofts family are capable persons. They are there. They will be dealing with Jodi. Remember his parents.’
He glared at her hand on his arm. He had no wish to hurt her. He said, forgetting the niceties, ‘Nicholas can look after himself and his wife.’
‘Do you think so?’ she said. ‘I think the sieur de Fleury will go straight to his son, and his wife will have to fend for herself. Which may be what someone is counting on.’
He stared at her. ‘St Pol is at home.’
‘He wasn’t at Haddington,’ she said, ‘when the cart slipped.’
Now the darkness was uneven: half the orderly torches were hurled aside or extinguished, and the braziers scattered. Racing back, swerving to avoid the wreckage of tents and fleeing people and tumbled and struggling figures, Nicholas plunged from near-blackness to sheets of shuddering light where flames rose to the sky and ran reflecting across new-melted ice. He stopped for nothing, but every now and then cupped his mouth and made the one call that would bring him an answer. After a while, Kathi replied, and he found her.
She was unhurt but covered with blood, one of a group working to lift a fallen horse from its victims. She scrambled to her feet as soon as she saw him, open relief on her face. She said quickly, ‘Jodi’s safe. They got him out at the beginning, and Robin and Archie and the others are taking him home.’
‘Where are they?’ he said. High above in the flickering darkness, lines of light began to appear and run like fire down the slopes of the Rock. Help from the Castle. Help, with any luck, from all those towering houses whose windows now glittered red.
She said, ‘They’ve gone. He’s safe. Nicholas, where is Gelis?’
The horse was dead. Its victim’s blood spattered the ice. Where it had fallen a crack had appeared, below which he could hear running water. The ice was thick, and had not given way. Elsewhere, with a little help, it might be different.
For a moment, ridiculously, he could not move. Then Kathi pushed him and said, ‘I’ll come too. Find her. Find her.’
The numbing cold of the water roused Gelis to come to the surface, and then notified her that further effort was not worth the trouble. She was aware that there was ice at her shoulder and that she would shortly slip under it. The thrusting boot appeared to have gone, but in any case, she felt no pain from its work; she felt nothing. Her eyes, blurring, rested on a sky which had turned into a portal of fire: a solemn circle of flames which would lead her to Heaven or Hell; into torment; out of it. It wrung pain from her then, to know that she was to be alone in this too; that he would never be with her; that, at last, she had lost him. She fancied she saw, as she sank, his face looking at her as she wanted him to look.
It was Mistress Clémence who, applying claustral calm and secular competence, discerned the strange burning tent and devised a means, helped by Dr Tobias, to thrust it over. When she saw the cracked ice and the pool, she set her lips and looked at the doctor, for you could see how the crust had been broken and sawn to make it unsafe to approach. Then they both saw something move, something sinking, and threw themselves forward.
A girl’s voice said, ‘No, Mistress