The Unicorn Hunt: The Fifth Book of the House of Niccolo

by Dorothy Dunnett

He lost footing once, near the beginning, and suffered all that before he forced himself upright again. Then he tried to think of nothing but running, his breath fierce and hot through the gag, his lungs steadily drawing, his body adjusting its balance to the unnatural weight of his arms. Then the horses increased their pace to a canter.

  Soon after that, his legs began to become heavy. His chest heaved, no longer under his perfect control. Lack of breath made his head sing; interrupted his concentration. He stumbled then, and was borne along twisting, his heels tossed on the ground, as he tried to regain his balance.

  That time, the riders stayed wide apart. The next time it happened, they spurred ahead and together, so that he was brought funnelling after, full length on his face in the snow, and had to roll over and over to save his head and give himself purchase. Then, separating, the horsemen gave him the half-lift he needed, but at the price of a sudden harsh tug which straightened his coils and set him to spin as if drunk.

  Throughout it all, they said nothing, and their faces, dim in the snow-light, were quite impassive. He looked at their faces when he could, for he had never in his life felt for anyone the hatred he felt for them, and for whoever was doing this. He began to feel, as his numb body weakened, that the sheer power of his hatred would uphold him, whatever they did; would scorch and shrivel them; would draw righteous cohorts to his aid. When they stopped, and he saw the sky to the north had turned red, he thought the Lord had come to his aid. A Judgement was being pronounced. The Lord’s Judgement upon those assailing him. He lay in the snow, and did not realise at once that the coils of rope lay about him.

  The men who had dropped them sat motionless, watching him. Then the swordsman stirred. He said, in French, ‘So we leave. You make a fine rabbit.’ They both smiled. And then, turning, they rode swiftly off.

  He lay like lead in the snow. He did not have to move. The relief began to send him to sleep. The relief, and the quiet. The sound of hooves deadened and vanished. Behind, in another direction, dogs barked remotely. Ahead, the dim red sky flickered and there were sounds. What sounds they were, he couldn’t be troubled to think. Then it came to him that he was succumbing to the very fate he had dreaded at the beginning. He had been brought here to die in the cold. Only they had exhausted him first.

  So he would beat them. His legs were free. They had bound his mouth and his arms, but had forgotten to retie his legs. He could walk. He could find help if he knew where to go. Slowly, he forced himself up to his knees, his feet, and stood swaying. Below the red sky, the landscape lay like rose-coloured icing. It was empty. He could try to go back, there where now he could hear the same dogs barking clearly. Or he could walk towards the red sky, and over the shallow rise lying before him, for he knew now what he would find.

  The salt-pans must be here. He had never seen them, but he had heard how the brine was brought from the estuary and cooked until reduced to dry salt. They said the fires never went out. He did not imagine there would be people: not here, at midnight in January. But the fires would be there, or their embers. Warmth, and shelter till morning. And then they would see, all of them. Then, if it took the rest of his life, he would find whoever had done this. He began to walk.

  He had almost come to the rise when his laboured attention was distracted, again, by the barking of dogs. There was another sound mingled with it. He identified it. The sound of a horn.

  The hunt. The King’s hunt – horses, friends, rescue – all coming this way. Directly this way. Where there were no lairs, no trees, no game to be seen, or any tracks in the snow.

  Except his own. You make a fine rabbit, his captor had said. They had dragged him and left him as you would stake out a goat, having given its scent to the wolves, or the hounds. The King’s hounds, trained to kill whatever they chased. They weren’t chasing the boar: their tongues would be raucous, excited. There probably wasn’t a boar. The boar was probably Joneta’s invention.

  Joneta, who had, of purpose, retained his cloak.

  He began to run, then.

  At the same moment, grey with fatigue, Bel of Cuthilgurdy arrived at the purlieus of Berecrofts and demanded to be taken to Nicholas de Fleury.

  Berecrofts the Younger, shocked and worried, had her admitted at once, with her companions. Robin, sent running, came back with servants, extra braziers, blankets, wine, and women offering comfort and bed. Bel refused the wine, but stood before the braziers and repeated, gratingly, her demand.

  Archie said, ‘He went to Linlithgow. The King is there, maybe you know? They’ve been hunting.’

  He was a sturdy, plainspoken man. She liked him, and the child. She said, ‘I was told M. de Fleury was here.’

  ‘Perhaps he is on his way,’ Archie said. ‘I could gather men and send out to meet him. I see it is something important.’

  A man came in; a man she knew and distrusted. The burly shipmaster who worked for Nicholas now: Michael Crackbene. He addressed her in his strange mixture of accents in which Scandinavian now prevailed. ‘You have a message for M. de Fleury?’ He ignored Archie. She realised that Nicholas had separate lodgings in this house, and that they included his staff and his office.

  ‘I maun see him,’ she said. ‘It is private.’

  He said, ‘You do not come to see Simon of Kilmirren?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why?’

  ‘It is of no consequence,’ he replied. ‘M. de Fleury is expected. His ship sails in a few hours. When he comes, he will have no time to speak.’

  ‘I willna keep him,’ said Bel. ‘But speak with him I must. Are ye sending to look?’

  The man hesitated. Archie said, ‘Yes, we’re sending. Robin’s gone to get lanterns and men. Your own two fellows are willing. We’ll make sure he gets here.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Bel. ‘Since time is short, and it’s late.’

  The King followed the hounds, fuelled on an elixir of frost and wine and excitement. What they followed, no one knew: the dogs themselves scattered the slots. It hardly mattered. Above were the stars; below the rare glistening white of the snow. And about him were his friends.

  Nicholas de Fleury was not there, nor Simon de St Pol – nor, presently, Anselm Adorne who, slipping away, had left to Metteneye the guest-mantle of Burgundy.

  Simon was very tired, and the pans were not as near as he thought. The first sign was the vanishing of the snow – the deadly, kindly, cushioning snow. Slowly, the ground became black. When he fell, he fell upon rock, thorn, unamenable gravel. When he struggled to the height of the rise, it was blackness he saw spread before him, lit by tongues of sullen flame, glowing smoke, smouldering circles.

  A naked man hatted with straw appeared in the distance, gazed, and moved on through the roseate dark as if blind. A spectral child followed, round of stomach, its hair on its shoulders. It looked at him, and continued to walk. Banners of vapour floated above sombre lattices made not of wicker, but fire. Beyond, he seemed to see a black meadow peopled by wraiths, men, women and children, stooping or upright, linked by yokes, holding tenuous shafts in their hands. Some were black; some red as blood, face, torso and limbs; some streaked, or white as himself. The red light glimmered through nets without fish and spotted the dark: red eyes glaring through silent black eyelets.

  He did not want to go on. He slowed. He stopped. Now he drew a quick breath and turned.

  A great hound, caught in silent mid-leap, was rising towards him. The shock, the close, warm odour paralysed him for a moment. Then Simon turned and hurtled down, towards Hell, for Hell could not be worse than a mastiff about to tear out his throat. The hound, with a snarl, followed after.

  And now he was in the inferno, where heat and cold fought in the air, and his throat was choked with the stench of blood and sulphur. He raced, fell and raced, tricked by shadows, tripped by some strange arsenal of iron weapons, beset by fire-dust falling like stars, which sizzled into his hair and soaked doublet and pierced his chilled skin like gnats.

  The hound followed
, as if bewitched. Simon stumbled through a maze of undefined shapes, red and black, sloping and vertical, trying this way and that to escape, and saw three naked men standing watching him in a river of heat. His mouth was stopped, his arms lashed, his dress soaked and torn. He ran to their feet, and as soon as he did so they faded into the darkness behind them. And the hound followed him, and not them.

  Behind the gag, his breath sobbed with exhaustion so that he did not even hear, until it was close, the uproar of the rest of the pack, and the horn, and the cracking of whips as men tried to control the King’s hounds. The King’s hounds, trained to kill, and set upon him by someone, through the bitter agency of his mistress Joneta.

  Hatred saved him. He knew that justice would not. Only great power could have brought this about. Power and money; the capacity to bribe and to frighten. Someone of consequence had willed him to die, and he would not.

  He turned. He forced himself to think. The hound was there, and the fading spiritous forms, but he was not in Hell; he was among the pan-houses of a salt-garden, and although their doors were shut and their denizens hostile, he would find shelter somehow. There, where a door was just closing. Where, if he used the last of his strength, he could hurl himself through, sending the timber shuddering back, even as the hound closed its teeth on his elbow and the heat struck him as fiercely.

  For a moment he thought he had failed; had merely brought the beast into the furnace. He kicked, ramming the brute with his shoulder, and knew, although he hardly felt it, that its jaws had clenched deep in his flesh.

  Then they opened. The wet, muscular body lifted. He heard a short whistle, of a special kind he had heard before, and the hound, releasing him entirely, swung its massive neck and stood, looking outwards. Then it bounded off.

  He lay, gathering strength. The door, drifting back, came to rest by his leg. He moved his foot, and it continued to close. On the outside was painted the usual mark, bird or beast, which distinguished the salt-house of each master. This time the picture held three creatures: a stag and two ratchets.

  The crest of St Pol.

  He looked up. The only other man present, lightly dressed, leaned against the door till it shut, and then locked it.

  ‘And so, Simon?’ said Nicholas de Fleury.

  Chapter 10

  A SALT-HOUSE IS AS close to Hades as ignorant man could well devise: made of plastered wattle and shingle, it is divided into three rooms, of which the first is the fuel-store and the last an outlet for smoke and for drying.

  In the centre room is the source of the heat: a floor furnace eight feet long and eight wide shaped of rock-salt and clay, and bearing above it on three immense hooks a lead rectangle full of brine from the estuary. In the lead receptacle, called the cauldron, the brine boils until it is reduced to white salt, which is then shovelled into cone baskets and cooled. In the same middle room is a bench, the blood-tub and the reserve tub of brine. It is hot enough to make the heart pound.

  Simon de St Pol lay, his frayed clothes steaming, within a yard of the furnace in the middle room. He lay on his face, to which position he had been tossed, and felt the vibration, but nothing else, as his deadened arms were set free. Then the knot of his mouth-band was cut, and his dry tongue expelled the cloth and then sought to form words. He tried to roll on his back, placing his weight on one elbow, and was shocked into gasping with the pain of the savaging; with the pain of restored feeling in his body and limbs. But the measure of his anguish was as nothing to the measure of his amazed disbelief.

  He blurted something incoherent out of that first emotion, and stopped. From it, he found the strength to thrust himself round and sit back on his heels. Anger rose and rose. He managed, finally, to repeat it with clarity as well as contempt. ‘Who are you working for?’

  ‘Who am I working for?’ the other man repeated. Then he sighed. He had chosen to dispose himself along the powdery bench, his smeared hands round one uplifted knee. The fire, dully red, whispered and murmured in its kingly bed, and the broth of salt popped and puttered above it.

  Simon said, ‘Who? Whoever it is, he set the King’s dogs on me. Or Joneta did. You arranged it.’

  ‘You set your dog on me once,’ said the man on the bench dreamily. He spoke as the thugs had, in native French. The tongue of Simon’s first wife.

  Simon frowned.

  ‘And had me captured, beaten and bound by hands quite as ungentle, I fear. You’ve forgotten that, too.’

  Venice. Now he remembered. And the dogs in Bruges. That had been over Mabelie. His fury rose again. ‘You forced Joneta –’

  ‘After what you did to her? She needed no forcing. Have you been roughly handled? Once, you stabbed me.’

  ‘That!’ That had been long ago. ‘That was an accident.’

  ‘So was the mastiff just now. Have you noticed the heat? Once, you set my house on fire. My house and Marian’s.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Simon shortly. ‘Now I wish I had. What is this? A boy’s list of grudges?’ He stared at the other man, and slowly, outrage was added to anger. He said, ‘There is no one behind this but you! My God, you perpetrated all this!’

  ‘I am easily piqued,’ Nicholas de Fleury observed. ‘May I continue?’

  ‘No!’ Simon said. Now he knew, it was easy. And he was rested. Aching, but rested. He got to his feet.

  ‘Sit down,’ the other man said. Between his hands, conjured from air, was a hatchet. He added gently, ‘I don’t mind using this.’

  ‘Against an unarmed man?’ Simon said. He sat down again, temporarily, on the floor, which was sticky and yielding and left smears on his hose, now half dry. He had his eye on a shovel.

  The mild voice replied, ‘You fought an unarmed man, near enough, when you fought me, and Gregorio.’

  ‘I wouldn’t quarrel with that,’ Simon said. ‘So what else have I done?’ He was listening for sounds. The hunt had been coming this way. Now he was safe from the dogs, they could get him out of the grip of this lunatic. He thought, now, he could hear them.

  ‘Let me think,’ said his captor. ‘Apart from claiming my ship, and attempting to steal the patrimony of your nephew Diniz? What about a sin of omission? The cartel you sent me in Venice, offering to fight me for my life and my business? Then you ran away.’

  Simon said irritably, ‘Of course, the cat runs from the mouse. You would have found me in Madeira. You did find me in Bruges and in Edinburgh. You withdrew your case. Changed your name to de Fleury.’

  ‘So I did,’ the other man said. ‘But then, I didn’t know all the facts. I didn’t know that you and my future wife were currently lovers. I do apologise,’ the unhurried voice added. ‘A boy’s list of grudges.’

  He knew.

  ‘You owed me a girl,’ Simon said. He said it to cover the depth of his surprise; the breathlessness of a slow and stunning delight. De Fleury knew. All these months, he had known about Gelis. This was why he had come to Scotland; had tricked him and trapped him and, hiring four bullies, was now bent on some puerile accounting.

  Everything was explained. At once Simon was relieved of the unreasonable fear he had felt out there under the sky, among ghostly watchers. Tonight he was in the hands of an aggrieved amateur, not a soldier; not the deadly and furious magnates whom he imagined de Ribérac had angered. His situation was perilous, but retrievable. And rendering it almost sweet was the knowledge that the other man had learned what he had done to Gelis van Borselen, and she with him, and would never cease to imagine it.

  He, Simon, had effected a masterstroke of the bedchamber worth all the sneers of a Jordan de Ribérac. A stroke which repaid, in one blow, all the pin-pricks he had suffered from Claes; all the fury his very existence had caused him. Which almost surpassed, in its life-long implications, the bludgeon-blow attempted this evening. For which, in due course, he, Simon, would extract life itself for payment.

  Simon smiled; and the other man, seeing the smile, said slowly, ‘Yes, of course. It had to be true.’ Then, heari
ng something, he lifted his head.

  Simon’s lips parted. Clear through the walls came the barking of the mastiffs at last, swarming into the settlement, and the blare of the horn close at hand, and the cries of the hunt-servants, and the cracking of whips. Freedom. The King’s party, and freedom. He made to move.

  Stupidly, he had been slow. His assailant – the cuckold, his attacker – was soundlessly on his knees beside him, the axe at his throat. De Fleury said, ‘I should prefer you not to call them.’ Simon reared, and the blade bit his neck. He lay still. It didn’t matter. Life and purpose had returned to his body. He was an expert. There would be other chances.

  They stayed, without moving. They heard voices raised in enquiry, and other voices, answering. They heard the thud of bodies as the hounds belaboured the walls and the doors. Simon lay, his clothes, once sodden with snow, now again soaked with his own perspiration, and watched sweat streak the other man’s cheekbones from the darkened screws of his heavy, waterlogged hair; slide from his brows and his lashes down the thin channel of Jordan’s incision.

  His hand on the axe-shaft was wet, but when Simon stirred, it tightened instantly. ‘No,’ said the man he had cuckolded.

  Then, suddenly, the sounds began to grow fainter. Simon heard laughter. He heard a man’s voice distantly raised in a chant, and others joining, slurred with wine, and overlaid with diminished barking. He heard the nasal twang of a jew’s trump.

  Above him, the other man’s breathing checked. An instant’s distraction was all Simon needed. He flung himself to one side, and then whined with pain as his captor swung his axe high and brought down the flat of its blade on the stob of his gnawed, bloodied elbow. The weapon returned to its place at his throat, where it stayed until all sound had vanished, upon which the other man rose and stepped back. Throughout, he had never appeared less than calm.

  Simon said, ‘What are you going to do?’ He sat, holding the weight of his forearm. His injury throbbed.

  ‘Shed blood,’ said his captor. He was tall, with a long reach and broad shoulders, but carried too little flesh, as might a man fighting a long campaign or recently ill. Something inconvenient strayed into Simon’s mind. The other man, hooking the axe at his side, lifted a scoop by its ear and lowered it into a bucket.