To Lie with Lions

by Dorothy Dunnett

‘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 of reasoned thought than she was; but would be riveted, despite all the horror, by the greatest performance in which he would ever take part, with the gods themselves as Masters of Secrets. She guessed he wished there had been music.

  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 by translating it into human dimensions. This was not a play. This was the hurling into the sky of thousand-ton blocks of ice, glinting and roseate in the thundering night. This was the discharge of millions of gallons of boiling water, plunging down from the mountain in a wild dashing glitter, outrunning the billows of its own pink-flushed steam. This was a
spectacle of red and gold flames, of spinning fire-balls, of swathes and columns of sparkling ashes and sand. This was the crack of thunder and the roar of explosions and the massive, evil susurration of the deluge, continuous as the hiss of the sea. This was the Twilight of the Gods.

  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 one to whom he could say that. Or no, perhaps one person: Katelijne Sersanders. He still would not say it. He smiled, as the journey ended and the ships loomed ahead. He knew what her first words would be, speaking in awe of tonight. There should have been music.

  Part IV

  Summer, 1472

  THE MULTIPLICATION OF PAINS

  Chapter 30

  AMONG THE RICHER class of dealers and traders, the disappearance of the principal of a bank in search of profit is not a matter of immediate concern. His non-return, as weeks go by, creates anxiety. The owners of banks obviate this, where they can, by the dispatch of consoling reports to their agents. From Nicholas de Fleury came nothing for four wintry weeks. And the message that did come, in the end, was carried by no agent of man, but arrived as dust on the wind.

  Nicholas had taken certain precautions, but it had not been his intention, setting out, to unsettle the market by dying, or by occasioning rumours of death. By the end of the first week in March, his own counting- house in Bruges knew where he had gone, and the news spread to the financial arms of the French and Burgundian and Angevin courts, and thence to their princes. Captain Astorre heard, and was impressed. Anselm Adorne learned of it as he stepped from his vessel at Sluys, but did not even reply to the man who hurried to tell him, however unexpected the threat to the Unicorn. He had other things on his mind.

  The relatives of Gelis van Borselen wondered if she were about to become a rich widow, and whether they would be expected to find her a husband. The vicomte Jordan de Ribérac sent a message by one of his ships to Madeira. It said:

  I think you may now come home. Your late wife’s good-brother would appear to be either lifeless or greatly subdued, and I should value your presence in Kilmirren.

  These reactions were however highly subjective, and the business of the Bank was not, in such a short time, disturbed. Indeed, the news had no time to reach Venice and activate the orders Nicholas had so judiciously sent there before he left Edinburgh. That is, Gregorio would have hesitated about carrying them out. Julius would have obeyed them regardless.

  In Edinburgh, closer to events, the merchant class evinced a guarded interest in reports of the venture; interest which blossomed into a worldly-wise pessimism when members of the Berecrofts family were not within sight. The magnates, pursuing their own affairs and the affairs of the country, said little, although individuals tended, with the passage of time, to find themselves closeted in contentious dialogue with their King. Mistress Clémence de Coulanges, in the High Street, watched the lady Gelis respond to the waiting, while ushering the lady’s son, with a firm hand, through the character-threatening perils of convalescence.

  Pasque, who had made herself reprehensibly absent during all the first stages of illness, recovered her nerve as soon as the spots began to disappear, and was to be found several times a day hopping, juggling or playing tunes on the comb for the edification of young Master Jodi as a kind of atonement. The offer to send her to Dean, where the Countess of Arran’s two children were equally smitten, had also had some effect. For a while, Mistress Clémence had expected to see Bel of Cuthilgurdy, the elderly lady who had a kindness for the sick boy. Instead, it turned out that the lady had generously offered her assistance to the Countess at Dean, where Mistress Sinclair, they said, was overworked and short-tempered these days.

  Mistress Clémence listened to everything, and permitted the younger gentleman of Berecrofts to visit the sickroom when he came to call on the Lady. Jordan reminded him, she thought, of his son. Master Roger also came once, with a very small kettledrum. He was not invited again.

  Then the Unicorn sailed into Leith, and Master Martin of the Vatachino rode into Edinburgh looking, they said, as if he had swum all the way from the North Pole himself, but openly triumphant. The Cologne merchant Reinholdt was with him. Naturally, they went to Adorne’s house to begin with, for Martin still had to make his report, even though Adorne was in Bruges, and his nephew Sersanders, it seemed, had elected to remain temporarily in Iceland.

  After that, word of what had happened in Iceland did not take long to spread. First, that the Vatachino had achieved a brilliant if opportunist success, not only bringing back their great vessel against the most vicious odds, but having as cargo the finest quality of Icelandic sulphur, to be sold off in Bruges as soon as the ship was in a fit state to take it. The partners in the Unicorn venture were rich.

  The rest of the story, picked up by Pasqu
e and conveyed to Clémence, was one that merchants avoided when speaking to Gelis van Borselen, although the news would reach her eventually. Many people had seen Master Martin marching down to the Canongate to burst into the Banco di Niccolò where, it was said, he had stormed at de Fleury’s man for an hour.

  By nightfall, everyone knew what Nicholas de Fleury had been up to in Iceland: preserving his own illicit cargo, in return for exposing his fellow-Burgundian’s ship to the Hanse. Further, he had caused the Unicorn to run on the rocks, from which it had only saved itself by a miracle. The last seen of the same Nicholas de Fleury, Martin was happy to say, was gun to gun with the Hanse ship the Maiden, whose captain Paúel Benecke had a sharp way with a person who didn’t deliver.

  ‘And the little maiden? Katelijne Sersanders?’ had asked Mistress Clémence, hearing it all from the voluble Pasque.

  ‘Ah!’ said Pasque. When she said Ah! in that fashion, Mistress Clémence always wished she had not asked.

  ‘Ah, the poor silly child,’ said the woman. ‘They have attempted to hide it, you know. They would like you to think that she stayed with her brother. But the girl ran away on her own, and was with M. de Fleury for six days, before her brother went to persuade her to leave. He never returned. They are at the bottom of the sea with M. de Fleury. Will our terms of employment remain the same?’ Pasque said. ‘The Lady might even want to increase them.’

  That was on Tuesday, the twenty-fourth day of March. For two days the lady Gelis stayed at home, save for one visit to the Bank at the Canongate, and one to the house of Adorne, where she heard the account, in person, of Master Martin. During that time, she behaved as she usually did, although her complexion was pale, her eyes darkened, and she could not disguise her disinclination for food. The household were proud of her stoicism and served her in whispers, even though it was not absolutely sure that M. de Fleury was dead.

  On the third day, in a fashion no one had contemplated, the doubt was resolved. An English privateer, foundering off Dunbar, had been seized as a prize and brought into harbour, where it was discovered that this ship also was returning from Iceland. If the state of the Unicorn was bad, it was a wonder that the Charity had stayed afloat at all, with her strakes splintered with balls, her sails patched and both her boats missing.