Race of Scorpions

  But today the sea was blue, and the sun burned as she went on her errand. She thought, when she went back, to find the shed empty, although she had been gone for no more than a moment, but he was still there, his eyes scanning her face. He wore, as she had already guessed, a stolen robe of the Knights of St John. She said, ‘Why did you stay?’ in both anger and anguish.

  And Nicholas, stirring, said, ‘In case you had wanted me. But you don’t.’

  She had betrayed him, and another man perhaps would have struck her. But there was no anger now on his face; only the aspects of thought translating itself into action. There had been, for a moment, a shadow that was more wistful than bitter. She stepped aside to let him pass, running silently, although she knew that by now he would never escape. Already, in the Commander’s palace below, men had roused to the alarm she had given. There was only one way out of the citadel, and that was down through the castle, and past the guard at the drawbridge, and down the staircase to the exedra with its ancient carved ship and its notice, vouchsafing to Hagesandros son of Mikion the privilege of a front seat at festivals for services rendered. It seemed likely that Nicholas son of nobody was about to receive a front seat at this rite for nothing.

  He had gone only a short way when she saw a sword flash in the sun and a guard leaped out from a doorway in his path. Only one man, but armed. Then she saw that Nicholas, too, had steel in one hand: a knife he must have worn under the robes and which he gripped in his left hand and not his right so that the stab, when it came, took the soldier quite by surprise. The man staggered and fell. As he did so, Nicholas wrenched the sword from his grasp and ran on.

  By now, the shouting below drilled through the air: rattling Greek from the garrison; loud, careful Greek from as many of the twelve Knights as were on their feet, with their swords out of the scabbard. She had intended to deliver her tormentor to the jurisdiction of the Order. She had intended to shut the door somehow, for ever, between Nicholas and herself. It struck her, now, that any excited soldier would be forgiven for executing his own summary justice. She stood transfixed under the eaves of the church with their whitened plaster of nests and glimpsed Nicholas vander Poele as he raced down the steps, and heard the challenge, and then the clatter of swords, now out of her view. Heard shouting, heard running footsteps, heard more swordplay and then, for a long time, nothing but shouting. The sound seemed to weave backwards and forwards in the lower reaches of the castle, sometimes nearer, sometimes further away. Katelina stood, staring across the baked and dazzling ruins and saw that already the lizards were flickering back to their glassy arena, and the cicadas’ buzz had resumed. A man, living, had stood here. Now he was out of their way. Even when something moved, it was so far off that the scene hardly altered. Between the ranked columns a bare-legged servant in white bounded up the glittering span of the celestial staircase to the propylaeum. Beyond was the terrace, and the altar, and the temple enclosing Athene goddess of war, Athene goddess of goldsmiths, Athene goddess of wisdom, who killed her own father. Beyond that was the precipice edge, and the sea. Unless he wished to commit suicide, there was nothing to take a lone labourer there.

  She waited, but no one came back and when, much later, she walked slowly up the same staircase, there was nobody to be seen. They found her there, to tell her that the spy of the Lusignan had somehow escaped. She returned to the castle in their company, and without looking over the wall, then or later.

  The Knights’ castle at Pharaclos occupied a squat grassy hill to the north. Its battlements had a remarkably clear view, if distant, of Lindos; and far too clear a view, in the opinion of Nicholas, of the red clay roofs of the cabins that littered the landward side of Pharaclos Castle, safely out of view of the shore. Once he had limped past the cows and the dogs and the goats, the mules and the poultry, the melon patches, the beans and the well, it was not hard to find the house of Persefoni, the woman with the best roasting-ovens in Pharaclos. She was not pleased to see him.

  ‘Boulaki! Boulaki sent you, you go back to Boulaki. A foul, fornicating fisherman who starves his own mother.’

  ‘I bought his boat,’ Nicholas said. ‘He says you are an angel as his mother is a devil. I need to hide until I can walk. And I need information.’

  She didn’t ask what was wrong with him, because she could see the bone of his shin. He kept his arms behind his back too, in case she expected him to dance on his hands. She said, ‘How much?’ And he said, ‘Boulaki’s boat and as much again as I paid for it, to keep for Yiannis’s grandson.’

  ‘Ah!’ she said. ‘He trusted you with the boy?’

  ‘He got paid for it,’ said Nicholas. ‘Twice over.’

  She shot a look at him. He hoped he looked as he felt, which was resigned, reasonably acquiescent and in some breath-shortening but not life-endangering pain. He knew, as well as she knew, that if he carried that amount on him, he could be killed and robbed in five minutes. He said, ‘I can give you half. The rest will be paid by a lady in Lindos. I have to meet her in two weeks on the west coast. Boulaki will speak for us both.’

  ‘Limboulaki,’ she said. ‘Little boatman. His true name is George. Well, come in. How did you come by all this? You climbed out of her window?’

  ‘It was a very high window,’ he said. The fires were all lit under the roasting-ovens, and the shacks, the yard, the cabin shimmered and reeked with the heat. He saw, without protest, that she was opening the door to a hay shed.

  She said, ‘As you see, no neighbours want to build close to this house. You can stay. There is a bucket. The boy will bring you some food. Show me your hands.’

  He brought them forward. She had a weathered brown face, and strong black hair plaited under a rag. She said, ‘For half the money in advance, I will bring hot water and linen and ointment. But maybe you’re a good healer, and don’t need them.’

  There was not much he could do. He let himself down and pulled the bag from his satchel and gave it to her. He said, ‘But the rest is for the boy.’

  ‘Oh, oh. The boy,’ she said, counting it. ‘Well, I suppose God tells us to take pity on beggars. I will bind this leg of yours as well. And what clothes are these, for a Christian man to be wearing?’

  ‘You have a son?’ he said.

  Her eyes moved to him. She said, ‘Maybe. But he is a Greek, not a foreigner. The woman in Lindos is foreign?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Your lover? Your wife, it may be?’

  ‘She would like to be,’ Nicholas said.

  Her mouth opened wide as a fish-scoop. She said, ‘Oho! We climb out of a lady’s window to escape her? She has no dowry? There is another?’

  ‘There is another. But,’ Nicholas said, ‘I think we must know one another better before I can tell you.’

  He had had a lot of experience with middle-aged women. Within a day, he had a bed inside the house. Within three, she knew about Katelina, and had promised to help him. He thought it very likely she would then sell him to someone else, but there was little he could do until he could walk again. And Primaflora would wait at the rendezvous they had arranged, since for her sake he would not go back to the villa at Lindos. And from that rendezvous, of course, they would make their way back to Cyprus, as husband and wife.

  His injuries were healthily mending; his abrasions and fingertips healing when Boulaki’s aunt brought him the news he was waiting for. ‘The Flemish lady who waits for a ship. She is going.’

  He was sitting at table, whittling out a new puzzle with cautious fingers. He looked up and laid down the knife. ‘Good news! When and how?’

  The woman sat down and lifted an edge of the puzzle. ‘Toys! Child’s play! You who should do the work of a man! She rides north at dawn tomorrow from Lindos to the City. She has a good escort. She will sleep on the way at Kalopetra.’

  In all their exchanges, usually, she glared at him. When she was being kindest, she glared at him. Now, her head bent, she fingered the puzzle. Nicholas said, his voice gentle, ‘It
is a strange route, for the City.’

  ‘So,’ said the woman. ‘You know the route. Before she arrives at the monastery, she will be abandoned. Her escort will be attacked, and will run.’

  ‘And the attackers will kill her?’ said Nicholas.

  ‘Not as before. No. No. They will leave her unharmed, but with no protection, no guide and no horse. There are many dangers,’ said Boulaki’s aunt, ‘and that spot, as you know, is deserted. It is natural that she would wish to walk there, where the Portuguese lord met his death. What happens to her, too, must be natural.’

  ‘I see,’ said Nicholas. He took the puzzle back and slowly cleared it of sawdust and shavings. He said, ‘But how can they be sure she will die?’

  The woman said, ‘You mistake me. She may die. Death is simple. But for some, there are fates –’

  ‘– worse than death,’ Nicholas finished. He looked up. ‘So, rape?’

  Her black eyes glared. She said, ‘Do you not know her? Do you not know what she fears to the point of madness?’

  He looked through her, thinking, recalling. A fan. A veil. A napkin at Kouklia. Precious plants, which nevertheless could not be watered by lamplight. And, long ago, an event in the valley of Kalopetra itself. He said, ‘How do you know what she fears?’

  ‘It is known,’ the woman said. ‘Her servant talks. She is watched. They have weaknesses, these rich women with husbands.’

  Nicholas said, ‘They are cruel, who prey on them.’

  She glared at him still. ‘Not my nephews,’ she said. ‘This time they have been told to do nothing. You promised no harm would come to my nephews. You may kill their hirelings again if you wish. I hold you to that.’

  ‘I meant it,’ said Nicholas. ‘I spoke the truth, too. I can afford to tell no one. Only I shall be there when it happens, if you will get me a mule. Can you do that?’

  ‘You are a good worker,’ she said, ‘although foreign. I can do that. Save her, marry her, and give her sons. Sons are worth all the gold in the world.’

  ‘They are worth what their mothers are worth,’ Nicholas said.

  Dressed as Guinevere, Nicholas had of course been before to the ravine he was going to, although riding through a winter’s dusk then from the opposite end, and not by himself. Astorre and Tobie had been with him, and an unknown soldier and Loppe, and Katelina. And, of course, Primaflora, riding pillion behind him with her moveable warmth and her golden hair and the gleam, white and gold, of her limbs. It was here they had found dead Tristão, and the youth Diniz, hurt and weeping in hiding. Diniz six months ago, when he was young, and before he came to sink an axe in anyone’s shoulder.

  Katelina had set out to ride there with four soldiers and no servant that could be detected. Waiting just outside Pharaclos, Nicholas let the small cavalcade pass and then followed, trotting easily on the horse which, after all, Boulaki’s aunt had managed to find for him. He suspected that, whatever the outcome, Boulaki’s aunt was sure of getting it back.

  Not that Katelina’s escort made any secret, either, of their passage. They took the usual road north by the coast, passing through Malona and stopping at Arkhangelos. Only at Afandou, thirteen miles short of the City, did they turn west and begin the climb that would cross the ridge and lead down to Kalopetra. Nicholas wondered why Katelina had agreed to spend the night there. Perhaps her woman had been sent on ahead. Perhaps she had been told of a ship she must join. Perhaps, indeed, she had been induced to consider a pilgrimage. Going home to Tristão’s widow she could take a flower, a stone from his death-place. Well protected, in clear brilliant sunlight, the spot would hold no present terrors, and only a small debt of mourning.

  It was a leisurely journey. Nicholas took his pace from the party he followed, and stopped when they did as the sun rose in the sky. Like them, he chose shade wherever possible, riding between olives and carobs, under massed and opulent lemons and the glossy leaves and choking perfume of oranges. He ate in a resinous pine grove, deep as fleece under his feet, and drowsed among cones, below an animal sheen of green needles. He put off time in a village, throwing dice in the shadow of yellow-green grapes, and bought a melon, and a plaited straw basket to hang from his saddle. He sat his horse talking to haymakers, and swished through dry grass in a rhythmical uproar of grasshoppers. He put up birds, and glimpsed sugarcane once, and identified the oil and incense of churches and finally came, as the sun stood past its zenith, to high places of silence, where he heard only the bray of an ass, and the remote, plodding clink of a bell and the soft, ruffled thud of his riding.

  He knew by then that he was only one stage from his destination. He made his last stop, peeling off his soaked peasant’s shirt but not the knee-high leather boots that irked his ripped legs and feet. Then he withdrew his mind from its rest, and began to think again.

  The ravine was half a mile long. He had seen it only in darkness, but he remembered where the ambush that had killed Tristão had been. They had shot him, and then had come down to look at the body. There could not be so many places in that particular gorge where mounted men could climb down at speed, and escape again. And Katelina would go there. They could depend on it.

  He had no wish to come across the ambushers, or to disturb them. He believed what he had been told. They would not risk an attack on the girl. In case she survived, her guard would take care to act out the fiction. They would try to defend her, and fail, and be beaten off. Whatever danger she fell into then was not of their doing. He wondered how long it would be before they turned up at the gates of Kalopetra, nursing some spurious injuries. Not, he guessed, until nightfall. All the harder, by then, to find her or her body. In time, he resumed his dry shirt, and a sleeveless skin jacket given him by Boulaki’s aunt which might, she said sourly, just keep out a spent arrow. He had had to abandon the sword he had won at the castle, but he had a good skinning knife in his belt which would do very well, unless he was unlucky. He had also cut himself a stout switch. He didn’t expect to have trouble with men. His object was to arrive when the men had departed.

  Ahead, the tracks of his quarry led downhill over slopes that in winter must have been slick with marsh-water and mud. Now they were patched with strong colour, shaded by trees and fed by the springs that combed down to unite in the ravine, scouring it into ladders and pools, cutting into the overhang of soft earth and rocks, nourishing the flowering bushes that grew along its sides, and the forest trees that stood with their roots streaming in water, their vaulted barks Gothic-high, their luminous leaves overhead, green as if painted on glass.

  It was what Nicholas saw as swinging out from the start of the gorge, he approached its edge further down, where the thunder of water told him the waterfall was. His horse tied out of sight, he moved circumspectly to the side and looked over.

  Chapter 32

  HE HAD FORGOTTEN how vast the trees were, growing close in the long, winding chasm where the stream ran. Some had fallen, their gnarled boles swollen with scaly protuberances, their hollows hummocked with webs. Rafts of pebbles divided the stream: brilliant ferns grew at its edges; moss gloved everything like double-cut velvet, sheeting the walls of the ravine and weeping harp-music under the organ-voice of the fall. To his right, the ladder of water blocked his view. To the left, so far as the stream ran before turning into the trees, the valley seemed to be empty.

  When Katelina’s party came, they would approach from the opposite side, where there was room for four men and a girl to lead their horses down to the small grassy strand where Diniz’s father had died. As for himself, the best hiding-place was down there, at the foot of the fall. Beyond the pool, it would be easy to cross.

  That, of course, meant he had to climb down. Nicholas, sighing, turned and started to hand himself watchfully from rock to rock, the mist from the cascade acceptably beading his skin and the noise unacceptably deadening his hearing, so that he spent half the descent with his chin turned on his shoulder. No one came. He dug his fingers without pleasure into the caked earth by a
clump of pale cyclamen, and a chaffinch rattled up, calling. Sunlight jumped in and out of his eyes, and tattooed his arms with a bright, fickle yellow. He persevered doggedly, swearing each time he dug in his toes and swearing again as he felt the pull on his shoulder and neck. After what seemed far too long he landed on the rocks by the edge of the fall, where the foam dashed and winked and, beyond, the pool lay still and green. Beyond that, the stream raced ahead on its business, winding into the green dappled gloom among boulders and bushes, creepers and the dark trunks of trees. Among the trees, someone was standing.

  Katelina, alone. Which was impossible.

  Katelina standing in silence, staring at him. Since he had just been performing in full public glare like a lizard, this was not surprising. Katelina staring at him and about to be joined, he assumed, by her four escorts, all prepared to be ambushed and chased off. This was disastrous.

  She had betrayed him before, and there was every reason why she should betray him again. He gave a fast, despairing look at the cliff down which he had just climbed, and decided he was damned if he would climb it again. He thought, letting the waterfall rinse off his hands, that if he could wade over the pool, he might be able to escape round the fall on that side. He moved, and she put both hands up in terrified warning to stop him.

  She put them up gradually, like a swimmer. Her face was pallid in the humid green dusk. She didn’t look venomous, she looked stricken. He cast a glance over her head. No sound; no movement. Well, no movement. Sound he could scarcely hear, where he was. He stared sightlessly at her, considering. No sight of her escort: but there should be, by now. No sign of their attackers, as he’d expected. But on the steep slope behind her, the slithering track where one person had escaped down from the brink, a track that ended where Katelina stood. And above on the skyline, a mess of broken boughs and tumbled clods as if a struggle had occurred beyond there between more than a few horsemen. And then, as he sought to decipher it all, he became aware of a vibration that was not a sound under his feet. The pounding of many hooves, making off from beyond the ravine.