The Unicorn Hunt (106 page)

He scanned the fleet all around him, but saw nothing of Nicholas or of Gelis. He didn’t expect, by now, to see Margot, although he wouldn’t have said so to Gregorio. He noticed that the boat to his right was now lit, but didn’t observe, of the smaller vessels behind him, that one was quite dark, although there were several people on board. Nor could he know that Gelis van Borselen was one of them, or that the master of the Banco di Niccolò, silenced and under duress, was another.

A roar came from the north, as the Serenissima’s trumpets began to mount to the crest of the bridge for their fanfare. The noise, from thousands of throats, rose like a blizzard and levelled. Julius
appeared, wine in hand. ‘Where has the stupid man got to? We’ll have to set off without him.’

Gregorio said, ‘I’m going ashore.’ It was perfectly possible, stepping from boat to boat.

John le Grant, also appearing, said, ‘Why not wait until we get to the Basin? He can catch us then, during the fireworks.’ Gregorio turned back abruptly.

The trumpets blared. It was a long and elaborate fanfare, and those hearers acquainted with Scotland found coming to mind certain strictures of an earthy, a whistling character. They were reminded, immediately, that in Venice all commonplace standards are useless. The fanfare ended. As if struck by the finger of heaven, a hedge of four thousand torches sprang alight on each side of the water. Hidden drums beat, and music blossomed like shrubs on each bank. The packed boats trembled and stirred and, moving, set off in consort on the last, glorious voyage back to the Piazza.

By now, such was the beat of the signal that the noise didn’t matter. Pressed down in the little hired boat, concealed by its hood, Nicholas was not much aware even of Gelis, close to him, watching. His three captors leaned at his shoulders, their eyes, too, on the silver thing spinning. He could not have disguised it. He could not even have controlled the stick, very likely. All he knew, and they didn’t, was that the force was coming from two people, close to one another. One of them he now knew was Margot. The other must be the child. And they were going towards it.

Once, he remembered the cruel hoax of Cyprus and the
dumm
, the deep summons he had seemed to experience then. But this time, he had not been thinking of gold; and Gelis was with him, her hands clenched white one on the other.

Once, he thought of something that he had been told about Margot, and that he thought sometimes that Tobie also knew.

It did not matter.

The flotilla moved down the crowd-lined Canal, passing the palaces of Bembo and Loredano and Cavalli; passing the Ca’ Niccolò, beflagged and garlanded like the others; servants crowding its balcony; all its torches ablaze. No arrow crossed the water tonight.

On either bank, lamps strung along jetties threw blooms of peacock colour into the water. Streamers of mist veiled and unveiled the tinted window-lights studding the darkness: the gilded mooring posts faded and glinted and overhead the fireworks, when they began, seemed to hang behind films.

Katelijne watched them from under the flag of the Knights, and collected her thoughts, which kept straying. At the time of the Abundance in Cairo, every mosque and palace and tower was swagged and massy with light, and boats of joy moved like this through the water, bells tinkling, music rising, while fireworks flowered and spat. She remembered fireworks and the Unicorn knighthood, and the unobtrusive, deft actions by which Nicholas de Fleury had exiled two people, and caused her uncle to suffer the consequences.

Fireworks. Catherine wheels. What had she learned from her pilgrimage? She didn’t know; or not yet. Her uncle had brought back literal Catherine wheels, or their models. They were to decorate his magnificent house in another city built on canals. Everyone celebrated water. In Venice they married the sea. After the disaster at Negroponte, the Turks had laughed at the Venetian Envoy: ‘You can leave off wedding the sea. It is our turn, now.’

Jan bumped into her, knocking the jew’s trump out of her hand. She picked it up. He said, ‘What do you want that for?’ Without waiting for an answer, he walked unsteadily to the other side of the boat, the side next to the beautiful vessel she was pretending nonchalantly to ignore. The
bissona
flying the unicorn flag of the Banco di Niccolò.

Apprehension gripped her, turning to horror as she saw him lift one unsteady knee to the rail. She said quickly, ‘M. de Fleury isn’t there. What are you doing?’ He was dressed, pathetically, in cock’s feathers, with glass eyes and a stiff golden beak and a great ruff of iridescent blue and green plumage.

He paid no attention but continued to climb with the evident intention of crossing to the next boat. She wished they were not so close, or moving so slowly. For a young man, even when drunk, it was easy. Infuriatingly, all the people she knew – M. le Grant, Master Gregorio – seemed as yet unaware. Then she saw Dr Tobias step forward and hold a hand out to steady and stop him. There was an argument. Heads turned. She saw Dr Tobias shake his head and step back, while Jan fell inside the Bank’s boat and, righting himself, began to walk forwards. Dr Tobias glanced towards her, and she knew he had seen her, but he didn’t approach. A few feathers stuck to the gunwale.

She thought it was the end, but it wasn’t. Far, from wishing to join Dr Tobias, Jan had merely used his boat as a bridge. Reaching the opposite rail, he clambered over and dropped out of sight. Feathers rose, and he reappeared giggling. Kathi saw he was in the
boat next to the Bank’s. Once in darkness, it was now lit and raucous with laughter. The voices seemed to belong mostly to women. A man emerged, his golden tunic adorned with a panther skin, and a wreath of ivy and vines in his hair. The costume exhibited the splendid symmetry of his body, but when he helped Jan aboard, you could see that the bare, cross-gartered leg was not that of a young man at all.

She realised suddenly whose boat it was. This time, Jan was staying aboard. When he disappeared under the awning, there was an outburst of feminine laughter.

Her uncle had not seen.

The fleet moved round the loop of the Canal, passing the Ca’ Foscari, the Palazzo Justinian. The loggias were full, the roof-tops crowded. Music fought against music from one house to the next, obliterated sometimes by drunken singing within. The heat from the massed torches warmed the dank night air of February; seagulls dipped and rose into fog. Their whining, thought Tobie fancifully, sounded like the souls of the dead; the shrill voice of the mask, of the
larva
, of the ghost from beyond.

The boat flying the Lusignan flag was filled with such phantoms. Chiefly he hated those masks which were white. A human back turned, and there was the oval, inhuman face, the pursed lips, the slender, classical nose, the ceramic cheekbones, down which a thread of silver or gold had been lazily drawn. The lightless eyes and cut nostrils above the beautiful gown; the shy, timorous gestures. The girl wearing the black diamanté mask had come forward again, and was gazing down at the boat with Jan in it.

Tobie had seen who was in the next boat. He had tried to stop Jan from climbing over. He knew Simon de St Pol had befriended Adorne’s son. He knew the girls in St Pol’s cabin were harlots, masked and costumed as men. The only mercy was that Jan also was masked, and the journey was short. Nothing much could occur in ten minutes.

Two minutes later, the curtains in the next boat flew apart and Dionysus emerged, dragging an indignant cockerel by the wrist. It was not apparent what they were arguing about. Then the argument suddenly stopped, as the eye of the cockerel fell on the Corner boat beyond, and the girl in the black mask who stood there.

Slowly she raised one gloved hand and allowed something to float from it: a kerchief. Jan leaned out and caught it. Then, shaking off the man at his side, he placed a precarious foot on the gunwale and offered his hands to the girl who began, with slow,
ineffable grace, to step from her boat to his. Simon de St Pol made to move to prevent her.

Tobie called John’s name, without making it urgent, while he himself scanned the Knights’ boat. Adorne, to his relief, was not visible, but he could see Kathi’s red gown, and where her gaze was directed. She saw him. He could feel her question, but do nothing about it. By the time John pushed to his side, the drunken cockerel and Simon were fighting in the next boat while the exquisite girl stood, one ringed hand arrayed at her breast, her mask sloping. The single tear glistened. The curtains of the deck-salon were open, and the entrance crowded with plumpish young gentlemen.

Simon was not a man of great patience. Perhaps only Jan was surprised when the golden god lifted his arm and caught his feathered disciple an efficient blow to the chin. Jan staggered back, stumbled and fell. The girl made no effort to save him. Instead she lifted her head and put first one gloved hand, then the other on Dionysus’s near golden shoulder. The cockerel scrambled to its feet. Simon glanced at him, then turned his golden mask to the girl. She leaned on him, her white fingers folded, and he put a muscular arm round her waist.

Jan exploded between them.

By now, every boat within reach was alerted, and people were scrambling to watch. Tobie stood grimly at his own rail, with John and then the others crowding beside him. Father Moriz said something in disgust and walked away; Gregorio followed.

It was never a contest. Jan was the son of a jouster but not the champion that Simon was. He gripped the boy by the shoulders and spoke to him. When the boy continued to fight, he spoke louder. Last of all, Simon de St Pol twisted back the cockerel’s arms and, pinning him down, leaned to draw the girl closer.

She came, in a glint of jewels and a rustle of taffeta. She came within an inch of them both. The eye spaces devoured, the diamanté lips hung; the spark of a tear lent its wistfulness to the virginal face. Then Simon wrenched off the mask and the headgear.

Nerio of Trebizond laughed and said, ‘Oh! Oh! How cruel!’ and rubbed the bare skin of Dionysus’s chest with his finger. Then, leaning forward, he plucked a feather from the motionless cockerel’s cap and stuck it in his own well-cut, masculine hair. ‘Now who will ever teach him the difference?’

Laughter spread. The boy, freed by St Pol, stumbled to the side of the boat, where Tobie and John were already leaning to rescue him. Behind the mask, he was retching. Between them, the two
men lifted him over and set him shivering on the deck of the Bank’s boat. Below the mask, he was green. Tobie took him inside. In the boat of the Knights, Katelijne Sersanders obtained leave from her uncle to see to his son, taken sick in the neighbouring vessel. Her uncle agreed, since Dr Tobias was there and M. de Fleury (she could assure him) was not.

She crossed. Dr Tobias said, ‘Thank God you’re here. Hold the bowl. I’ve got to see what Simon is up to.’

‘I can tell you,’ said Kathi.

Now they were close to the Basin; the deep-water anchorage off the Doge’s Palace and the Piazzetta. The young man Nerio, having kissed all the whores, replaced his mask and swung himself laughing back aboard his own boat from which, in a moment, the Queen of Cyprus and her mother and aunts sent across a casket of sweetmeats. Simon’s ladies fell on them. Simon ignored them. He might be deprived of his partner, but that wasn’t going to stop his glorious plan.

He knew where the vessel was, because he had arranged for its hiring. He knew who would be in it, because three of them were in his employment as well. Having an office in Genoa, he had not found it difficult to discover where Gelis van Borselen was going to stay, or to forestall her when she wanted armed help. She would not have heard his name mentioned. That is, she might not have minded, but one could never be sure.

He had to admit, too, that his father had helped. It was awkward, because his father and he had quite different ideas about what to do with Gelis’s son.

He fastened his panther skin a little more securely and began, with confidence, to jump from boat to boat.

It had come to Nicholas some time before, that Gelis was frightened. It did not mean much, in the curious place where he was. He assumed she was afraid that he would somehow perish before he had found what she wanted. When he could not concentrate any more, he said, having obtained permission to speak, ‘Do you think I could see where we are?’ They would not let him into the open, but they drew back the curtain a little so that he could see how close they were to the Basin and the end of their journey.

The end of his journey. Ahead was the terminus, the space of water lit by the flood of torchlight from the Piazzetta where all the regatta would finally come to rest. The place was marked by a group of objects at anchor: the broad barge upon which, earlier,
the stilt-walkers and acrobats had performed, and the fire-swallowers had sent their columns of flame into the air; the raft with the windlass from which rose the double rope joining palace to campanile, up which the tightrope artists had walked; the floating sea-monster which by day delighted and terrorised children from canal to canal. And within the rectangle they described, a vessel he could not yet see, from which came the summons he felt.

He did not need the whistle any more; the desecrated whistle. He let it swing to its furthest extent from his lacerated finger, and loosed it to hurtle ahead, accurate as a date stone, through the curtain and into the water. Gelis started. The soldier behind struck his arm. Then he saw the golden figure leaping towards him, spanning the widening gap between boats. He had no doubt who it was.

He thought at first, naturally, that Gelis had planned it. He was surprised when she gave an order to her three hirelings beside him. ‘Send that man away.’

He said nothing. If she did not recognise Simon de St Pol, it was not for him to tell her. Then he heard her repeat sharply, ‘Stop that man from coming aboard!’ and realised that she knew who it was. And, further, that the men also knew who it was, and were not going to do as she said.

Nicholas said, ‘They are Simon’s, not yours,’ and watched, almost with pity, as understanding came to her face.