Race of Scorpions by Dorothy Dunnett
The sound, he had to assume, of Katelina’s absconding escort. It had all happened as Persefoni foretold. Their sham fight had taken place while his ears had been closed by the waterfall. Katelina had been persuaded to run downhill to safety while her guards had met their expected attackers, and after some loud, harmless fighting they’d left. So she found herself alone, she thought, with the one man in the world who had good reason to hurt her.
He might be wrong, in which case he could hardly risk yelling a question. He might be right, and every step she took away from him would place her in danger. Nicholas turned his back on the roar of the waterfall and began, as calmly as possible, to walk down his side of the ravine towards her. All the time he was moving she repeated, with a sort of despair, the slow, urgent motion to halt him, and followed it with a finger to her lips.
Her fear was not connected with him; or not directly. She wanted silence. He halted, baffled. Mime seemed to be the only solution. He pointed uphill behind her, and unsheathing a non-existent sword, conducted a fight with it. He ended with his outspread hand frozen over his head, like a bad acrobat inviting applause, and raised his brows in wordless enquiry.
Across the stream, Katelina was not so far away. He could see now that her face was hollow with strain. She wore a scarlet silk cord round her head, binding a linen veil striped with embroidery, of the kind that Fiorenza and Valenza used as a cloak when they had the fancy to be taken for Greeks. Her grass-stained skirt, tied up at one side for riding, revealed pale woven hose and embroidered kid slippers, sunk among shadowy reeds. She herself seemed oblivious to the wet, uneven ground at her feet. She put her hands fearfully to the cloth at her ears, and again to her lips and finally, with another gradual gesture, turned towards the top of the cliff and pushed the air away from herself, shaking her head with dreamlike urgency.
So her escort and her assailants had gone – or else she wanted him to think that they had.
No, they had gone. No one could imitate the way she looked now. And if they were going when he first heard their hooves, they must be well out of earshot by now. Before he called to her, he thought it as well to listen. Away from the rush of the cataract the green tunnel they occupied seemed filled by a thunderous quiet. The stream produced glottal sounds in a hollow voice. Far out of sight, larksong trembled. Invisible grasshoppers buzzed. In the distance, water eased unctuously over the fall, dark as snail-oil, and dropped in grey and white streaks to the pool. Near at hand, a boulder lay in the water, split, misshapen, ochre-grey dappled with lichenous pebbles.
The atmosphere steamed as the plant-house at Lindos had done, releasing a fungoid smell of earth and leaves, of hidden flowers, of animal life; of decay. Among it all was a scent that he couldn’t identify, pungent yet sweet as molasses. For a brief, livid moment, he wondered what on earth he was doing here, and what was happening in Cyprus without him. He saw Katelina’s face, and thought she might faint, and then, concentrating at last, realised what she was staring at; what she was trying to tell him.
It had nothing to do with human danger, or soldiers. It had to do with this valley. The boulder he had thought scaled with growth was quilted with something other than lichen. The moss at his back was a speckled, smothering dun instead of emerald green. The bulbous trunk of the tree at his shoulder was dressed in a deep, ruffled garment of brown seamed with yellow, cut with layer on layer of dagging, fine as pastry, fine as shells made of organdie. The stuff clothed the tree to the top and, when he lifted his head, he saw that its leaves, too, were lined with clustering petals of brown heart-shaped silk, veined with chrome. Then he looked again, and saw that, as if heaped with lice, the soft speckled stuff on the tree and the rock and the boulder was full of small movements. There was a prickling mass on the bush at his side, on the stones in the stream, on the flowers, on the grass at her feet and his, bending under the weight of it. He moved, and a petal detached itself from the thick appliqué, fluttering upwards. It had two brown and cream wings, revealing underwings of spotted burnt orange, and a furred body, and fine, whiskered feelers. It spread itself over his arm, twitching, tickling, and then took the air over its shadow. Flying, the thing was nearly two inches long. An insect. A butterfly. A moth, not a butterfly. A moth from a colony of moths numbering millions and millions: covering every growing thing in the valley.
He looked at Katelina then, in absolute silence, for he knew why his presence meant nothing, except as a disturbance, and why the absence of her protectors meant less. He realised, too, something she didn’t know. If this valley bred moths, then it would attract and breed all the reptiles that fed on them. This was why men died; why Tristão, felled by a bite, became victim of a murderer’s arrow. Whoever planned this knew that Katelina was unlikely to survive. And as the thought came to him, he saw what already writhed about her slender kid slippers, the flowing shadows he had taken for reeds.
It was either one snake or two. He didn’t wait to find out. He plunged shouting towards her in a blizzard of spray, his knife out, his arm outflung in warning. He saw her jump back, her mouth open. Even then, she didn’t scream. She didn’t scream as he floundered out of the stream, and kicked one coiling green back while he stabbed the knife into a second reptile and killed it. Then he made a swift turn on his booted feet, to find the wounded snake upreared and facing him. The hairlike tongue quivered and threatened and the snake hissed and hissed.
He didn’t know, intent on his duel, that in inducing that hiss, he had released a signal of danger that would travel echoing through the whole valley. The gleaming, leathery head brushed his hand, darted up to his calves, coiled and uncoiled like a medal of rope. Even when he caught it again with his knife it lurched away, and he had to follow, cutting and stabbing until at length it lay at his feet. It was the only one left: if there were others, they had gone. As he looked down, a deep frilling sound filled the air; a sound of ghostly applause; a sound of ghostly alarm. He looked up. From every tree, leaf and bush the moths rose like goosefeathers sacked by the wind. They lifted, darkening and thickening until the green tunnel was roofed with brown, living insects, obscuring the green. Katelina began to scream, then.
The dark, trembling cloud overhead dyed the stream sullen and tawny: the twilight shadows about Katelina swung and darkened as the ceiling of insects responded, its instinct fine-tuned to her screams. Nicholas turned, sheathing his knife, disregarding the still, scaly bodies that, a moment ago, had seemed the real menace. As he did so, fragile outriders from above were descending, thickening, crowding, fanning his hair; alighting and clustering on his skin. Dry, fluttering wings entered his mouth and stuffed stifling into his nostrils. Katelina’s face, like his own, became a shell-mask of moths.
Her screams became spasmodic and clotted: he thought she was dying. He scoured her face clear with a single rough hand, his palm a mess of half-wings and hair feelers and bodies, while with the other he whipped closed the linen stuff of her veil, covering all of her, eyes, mouth and body so that her screams became stifled, then stopped. He ripped off his shirt and added that to her armoury, trapping her hands safely inside it. In a vibrating storm of brown taffeta, the whole body of moths now descended, first to the high trees, then the trunks, then lower, clasping and crowding each surface, mounded deep as fine shavings of tortoiseshell.
They settled on Katelina and on Nicholas, as he held her. They rustled into his lips and his hair, clustered into his eyes and the folds of his ears, heaped themselves, as if magnetised, on the fine banded linen that shrouded the girl from head to foot. In mounds, they flickered under his palms as he grasped her. They clouded round him as he picked her up and started to run in the dizzying heat. And only then did he realise what the scent was in the valley: the clinging odour, sweet as vanilla pods, he had failed to identify. It was still there, all around. But strongest of all, it rose from the girl in his arms. From her clothes. No. From the veil he had wrapped so firmly about her. He lifted a corner of linen and moths buffeted over his fingers, wrig
Storax. That was what the trees were: the great Hygrambaris on whose resin gods and butterflies fed. And whose oils had been pressed on Katelina, soaked into the reverse of her linen. He had no hands to clear his own face but she was safe, cocooned, her face on his shoulder. Safe, although she was rigid as death and he had, somehow, to get her into the sunlight; away from the trees where every step that he took plastered them both, thicker and thicker with a whiskered, fluttering mass of brown and yellow and orange.
There was no time to ask any of the polite questions one asked a woman, before doing what he was going to do to her. In any case, his lips were smothered shut. As best he could, he stumbled with her as far as the dappled, sunlit dell of the fall, and set her down, clearing his clogged, streaming face. Then he put hands to her scarf and tore it cord and all from her hair, dragging it free of her shoulders and flinging it with his shirt as far off as he could. A carpet of moths rose as he did it, and hesitated, and then flew to fasten upon it again where it lay. The rest dropped and lingered like leaves upon the hot, perfumed skin the veil had laid bare.
Nicholas gave the things no time to cover her face or her hair or her shoulders. He took her by both arms and jumped with her into the pool, pulling her down, ducking her under the surface. He brought her up, commanded ‘Breathe!’ and thrust her down again. Drowning moths dimpled all the green surface: others swung overhead, waiting to alight once again. He could see the glutinous patches still in her hair, on her neck; and found wet wings alighting on his own bare shoulders, where her scent had stuck.
She seemed almost lifeless, and certainly beyond words. He took her arm and, half swimming, half wading, drove her under the waterfall. There, in a place where she could breathe, surrounded by spray, he rubbed her face and twisted and fretted her hair in the falling, cool water and then, with both hands, tore apart her sticky dress and the chemise below it and pulled them down from her shoulders. He paused at her waist and, stirring for the first time, she laid her trembling hands over his and dragged her skirts down until they jumped and tugged at her ankles. Then she moved, and they were gone in the foam. And loosed from her bosom the broidered zone, curiously wrought, wherein are fashioned all manner of allurements; therein is love; therein desire; therein dalliance – beguilement that steals the wits even of the wise.
Aphrodite.
He remembered, in Bruges, how she looked. The black Borselen brows, that she was too strong-minded to pluck and to pencil. The full-blooded mouth; the long hair, thick enough, even wet, to lead his eye down to what it didn’t conceal. The pretty breasts, round as fruit with their wet, swollen tips. The rib-cage strong, the waist narrow, the thighs shapely and generous. And the glittering, dark place between them where, with such consequences, she had admitted him.
He saw she was no longer rigid. Her body was quiescent in the quiet, running water. No. Not quiescent. He could feel her burning warmth, and his own. The waterfall thundered about them. His throat tight, he sought to look at her face but was stopped by her hands at his waist. Then she said something he had never expected to hear; and, lifting his eyes from her fingers, he saw her lips were open, and near. He closed them with his own, with her fingers still jammed between them. After a while he untied what she wanted got rid of, and then planted his hands round her and kissed her again, with her fingers no longer between them but behind him.
It seemed likely, in the extreme urgency that began to overwhelm the matter, that they would not really get out of the water. She began moving against him long before they surged to the edge of the pool and afterwards he didn’t remember whether or not they arrived separately on the hot, sunny bank. Everything else seemed blotted out by this extraordinary event, dwarfing the terror behind them in its avidity. Its summary nature, or the tension, and the release from tension hurled them both, immediately it was over, into fathomless sleep. After an uncounted passage of time Nicholas woke, leaf-shadow and sun on his back, and moved gently away from his sleeping mistress.
The glade was as it had been when they arrived there. Well, not quite the same, maybe. Beyond the dell where they lay, the trees, the boulders, the mosses slept with their moving moth-burdens, syrup-fed, drowsy in silence. Those who had pursued them and died floated transparent brown in the pool, or lay drying like leaves on the pebbles with ant trails already consuming them. Some idly moving from harvest to harvest, passed transparently over his head, or settled below, heart-shaped, brown seamed with yellow. Some, bigger and brighter, were not moths but stray and beautiful butterflies. Far away, a sleeping cinnamon carpet, lay Katelina’s veil and his shirt, where he had thrown them together.
She was going to need something to wear. So was he, apart from his boots. He began to laugh to himself, hoping they had not been an inconvenience. The moths rose when he handled the garments, but beyond brushing his skin, made no effort to settle on him. He scoured both, then hung them to dry on a twig. Though he watched, no moths rushed to alight on them. He did the same for her chemise, when he found it. Her gown was torn to shreds, by her hands or his. Much further down, to his relief, he found his own peasant-breeches, cast up on the bank and half dry. He put them on, and came back, silently, in case he frightened her.
She was sitting up, motionless, her back to him. Her hair, half dried, fell down her back like fine brown hemp of different textures. He continued to walk without sound, allowing himself the modest delight of looking at the silky knobbed tail of her spine, ending in the double whorl of white buttocks whose contours he could not remember exploring. He saw blue veins, like the veins he had glimpsed on the ripe, unfamiliar breasts pressed below him such a short time ago. Such a long time ago. Such an unspeakably long time ago. He realised with a quarter of his mind that whatever had happened was going to happen again, and he couldn’t halt it. Then he stopped still.
There was a moth near her, passing through shafted sunlight, and she was watching it. Her face was invisible. But he saw her raise her wrist slowly, and hold it. Like a courtier, the clouded thing landed on it, its orange skirts vanished, and lay, a frail umber shield veined with yellow. She remained without moving until his shadow fell at her side. Even then, she didn’t speak until, of its own accord, the moth palpitated, and went on its way.
Then she said, ‘It was a test. If I could do it, you were going to come back.’
‘You can trust me without that,’ he said. ‘They are helpless, and don’t mean any harm. And they know only one mating.’
He saw from the line of her cheek that she smiled. She looked round at him, and up and, leaning back on one elbow, let him see all he wanted to be reminded of. Then she said, as he had hoped, ‘And am I to be the same?’
Part-way through, she saw his hands and caught them saying, ‘The rocks at Lindos?’ He answered that without words, and didn’t use words, either, when later she said, ‘I adore you. I will adore you for ever.’
It was necessary afterwards not to sleep; but hard to separate limb from limb so that he could collect their clothes, and dress her, and prevent her from dressing him, or more time would be lost. She said, ‘The snakes! Do they respect Franks?’
And he laughed and said, ‘We frightened them. No. They live in the dark, where the trees and the butterflies are.’ Until then, she had asked him no questions except the small ones of intimacy; and he had mindlessly found himself courting her with Hesiod and Homer and Horace, as befitted the foam-born: and with her went Eros, and comely Desire followed her at her birth.
Later, when he had pulled her up from the gorge, and found his saddlebags, and unpacked wine and cheese, bread and melon, he could feel the silence behind him, and knew that the staved-off world had come back, and with it anxiety, if not doubt; and hesitation over the immensity of the gap which now must be bridged by words. He said, ‘Rich-crowned Cytherea, you are spent. Eat and drink, and then we shall see what has to be done. Don’t let any
Her hands round the wine-cup were trembling. ‘I didn’t care,’ she said. ‘They could have come in their thousands. At that moment, I didn’t care.’
He said gently, ‘They were up against the most powerful thing in the world. You may be frightened of them again, but perhaps never quite so much. Or perhaps not at all. How did it start? The fear?’ He was eating melon to prevent himself from touching her again.
She smiled, but her eyes were unseeing. ‘My dearest nurse died. The girl who came next had lovers. She let the moths beat on the lamp by my bed while she pleasured them.’
He threw the melon away and laid his arm round her, caressing. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘No. I want to tell you. Then the first time Simon touched me was in a garden. There were moths, gnats and a kiss –’ She broke off and said starkly, ‘I hated him.’
His fingers stopped. He said, ‘Don’t. I don’t. It is not what will help him.’
Then she said, ‘Is he your father?’
He laid her hand down. After a moment he drew up his knees and embraced them. He said, ‘I believe so. And so did my mother, his first wife.’
He could hear his voice, cool and quite steady. She said, ‘But he has never sired children.’
‘Oh, yes.’ he said. ‘A son, born dead before me. Between his death and my birth, Simon claimed never to have slept with my mother. My mother said she had slept with no other. I believed her.’
Katelina said, ‘You knew her?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘She lived with her father, after Simon cast her off. She died when I was seven.’