Queens' Play (25 page)

Shoulder to shoulder with Laurens de Genstan he climbed the rooftops that cluttered the south shoulder of the church, and the crowds at the foot of the façade, with its three great doors, its arcades, its twin towers and rose window, surged round to watch. Then
reaching the sloped roof of St. Lomer itself, the two men scrambled to the base of the tower and started to climb.

Between Thady Boy and Robin Stewart the rope hung slack. The fat man was moving gently, testing foot and handholds half seen in the dark, and Stewart crawled up after, paying rope in or out, the night air cold on his body. Directions, clear and precise, came now and then from above. Once Thady Boy, secure on a ledge, was able to lay hands on the rope and draw the Archer bodily up to his level. Breathing was difficult; the cramp in his fingers, the stitch in his side, were agony; but looking down was no hardship. The church of St. Lomer rose like a lighthouse from a silting of faces, winking, glinting, shifting in the radiance of lantern and torch. Their own shadows, grotesquely, had climbed the first twenty feet of tower before them. Now they were in darkness above the black equator of night. Across the hollow was the cathedral on its hill, and the crooked down-running streets they had just toilsomely left; and beyond the chimneys, the flat black pool of the Loire, the houselights from the bridge caught there trembling.

He had taken his eyes from his leader to look at it; had failed to watch Thady’s movements and to match them with precautions of his own. The first he knew was a crack of a stone at his ear which disappeared chattering into the void. There was a quick movement, then the sound of a breath sharply drawn and then held. The linking rope whipped and swayed.

He looked up. Faced with a space of sheer wall, Thady Boy had done the only thing possible. He had flung the free end of his rope to noose a stone crocket high above his head near the belfry, and bringing his weight to bear slowly on the doubled rope, was climbing the open face with its help.

The crocket bore his weight. It was the rope which, fraying on some unseen neck of the spire, had given way, bringing him slithering down to the fine ledge of his starting point. And under the sharp impact of his foot, the stone had broken.

Horrified, Stewart watched. Thady Boy had saved himself, for the moment, by throwing himself inwards, hands flat on the wall, feet arrested in inadequate cracks; but he had almost no purchase, no belaying projection within reach and no safeguard but the remaining intact rope linking his waist with Stewart’s. And Stewart, cramped like a moth himself to the stonework, nails dug into crevices, could not support another man’s falling weight.

Lymond knew it too. Economically, using as little as possible of his vanishing store of balance, of energy and of time, he cut the rope between himself and the Archer.

Thought that night came godlike to Robin Stewart; dilemma and master plan appearing from nowhere printed themselves on the wax
tables of his brain. In the half minute before the fat man fell, he knew exactly what he must do.

There was a barred window on his left, just out of arm’s reach. For a moment, each in turn had rested on its sill, looking longingly at the inaccessible staircase inside. Stewart had no time to wonder if the stone was rotten there too, or if the bars would hold. To reach it, he must leave hand and foothold and jump: a jump of life and death, with below him the gaping chimneys and the blue slates and the waiting bricks of the streets.

He turned his back on Thady Boy and leaped. As his bony hands, like a grip from the tomb, closed hard on the cold bars, his feet swung free over the void; then his knee found the sill, his shifting elbow the bar, and ramming body and arms like some iron throttling plant within the lifesaving cangs and cavities, wearing the window like a harness, he spun the dark rope through the night, unfolding the coils he had held spare in his hand, sending the hemp hissing along the stone surface level with Thady Boy’s head.

In his turn, Lymond took the life-or-death chance as had Stewart. Loosing all his inadequate, sliding grip, he watched the dim rope coming, and jumped.

Stewart braked his fall. The bars, though he didn’t know it till later, squeezed his arms black; and the rope running harsh through his hands left raw flesh, whipped and bloody, behind it. Then came the drag at his body he was waiting for, the pulsing strain at his waist rope as the man below swung and span at the bottom arc of his fall. Stewart braced his aching body across the width of the window and gave his whole strength as an anchor. And the bars held.

The rope had stilled. Then, as if his ears were unstopped after deafness, Stewart heard a roar rise from the sunken radiance of the streets, and the strain on his back and pelvis lifted. Thady Boy had found a foothold and, using the rope as sparingly as he could, was climbing back up.

Presently, black against the black night, the unkempt head appeared at his feet; the light, acrobatic bulk gave a wriggle and a twist, and Thady Boy, breathing hard, was sitting beside him. Thady snorted. ‘Dear God, is that all the distance you’ve got? I could have been up and down the damned thing twice in the time.’ In the dark, his teeth flashed in a smile. ‘I told d’Enghien you were worth ten of him.’

Then they were climbing again. As he watched the Irishman above him moving steadily, delicately exploring, there stirred in Stewart something life-giving: a surprised gratitude for what Thady had tried to do; a fierce pride in what he himself had done. Strong, confident and free, for one evening envious of no man, Robin Stewart followed his leader up and into the belfry.

By the reaction of the crowd St. André also knew that something had occurred. The route he and de Genstan had chosen gave them no very clear view; but seeking footholds presently round a corner he realized that in spite of the setback the other two must be already inside.

Fingers bleeding, bruised and grazed by the stone, he was quite unaware of discomfort; only of the need to reach the belfry fast … at the very worst, before the rope-crossing from church to château had been completed. He gazed upwards, impatient of the noble Franco-Scot labouring in his wake.

Above his head, trailing, abandoned and God-given, was a length of rope. Upwards it wound, above his head, as far as he could see, and disappeared, if it ended at all, not far short of the belfry itself. In two steps he had reached it and, firmly straddled, had tested it with one hand and then both. Then, slowly and cautiously, he began to edge up.

It bore his weight without difficulty. After a moment, accepting the calculated risk as calmly as in battle, he brought his feet to grip the rope also, and climbed up.

Far below in the street they watched it; saw the free end whip beneath him and the rope sway and jerk over the uneven stones of the tower. Far above their heads, something moved in the night air, something mighty and echoing, as if a hollow wind had passed over and, passing, sucked in its breath. It came again, a shaking of the air, a word spoken a universe away by an awful and inhuman tongue.

They saw the white face of Laurens de Genstan look up, and St. André himself pausing, a foot on the stone to keep steady. The rope jerked, and the mighty bass bell of St. Lomer bawled out over the sleeping vale of the Loire. The rope swung, and again the bell spoke. St. André, close enough to be deafened, looked up frantically, and then down at his partner. Then he pronounced a stream of curses, heard rarely on land or sea, but properly suited to a position halfway up a cable lashed to the hand rope of a church bell. The choice was simple. They could lose the race, or climb the bell rope for all Blois to hear.

The Marshal de St. André did not even hesitate. Fist over fist he sped up the rope, and de Genstan after him; and as the great tocsin boomed and bellowed over the country, the remaining lights of Blois sprang to life until town and palace on their two hills sparkled in the black night like an oasis of pleasure, a queer winter revelry of some antique city of vice. With pikes rattling the town guard answered the alarm. Streaming with them, nightcapped, sheeted, quilted, the citizenry sank through the streets to St. Lomer like fussing aphids set awash in a flowerpot. The château blazed.

The belfry was empty, but for the silent tenor
Marie
and the great moving mouth of the bass bell, lumbering to a halt. On the floor, the
penultimate paper gave them their key word, and their final clue. To win, they had to reach the château, and the Archer on duty outside the King’s suite.

A wooden platform had been built out, extending the size of the bell chamber, and a small handrope railed it. A metal post, strutted into the stone, held one end of the cable which rose upwards before their eyes, shining in the new light, above the ravine separating the church of St. Lomer from the château on its rock. Two-thirds of the way along, arms scissoring, legs swaying, an angular figure was moving, suspended above the vault. A second was already over, climbing the crowded wall, busying himself, distantly and mysteriously, on the far side. Three yards, or four, and Stewart would have landed also.

St. André reached the platform and ducked under the rail. As on the far side Stewart struggled off the cable to the blessed safety of the château wall, the Marshal de St. André bent, found a grip, and swung off into space.

Short of murder, the cable could not now be cut. And there was a chance—a slim but real chance—of snatching the lead in that crowded courtyard where, as he could see, the huddle of bobbing heads had not parted even to let Thady Boy and Robin Stewart through. St. André was three arm spans from the church wall, and de Genstan was just stopping to grip the wire when a roar of acclaim—a double roar—reached his ears. Hung in black space, arms cracking, palms hard on the rope, he looked to his right.

On the wall of the château a queer, misshapen bulk had appeared. On its flanking harness holstered torches spluttered and burned. Under its knees and haunches a wooden platform was bound. Between its heavy ears, black and gross in the wild, smoking darkness, were two rolling eyes and a lip that curled back, showing long teeth and an open throat that lanced the cheers, the screaming, the laughter, the remembered beats of the great bell, with an ear-splitting bray. Tosh’s donkey, untied and in full working array, was about to make its solo celebrated cable-swoop on the church of St. Lomer. With all the power of his shoulders St. André set himself, grimly, to race back to the safety of the church.

It was Tosh’s donkey’s finest moment. With a whine and a hiss she left the wall and, torches streaming, tail flying, ears laid back and braying fit to drive back the waters of the Loire, whizzed over the abyss on smoking timber to plunge, hot, hairy and kicking, into the crowded belfry of St. Lomer.

What St. André said was never recorded. What the donkey said rang from wall to wall and spire to spire and house to house of Blois. Robin Stewart, watching filthy, exhausted and triumphant from the walls of the château, cried tears of laughter at the sound
until he found himself swung off his feet and riding shoulder-high side by side with his friend through courtiers, colleagues, well-wishers, failed competitors, over the courtyard to the castle.

John Stewart, Lord d’Aubigny, on duty in the King’s cabinet, came out at the noise, already sufficiently irritated by his overdue Archer. But the scene in the wide guardroom had in it such a flamboyant smell of success that his lordship paused. His Archer and the Court’s darling, Master Ballagh, in a state only describable as revolting, led a vociferous and excited crowd, struggling to tack up on the beautiful woodwork a paper which Robin Stewart had just finished writing, in his round, difficult hand, to the ollave’s dictation.

His lordship of Aubigny smiled, and moved forward to congratulate them.

Much later, when the wine was finished and the songs were wavering, Robin Stewart, half-clean in borrowed clothes, went back to duty, still a little tending to pant, a stressful ache in his larynx and throat base and a shrunken cabbage inside his ribs.

All the rest of him was happy. He had attempted to analyze the night’s events with Thady Boy, but the ollave had cut him short. ‘You did a good thing or two this night, Robin Stewart. A few small exploits more, and you have this Court eating out of the palm of your hand … do you never want to see your fingers again.’

He had been embarrassed. ‘If the King ever hears of it. According to d’Aubigny he’s been out the whole night, and came in the back way only just now with his nose white; and the Constable behind him with his nose red. The lady didn’t suit him tonight, I jalouse.’

‘He’ll hear of it.’ Thady, trailing his recovered doublet, was at the guardroom door. Stewart suddenly wanted to stop him. ‘Ballagh, listen …’

Patiently the fat man turned. ‘I have been making terrible free with the Robin, so you had better put your tongue to Thady Boy.’

Full of drink and success and his new, frail, fledgling trust, the Archer stood over him. ‘Leave O’LiamRoe. Leave him,’ he said. ‘Yon
serena
was gey funny, and he fairly needed the lesson, but it isn’t enough. Leave him. He’s no good. They’ll spoil you, the lot of them—och, it’s recognition, I know, of a sort: the kind I once thought I was desperate to have. But it’ll wreck you, body and mind. Better find an honest master and do an honest day’s work; and if success comes, you can be proud of it.’

His friend Thady Boy was able, at least, to put something of its proper value on this newborn and unwonted solicitude. After a second he said, ‘The O’LiamRoe and I will part soon enough in Ireland. We talked of this once before. If you dislike the Court so much, why not leave?’