The Game of Kings (49 page)

It was the steadiness of the voice that shook Scott. He exclaimed, “For God’s sake: this is where she died. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

“If I killed her, why should it? If I didn’t, I’m not likely to be goaded into triple suttee, even to enable you to expire in a spray of madder-fed milk.”

“You are willing,” said Scott harshly, “to give yourselves up?”

“We are waiting with, I hope, well concealed impatience to do so.”

“In that case, I’ll take back my sword.”

Knowing Lymond, Scott was well prepared. He expected a thrust or a cut, or even the heavy blade hurled in his face. Instead Lymond said briefly, “I’m damned if I’ll give it to you. This one wrote a betrayal. It can stay and sign it.” And he hurled it away from himself,
far across the dark cellar where it spun with a little tongue from the torch flame, carrying the boy’s gaze instinctively with it.

In that one small blind instant, like the tiger of Scott’s own fantasy, Lymond jumped.

Too late to avoid him, Scott had all the time in the world to do what he wanted. The heavy torch, flung with all the boy’s strength, left his hand and soared high over the gunpowder boxes, jettisoning sparks. The shadows pounced after it; the new, rough wood of the boxes bloomed under its high star; then it fell.

Halfway to the powder it collided with the clogged, sodden wool of Lymond’s cloak, simultaneously thrown. Torch and cloak fell together; the wrap, batlike and sluggish, rolled over the lower boxes like a carpet and the tallow dip, upright, hit the topmost box, hesitated, bowed, and then halting in the surge of its own fire, toppled slowly forward and into the cloak. There was a flare of light, writhing over ceiling and uneven, web-clotted walls. Then Matthew leaped forward and Scott, borne to the floor by Lymond’s hard strength, twisted vainly to stop him. There was a shrinking of light; a stink of tallow; a hiss; and the shock of utter darkness seized them all.

There was no light; there was no air. Scott heard Matthew blundering about, seeking them. He could hear Lymond’s quick breathing, close to his face and his own raucous panting. He could feel cool fingers bending and turning, the weight of the lean, clever body and the steady leverage on his own limbs.… Kill girls! He could kill girls; but he wasn’t going to stop Will Scott.

He broke that hold, and the next. He knew some of Lymond’s tricks, but not all. The pressure on his ribs had gone. Now he needed only to get his right hand free. He twisted.

Matthew stumbled on them and laid hands on something. Lymond’s voice, breathless, told him curtly to keep away. There were men’s voices in the convent above, and someone shouted something, but the blood roaring in his ears deafened Scott. He crashed again on his side, bruising his hip agonizingly against fallen stone, gritted his teeth, and shifted his own grip again.

It was bitter delight: to feel Lymond, the cool, unassailable Lymond, wince beneath his grip. He pressed with all his weight, and felt the other man jerk. Then, brutally as Dandy Hunter had done, Scott felt a surge through their locked limbs; cramp gripped his legs, and he was raised in the air and smashed on the rubble.

His own grip weakened. “God … !”

The powerful muscles opened again; again he fell, and this time struck his head, his senses spinning with the pain. He had rolled halfway across the Master’s legs; he had no sort of hold at all; Lymond could do as he pleased … but he wasn’t going to. Scott’s right hand was free. Thank God, to be reminded in time. His right hand was free; his jerkin was torn apart; and beneath it, strapped to his body, was the small, sharp knife he had put there long before.

It came to his hand like a child. He balanced it a moment in the dark, cherishing it; and then with a grim and godly triumph, drove it up to the hilt into Lymond’s hard body.

The blow delivered, energy, initiative and even normal sensation left Scott. Lying flaccid on the dark stones he was aware of noise and vibration; aware dimly that the roof was shaking and men’s voices, shouting, were calling his name. There was a crash, and plaster and stone rattled about him, sifting lax into eyes and hair. He laid a hand over his face.

Matthew was shouting, and now he knew. Of course. Stoneshot first, then Greek fire. He ought to get up and stop them; after a moment he did get up. In the dark, there was no movement beside him.

Painfully blundering, he found the stairway and began climbing just as Matthew, working obstinately in the darkness from wall to wall, found and fell on his knees beside Lymond.

Covered with dust and mould, with blood on his hands from the sharp stones, Scott waited in the open air with the rest while Sir Andrew Hunter and a few others went down with lights. He had resented the sardonic cheer they gave when he appeared.

Presently, Sir Andrew also returned to the daylight. Collected as always, he walked over to Scott and took from the boy’s hand the bridle of Lymond’s riderless horse. “Wake up! It’s a fine June day now.”

Scott changed colour. “Can we go?”

“When your friend has mounted,” said Sir Andrew calmly. “What did you think you had done to him? He has a bad shoulder, that’s all.” And Scott, the colour driven out of his face, looked where he nodded.

In the centre of Hunter’s men, Lymond was waiting equably, handkerchief to shoulder, while they prepared to truss and mount first Turkey, then himself. He was as dirty as Scott, the stained white
shirt gaping between broken points and his face white with shock and masked with stone dust. But there had been, clearly, no lethal, no maiming wound.

Sir Andrew Hunter’s gaze was critical. “The fabulous Lymond, trapped like a rat in a cellar.”

“Like cats to catmint. Everyone finds you so irresistible, Dandy: are you surprised?” Lymond had heard him.

He was unhelpful, but they put him firmly on horseback, and in a moment they were moving, with the Master riding between Hunter and Scott, and Turkey well back in the cavalcade.

The rain had gone, leaving a haze of sunshine. Heartsease quailed under their hoofs and honeysuckle dispensed bees and a yearning of scent; the elms passed like weeping seneschals. Behind them, dwindling into a green silence, lay the convent, denying its fractured bones to a tranquil grave; ravished and inviolate; wearing the nimbus of its injuries like a coronal.

But neither Francis Crawford nor the boy Will Scott looked back.

*  *  *

Twenty miles from Threave, Lymond’s silence became intolerable to Hunter as well as to Scott, already pierced between the shoulder blades by Matthew’s gaze. Then Sir Andrew said something at last which aroused the man between them. Lymond looked at him suddenly, and the flexible mouth curled. “Other than apologizing for not being Asmodeus, what can I do?”

Scott’s classical knowledge fell short of the reference, but he saw Hunter change from red to white. Lymond went on. “Do you usually bolt your rats with other people’s terriers?”

“Your young friend came to me of his own free will.”

“Initium sapientiae,” said Lymond absently, “est timor Domini. You may look in vain for the sapientia, but the timor, I promise you, will be very much in evidence.”

“I don’t think he’ll have much to fear. There’s another saying. Wha sits maist high shall find the seat maist slidder.”

There was a spark in Lymond’s eyes. “Or—Like to die mends not the kirk yard: how does that one suit you? And how is Mariotta?”

Sir Andrew answered repressively. “Lady Culter is alive. No thanks to your monstrous efforts.”

“Sadder, but also subtler. The intellect and its cultivation, as someone
once said, bring a higher form of fertility and a nobler pregnancy into human life.” Having delivered this sentence with perfect aplomb, Lymond addressed Scott. “Cheer up. Better luck next time.”

Scott snapped without dignity, “You would have done the same to me!” and Lymond was about to answer when his gaze went beyond Scott. Stark-free of frivolity, his voice rang out. “My God,” said Lymond furiously. “No! You fool.”

For behind them, the column had burst asunder.

Scott, holding the Master’s reins fast with his own, saw that Matthew, the wily campaigner, had seized his moment. While the men around him, grinning, listened to the entertainment ahead, Mat had kicked his horse out from the others and riding at full gallop, disappeared through the trees.

It was easy to follow, and they did, strung out through the wood while Turkey crashed with unnecessary violence through scrub and undergrowth, his hands freed with the practice of a dozen similar embarrassments. Unluckily the wood wasn’t big. As the trunks thinned out, they caught sight of him, and Sir Andrew gave an order. A shower of goose feathers hissed through the air.

Turkey continued riding for perhaps a minute after; then he lurched forward, his bald pink head bewigged among the tangled grey mane of his horse.

Scott, his sword out and his hand tight on Lymond’s reins, worked both horses around and cantered through to the others. There he dismounted, and after a moment’s hesitation, untied the Master and let him get down.

Turkey Mat, pulled from his horse, was lying flat on his back under the trees, with Sir Andrew bent over him. As Scott and Lymond came up, Dandy straightened. He was rubbing a handful of grass between his palms, and they saw the skin stained green and red. “I’m sorry, Scott,” he said. “Whatever possessed the fool to do that?”

Scott, knowing very well, said nothing, but Lymond dropped like a shadow beside the heavy, scuffed body. “Mat,” he said quickly.

The tough, scarred face was twitching with pain, but Turkey opened his eyes and grinned into Lymond’s blue ones. The grin disappeared. “Did yon greetin’ wean stop ye?”

“No. I didn’t go. Mat, you damned senseless fool!”

The prone man opened blue lips. “It’s nae loss: I’d have been sweir tae see ye leave, and me with nothing but my big wame on my
mind from morning to night. Tell Johnnie I got there one step ahead of his mixtures.”

“I will.”

“And tell the boy he’s a—”

“No,” said Lymond. “It was my bloody fault.”

“Aweel. I’m not for arguing,” said Turkey, and his voice suddenly was hardly audible. “If you get a chance at the gold, my bit’s yours. And the croft. Appin’s a nice place,” he said with a faint wistfulness. “But it’s damned cold in winter.”

And his eyes, moving aimlessly among the trees behind Lymond’s head, suddenly halted there with a pleased look, as if a sunny beach and a flat board and a pair of celestial dice had manifested themselves among the leaves.

*  *  *

Violence was the odour of Threave. As the rose and the rat and the whale and the beaver yield their essence, so the glands of Threave answered love, warmth and terror with dispassionate violence.

It was two hundred years old. Under the Black Douglases, the River Dee which islanded it had cherished blood as its native weed. Under the Maxwells it gathered to itself a robust bride; it cast its suggestive shadow on John Maxwell’s exchanges with England, and it let fall its mailed fist at random to flex its power the while.

When Hunter’s long train, with his disreputable prisoner, swept through Causewayend, forded the Dee and clattered into the courtyard at Threave, the reception, fremescent to a degree, gave fierce delight to Scott and allowed him temporarily to forget the raw episode of Turkey Mat’s end.

About Lymond’s sinful head, publicly exposed for the first time, blew the rages, the jeers, the curses and the gibes which had five years’ ripening to them. He sailed through them as white and insouciant as swansdown but, thought Scott, his emotions for once must be a little irregular—have I touched some pulse? Or will this sudden exposure do it for me?

John Maxwell was away, to Scott’s overwhelming relief. Until Buccleuch came for Lymond, Dandy and he would be passionate jailers. Not that Maxwell, whatever his past relations with the Master, would have risked an inch of his new security to help him; but one would
savour the situation more expansively away from that remembering yellow eye.

Threave, pockmarked and exigent, hung above them. While a temporary prison was being made, Lymond, fingered impiously off his horse, was lashed to one of the four drum towers of the wall. He was now very white; his fingers unobtrusively linked in the tethering ring behind held him firmly erect. Scott, talking to a fleshy man with a thick yellow eye and a jovial smile, the captain of Threave, looked away as the crowd surged around the drum tower; and then was driven to look back as, mysteriously, the quality of noise changed.

They reached the wall none too soon. Lymond, out of what looked like sheer boredom, had begun answering back. Scott could hear the sound of his voice, followed by a roar; then someone else speaking, then Lymond and another roar. The response was not threatening, it was appreciative. In a minute, Scott recognized with fury, it would become laughter, and laughter like Cupid is a notorious locksmith.

For their essay in comedy the crowd had launched a mock trial. Pressing thickly about the prisoner’s negligent person they clamoured accusations and he replied instantly with the kind of double and even triple entendre commonly fished for at the bottom of an alepot and commonly never caught. The captain roared with laughter; he was wildly amused and even joined in; he saw, to Scott’s annoyance, no possible harm in it. The castle had emptied itself; so had the kitchens and the buttery and the brewery and the bakehouse and the stables and the byres.

The little performance lasted ten minutes, and then Lymond suddenly stopped. They slung their ripostes at him and this time he shrugged his shoulders impatiently. They shrieked and he was silent; they went on shouting and he ignored them. Perhaps he had tired of the game; perhaps under its besetting pressures, invention had failed. At any rate, there was no mistaking the hubbub now. These were threats, and these, clattering off the tower wall, were stones.

The captain forced his way through. “None of that, now: we want the fellow alive. What’s happened to you? Answer them, can’t you, when you’re civilly spoken to?”

Lymond said nothing, but his stare was an insult.

Or so the captain thought. “Ho!” he said. “Jesus, you’re particular, aren’t you? Canna trouble to reply to the likes of me. Man: you’re going to stand there and sing like a linnet before we shift you a step. So cheep, my laddie, give us your tongue.…”