The Game of Kings (61 page)

“Bloodthirsty, Richard?” he asked. “Husband your humours. Think of the fair ones at home. His heart was light as leaf on tree, when that he thought on his—”

It was one quotation he never did finish. There was a growl from Richard, an unconscious yelp from the spectators, and the fighting had begun in earnest.

In all the length of the bare room, no one spoke. The long blades exploded together, cracked, chimed and clattered; the stockinged feet slid and shuffled and the two men breathed in gasps, quickly, traversing and gyrating, slipping in and out of sword-length, each in a cocoon of whirring light. A blizzard of suns on walls and ceiling enclosed them.

Culter was a master, worth seeing on any terms: worth seeing even when wrought up with anger. His brain directed; his eyes and feet, shoulders and wrists answered, and the result was sure and powerful swordplay. Lymond said once, in a breathless voice curiously close to laughter, “He’s
twice
the size of common men, wi’ thewes and sinewes strong,” and then retired into silence. The daggers, sparkling over and under the swords, darted like serpents.

Within the first three minutes Richard’s sword touched his brother’s shoulder. Gideon, with the rest, said “Oh!” and then smiled. There was no harm done: the shoulder was already protected by the old bandage of Scott’s thrust. The lids veiled Lymond’s eyes as they disengaged. “Reaping the eddish. Try the other side next time.”

There was no next time. They fought themselves across, to and against the ropes on the Master’s side, the watching men pressing back against the wall; and then slowly moved back to the centre. Culter was attacking fast and brutally and his brother was displaying, one after the other, every trick at his command in a prodigious effort to defend himself.

He succeeded at the cost of being whipped forward and then back again across the floor, his parrying arm taking again and again the jar of the meeting blades. He showed surprising mastery with the dagger hand, and his excellence with that was something Richard clearly had to allow for consistently: again and again it baulked his follow-through and his feint.

The cost to both men was a growing tiredness, magnified by the long chase and by the emotional battle upstairs. After his first violence Richard’s speed dropped, but he fought like a textbook, missing nothing and giving nothing away. Lymond, his shirt soaked with perspiration, recoiled incessantly.

Ten minutes later, they were still fighting, and the watching room
was quite silent. At Gideon’s elbow, Tom Erskine said suddenly, “I tell you: no man has ever stood against Culter’s sword for so long.”

There was trouble in Somerville’s eyes. “I could have warned him,” he said.

Erskine’s breath hissed. “If one of them isn’t fighting, I shall stop it.”

“It won’t be necessary,” said Gideon quietly. “I think Lord Culter has realized.”

It was true. Fighting against a sword so weak as to be incapable of riposte or counterthrust or attack of any sort, he had still failed to penetrate Lymond’s guard. With grim fortitude, Richard put a monstrous theory to the test. In the middle of an imbroccata he dropped his left hand, exposing his whole flank momentarily to Lymond’s right blade.

Lymond parried and withdrew, the blue eyes quite impersonal.

Lord Culter disengaged. He did more: he drew back his arm and hurled his sword quivering on the floor, his eyes bitter as squill. “Damn you to hell. You’re not fighting?”

A man’s voice called through the silence of the room. “He’s escaped!” Lymond, breathing quickly, stood without speaking.

“I’m to be your buffoon here, as everywhere else.…”

The shouting voice was nearer. It said, “Mr. Erskine, sir! The black fellow: he’s got a horse and escaped!”

Richard didn’t even pause. “You bloody-minded little vampire—how in God’s name can I hurt you enough?”

Lymond said briefly, “Don’t underrate yourself.… Erskine: if Acheson has got loose, he’ll go to Hexham. Do you know it?”

“No, but don’t worry,” said Erskine grimly. “We’ll get him before he arrives there. Richard—”

“Do what you like. I’ve business to finish here,” said Culter.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Richard,” said Lymond harshly. “Erskine: I can take you straight to where that man is going. How the hell do you expect to stop him otherwise, if you don’t know the road? Give me a horse and all the escort you like but be quick about it. I don’t give a damn who you think carried the dispatch, but Acheson knows its contents.”

Calmly Richard, picking up his sword, moved between his brother and the door. “You won’t wriggle out of it that way.”

“Richard—”

“Don’t be a fool. He’ll lead you straight to Lord Grey.”

“Then it’s a risk we must take,” said Erskine steadily. “He’s right, Culter. Let him go.”

“Not until we have finished this.”

Erskine was trying desperately hard to keep his temper. “Listen. If that message gets through …”

Richard rounded on him. “Are you relying on
Lymond
to stop it? Then you’re a simpleton. Go if you want to. I’m not holding you back. But you’re not taking him: I’ll kill the first man who comes near him.” And he turned, his eyes sparkling in his white face, to his brother.

“You were too superior to attack? Then you can damned well attack now.” His sword was in his hand, a fine instrument of latent death, sparkling largo to larghetto with his dagger. “The way to that door is through me. Take it, brother, if you can.”

There was a pause. Erskine said sharply, “Hob, Jamie: take your horses and try and pick up the tracks. We’ll follow as soon as we can.”

Lymond stirred. Sleek, cold, finely polished as his own steel, there was an air about him now that none of them had ever seen. “Very well,” said the voice that sixty outlaws had known. “Since you offer, I’ll take it.”

And he moved in straight to the attack.

It was as if some flawed and clouded screen had slid from the air, leaving it thin and bright; informing the white figures and pale heads, fair and brown, with an engraver’s beauty of exact and flexible outline, and lending a weightlessness and authority to their art.

For the brothers were natural swordsmen. The slipping and tapping of the fine blades, the unfurling movements growing smokelike one within the other, showed no trace of the grim and gritty striving of a moment before. It was classic swordplay, precious as a jewel, beyond any sort of price to the men watching, and concealing in its graces an exquisite and esoteric death.

They had always known Richard for a master. They now saw Crawford of Lymond grow before their eyes, the tutored power entering behind the elegance, the shoulders straight, the wrists of the temper which had withstood all the force of Richard’s long aggression and which now adventured, strong and pliant, with every trained sinew in his body.

To the two men, existence was in the end the flicker of the other man’s steel; his brown arms and wrists; a blur of white shirt and white face and the live, directing brain betraying itself through grey eyes or blue. The men watching, unable to breathe, heard the click and clash and slither of contes, froissées, beating and binding: saw first one man and then the other bring his art to the pitch of freeing his blade for the ultimate perfection, only to bow before the other’s defence.

Lymond fought consistently within measure, intensely fast, with an attacking dagger: Erskine, his heart frozen by his eyes, saw him beating constantly on Richard’s blade, moving it out of his way; out of fine; pressing it down and opening the way for a lunge.

Tap, tap went the compound riposte, the soft feet slithered—and then Richard’s blade moved, Lymond’s right arm whipped stiff, and the flat of his blade adhered to the flat of his opponent’s. There was a glottal whine. The point, glittering, slithered down and down to Culter’s counterguard until Richard, with all his compact strength, wrenched it free, slipping and flicking aside the automatic flight of his brother’s dagger. He moved forward himself, and attacked.

He was possessed by one instinct: to wipe out the insult of the last twenty minutes. In this soil there flowered a strength which lapsed sometimes, but never seriously, and which gained leisure, more and more often, to answer the astonishments of Lymond’s attack. For here, perhaps for the first time in his life, Lymond also was stretched to the limit, his breathing raucous, his concentration a tangible and frightening thing.

Very soon after Richard, he made his error. He was at the end of a thrust, his right arm rigid and his bright point nearly level, when Culter caught the blade flat with his own, pressing on the steel and then dropping his own point.

Circling his brother’s blade, Richard’s sword adhered to it gratingly, the forte of his foil acting on the foible of Lymond’s; and the intent blue eyes narrowed. This was the first step toward disarming and the Master knew it. His attention was for a second wholly concentrated on disengaging from the danger point and Richard with a single movement, took his slender chance.

He gave way suddenly with his right hand, moved quickly with his left and then with his supporting rapier; and trapping Lymond’s dagger, whipped it from his hand to the floor.

With an answering, animal-like twist the Master leaped back out of close range, the sweat running down his face and into the hollow
above the collarbone, and covered himself with his single blade against the unleashed power of Richard’s following attack.

The force of it drove Lymond the full length of the room; that, and the need to keep out of measure, out of the range of Richard’s left hand. Corps à corps fighting was death to the Master now. Richard knew it and rose to his full, triumphant stature as a swordsman, the blades in his hands swooping like the many scythes of Chronos, driving the other diagonally back, into the rope and into the corner of the rectangle.

There was, throughout the room, the soft hiss of an intaken breath. Somerville, unconsciously looking away, found the palms of his hands were wet. Lymond, his back to the rope, allowed himself one fleeting glance to his side. As the skilled, tempted blade rushed toward him he dropped like a stone, left palm to the ground in a perfect stop thrust. Richard overshot, stumbled and whipped around: Lymond was already rising, his recovered dagger in his hand.

Lord Culter was shaken. Like his brother, he was breathing in retching gasps, his hair soaked, his wrists numb with the vibration of the blows. There was, for the first time, a moment of loose play. The men about them sighed, as if in an hour’s suffocation they had purchased a little precious air, and Richard’s eyes kept for a moment their look of bewilderment and appraisal. Then his head came up; beneath the thin shirt his muscles spoke a fresh conviction, and he turned on the fair, fastidious presence of his brother with a mighty and flagellant hand.

Lymond had recovered no such resurgence of energy. He was tired, the shadow of it dragging at his brilliance; but he fought like a fiend when Culter sought to drive him again across the length of the room. Somerville, watching, saw that he was fully aware of the ropes behind; of the small traps devised for him. But what he should fear and did not was the long wall of windows with their hard girdle of seats, and below them, the rough opened pack from which Erskine had taken the damning letter betraying the Queen.

Richard was aware of it; had had it burning behind the grey eyes for five long minutes; was beyond now considering the laws of the sword and the shallow lessons of courtesy and fair play. He drove Lymond like wind whipped by rain back from the ropes, back across the room, back to the windows, and finally back across the soft, shadowed litter of the pack.

Lymond stepped back into the trap. The cloth caught him; he stumbled,
and Richard, with all the power of his shoulder, brought three feet of accurate death to cleave the fair, unsettled head.

It fell on a crucifix of steel.

Fully aware, stumbling with precision to the exact place he must occupy, Lymond had already launched his two blades on high. Fiery with light, they caught Lord Culter’s sword between their crossed hilts and wrenched it from his grasp. There was one, sweet, invisible turn, an impact on the fine bones of Richard’s dagger wrist, and the short blade in its turn jerked free, dropped, and followed the longer to the ground.

In a matter of seconds, astonishing to him as anything that had ever happened in his life, Lord Culter was disarmed.

To stop was almost to faint, such was the strain. They stood very close, face to face, the breath shaking their ribs; and the rapier flared in one of Lymond’s hands, the dagger in the other.

He raised them slightly, the blue eyes haggard and wanton.

“My victory, brother Richard. My chance. My choice, to sheath either or both in fat, brotherly flesh.” The long fingers whitened on the two hilts as he held them out. “Handy Dandy prickly prandy, Richard … Which hand will you have?”

No one spoke. Culter’s gaze, at this ultimate moment, was steady and unafraid.

Lymond laughed. And laughing, hurled the rapier to the floor and leaped to the window seat, the baggage roll scooped in his arms. For a moment he was poised there, collected, elegant and fleetingly analytical. Then—“If you won’t lead, try following!” said the Master; and in a storm of contemptuous glass swept the pack through the window and followed it himself. They heard, as they ran forward, the thud, the pause, and the quick recovery as he rolled on the soft grass below. From there, as they knew, it was a step to the horses.

And so they had to follow.

Gideon found Kate in the music room, her eyes on the road south. He put two hands on her shoulders. “How good an Englishwoman are you?”

He felt her shiver. “I don’t know. Not very good, I’m afraid. It was Philippa who told them.”

“I know.”

There was a long silence. “Did they fight?” asked Kate at length.

“Quite brilliantly,” said Gideon. And he took her below where the
air blew soft through the tall panes, and where the fallen rapier, like the Master’s discarded victory, lay unmarred among the glass on the floor.

They were riding into the yellow, grit-blasted socket of the sun, following the wisp of dust which was Lymond.