The Game of Kings (70 page)

She had been less than tactful, and he demurred at first; but both Mariotta and Agnes added their voices, and finally he brought out the silver box. Sybilla opened it lovingly.

“Lift it,” said Janet. “Is it heavy?”

The Dowager inserted a delicate finger and thumb. “Not very. So small, and so powerful. If one scraping does all this, what mightn’t the whole Stone do?”

The white teeth flashed. Johnnie, royally confident, was in carefree mood. “It would burn as the sun in your hand would burn, my lady. But you will wish to use it sparingly and make it last long.”

“Not particularly,” said Sybilla. She weighed the precious thing a moment in her hand, a calculating look in the blue eye, and then pitched it wholesale into the heart of the furnace.

Everybody screamed at once, and Johnnie’s shout was the loudest of all.

The roar and belch of black smoke this time pounced on them like the black underbelly of the ancient Chaos himself, snarling and surging about them with inhuman venom. It grew dark: far darker than before. Their eyes became blind as the eyes of the dead and the unborn; their senses thickened and stifled beneath the blanket of sulphur and their skins grew heavy and clogged with the rushing filth. The furnace roared. The last thing Janet saw was Sybilla’s head, like eidelweiss on some black, mirrored tarn. She took two strides and, embedding her powerful grasp in Sybilla’s long sleeves, hung on. Then they were all lost to each other.

There was no yellow flare. The sightless nightmare engulfed them
and the seconds passed, and then minutes, of black choler, livid and briefly guttering with the surge of the furnace. Light came reluctantly, clearing the blackness in misty circles, like clean water running white and graining over the blackened face of a drawing.

The floor became visible to them; then the stools; the lower part of the bench, and the five persons in the laboratory, three of them in much altered positions. Instead of commanding the furnace, Johnnie Bullo was standing hard by the door, looking out of the corners of his eyes at Sybilla. The Dowager had reseated herself and with Janet peering beside her, was poking energetically inside a large crucible, the twin of the one which stood shattered on the iron plate still in front of her.

“Such a useful thing, smoke,” said Sybilla. “Now what have we here? Yes. I thought so.”

She plunged her arm inside the jar and lifted something out, displaying it to them all. “One pound of lead, untouched. From the first crucible, stealthily hidden beneath the bench. Leading us to the second crucible, now broken, and containing one block of lead (at a guess) thinly coated with gold. Leading us to the further matter of my chains and coins which were supposed to be in the first jar but are (at a guess) inside the bench drawer instead. Yes, here they are.

“Dear me. Having supplied me with my coated brick and my Stone, Mr. Bullo meant I suppose to pocket the gold intended for the experiment and to stimulate a small regular income of gold with which to repeat his initial success. I do call that a little grasping, when I seemed to have housed and fed and paid him practically all winter.… I shouldn’t try it, my dear man. The door wouldn’t open for a very good reason: half my servants are outside with pikestaffs. Didn’t you know that Dame Janet dabbled in alchemy too? She has been a most valued adviser.”

Standing against the door, Johnnie Bullo showed his teeth; and there was something of the occult still about his smile, although he was unarmed and rather dirty, as they all were, and his hair was curling over his eyes. “At least, as you say, I had a winter’s lodging for it,” he said impudently. The brown eyes were limpid. “Have I made an error? I was under the impression you were buying my services.”

The blue eyes were equally seraphic. “Your services proved a little expensive.”

He shrugged a little. “I did all I could be expected to do, barring
manufacture fresh time. You feel,” and he jerked his head toward the door, “you have no further need of me?”

“On the contrary,” said Sybilla, and gathering her stained clothes carefully, she sat down again on her blackened stool. “On the contrary: I wished it to be very clear to you that you need my good offices much more than I need yours. If these men outside take you to a sheriff with this tale, you’ll hang.”

Romanies, having no use for confessions and excuses, likewise prefer to reach a crooked point quickly. Johnnie Bullo moved away from the door, strolled to the bench, turned, and regarded the Dowager with resignation and some misgiving.

“All right. What must I do?” he inquired.

*  *  *

On that same evening, as the small, gusty wind blew heather off the fuel stacks and straw from the roofs and goffered the gutter mud in the High Street, Lord Culter left Edinburgh for home.

It was five months since he had seen Midculter; five months since he had ridden around the estate, or seen to his fishings and his warrens and his peats. He had watched his stock coming to market outside the city walls; had met and corresponded with Gilbert over the shipments of wool and hides and the ordering of the farms and the affairs of his dependents; his wright and his mason, his tailor and amourer and falconer and carpenter and smith and gardeners; the men who supplied his oats, meal and barley, herded his pigs and sheep and cattle, grew his peas and beans, brewed his beer and bred his horses and cared for his wealth, infield and outfield.

He had missed the lambing and the finishing of his new barns and outbuildings; the shearing; the new plantings he had decided on for the spring. For five months he had carried a sleepless sword and husbanded other, corrupt intentions.

Now he was going home. Against the red western sky the outline of the Pentland hills, each shape familiar to him, moved and fell behind him on his right. The road, climbing up into Lanarkshire, reached the high moors as the wind freshened. The sky above him, changing from turquoise to Chinese blue, drew over him the inconspicuous film of night. The horizon, lingering apple green before him, breathed out its colour scrupulously after the prostrate sun.

He had said to Buccleuch, and Dandy Hunter, seeing him off, “I’ll
be at Midculter before morning”; and Buccleuch had pummelled him briskly on the shoulder and said, “Good lad. I hope it comes right for you. Kittle cattle, women, kittle cattle: but it’s wersh and wae without them.”

Bryony’s hoofs drummed in sympathy. Kittle cattle: kittle cattle. Would it come right? God knew, thought Richard—and closed his thighs like iron on the mare.

Like a wet and turgid emergence from a pool, the night became peopled with figures. Someone spoke harshly; there was a rush of soft feet and a chinking of metal against buckles. Bryony plunged, and trickling, wirelike fingers over nose and bridle secured her and then tugged and twisted at Richard himself.

Culter, kicking with his spurred boot still in the stirrup, freed his right hand and laid it on his sword, cursing himself under his breath. It was always a bad road to travel alone: it meant riding fast and staying alert, and he had been doing neither. Hell. They still had Bryony fast. There were two of them—no, three. He saw the shadow of a cudgel just in time, ducked, cut and heard a scream as he dodged and cut again.

The hands began again, twisted in his belt and pulling his leathers. The saddle became loose and he knew the girth had been slit. He slashed at the dim faces, feeling the numbness of a blow on his arm; fighting to free his sword arm from the clinging hands. The saddle was swinging, bringing him down with it. Below him, the unseen men grunted and swore; then the blade was suddenly wrenched from his grip and they leaped at him, bringing him successfully down, driving with his fists, knees and elbows into the tangle of hard bodies and then on to the road.

There was a gleam of steel: a solitary, agonized, breathless moment in which the irony of the thing struck him like a cannon ball, and then the circle of dark heads above him opened out like girasol to the sun. A brown pony, dark with perspiration, shot into the circle and decanted a thunderbolt: a dark figure which skirled and spat like a being demented.

The men about Lord Culter froze. The newcomer raged, in a language which was not English. The leader of the assassins answered, sullenly, in the same tongue and was treated to another shrivelling outburst. The other two, making an attempt to speak, were cut off by a storm of abuse. Under it, the three moved off sulkily, mounted and, without a word, disappeared as they had come into the darkness.

The owner of the brown pony remounted. Richard, shaking his head, rolled over, groped for and found his sword, and got to his feet. “I trust,” said the rider in clear but sibilant English, “that you are not hurt?” His expression, so far as it could be seen, was one of resignation rather than triumph.

Richard got back his breath. “Not at all. I would be suitably grateful if I didn’t know they were your men.”

“You have the Romany?” asked his rescuer, and there was a dim flash of white teeth. “Or only a little? Then I must explain that they attacked you through no orders of mine. We are a wayward people, my lord.”

Richard flexed his arm thoughtfully, studying the immobile, spare figure. Vivid in his mind was the firelit room at Stirling, and the stained arrows on the table. He had unfastened his jacket and, pulling out one of the points, laced his broken girth with it. “I believe I could put a name to you,” he said.

The white teeth flashed again. “I hope you won’t. My people tell me, when I come home, of the little commissions they are offered. I seldom interfere. If it were not that I am at the mercy of the shrewdest of your relatives …”

Richard straightened suddenly. “My brother?”

The other was already wheeling his pony to the Edinburgh road; he laughed as he went and shook his head. “No, no. Not at all. Devil take it, not at all.” The pony’s hoofs, gently pattering, dropped into rhythm and faded, leaving the echo of wry laughter on the air.

Richard slowly gathered Bryony’s reins and put his left hand on her neck. A half-smile lifted his mouth, so that for a moment he looked astonishingly like the Master.

“Mother! What now?” he said, and lifting himself into the saddle put the mare, fast, along the Midculter road.

*  *  *

Patrick opened the gates to Lord Culter long past midnight, with incoherent words of welcome. He sent his chamberlain back to bed without rousing the household, and taking a candle, went alone up the main staircase and along the dimly lit corridor to his wife’s room.

There he hesitated. He had removed all traces of his adventure: he had no idea of posing as a brave but battered warrior. Was it equally unfair to take her unaware like this? He wished he had kept
Patrick. He could have roused Mariotta’s maid; have sent her in to ask if she would receive him.… And if she refused? What a scene for the women, that.

He pulled himself together. If she didn’t want him she should say so, directly, to him. He hesitated only a moment longer, and then put out his hand and knocked.

Through a welter of necromantic, smoke-ridden dreams Mariotta became aware of the light tap. When after a moment it was repeated, she sat up, fencing with the supernatural, and called, “Yes? Who is it?” The answer took her by the throat.

Silence had fallen again. Her breathing had become erratic. Unable to talk with this chaos in her lungs she was quiet, trying to control the disorder.

“Mariotta?” He was speaking again, very low. “May I come in?”

It didn’t occur to her to refuse. She pulled a bedgown over her ruffled linen, gave a despairing thought to her hair, and called to him levelly. “Come in if you wish.”

She was paralysed by the change in him; because she had expected time to have stood still for him, as it had done for her. He was brown-skinned and light-haired with the sun, the corner of his eyes seamed with white. He was thinner and harder, and his quietness had a quality of power and repose in it which was new to him.

Coming no nearer than the foot of the bed he said, “I wakened you. I’m sorry. I couldn’t leave until sunset, and I thought it might be better to speak now, in private.”

Mariotta’s eyes were unchanging violet in the glimmer of the candle. “What is there to say?”

You may know the devil by the inverted image in his eyes. The candle flame in her husband’s showed her, sanely, herself twice over. He dropped abruptly on the low chest below her bed and taking the fringe of her coverlet in his fingers, twisted and plied it with his eyes on his hands.

He said, “I was brought up to distrust talkers. A foolish thing which recoiled, naturally, on my own head. I was taught to judge people by their actions, and I do—and it works—except sometimes, when it matters most. I probably haven’t learned much, but I’ve learned that people don’t always say what they mean, for good reasons as well as bad.”

“People don’t always say what they mean for no reason at all,” said Mariotta lightly. “Especially feminine people.” She saw he was
troubled by this vein and watched him, her chin cushioned on her updrawn knees. She went on in the same deceptive voice. “But you accused me of being Lymond’s lover before I claimed I was.”

The trouble in his eyes deepened as she brought out, irresponsibly, the difficult thing he had to discuss. He rolled the tortured fringe in his hands and she went on, before he could speak. “You’re trying to tell me you know there was nothing between us. But I think you must tell me how you know. You didn’t believe me. Whom did you find to believe?”

It was hard, but she meant to be hard. She watched him as he groped painfully for an honest and lucid answer; trying with all his strength to satisfy her and win through to her without invoking the shadows of the last five months, and of the last three weeks. It couldn’t be done, and she made it clear to him that he mustn’t try. “Richard? What have you done?”

He didn’t look up, or call his brother by name. “Nothing. He’s alive. This isn’t an act of expiation.”

“Did he tell you what passed between us?”

Richard’s face was buried in his hands. “Some of it.”

“He told you he had never laid hands on me?”

“Yes.”