The Game Of Kings Part 23

It was bitter delight: to feel Lymond, the cool, una.s.sailable 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. "G.o.d . . . I.

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 G.o.d, to be reminded in time. His right hand was free; his jerkin was tom 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, cheris.h.i.+ng it; and then with a grim and G.o.dly triumph, drove it up to the hilt into Lymond's hard flesh.

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 whites.h.i.+rt 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 suns.h.i.+ne. Heartsease quailed under their hoofs and honeysuckle dispensed bees and a yearning of scent; the elms pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.sical 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 some-one once said, bring a higher form of fertility and a n.o.bler 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 G.o.d," 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 embarra.s.sments. 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 gra.s.s between his palms, and they s~w 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 d.a.m.ned senseless fool!.

The p.r.o.ne 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 mymind 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 d.a.m.ned 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 dispa.s.sionate 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 cxposure do it for me.

John Maxwell was away, to Scott's overwhelming relief. Until Buccleuch came for Lymond, Dandy and he would be pa.s.sionate 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 wouldsavour 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 un.o.btrusively 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 b.u.t.tery 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 s.h.i.+ft you a step. So cheep, my laddie, give us your tongue. .

Nothing.

The captain raised his voice. Scott could see he was a popular man. "Oh, fine then. We know how to Sort this kind. There's a legal punishment for refusing to plead. Alec: have we got any weights? Well, chains, then. Plenty of chains. Davie: there's two high rings. Cut him off and stick his hands on these. Now. That's a fine bit of chain, man. A shade rusty but no harm to it: we wouldna want to dirty a nice clean one. We'll put the first one around his neck..

The Peine Forte et Dure was a perfectly valid punishment for silence: it used weights to achieve a gradual pressing to death. Scott said, "Wait a moment. We're supposed to deliver the man alive. The courts won't exactly thank you for doing their job for them..

The captain was engineering the laying of the first chain like a Roman with his first viaduct; he didn't even bother to look around. "Never heed. We'll have him talking that fast he'll wear his tongue thin..

And they would, of course. Lymond might be capriciously vain, but he wasn't foolish. Like some mountainous and ironic chain of office the cable bedecked him; he had braced himself against its weight so that there was no needless drag on his arms, spread-eagled above. His face was set like iron. Never before had Scott seen so clearly the force of his will.

The captain was bringing forward another chain, ostentatiously, to cheers. Lymond took the strain in silence, with an odd mixture of impatience and resignation, and Scott, bemused by the sickly luxury of the event, almost missed the flickering lashes as Lymond looked fleetingly up and beyond the crowd. Scott turned un.o.btrusively.

At an open window on the first floor of the castle stood Christian Stewart. He saw her, saw the blowing red hair and listening face and then no more, for with an uproar greater than all Threave could offer, his father and his father's train appeared. The sharp Buccleuch eyes swept over the throng; over the grotesque, taut figure by the tower over the captain, whom he jerked to his side, and over his son's re~ face.

"Chains. That's a new idea. Thank G.o.d ye didna have them at Crumhaugh. . . . Are you the captain? Just so. The Master of Culter may be anathema to you, as he is to the rest of us, but that doesna alter the fact that . .

The window was empty. Christian had gone, thought Scott, mercifully missing the name. Then he saw a billow in the crowd: a redhead and two stout elbows made remorseless pa.s.sage and Christian Stewart, agonized and dishevelled, arrived among them like an arrow, Sym flying at her side.

"Buccleuch? They're killing a man here. Your snivelling whelp and that ape-.

"Hey!" said the captain resentfully.

Buccleuch, with plenty on his mind, looked both annoyed and alarmed. "Are you staying here? Well away back in: Hunter's there; I've seen him. n.o.body's being killed, and this is no place for la.s.sies." But she was off, Sym pulling her, and paid not the slightest attention.

Cleated with iron, his wrist tendons stark and his yellow head poised like a ta.s.sel, Lymond watched her like a cat, chilling even Sym's red-faced grin into blankness. Within a yard of him, the blind girl said, "Mr. Crawford?.

The way it was said caught Scott by the throat. His father's breath hissed through his teeth; there was a surge of intrigued whispering and Lymond turned his full regard for the first time, wide-eyed, on Scott. The boy jumped forward, and put a hand on her arm.

He raised his voice. "It's Lymond, Culter's young brother, they've got," he said. "Let me take you indoors. We'll look after him: don't worry..

"I know who it is, you fool: I heard your father," said Christian. "Are those improbable, schoolboy chains still on him? Sym, take them off. Francis Crawford: you're another fool, playing Maca.n.u.s with the lockjaw. I told you sound was my stock-in-trade. I've known your voice since I was twelve. You intended, I suppose, to sink like a pressed duck into a vertical grave." There were tears of fright in her eyes.

Sym's st.u.r.dy arms raised the last garland of cable, its manifold prints embedded below in pulped cloth. Lymond, obsessed and unheeding, opened tight lips at last and hurled words at her. "There are two hundred people listening to you. Buceleuch, d.a.m.n you: get her out of here.~~"I don't care," snapped Christian, "if there are two thousand. I'm not accustomed to denying my friends in public..

"Lady Christian knows the prisoner?" The captain, no less than his audience, was fascinated by this glimpse of frailty in high places. Scott rushed to her aid. "The Master imposed on the lady's kindness without telling her who he was..

That touched off the explosion. Ignoring Buccleuch's hand on herelbow, Christian rounded on his son. "I knew who he was. To know isn't necessarily to inform, as with some people..

"But he believed you didn't know, didn't he? Hence the pantomime..

The captain was impressed. "Jesus, that's crafty. He wouldna pipe up in case the la.s.sie linked his name with his voice, and let on that the two of them"I told you!" said Scott angrily. "He got her to s.h.i.+eld him. You've no right to a.s.sume . . . But his voice was lost in the deluge of ribald laughter and comment.

The row lessened as Buccleuch let out a roar, but it didn't stop. He gripped Christian's arm afresh and she shook him off. "I don't move until he's safely out of this yard." Her face creamy white within the masking red hair, she was quite unflinching. "It's more than time some things were said and done in the open, instead of underground like a nation of moles. This time, I'm going to stop a man from knitting his own noose. Mr. Crawford-.

Lymond's voice, carrying its full power, cut across her words. For his own sake, clearly he must silence her. He did it in his own way, raising his voice in a mockery which insolently denied pain, or strain, or any experience of ignominy.

"There goes my epic moment again!" he said. "Pantomime! I'd have held the Rose of Hamborough in twenty fathoms on a gravel bottom in a southeast gale, and all for nothing and less than nothing:my illusions destroyed, my deceptions dragged into the light of day and my speech miscarried and scattered to the hyenas. I do not complain. You may have your frolic. But on one thing I insist. I will not have my name coupled with a redheaded woman. Red-ribboned mares kick. Red-horned cattle gore. Rowans poison, and so do redheads, given the chance. . . . Is that clear?.

Sym had drawn back. The blue eyes pursued him coldly. "Well? What more? You heard her. She won't move until I'm freed..

He had lost any good will left to him. Sym, at a nod from the captain, moved forward doubtfully to unlock Lymond's wrists. The captain cleared his throat uneasily. Inside the castle his temporary prison was ready, and there was an escort of soldiers waiting; the sooner the fellow was locked up now the better.

He glanced sideways. In spite of what they'd just heard the girl showed no signs of anger with the jackanapes. And she had high-up friends, he knew. As the shackles were unfastened, he addressed her.

"It's a fine, dry cellar, my lady, and he'll come to no harm. Forbye, we hardly laid a finger on him..

"Ye leid, ye leid, ye filthy nurse," said the prisoner pleasantly. "One hand free. G.o.d. Ma.n.u.s loquacissimae-it's pantomime all right. And the second free. Competently done. Restored without loss to the parent trunk: ulna, radius, humerusThere was a long pause. "Not very," said Lymond rapidly. "Not at all, in fact..

He had lowered his arms very slowly. Ceasing to speak, he cupped his face momentarily, grimacing; then with a gesture of hall-comic resignation slid like a trout through Sym's grasp to the ground.

And the odd thing was, as Scott bending sardonically over him discovered, that he really had fainted.

* * *They had Maxwell's permission to use the castle for one night, leaving for the capital next morning.

In the privacy of Threave, once the prisoner had been battened down under triple guard, the chief actors expended their nervous excitement on each other. Christian, frustrated in her efforts to visit Lymond and irritated by Buccleuch's wholesale d.a.m.ning of that gentleman's anonymous ways, finally lost her temper completely and went off to bed. Scott fared little better.

The question was one of naming his former colleagues. Accused of standing with one foot in each camp; of leaving the countryside at the mercy of leaderless cutthroats, of lack of responsibility and of owning a head full of pulp and pips like a Spanish orange, Scott replied in kind without a trace of exhaustion, and he and his father were still going at the subject hammer and tongs long after Hunter had collected his men and departed. Finally Buccleuch roared. "It's a pity, since you're so keen on them, ye didn't stay with your precious friends!.

Will, already on his feet, s.n.a.t.c.hed up his cloak. "All right; I will!.

"Ye kale-heided coddroch! They'll cut ye in triangles if ye show your neb there after what you've done!.

'Then I'll go somewhere else!.

"You'll go somewhere else all right," snarled Buccleuch, and rang the handbell as though he were twisting a c.o.c.kerel's neck. "You'll spend the night where you can't do any harm and where you'll haveevery chance of comparing your dear old friends with your new ones- Fetch the captain..

Scott jumped to his feet, but Buecleuch's heavy hand was on his sword arm. When the captain came, Wat alarmed him by continuing to shout. "Here's another prisoner for you. I want him under lock and key for a night to clear the mud off his brain..

The captain was anxious to please, but unprepared. "I havena a fast room, Sir Wat. The dungeon's blocked, and there's only the cellar . .

"That's what I mean," said Buccleuch vindictively. "Put him in the cellar..

The captain hesitated. "But the Master of Culter's in the cellar..

"I know that, you fool!" said Buccleuch. "Put him with Lymond for a night, and let's see if he's hare, hound or rabbit, the fool..

Will Scott fought every plank of the way to the kitchen; he fought while they unbolted the heavy trap door in the floor, and he bit and kicked while they shoved him through it and halfway down the wooden steps which led to the cellar. Then the trap thudded shut above his head, the bolts clattered, and he was left alone with initium sapientiae and the Master of Culter.

* * *There is nothing very jolly about being locked in a cellar with a man whom, in every possible sense, you have just stabbed in the back. As Will Scott crashed into the stair rail and heard the trap thud above him, his very thews melted with apprehension.

The cellar had been used as a storeroom. Opposite, two barred windows near the ceiling imprisoned the night sky. There was a well in the shadows on his right, and a quant.i.ty of sacks, barrels and boxes. On two of these Lyniond lay stretched at ease, a solitary candle at his side.

Within the light, shapes and colours were sudden and strong: the b.u.t.ter-yellow head, impeccably neat, with a bag of meal under it; the fresh Hessian bandaging; the silver spark of burst points and the blue of the light cloth at shoulder and raised knee; at neck and cuff, the half inch of cambric glinting white. All that was unsightly had been removed from Lymond's appearance.

Looking for traces of the day's humiliations or the languor of bodily weakness, Scott found neither. With the face of a Della Robbiaangel, Lymond spoke. "In a day of gimcrack cannibalism and snivelling atrocities, we have now touched rock bottom. G.o.d send," pursued the voice as Scott, descending, made his way to a trestle by the well, "G.o.d send that somebody else is about to flay the gristle from your inestimable backbone..