The Disorderly Knights (90 page)

His massive, golden head flung back, his broad shoulders braced under their black cloak lightly laced over his white shirt, his sword firm and light in his hand, Graham Malett, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St John, Sigad id Din of Dragut’s prophecy, looked across at his fated opponent, met that expressionless blue gaze above Lymond’s sword, balanced between his two hands, and smiled. ‘Sweet, hot-blooded creature,’ he said. ‘I had no idea you had a brain. You should have joined me. I would have made you a little prince.’

He sighed, his clear blue eyes tender. ‘And now I must find another.’ He moved his hand and the point of his blade, searing in the banked candlelight, described a gentle, impatient pattern in the still air. ‘Come, my flower. No one will interfere. You have not yet quite proved your innocence and I have not yet quite proved my guilt but I cannot afford—you are right, surprisingly right—to be detained while they find out how just are your guesses. Ah, sir,
you meddle!
’

It was addressed to the Deacon, his old face white, his courage gripped hard under the cloth of gold, who ignoring d’Oisel’s exclamation, ran forward between the two fair-headed men and laid a hand on Gabriel’s arm. ‘This is a House of God, sir! And you with the Cross on your breast draw naked steel before Our Lord’s altar! Put up! And you also!’

Lymond’s gaze did not leave Graham Malett’s. ‘Willingly,’ he said. ‘If the Knight Grand Cross will do the same.’

‘Willingly,’ repeated Gabriel at once. He made only a little movement, but the tip of his sword, entering the old man’s shoulder, drove home with a speed that sent the deacon reeling back into d’Oisel’s arms, his sparkling vestment running with blood. Stepping back, all his bright blade dulled, Gabriel turned again, smiling, to Francis Crawford.

‘It is sheathed,’ he said. ‘As I was saying, no one will interfere. And only one man besides myself requires his freedom and has no objection to killing you first … 
Randy!
’

Then they all saw the movement behind the octagonal pillar to the left of the altar. They all watched, helpless, as, dodging out of the shadows, sword drawn, Randy Bell, physician and Will Scott’s assassin, drove straight for Lymond’s unwitting back.

But because of Gabriel’s shout, as Gabriel was fully aware, Lymond had a little forewarning: just enough to meet Bell sword to sword, as he backed up the steps, his eyes flickering from Malett on the one side to Bell on the other.

Bell was afraid. Catching the glint of his eye as he thrust at Lymond, dodged and thrust again, Jerott remembered where he had seen that look before. It was on the face of Joleta, in the streaming dark courtyard of St Mary’s, when she read Gabriel’s intention in his eyes.

But Randy Bell had no alternative. If he stayed, he would hang. And in supporting Gabriel lay his only chance of escape. Only Gabriel, playing his own amusing game, closing in a little, forcing Lymond, now fully engaged with Bell’s blade, to watch his own sword; from time to time thrusting with intention so that Lymond had to guard himself, breathing quickly, on two sides at once, knew what outcome he planned. For Lymond was Randy Bell’s master with the sword and Bell, looking desperately for help to Gabriel’s
playful blade, knew it. Only Gabriel was not supporting Randy Bell’s attack. He was merely bent, Jerott saw suddenly with incredulous loathing, on having the inconvenient doctor neatly killed for him, while sapping Lymond’s own strength.

It was not a game that Lymond, either, proposed to play. As Jerott watched, he suddenly put extreme pressure on Bell, his sword thrusting and flashing, arching always to the left, where Gabriel followed him up. Then at length Bell, chest heaving, the dark blood high in his face, stepped back just below the great standing candelabra at the top right of the steps. He saw it just as it came toppling over him, thrust by Lymond’s shoulder and knee and, struck across the shoulders, slithered and bounced down the remaining steps to the carpet where he rolled to d’Oisel’s feet.

Few watched while rough hands were laid on him and, below Janet Beaton’s stony gaze, Randy Bell was dragged through the press to the north door to take his place in the Tolbooth. Instead, swaying, calling, they saw Lymond drop instantly on one knee, and dodging Gabriel’s first, unconsidered drive of fresh anger, strike forward and up with his left hand.

Graham Malett rolled back along the altar rail, angry surprise in his lucid blue eyes and blood wet on his white shirt, where Lymond’s dagger, slipped at speed from his belt, had slit the garment from end to end in a long raking thrust that ended deep by one clavicle. Bare under his black cloak, the stained skin of his breast heaved as he collected himself, his sword flickering as he parried Lymond’s quick, following attack until, his forces gathered again, he stood firm and was able, in a moment, to disengage, his back to the rail. Then Jerott, and all those near enough, saw what the torn shirt revealed, pricked, white-scarred with the passage of time, on his breast.

Lymond saw it too, and his sickened understanding must have shown, for Gabriel’s amusement lit all his fine, fresh-coloured face. ‘Why so prim, sweeting? Surely Evangelista told you? But for Trotty, the Sisters of Sciennes might have had a rare child to nurture.… Which reminds me.…’ The smiling eyes under the cropped golden hair considered Lymond. ‘I have a little news for you, my brash child. But not yet. Not yet. First, Francis Crawford, I must teach you and others like you to keep out of my way.’

His arm steady, Lymond parried that first stroke. To Jerott, to all his men, to Sybilla, watching, her heart struck cold by Gabriel’s words, his blue and level gaze was no more or no less than they had often seen it, in armed combat with someone whose skill he respected, or at the beginning of some subtle and delicate action. He said, speaking clearly and directly, ‘There is no certainty in your sword, and no escape at the end. You are fighting for your pride, but I haven’t done what I have done to die here, under your blade. Only
a fool, Malett,
or a man losing his mind
, makes the same mistake twice.’

It was done deliberately, no doubt. It touched, Jerott saw, on what was probably the only fear that Gabriel knew. There was, in that open, tolerant face, a flowering of cold anger such as Jerott had never seen, even at the whipping-post at St Mary’s; and Graham Malett, his eyes alight, said softly, ‘
Jabatek ummek wahad f’il-dunya
.… Thy mother made thee unique in the world; a true word, lout, usurper, hurd without name. You would meddle with me? You would lay your half-made hands on my life?’ He broke off, his white teeth flashing. ‘Come here, Francis Crawford, who worships, I am told, two things himself: power and music. Don’t be afraid. I am not going to kill you. But the armbone of St Giles, who can cast out demons, will have company before very long.… First I shall sever your right hand, my dear. And in due time, the left.…’

And smiling still, he attacked.

Almost no one, of the crowded men of St Mary’s who watched, murmuring and jostling from the body of the church, had ever seen these two men fight. It was something Francis Crawford had instinctively avoided, Jerott realized. Opposed often enough at the butts or the tilt, they had never been matched body to body in physical combat. And that, shortly, was what they were doing, for Gabriel, superb in height, reach and confidence, made the one small mistake he had made over and over: he underestimated his opponent. Richard Crawford, who better than anyone there knew Lymond’s gift for the sword, drew in his breath as Gabriel, moving round and round the scuffed carpet, springing from step to step, up, sideways and down, his point intent on Lymond’s bright sword and quick, skilful hands; his dagger left-handed matching Lymond’s, over-reached himself for one second too long. The fist of Lymond’s dagger hand thrust up; his long blade came down, and Gabriel’s sword, hooked from his grasp, flashed past the brass rail, and slitting the red silk of the altar, sank quivering into the carved wood behind.

Following its flight, Lymond almost missed the spurred foot rising with all Gabriel’s weight to his groin. There was only one way he could jump: he hurled himself down the wide steps and was caught, deep in the sword-arm, by Gabriel’s dagger. Adam Blacklock, gripping the child Philippa’s shoulder, saw Lymond stumble, his hand loosening on the sword, and Gabriel’s dagger pull out and flash downwards, its razor edge flying to the blood, flesh and tendons of that long, slender-boned hand. Then Lymond, dropping the sword, snatched his hand back, blood pouring from his right arm, and sought left-handed and nearly reached Gabriel’s exposed ribs.

In the effort, both men overbalanced. With the effective use of only
one arm Lymond could not wholly control his manner of falling. He took the brunt on his shoulder, as Gabriel did, but rolling back to regain his feet, half his back must have been pressed hard against the thin edge of the steps, and when he found Gabriel, half-risen, on him again, his dagger high in his hand, Lymond did not parry, but instead, holding his dagger left-handed, he grappled close, pressing hard on the high wound of Gabriel’s chest while quickly, unobtrusively, he sought the grip that would do what he wanted.

Pain Graham Malett had never feared. He would have withstood it, with massive strength, until Lymond tired, if Lymond’s fingers, scored and bleeding where he had not always contrived to miss that teasing sword-point, had not found and pressed on the one nerve that mattered. No amusement at all on his face, Graham Malett dropped his last weapon and brought his two powerful hands to bear on wresting the remaining knife from Lymond’s grip.

Watching, in a fellowship of craning heads and jostling, shouting bodies, among whom, marked by their silence, were Lymond’s own officers and men, Jerott saw the two men crash again to the floor, and rolling over and over, stain the altar-carpet with their blood. There was a brutal, effective repertoire which he knew, and Gabriel in his day also had used against men taught to wrestle in the
bagnios
of Constantinople. He saw Gabriel begin the familiar moves with a kind of loving care, while the muscles of his left arm rose under his torn shirt as he kept Lymond’s dagger hand in chancery. With only his feet left to use, Lymond used them, in a deft move quite as unforgivable as Gabriel’s and entirely successful, since Gabriel had not expected it. You forgot, thought Jerott, that Lymond had not sailed the Mediterranean pacing the poop deck; he had been below, in shackles, where to exist you had to fight like a cur.

Because of it, now, he had broken Gabriel’s grip on his thighs and, more important still, on his left hand holding the dagger. With a thrust that sent the big man hurtling in turn on to his back, Lymond followed him with the same hard deliberation, using knees, feet, the chopping edge of his hand in a sequence no one there could follow: a sequence that brought a husky growl from the golden throat, a rising flush to the mellow skin, a white-rimmed blaze of hatred to the pale blue stare of Graham Malett. Using his splendid body he arched his muscles and fought, fending off the blows that palsied his limbs and dissected his nerves, bent now on nothing but escape, revenge and total destruction. With the great advantage of his weight he would have succeeded, in no more than a moment, except that Lymond, releasing him choking from a blow on the windpipe, raised his left arm and hurled his one weapon, the dagger, after Gabriel’s sword to the altar. Then, setting his teeth, Francis Crawford closed the fingers of his crippled arm fast on one of the thick white silk
cords of Gabriel’s torn and crumpled knight’s garment, and seizing the other in his good left hand, pulled the cord tight.

To maintain a grip when your arm has been torn through with cold steel and when with feet and hands the man below you is attempting for his life to maim and overthrow, needs a special kind of endurance. Lymond was helped, perhaps, by the fact that Gabriel was tired and injured, as he was; and that by blow and pressure he was already at the start half-deprived of air and therefore full consciousness. But the punishment Lymond took as the cord tightened and the handsome, suffused face opened, gasping, for air, was made possible only by his training and the particular kind of way, Jerott thought, that his mind happened to work, notwithstanding the weaknesses of the past few weeks.

Then there came the moment when Graham Malett’s big hands, still loosely flailing, fell to his sides and his bloodshot eyes closed; and Lymond then, releasing him, groped, his face half-blind with pain, and finding the dagger, placed the sharp blade, held by the heel of his hand, across the stretched tendons of Gabriel’s empurpled throat.

Slowly, the air returned to Graham Malett’s drained lungs; slowly the saintly blue eyes opened, and understood the meaning of the cold line at his throat, and comprehended, incredulously, his defeat. For a long moment, in the big church there was silence, barred only, second by second, with the slow muffled strokes of the bell. Then Lymond said, his strained and breathless voice strange to all their ears, ‘I take upon me your execution, Graham Malett. I take you all to witness that if I must suffer for it, the crime is no one’s but mine. The venue I cannot help … except that under this roof, Gabriel, your corpse is more seemly than your body. For Will Scott, for Wat Scott his father, for Thomas Wishart and Trotty Luckup, for the pain you occasioned the Somervilles and the corruption and death of your sister, for what, above all, you hoped to do to this realm of Scotland, I call your life forfeit.’

Soft from the body of the church came de Seurre’s voice, chiming with Lymond’s in its frozen intensity. ‘For what you did in Malta and in Tripoli, I call your life forfeit.’

‘For what you did to the peoples of the Borders, who will hardly knit now for a generation,’ said Lymond’s pale voice, resuming. ‘For what you did to the men under your cure, who became less than men; for the lives you risked and the lives you wasted; for the emotion you fostered and fed on, and the values and beliefs you have left wrecked and cheapened by your masquerade; for the army that might have made us a whole nation and the Queen Mother deceived of her strong arm; for all your crimes against humanity and those far higher than human, Graham Malett, I call your life forfeit.…’