The Game of Kings (64 page)

Then the riven flesh and burst vessels made their protest, the freed blood springing liberal and scarlet through the fragments of Lymond’s shirt. Erskine saw the long hands loosen, the sudden, uncontrolled sway; but was not prepared for the drowned, revealing blue gaze meeting his like a blow.

“And died stinkingly martyred,” said Lymond, with painful derision; and losing hold bit by bit, slipped into Erskine’s gentle grasp.

T
HE bell of Hexham Abbey opening its lips to the pagan moon, sent its voice across the river:
Voce mea viva depello cuncta novica;
and the men waiting across the water in a blackened and doorless dovecote heard it; and heard also the rattle of approaching hoofs.

Somebody—a hospital, a manor, a priory—had once owned five hundred fat pigeons here, and had housed them fittingly with fourteen tiers of holes and ledges, a bathing tub filled by a spring, a stone table and a tall and creaking potence, its revolving arms scanning the circles of tiered nests so that two men on its wheeling perches could pocket the warm squabs.

Now the broken doorway admitted rats. But rock doves had found a way through the glover to the safest, topmost nests; and when Erskine’s men went in, birds arose with the sudden rattle of an emptied topsail. Waiting for Tom to return, they could see shocked golden eyes darting from the lantern edge high above.

The sudden inaction, agitating to Erskine’s men, was dreadful for Richard, bereft of his prey and of any part in the climax of this
hideous marathon. He would have been at the gates of Hexham fifty times if Stokes had let him. If Erskine could get in, then why not himself? If Erskine failed, wasn’t it his duty to replace him? And who gave Erskine the right to annex another man’s quarrel?

Stokes, luckily, was gifted with patience. As the light faded he returned his decent, sensible answers, without pointing out that but for Lord Culter himself, they would all have been safely on the Edinburgh road hours since. Eventually, even Richard relapsed into silence, and occupied himself with an explosive pacing of the dusty floor.

The hoofbeats, like harried spirits, followed the tolling of the bell. Stokes, signalling silence, went himself to the miniature door and then fell back, the grin on his face red-lit by the low fire. It was Tom Erskine.

He was barely inside when Richard’s hands seized his shoulders. “Well, damn you: well?”

Erskine, looking queerly, jerked free. “We’ve stopped the message being delivered. Acheson was carrying it in his head.”

“And Lymond?”

Nothing else and no one else mattered. Erskine’s own gaze, newly fierce, newly level, beat down Richard’s to the floor before he answered curtly. “They loathed and feared Lymond. If you believed he was England’s secret insurrectionist, you’re wrong. He killed Acheson himself.”

There was no real change in the fanatical grey eyes. Richard said, “Where is he?”

Someone had already unloaded Erskine’s horse. The heavy roll lay near the fire: bending, Erskine turned back the blankets.

Devoid of mischief or anger; silent; defenceless; Richard’s brother lay at his feet. Erskine knelt by the plastic body, clothed and clotted with blood, and touched Lymond’s hand.

“Is he dead?” They stared, like men mesmerized. Erskine said abruptly, “Stokes: collect the horses and get the men out. The job’s done. We can’t risk staying any longer. Quickly.”

The exodus began against Lord Culter’s unmoving figure. He repeated himself, without raising his voice. “Is he dead?”

Erskine’s face was as hard as his own. “He won’t survive an hour on horseback. We must leave him.”

Richard swore coldly. “Damn it, how can we? He knows all Acheson knew.”

“Then he can tell it to the pigeons,” said Erskine harshly, and flung wide the rugs. “How long d’you think he’ll live like that?”

“Someone might find him.”

“All right. Someone might find him. That’s your concern: he’s your brother. That’s why I brought him back. This is one decision I’m not making. I saw him risk his life to kill that fellow today.”

There was no softening in Richard’s face. “He had to choose between Grey and you, and he plumped for the likelier prospect, that’s all.… Justifiably: you rescued him, didn’t you?” His fingers slid up and down the quillons of his sword. There was a pause; then he pulled them away. “No. I’m damned if I do. I want him killed publicly and lawfully and painfully and fully conscious, at least. Take your men and get on the road. I’ll stay and get him home later.”

They were alone; they could hear the trampling as the horses were brought up outside. Erskine said, “You’ve fought him once already: isn’t that enough?”

The firelight glinted in Richard’s eyes. “Do you think he’s innocent? I’m willing to save his life: what’s wrong about that? And if he’s guiltless he’ll have a chance to prove it: what’s fairer?”

Someone called to them through the doorway. Erskine stepped outside and returning, threw at Richard’s feet his baggage roll and cloak. “You’ll need these.”

He added abruptly, “Come with us, Richard. Let him alone. You can’t seal him alive in the larder like a bloody wasp with a fly.”

There was no answer.

Erskine had to go. But in the dovecote doorway he glanced back, once. Richard had stooped over his brother and, with excited face, was scanning the engrossing tally of his wounds.

*  *  *

Long after, Richard himself stood in the doorway, gazing out at the quiet night. Then, moving noiselessly, he collected the wood he needed and stacked it inside.

It was late. The fire, rebuilt under the overhung ledges, glimmered on his brother’s face: the artless, sleeping face of his childhood.

But Lymond was now in the cold sleep close to death. Experienced soldier and countryman, Lord Culter had faced the spilled blood, the spoiled muscle, the split bone with no qualms; and had washed,
cleaned and bandaged with steady hands, missing nothing: the scarred hands, the old whippings; the last degradation of the brand.

There was no more he could do now. The door cloth secure, he stretched at length by the fire, his saddle for pillow, and waited side by side with the silenced tongue which had mocked him so long. The cushats had long since returned sidling to their roosts. As stillness fell, they settled too, with frilled feathers and the rasp of dry feet. Then it was quiet, and the only sound in all the warm June night was Lymond’s faint, gasping breath.

Through the darkest hours of the short night Richard slept, wrenched by sheer exhaustion from his vigil; and woke stupid, forgetting.

Then his bemused eyes picked out the pale, dawn-lit arches of the lantern above him and the wintry skeleton of the potence, and the dark, enclosing walls with their hundred upon hundred of empty sockets, black and salaciously flickering with the dying glimmer of the fire. And the wide, fathomless eyes of his brother, resting on him.

In that crude second, neither spoke. Culter rose, and stooping to the fire, rebuilt it with unhurried care. In its spreading light, pale hair gleamed beside him, and whitened cheekbones and white lips, all tinged to health by the flames. Roseate and sardonic in extremis, Lymond spoke with the least possible expense of sound.

“You still snore like a frog. Did Tom Erskine get me out?”

Richard was building a cathedral of boughs. “Who else? He brought you here and then took his men home. We’re just outside Hexham.”

There was a difficult pause. Then Lymond said clearly, “If you’re waiting to preach in articulo mortis, don’t put it off for my sake.”

The oblique inquiry gave Richard the metal he needed. He said with a grim pleasure, “I don’t mind waiting.”

Something—hardly laughter―glimmered in the heavy eyes. “Neither do I. But the fenestration seems fairly extensive.”

Richard had hung a can of water over the new fire, and his fresh bandages were waiting. “Not if you have a good surgeon.”

The careful voice was resigned. “Two chapters of Anatomía Porci and they think they’re Avicenna. Don’t trouble. No wriggling and no recantations from this quarter.”

“You’re surprised?” Richard tested the water with a broad finger.

“What did you expect? That I’d curse you, kill you and drop you in the Billy Mire?”

“Yes. You tell me why not: I can’t help you. Overtures of friendship from me would sound damned silly at this point … I can’t drink any more.”

Richard took away the flask. “You said no recantations.”

“That doesn’t rule out the plain, freestanding explanation.”

“Make it later,” said Richard equably, unwinding bits of torn sheet. “You’ll have plenty of time.” He knelt, and the incalculable eyes dropped.

It was not a pretty business: a grim, forbidding task even had there been proper gear and the skilled treatment of the doctor he was not. The bowls of water became scarlet and the makeshift wads reeked.…

Explanations. What explained the killing of one’s son? The seduction of one’s wife? And these were the hands that Mariotta knew better than he did: this the mouth; this the marked body.…

Lymond took too long to recover when the dressing was done. But in the end his eyes opened, and after a time he spoke. “All right. I love sadism too,” he said. “But try that too often, Master Haly Abbas Cat, and you won’t have a mouse left to play with.… Your move.”

Richard was careful. “Not yet,” he said. “When I make it, I want your undivided attention. All you have to do is get well.”

*  *  *

That day Lord Culter spent some time looking for a fresh harbour for his patient: one that would give some shelter, and be sufficiently remote from both houses and paths.

Late in the afternoon, on his last sally, his arms full of moss for dressings, he found the ideal spot. A small stream running through sandstone had created a toy gorge within which for perhaps twenty yards the bottom widened on each side of the water into a secluded and grassy meadow. There was room there, and in other and more distant bays, to graze his horse, and better still, a place where the rocky sides of the banks steeply overhung and enclosed the grass, forming a shallow cave within. There he could safely light fires, and there too they would be dry in bad weather.

He explored it thoroughly, and it was later than it should have been when he returned.

Lymond watched him pack with bright eyes. “Hullo! Are we setting up house elsewhere? Far away?”

“A short ride. I’ll strap you to Bryony.”

There was a pause. Then, detached, the Master observed, “Richard. You can’t seriously picture me pursuing a healthy career as a sieve. Time isn’t on your side either. Stop toying with the prey and let’s get this thing over with. Say what you have to say to me.”

“We didn’t,” observed Richard, “take long to get to the wriggling.”

“No. I’m only trying to find a knee-high viewpoint that’ll interest you. Before one of us bores the other to death I have to talk to you about Mariotta.”

Lord Culter straightened, the two packs under his arms. “Not to me.

“To you, here and now. After which you can make your own conversation in whatever damned draughty hole you’ve picked for yourself, and put your own bloody feet over your bottom like the Romans when it rains. Mariotta—”

“You’re not dying,” said Richard. “Keep your pitiful confessions for someone else.”

“Whose guts are they?” demanded Lymond, offended. His hair was dark with sweat and his fingers cramped, resisting the oncoming tides. “I’m going to tell you what happened, brother mine. You’ll have to execute me, leave me, or listen to me.”

“Or remove your tongue.”

“Happy are the cicadas’ fives. Go ahead. But then you’ll never know the truth.”

“I know all I need to know.”

“What do you know? How to match, but not how to marry. How to choose, but not how to husband. Grand Amour should be received royally, Richard, as a harsh and noble art. You idiot.… You nearly lost her. But not to me.”

The sword was in Culter’s hand. The thoughtful eyes of his brother and even the shadowed walls of the dovecote disappeared. With the last rags of self-possession, Richard drove himself out of the door.

And bathe my son in morning milk
, said the doves. And other voices, too, hammered in his ears. Here, reeking and blubbering over the green fields, were the resurrected deaths he had died because of Lymond. “You haven’t packed the ladies off to Stirling, have you?”—An arrow, tearing ignominiously into one’s shoulder, before a shouting crowd—a drunken glover and a frozen ride—the prison at Dumbarton and the walk across the ballroom floor—the failure at Heriot;
the trickery with Scott; and monstrously, Mariotta, Mariotta, Mariotta, blazing with jewels.

“Believe, if you like, that the child is Lymond’s.” … “He is with Mariotta now.” … “It would have been a boy.”

The grass at his feet, the blue sky, the short purple shadows of the trees, came into focus again. He unbuckled his dagger, and laying it together with his sword within the doorway, walked back and seated himself on the edge of the stone table. “Go on. We have five minutes to spare. Discourse on the seductive arts. I want to quote you to Mariotta.”

“I,” said Lymond plaintively, “am the octogenarian who planted. In my marrows are my monument; and your wife, thank God, is no marrow of mine. I was gallant at Midculter, God save me, through being most damnably drunk: but never again.”

“You didn’t approach her, or she you?”

“My dear ass, I ran like a corncrake. You can ask leading questions till you’re cross-eyed as Strabo: that’s what happened. Unfortunately, becoming tired of home life, she ran too; and got herself taken by the Englisn. I had her redeemed, like a fool, and my poor morons brought her to me when she fell ill on the road instead of running like hell when at least she’d have arrived at Midculter unsullied, if dead.”

Richard said quietly, “I hope she thanked you for the trinkets, since she had the chance.”