The Game of Kings (65 page)

“She did. It was a little embarrassing,” said Lymond. “Because I didn’t send them.”

“Oh. You haven’t any idea who did, I suppose? Buccleuch, for example?”

He bent suddenly to enclose Lymond’s wrist, his eyes intent, as the Master’s weakened voice said, “I don’t see why I should spoil another man’s fun.… Although he must have been damned annoyed to find me getting the credit for it all.… If you’re curious, you could try asking Mother.”

Richard laid down the scarred hand. “I don’t mean to exact retribution from all my wife’s lovers. Just those actually related to me. Although you’ll be glad to hear that Sybilla is still your infatuated devotee.”

His brother’s gaze was unexpectedly severe, with a marked line between the brows. He said, “But Mariotta is not. She made it quite
clear before she left that she thought my existence unnecessary, and that the third baron was her only patron. What you did when she got back God knows, but it didn’t sound very intelligent in the fourth-hand version I got, and if she agrees in the end to come back to you it’ll be a miracle of constant vapidity over assiduous obstinacy.…” Prone on the spread rug, he studied Richard’s expression of harsh amusement. “Not very convincing?”

“No.”

“No, I suppose not. I could enact you Phoenissae-like tragedies and you’d believe them, but the truth, as I once said to someone—”

“What?”

“Is a queer thing to meddle with,” said Lymond rapidly. “Must we go? Accord me a niche. I don’t mind being calx in a columbarium: the doves will feed me and I shall rise and found Nineveh.… Hic turtur gemit, drowning the groans of the Britons.… Must we go? An elephant’s head riding on a rat—the symbol of prudence, Richard. Are you listening?”

Richard was already kneeling, hands gripped as if physical force could hammer back the shutters closing on life and consciousness. “You aren’t going to die. Not until I’m ready for you.”

“Don’t be silly, Richard,” said Lymond, coming from a great distance. For a moment his quick mind cleared; he squinted at the darkening cupola with clouded eyes, and then closed them with a wisp of a grin. “God, I forgot. You don’t like glovers.”

He fought for Lymond’s life for two days: thorough, methodical, intelligent; mending with dedicated skill like a man cleaning and mending an engine of war. He longed for his brother, desperately ill as he was, to know what was being done for him, and to savour this devoted nursing at his hands.

On the second night in their new home, sitting in the mellow darkness with the stream bubbling companionably beside him and the odours of warm, fresh turf and flowers and quenched mosses breathing into the withered air, he thought of that coming moment with pleasure.

Lymond was steadier; the pulse a fraction stronger; the sound of his breathing more settled. Assume he survived. Assume a convalescence of weeks—two or three, perhaps, before they could move north …

This was a man who prized his self-control. This was the contaminating
mind whose presence in daily life was insupportable. Three weeks—or even two—should be enough.

*  *  *

Since Lymond was alone, the question was pointlessly rhetorical. After a moment he removed a grave blue stare from the clouds and closed his eyes again.

Two days of fever: two of infantile helplessness. The stream, a strip of grass, the rug, the makeshift pillow, and immobility under the hot sun. He stirred in a difficult, indistinct way, the light beating on his closed lids, and then lay painfully silent.

A pebble dropped.

Richard, approaching downstream with a bouquet of fish, watched the effect of it, smiling. Lymond, instantly awake, gave no answering smile as his brother strolled up to him.

Richard’s skin, amenable to the sun, was smooth and brown, and his hair bleached from umber to something near straw colour where it stood ruffled around his head. After five days of foraging, neither his shirt nor his hose were particularly respectable: he wore light shoes from his baggage which were already much the worse for wear, and his brother was wearing his only spare shirt.

These sartorial deficiencies were clearly not weighing on him. He cast down the fish, bestowed an effervescent twinkle on the Master and said, “Comfortable?”

“Acutely so.”

“You don’t
look
very comfortable,” said Richard, arrested. “How odd of me. More delightful little fish. Where are you hatching them?”

There was an uncomfortable pause. “I’m doing my best,” said Richard gently. “I haven’t your touch for killing birds.” He walked around, and grasping the edges of his brother’s makeshift pallet, pulled it two or three yards into the shade. “Has Patey Liddell ever been publicly whipped before?”

The change brought such physical relief that Lymond closed his eyes. He opened them again and said, “He only does what he’s told.
I thought you’d enjoy a trip to Perth. Good for the olefactory senses.”

Culter shook his head over the fish. “Crawfordmuir gold and Liddell: how dull of us not to connect the two.”

“How dull of some of you. What a delicious smell. You nurse; you cook. Do you sew?”

“I reap. Who was the exception? Mother?”

“And getting quicker, too,” said Lymond’s light voice admiringly. “The country must miss you on the frequent occasions when you are absent. How long were you in prison for?”

Richard rubbed the palm of his hand on his seat, and then held it up, square, clean and unmarked, for Lymond to see. “I was lucky. No one could tell, could they?”

“The point is registered. Pannage, my dear brother. You’re a butterfly as much as I am. You failed Arran, you defaulted at Dumbarton, you walked out on your wife and mother, you engaged Janet Beaton in a charming little conspiracy behind her husband’s back and displayed a remarkable incapacity on the rare occasions when you did set foot on a battlefield. If you contrived to nip the enthusiasms of young Harry a bit quicker at Durisdeer, to mention only one, you might have had Lords Wharton and Lennox behind bars for the asking.”

“And stopped your income?” asked Richard, laying the cleaned fish neatly on his baking stone. “Not when you must have needed every penny to cajole your rabble of thieves into obedience. Or does one simply glut them with women and drugs?”

“One uses force of character. Wo worth your tedyus synne of lechery. That’s a damned silly way to bake fish.”

“It works. You know,” said Richard, rubbing his fingers on a handful of grass, “considering who you are, you choose intriguing subjects for invective. Are you still quite comfortable?”

“In this line of country,” said Lymond, “I have a phenomenal staying power. Probe on, if you want to.”

“Thank you. I thought an exchange of civilized opinion might help pass the time. Until you can travel.”

There was a pause. “All right,” said the Master at length. “That was quite artistically done. Behold me in a state of suitably agitated inquiry. What then?”

“Guess,” said Richard amicably.

“Oh, try somebody else’s sudorific. This really is too damned childish.” Lymond’s eyes were black with fatigue. Richard observed
it, as he observed everything about him, eagerly and with a clinical thoroughness.

“Nothing childish about having a respect for the law,” said Culter cheerfully. “Once up on your feet; once up on your horse; and it’s Edinburgh for you. Prison and chains and a series of unpleasant questions. You’re going to stand trial before Parliament as indicted, brother mine.”

No recoil, but a temper as taut as a fishing line. “There’s nothing juvenile either about having a care for one’s family. You know what kind of sensation this will make.”

“Beautiful,” said Richard. “You’ll enjoy it. You know how you like extravagant gestures. Have some fish.”

His brother ignored the outstretched hand. “Look: suspend the godlike poking for a moment. I thought you’d make a clean end of it, at least, even if it was pretty dirty going in the middle—You wouldn’t come to any harm: no one expected me to live.

“The scandal of five years ago will be nothing compared to what they’ll raise in open court. You know damned well I’ll be found guilty: nobody has any illusions about that. But you’ve got the rest of your life to live, and what’s more important, so has Mother and so has your wife. Do you want your sons to have that sort of nauseating exhibition cast up to them?”

“Don’t get excited,” said Richard. “Knowing Mariotta, I should never be perfectly sure that they
were
my sons anyway.”

“That’s what I mean,” said the Master slowly. “Your sense of values has broken down, and you won’t face it. I had some sympathy—some—for this idiotic pursuit of yours: I was labelled cur, and in the end I had to bark. Not entirely your fault.

“But what the hell are you doing out of Edinburgh now? What reason had you to deprive Erskine of the support he had a right to expect at Flaw Valleys? What sort of a lead have you given anybody in the last six months? And now more intelligent, reasonable people are to be thrown into the circus so that you can continue to view your prejudices through a thick, green eyeglass. A long, fancy humiliation is to flatten your circle into conformity and your soul into grace. Well, it won’t do, Richard.”

Lord Culter wore an expression of astonishment. “I suppose that’s the most eloquent protest I shall ever hear against professional justice. I’ve just told you. I’m not going to touch you.”

A smile touching his mouth, he saw Lymond’s will defeated yet
again by his weakness. His eyes closed, peremptory in exhaustion; and Richard flicked a pebble into the stream.

The heavy lids lifted.

Hospitably, Richard closed in. “Have some fish?”

Lymond would not break. As one day and then another went by, Richard, insistently present and persistently gibing, began to find his own nerves betraying him, and sentence by sentence, Lymond fought back.

It was a tragic and annihilating war, in which intellect fought naked with intellect, and the blows fell not upon the mind but upon the soul.

At times, the longing to kill became so overpowering that Richard had to blunder off, to get away from the sound of his brother’s voice, his hands murderers at his sides. He knew, none better, what Lymond was driving him to do; and he guessed why. Indeed, the desperate savagery of these attacks gave him his only encouragement.

On the sixth day he became careless.

All week the weather had held. Dry stones were born in the stream and wagtails trembled on them; the grass was full of fledglings and flowers of disparate build.

On Saturday the dawn sky was poppied with high cloud and there was a welcome freshness in the air. Late in the afternoon, Richard found a rabbit in his traps and was cleaning it when he heard, very distantly, the sound of cantering hoofs. It was not coming near, and it seemed innocuous, but all the same he slipped through the stream to the next bay and laid a precautionary hand over Bryony’s nose. She jerked disgustedly, her ears pricked, but stayed quiet until the sound died away. He gave her a clap on the back, checked her rope, and splashed around the grassy arm of the cliff.

Lymond was no longer propped up on rugs, where he had left him, but sat on a convenient boulder halfway between his bed and Richard’s improvised kitchen. The bold light defined the untidy fair hair, the bruises and hollows of illness and the brilliant, heavy eyes: he looked high-strung to a shocking degree.

Curious and eager, Richard studied him; then his eyes travelled to the cooking stone and the rabbit. His knife had gone.

Lord Culter made no attempt to cross the clearing. Instead, hitching himself on the nearest ledge, he spoke mildly. “Fine weather for travelling. The prickmadam chasing you?”

There was a little pause. “No,” said Lymond. “I was getting tired of the John-go-to-bed-at-noon era.”

“I find it quite pleasant,” said Richard. “This peculiar mental agility of yours has been no friend to you, has it? Without it, you might have survived, harmless, in a lukewarm limbo of drink and drugs and insipid women—”

“Do you want me to pursue the subject?” said Lymond. “I don’t think I can bring myself to pant all over your morals, or lack of them.”

“I wondered,” said Richard idly, “now that you have leisure to think again, what you are missing most. You’ve no money, of course; and that has been very important to you. And you must, of course, miss the illusion of command. The ant milking the aphid. How pathetic: those simple men and broken criminals hailing you as their mighty Lar: how easy and exciting to gain ascendancy over them, to play at inverted Robin Hood, and become besotted with the vicarious thrill of defying nations.… You got a lot of attention that way …”

Impaled shrikewise on his boulder, Lymond had no reserves of strength to make the half-crippled journey back to couch and clear thought. Knowing, surely, that the last, bowelless assault was upon him, he spoke under his breath. “Nay, brother,” said Lymond, “I
wyll not daunce.”

Richard’s voice, too, was soft. “And the love of young boys, of course: you must miss that. Someone to relax with, in a gracious way, to twist and indoctrinate and shatter with the wild, delightful mutability of your moods. You must miss Will Scott. And your women.”

Lymond spoke without dropping his eyes. “Suppose we leave out the women.”

“Christian Stewart, for example?”

“Suppose we leave out Christian Stewart and everything to do with her?” It was so quiet that his breathing was quite audible.

“Wouldn’t you like it,” said Richard, “if she were here with us now? A kindhearted girl, Christian: she wouldn’t mind. She would help, without asking questions. She was used to that—a little too trusting, one would say, but after all, in God’s world, we must trust somebody?” His gaze never left Lymond: inexorable, ruthless, dissecting, hygienic as burin or scalpel. And there was a change in his brother’s face: the fissure; the first break.

A great pain of joy seized Richard’s heart. My God: my God, was
it coming … ? “Yes,” he said calmly, and got up. “A little adulatory company would be pleasant. That fellow who promised you all his gold, Turkey something: he tried to help you as well, and died, poor fellow. Blaming Will Scott for it, I’m told. Would you like his support now? I’m afraid you’ll never enjoy his cottage in Appin …”