The Game of Kings (66 page)

The level denunciation gave the words a power that rolled like the thunder of Götterdämmerung through the meadow. And Lymond cried out, “Stop it, Richard!” and at last, violently swaying, forced himself to his feet.

Culter watched him; watched the hands groping at the cliff face behind for support; watched the death of all the characteristic, cultivated graces and spoke again, quite close now, a stony and judging shadow.

“Or if you hadn’t killed her, would you be comforted by Eloise?” Lymond made no sound.

“The only daughter, and the finest child. The most vivid, the most eager, the most intelligent. By now, cherished by her own lover, with her own children in her arms. Once, late at night when you were away, she told me …”

No!”
said Lymond.
“Oh, damn you, no.”

“No? You wanted her burned alive, and she was,” said Richard with a terrible impartiality. “Why should you cringe over it now?”

The guard was down. There was the face he yearned to see: never again inscrutable; never again would he need to wonder what lay behind the smiling mouth and the delicate, malicious wit. Skull, flesh and muscle, every fluent line and practised shade of Lymond’s face betrayed him explicitly, and Richard, swept into a major, a foreign dimension, was suddenly dumb.

Behind clenched hands, face to the rock, Lymond spoke at last.

“Why?
I made one mistake. Who doesn’t? But I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands. Of course it left me deformed and unserviceable, defective and dangerous to associate with.… But what in God’s name has happened to charity? … Self-interest guides me like the next man but not invariably; not all the time. I use compassion more than you do; I have loyalties and I keep by them; I serve honesty in a crooked way, but as best I can; and I don’t plague my debtors or even make them aware of their debt.… Why is it so impossible to trust me?”

“You shut the door yourself.” Richard spoke harshly. Now that
it had come he recoiled from it: recoiled as Lymond turned and baring his face to the light went on, his voice exhausted, dogged, unsteady.

“Why should you think so? Why assume me to be of such different stuff? We have the same blood, the same upbringing. What else is there, at the end of the day, that we can call our own? We’re our father’s prejudices and our swordmaster’s dead men; our mother’s palate and our nurse’s habit of speech. We’re the books unwritten by our tutor, and our groom’s convictions and the courage of our first horse. I share all that. Five years—even five such as these—can’t tear me drop by drop from your blood.”

Numb, appalled, Richard flung back, reflecting horror with horror: “And who made you a murderer?”

With the last offering of his strength, Lymond answered. “Pull your hands away, Richard. Get out: get free. I have enough to answer for. If I’ve shut one door, you have barred and locked all the others against yourself.”

“Do you think
my
life,” said Richard violently, “is a matter for your tarnished and paltry conscience?”

There was a silence. Then the Master said at last, “Why else should I say what I have done?”

“Because,” said Richard cruelly, “you’re afraid of the rope. Because I’m the first victim you’ve failed to enchant. Because you’re wriggling as you made others wriggle, and broken piecemeal as you’ve dissected others. Because you’re crumbling and disintegrating and whimpering beneath the gut-sucking evil on your back; and since there was no one else to whine to; no one alive to listen; no one to help, you dropped on your belly and crawled and writhed and crept whining to me!”

Because his eyes had never left Lymond’s hands he saw the flash of steel, and was launched already as the Master snatched out the bright stolen blade. He grasped the driving elbow and wrist—”No: not that way, you poor, canting bastard!”—and was pulled up short by the strength of the thrust.

Lymond didn’t drop the knife. Instead he bore downward, drawing strength from the hysteria of necessity: with his body braced against rock he withstood Richard’s tug, made a leverage with the locked arms and, without a word, silently and inhumanly forced the point down.

It was uncanny. Richard found it terrible: it froze his blood, the slow descent of his brother’s arm, prevailing heavily and inexorably
against Richard’s whole weight; forcing the bright, two-edged blade inward, between the locked bodies.

He damned the passion which had made him wait, instead of seizing the weapon at once; he damned the possessed body and the bent head and the transcendent will guiding the knife. He exerted all the strength he had. Lymond said something, on a gasp, and then bent forward, using his dead weight to help him, and the knife moved again, duly, along the path he designed for it; and an astonishing light broke on Richard.

In that second, Lymond looked up. Blue eyes met grey, and Richard read in them a power and a determination that he suddenly knew were unassailable. Anger left him. He framed the word “No” with his lips; read his rejection in the dedicated eyes, and with all his strength drove first his knee and then his foot through the stained bandaging and deep into the other’s hurt body. The knife dropped like a discarded straw. Lymond screamed once with agony, and then screamed and screamed again.

Within a dumb and breathless nature the sound exploded, addressing the arbour from its banks and gradients; bouncing; sticky-fingered; callowly mocking. Culter, white as paper, picked up the knife and backed.

Lymond had stopped the noise with his hands. The long, cramped fingers hid his face as he crouched, the breath sobbing in his lungs and the blood flamboyant through the crushed bandages, welling between his rigid elbows, soaking into the trampled grass.

“Francis!” Excoriated by the shuddering, raucous sound, Richard spoke harshly. “I can’t let you take your own life.”

Lymond took his hands from his face. The blood was everywhere now; his torment of grief public, uncaring. “Must I plead?” He stopped in extremity, beaten, shaken by pulses, and then struggled on. “You claim your right of execution.… May I not exercise mine? Could all the chains of Threave outweigh what I already bear, do you think? Or all the Tolbooth’s pains be worse than this? … You can’t relieve me of your weight, or help me, or free me … except in one way.”

Richard, his memory taken by the throat, was mute. With a bitter courage, Lymond raised his head.

“I beg you.”

I will bring him to you on his knees, and weeping, and begging aloud to be killed
.

Richard, rising, turned on his heel and walked over the meadow without looking back. Around the next spur of cliff was Bryony. She blew softly at him, pleased to have company, and while he waited, he smoothed down her lustrous neck.

When he went back, the clearing was empty. It was no longer a sanctuary, he knew, but the antechamber to a solitary, a desperately wanted death.

*  *  *

Beneath the cocked blue sky of summer, in the jostling towns and highways, in the forts hissing with tar and hot iron, the friaries and keeps, the foreshores where salt timber rolled ashore and oxen sprayed sand into wainloads of coal and cables and cannon shot and powder; in granaries rustling with early threshing and the unlacing of tents and the graithing of blades and the polishing of gorgets; and the intent of three European nations fastened to these small acres between Berwick and the Forth—with all that, it occurred to nobody in all this busy month that history was being made.

It didn’t enter the head of Sir James Wilford, captain of English-held Haddington, that in twenty-five years someone would call his defence the most brilliant of the century. He was aware only that he was just seventeen miles from Edinburgh, and had forty-odd more and only two lines of communication between himself and the Borders; and that he had to keep in heart and health and, if possible, a state of truce—not only English but Spaniards, Germans and Italians against the malefic glitter of French arms and the shiftless shuffle of the neighbourly Scot on his patellas.

It was not in the mind of Lord Grey, riding his bones loose between town and town, insifflating the precious troops and horses, the pikes and powder and footmen, the rolls and matches and demilances and oil and flour and money, the working tools and men, men, and more men into the feverish maw of the fort. Or to Wharton, angrily denuded of the men sent to Grey, guarding a weak city and studying, whally-eyed, the ambiguous movements of the western Scots.

To the French, dropping like canescent frost on the discreet slopes about Haddington it was a small, acute campaign ordered by His
Most Christian Majesty out of a fine warm regard for Scotland and a need to spit in the Protector’s other eye.

To the Germans, the Swiss, the Italians and the Spaniards who were paid in écus and knifed each other when drunk and fished in the thin streams and picked lice out of their pallets, it was money to take home or to gamble away, some easy love and some more difficult; and leisure for boasting. To the Scots it was pride and fright, a wish to break the will of England and a need to smoke the vermin from one’s little shoots and to pay the price with a hauteur that might make surrender a virtue.

The price was plain, and the Crown was ready to pay it. The Crown made its move on the day that Tom Erskine, altered and withdrawn, came back to Edinburgh from Hexham. Messengers slipped unobtrusively back and forth; Villegagne quietly left Court, and one evening four galleys of the French fleet slipped anchor at dusk and moved with ductile grace out of the Firth of Forth. The alert flickered, as it was conditioned to do, from point to point down the east coast of England; the skiffs fled about the English great ships of war and the stiff sails lay heavy on the decks, and men in the rigging strained at the recalcitrant block and the sullen, bearded ropes.

In vain. The four ships never came. They lifted their airy linen before a southwest wind and sailed out across the dark North Sea; then with four peacocks’ tails at their keels they lay over, gathering the wind from port, the boom hammering to starboard, and hissed on their way north. Then having sailed over the roof of Scotland, turned south again, on her western shore, making with mischievous triumph for Dumbarton, where the Queen of Scotland, if she so wished, could safely step aboard.

The Crown had given evidence of its good faith. The last word lay with the people; and on a brilliant, wind-filled Saturday in July, the Scottish Parliament met in the Abbey outside English-occupied Haddington and gave their consent to the marriage of the Queen’s Grace their Sovereign Lady and the Dauphin of France—“provided always that the King of France keep and defend this realm and the laws and liberties thereof as his own realm, lieges and laws of the same; and as has been kept in all kings’ times of Scotland bypast.”

Will Scott was there. As soon as the processions had left and the aisles were clearing, he slipped out to the churchyard where Tom Erskine stood talking, the short fur blowing on his hat. The moment he was free, Scott caught his arm. “Any news?”

Erskine, nervously rubbing his face, gave him a nonplussed stare. “What? … Oh. No—there’s no news of either of them.”

Scott said suddenly, “I met Lady Douglas yesterday: George Douglas’s wife. She said—”

He broke off as a peer, his black hat at a rakish angle, jabbed Erskine in the back. “My God, old Slovenly Thomas interpreting: who’d have thought it? I said, if his French hasn’t improved since the Rome embassy, I said, we’re just as likely voting on a proposal to crown Archie Douglas. Eh? … See your friend Culter didn’t turn up to this one either. What’s the holdup, eh? Buried himself instead of his brother?”

Erskine said, “Looking after his own affairs, I expect,” and detached himself. To Scott he said, “What about Lady Douglas?”

The boy was watching their hilarious neighbour take himself off. “It doesn’t matter. But I thought you should know my father is going to try and trace them.”

“Buccleuch? Why not you?”

Scott flushed. “I’m supposed to stay with the army. Probation, of a sort. It would only make trouble.” He lifted his eyes to Erskine’s noncommittal face. “Damn it: why did you leave them together?”

Someone brought Erskine’s horse. He pinned the flapping foot mantle with his glove, put his foot in the stirrup and mounted. Gathering the reins, he looked down for a moment at Scott’s upturned face. “Because my name isn’t Crawford.” he said sharply. “Any more than yours is.”

*  *  *

It was the cavorting and immalleable wind, boiling through the rowans and sifting the junipers and baying eagerly through lutelike caves and chasms, that chivvied Lord Culter into proper thought again that night.

A snatch of spray touched his hand, and he lifted his head from his arms and was vaguely surprised by the darkness and the noise. He rolled to his knees and stood up, automatically anchoring rugs and collecting his scattered belongings. Moving stiffly he crossed to the neighbouring arbour and found and checked Bryony’s tethering and pulled her reproachful forelock. It occurred to him, the first positive thought in a wilderness of dead emotions, that there was nothing to stop him from going home.

The thought, staring at him, divided and became twenty. He hooked one arm over the mare’s neck and defied them for thirty seconds before recognizing the childishness of the impulse. Facts. He was bred to respect them: what were they?

The graceless, the dissolute, the debauched, the insolent, the exquisite Lymond was obliterated. As he intended, he had broken his brother. He had, indeed, been more merciful than he had intended.

The wind buffeted his shirt. Home. A hundred and twenty miles with the double packs behind him; a cold house in Edinburgh; his mother’s face. Midculter, and an estranged wife. Erskine, with a sharp and speculative gaze; Buccleuch’s uninhibited stare. The Court, where he would already be under censure.

The mare’s skin was warm; his fingers tightened on her rough mane. God, Francis had screamed.

Something unused and ritual at the back of Richard’s conscious mind stirred, and he stared into the buffeting darkness, quickly denying it. He assembled a chain of thought about provisions, about his route home, and about an imminent issue of jacks for his men. He thought seriously about the water problem at Midculter and began to plan, in elaborate detail, a discussion with Gilbert about new spearheads. And all the time the stiff-jointed thing at the back of his mind was flexing its subconscious limbs and shaking its aged neck and rearing nearer and nearer his waking mind.