The Game of Kings (67 page)

The wind sprang among the young trees: persecuted beyond reason an ash high above them lurched heaving to its feet and crashed beside Bryony and the mare leaped, whinnying and shaking under Richard’s idle hand.

The block of sensation, held so insecurely in check, broke its bar and blundered into the forefront of his mind. It gripped him as he pulled down and soothed the mare, beyond proper analysis: man’s infant fear of the irretrievable; a starved yearning for warmth; a childish speck of uncluttered vision; a tight and tangled warp of reason and emotion become suddenly an obsessive compulsion.

Abandoning sense, revenge, and the role of complacent dempster and letting reason fly like a hag through the night wind, Richard Crawford struck off through the darkness, plunging over myrtle and bracken and torn boughs and boulders, between thorn and furze and blurred trees and low thickets, in the direction last taken by his brother.

*  *  *

Instinct, in belated command on this ultimate journey, had led Lymond into the shelter of the thickest undergrowth and the wildest bushes and the closest trees.

Using them as crutches he had gone farther than seemed humanly possible for a man in his state. Richard, after two fruitless attempts, set out a third time with a flaring brand from his fire, regardless of who might see it, and in the end found him, in a deep and unlikely forme at the foot of a meagre willow.

It was not a heroic picture. Bracken obscured it, with botched and scrabbling hands; the wind whined and ran blenching through the long grass, split by dim breakwaters of burdock and furze. Lymond himself lay in a tangled abandonment of blood and bruised greenery and torn cloth: unruly; filthy; and emphatically severed from society.

Culter rose, extinguished the light, and gathering the derelict hands, lifted his brother and carried him back to the camp.

He had worked once before, impatiently, to succour the Master. This time he brought his will to bear as well as his strength. By daylight a thin and stammering pulse was his reward. By afternoon he was able, temporarily, to let go and rest, his tired shoulders propped against the overhang and his legs splayed before him in a yellow carpet of silverweed. He watched his brother.

A remarkable face. Like the sea, it promised monts et merveilles: you might resent its graces and yet long to unclose its secrets. He began to look forward to the moment—the graphic, revealing moment, when a man opening his eyes on the lentils and salt, found himself greeting the living.

He was there when Lymond woke, and saw neither surprise nor relief, but a dissolving horror, altering the other’s already altered face and fading in ineffectual recoil. Richard exclaimed then, and put out a hand; and Lymond flinched as if he had been struck.

Throughout the day, it continued. Throughout the day, Lymond lay motionless, the eyes opaque and open, the mind incurious, inanimate, unaware; except for the terror which sprang into being when Richard appeared.

By nightfall Richard knew that the only thing living within the other man was the memory of a fear. You choose to play God, and the Deity points out that the post is already adequately filled. During an outburst of besotted philanthropy he had redeemed Lymond, but
Lymond quite simply was not prepared to be rescued; and least of all by his brother.

Lord Culter was a strong, an honest and a stubborn man. He made his decision, and laying a finger on the one thread anchoring Lymond to reality, proceeded to twist it into a rope.

He talked. As his brother lay, reflecting the vacant sun in his eyes, Richard moved about him, chopping wood, cooking, cleaning, tending with steady hands. Moving and working he talked about the Midculter of his childhood; about school lessons and games and books and sporting excitements; about visits to Edinburgh and Linlithgow and Stirling and his own days in Paris; about the land and their tenants; about nurses and tutors and servants and relatives they had both known.

The empty calyx he was attacking made infinitesimal efforts to avoid him; to refuse his services; to deny his proximity; but he persevered. Hatred was life; shame was life; humiliation was life; the trivial movements Lymond was making in his extremity were life.

Richard Crawford was a very stubborn man.

He went to bed that night hoarse but refusing to be depressed, although the next day, confronted by the same eyes and the same rejection, he was sometimes very near to giving it up.

He was unused to sustained talking: his mind balked; topics forsook him. Recent events he had forbidden himself: everything to do with the Master’s own adult life; all political and national affairs. That left only the half-forgotten, virgin tracts of their common childhood. He dug, obstinately, into those sealed mines and shuttered bondhouses and in doing so dragged out days and weeks of his life hitherto quite forgotten.

That he should mention his father at all was accidental: it was years since the second baron had died, and he had hardly thought of him since. And that was surprising too, considering the part he had played in his boyhood.

“I don’t fancy,” said Richard, thinking aloud, “that he was fond of children, or even of marriage, much. But he wanted us to reflect his own physical superiority—in hunting, riding, shooting, swordplay, swimming and all the rest of it. My God, I used to lie like a Gothamite fisherman sometimes about my scores. And yet”—he paused, hands locked around knees, eyes unseeing as he groped after a new idea—“and yet it wasn’t altogether a good thing. He hadn’t any other interests, and couldn’t tolerate anyone who had. I remember Mother once
got a case of new books from the stationer’s, and he burned …”

No. That was one incident better forgotten. At the back of his mind he could hear the two voices, his brother and his father, shouting at one another: or rather, his father shouting and Francis retorting, using the very twin of the voice, he suddenly realized, that Lymond had used to himself in an obscure wood near Annan.

Memory, once jogged, showed him other pictures. A born athlete, at ease with every kind of sport, Richard had been human enough to enjoy his father’s delight in him. He was adolescent before he suspected that his younger brother was less of an effete brat than his father made out; that although he was aggressively scholarly he also moved like an acrobat. He had eloquence. He had charm. He submerged himself and his filthy tongue in music and books, and Sybilla abetted him. Why?

The answer to that had been easy, too. Apple of the baron’s alcoholic eye, Richard was cut out for a mockery, a figurehead, a substitute leaking straw inconspicuously at the joints and accepting the respectful plaudits of the tenants. The steeples were being cut down so that the chimney could aspire. And Francis, of the sardonic blue eye, was without doubt a party to it.

It was a bitter discovery, and one that he had never questioned till now. It had never struck him that his brother, seeing their father with a clearer eye than his, might purposefully have turned aside from all that he stood for; might have taken a satirical pleasure in avoiding their father’s approval. With Sybilla and the brilliant, worldly shadow of their grandfather behind him, he could afford to go his own way uncaring, and allow Richard his arena. Was that what had happened?

Was it? He looked with sudden, searching eyes at Lymond. The hypersensitive face gave him no answer, but there was a change of some sort: the eyes no longer reflected the sky but were half hidden by his lashes, as though there existed a thought to conceal. Richard lifted the fresh bandages he had prepared and kneeling, unfastened the old ones. The Master’s mouth tightened, but he didn’t recoil.

Slowly, it came. As well as instinct, there was somewhere a fragment of conscious will: Lymond’s eyes recorded what they saw; and he was listening. Richard, talking like a mechanical corncrake, knew that he was listening, and yet he refused to come openly into the living world. He was refusing to fight; refusing the goad even
when now at the eleventh hour admitting its pricks. Having come so far, Culter took a risk. He leaned over, closed both hands on the light tissue and bone of the Master’s shoulders, and shook him like a puppy.

“All right: listen!” said Richard. “I’m scunnered at washing bandages. I’m sick of cooking; I’m tired of hunting; I’m fed up washing your ears and combing your hair like a bloody nursery maid. Suppose you make the effort now.”

It brought him his answer. A frail and passionate anger flickered through the other man’s eyes; and weakly but distinctly Lymond spoke. “You can’t force me to live.”

“No. But I can force you to think.”

“—No.”

“You fought for Christian Stewart’s good name. Why won’t you fight for your own?”

His brother’s voice made a mockery of the words. “My good name?”

“Or Mariotta’s, then?”

The flicker of animation died. Lymond said helplessly, “No! You won’t get me to Edinburgh … even for that. I won’t go; I can’t … Oh, God! I can’t, now.”

To his surprise, Richard found himself shouting. “Edinburgh! Who mentioned Edinburgh? If I object to playing apothecary in private, I’m damned sure I’m not going to trip about with hot towels in public.”

Lymond said something, from which only the word “trial” emerged clearly. Lord Culter used three adjectives to qualify the same word, and pronounced flatly: “You’re not going for trial. You’ll travel to Leith, and from there get out of the country. All you have to do is to work at your renovation until you can trust your feet on either side of a horse.”

It was much too sudden, he saw, for a tired mind to grasp. Richard leaned forward, one hand on either side of his brother’s young, irresolute face, and said slowly and clearly, “Listen. You’re not going to Edinburgh. You’re not going to prison, or the gallows. I’m here to help you. You’re going to be free.”

For the second time in a few days, Richard Crawford had made a momentous decision purely on impulse. It made him feel uneasy,
the prey of dark and atavistic caprice. But on thinking it over, more or less all night, he found that he regretted nothing.

The odd thing was that Lymond believed him without question. The next day, although catastrophically weak, he replied slowly and sensibly to Richard’s necessary questions. Moved for the first time to imagine how it felt to exchange an oblivion so passionately wanted for such an extremity of defencelessness, Culter dealt with him wisely.

As the days passed, his sense of time perished. Lymond, however spent, was never less than scrupulous, unaffected, undemanding. Avoiding only the recent past, they ranged in their talk over the widest fields. Richard was impressed by his brother’s grasp of affairs. He was well-informed, not at the level of ambassadorial junketings and court levées, but as the product of shrewd observation over the battlefields and spyholds of half Europe.

He spoke without embarrassment of such episodes in his life, but with discretion. Once, when Richard, seizing on a point, began to develop it with uncharacteristic excitement, Lymond himself interrupted with an anecdote so helplessly funny as well as so ribald that Culter was surprised into a shout of laughter and forgot, until afterward, the original issue.

Later, staring up into the night sky, Culter said, “If only you’d come to us after you left Lennox, instead of …” Instead of foundering in self-pity. He could hardly say that.

Lymond flushed. “Instead of surviving to bellow like a barghest?” It was his only reference to the other night, and Richard was caught without a rejoinder, but after the briefest pause, Lymond himself went on. “But I did come back. To my kinsmen I will truly, praying them to help me in my necessity.… I thought you knew. I came to Midculter from Dumbarton in ’44—fully au prodigal son, puffing excuses like smoke from a chimney head—” A trace of the old mockery sharpened the light voice.

“What happened?” asked Richard quickly.

“I was shown the door. By our honoured father. He tried to enforce the suggestion with a whip.”

There was a short silence. Then Culter said, “He must have told nobody. I wouldn’t touch you: you know that. Until the—the Midculter affair.”

“I know, you damned fool,” said Lymond mildly. “That’s why I had to attack Midculter.”

Lord Culter sat up. After a moment he pushed a hand through
his fiat brown hair and said bluntly, “What about the setting fire to the castle … ?”

“Green boughs. Good God, Richard: I’ve mastered the art of making timber burn better than that by this time.”

“And the silver?”

This time there was a little pause. Then Lymond said, “You’re going to be annoyed about that. She didn’t tell you, I expect, because she knows what a filthy bad actor you are. Mother got it all back the next day.”

Richard’s stare was embarrassingly concentrated. “And Janet Beaton?”

“Oh. That,” said Lymond bitterly. “That was because I had to drink the whole bloody night through to get enough courage to visit the castle at all. One more skirl and one of my pets was going to slit the lady’s larynx for her. So I did something first. Unfortunately, I was too damned drunk to do it properly. That and the passage with Mariotta: the kind of lunatic blunders that always blemish the high romantic in grim reality.… Come, my friend, my brother most enteere; for thee I offered my blood in sacrifice; and all that. Except that it was Janet Beaton’s blood.”

Richard said mildly, “It wasn’t anyone else’s blood at Hexham,” and saw his brother redden again. “The climax to a series of sordid private fights. Don’t get excited. Erskine got the idea he was carrying out the Third Crusade, but all he carried out was me, the lord be thankit. God, I’ve whined for ten minutes. Bury me at Leibethra, where the nightingale sings.”

As Lymond grew stronger, his brother forced the pace of their discussions and once, out of an obscure train of thought, said, “Francis. Did you ever tell Will Scott how old you actually are?”

Lymond looked blank. “No. Should I?” and Richard grinned.

“Probably not. You appear to be immeasurable in his view, like God and the Devil.”

“A year with Will Scott would make a dayfly feel like Enoch,” said the Master. “Whose side is he on now?”