The Game Of Kings Part 32

"Richard-.

"Don't be a fool. He'll lead you straight to Lord Grey..

"Then it's a risk we must take," said Erskine steadily. "He's right, Culter. Let him go..

"Not until we have finished this..

Erskine was trying desperately hard to keep his temper. "Listen. If that message gets through . .

Richard rounded on him. "Are you relying on Lymond to stop it? Then you're a simpleton. Go if you want to. I'm not holding you back. But you're not taking him: I'll kill the first man who comes near him." And he turned, his eyes sparkling in his white face, to his brother.

"You were too superior to attack? Then you can d.a.m.ned well attack now." His sword was in his hand, a fine instrument of latent death, sparkling largo to larghetto with his dagger. "The way to that door is through me. Take it, brother, if you can..

There was a pause. Erskine said sharply, "Hob, Jamie: take your horses and try and pick up the tracks. We'll follow as soon as we can..

Lymond stirred. Sleek, cold, finely polished as his own steel, there was an air about him now that none of them had ever seen. "Very well," said the voice that sixty outlaws had known. "Since you offer, I'll take it..

And he moved in straight to the attack.

It was as if some flawed and clouded screen had slid from the air, leaving it thin and bright; informing the white figures and pale heads, fair and brown, with an engraver's beauty of exact and flexible outline, and lending a weightlessness and authority to their art.

For the brothers were natural swordsmen. The slipping and tapping of the fine blades, the unfurling movements growing smokelike one within the other, showed no trace of the grim and gritty striving of a moment before. It was cla.s.sic swordplay, precious as a jewel, beyond any sort of price to the men watching, and concealing in its graces an exquisite and esoteric death.

They had always known Richard for a master. They now saw Crawford of Lymond grow before their eyes, the tutored power entering behind the elegance, the shoulders straight, the wrists of the temper which had withstood all the force of Richard's long aggression and which now adventured, strong and pliant, with every trained sinew in his body.

To the two men, existence was in the end the flicker of the other man's steel; his brown arms and wrists; a blur of white s.h.i.+rt and white face and the live, directing brain betraying itself through grey eyes or blue. The men watching, unable to breathe, heard the click and clash and slither of contes, froiss&s, beating and binding: saw first one man and then the other bring his art to the pitch of freeing his blade for the ultimate perfection, only to bow before the other's defence.

Lymond fought consistently within measure, intensely fast, with an attacking dagger: Erskine, his heart frozen by his eyes, saw him beating constantly on Richard's blade, moving it out of his way; out of line; pressing it down and opening the way for a lunge.

Tap, tap went the compound riposte, the soft feet slithered-and then Richard's blade moved, Lymond's right arm whipped stiff, and the fiat of his blade adhered to the flat of his opponent's. There was a glottal whine. The point, glittering, slithered down and down to Culter's counterguard until Richard, with all his compact strength. wrenched it free, slipping and flicking aside the automatic flight of his brother's dagger. He moved forward himself, and attacked.

He was possessed by one instinct: to wipe out the insult ot the last twenty minutes. In this soil there flowered a strength which lapsed sometimes, but never seriously, and which gained leisure, more and more often, to answer the astonishments of Lymond's attack. For here, perhaps for the first time in his life, Lymond also was stretched to the limit, his breathing raucous, his concentration a tangible and frightening thing.

Very soon after Richard, he made his error. He was at the end of a thrust, his right arm rigid and his bright point nearly level, when Culter caught the blade flat with his own, pressing on the steel and then dropping his own point.

Circling his brother's blade, Richard's sword adhered to it gratingly, the forte of his foil acting on the foible of Lymond's; and the intent blue eyes narrowed. This was the first step toward disarming and the Master knew it. His attention was for a second wholly concentrated on disengaging from the danger point and Richard with a single movement, took his slender chance.

He gave way suddenly with his right hand, moved quickly with his left and then with his supporting rapier; and trapping Lymond's dagger, whipped it from his hand to the floor.

With an answering, animal-like twist the Master leaped back out of close range, the sweat running down his face and into the hollowabove the collarbone, and covered himself with his single blade against the unleashed power of Richard's following attack.

The force of it drove Lymond the full length of the room; that, and the need to keep out of measure, out of the range of Richard's left hand. Corps ~ corps fighting was death to the Master now. Richard knew it and rose to his full, triumphant stature as a swordsman, the blades in his hands swooping like the many scythes of Chronos, driving the other diagonally back, into the rope and into the corner of the rectangle.

There was, throughout the room, the soft hiss of an intaken breath. Somerville, unconsciously looking away, found the palms of his hands were wet. Lymond, his back to the rope, allowed himself one fleeting glance to his side. As the skilled, tempted blade rushed toward him he dropped like a stone, left palm to the ground in a perfect stop thrust. Richard overshot, stumbled and whipped around: Lymond was already rising, his recovered dagger in his hand.

Lord Culter was shaken. Like his brother, he was breathing in retching gasps, his hair soaked, his wrists numb with the vibration of the blows. There was, for the first time, a moment of loose play. The men about them sighed, as if in an hour's suffocation they had purchased a little precious air, and Richard's eyes kept for a moment their look of bewilderment and appraisal. Then his head came up; beneath the thin s.h.i.+rt his muscles spoke a fresh conviction, and he turned on the fair, fastidious presence of his brother with a mighty and flagellant hand.

Lymond had recovered no such resurgence of energy. He was tired, the shadow of it dragging at his brilliance; but he fought like a fiend when Culter sought to drive him again across the length of the room. Somerville, watching, saw that he was fully aware of the ropes behind; of the small traps devised for him. But what he should fear and did not was the long wall of windows with their hard girdle of seats, and below them, the rough opened pack from which Erskine had taken the d.a.m.ning letter betraying the Queen.

Richard was aware of it; had had it burning behind the grey eyes for five long minutes; was beyond now considering the laws of the sword and the shallow lessons of courtesy and fair play. He drove Lymond like wind whipped by rain back from the ropes, back across the room, back to the windows, and finally back across the soft, shadowed litter of the pack.

Lymond stepped back into the trap. The cloth caught him; he stumbled, and Richard, with all the power of his shoulder, brought three feet of accurate death to cleave the fair, unsettled head.

It fell on a crucifix of steel.

Fully aware, stumbling with precision to the exact place he must occupy, Lymond had already launched his two blades on high. Fiery with light, they caught Lord Culter's sword between their crossed hilts and wrenched it from his grasp. There was one, sweet, invisible turn, an impact on the fine bones of Richard's dagger wrist, and the short blade in its turn jerked free, dropped, and followed the longer to the ground.

In a matter of seconds, astonis.h.i.+ng to him as anything that had ever happened in his life, Lord Culter was disarmed.

To stop was almost to faint, such was the strain. They stood very close, face to face, the breath shaking their ribs; and the rapier flared in one of Lymond's hands, the dagger in the other.

He raised them slightly, the blue eyes haggard and wanton.

"My victory, brother Richard. My chance. My choice, to sheath either or both in fat, brotherly flesh." The long fingers whitened on the two hilts as he held them out. "Handy Dandy p.r.i.c.kly prandy, Richard . . . Which hand will you have?.

No one spoke. Culter's gaze, at this ultimate moment, was steady and unafraid.

Lymond laughed. And laughing, hurled the rapier to the floor and leaped to the window seat, the baggage roll scooped in his arms. For a moment he was poised there, collected, elegant and fleetingly a.n.a.lytical. Then-"If you won't lead, try following!" said the Master; and in a storm of contemptuous gla.s.s swept the pack through the window and followed it himself. They heard, as they ran forward, the thud, the pause, and the quick recovery as he rolled on the soft gra.s.s below. From there, as they knew, it was a step to the horses.

And so they had to follow.

Gideon found Kate in the music room, her eyes on the road south. He put two hands on her shoulders. "How good an Englishwoman are you?.

He felt her s.h.i.+ver. "I don't know. Not very good, I'm afraid. It was Philippa who told them..

"I know..

There was a long silence. "Did they fight?" asked Kate at length.

"Quite brilliantly," said Gideon. And he took her below where theair blew soft through the tall panes, and where the fallen rapier, like the Master's discarded victory, lay unmarred among the gla.s.s on the floor.

They were riding into the yellow, grit-blasted socket of the sun, following the wisp of dust which was Lymond.

Somewhere ahead, presumably, was the man Acheson. Somewhere ahead, certainly, was the English army. A little down the road the two men Erskine had sent ahead joined them at a tangent from the moors, with no news except of a baked, and unprinted crust of hills, and it became certain that their only hope, as well as their greatest danger, lay in following the incalculable figure ahead.

Lymond flew before them like a honey guide seducing a vespiary, sparing them nothing: they jumped ditches and peat pits, scrambled up banks and old diggings and crossed streams where the shallow mud embraced pastern and coffin bone and left some horse shoeless. The dust of whin and seeding gra.s.s, of baked earth and broken pollen attacked and burned them until the freshest of their horses stumbled. The gilded head in front never dropped from their sight.

Richard was sitting heavily in the saddle. Erskine, watching him drop back from the lead, recognized that Culter was worn out, riding on will power alone, much as the man in front must be. It struck him that today's disastrous encounter between the two had done nothing so much as reveal how brilliantly alike the brothers were. It further struck him that if they did approach any closer to Lymond, his job was to prevent Osiris from being destroyed by brother Set. Until, at least, he had shown them the way to Acheson. He singled out Stokes, his best man, and edged him out of Culter's hearing as they galloped.

"If Lymond gets to Hexham first, I'm going alone after him: one man might just bluff his way through. Th~ rest of you will have to wait for me. Give me an hour or two, and then make your own way home. . . . And Stokes..

"Yes, sir?.

"Stop Lord Culter from following me..

The other man met his eye. "Yes, sir..

They were riding uphill, over high ground: a cavalcade of a.s.ses after a bizarre and amorphous carrot. Then the rider ahead slipped out of sight down the other side of the hill. Erskine swept up after him and drew rein.

They were on the verge of a long and stony escarpment which ranas far west as he could see. Below the cliff, a track led through flat meadows to the broad and tranquil banks of the Tyne, crossed it by a humped bridge and after traversing a narrower strip, shot precipitously into the Alpine bosom of Hexham.

The town smoked morosely on its hill. Tom could see the Abbey tower, the prison, the tall houses of the church offices and the solid town gates, halfway up the hill. The streets seemed to be crammed with people. He dropped his eyes, and witnessed a small drama nearer at hand: a man, spurring his horse without mercy, was approaching the bridge from this, the north side. As he reached it, another rider galloped toward him across the turf, calling something: the sun glinted on fair hair, and Erskine held his breath.

He saw the man at the bridge look around for a second and even hesitate; then he raised his arm and with a slap of his hand, sent the rowelled horse bounding over the river. Erskine saw Lymond's horse leap forward also, and then race flat out for the bridge; but there were two hundred yards between the two men, and Lymond was not closing it. Erskine swore under his breath.

Behind him, his men were arriving on the crest and halting, arrested by his arm. Culter was nearly last. He rode to Erskine's side, his eyes, reddened and painful with dust, searching the new landscape; and suddenly pointed. "There they are!.

"Yes. I'm going after them," said Erskine. "Stokes!.

"Then I'm coming. . .

"You're staying here," said Erskine sharply. "So are the men. Stokes: there was a building of some kind back there; a burned-out one. See what shelter you can get there for yourselves and the horses. Not more than two hours." And he put his horse down the cliff.

The last thing he saw, as he held the mare's neck high and felt her haunches slither among the scree of rough sandstone, was Stokes' hand on Richard's rein, and Richard trying to fight off three of his men. It came to Tom, wryly, that the round, blackened building he had seen was a dovecote.

* * *Adam Acheson, arriving at last at his destination, found the whole of Hexham in the street and in the market at the top of it, bent on commercial prey, and squeezing a quick fortune from Wharton's menat-arms.

While taking no risks in open country, Acheson had no political reason for distrusting Lymond. On the contrary, his relations.h.i.+ps vis ~ vis his own countrymen and the English were from Acheson's point of view perfectly satisfactory. The attempt to delay him was Ache-son's main grievance, and he was willing to overlook it if the fellow, abandoning this irrelevance, had arrived at Hexham after all.

So, when the porter at the gate looked at his safe-conduct and read laboriously, "And bodyguard?" Acheson jerked his head down the i'oad, and waited while the porter, after argument, found an escort for him to the Abbey. Acheson was ready to grant that Lymond's presence was conclusive guarantee of his good faith. Still, there was the matter of the opened dispatch he had slipped into the other man's baggage. He wanted the credit of delivering the fellow, but without undue personal risk.

But the Master, it seemed, bore him no ffi-will. He rode up as Acheson, dismounted, was chatting with the three men of his guard. He looked a little wild-eyed, perhaps, but with nothing threatening in his face.

Admitted through the gate, he guided his horse toward Acheson, smiling, and drawing abreast, bent down to address him.

Only one of the four men standing around them saw the twelve inches of steel in Lymond's hand, and he shouted too late. Acheson took the stab full in the chest, propelled backward with the force of the blow; then the blank amazement in his face gave place to vindictive fury. He straightened. The dagger, falling from the rent cloth over his breast, betrayed the sparlde of chain mail beneath. Acheson was unhurt, and five men leaped at Lymond.

There was one weapon left to him. Driving his feet hard into the mare's flanks, Lymond dragged her soft mouth back and guided her plunging hoofs. Acheson, isolated under the iron soffit of the rearing horse, screamed once, the blood leaping from a great cut on the temple, before he was kicked to the ground.

There was just time for Lymond to see as much before he, too, was overpowered.

Erskine heard the story five minutes later when he in turn arrived at the gate. Affairs at the wicket were in some disorder, but he made hectoring play with the vacant cover of Acheson's dispatch, and was admitted immediately and directed to Lord Grey.

Having asked as many questions as he dared, Erskine hesitated.

Both Acheson and his a.s.sailant, he now knew, had been taken to the Abbey, where the conunanders were in conference. No one knew how seriously the messenger was hurt. But if the two men possessing this secret were in the Abbey, then there, clearly, he must go.

He pressed his horse slowly through the crowds and up the steep hill. His chances of coming down it again were something, he thought fleetingly, he wouldn't care to wager money on. And the decisive factor was whether he had to a.s.sa.s.sinate one man, or two.

Through several centuries, predecessors of Tom Erskine had found a morbid attraction in the fat cows and silver plate of Hexham, with damaging results to the fabric. It cost Erskine some bluffing, some skin off his knuckles and a btuised s.h.i.+n, but he got inside, unseen and unmolested, and was violently relieved to find his end of the church plunged in gloom.

He was in the west nave; and while cleaving to the White Canons, he gave a pa.s.sing nod to the Augustinian sense of proportion, material and intangible. About thirty yards ahead there were lights, of a sort, and the murmur of voices: the meeting, or gathering, or conference seemed to be taking place in one of the transepts. As his eyes grew used to the dark, he looked about him.

On his right, a flight of steps rose into the wall, presumably leading to the west offices of the cloister and therefore of no immediate use. But above his head, a row of lancets ran along the south wall of the nave, supporting the upper part of the wall, and with their feet firmly planted on a ledge a full yard wide.

Where staging went, a man could go. Erskine made a silent dash for the stairs, and after two twists debouched through an open door onto a dark and dizzy ledge high above the nave. Moving silently from group to group of its pillars he slipped toward the heart of the church, flattening himself against the wall as the candlelight grew stronger.

Another doorway appeared ahead. Through it, he found the wall turned at right angles. The ledge continued, and the supporting pillars, but instead of looking down into the church, the open side was sealed. Before him instead was a long, narrow tunnel, completely dark, with a glimmering of light at the end. Then he realized what was happening: the wall here turned to run along the west wall of the south transept, and the s.p.a.ce between the columns had been hung with tapestries.

He edged his way a little along, feeling the cold stone on his right and touching the hangings on his other side with the tips of his left hand. The dim light at the end came from a stairway which spiralled both up and down. Investigating, he found that a short descent led to the corner of a broad gallery filling the end of the transept. A flight of wide, shallow steps led from the gallery to the floor of the church. He retreated up the staircase and halfway back along his ledge.

His best hiding place was here, and here probably his best view of the transept. Judging his distance, he halted and with careful fingers made a gap in the tapestried wall of his tunnel. Candlelight fell on his fingers, and animated conversation sprang to his ears with a paralyzing vigour.

Then a known voice, Lymond's voice, beating home some fragment of rhetoric, said startlingly, "I can give you one name that you can't give me: cuckold, Lord Lennox!.

* * *Within the Abbey, this singular and unbooked-for capture slipped like a midsummer halcyon upon the sour and surly waters of incompatability.

Lord Wharton, exhausted with the effort of being civil to Grey, irritated by Lennox and stricken at the prospect of parting with a company of excellent hors.e.m.e.n whom he would probably never see again, was sunk in highly secular gloom at one end of the long, polished table.

The Earl of Lennox, bored and more than a little put out by a cool reception from his wife, fiddled with the inventories and bills lying in front of him, and crossed his long legs under the table in such a way that neither Grey nor Margaret could sit in comfort.

Lord Grey, missing Gideon and worried as well as annoyed by this tale of Margaret Douglas's, was unfolding a long and complicated saga of his Treasurer's shortcomings and Lady Lennox, who was pale, was sitting upright in an uncomfortable chair and frowning abstractedly at the floor.

Then Mr. Myles came in and whispered; an officer from the gate came in and made a statement; and the guard helped to carry in and deposit the rec.u.mbent and unconscious form of Mr. Acheson on a convenient tomb, while two other pleased-looking stalwarts filed inand closed the door. Between them was Lymond. At the unlikeliest moment, the fish had swallowed the hook.

He wore no jacket and no boots; he was dishevelled, as might be expected, and looked tired and disreputable. He also looked, thought Lord Grey with a pang of fury, roughly as humble as s.h.i.+shman, Emperor of the Slays: Bralima finding pest in the henhouse might have worn such a look. "Did you do that?" snapped the Lord Lieutenant, and jerked a finger toward Acheson's prostrate body.

Lymond turned his head. "Gus.h.i.+ng Hippocrenes at every joint. No. Strictly speaking, the blame belongs to a strawberry roan. The gentleman carries two letters for the Lennoxes, and I have come with him in answer to your ultimatum. If you are wondering, Margaret, whether I know that the ultimatum is void and why; I do. Mr. Ache-son was rash enough to tell me just inside the gates..

A severe and brilliant triumph illuminated Meg Douglas's face. She didn't ask how Acheson knew. "Your little redheaded friend was unintelligent but persevering. She forgot there are rules in war as well as in love. . . . Kill him, Matthew..

"In your experience they are the same rules, aren't they? Slay those who are great in heart, for they are blind. Matthew can't in decency kill me, Margaret, until Lord Grey has spoken, and by then I shall have said a great deal myself..

"Will you? I doubt it. By G.o.d," said Lord Grey, "there isn't a man here, I should think, who wouldn't be happy to slit-.

"I should certainly like-as a major sufferer-to lay claim to the body," said Lord Wharton. "What happened at Annan is very freshly in my mind, and so is the disruption of my courier service and your several and inventive actions when under my command..

"As I observed," said Lord Grey impatiently, "this miserable man is evilly disposed to us all. I have not forgotten Hume and Heriot nor has Lennox, I imagine~ dismissed the events at Dumbarton. We are not, I suppose, going to terminate this remarkable history by squabbling over the manner of his death. No. We are pressed for time. This is war, and this man is of the rubbish thrust to the surface by war. Let the guards take him to the market place and hang him for a treacherous Scot..

Four voices broke upon his ears with exclamatory advice; and were in turn defeated by the single, carrying voice of the prisoner.

"One at a time," said Lymond. "Remember your English unity, for G.o.d's sake, or we are all lost. Think hard; don't let the principleescape you. What are you? A great and G.o.dly nation speaking with the voices of corporate right: one brain, one heart; a thousand members drawing life from each. A nation of loving lambs dutiful to the bellwether: chickens of the world-egg following the hen-figure gladly into the eye of the cannon. Unity, solidarity and brotherhood. Brotherhood! My G.o.d..

Grey shut the ledger before him with a snap. "At least this is a nation, with a religion, a head, a status, a policy. Not a d.a.m.ned Noah's Ark: a chicken here, a lamb there, a family of wolves in the next field. I suppose you are proud of your French Queen, playing dice with Scots knucklebones for the greater glory of her native land? Of Arran, the fool, bending like a springal toward the weightiest pocket? Of your Douglases and your-.

"Lennoxes?" Smoothly, unhurriedly, the Master was playing for time. "They serve their turn: why not? A Lennox pressed is a Dead Sea apple, held by London instead of by Paris; and for the richest, not the fairest. Fairness has nothing whatever to do with the Douglases..

"I think," said the Earl of Lennox, white with emotion, "that my wife and I have heard enough insults. And I can dispense with a dissertation about our national characteristics. Knock him down! Hang him!.

Lymond turned suddenly. "'Our' characteristics? Whose? Whose are yours? Brought up in France; feted in Scotland; would-be bridegroom of Mary of Guise; would-be ruler; would-be conspirator; full of terrestrial appet.i.tes and an eagerness to feed your kindred flesh to all the feared and threatening raptors at your heels .

"What are you? A citizen of Europe or of the life of the sh.o.r.e: a thief, a renegade, a liar and a coward, as you have named me? But I can give you one name you can't give me: cuckold, Lord Lennox!.

The Earl had risen slowly to his feet. As Lymond flung the word at him Lennox's voice rang out, high-pitched as a bird's. "My G.o.d, you stopped me once, Wharton, but not this time Not again! Clear the way-move aside-.

His path to Lymond was unexpectedly blocked. "Who the devil are you?" said Lennox hysterically. "Get out of my way!.

Henry, Lord Wharton's son, shut the door behind him and blinked at the white and angry face. His gaze, mildly surprised, sought his father at the table and then, roving, fell on the Master of Culter. "Him!.