The Game Of Kings Part 35

"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 wayImpaled 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 a.s.sault 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 ittle too trusting, one would say, but after all, in G.o.d'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 G.o.d: my G.o.d, wasit 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. .

The level denunciation gave the words a power that rolled like the thunder of Gotterdammerung 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, d.a.m.n 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 a.s.sociate with. . . . But what in G.o.d's name has happened to charity? . . . Self-interest guides me like the next man but not invariably; not all the time. I use compa.s.sion 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.i.t 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 a.s.sume 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed out the bright stolen blade. He grasped the driving elbow and wrist- "No:not that way, you poor, canting b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"-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 inexorablyagainst Richard's whole weight; forcing the bright, two-edged blade inward, between the locked bodies.

He d.a.m.ned the pa.s.sion which had made him wait, instead of seizing the weapon at once; he d.a.m.ned 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 una.s.sailable. 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 gra.s.s.

"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 compan.y, and while he waited, he smoothed down her l.u.s.trous 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 c.o.c.ked blue sky of summer, in the jostling towns and highways, in the forts hissing with tar and hot iron, the friaries and keeps, the foresh.o.r.es where salt timber rolled ash.o.r.e 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 n.o.body 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 HisMost 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 ~cus 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 un.o.btrusively 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 d.i.c.kered, 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 peac.o.c.ks' 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 G.o.d, old Slovenly Thomas interpreting:who'd have thought it? I said, if his French hasn't improved since the Rome emba.s.sy, 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. "d.a.m.n 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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. G.o.d, Francis had screamed.

Something unused and ritual at the back of Richard's conscious mind stirred, and he stared into the buffeting darkness, quickly denymg it. He a.s.sembled 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.

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 a.n.a.lysis: man's infant fear of the irretrievable; a starved yearning for warmth; a childlish 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 gra.s.s, 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 Ct merveilies: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 G.o.d, and the Deity points out that the post is already adequately filled. During an outburst of besotted philanthropy he had redeemed Lymond, butLymond 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 G.o.d, 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 oncegot 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 subst.i.tute 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 corucrake, knew that he was listening, and yet he refused to come openly into the living world. He was refusing to fight; refusing the goad evenwhen now at the eleventh hour admitting its p.r.i.c.ks. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y nursery maid. Suppose you make the effort now..

It brought him his answer. A frail and pa.s.sionate 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..

"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 fficker of animation died. Lymond said helplessly, "No! You won't get me to Edinburgh .. . even for that. I won't go; I can'tOh, G.o.d! 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 d.a.m.ned 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 p.r.o.nounced 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..