Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [333]
The silence this time was terrible, for he had to gather his breath, as one might try to scrape bucket-water from the almost-dry bed of a river. Then, ‘Yes,’ he said once again.
‘Then I tell you,’ Sybilla said, ‘that you have no leave to die. Nor have you leave to desert the race you belong to. I want your word that from this moment, you live. You live until no device of priest or leech will hold the web of your body together. And when you walk from this room, you turn your back on France and your face towards the place of your life’s work. I want your oath that you will come back to Scotland.’
She halted, but there was no mercy in the blue stare. ‘Do I have it?’
Jerott did not see the fight to reply, for his own head was twisted away from it. He heard Sybilla say, ‘It is not enough. I must have your spoken word, Francis.’
There was a space, during which, of the five men and women standing or kneeling about Francis Crawford, only one watched him. Then Lymond said clearly, ‘On my honour, I promise it.’
Sybilla saw the change in his face before Jerott did. She cried out, and instantly Richard flung open the door. Air, light and movement broke into the room, disrupting the tension. Marthe’s husband, set aside by many hands, saw Nostradamus had already gained his place, kneeling, with eau de vie and strong, massaging fingers.
Jerott moved back, his limbs shaking, and watched the man on the floor, the busy heads crowded about him.
His eyes were shut and he was unconscious, but in a manner subtly changed from the death-stupor from which they had roused him. Where there had been peace, now there was endurance.
‘He will awake,’ said Nostradamus. ‘You took a great risk, but he will awake, if that is what you want for him.’
It was then that Jerott turned, and caught sight of Sybilla.
Richard got to her first. She relinquished her full weight, choking, against him. Then Nostradamus with surprising agility made for her, and speaking in a low voice swept her, with Richard beside him, from the chamber.
The door closed.
Archie had gone to stand at the foot of the low pallet where the hospitallers, gently working, were still occupied in bringing Lymond to safety. The other bed, drenched and blackened, stood vacant, its tapers darkened: a monument perhaps, but no longer a bier. Marthe said, her face streaked and silvered with tears, ‘I could not have done that. I fear nothing and no one. I respect nothing and no one. But I could not have done that.’
‘You have done it,’ Jerott said. ‘It is easy to do it, out of hatred. But you are right. I know of no one else on earth who could have done it out of love.
‘It was a miracle, and it partook of the first property of miracles. It should never have been performed.’
Chapter 9
Celui qu’aura tant d’honneur et caresses
A son entree de la Gaule Belgique:
Un temps apres fera tant de rudesses,
Et sera contre à la fleur tant bellique.
For three days, Francis Crawford was helped to establish his hold upon life, and his door was locked to all but his doctors.
On the fourth day the King entered, his hand on the Dauphin’s shoulder, and later the Duke de Guise and his brother the Cardinal. The King spoke of the truce. The brothers de Guise spoke of the disease which had so tragically cheated the Scottish Commissioners of their happy homecoming; and the Cardinal prayed a little.
After that, the sickroom saw no guests until next day, when Sybilla asked leave to visit her son, and Nostradamus, considering, granted it.
This time, there was no one else in his room.
They had replaced the burned bed with a better one. Through its light damask hangings the sun lay tawny upon the carved headboard against which, cushioned in pillows, Lymond’s fair head and shoulders were resting. In the rosy light his skin was lucent as mother of pearl; his hair burnished, his robe lightly folded over the bandaging. Only he was perfectly still, and the trenches round his eyes might have been quarried there.
She shut the door, and walked to the bed. His gaze on her