Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [54]
Rousing herself: ‘The pledge,’ said Philippa, tartly, ‘is friendship. Simplicity is not, you will agree, one of your prominent attributes.’ They had passed through the gateway and turning left, mounted the rise of the long eight-arched bridge crossing the Saône. The fog was still thick on the bridge, concealing all but the first pair of flambeaux, but a current of air, winding through it, revealed the Fourvière heights for a moment, black against a starlit sky with the chapel lights bright on its summit, and the roofs of lamplit houses with their feet in the fog at its foot.
Dancing red in the haze, one of the bridge torches swayed in its socket. Gazing at it, Philippa was aware that she had been ungracious. She said, ‘But if you’ve no objection to fish scales, I’ll shake on it.’ And Lymond, to her gratification, accepted the hand that she offered him.
He did not shake it. He took it in a grinding and sinewy grip and dragged her sideways until she was running. Then he released her, spinning, to sprawl on the cobbles. His sword hissed from its scabbard. And gasping, she sat up and stared at him.
What she had seen was not the bridge flambeau swaying. It was a torch in the grip of a burly man with a fierce, swollen face and a patch of raw flesh two inches wide running down brow, cheek and jawbone. A man who strode out of the fog on the crown of the bridge, axe in hand and stood, holding the torch high and grinning. ‘Well met, M. de Sevigny: I might have been in the boat if your little bitch hadn’t blocked the traboule with Renaud’s knife-grinding wheel, and left it running. You may put up your sword. There is a line of men awaiting you at the other end of the bridge, and another line closing the bridgehead behind you. You would have met them if you had come out of the rue Mercière. As it is, you came by the quay gate, and this makes me very happy, and also my friend Octavien beside you. Only, where is the little bitch?’
He never did hear the answer, for Philippa stabbed him from behind with her husband’s poniard. She dragged it out as he fell and stabbed him again, gritting her teeth, in the area delineated in white paint by the black eunuch who instructed the princes’ class in the seraglio. A staccato hack of steel, interspersed with an outbreak of retching, told that the man Octavien had flung himself on Lymond. She caught up the fallen man’s torch and lifted it.
In a flare of yellow, the blade of an axe parted from the haft and whistled out of their sight in the darkness. The owner, the stock still in his hand, was in Lymond’s grip and Lymond’s hand was over his mouth, stifling his cries and forcing his head back with an expertise which Philippa saw was swift, impersonal and utterly final. As Lymond lowered the dead man to the ground she uttered neither comment nor commendation. It could hardly have been otherwise, man to man; or Octavien would have been fit to lead armies, and Lymond to be a third-rate paid assassin.
But from this point onwards it was not man to man, but Francis Crawford and herself against an unknown number of men at each end of this bridge. And although she had joked about swimming, there was no escape that way. Below the bridge was swift current and a tumble of rocks that would kill them. Lymond’s voice very quietly said, ‘Christ, Philippa: I won’t ask where you learned that. Now prop up the torch and come and give me a hand. Si leonina pellis non satis est, assuenda vulpina.’
‘Or, Si Dieu ne me veut ayder, le diable ne me peut manquer,’ said Philippa valiantly. ‘I am listening, mon compère. As a drunkard believes a drunkard, and a madman a madman.’
Very soon after that, the chain of five men at the Fourvière end of the bridge heard break out again, and closer, the clash of sword blades in the vapour. This time they could also hear voices, including the screams of a woman.
Their orders were to remain where they were. But it was galling to stand by and listen, when it was clear that the King’s emissary and his lady had been quite overthrown by the ambush.