Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [313]
Following its flight, Lymond almost missed the spurred foot rising with all Gabriel’s weight to his groin. There was only one way he could jump: he hurled himself down the wide steps and was caught, deep in the sword-arm, by Gabriel’s dagger. Adam Blacklock, gripping the child Philippa’s shoulder, saw Lymond stumble, his hand loosening on the sword, and Gabriel’s dagger pull out and flash downwards, its razor edge flying to the blood, flesh and tendons of that long, slender-boned hand. Then Lymond, dropping the sword, snatched his hand back, blood pouring from his right arm, and sought left-handed and nearly reached Gabriel’s exposed ribs.
In the effort, both men overbalanced. With the effective use of only one arm Lymond could not wholly control his manner of falling. He took the brunt on his shoulder, as Gabriel did, but rolling back to regain his feet, half his back must have been pressed hard against the thin edge of the steps, and when he found Gabriel, half-risen, on him again, his dagger high in his hand, Lymond did not parry, but instead, holding his dagger left-handed, he grappled close, pressing hard on the high wound of Gabriel’s chest while quickly, unobtrusively, he sought the grip that would do what he wanted.
Pain Graham Malett had never feared. He would have withstood it, with massive strength, until Lymond tired, if Lymond’s fingers, scored and bleeding where he had not always contrived to miss that teasing sword-point, had not found and pressed on the one nerve that mattered. No amusement at all on his face, Graham Malett dropped his last weapon and brought his two powerful hands to bear on wresting the remaining knife from Lymond’s grip.
Watching, in a fellowship of craning heads and jostling, shouting bodies, among whom, marked by their silence, were Lymond’s own officers and men, Jerott saw the two men crash again to the floor, and rolling over and over, stain the altar-carpet with their blood. There was a brutal, effective repertoire which he knew, and Gabriel in his day also had used against men taught to wrestle in the bagnios of Constantinople. He saw Gabriel begin the familiar moves with a kind of loving care, while the muscles of his left arm rose under his torn shirt as he kept Lymond’s dagger hand in chancery. With only his feet left to use, Lymond used them, in a deft move quite as unforgivable as Gabriel’s and entirely successful, since Gabriel had not expected it. You forgot, thought Jerott, that Lymond had not sailed the Mediterranean pacing the poop deck; he had been below, in shackles, where to exist you had to fight like a cur.
Because of it, now, he had broken Gabriel’s grip on his thighs and, more important still, on his left hand holding the dagger. With a thrust that sent the big man hurtling in turn on to his back, Lymond followed him with the same hard deliberation, using knees, feet, the chopping edge of his hand in a sequence no one there could follow: a sequence that brought a husky growl from the golden throat, a rising flush to the mellow skin, a white-rimmed blaze of hatred to the pale blue stare of Graham Malett. Using his splendid body he arched his muscles and fought, fending off the blows that palsied