Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [314]
To maintain a grip when your arm has been torn through with cold steel and when with feet and hands the man below you is attempting for his life to maim and overthrow, needs a special kind of endurance. Lymond was helped, perhaps, by the fact that Gabriel was tired and injured, as he was; and that by blow and pressure he was already at the start half-deprived of air and therefore full consciousness. But the punishment Lymond took as the cord tightened and the handsome, suffused face opened, gasping, for air, was made possible only by his training and the particular kind of way, Jerott thought, that his mind happened to work, notwithstanding the weaknesses of the past few weeks.
Then there came the moment when Graham Malett’s big hands, still loosely flailing, fell to his sides and his bloodshot eyes closed; and Lymond then, releasing him, groped, his face half-blind with pain, and finding the dagger, placed the sharp blade, held by the heel of his hand, across the stretched tendons of Gabriel’s empurpled throat.
Slowly, the air returned to Graham Malett’s drained lungs; slowly the saintly blue eyes opened, and understood the meaning of the cold line at his throat, and comprehended, incredulously, his defeat. For a long moment, in the big church there was silence, barred only, second by second, with the slow muffled strokes of the bell. Then Lymond said, his strained and breathless voice strange to all their ears, ‘I take upon me your execution, Graham Malett. I take you all to witness that if I must suffer for it, the crime is no one’s but mine. The venue I cannot help … except that under this roof, Gabriel, your corpse is more seemly than your body. For Will Scott, for Wat Scott his father, for Thomas Wishart and Trotty Luckup, for the pain you occasioned the Somervilles and the corruption and death of your sister, for what, above all, you hoped to do to this realm of Scotland, I call your life forfeit.’
Soft from the body of the church came de Seurre’s voice, chiming with Lymond’s in its frozen intensity. ‘For what you did in Malta and in Tripoli, I call your life forfeit.’
‘For what you did to the peoples of the Borders, who will hardly knit now for a generation,’ said Lymond’s pale voice, resuming. ‘For what you did to the men under your cure, who became less than men; for the lives you risked and the lives you wasted; for the emotion you fostered and fed on, and the values and beliefs you have left wrecked and cheapened by your masquerade; for the army that might have made us a whole nation and the Queen Mother deceived of her strong arm; for all your crimes against humanity and those far higher than human, Graham Malett, I call your life forfeit.…’
With difficulty; with breath that must have seared his lacerated throat as it rose, Sir Graham Malett said hoarsely, ‘I forgot, my winsome darling, that you were taught by the scum of the seas. What a pity that your Irish trollop and her grovelling bastard will never know what they’ve missed.’
Standing small, staunch and shivering beside her son Richard, Sybilla heard the words spoken to Francis at last. Jerott, understanding also, bent his head and covered his aching eyes with his hands. The men who had come to know Lymond well—Hoddim, Guthrie—stirred uneasily where they stood; and Adam Blacklock’s long artist’s hands tightened round Philippa who stood, looking at no one, misery in her dark-ringed eyes.
The bell tolled. Then Lymond said, the knife steady still in his hand, ‘I see.