Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [169]
John Maxwell was away, to Scott’s overwhelming relief. Until Buccleuch came for Lymond, Dandy and he would be passionate jailers. Not that Maxwell, whatever his past relations with the Master, would have risked an inch of his new security to help him; but one would savour the situation more expansively away from that remembering yellow eye.
Threave, pockmarked and exigent, hung above them. While a temporary prison was being made, Lymond, fingered impiously off his horse, was lashed to one of the four drum towers of the wall. He was now very white; his fingers unobtrusively linked in the tethering ring behind held him firmly erect. Scott, talking to a fleshy man with a thick yellow eye and a jovial smile, the captain of Threave, looked away as the crowd surged around the drum tower; and then was driven to look back as, mysteriously, the quality of noise changed.
They reached the wall none too soon. Lymond, out of what looked like sheer boredom, had begun answering back. Scott could hear the sound of his voice, followed by a roar; then someone else speaking, then Lymond and another roar. The response was not threatening, it was appreciative. In a minute, Scott recognized with fury, it would become laughter, and laughter like Cupid is a notorious locksmith.
For their essay in comedy the crowd had launched a mock trial. Pressing thickly about the prisoner’s negligent person they clamoured accusations and he replied instantly with the kind of double and even triple entendre commonly fished for at the bottom of an alepot and commonly never caught. The captain roared with laughter; he was wildly amused and even joined in; he saw, to Scott’s annoyance, no possible harm in it. The castle had emptied itself; so had the kitchens and the buttery and the brewery and the bakehouse and the stables and the byres.
The little performance lasted ten minutes, and then Lymond suddenly stopped. They slung their ripostes at him and this time he shrugged his shoulders impatiently. They shrieked and he was silent; they went on shouting and he ignored them. Perhaps he had tired of the game; perhaps under its besetting pressures, invention had failed. At any rate, there was no mistaking the hubbub now. These were threats, and these, clattering off the tower wall, were stones.
The captain forced his way through. “None of that, now: we want the fellow alive. What’s happened to you? Answer them, can’t you, when you’re civilly spoken to?”
Lymond said nothing, but his stare was an insult.
Or so the captain thought. “Ho!” he said. “Jesus, you’re particular, aren’t you? Canna trouble to reply to the likes of me. Man: you’re going to stand there and sing like a linnet before we shift you a step. So cheep, my laddie, give us your tongue.…”
Nothing.
The captain raised his voice. Scott could see he was a popular man. “Oh, fine then. We know how to sort this kind. There’s a legal punishment for refusing to plead. Alec: have we got any weights? Well, chains, then. Plenty of chains. Davie: there’s two high rings. Cut him off and stick his hands on these. Now. That’s a fine bit of chain, man. A shade rusty but no harm to it: we wouldna want to dirty a nice clean one. We’ll put the first one around his neck.”
The Peine Forte et Dure was a perfectly valid punishment for silence: it used weights to achieve a gradual pressing to death. Scott said, “Wait a moment. We’re supposed to deliver the man alive. The courts won’t exactly thank you for doing their job for them.”
The captain was engineering the laying of the first chain like a Roman with his first viaduct; he didn’t even bother to look around. “Never heed. We’ll have him talking that fast he’ll wear his tongue thin.”
And they would, of course. Lymond might be capriciously vain, but he wasn’t foolish. Like some mountainous and ironic chain of office the cable bedecked him; he had braced himself against its weight so that there was no needless drag on his arms, spread-eagled above. His face was set like iron. Never before had Scott seen so clearly the force of his will.
The captain