Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [171]
Lymond’s voice, carrying its full power, cut across her words. For his own sake, clearly he must silence her. He did it in his own way, raising his voice in a mockery which insolently denied pain, or strain, or any experience of ignominy.
“There goes my epic moment again!” he said. “Pantomime! I’d have held the Rose of Hamborough in twenty fathoms on a gravel bottom in a southeast gale, and all for nothing and less than nothing: my illusions destroyed, my deceptions dragged into the light of day and my speech miscarried and scattered to the hyenas. I do not complain. You may have your frolic. But on one thing I insist. I will not have my name coupled with a redheaded woman. Red-ribboned mares kick. Red-horned cattle gore. Rowans poison, and so do redheads, given the chance.… Is that clear?”
Sym had drawn back. The blue eyes pursued him coldly. “Well? What more? You heard her. She won’t move until I’m freed.”
He had lost any good will left to him. Sym, at a nod from the captain, moved forward doubtfully to unlock Lymond’s wrists. The captain cleared his throat uneasily. Inside the castle his temporary prison was ready, and there was an escort of soldiers waiting; the sooner the fellow was locked up now the better.
He glanced sideways. In spite of what they’d just heard the girl showed no signs of anger with the jackanapes. And she had high-up friends, he knew. As the shackles were unfastened, he addressed her. “It’s a fine, dry cellar, my lady, and he’ll come to no harm. Forbye, we hardly laid a finger on him.”
“Ye leid, ye leid, ye filthy nurse,” said the prisoner pleasantly. “One hand free. God. Manus loquacissimae—it’s pantomime all right. And the second free. Competently done. Restored without loss to the parent trunk: ulna, radius, humerus …”
There was a long pause. “Not very,” said Lymond rapidly. “Not at all, in fact.”
He had lowered his arms very slowly. Ceasing to speak, he cupped his face momentarily, grimacing; then with a gesture of half-comic resignation slid like a trout through Sym’s grasp to the ground.
And the odd thing was, as Scott bending sardonically over him discovered, that he really had fainted.
* * *
They had Maxwell’s permission to use the castle for one night, leaving for the capital next morning.
In the privacy of Threave, once the prisoner had been battened down under triple guard, the chief actors expended their nervous excitement on each other. Christian, frustrated in her efforts to visit Lymond and irritated by Buccleuch’s wholesale damning of that gentleman’s anonymous ways, finally lost her temper completely and went off to bed. Scott fared little better.
The question was one of naming his former colleagues. Accused of standing with one foot in each camp; of leaving the countryside at the mercy of leaderless cutthroats, of lack of responsibility and of owning a head full of pulp and pips like a Spanish orange, Scott replied in kind without a trace of exhaustion, and he and his father were still going at the subject hammer and tongs long after Hunter had collected his men and departed. Finally Buccleuch roared. “It’s a pity, since you’re so keen on them, ye didn’t stay with your precious friends!”
Will, already on his feet, snatched up his cloak. “All right; I will!”
“Ye kale-heided coddroch! They’ll cut ye in triangles if ye show your neb there after what you’ve done!”
“Then I’ll go somewhere else!”
“You’ll go somewhere else all right,” snarled Buccleuch, and rang the handbell as though he were twisting a cockerel’s neck. “You’ll spend the night where you can’t do any harm and where you’ll have every chance of comparing your dear old friends with your new ones—Fetch the captain.”
Scott jumped to his feet, but Buccleuch’s heavy hand was on his sword arm. When the captain came, Wat alarmed him by continuing to shout. “Here’s another prisoner for you. I