Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [208]
In all the length of the bare room, no one spoke. The long blades exploded together, cracked, chimed and clattered; the stockinged feet slid and shuffled and the two men breathed in gasps, quickly, traversing and gyrating, slipping in and out of sword-length, each in a cocoon of whirring light. A blizzard of suns on walls and ceiling enclosed them.
Culter was a master, worth seeing on any terms: worth seeing even when wrought up with anger. His brain directed; his eyes and feet, shoulders and wrists answered, and the result was sure and powerful swordplay. Lymond said once, in a breathless voice curiously close to laughter, “He’s twice the size of common men, wi’ thewes and sinewes strong,” and then retired into silence. The daggers, sparkling over and under the swords, darted like serpents.
Within the first three minutes Richard’s sword touched his brother’s shoulder. Gideon, with the rest, said “Oh!” and then smiled. There was no harm done: the shoulder was already protected by the old bandage of Scott’s thrust. The lids veiled Lymond’s eyes as they disengaged. “Reaping the eddish. Try the other side next time.”
There was no next time. They fought themselves across, to and against the ropes on the Master’s side, the watching men pressing back against the wall; and then slowly moved back to the centre. Culter was attacking fast and brutally and his brother was displaying, one after the other, every trick at his command in a prodigious effort to defend himself.
He succeeded at the cost of being whipped forward and then back again across the floor, his parrying arm taking again and again the jar of the meeting blades. He showed surprising mastery with the dagger hand, and his excellence with that was something Richard clearly had to allow for consistently: again and again it baulked his follow-through and his feint.
The cost to both men was a growing tiredness, magnified by the long chase and by the emotional battle upstairs. After his first violence Richard’s speed dropped, but he fought like a textbook, missing nothing and giving nothing away. Lymond, his shirt soaked with perspiration, recoiled incessantly.
Ten minutes later, they were still fighting, and the watching room was quite silent. At Gideon’s elbow, Tom Erskine said suddenly, “I tell you: no man has ever stood against Culter’s sword for so long.”
There was trouble in Somerville’s eyes. “I could have warned him,” he said.
Erskine’s breath hissed. “If one of them isn’t fighting, I shall stop it.”
“It won’t be necessary,” said Gideon quietly. “I think Lord Culter has realized.”
It was true. Fighting against a sword so weak as to be incapable of riposte or counterthrust or attack of any sort, he had still failed to penetrate Lymond’s guard. With grim fortitude, Richard put a monstrous theory to the test. In the middle of an imbroccata he dropped his left hand, exposing his whole flank momentarily to Lymond’s right blade.
Lymond parried and withdrew, the blue eyes quite impersonal.
Lord Culter disengaged. He did more: he drew back his arm and hurled his sword quivering on the floor, his eyes bitter as squill. “Damn you to hell. You’re not fighting?”
A man’s voice called through the silence of the room. “He’s escaped!” Lymond, breathing quickly, stood without speaking.
“I’m to be your buffoon here, as everywhere else.…”
The shouting voice was nearer. It said, “Mr. Erskine, sir! The black fellow: he’s got a horse and escaped!”
Richard didn’t even pause. “You bloody-minded little vampire—how in God’s name can I hurt you enough?”
Lymond said briefly, “Don’t underrate yourself.… Erskine: if Acheson has got loose, he’ll go to Hexham. Do you know it?”
“No, but don’t worry,” said Erskine grimly. “We’ll get him before he arrives there. Richard—”
“Do what you like. I’ve business to finish here,” said Culter.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Richard,” said Lymond harshly. “Erskine: I can take you straight to where that man is going. How the hell do you expect to stop him otherwise, if you