Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [209]
Calmly Richard, picking up his sword, moved between his brother and the door. “You won’t wriggle out of it that way.”
“Richard—”
“Don’t be a fool. He’ll lead you straight to Lord Grey.”
“Then it’s a risk we must take,” said Erskine steadily. “He’s right, Culter. Let him go.”
“Not until we have finished this.”
Erskine was trying desperately hard to keep his temper. “Listen. If that message gets through …”
Richard rounded on him. “Are you relying on Lymond to stop it? Then you’re a simpleton. Go if you want to. I’m not holding you back. But you’re not taking him: I’ll kill the first man who comes near him.” And he turned, his eyes sparkling in his white face, to his brother.
“You were too superior to attack? Then you can damned well attack now.” His sword was in his hand, a fine instrument of latent death, sparkling largo to larghetto with his dagger. “The way to that door is through me. Take it, brother, if you can.”
There was a pause. Erskine said sharply, “Hob, Jamie: take your horses and try and pick up the tracks. We’ll follow as soon as we can.”
Lymond stirred. Sleek, cold, finely polished as his own steel, there was an air about him now that none of them had ever seen. “Very well,” said the voice that sixty outlaws had known. “Since you offer, I’ll take it.”
And he moved in straight to the attack.
It was as if some flawed and clouded screen had slid from the air, leaving it thin and bright; informing the white figures and pale heads, fair and brown, with an engraver’s beauty of exact and flexible outline, and lending a weightlessness and authority to their art.
For the brothers were natural swordsmen. The slipping and tapping of the fine blades, the unfurling movements growing smokelike one within the other, showed no trace of the grim and gritty striving of a moment before. It was classic swordplay, precious as a jewel, beyond any sort of price to the men watching, and concealing in its graces an exquisite and esoteric death.
They had always known Richard for a master. They now saw Crawford of Lymond grow before their eyes, the tutored power entering behind the elegance, the shoulders straight, the wrists of the temper which had withstood all the force of Richard’s long aggression and which now adventured, strong and pliant, with every trained sinew in his body.
To the two men, existence was in the end the flicker of the other man’s steel; his brown arms and wrists; a blur of white shirt and white face and the live, directing brain betraying itself through grey eyes or blue. The men watching, unable to breathe, heard the click and clash and slither of contes, froissées, beating and binding: saw first one man and then the other bring his art to the pitch of freeing his blade for the ultimate perfection, only to bow before the other’s defence.
Lymond fought consistently within measure, intensely fast, with an attacking dagger: Erskine, his heart frozen by his eyes, saw him beating constantly on Richard’s blade, moving it out of his way; out of fine; pressing it down and opening the way for a lunge.
Tap, tap went the compound riposte, the soft feet slithered—and then Richard’s blade moved, Lymond’s right arm whipped stiff, and the flat of his blade adhered to the flat of his opponent’s. There was a glottal whine. The point, glittering, slithered down and down to Culter’s counterguard until Richard, with all his compact strength, wrenched it free, slipping and flicking aside the automatic flight of his brother’s dagger. He moved forward himself, and attacked.
He was possessed by one instinct: to wipe out the insult of the last twenty minutes. In this soil there flowered a strength which lapsed sometimes, but never seriously, and which gained leisure, more and more often, to answer the astonishments of Lymond’s attack. For here, perhaps for the first time in his life, Lymond also was stretched to the limit, his breathing raucous,