Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [211]
To stop was almost to faint, such was the strain. They stood very close, face to face, the breath shaking their ribs; and the rapier flared in one of Lymond’s hands, the dagger in the other.
He raised them slightly, the blue eyes haggard and wanton.
“My victory, brother Richard. My chance. My choice, to sheath either or both in fat, brotherly flesh.” The long fingers whitened on the two hilts as he held them out. “Handy Dandy prickly prandy, Richard … Which hand will you have?”
No one spoke. Culter’s gaze, at this ultimate moment, was steady and unafraid.
Lymond laughed. And laughing, hurled the rapier to the floor and leaped to the window seat, the baggage roll scooped in his arms. For a moment he was poised there, collected, elegant and fleetingly analytical. Then—“If you won’t lead, try following!” said the Master; and in a storm of contemptuous glass swept the pack through the window and followed it himself. They heard, as they ran forward, the thud, the pause, and the quick recovery as he rolled on the soft grass below. From there, as they knew, it was a step to the horses.
And so they had to follow.
Gideon found Kate in the music room, her eyes on the road south. He put two hands on her shoulders. “How good an Englishwoman are you?”
He felt her shiver. “I don’t know. Not very good, I’m afraid. It was Philippa who told them.”
“I know.”
There was a long silence. “Did they fight?” asked Kate at length.
“Quite brilliantly,” said Gideon. And he took her below where the air blew soft through the tall panes, and where the fallen rapier, like the Master’s discarded victory, lay unmarred among the glass on the floor.
They were riding into the yellow, grit-blasted socket of the sun, following the wisp of dust which was Lymond.
Somewhere ahead, presumably, was the man Acheson. Somewhere ahead, certainly, was the English army. A little down the road the two men Erskine had sent ahead joined them at a tangent from the moors, with no news except of a baked and unprinted crust of hills, and it became certain that their only hope, as well as their greatest danger, lay in following the incalculable figure ahead.
Lymond flew before them like a honey guide seducing a vespiary, sparing them nothing: they jumped ditches and peat pits, scrambled up banks and old diggings and crossed streams where the shallow mud embraced pastern and coffin bone and left some horse shoeless. The dust of whin and seeding grass, of baked earth and broken pollen attacked and burned them until the freshest of their horses stumbled. The gilded head in front never dropped from their sight.
Richard was sitting heavily in the saddle. Erskine, watching him drop back from the lead, recognized that Culter was worn out, riding on will power alone, much as the man in front must be. It struck him that today’s disastrous encounter between the two had done nothing so much as reveal how brilliantly alike the brothers were. It further struck him that if they did approach any closer to Lymond, his job was to prevent Osiris from being destroyed by brother Set. Until, at least, he had shown them the way to Acheson. He singled out Stokes, his best man, and edged him out of Culter’s hearing as they galloped.
“If Lymond gets to Hexham first, I’m going alone after him: one man might just bluff his way through. The rest of you will have to wait for me. Give me an hour or two, and then make your own way home.… And Stokes.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Stop Lord Culter from following me.”
The other man met his eye. “Yes, sir.”
They were riding uphill, over high ground: a cavalcade of asses after a bizarre and amorphous carrot. Then the rider ahead slipped out of sight down the other side of the hill. Erskine swept up after him and drew rein.
They were on the verge of a long and stony escarpment which ran as far west as he could see. Below the cliff, a track led through flat meadows to the broad and tranquil banks of the Tyne, crossed it by a humped bridge and after traversing a narrower strip, shot