Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [218]
He paused, his eyes flickering to the obscured figure of Acheson and back to the upraised, angry faces. “Every war has the man on the balcony, the man in the tree, the man in the doorway. He stings; he frightens; he causes loss of face; but he is always caught in the end. Turn aside to hunt for him if you must, Lord Grey; but don’t ever unleash your vanity on his track. Today …”
In the heavy eyes, new life suddenly blazed. “Today,” said Lymond, “such an error has cost you a war.”
“Lord Grey?” said an uncertain voice: Acheson’s voice. “Take me to Lord Grey? I’ve a dispatch … about the Scottish Queen.”
Grey said “What?” as the glimmer of a slow match swept through the dark transept like a firefly. The black mouth of the hackbut, steady as a wand, inexorable as Melpomene, turned like a dark flower to its killing, and Erskine cried softly, “Oh, God!”
Adam Acheson repeated, dizzily, “It’s about the Queen;” and walked out into the centre of the floor.
The fine bow drifted in Lymond’s hands like the frail, side-slipping glide of a heron; the steel tip steadied, sparkling, and his knuckles whitened. In the darkness opposite, the hackbutter’s arm jerked. Lymond smiled once, with a kind of surprised pleasure, and releasing the deadly, unerring arrow, shot Acheson through the heart.
The explosion of the hackbut drowned Margaret’s scream. Aiming for Lymond’s body, given the brilliant, unmoving target of his white shirt, the marksman made no mistake. He was defter, indeed, than he meant to be; because the shot, raking the stone coping of the balcony, acquired missiles and satellites of its own and struck home not once but several times.
Lymond flung up his head, turned half around with the force of the explosion. The bow fell. For one second—two—he held fast to the broken coping, defying the heralds of agony and an easy darkness. Below, Erskine caught a glimpse of the circle of white, upturned faces about the fallen body of Acheson.
Then the riven flesh and burst vessels made their protest, the freed blood springing liberal and scarlet through the fragments of Lymond’s shirt. Erskine saw the long hands loosen, the sudden, uncontrolled sway; but was not prepared for the drowned, revealing blue gaze meeting his like a blow.
“And died stinkingly martyred,” said Lymond, with painful derision; and losing hold bit by bit, slipped into Erskine’s gentle grasp.
III
Knight Adversary
And also hit behoveth … that they first have the cure
of themself, and they ought to purge themself fro
alle apostumes and alle vices … and that they
shewe hem hole and pure and redy for to hele other.
1. Strange Refuge
THE bell of Hexham Abbey opening its lips to the pagan moon, sent its voice across the river: Voce mea viva depello cuncta novica; and the men waiting across the water in a blackened and doorless dovecote heard it; and heard also the rattle of approaching hoofs.
Somebody—a hospital, a manor, a priory—had once owned five hundred fat pigeons here, and had housed them fittingly with fourteen tiers of holes and ledges, a bathing tub filled by a spring, a stone table and a tall and creaking potence, its revolving arms scanning the circles of tiered nests so that two men on its wheeling perches could pocket the warm squabs.
Now the broken doorway admitted rats. But rock doves had found a way through the glover to the safest, topmost nests; and when Erskine’s men went in, birds arose with the sudden rattle of an emptied topsail. Waiting for Tom to return, they could see shocked golden eyes darting from the lantern edge high above.
The sudden inaction, agitating to Erskine’s men, was dreadful for Richard, bereft of his prey and of any part in the climax of this hideous marathon. He would have been at the gates of Hexham fifty times if Stokes had let him. If Erskine could get in, then why not himself? If Erskine failed, wasn’t it his duty to replace him? And who gave Erskine the right to annex another man’s quarrel?
Stokes, luckily, was gifted with patience. As the light faded he returned his decent, sensible