Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [220]
There was no more he could do now. The door cloth secure, he stretched at length by the fire, his saddle for pillow, and waited side by side with the silenced tongue which had mocked him so long. The cushats had long since returned sidling to their roosts. As stillness fell, they settled too, with frilled feathers and the rasp of dry feet. Then it was quiet, and the only sound in all the warm June night was Lymond’s faint, gasping breath.
Through the darkest hours of the short night Richard slept, wrenched by sheer exhaustion from his vigil; and woke stupid, forgetting.
Then his bemused eyes picked out the pale, dawn-lit arches of the lantern above him and the wintry skeleton of the potence, and the dark, enclosing walls with their hundred upon hundred of empty sockets, black and salaciously flickering with the dying glimmer of the fire. And the wide, fathomless eyes of his brother, resting on him.
In that crude second, neither spoke. Culter rose, and stooping to the fire, rebuilt it with unhurried care. In its spreading light, pale hair gleamed beside him, and whitened cheekbones and white lips, all tinged to health by the flames. Roseate and sardonic in extremis, Lymond spoke with the least possible expense of sound.
“You still snore like a frog. Did Tom Erskine get me out?”
Richard was building a cathedral of boughs. “Who else? He brought you here and then took his men home. We’re just outside Hexham.”
There was a difficult pause. Then Lymond said clearly, “If you’re waiting to preach in articulo mortis, don’t put it off for my sake.”
The oblique inquiry gave Richard the metal he needed. He said with a grim pleasure, “I don’t mind waiting.”
Something—hardly laughter―glimmered in the heavy eyes. “Neither do I. But the fenestration seems fairly extensive.”
Richard had hung a can of water over the new fire, and his fresh bandages were waiting. “Not if you have a good surgeon.”
The careful voice was resigned. “Two chapters of Anatomía Porci and they think they’re Avicenna. Don’t trouble. No wriggling and no recantations from this quarter.”
“You’re surprised?” Richard tested the water with a broad finger.
“What did you expect? That I’d curse you, kill you and drop you in the Billy Mire?”
“Yes. You tell me why not: I can’t help you. Overtures of friendship from me would sound damned silly at this point … I can’t drink any more.”
Richard took away the flask. “You said no recantations.”
“That doesn’t rule out the plain, freestanding explanation.”
“Make it later,” said Richard equably, unwinding bits of torn sheet. “You’ll have plenty of time.” He knelt, and the incalculable eyes dropped.
It was not a pretty business: a grim, forbidding task even had there been proper gear and the skilled treatment of the doctor he was not. The bowls of water became scarlet and the makeshift wads reeked.…
Explanations. What explained the killing of one’s son? The seduction of one’s wife? And these were the hands that Mariotta knew better than he did: this the mouth; this the marked body.…
Lymond took too long to recover when the dressing was done. But in the end his eyes opened, and after a time he spoke. “All right. I love sadism too,” he said. “But try that too often, Master Haly Abbas Cat, and you won’t have a mouse left to play with.… Your move.”
Richard was careful. “Not yet,” he said. “When I make it, I want your undivided attention. All you have to do is get well.”
* * *
That day Lord Culter spent some time looking for a fresh harbour for his patient: one that would give some shelter, and be sufficiently remote from both houses and paths.
Late in the afternoon, on his last sally, his arms full of moss for dressings, he found the ideal spot. A small stream running through sandstone had created a toy gorge within which for perhaps twenty yards the bottom widened on each side of the water into a secluded and grassy meadow. There was room there, and in other and more distant bays, to graze his horse, and better still, a place where the rocky sides of the banks steeply overhung and enclosed the