Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [222]
Richard laid down the scarred hand. “I don’t mean to exact retribution from all my wife’s lovers. Just those actually related to me. Although you’ll be glad to hear that Sybilla is still your infatuated devotee.”
His brother’s gaze was unexpectedly severe, with a marked line between the brows. He said, “But Mariotta is not. She made it quite clear before she left that she thought my existence unnecessary, and that the third baron was her only patron. What you did when she got back God knows, but it didn’t sound very intelligent in the fourth-hand version I got, and if she agrees in the end to come back to you it’ll be a miracle of constant vapidity over assiduous obstinacy.…” Prone on the spread rug, he studied Richard’s expression of harsh amusement. “Not very convincing?”
“No.”
“No, I suppose not. I could enact you Phoenissae-like tragedies and you’d believe them, but the truth, as I once said to someone—”
“What?”
“Is a queer thing to meddle with,” said Lymond rapidly. “Must we go? Accord me a niche. I don’t mind being calx in a columbarium: the doves will feed me and I shall rise and found Nineveh.… Hic turtur gemit, drowning the groans of the Britons.… Must we go? An elephant’s head riding on a rat—the symbol of prudence, Richard. Are you listening?”
Richard was already kneeling, hands gripped as if physical force could hammer back the shutters closing on life and consciousness. “You aren’t going to die. Not until I’m ready for you.”
“Don’t be silly, Richard,” said Lymond, coming from a great distance. For a moment his quick mind cleared; he squinted at the darkening cupola with clouded eyes, and then closed them with a wisp of a grin. “God, I forgot. You don’t like glovers.”
He fought for Lymond’s life for two days: thorough, methodical, intelligent; mending with dedicated skill like a man cleaning and mending an engine of war. He longed for his brother, desperately ill as he was, to know what was being done for him, and to savour this devoted nursing at his hands.
On the second night in their new home, sitting in the mellow darkness with the stream bubbling companionably beside him and the odours of warm, fresh turf and flowers and quenched mosses breathing into the withered air, he thought of that coming moment with pleasure.
Lymond was steadier; the pulse a fraction stronger; the sound of his breathing more settled. Assume he survived. Assume a convalescence of weeks—two or three, perhaps, before they could move north …
This was a man who prized his self-control. This was the contaminating mind whose presence in daily life was insupportable. Three weeks—or even two—should be enough.
* * *
“Is this fraternall charity
Or furious folie, what say”
Since Lymond was alone, the question was pointlessly rhetorical. After a moment he removed a grave blue stare from the clouds and closed his eyes again.
Two days of fever: two of infantile helplessness. The stream, a strip of grass, the rug, the makeshift pillow, and immobility under the hot sun. He stirred in a difficult, indistinct way, the light beating on his closed lids, and then lay painfully silent.
A pebble dropped.
Richard, approaching downstream with a bouquet of fish, watched the effect of it, smiling. Lymond, instantly awake, gave no answering smile as his brother strolled up to him.
Richard’s skin, amenable to the sun, was smooth and brown, and his hair bleached from umber to something near straw colour where it stood ruffled around his head. After five days of foraging, neither his shirt nor his hose were particularly respectable: he wore light shoes from his baggage which were already much the worse for wear, and his brother was wearing his only spare shirt.
These sartorial deficiencies were clearly not weighing on him. He cast down the fish, bestowed an effervescent twinkle on the Master and said, “Comfortable?”
“Acutely so.”
“You don’t look very comfortable,” said Richard,