Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [224]
“That’s what I mean,” said the Master slowly. “Your sense of values has broken down, and you won’t face it. I had some sympathy—some—for this idiotic pursuit of yours: I was labelled cur, and in the end I had to bark. Not entirely your fault.
“But what the hell are you doing out of Edinburgh now? What reason had you to deprive Erskine of the support he had a right to expect at Flaw Valleys? What sort of a lead have you given anybody in the last six months? And now more intelligent, reasonable people are to be thrown into the circus so that you can continue to view your prejudices through a thick, green eyeglass. A long, fancy humiliation is to flatten your circle into conformity and your soul into grace. Well, it won’t do, Richard.”
Lord Culter wore an expression of astonishment. “I suppose that’s the most eloquent protest I shall ever hear against professional justice. I’ve just told you. I’m not going to touch you.”
A smile touching his mouth, he saw Lymond’s will defeated yet again by his weakness. His eyes closed, peremptory in exhaustion; and Richard flicked a pebble into the stream.
The heavy lids lifted.
Hospitably, Richard closed in. “Have some fish?”
Lymond would not break. As one day and then another went by, Richard, insistently present and persistently gibing, began to find his own nerves betraying him, and sentence by sentence, Lymond fought back.
It was a tragic and annihilating war, in which intellect fought naked with intellect, and the blows fell not upon the mind but upon the soul.
At times, the longing to kill became so overpowering that Richard had to blunder off, to get away from the sound of his brother’s voice, his hands murderers at his sides. He knew, none better, what Lymond was driving him to do; and he guessed why. Indeed, the desperate savagery of these attacks gave him his only encouragement.
On the sixth day he became careless.
All week the weather had held. Dry stones were born in the stream and wagtails trembled on them; the grass was full of fledglings and flowers of disparate build.
On Saturday the dawn sky was poppied with high cloud and there was a welcome freshness in the air. Late in the afternoon, Richard found a rabbit in his traps and was cleaning it when he heard, very distantly, the sound of cantering hoofs. It was not coming near, and it seemed innocuous, but all the same he slipped through the stream to the next bay and laid a precautionary hand over Bryony’s nose. She jerked disgustedly, her ears pricked, but stayed quiet until the sound died away. He gave her a clap on the back, checked her rope, and splashed around the grassy arm of the cliff.
Lymond was no longer propped up on rugs, where he had left him, but sat on a convenient boulder halfway between his bed and Richard’s improvised kitchen. The bold light defined the untidy fair hair, the bruises and hollows of illness and the brilliant, heavy eyes: he looked high-strung to a shocking degree.
Curious and eager, Richard studied him; then his eyes travelled to the cooking stone and the rabbit. His knife had gone.
Lord Culter made no attempt to cross the clearing. Instead, hitching himself on the nearest ledge, he spoke mildly. “Fine weather for travelling. The prickmadam chasing you?”
There was a little pause. “No,” said Lymond. “I was getting tired of the John-go-to-bed-at-noon era.”
“I find it quite pleasant,” said Richard. “This peculiar mental agility of yours has been no friend to you, has it? Without it, you might have survived, harmless, in a lukewarm limbo of drink and drugs and insipid women—”
“Do you want me to pursue the subject?” said Lymond. “I don’t think I can bring myself to pant all over your morals, or lack of them.”
“I wondered,” said Richard idly, “now that you have leisure to think again, what you are missing most. You’ve no money, of course; and that has been very important to you. And you must, of course, miss the illusion of command. The ant milking the aphid. How pathetic: those simple men and broken criminals hailing you as their mighty Lar: