Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [226]
Numb, appalled, Richard flung back, reflecting horror with horror: “And who made you a murderer?”
With the last offering of his strength, Lymond answered. “Pull your hands away, Richard. Get out: get free. I have enough to answer for. If I’ve shut one door, you have barred and locked all the others against yourself.”
“Do you think my life,” said Richard violently, “is a matter for your tarnished and paltry conscience?”
There was a silence. Then the Master said at last, “Why else should I say what I have done?”
“Because,” said Richard cruelly, “you’re afraid of the rope. Because I’m the first victim you’ve failed to enchant. Because you’re wriggling as you made others wriggle, and broken piecemeal as you’ve dissected others. Because you’re crumbling and disintegrating and whimpering beneath the gut-sucking evil on your back; and since there was no one else to whine to; no one alive to listen; no one to help, you dropped on your belly and crawled and writhed and crept whining to me!”
Because his eyes had never left Lymond’s hands he saw the flash of steel, and was launched already as the Master snatched out the bright stolen blade. He grasped the driving elbow and wrist—”No: not that way, you poor, canting bastard!”—and was pulled up short by the strength of the thrust.
Lymond didn’t drop the knife. Instead he bore downward, drawing strength from the hysteria of necessity: with his body braced against rock he withstood Richard’s tug, made a leverage with the locked arms and, without a word, silently and inhumanly forced the point down.
It was uncanny. Richard found it terrible: it froze his blood, the slow descent of his brother’s arm, prevailing heavily and inexorably against Richard’s whole weight; forcing the bright, two-edged blade inward, between the locked bodies.
He damned the passion which had made him wait, instead of seizing the weapon at once; he damned the possessed body and the bent head and the transcendent will guiding the knife. He exerted all the strength he had. Lymond said something, on a gasp, and then bent forward, using his dead weight to help him, and the knife moved again, duly, along the path he designed for it; and an astonishing light broke on Richard.
In that second, Lymond looked up. Blue eyes met grey, and Richard read in them a power and a determination that he suddenly knew were unassailable. Anger left him. He framed the word “No” with his lips; read his rejection in the dedicated eyes, and with all his strength drove first his knee and then his foot through the stained bandaging and deep into the other’s hurt body. The knife dropped like a discarded straw. Lymond screamed once with agony, and then screamed and screamed again.
Within a dumb and breathless nature the sound exploded, addressing the arbour from its banks and gradients; bouncing; sticky-fingered; callowly mocking. Culter, white as paper, picked up the knife and backed.
Lymond had stopped the noise with his hands. The long, cramped fingers hid his face as he crouched, the breath sobbing in his lungs and the blood flamboyant through the crushed bandages, welling between his rigid elbows, soaking into the trampled grass.
“Francis!” Excoriated by the shuddering, raucous sound, Richard spoke harshly. “I can’t let you take your own life.”
Lymond took his hands from his face. The blood was everywhere now; his torment of grief public, uncaring. “Must I plead?” He stopped in extremity, beaten, shaken by pulses, and then struggled on. “You claim your right of execution.… May I not exercise mine? Could all the chains of Threave outweigh what I already bear, do you think? Or all the Tolbooth’s pains be worse than this? … You can’t relieve me of your weight, or