Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [229]
The wind sprang among the young trees: persecuted beyond reason an ash high above them lurched heaving to its feet and crashed beside Bryony and the mare leaped, whinnying and shaking under Richard’s idle hand.
The block of sensation, held so insecurely in check, broke its bar and blundered into the forefront of his mind. It gripped him as he pulled down and soothed the mare, beyond proper analysis: man’s infant fear of the irretrievable; a starved yearning for warmth; a childish speck of uncluttered vision; a tight and tangled warp of reason and emotion become suddenly an obsessive compulsion.
Abandoning sense, revenge, and the role of complacent dempster and letting reason fly like a hag through the night wind, Richard Crawford struck off through the darkness, plunging over myrtle and bracken and torn boughs and boulders, between thorn and furze and blurred trees and low thickets, in the direction last taken by his brother.
* * *
Instinct, in belated command on this ultimate journey, had led Lymond into the shelter of the thickest undergrowth and the wildest bushes and the closest trees.
Using them as crutches he had gone farther than seemed humanly possible for a man in his state. Richard, after two fruitless attempts, set out a third time with a flaring brand from his fire, regardless of who might see it, and in the end found him, in a deep and unlikely forme at the foot of a meagre willow.
It was not a heroic picture. Bracken obscured it, with botched and scrabbling hands; the wind whined and ran blenching through the long grass, split by dim breakwaters of burdock and furze. Lymond himself lay in a tangled abandonment of blood and bruised greenery and torn cloth: unruly; filthy; and emphatically severed from society.
Culter rose, extinguished the light, and gathering the derelict hands, lifted his brother and carried him back to the camp.
He had worked once before, impatiently, to succour the Master. This time he brought his will to bear as well as his strength. By daylight a thin and stammering pulse was his reward. By afternoon he was able, temporarily, to let go and rest, his tired shoulders propped against the overhang and his legs splayed before him in a yellow carpet of silverweed. He watched his brother.
A remarkable face. Like the sea, it promised monts et merveilles: you might resent its graces and yet long to unclose its secrets. He began to look forward to the moment—the graphic, revealing moment, when a man opening his eyes on the lentils and salt, found himself greeting the living.
He was there when Lymond woke, and saw neither surprise nor relief, but a dissolving horror, altering the other’s already altered face and fading in ineffectual recoil. Richard exclaimed then, and put out a hand; and Lymond flinched as if he had been struck.
Throughout the day, it continued. Throughout the day, Lymond lay motionless, the eyes opaque and open, the mind incurious, inanimate, unaware; except for the terror which sprang into being when Richard appeared.
By nightfall Richard knew that the only thing living within the other man was the memory of a fear. You choose to play God, and the Deity points out that the post is already adequately filled. During an outburst of besotted philanthropy he had redeemed Lymond, but Lymond quite simply was not prepared to be rescued; and least of all by his brother.
Lord Culter was a strong, an honest and a stubborn man. He made his decision, and laying a finger on the one thread anchoring Lymond to reality, proceeded to twist it into a rope.
He talked. As his brother lay, reflecting the vacant sun in his eyes, Richard moved about him, chopping wood, cooking, cleaning, tending with steady hands. Moving and working he talked about the Midculter of his childhood; about school lessons and games