Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [273]
They burned also at the Castle, where light and heat reeled in mortal embrace in the prisoners’ room. The ceiling, low and plastered, pressed down the strata of exhausted air, stale with old beer and sweating bodies. There was no room left to stand and no air to inhale, but the light beat down on a swaying corymb of heads, and shone on necks craning with a nervous, avid tension like beasts at a water hole.
At the centre sat Will Scott and Sir Thomas Palmer, half-naked: sunburnt thews glistening under multiple lights and sweat slithering down the tough cord of their spines.
For maybe an hour now, Palmer’s string of jocularities and pithy memoirs had stopped, and he was breathing hoarsely into the cards, eyes intent and chin set in three trim folds against his chest. Beside his chair, topped by a bundle of clothes, lay a good half of Scott’s belongings. Beside Scott, kicked into a disorderly tangle by the eager feet of the onlookers, was every article presently owned by Tommy Palmer except one: his cousin’s statement.
Scott was too tired to think. Often before he had played the night through, ending wild-eyed and unshaven and ravenously hungry and going on to perform prodigies of nuisance-making in his father’s wake. But against Palmer he needed more than a flair: he needed nerve and watchfulness and weblike concentration, with an instinct for bluff, and an inspiration to know when to call it.
He ignored the chaffing of his enthusiastic audience; he refused to be upset by the games he lost and by Palmer’s unworried bonhomie. He played on doggedly with his red hair sticking in cowlicks to his brow and stared at the tarots until they glimmered in his eyeballs like invitation cards to hell. He knew that it was dark, that the inquiry was over and, from Erskine standing now at his side, that it had gone against Lymond. He had no idea of the time.
Palmer was preparing his sequences. He did it slowly, as if the feel of the cards gave him pleasure. “My pretty atous,” he said, and admired them, his broad fingers sprawled across the painted backs.
Scott looked at his own hand, and the tarots’ sleek, Egyptian heads with ancient divination in their eyes stared back, warming their painted hands at a world of flesh. His feet were on le chemin royal de la vie and the thin travesties in his hands this time were real: the traitor and the hanged man, death and the fool. Their avid fingers were real, and the scent of an evil nostalgia. He closed the cards abruptly and held them closed until his brain cleared.
He had a good hand, but not a first-class one; and he suspected Palmer’s was better. There was one way he might improve on it: by calling on luck. He had the World and the Bateleur in his hand. He could challenge Palmer for the Fool; if he didn’t have it, his two tarrochi nobili would bring him five points extra and almost certainly the game. It had to. Each article redeemed by Palmer cost him another game to win it back. If he lost this game he had to play a minimum of two more and win both. And he doubted if he had a reserve of mental energy for even one.
It was very quiet. Scott looked at the cards again. Palmer, breathing heavily, had the beginning of a smile compressing his stubbled chins.
“Qui ne l’a,” said Scott, and Palmer’s gaze, arrested, narrowed and shot to meet his. “Qui ne l’a? Well? Have you got one?”
Palmer scratched his nose. He grunted, and the silence moved down on the bruised and foundered men like a wine press.
For as long as he dared, Palmer tested Scott’s nerve. Then slowly he shook his big head. “No. Damn it to hell: I have not.”
Will moved his hands very slowly: red hands like Buccleuch’s. The tarots, throttled and limp, dropped to their places on the table: sullen; maudlin; sulkily protesting the laughterless starvation of a paper world. There was a moment