Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [44]
V
Castling
The rybauldes, players of dyce And the messangers and corrours ought to be sette tofore the rook. For hit apperteyneth to the rook … to have men convenable for to renne here and there for tenquyre and espie the place and cyties that myght be contrarye to the kynge.
1. Capture of Some Advancing Pieces
WILL SCOTT of Kincurd was stringing his bow and singing.
Le douxiem’ mois de l’an
Que donner à ma mie?
Life at the moment was not unbearable. He was well-fed and warm. He had that morning shot a buck at a hundred and seventy yards and been congratulated by Matthew. He had a new ambition: in this penumbral region to cast a shadow bigger, grander and more devastating than Lymond’s.
Douz’ bons larrons
Onze bons jambons
Dix bons dindons
It had not, he conceded, been easy to progress greatly toward this goal in a month, allowing as well for the hiatus which followed the Annan affair. His own state of superficial injury he shared, he had discovered, with half the troop. Dead men there were none; a telling enough point in a retreat which had been hard-fought and narrowly won.
For Lymond had genius. When building his force, he had taken sixty heterogeneous ruffians and cut and buffed them like diamonds, each rootless creature made an artist in his own small field. Some of their stories he had already from Matthew.
Dandy-puff, of the bog-cotton hair, was their farrier, and at the horn over a small matter of a cousin’s sudden death which had unluckily brought to light a series of other unexplained mishaps.
Oyster Charlie, the cook, who bore young Scott no ill will (“It’s not your fault, lad: the Master’s an unchancy bastard to cross.”) had been dentally denuded by an infuriated husband who was also a barber and now, untimely, with Abraham.
Jess’s Joe (scout) was the ex-leader of a profitable band of dock thieves; the Lang Cleg (armourer) had been racked twice, but remained an unrepentant and unskilful pickpocket. Skinner, an ex-priest, was their barber-surgeon and, at need, their confessor; Cuckoo-spit, a magician with horses, had forgotten polite usage for rheum, if he ever knew it, in five draughty years in the Tolbooth …
Neuf boefs cornus
Huit moutons tondus
Sept chiens courants
Six lièvres aux champs
These figures, he knew, were the grotesques in the bestiary. There were also unmarked, homeless men who for some reason had lost their farms and families, or had left them; individualists and misfits; and mercenaries like Turkey Mat, who had sold their swords over half Europe before one day falling in with Lymond and being brought here by him.
“Why is he back?” he had once asked Mat.
Matthew had grinned. “Just to be neighbourly. Besides, there’re two or three folk he wanted to see.”
“Jonathan Crouch?”
Turkey’s gaze was direct. “That’s one. How did you know?”
“He told me.… Mat, you’ve had three years of it. How d’ye thole him?”
Mat had chuckled gently. “Over there in Appin, a place you’ve never heard of, there’s a bien stone house with an honest pinch of soil to it, and a doocot and an orchard and some fine dry byres. It’s mine for the taking, that house, and, man, when I’ve cooked my own fatted calf at the Master’s fire, it’s me for the white beach, groaning belly and all. I’ll lie on it from morning to nightfall throwing dice against myself, and whiles winning.… I can thole him; I can thole him.”
Cinq lapins trottant par terre
Quatre canards volant en l’air
He had asked Mat about Bullo.
“Johnnie? Johnnie’s King of Little Egypt, and a law to his sweet sleekit self. He rules his wee pack of gypsy stoats like the Grand Turk, and keeps them happy with silk shirts and buckles forbye. You should see him at work in a fair: it’s a scholastic education. Johnnie,” said Mat, not without rancour, “has all the old crafts.”
Scott said, “I thought he worked for Lymond?” and Mat had shaken his head, rubbing rhythmically, whether of necessity or through association of ideas it was hard to tell.
“I suppose you would cry it a business partnership,” said he solemnly. “But