Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [75]
Astonishing that a voice should carry such power to soothe and disarm. She said, seated, clasping her hands, “It’s been a bad sort of day—I’m sorry—and the Fair on top was a little too much.”
“A day remarkable, certainly, for a wholesale slaughter of the innocents,” he said. “I wonder how the parrot enjoyed its brief second of freedom. And the victim of the less schismatic shaft, how’s he?”
She told him, and he received it with a hint of mockery, adding: “Don’t, for your own sake, begin weaving fantasies of evil around me as well. I haven’t tried to kill anybody today, I give you my word.”
“Well, if you had, I think you probably would have succeeded,” said Christian. “Do you shoot?”
“Yes. Very well, as it happens: one of my vanities, you see. It’s handsome to watch, and satisfying to perform; it’s convivial and competitive and artistic and absorbing. Poets love it: they rush home to unpick all their quills and write odes with them.”
“Others don’t,” she said quickly. “Others kill.”
There was a little silence. Then he said, “And that’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? Violence?”
It was true, and she acknowledged it. “Except that it isn’t trained and purposeful violence that terrifies me: it’s the negligent, casual kind. All these people today … They were taking wagers, you know, on Culter’s chances of life. And violence of a nasty, inconsequent kind, tonight at the Fair. Or the kind that amuses itself by stuffing women and children into a cave and smoking them to death. In slaughtering livestock and burning a harvest for fun. Or after Pinkie, when the army broke; and the Durham and York and Newcastle boys, and the landknechts and Italians and Spaniards sat on their beautiful horses and flew along the Leith sands, and the Holyrood road, and the Dalkeith road, hawking men with their swords like butterflies …
“Violence in nature is one thing,” said Christian, “but among civilized mankind, what excuse is there?”
His voice was cheerful. “Nothing more civilizing than a good crack of thunder. One hot unsettled summer and whole countrysides end up like St. James with their knees hard as camels.… No. I take your point. But what in God’s name had that poor, enthusiastic, politically imbecile troop of Englishmen last month got to do with civilization? And what’s going to stop them? Religion? With their music, their churches, their prayers, in a rag bag at home; His Most Christian Majesty of France egging on the Turks to scimitar the head off His Most Catholic Majesty King Charles; the Bishop of Rome seducing the Lutherans in Germany to secure his posterity …”
Christian said, “What kind of excuse would you make then for a private assassin?”
He was silent for a moment, then said, “Let’s get one thing clear. I’m not excusing anything. I’m no theologian, only a pedagogue in rhetoric, with whatever shreds of humanity the universities have left me with.”
“Well, as an apologist for human nature, then. What of private murder?”
“What of it? This afternoon’s, if you mean to particularize, was neither very private nor very successful, by all accounts. It shouldn’t be difficult to classify. Not high-spirited; not casual; an act of instructed force, like Somerset’s: a matter of policy, in fact.
“And brilliantly carried off—by the Old Man of the Mountains himself, obviously, the Sheikh-al-jebal, twanging his hemp instead of eating it. Motives: greed, hate, envy—I don’t know. Excuses: there don’t seem to be many. He might, of course, be a saintly old sheikh, whose doctrines Culter was denying; or a lascivious old sheikh, whose mistress Culter had alienated … except that Culter, Jerome bless his childlike head, is such a remarkably dull and blameless creature himself.”