Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [84]
“Very humanly. By a stone. And led us the devil’s own dance bringing him back, Mat and I. We had to leave him under cover—Culter and the rest came about us like bedbugs in an almshouse dorter—and when it was safe to go back, the infallible Lymond had found himself a horse and vanished. We found him, of course.”
“Where?”
“It would be a shade indiscreet to say. Particularly with the two most interested parties at our elbow. You perhaps noticed that when we came back there was no mention of our passing faiblesse. Lymond, you see, is omnipotent, as you were saying.”
The white teeth flashed again. “Ask me again. I’m going to Edinburgh this Saturday, but when I come back, we might meet over it. The story’ll charm you. You’ll maybe want to write a poem about it, if you’re that way inclined: how Lymond passed the days after Annan. It’s a bonny tale.”
Scott listened, and hearing in Bullo’s voice an acid counterpoint to the high, sudden cackle of gypsy laughter behind, grinned sedately to himself and rode on.
They had kept to the high ground, where the fog was thinner and the ground less rotten. At some point the heather roots and tarnished bracken of Scotland became the heather roots and bracken of England. They crossed the Border like a fixed and hidden constellation and passed silently over lost grass behind the dim, leading form of Johnnie. The whiteness turned to black; the day withdrew, and they breasted the last incline.
Before them, vast golden parhelions blistered the fog. They approached. The colour changed and sharpened, became windows lit by lanterns and candles; and an open door, and faint music and voices, and a warm, stinging fragrance of roast meat curiously laced with musk. Became a courtyard with running ostler-wraiths, appearing and evaporating with the horses and, finally, an enormous shadow in the wide doorway: a monstrous, eighteen-stone shadow of a woman with a fresh, childlike face, who stretched powdered arms, calling, to Lymond. “It’s yourself … and Johnnie! Back at last … Lord! We thought we were abandoned.”
“Why else,” said Lymond, “are we here?” The eyes were sea-blue and the expression one of celestial affability. “This, Marigold, is the Ostrich Inn. So hop Willieken, hop Willieken: England is thine and mine …” and moving swiftly to the threshhold, he scooped up the tremendous form of his hostess, accepted a hearty kiss and a dimpled arm along his shoulders, and disappeared indoors.
Scott found Johnnie Bullo looking at him with an ironic glint in the brown eyes. “Come along,” said Johnnie. “We’re allowed in as well.”
* * *
Men keeping vigil at the dawn of battle spoke of the square common room of the Ostrich. It rose two silken stories high, and whole oxen confessed to the fires at each end and reached sizzling Judgment on the crowded tables, alongside pies and puddings and heaped fragrant trenchers and jars of bland, too-warm wines.
All the pleasures of unfilled time belonged to the Ostrich. For those who were shy about sleeping in public, a wooden arcade around three sides of the room supported a gallery at first-story level, off which opened the private rooms. Wax lights blazed. The gypsies, flooding the centre floor with music and violent colour, danced in the footsteps of tumblers and harpists and magicians and monkeys; of bears and minstrels and dogs and play actors and mimics; and the painted walls and brilliant hangings kept a sense of them. Combers of talk and laughter rolled aggrandizing from pillar to pillar with the beat of drum and guitar; the air bounced with fat enjoyment and gourmandise, and bright ministering women like chaffinches flew and darted between the dark arcades.
Will Scott, at one of the fires, found his fogged eyes swimming with the blaze of marching lights and his senses drugged with fleshly smells and mulled wine and the heat of the fat-spitting fire. Lymond had vanished; Johnnie Bullo was plying his trade with his gypsies, and Mat, after an encounter half glimpsed