Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [88]
The Master grinned, surveying the spent and torpid room. Men snored; drinkers drooped and murmured about the slow fires; and snatches of wavering harmony smothered themselves in the reeking, smoke-hazed air. In a corner, the gypsies slept in a limp heap like gillyflowers. Mat had reappeared and lay stomach down on a bench, his bald head rosy in the firelight.
“Have I to teach you your business?” asked Lymond.
“Give us excitement!” demanded Molly. “Come down! Have you lost your storms? Come and enliven us, Lucifer!”
Lymond withdrew an arm, found his tankard, and spun it accurately at Matthew, who awoke and fell off his bench with a crash.
“It’s a terrible thing,” said the Master, “to lose consciousness at the very start of a party. Molly has a hogshead of claret in her wine store, Matthew. Bring it out for her, and we shall part the Red Sea again. Then, Molly, my sweet honey-mountain, my day’s darling, we shall want both fires made up, and fresh candles and more of them, and music.”
“And you, my love,” said Molly. “But there’s devil a note of music in it. The players are as drunk as sows.”
The yellow-haired man straightened, and his laughter brought Scott wavering into the passage. “There are nine devilish notes not two yards away. Have you forgotten, my sweeting, who is in room number one?”
“Hell!” said Molly, and added a word which even the wives of innkeepers seldom pronounce. “Did I not shut the door?”
Lymond shook his head.
“No!” screamed Molly. She clapped her white hands over her ears and the rubies flared. “No!” A sleepy voice from a private room raised itself in complaint, and one or two somnolent drinkers, roused by the shout, made querulous inquiry. “But yes!” said the Master, and disappeared.
The vast room, swimming in heat and hazy light, and heavy with dreaming murmurs and drunken croonings, sank into torpor. Will, propping his elbows on the rail, stared below and saw that Molly, her fists still over her ears, had doubled over the table in mild hysteria. Her eyes were tight shut.
Then several things happened at once.
A dim thunder outside the arcades heralded Matthew with the hogshead; the fires flared with fresh coal and peats, and a white dazzle searched the floor as candles were renewed.
A little silence fell; the silence, fateful and perspiring, of the imminent storm.
Then a desolate, mammoth, mourning Troll inflated its lungs and uttered. Through the shocked air tore a stern, snoring shriek followed by another. It became a united bray; the bray a wobble; the wobble a tune. High above the gallery balustrade swam a human head, inhumanly antennaed; the cheeks plimmed, the eyes closed, the fingers leaped, and all audible hell released itself. Tammas Ban Campbell, piper to Argyll, ransomed prisoner of Pinkie now travelling north and home, stalked around the three-sided gallery of the Ostrich and gave them Baile loneraora so that beam roared at beam and door at door; so that glasses smashed and windows rattled and hams vibrated and fell; so that sleepers snorted and leaped awake with their dirks in their fists, sots opened bloodshot, maddened eyes, and the sober dissolved according to temperament into shocked laughter or oaths.
There was a man in the corner who went down on his knees and prayed, but the rest of the Ostrich rose and roared, like a summer herd of caaing whales, to the foot of the stairs to the gallery.
Lymond met them at the top, sword in hand and his eyes like jewels. He had peeled off his doublet and had locked every door in the passage, as thunderous hammerings testified. Will, dazed but willing, hesitated behind him and Mat, summoned not an instant too soon, was at his side.
Faced with three sword blades in the narrow stair, the tidal wave stopped. Lymond looked down on the carpet of crimson, jostling faces and pitched his voice against the bellow of the pipes, which had switched to Gillie Calum. “What about it, my dormice! D’you mislike my lullaby?”
A tall well-built man in a green fustian coat screamed, “Listen, my friend: put your walking mandrake on Ben Nevis and myself