Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [90]
He found it a little difficult after that to find a challenger, the more so as the audience by now was making more noise than the piper; but he heaved a lawyer through a window, and the Master followed up by winning Elizabeth from a lithe packman, who put up a cracking fight for twelve minutes. This he topped by two easy successes, each of which was greeted by storms of applause.
There was a brief caesura.
Molly herself brought fresh wine to Lymond and he took it, grinning, in one hand while blotting the sweat from his eyes with the other. “Drink, you wildcat: did I ask for this? I must have been mad. Give over, now, before the whole house is in shivers and shards. Stop that damned piper and let’s have some music.”
Lymond raised his eyebrows. “You’ll have to throw me first.”
“That I will!” said Molly purposefully.
Scott, deaf and enchanted in the gallery, and the whole row of pretty heads at his side saw the concerted rush on Lymond: his assailants downed him without malice and eighteen stones of Molly planted themselves on his chest. “A throw!” said Molly, and Lymond, half buried, gave a choked whoop of laughter and raised a defeated hand in signal to Tammas.
Silence, like a supernatural thunderbolt, burst upon the Ostrich.
It lasted perhaps two seconds. Then a shout of responsive laughter hit the roof, the guitars and fiddles of the gypsies started up, and life flowed across the common room. Lymond, released, flung his head back and, viewing his winnings, gave them solemn dispensation to descend for the space of the dance. He asked for and obtained some chalk, and set to marking his and Mat’s property where the cross was most obvious and the whim most appreciated. Then he swept Molly off her feet and into the dance, and the room rocked with beating feet and whirling bodies, while the candle flames bent like comets in the wind of passing skirts.
Scott, laying down his sword and with Joan’s hand in his, ran downstairs and into the rollicking hall and danced blisters into his shoes; he drank; he danced; he had something else to eat, and he danced again. Then, as muscles and musicians tired, the trestles and benches were drawn to the fires and song after song went around until the choruses became rounds, and the rounds trios, and the trios duets, and finally one solitary, happy, wavering voice made itself heard.
Scott’s eyes closed. Joan and the other woman had disappeared, and Lymond was missing. Thick murmurs vying with the snores finally ceded to them. His head, brighter than the fire, jerked, drooped, and laid itself at last on the table. The Ostrich slept.
At five o’clock Lymond, dressed again in his riding clothes, came to Scott and took the alepot out of his lax hand. “Dronken, dronken, y-dronken. A wilted and forfoughten Marigold,” he said caustically. “Upright, sluggard. The fog’s lifted, and I propose to be gone before daylight.”
Will didn’t remember getting up. From nowhere, it seemed, a sweet, blowing air touched the sweat on his face, and he saw that he was in the courtyard of the Ostrich, in the flinching light from the broken window; that his horse was beside him, ready saddled; and that Matthew, mounted, was waiting at the gate. Lymond threw him up, then mounted himself and raised his head.
Under a pale, fresh moon, trees and bracken sighed and gentle cloud washed over the sky.
“Th’erratic starres heark’ning harmony. Look up,” said the Master. “And see them. The teaching stars, beyond worship and commonplace tongues. The infinite eyes of innocence.”
But Scott was too drunk to look up.
3. Cross Moves by a King’s Knight
Lord Grey of Wilton, general of the northern parts for His Majesty King Edward of England, had swallowed a sour autumn and was encompassing an acid winter since the unlucky affair at Hume Castle.
On the Eastern Marches the River Tweed, with Berwick at its mouth, divided England and Scotland. Like the ancient pike Sir George Douglas had once called him, Lord Grey bitterly