Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [291]
None of Lymond’s team had yet been taken. But pursued by Gabriel, Lymond’s King was now driven too easily from his consorts, and the breathing-spaces he could snatch out of check in which he might make some move other than one of defence came along less and less often.
From Lymond’s voice and manner, no one could have told that the tide against him had turned. Archie’s face was unreadable but Jerott thought Marthe knew it, walking silently, straight and steady when she was required, her eyes often on Philippa, moving gently from one child to the other. Once, when Khaireddin came near her, Marthe guided him instead.
Gaultier had begun to breathe heavily. To himself, Jerott made a calm promise that if the old man broke into supplications or sobs, he would kill him with his own hand. Then he caught Archie’s eyes on the clock.
The afternoon was growing old. The mild sunlight outside the bright-coloured windows would soon drain away; and so would the strength of the drug on which all their Uves now depended. Suddenly all Jerott’s fears pooled in a moment of suffocating anger with Lymond, that he should have harboured and failed to conquer by now this essential weakness; and he began to watch Francis Crawford for the first time, with deliberate scrutiny, as with angry pain a woman might watch her false lover for the first signs of a plague.
He saw nothing. Lymond’s voice was unchanged. His hands, tucked into his over-robe, were quite invisible. His face, shadowed against the dimming light from the windows, was the colourless etching it had been from the start: pure emotionless lines drawn by needle and acid. At rest for the moment, Jerott stood between Archie and Gabriel’s Rook and watched Lymond from two squares away until, feeling it, Lymond turned. For a moment, he looked at Jerott and Archie. Then, too quietly to be overheard, he said, ‘Pray now, if you want to pray. And don’t look round.’
Don’t look round at what? Guarding his eyes, Jerott tried frantically to compose the board in his mind. Behind him was Gabriel, in the red corner-square, with one of the children, Kuzúm, just taking a new place before him, and the other, the Knight played by Khaireddin, in the Queen’s place a few squares along. Lymond, Archie and he were together, and one of Gabriel’s Rooks had shifted behind him, he remembered, to the same side as Gabriel. There was a Bishop of Gabriel’s in the same region, and his Queen somewhere there in the middle. On the far side Marthe was standing alone, where she had been for some time at the edge. He had an impression that Gaultier, playing Lymond’s Bishop, was in a corner too, not far from Marthe and opposite that occupied by Gabriel himself.
The impression was right. Just as the thought struck him, Gaultier screamed, and Jerott whirled round. At first he thought it was perhaps checkmate, the final disaster; the locking of Lymond’s King by Gabriel so that no escape was possible and the game therefore lost. Instead he saw, face to face in opposite corners, the figures of Georges Gaultier’s Bishop and the newly arrived Kuzúm, Gabriel’s Bishop, ready to take it.
Don’t look round, Lymond had said. Don’t look round, Jerott thought, so that Gaultier might not notice his fate; might not observe death about to cross the long line of squares there towards him. But Gaultier had observed; and Gaultier screamed and, swinging round, began uttering hoarse protestations and demands to the calm veil on the throne, which surveyed him in its turn and then lifted to look at Graham Malett. And Graham Malett laughed aloud, and said in his beautiful voice, ‘He’s a pretty sight, isn’t he? Calm him, dear Francis. Tell him that it is your move to follow,