Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [109]
Puzzlement, as he read it, showed briefly through the disordered rubbish-heap of Thady Boy’s face. Then he brushed it aside, and swept into the bizarre and engrossing activity of the moment.
Then, at last, O’LiamRoe was on his way back to Blois.
He had his last ride with Oonagh the day before, jogging out through the park at Neuvy, the new wolfhound loping at their side. It was one of the few times they had been alone together since the unfortunate night of the serendade, when O’LiamRoe had appeared, dogged and apologetic, his arm streaming blood on the Moûtiers’ threshold. Now they trotted, shoulder to shoulder, finding silent pleasure in the stinging air, the thin woods worn dry and silver with wind and ice, the spent grass rustling at their knees. Soon they reached open ground and the horses pulled unchecked into a canter, and then a gallop, racing neck and neck, his frieze billowing alongside her black hair and her furs.
Side by side they jumped ditches and followed dykes, and fled at last down a dry-tussocked hillside full in the yellow sun, leaving their breath white behind them, the blood whipped bright under the skin. Then, at the edge of another copse, they drew rein in pity for the sweating horses, and he walked them and then hobbled them while Oonagh flung herself among the bracken and the thin, dead spokes of bush and branch and bough which nested the ground.
There was a flask at his saddlebow. Kneeling, he offered it and she drank deeply, like a man. When he had drunk and laid it by, he came back and, finding a boulder at her side, leaned on it looking down at her. Throughout the morning, against the whole grain of his being, he had hardly spoken. Now it was she who broke the silence, her green eyes watching him. ‘I have news for you, O’LiamRoe. Your ollave is leaving you.’
‘Is he now?’ He waited. They had never discussed Thady Boy, or spoken of the serenade.
‘I heard today. Robin Stewart leaves for Ireland on Friday, and has threatened, it seems, to take Ballagh with him. The attachment I gather, is a little one-sided, so you may preserve your suite intact yet. On the other hand, Thady Boy may simply be waiting to persuade you to go, too.’
‘He would sooner help to ship me off, I am sure, and stay on here for ever, indulging himself. Has he wearied so soon? The life must all have run out of him with his songs.’
‘Or maybe he has a sense of responsibility?’ suggested the black-haired woman. ‘Ah now, but I forgot. You believe there is no such thing at all. Only a fool’s craving for power, the dream of the officious, the corruption of the mediocre. There is no natural leader alive who should not have this throat slit directly he has led.’
‘You have a bully of a memory,’ O’LiamRoe agreed peacefully. ‘I never knew a being on two legs yet that got a pennyworth of power and so much as treated his hound-dog the same. Or his women.’
She almost did not answer; but she could not quite keep her temper from showing. ‘Men have taken up that particular burden who would give their souls to be able to shed it.’
O’LiamRoe’s retort was mild and sunny and disbelieving. ‘Who? Who has there ever been? Do you know such a one?’
The wild colour had come up under her skin; couched in it, her two eyes looked like clear, green-grey water. She said, ‘You cut Luadhas’s throat for the sake of a Queen who is no more than a senseless baby, and a foreigner at that. Are your own people worth less to you?’
His head cocked, he was revolving on his knees his broad, helpless pink thumbs. ‘Now that you mention it, I had never thought of the King of England’s sheriffs as so many cheetahs.’
She raised herself on one hand and swung round to lean her back on the rock where O’LiamRoe sat. Her head tilted back, she watched him, her expression not unfriendly. ‘You feel for the man you can see; not the nation you cannot.’
‘You may have the right of it,’ said O’LiamRoe. It was not the wittiest