Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [114]
His neighbours he found pleasant, in a casual way. There had been no place yet for serious conversation, but it was well within his powers to make them laugh with him; and he supposed he did not care if they laughed about him afterwards. In any case, the ear of the Court was pitched, not to him, but to Thady Boy.
During supper, the ollave had been asked to sing, and did so readily, unprepossessing but reasonably clean, and almost quite sober. Palestrina and the caquet des femmes O’LiamRoe enjoyed; but he had not expected the purities of the Gen-traige, the Gol-traige, the Suan-traige. In what nether vert Thady Boy had learned the great music of the bard he did not know; but he played in the austere tradition of the monasteries, stretching from Pavia to Roth, which once made the music of Ireland free of every harpstring in Europe. Whatever he was, the justification was there in his art. The familiar music, precisely chosen, decorated the beautiful room as if it had been a painting, and O’LiamRoe, his heart tight, thought, This is my country. Whatever she may become, she has conquered the world. Then the meal ended, and the singing; and the other entertainments began.
These were pleasant enough. Nothing, in fact, hinted at a change in the tenor of the evening until the display of the savages was reached—a dance by some captured Brazilians, sent down from the latest expedition in charge of the Keeper. Abernaci, in a cloth of gold turban, was amongst them, supervising his men as they bustled the confused captives in. Suddenly the entertainment had changed from the civilized to the freakish: was that why the Scottish Dowager’s face was immovable; and Catherine fidgeted a little, as if prepared for imminent boredom? But the men of the Court on the contrary had come alive. The King, leaning away a little from his gathering of scholars, had caught St. Andre’s eye, and a smile of common understanding had passed. O’LiamRoe counted six men and one woman who had obviously had too much to drink. The rest, presumably, could hold it better. This surprised him too, for he had expected the standard of behaviour here at least to be rigid to the point of fussiness.
For the Prince of Barrow, the urgency and beauty of the dance, in their own way, complemented the handsomeness of the setting no less than the music had done. The dancers were all men, black-haired and naked. Copper-skinned, they whirled and padded on the smooth tiles, bare feet slapping, the swinging blue-black curtain of their hair blown sticky on to their jerking, round muscled arms. Sweat, gold in the firelight, slid down the smooth channels of breastbone and spine, between the flat bronze pads of the breasts and round the taut horseshoe of the rib cage. Their eyes, cut round and small above the taut cheekbones, were hot and blank.
At first, O’LiamRoe and those around him heard only the music from the embrasure where the small drums thudded and the flutes whistled. Then under that, he began to hear laughter and exclamations, and one familiar voice; and between the leaping, silent, shifting figures he began to see three in particular, directly in front of the King, whose bearded mouth showed suddenly a flash of white laughter. Between the curled toes and knotted calves, a little flurry of feathers dived out, glinted and changed direction, like small, silvery fish in a shoal.
A rustle passed along the cushions. The ranks of dancers suddenly cleared to give an excellent view of Thady Boy Ballagh giving a spirited rendering of New World agility, flanked on one side by a nude Brazilian and on the other by an Archer, stripped to his netherstocks and crimson with shame and a violent determination to win the wager undoubtedly in the offing.
The Brazilian, who probably had