Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [115]
O’LiamRoe gazed. This thick-faced Silenus, pouch-eyed, diligent, was something he had glimpsed in the privacy of his room, but had never, even in nightmares, expected to witness here. He felt the hairs of his neck rise, and his stomach lodged in his throat. Then he took in the fact that the King was laughing.
The figures came nearer. The dancers, shuffled into bewildered disorder, had already made way. In a vortex of ecstatic improvisation Thady Boy led, scraping a phrase from a snatched fiddle, dousing the steaming Archer with a wine jug, directing a figure from a table top; dancing suddenly in a flicker of parodied styles which brought each its calls of recognition and laughter. He began to dance a Volta with the Archer. Then, grasping an arm each of of his acolytes, Thady Boy whirled them faster and faster and then set them at each other. Helpless, captive and Scot cracked together in a ringing of skulls and slithered bemused to the floor. Thady Boy sat straight-legged, looking up, the blue, blurred eyes unfocussed; then he closed his mouth, climbed into one of the dog baskets and fell firmly asleep.
He may have thought the performance sufficient, but the courtiers did not. O’LiamRoe, watching dumbly, saw St. André and someone else slide the basket to the door and shake him awake, the black head joggling back and forth on his shoulders. Thady Boy came to life suddenly, with a snort, and burst into song.
‘I cannot eat but little meat
My stomach is not good;
But sure I think that I can drink
With him that wears a hood.…’
In O’LiamRoe’s ear, his lordship of Aubigny had hardly ceased to pour a stream of amused comment, tolerant, civilized and worldly-wise. He seemed not in the least put out by anything they had just witnessed; he gave more the appearance, in fact, of enjoying within himself some enormous private joke. O’LiamRoe, his nerves on edge, found it intolerable. Did they imagine that this was how Ballagh ought to behave? Or think that he knew no better? Then he saw that, during the act which followed the dancers, Thady Boy had been taken into the King’s own circle.
They were just within earshot. The earlier part of the evening had been made memorable for O’LiamRoe by the famous faces pointed out round the King: Turnèbe and Muret from Bordeaux and Paris, de Baïff, Pasquier the lawyer and Bodin the philosopher. Already, on the edge of their conversation the Irishman had heard, without being near enough to share, the stir and swirl of ideas; through the condition of human society, the nature of liberty, the purpose of law, to the topical sciences: astronomy, medicine, natural history. They spoke in Latin, so that all might understand; but the quotations they flung at each other were Greek and Hebrew, Turkish, Persian. At the mention of Budé, caps were touched.
But they had accorded Thady’s music the perfect compliment of silence; and produced for him, when he joined them, a genuine interest which expressed itself in a patter of dry, courteous and intellectual questions about his art. It evidently annoyed Thady Boy to be questioned about his art. Selecting the oldest and the most persistent of his enquirers, the ollave replied politely in a phrase off the streets.
More than taken aback, the professor glanced first at his colleagues, then tried again. Thady Boy’s answer this time was coarse; but wittily coarse. Even the King smiled inadvertently and Thady Boy himself dissolved into laughter. Almost immediately it became apparent that no one thought it necessary to rush to the scholars’ defence. Vinet, finding St. André at his elbow, said dryly, ‘The catgut has got