Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [117]
With a deft movement, his face grave, Fernal slipped off Thady’s boot. The ollave, craning, started to moan. Then with his knife the physician peeled off the soaked stocking and, cleaning his way gently down the crippled limb, revealed every inch of it to be intact and enjoying the most unsullied good health.
There was a blank pause. It was d’Enghien, idly fondling one of the mastiffs, who sensed the canine worry in the air. Fastidiously he lifted the bloody calfboot; ruminating, he peered into it; and triumphantly he plucked out and held high a nice portion of giblets, squeezed quite flat by the bardic toes. The mastiff barked.
As the shrieking laughter seared through the air, O’LiamRoe damned etiquette and escaped. He was in his room when by considerate royal command, twenty drunken young men, raucous and singing-merry, swept out of the Salle d’Honneur with Thady Boy limply weaving in their midst, and set out to take his ollave to bed. John Stewart, Lord d’Aubigny, was among those who watched, standing at the tall windows as the chosen escort surged down the twisted staircase and across the broad courtyard outside, screeching, struggling and swaying, and letting down all the cross-hung oil lamps as they passed in order to drink from them one by one.
And it was Lord d’Aubigny, shaking his handsome head, who pronounced the epitaph on the evening. ‘Per qual dignitade,’ said his lordship sorrowfully to anyone who would listen, ‘L’uom si creasse.’ Margaret Erskine was among those who heard him; but she could not trust herself to reply.
By the time Thady Boy was brought to his door, O’LiamRoe was completely packed.
Piedar Dooly, summoned brusquely from the kitchens, had found the carpetbags open on the bed, and their meagre belongings heaped on the floor. When the stamp and slither of a score of unsteady pairs of feet, a volley of bumps and a cackle of uninhibited laughter arrived outside the door, and then burst through it, he was finished. With a jerk of his combed golden head, O’LiamRoe dismissed Dooly, with saddles and bags, and addressed the incoming party. ‘Leave him and get out.’
They revolved round him like Bacchantes, screeching, and one whipped off the bedsheet and, draping himself in a rough copy of O’LiamRoe’s tunic and frieze, released a squall of synthetic Erse. They sang, harangued one another, and vomited, clinging to the bedposts and the prie-dieu; they scuttled round the room in search of more wine and, finding it, poured it over each other and attempted to pour it over him. Then they aimed roughly at O’LiamRoe’s door and fell through it.
The door slammed shut, leaving the Prince of Barrow in the stinking wreck of his bedroom, standing alone over Thady Boy, heaving drunk on the floor. In a voice unrecognizable even to himself, he said, ‘Get up.’
He had to repeat it twice before anything happened, and then, conquering a disgust which possessed him like a sickness, he had to touch him, to wrench him by the defiled and oozing stuff of his sleeve. Then Thady Boy lurched to his feet, spluttering, his eyes oily black under slack lids.
Without turning, O’LiamRoe unhooked the Irish harp from the wall and flung it. It struck the other man, jangling, and fell uncaught to the floor. Thady Boy, blankly aggrieved, sank after it, precipitated into his most undignified spasm yet. ‘Take it up, then!’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘What about the Prelude to the Salt! Sing me the Riding of O’Neill! Are the great, epic songs not to be in it tonight?… Mother of God, Francis Crawford of Lymond, you’ve made a slut of your art, have you not, as well as a whore of yourself?’
Through the harpstrings, like an inebriated jackdaw’s, one distended eye cocked skittishly at O’LiamRoe; but the next moment Thady Boy had lost interest, was on his feet and single-mindedly setting off somewhere else.
There was a keg of wine in Piedar Dooly’s cabinet. O’LiamRoe in two calm strides barred the way as his ollave tacked towards it. One hand on both his wrists was sufficient to hold Thady off. ‘Tell me a thing. Why did