Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [135]
In fact, the days passed and no attack was made on Queen or ollave. Marguerite, the two Bourbons, St. André, the Vidame, the young de Guises and their wives and the bright fraternity of the Archers nursed, scolded, and encouraged to fresh excesses the fuelless blaze which was Thady Boy Ballagh, living tumour-sick on his nerves. Then, without warning, came the message he was waiting for.
It reached him at eight o’clock on a raw night on the Saturday before Shrove, when dressed in John Stewart of Aubigny’s mask and a cloak of green feathers, he rode with a party of twenty Aztecs and as many Turks led by his lordship to the inn on the Isle d’Or, outside Amboise.
That day, the jousting had ended early because the King had an attack of toothache. It was the only ailment which ever troubled him, and he met it as always with the frightened anger of the robust. The afternoon’s revels were cancelled, and the Court was left disguised in turban and feathers with a collective explosion of unused energy to let off.
The day had been reasonably fair. Mounted on their heterogeneous coursers and cobs, robes flapping, feathers streaming, gourds rattling aloft, the two jousting teams, Turks and Aztecs, flew calling along the Amboise road, jumping, chasing, belabouring one another, ducking the discourteous in the flat Loire and drying them with gold pieces. It was dusk when they came to the first leg of the double bridge over the Loire, and crossing to the little island in the middle, stormed into the Sainte Barbe for hot food and wine. Astounded by the costumes but flattered by the presence of all these young lords, the staff fled to obey. Thady Boy threw his mask on a table, drank a solid tankard of strong wine straight off, and led the rendering of a new song he had just devised. Then, the pain not deadening at all, he waited until all eyes were on the Vidame, in feathers, attempting a clog dance, and wandered restlessly outside.
It was a still night and very dark, with a thin, wet mist rising grey from the river and turning yellow in the window lights from the two bridges to right and to left. Behind, the roof of St. Sauveur showed black, and there were lights in the cottages grouped round the inn, showing fitfully the strip of white beach and the water parting, smooth, oily and black, round the creaming shoal of the isle.
The mist hid the far shore. He could see only the spires of St. Florentin and St. Denis, the tops of the town wall, its towers and the belfry, with all the huddled chimneys within. The outline of tiled roofs slid down into the misty cleft of the River Amasse, then emerged on the far side as a great bastion of rock, overlaid and braided and terraced by the cameo-like intricacies of the King’s castle of Amboise. Above the fog, the ranking windows were lit, and the trees in the long garden glimmered with lanterns. The Queen Dowager was in residence.
It was cold. Lymond wondered prosaically if he were going to faint; and again, with clinical interest, whether his health would give out before either the term of his promise or the assassin completed the task.
The shiver of metal, striking sweet on the ear, revived him like cold water. He wore his sword, as usual, on his skin dress. Drawing it, he slid from the white wall and felt the stable hard at his back as another chink, this time of spurs, sounded to one side. He had his hand on the stable door when the crack of swordplay shatteringly broke out in front.
Lymond stopped breathing. Somewhere in the dark, the spurred unknown, abandoning silence, drew his sword with a whine and thrust past, his footsteps sharp and light on the small cobbles. A man shouted, then bit it off, and in the inn someone opened