Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [137]
To this, Lord d’Aubigny, leader for the day, had added refinements. The route was to be reversed. Mexicans and Turks, heralded by a nearly sober young captain with curling hair, would seek admission to the King’s castle of Amboise, would foregather at the top of the Tour des Minimes, and racing down the spiral carriage ramp for which the Tower was famous, would debouch over the drawbridge on to the shore and across the near arm of the river to finish midstream at the Isle d’Or, where they now were.
The nearly sober young captain, who had to ingratiate himself with the Queen Dowager and the King’s commander, had gone; and to keep him nearly sober, an Archer called André Spens had gone with him.
In due course the rest of the grotesque party followed too, howling, over the second bridge, Thady Boy in the thick of them. He was not, by then, thinking very clearly, part of his mind being distantly occupied with analysing the significance of what he had just learned. Another part, philosophically, recognized that the crisis he had been waiting for was probably on him, and that he had sent his brother’s men home. The rest of him did not care; for by then he was blessedly, exceedingly drunk.
He retrieved the mask from Lord d’Aubigny who seemed, with reason, to have lost his fancy for it, and tried and failed to order his vagrant senses as they rode up the incline from the bridge and through the Lion Gate into the castle.
By then, the mist had risen higher, glooming off the dark river like pillowed figures. Mattresses of fog lay round the castle and behind them the lanterns showed faded, with cannibal rainbows, hazy and parched, all around them. Below, the river stirred, black and sluggish in the raw night air.
But no one crossed the Loire swimming that night. The tragedy happened in the castle itself, where all the Scottish Court gathered under the great awning outside the King’s lodging to watch the cavorting, careless delinquents of the King of France’s train.
The two processional towers of Amboise, up which carts and gun carriages could crawl, climbing the steep, cobbled slope, winding round and round a newel post itself nearly thirty feet wide, could take four horsemen abreast on its slopes. Tonight, it was empty. All down the steep ramp, coiling from palace to shore, torches flared beside the tall windows, night-black slits in the twelve-foot walls, hung with arras, and the fog, curling up from the river, past the convent, filling the moat, drifting smokelike through the wide, crested door, climbed the damp walls below with soft fingers.
At the top, the horses jostled in the wide courtyard, lining up, breaking line and reforming. The still-lanterns made fireflies of their jewels; the cloaks swung, hissing, like thick-winged birds; a scimitar flashed; the awning cords, draught-borne, lifted weblike as quipus; a conch blew, and St. André’s face, earringed and turbaned, melted in the queer, slanting glare into an eminently fungoid growth, throwing disjointed shadows.
Richard, watching in silence beside the Queen Mother, his face disciplined to be still, saw the Vidame, nearly too drunk to ride, thickly rallying his forces; Laurens de Genstan, heavily scented in red brocade, groping for his gelding’s dropped reins; Lord d’Aubigny, half wishing himself elsewhere and half pleased to be exercising his higher sensibilities; and last, merging into the night, an odd and gruesome mask at his saddlebow, the slack form of his brother being thrust forward to Condé’s green feathered side.
A handkerchief was raised. As it went up, Lymond turned, vaguely, towards the faceless body of Scots and raised a hand in a perfunctory wave. In the obscure light his face was both fuddled and strained, as it had been two weeks ago in his room. He looked half-stupefied; but impulsively Richard waved back. Then the white linen dropped,