Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [139]
At some point, Tom Erskine had appeared at his side. As, one by one, the horses were dragged off and killed and the riders in all their blood-soaked disguises were pulled and shifted, Richard and he worked unsparingly, looking always for one man. More torches were brought. They lit what was best left unlit: the sodden marc of the avalanche; the horsemen who had borne the full weight of the fall. It was Richard who knelt and took the dead hands in his, the unremarkable hands, square and bony and plump, cut by their own jewels, and then laid them each time gently back in their place.
The last horse was removed. Men with candles turned over the looming bundles of cloth, the cloaks, the horse trappings, the over-robes which littered the slopes, black and greasy with blood. The lackeys came out and gathered these up, and the Tour des Minimes was empty but for the fog and the blood: empty, although they visited it again, disbelieving, after climbing up to look again among the rows of hurt, of dying and of dead.
In the end, dirty, stained and exhausted, they and all Lymond’s wild young disciples understood only one thing. Thady Boy Ballagh, who had been seen to fall hurt by half the riders about him, was no longer there.
Gone too was the man who, looking down at the death lying about him, had exclaimed, unheard in the uproar, contempt in his reflective, soft voice, ‘… Ta sotte muse, avec ta rude Lyre! The devil give you his bed now, Master Thady Boy Ballagh!’
Every doctor and every apothecary in Amboise was at the castle that night; and next day the Constable came too, sitting, thick-veined hands over straddled knees, listening to St. Andre’s white-lipped account. For this time the assassins had been careless. The planned accident, the perfect picture of a chance stumble bringing inevitable result, had been destroyed at the very start by the fact that the murderers, frightened, had abandoned the trip rope stretched from side to side of the ramp.
While suspicion grew, faint and thickening like the river fog, Richard and Tom Erskine searched in vain for any trace of Thady Boy. With infinite care, preserving at all costs his masquerade, Richard visited the mahout Abernaci. The Keeper had been all night at Blois and knew nothing.
Then, five days after the disaster, Tosh appeared, pulling his donkey and trailing his ropes, and a group of Scotsmen, leaving thankfully behind them the makeshift hospital that was Amboise castle, walked down to the bridge where, watched by a throng, the lower end of one of the funambulist’s great cables was being lashed.
Richard was not among them. It was George Douglas who after a while returned to his lodging, and catching Culter just back from one of his tiring, unexplained rides, said casually, ‘Relax, my dear man. Your teeth will rattle like sounding-bones if you wear yourself out in this fashion. Leave your obscure pursuits and go and see Ouishart. He is quite a remarkable man. He ought to be wearing the mask instead of that unfortunate donkey. Quetzalcoatl, lord of the Toltecs.’
‘The donkey’s wearing a mask?’ This was, he knew, the Douglas method of imparting information; but even so, he felt himself redden with the shock. ‘An Aztec mask, good God?’
Sir George smiled. ‘A great, grinning thing in mosaic, with gold ears. It used to have inlays and teeth too, by the look of it, but someone’s tried hard to smash it to bits. Presumably the donkey. Go and see it. You’ll laugh.’
He went; but hardly to laugh. Struggling through the crowd, he found the grotesque thing, bound crudely to the beast’s furry head, cracked and blackened with the glaze of some stain. It was the mask Lymond had had at his saddlebow, at the start of that fated night’s race.
And Tosh’s news, delivered with practised discretion, was disastrous. For he himself had found that much-advertised mask that morning—not in the castle, not in its precincts, not in the town of Amboise at all. He had found it in Blois, trampled underfoot by spectators like himself, in the crowded courtyard of Hélie