Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [188]
A boar trusts to his strength and his tushes, and not to his feet, which are slow and less than nimble. To kill him, a man needs a spear of exceptional strength, razor-sharp, with a crossbar of great staying power. This is to prevent the spear, once driven in, from sinking so deep that the man is brought within range of the boar’s last, formidable charge.
Robin Stewart had one of these; and in his other hand a sword. He had also, invisibly, the years of his profession, when from Christmas to Candlemas every year a chosen escort of Archers had helped the monarch bait, net and spear his boar. And more than these was a violent anger, driving out even fear, at the fate which could strip him of the dignity of death and the pleasures of denunciation at one stroke.
He did not suppose he would be left deliberately to die. Someone would intervene—if they could. But he was there to make sport, with the beast of this world that is strongest armed, and can sooner slay a man than any other. In the last resort, the man his life depended on was himself. And Thady Boy—Lymond—wherever he was, was still untrammelled, still feted and free.
A gust of wind rocked the last dummy. The boar, hearing, started round at it and then paused. The heavy head turned again, and the small, thick-veined eyes hunted, stiffly, for the man-figure the delicate nose had picked out. The young boar, the animal gregale, the stinking beast born to rip, sidled, stopped, gathered his haunches and, shaking his leather hide, his shield and his straw-spattered spikes, launched into a straight charge at the Archer.
As if Beelzebub, god of Accaron, oracle of Ochazias, had dragged her by the hair, Margaret Erskine looked round. She met, disconcertingly, the direct gaze of George Douglas, who raised his eyebrows in even more exaggerated enquiry this time. Beside him was an empty seat. Circumspectly, controlling all her impulses, she searched the crowds, to realize presently that the Queen Dowager, calling on her herald for some service, had kept him at her side. Lymond was folded neatly beside Mary of Guise’s chair, distracting the attention of several nearby ladies and enjoying an uninterrupted view of Robin Stewart sidestepping the first rush of the boar.
Robin Stewart’s view being equally unimpeded, he glanced up, gasping, from this endeavour in which he had slit, but not impaled, the boar’s hide, and discovered that Heliogabalus, fair, exquisite and untouched in cloth of gold, was in the front row, savouring him. He turned on the boar, and the boar backed.
Then, transfigured with anger. Robin Stewart fought, and fought well: well enough for the laughter and the drawled abuse to alter to excitement. A direct hit he could not get. But as time went on, the black mess on the animal’s hide showed how near he had come; and Stewart’s gashed left arm, the stained doublet and the sword split in the grass told of something stoical and persevering which had always been there, but seldom drawn out in other than low causes and grumbling.
Man and beast were by that time tired, shaken with effort and the loss of much blood. The boar, sustained more than Stewart now by stubborn anger, slid and threshed on the grassy tilth, and turning, lowered his head afresh.
Now, if ever, was the moment for Henri to end it: to drop the baton and let the Archer serve his days of waiting with honourable wounds. It was Lord d’Aubigny who stayed his hand, and his own passionate love of sport which left the baton untouched. For Stewart, in Roman style, was kneeling, his back to the castle wall and the shaft of the spear tight in both hands, waiting for the boar face to face. And for the flicker of a second, as the lumbering creature gathered speed, Stewart’s eyes turned, searching, to the crowded faces above his head. Some of his audience,