Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [220]
He had stripped quickly. As they waited for Perrott, the trumpets soared; the talk and laughter rushed round. It was the last fight of the day, and already the pleasures of evening were pressing on them: the torchlight hunt of red deer, the midnight supper. There was a ripple of movement in one of the passages, and a lady-in-waiting bent down and spoke to Sir John Perrott’s page, who trotted off. A moment later Perrott himself reappeared, and the English stands were restrainedly enthusiastic.
‘Happy mortal,’ observed Sir George Douglas, his eyes on Lymond, his neckband black with sweat, sliding into the vacant seat at O’LiamRoe’s elbow. He had used his lance more than adequately, enough at any rate to match any of the late King Henry’s illegitimate sons. ‘Happy mortal, invariably licensed to lechery, forced by duty like clockwork into sin and indulgence.… Even here, all he need do is fail.’
‘After the boar fight?’ said O’LiamRoe sardonically. But the two men on the field had closed with one another, and Sir George Douglas, his hands unconsciously fast on his chair, said nothing at all until some long minutes later, when releasing his pent breath softly, he observed, ‘Well, Irishman, if he is wise he will get himself thrown, fast. I fancy Sir John has had a little advice. He is following the same moves exactly as our friend the Cornishman.’
If the same thought had occurred to Vervassal, it was obvious that, short of throwing himself abjectly on his back, there was very little he could do about it. Sir John Perrott was built on the same scale as his father, and to weight was added training and temper. Perrott was angry, he was out to do damage, and he was being very careful indeed not to throw his opponent too soon.
This left Lymond, clearly, to improvise a series of defences which should be safe, unspectacular, and quite unlike his habitual responses to the recognized moves.
There are not so many ways of solving a sudden problem of leverage; especially when the problems are presented in prearranged sequence. The Englishman, his fringed jaw like a quarry block, hugged and hoisted, heeled and thrust with knee and foot, and was parried with an adequacy which was less than enthusiastic. After a good deal of this, when both men were blotched with bruises but otherwise unimpaired, Sir John Perrott released the Queen Dowager’s herald, rasped, ‘Well, here is a bastard, sir, who will dirty his hands on you,’ and opened his thicketed hands.
Arrested for the second, whether in admiration for Lord d’Aubigny’s inventiveness or in a kind of silent snort of hysteria at the prodigies expected of him—a condition, O’LiamRoe recognized, to which Lymond was all too prone—Francis Crawford was off guard for the one moment that mattered.
In the pavilion, attention already weakened by the Breton sports, the tilting, the jousting, was left cold by the undistinguished contest, spiderlike on the big field to all but the nearest benches. People were moving, tongues were chattering. Although no one physically could leave until the King rose, mentally most were by now back in the castle and climbing into their next change of clothes.
So perhaps only those who had heard Lord d’Aubigny mention Vervassal’s supposed prejudice against bastardy, only those sharing willy-nilly the King’s diplomatic engrossment, and those, finally, who knew who Thady Boy was, saw the quick succession of moves that brought Lymond to the ground under hip, knee and calf locked in a tightening wedge intended to crush.
For an agile man, there was one feasible retort: the move which had