Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [223]
‘Now cease, my lute! This is the last
Labour that thou and I shall waste
And ended is that we begun:
Now is thy song both sung and past
My lute! be still, for I have done.’
He did not allow them to applaud him. As the notes died, he forced his thumb through the strings, then again, then again, hurling them into a fury of sound, and launched like an armed man into battle, into one of the paramount Irish epics, the greatest perhaps of all, which he had given them again and again unstinted from his extravagance. O’LiamRoe, drunk, had listened to Thady Boy, drunk, creating this passion and had wept, snorting unawares, the oval face caged with tears. Then he had wept for himself; for the human pain and valour and grief he knew and recognized in the song. This time he did not weep, but pressed his lips on his clenched hands with a stubborn pain in his throat, for he had never heard it as, cold sober, Lymond created it now. And about him, involuntarily, each listener tightened as if called into tune. The double pull on sense and intellect was final, exposing the small places of self to universal challenges. The Queen Dowager of Scotland looked away; George Douglas, his brows raised, studied his knees; and Margaret Lennox, her eyes wide on the singer, sunk her teeth in her lip.
Lymond himself flung what he had made at John Stewart of Aubigny, standing broad and still by the King, ornamental as some Ionian pillar, perfect in column and capital, waiting.
The paean ended, properly served, dying until the brush of the forest leaves hid it. There was a vacant quiet into which all their bruised emotions pooled and ran, filling it, splash by splash, with exclamations and the stir of revived movement, and the mounting dash and eddy of applause. From his stance behind the King, Lord d’Aubigny moved forward smiling and dropped on one knee. No one in the Scottish Court heard what he said, but it was cut short by the King’s own hand summoning the singer.
Only Margaret Erskine, close to Lymond, saw that he was shivering. He waited a second until the fires of his own making left him; then with a minimum of gesture he rose, laid the lute neatly down and walked across the soft dunes of tapestry. The torchboys followed the tabard, bright as a wave breaking at night, their shadows chequered in the cross lighting. Lymond knelt.
From Northampton’s circle, it looked merely like a called-for bestowal of praise. King Henri, keeping his voice level, preserved the illusion. ‘M. Vervassal. How are you called?’
‘My name is Francis Crawford of Lymond, your grace.’ The reply also was sober. ‘I commend me to your justice.’
‘Francis Crawford of Lymond. You are known also as Thady Boy Ballagh?’
‘I have been so,’ said Lymond. Beside the King, the sieur d’Enghien looked suddenly up and away again; the King’s sister had not removed her gaze throughout. D’Aubigny smiled.
The bearded, fine-drawn face of the King studied the other man at his feet; and in Henri’s hardened muscles and pressed nostrils was plainly the temper he did not propose to unleash. ‘Here is a matter for judges,’ he said. ‘My Archers will bring you before me tonight. Go.’
And Stewart of Aubigny, bending, raised the former Thady Boy Ballagh to his feet and drew him among the guard with a grip framed expressly to cripple. Lymond sustained it, his eyes alight, while the applause broke out again, and across the carpet someone held out his lute. But Henri, smiling briefly, indicated the interval closed. It was time to stir, to leave the night and prepare to return.
Francis Crawford turned his fair head on Lord d’Aubigny’s shoulder and looked up at him, with his right arm hanging numb and the bog-gravel irony of Thady Boy plain in his face. ‘A bull for the cows in time of bulling; a stallion for the mares in time of covering; a boar for the sows in time of their heat. A foot for a foot; an eye for an eye; a life