Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [233]
O’LiamRoe had dropped his sword. On all fours he was fumbling to lift it when with a rustle Mistress Boyle swept through the doorway and bent down to seize it.
‘Ah, no!’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer. ‘Ah, no, wild hag, we are not heeding you this night at all.’ And laying hands on the two wiry grey plaits, she made to drag the older woman like a drowned thing to her feet.
In that moment, for the second time, the bright glass aimed at O’LiamRoe descended. Like the grey shears of Atropos, grim among the late flowers in Jean Ango’s garden, the needle edge dropped, cleaving the thick plait with a tug clean between hand and scalp; and falling, bit into Theresa Boyle’s neck.
The scream, when it came, was like a man’s, gross and brutal, and all the folds of the bundled cabbage, screwed featureless on the floor, had become poured over with red. His mouth open, the up-wrenched bottle still fast in his hand, Cormac O’Connor bent over the woman while O’LiamRoe rising backed, his face sick.
He turned and ran.
He had reached the parlour door when Cormac came back to himself. O’Connor said nothing; the curses and threats all cut off by the weight of the shock. Then rage came. Like a man spiritually harmed, like one who has looked on the symbols of a diabolical Mass, he put out his hand and armed himself, lifting the heavy sword from its deep cut as if it were paper and presenting it, across the width of two rooms, at O’LiamRoe’s unarmed body.
Oonagh saw it. Rising stony-faced from the fallen woman’s side she jumped at O’Connor, her two hands firm on his arm, and without looking he hurled her off like a cur. As she crashed clutching into the far wall, O’LiamRoe’s hands moved.
It was only a small sling, and the stone was small too, round, silvery and warm from his pocket. But slinging was an ancient art, a lost custom, a piece of erudite and unnecessary knowledge which only O’LiamRoe would have bothered to gain, and an art which only O’LiamRoe would have thought it worth while practising. With the soft, craftless fingers which, right hand or left, could split a held hair, the Prince of Barrow fitted his little stone, lifted the sling and let fly.
The first struck O’Connor in the mouth, breaking in the fleshy lip and like a wrecked forum razing his teeth. The second, stinging sharp in the middle of the round, suffused brow, felled him like a tree; slowly, buffeting shrub and sapling and undergrowth, flat to the ground. Holding hard to the wall, Oonagh watched him.
Above the old woman’s harsh moaning, ‘Never fear,’ said O’LiamRoe breathlessly. He cleared his throat, gasped, and moving stiffly nearer, ran a dirty hand through his hair. ‘He won’t be dead.’
In her white face the younger woman’s pale eyes looked almost black. ‘And if he were?’
Still breathlessly, he spoke at a tangent. ‘The woman will need help.’
Again she faced him without moving. ‘She is past helping.’
He said, ‘It had to be done … and at this minute I do not know yet if it is done.’
‘It is done,’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer. The woman moaned, and was quiet.
His oval face had no smile. ‘Twenty years of my thinking life have said their seven curses over him. He has won, too, in his way. It is a triumph of violence over culture, force over thought.… I have come to the crossroads you feared, and passed them. It may be a true road, or it may be the first step into all the kind, easy turnings of decay.’
‘Maybe. There is no knowing for either of us until judgment day.’ She passed him, remote as she had always been, dreamlike with her white face and her streaming black fall of hair, the stained robe dragging the floor; and opening the door, turned and faced him. ‘The back door is quiet to unlock, and not overlooked. Go quickly. The light is not far off.’
He came beside her, but no nearer than that. ‘I will not leave