Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [242]
‘Oh—Stewart,’ said Lymond. ‘He’ll bustle in with a knife and a bloody lecture, both wide of the mark, when it’s all over. To the sea. To the sea, thou that art initiated!’
Running past the tiltyard, the sweat dripping from the chin—’Michel Hérisson is there,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘They’ve got Beck.… The man we’re looking for is fortyish, small, thick, black haired, with a ginger beard.’
‘God!’ said Lymond and laughed, panting; to O’LiamRoe he seemed vibrant with life. He ran like a dancer, outstripping the other man’s stumbling feet, the soldiers in their leather jerkins at his elbow. But at the lake he stopped dead. ‘My God, what are they doing? She’s still there. Look!’
They stopped. It was true. The Queen’s barge, gaily painted and stuffed with children and men-at-arms, was tied up in the centre of the lake, with the twelve little vessels alongside.
‘No boats,’ said O’LiamRoe, a shade late. ‘They took the last for the Queen. And the musicians are drowning the shouting.’
‘If there’s a slow match …’
‘There isn’t,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘Abernaci swears no one has been out to these boats since last night. There isn’t a master gunner alive who could judge a slow match for that long.’
‘Then it’s going to be a fire arrow,’ said Lymond, without apparently taking any thought at all. ‘The menagerie is clear of strangers?’
‘We can depend on that.’
‘Then it must come from the pavilion, or the end of the lake where the chariots are. You can see this end is empty. Take three men and scour the carriages. I’ll do the—’
It was Michel Hérisson, without greeting, who interrupted him. ‘Thady, there are Diana’s bows over there, and flint by the stand—’
‘Find the fountains and put them on. Can you swim? No? Phelim? God—no, look. Abernaci is in.’ The file of running men, stringing out, began to spread round the box paths. Lymond, Hérisson at his side, started up to the lakeside stand, glaring cloth of gold, with the workmen resting, staring, on its roof. One of them began to run.
Lymond whistled. The high, sweet call stopped O’LiamRoe in his tracks, halfway over to the carts. The de Guise men below halted and looked up. By now the men-at-arms in the Queen’s boat had caught sight of the flurry. From the shore their sun-reddened faces could be seen gazing distrustfully towards land. They had raised their shields in a kind of barricade; behind it, not even Mary’s red hair could be seen. They must have thought, with relief, that she was quite safe; they made no move to row to land.
The man on the roof disappeared. But not before they had seen the small barrel body, and the chestnut grizzle on the chin. It was Cholet. Lymond seized one of the stout Roman pilasters and began to climb like a goat—O’LiamRoe could see the flying black coat of the ollave, racing up the mast of La Sauvée, knife in his teeth. He had no knife now. To free his arms he had stripped off even the wide canvas shirt; against his brown, scarred back his hair looked less yellow than silver.
Cholet reappeared, bow in hand, on the thick cartouche crowning the front of the stand. Against the white disc of the sun, flame was pale as air, but they could see the grey smoke rising, thin and wandering, from the flaming arrow as he nocked.
He shot three burning arrows swiftly, one after the other. The first dropped hissing into the water. The second and the third sank firmly into the wood of the ninth vessel in the lake, the small galley next the canopied barge of state. Then Artus Cholet threw down the bow and kindling on the flat roof beneath him. The varnished wood and baked metal cloth of the stand received it like some worldly