Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [247]
‘John Stewart will go,’ said the King. For a second only, the Constable hesitated; he saw the Duke de Guise’s eyes narrow like his own. Then—‘As you desire, Monseigneur,’ he said.
The wall of shock, moving through the turmoil of water, saved O’LiamRoe’s life. Turning even the great elephant back to belly, it lifted Phelim and wheeled him like a dolphin into the air, air scarcely less dangerous with falling wood and flaming fabric, with random fire shells and lights white and coloured, and in the midst, the white coalesced furnace of what had been four ships, blustering and hissing, hammering like a molten mallet on the jerking black waves.
Far away, an untouched boat was reaching the shore, an untouched royal head in the bows. Nearer, a raftful of prone musicians trotted and leaped with the water as they lay, eyes squeezed tight, heads helmed with pocked lute and snake-gutted viol.
Nearer still, converging towards him through the splashing water, their heads rimmed with light from the conflagration, were Lymond and Archie Abernethy, swimming matched side by side. Hands gripped his arms, a naked shoulder bore him into the air, and as Abernaci, smiling, slipped past, calling to the rearing waterfall of trumpeting anger which was Hughie, Francis Crawford held O’LiamRoe, vomiting water, firmly under his arms and set off with him to the shore; set off shearing through the smacking water like a honed blade as the feux de joie danced and sparkled, pink and blue and gold under the pall of black smoke between themselves and the sun; and crooning under his breath into O’LiamRoe’s blocked red ears.
And he did not need, after all, to swim all the way. O’LiamRoe, emerging from his stupor, found himself brought to a little rowing barge, one of those Lymond had cut free, rocking gently on its own with two pairs of oars for cargo. In a moment more he was amidships, with the shafts in his soft hands, trying to match Lymond’s unthinking, professional pull. The boat bucketed over the settling waves, making straight for the menagerie. Abernaci and the elephant, he noticed, were already halfway there.
Lymond was singing:
‘Un myrte je dédierai
Dessus les rives de Loire
Et sur l’ecorce écrirai
Ces quatre vers à ta gloire.…’
O’LiamRoe, for the first time in what seemed like hours, essayed human speech. A quack burst from him, with a good deal of spit. He hiccoughed, his green face returning to pink-. The intrusive C,’ said Lymond’s voice like a lilt over his shoulder. ‘Did the Slieve Bloom and your sitting-skins seem dear to you just now?’
Over his shoulder, half choked, ‘Last night, they seemed dear to me,’ said O’LiamRoe.
The abandoned voice behind him, speaking beat for beat with the rowlocks, altered arbitrarily in timbre. ‘I dreamed,’ said Lymond, ‘that … Cormac O’Connor was alone.’
‘He is,’ said O’LiamRoe, his eyes on the festival of lights. ‘And the woman Oonagh O’Dwyer, she is alone also.’
For a moment, the boat glided in silence. Then—‘We are two pedants, Phelim, guarding the moon from wolves. But better—I suppose better—than electing to be of the moon, or of the wolves.’
They had pulled out of the smoke. The sun struck them, cosy as an old nurse, happing them with heat and stillness and lazy security. Above, the sky was measureless, blue upon blue.
‘What now?’ said O’LiamRoe suddenly, catching something of the power and gaiety struck from the pure light and the mood of the man sitting behind him. ‘The menagerie?’
‘Certainly the menagerie,’ said Lymond. ‘Where are your ears? The menagerie, where Artus Cholet has been trying to escape from a fat Rouen sculptor ever since you began to swallow the King of France’s new pond.’
VI
Châteaubriant: Satin and Scarlet
In the distraint of a chained dog, let a stick be placed across his dog-trough and a prohibition made that he be not fed; if he is fed after this, there shall a man trespass upon him.
As to the distraint of a poet: let his horsewhip be taken up, and a warning given that he is not to make