Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [248]
Satin and scarlet are for the son of the King of Erin, and silver on his scabbards, and brass rings upon his hurling-sticks. The son of the chief is to have all his clothes coloured, and is to wear clothes of two colours every day, each of them better than the other.
SCANDAL, outrage and unauthorized bedlam were the comforts of Michel Hérisson’s gouty years.
When the three arrows arched flaming into the centre of the pond and the water filled like Palissy’s crayfish with swimming forms, when the workmen and the men at arms and all the openmouthed spectators stood limply gazing after Lymond’s vigorous head, or else scrambled with filled helmets to the flaming stand, Michel Hérisson hopped and hobbled and finally hurtled, forgetting his gout altogether, after the thickset scampering form of Artus Cholet.
Gingerbeard, to begin with, did not see him. Gingerbeard flashed down the far side of the stand like a lizard and set off, twisting and dodging, round the end of the lake where the stacked baubles and accoutrements for that evening’s pageant offered unusual cover. Past the chariots and the plaster gods lay the way to the menagerie; beyond the menagerie was the edge of the forest and freedom.
Artus Cholet ran, head down, round the wreathed wheels, past the gilded lamps for the Satyrs, into and out of a grove of grey deities. A Jupiter rocked and Hérisson, heaving his knotty bulk on to a cart-shaft, roared from his vantage point: ‘Aye, shoogle, ye pie-maker’s huddle of ooze, take to the skies! Ye’d best get back to the Nymphaeum, for by God, ye havena the tibias for a socle on earth!’
And as the maligned King of Heaven fell with a crash, disclosing the black head and ginger beard arrested popeyed behind, the sculptor let loose a bellow that roused all the keepers, and leaped from the cart. ‘To me! To me!’
A cage of doves crashed, and a frightened turtle, wings ajar, clung to his chest. He clutched it. ‘A sign! Noah, we are saved! To me! To me!’
In the distance, a lion roared. ‘Ah, puss!’ said Michel Hérisson, running like a hare, hearing ahead of him the frantic crash of Cholet’s escape and beyond that the first questioning calls of Tosh and Pellaquin and all Abernaci’s subtle crew. ‘Sing. Sing like one of Hero’s own birds piping out of a siphon. I have a naughty man here, meet to be skewered.’ And laughing like a fool at his own doubtful wit, he plunged after Artus Cholet past the first of the cages.
His broad back was the first thing O’LiamRoe saw when, already half-dried with the sun and exertion, he and Francis Crawford reached the shore. It was the first thing Abernaci saw as, comfortable on Hughie’s mighty back as a lotus erect on its pad, he bade Hughie drink his fill and bless Michel’s cotton poll with his trunk.
By then, the noise was prodigious. The explosion had rocked the menagerie, already distraught with scampering men. Among the loose animals, the Keeper’s sick camel, a lady of brittle temper, had bobbed her tassels and sunk her yellow teeth three times into unguarded flesh; the dwarf ass brayed itself hoarse and the lion cubs, dear to Abernaci’s heart, had shambled off, humping their fat, sandy rumps, to feast among the spilled milk in the wrecked kitchens.
Amongst it all Cholet ran, no longer the compact bully, the master-gunner, the man who had snored last night in Berthe’s hot bed. Trapped in a labyrinth of tent, cage and pavilion, of sudden foot-encumbering messes of food and straw, of alleys which ejected liveried men with pitchforks, black men with horsewhips, bears, drunk on rice and reeds and primed for the arena; distraught with chained leopards whose leap checked a yard from his face, by stones accurately thrown by caged apes, by the roaring bulls and trampling, screeching elephants, by the whorls of black smoke and impossible blossoming of fire and squibs and fire darts and bombards booming, cracking and detonating in the quiet lake behind him, Artus Cholet finally came to the most wilful challenge to his resources. He came face to face with