Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [251]
The nutlike face cracked. The Keeper answered fully in Urdu; then led his lordship, his lordship’s Archers and the prisoner to the great tent where the elephants stood. ‘Good. We shall stay here,’ said Lord d’Aubigny, running his eye over the orderly, mountainous backs, ‘until the menagerie and lakeside have been cleared. Then, Crawford, you will be taken back to your cell.’
Lymond’s eyes were direct; his voice unmoved. ‘Play it out,’ he said. ‘But we have Beck. It makes no matter now.’
Hérisson had gone, hurried roughly by the guards. O’LiamRoe likewise had been forced to go; but first he had said something in Gaelic. ‘Leig leis. Do not answer provocation. He is in sore need of a chance to kill. I shall find Stewart.’
And then only Abernaci was left, cross-legged in a corner in a freshly glorious coat, bent over a block of wood. Leaving Lymond deliberately to stand, Lord d’Aubigny sat on a stool specially provided, twisting his fingers, and his personal bodyguard patiently waited, the canvas hot at their backs.
Then, obsessively as a man opening box within box who knows that, irrevocably, he has come to the last, and that the last will be empty; obsessively, he began to revile the man standing before him, because he had deceived him, because he had cheated him, and because he was a man and not made of ivory and gold. And also because, as O’LiamRoe had guessed, he intended to kill him if Lymond gave him one reasonable excuse.
The outcome of that would depend on Lymond himself. The matter of Robin Stewart, Phelim O’LiamRoe had taken on his shoulders. And since there seemed no possible means of tracing, in this seething town, one furious man bent on mischief, O’LiamRoe concluded that his only hope of success was to make first for the cabin in the forest where Piedar Dooly had been taken, and try to trace him from there.
The instructions Dooly had given were quite explicit, and they were written again on the handful of torn-up paper he had recovered from the near-unconscious Firbolg. Neither Abernaci nor Tosh had been gentle with Dooly. He himself, before they got all the truth out of him and after, had thrashed him until the stick broke. The thought of it curdled his stomach yet.
For he was tired, more tired than he remembered being ever in his life. Even Lymond’s trained body, he guessed, after the double swim, the nervous work of the boats, the hard row, must be bone-weary by now.
To find his horse and mount it, to shake off the well-meaning offers of Hérisson and Tosh, to jolt cantering through the park and into the village, and then beyond the village on to the forest road, was a triumph of unreasoning instinct over the sedate, ironic soul which had lounged in the Slieve Bloom commenting with some wit, every now and then, on just some such dramatic embassy.
At one hour past midday, when at Châteaubriant the French Court and the English Embassy, both thickly robed, both smiling, both primed, in private, with the news of what had occurred and both ignoring it, were ending their banquet, O’LiamRoe rode through the vacant trees and saw the cabin before him.
Dismounting, he tied his horse to a tree and paused. He was not, after all, armed; and Stewart was no crony of his. If not already in Châteaubriant, sharpening a knife for Lymond’s throat, Stewart could be here, bursting with understandable anger and waiting to show it.
Circumspectly O’LiamRoe walked over the mounded grass, his shoes shivering last year’s oak leaves, rattling pebbles, snapping slivers of wood. The windows of the hovel, clear and glossy as jet, remained black; from the chimney rose a snatch of spangled grey ash. O’LiamRoe walked to the window and looked in. On the verge of cupping his eyes, boylike, to spy, he thought better of it, and turned at last to the door.
It was a little ajar. He said ‘Stewart?’ and knocked, at the same time, on the wood.
He was out. Or asleep. Or behind the door with a sword.
‘Oh, well,’ said O’LiamRoe, in speechless benediction to himself, to Stewart, and to the general situation at this ultimate moment.