Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [258]
There were flies in the warm wine. O’LiamRoe tipped them out and slapped the jug back on the table. ‘He got it for you, so you might as well have it. Give me your hand.’
The thinned mouth tightened. Then Francis Crawford gave up his wrist, pushing the jug untasted away, and said in his ordinary voice, ‘Yes, of course. Pure melodrama. How my brother would agree.’ And added, after a moment, ‘Thank you, Phelim. It was all well intentioned, I know … and very likely true.’
Two of the cuts were deep, but nothing was severed: the old bands round the thick glass had given way. By the time he had finished, Lymond was sitting quite collectedly, watching him with a sort of desiccated courtesy. ‘Now what?’ said O’LiamRoe.
‘Now for the funeral,’ said Lymond flatly, and got up.
The forest floor was soft. They dug in the small clearing; with stones, with their hands, and finally with a shovel O’LiamRoe unearthed from an old midden. In his pack was the Archer’s cloak they wrapped him in; and the twined crescents of Henri and his mistress glittered up from the rich dark mould.
Lymond, looking down for the last time, saluted, as O’LiamRoe had done, the meticulous shadow of himself, then bent, with O’LiamRoe, to obliterate it for ever.
It was a pleasant grave; gentler than the gibbet, or the town spikes, or the cold yard of uncaring, distant kin. They buried his pack with him, and put his hands on his sword, and put the turf like a living mosaic where he had been.
‘Let us be tidy at all costs,’ said Lymond. He came to where O’LiamRoe had flung himself, the last task done, and stood swaying a little, his face emptied of emotion, the blood drying on the soiled bandage round his hand. ‘What, in the event, did Margaret Erskine say? Now, if ever, seems the time to tell me.’
O’LiamRoe looked up, sweat spilled in the soft cup of his throat.
‘Ah, dhia.… Have I not attacked you enough? It was a piece of advice only, and aimed at myself as much, I suppose, as at you.—For those of easy tongues, she said. Remember, some live all their lives without discovering this truth; that the noblest and most terrible power we possess is the power we have, each of us, over the chance-met, the stranger, the passer-by outside your life and your kin. Speak, she said, as you would write: as if your words were letters of lead, graven there for all time, for which you must take the consequences. And take the consequences.’
Bringing down his gaze from the still, golden-green of the trees, Lymond was for a long time silent. Then he turned squarely to meet O’LiamRoe’s blue eyes and in his own, remotely, a familiar irony showed. ‘Now, that at least I seem able to do,’ said Lymond dryly, and dropping beside the Prince of Barrow, rolled like a weary animal on his back and lay still.
Now the sounds of labour had ceased, birdsong had come back to the wood. You could even see them, high up: a dove, a couple of finches, the swinging flight of a tit. In the trees, the light had changed and ripened; it must be midafternoon by now. Their horses, content with the shade and the deep grass, cropped complacently, the unstrapped bits tinkling like Mass bells. Otherwise the quiet was absolute; the peace heavy as wine.
Out of a warm and billowing mist of some comforting colour, O’LiamRoe realized suddenly that, beside him, Lymond’s breathing was making no sound. With a grunt, forcing his strained eyes open, he lurched to one elbow and looked.
He need not have worried. Francis Crawford and Thady Boy Ballagh were both asleep, noiselessly, the clever hands quiet, the ruffled head sunk in the grass; as still as that other, unendowed face they had just laid to rest.
‘I want your help,’ O’LiamRoe had said to that face, ‘to trim a bowelless devil named Francis Crawford until there’s a human place on his soul to put the mark of grace on.’
The living Robin Stewart had failed. But the dead, thought O’LiamRoe, sinking back, his eyes on the green grass and the cottage from which