Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [33]
He was in his usual place, with Thady Boy Ballagh seated before him, the worse for drink. Thady’s breeches were stained with vermilion, and his idle gaze was focussed on Abernaci, cross-legged on the floor, his dark face hidden and his long, brown fingers curled round a knife. He was wearing robes, finely laundered and brilliantly printed, and a jewelled turban on his head. From a block of pearwood in his left hand the shavings were falling, tender and curled in the light.
‘Woodcuts. He’s fair away with himself making pictures,’ said Stewart ironically, towering over Thady’s right shoulder. ‘Hérisson found him doing it one day, and asked him over to see it on the press. It’d surprise you sometimes what these natives can do. You wouldn’t credit him with a thought barring slitting your throat one dark night for your buttons. Wait till you see the face on him. Abernaci!’
The carver looked up. Under the fine turban, the brown face was small and seamed like a walnut. Years of Indian sun had dried a skin possibly middle-aged to look like the sloughed hide of a serpent; his nose was broken-backed and ignoble, and he had a scar, running from brow to cheek, which clenched one eyebrow unnaturally high. He glanced at the two men, and then resumed his carving without a word.
‘Will you look at yon!’ said Robin Stewart, who was no longer feeling so remote from his guest. ‘And he can take a drop, too. Abernaci!’ He bent over the silent figure. ‘Drink—good, yes?’ He made a motion of drinking. ‘More?’
Within the black beard, the thick lips moved. ‘More,’ said the man Abernaci gutturally; and Stewart, laughing, turned away.
In an untidy, stained heap on his hocks, the ollave remained, watching.
The carver looked up. The knife, razor-sharp, lay still in his hand; but his grip suddenly had changed. On the opposite wall a leather ink bottle hung with a table just below it, and on the table Robin Stewart’s white jacket lay.
The hand with the knife moved. There was a flash, a hiss, and the blade, arching slim through the air, slit the fat-bellied bottle clean through. Ink, in a thin black stream, began to issue and splash on the table. The brown hands clasped, the robes were still, and Abernaci was passive once more, his dark eyes resting on Thady.
There was a knife in Thady’s hand, too, although no sign of how it came there. He turned, balancing it thoughtfully, waiting until he might be unperceived; then he judged it, and threw. It was a more difficult target than Abernaci’s. The knife hurtled straight to the bottle cord, and parting it, let the spouting ink flask fall free to spill its black pool harmlessly on the floor. Black eyes met blue in mutual speculation; and Lymond, speaking softly, said, ‘More?’
And then the shouting began.
The voice of Hérisson’s steward began it; a door banged, and his calling rang suddenly through the packed cellar. The paper cart had reached the Porte Cochoise and was entering the city. Stewart, fighting back to collect Thady, watched for two minutes while the scene dissolved into pandemonium, with Hérisson in the middle sonorously making his dispositions to take the illegal consignment. Then he hurried Thady outside.
It was the ollave, cheerful with much drink, who wandered immediately from Stewart’s side and was found presently halfway up the adjacent scaffolding. And it was Thady Boy, rocking slightly on the steeple top, oblivious to the Archer’s angry hissings below, who spotted the spark of gorget, the glint of arquebus and the bristling shadow of pikes under the housetops in the Rue aux Juifs.
They raised the alarm in the Hôtel Hérisson as the cart arrived from the north. The grille was lifted, the base unbolted, and the bales were sliding into the cellar while the city guard was two streets away. Bouncing like a cork, Thady Boy ran downstairs to the cellar; and when Stewart, scrambling, got there after him, the ollave’s voice, raised in charitable zeal, was already making drunken, flamboyant and