Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [39]
Already the streets were all but impassable. Half Normandy was taking part in King Henri’s processional Entry and the other half had turned out to watch. The streets had been crammed to the crown since midnight and the processional route, the Rue Grand Pont, the Cross, the Rue St.-Ouen, St.-Maclou, the Pont Robec and the Cathedral, was lined with tapestries and flowers, and the draped and garlanded windows were thick with heads.
Somewhere a trumpet called, threadlike above the trampling, and the pace suddenly quickened. The trumpet sounded again.
‘God, we’re going to be late,’ said Robin Stewart; and Lord d’Aubigny, hearing, swore. The mistiming was his, not the Archer’s, but his place for the procession, unlike theirs, was public and prominent. ‘There’s a cart,’ said O’LiamRoe mildly.
The stresses of the journey had made speech so far impossible, but both the King of France’s guests had seemed more tickled than impressed by the occasion, although The O’LiamRoe, industriously craning, had twice tripped and been saved by his armpits from being trodden flat underfoot.
The cart he had noticed held the last of the cortège: a huddle of garlanded nymphs clutching baskets; several men with cardboard castles on poles, or with antique trumpets or amphorae; two gloomy mock-captives with their hands tied; and three withdrawn figures in square-necked Roman costume and bare knees, burdened each with a struggling lamb. ‘Come on,’ said O’LiamRoe, and scrabbled diligently at the side of the vehicle. Thady Boy gave him a heave and followed, and Stewart and his men piled after.
Lord d’Aubigny hesitated. The decision was not his, but he could see no alternative. He had no intention, however, of personally riding in the cart. He had a brief, charming conversation with the nearest embroidered young man on horseback and was helped up to share his saddle. In a short while he had disappeared.
The cart with its habromaniac burden trundled on. The O’LiamRoe, wound like the Laocoön on a trumpet, raised his voice in amiable strictures on victory processions that were a dead copy of the Ptolemies, and one of the dryads crushed close to an Archer gave a giggle. Yellow light burst from the sun. Shadows sprang fresh and lively over the crowd; gilt shone and paint sparkled, and cold, neurotic, bad-tempered faces warmed and coloured and relaxed. There were bursts of laughter, and bursts of cheering, and a surge of noise from behind them as the cart, reaching the gates, rumbled on to the bridge, and the fresh river air greeted it.
The Seine was covered with ships. On their right, the big merchantmen were crowded to the yardarms; and on the left smaller boats, brightly painted and pinned all over with armorial shields, darted backwards and forwards. On the far shore Orpheus waited by the Triumphal Arch chatting to Hercules. Beside them on the beach Neptune, a cloak over his blue robes, was sitting huddled beside a Seven-Headed Hydra which was lying on its back and eating a sausage. Beyond that sat three men next to a plaster whale.
The noise, the splashing, the flag-strewn spread of colour beyond, where the whole pageant wheeled and formed and shifted ready to move, like some private army conscripted by gods, jewellers and theatrical costumiers, was too much for the lambs. They broke loose. One got over the side of the cart. One, struggling, was hooked by O’LiamRoe’s trumpet, and the third was silenced, threshing, by a pot on its head. To laughter, shouts, bleating and a shower of triumphant toots O’LiamRoe arrived at the muster point like chariot-borne Dionysus with his Pans, Menads and Satyrs but without Thady Boy Ballagh who, to Stewart’s rib-squeezing chagrin, was no longer there.
There was no time to search. A fanfare