Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [74]
Oonagh O’Dwyer knelt by the groom, her pale eyes blazing, as the cat drank its reward and, masked and manacled, leaped in a flash of white fur on its keeper’s crupper. Soon, pleased with their new toy, they were galloping at full stretch again; and the sun at its height patched the white shadows with colour and lit them like a book of hours in vermilion and gold as they streamed through the little woods, black-fanned by tree shadows. On the boldest horse, erect and still, masked like an executioner, sat the cheetah. Nearest to him rode Oonagh, her black hair freed and streeling in the wind, her mermaid’s eyes green-lit and intent as the cat’s. The running dogs, leashed, were still with them, but they were not used again. The reign of Luadhas had been short.
The check came with the last hare of the day. The mechanical killing, the silken violence of the cat, had added a fulsome excitement to the hunt but drained it of skill. A good while before, O’LiamRoe, without comment, had dropped to the back; and immediately the pied jennet also had slackened its pace.
This hare had waited in her form till unharboured and had left it like a thunderbolt, running hard in the open for over a mile before clapping; and then trying every trick. She doubled over gates, bobbed along a boundary wall, leaped long-short, long-short on the straight for a while, and then, jumping at right angles to her own track, made off in a fresh direction. In a little while she began to run mostly straight, and they knew she was lost. Then the scent, weakened over the stubble by the morning’s bright sun, suddenly redoubled, fresh and strong, and the lymers quickened, tongues lolling; and then checking, flung here and there searching. She had come back on her tracks, doubling scent, and then vanished. The riders stopped and the horns blew the ritual bewilderment of the stynt.
They were not sorry to stop. In twos and threes, they gathered at the edge of another wood, steam rising from riders and horses. Before them, a wide mole-combed meadow unrolled, dipping distantly to a grey, ice-clogged stream and rising beyond in the same rolling yellow grass and gorse, with low bushes and a rare copse beyond.
Waiting, they chatted. Margaret Erskine, pausing briefly at his side, complimented O’LiamRoe pleasantly on his dog; but he wanted to speak of the little Queen, who certainly rode well, even boisterously, for her age. St. André on foot at Mary’s side was checking a saddle girth. The horses chafed a little, sidling as the cold penetrated; and O’LiamRoe, his face thoughtful, looked down at the ollave heaped at his side. ‘Thady Boy, between this and no one murdering me at all, it’s a poor day you’ve had.’
‘Ah, be still. The day is not over. There are worse off,’ said Thady, acknowledging the unexpected thrust neither in dark face nor flat voice. ‘Look at Piedar, and the legs on him like honeybags.’ Then the horn, blowing the rights, told the hare had been found, and like split pulses the party tumbled apart.
A beaten hare, far from landmarks, forgets to run in a ring. A beaten hare runs uphill; and if she is old and shrewd and there is a fresh young hare at hand, she will clap and lie by the young one, and let her spring up first, if she will, so that the simpler braches, the pups, the addlepates, would bob and babble after the different scent.
It happened here. But the older hare, rising, fled the meadow with half the company following, as the braches in the wood gave tongue after a different prey. For a space, two hares held the field and split the pack between them, one crossing the open in great bounds with the leaders—the Duke, Diane, the little Queen, the Neuvy party—after her, and the