Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [78]
At that point, the automatic obedience which had brought Stewart so far came to an end. He could run no further. He couldn’t fight a hunting cat with his bare hands, nor could Thady. He began to duck, in pure reflex action, but in his mind was only a dead wilderness which did not even anticipate pain. Then something took him by the collar. As the cat was in mid-spring, Thady Boy ducked, twisted, and hurled Stewart forward with all the strength of his shoulder into the ground.
And the ground gave way. In a kind of trauma of exhaustion and fright the Archer felt himself falling not merely forward on his knees in the scrub but sucked downwards, blundering, banging hip, knee and elbow on unyielding surfaces, losing his breath, and not merely from concussion; losing his sight, and not merely from panic. Slipping, sliding, skidding, in utter amazement, Robin Stewart tumbled head over heels into darkness.
There was a lung-flattening jolt, a burst of light, a choking flurry of smoke, and a scream. The Archer opened his eyes. He was sitting half-disgorged from a twisting stone chimney, on a hearth with a little wood fire: a discovery he made painfully and fast as Thady Boy, tumbling down on his tracks, landed plump on his lap. In that age-old limestone landscape, all colonized with caves, he had dropped on to the troglodyte hearthstone of the man with the cap. And ringing in his ears was a soft voice which had surely just spoken, back there in the field, before the bed of the fire burned his seat. ‘For O’LiamRoe’s sake, my dear,’ it had said, ‘you deserve to fall first.’
Before they left, the Archer got Thady Boy by the arm. ‘You saved my life,’ he said. ‘You’d no need to do yon for me.’ Then, being Stewart, he spared a glance for the little hare. Her eyes were open and her soft ears laid back, but already her brown fur was cold.
‘She died of fright just after you got her,’ said Thady Boy Ballagh. ‘I told you to throw her.’
A less worldly society would have cheered their reappearance from the cave. The Court of France cheered the cheetah, laughed, and went about their business. Someone brought up Thady’s jennet, and Stewart, sitting tenderly in the saddle, posted stiff-legged after the rest. The cheetah, masked and leashed, sat rock-still and silent once more on her groom’s crupper; and strung out, the horns speaking their message, the hunt was making for home. Long ago the Queen’s party had gone. The younger men trotted beside Thady; and St. André himself held him in light conversation, his hand on his knee. The leveret hung from his saddlebow, the jewelled collar winking green.
Back in the field, one horse still stood waiting; one man was not quite ready to go. Mistress Boyle noticed it, glancing over her shoulder; lightly she skirled, and winked at her friends. ‘Ah, Oonagh, there goes the fine present our noble friend was after making you. Is it paid for, do you think, or will he be needing to ask a loan of us next?’
There was a long laugh. It rolled clear over the crushed stalks and bruised grass, the smeared weeds and wet earth to where O’LiamRoe knelt, his golden hair blowing, by the shuddering rags of the dog Luadhas, and drew his knife in charity along her long throat.
III
Aubigny: Boldness of Denial
Four things sustain crime: temptation, consent, urging, and boldness of denial.
THAT autumn, Margaret Erskine wrote to her husband, ‘Your lantern lissom of light is possessed of devils’; and far off in Augsburg, with its vineyards and walnut trees, its sandy, stony terraces and its ageing, weakening Emperor, the Ambassador, knowing Lymond, wondered what barbaric enfranchisement of soul or of body he was devising for himself and for his sponsors now.
Before the cheetah hunt was a week old, the full Court arrived at Blois, streaming uphill from the river to the broad court of the château. The sun on the King’s mail splashed through