The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [160]
Driving one-handed, wildly tipping; jostled among the frantic bodies around him, Lymond had been calling from the start, his free arm high, his reins forcing the deer inwards, away from escape and towards the plunging centre of the still-moving morass of sledges and bodies. Three sledges broke from it and fled upriver, their drivers shouting, their reindeer crazily galloping. The eagle, baulked and malevolently angry, rose a little higher and considered the upraised arm she knew, without the lure to which she was accustomed. With deliberation, she took three, steady flaps of her towering wings; and flew straight at Lymond.
Chancellor saw it. He had cast the lure as Slata Baba made her first swoop; but he was too far behind; and with living flesh underneath her, the eagle ignored it, if she saw it at all. After that, he had found it hard enough merely to force the sledge closer to the wild, slithering concourse ahead. The pulkha trembled with the battle between himself and his terrified animal. Bearing his whole weight on the reins, he kept it running, wider and wider from the dark mass in front of him. He saw the three sledges break free and run straight ahead, out of control. He saw Slata Baba lift, pause and then suddenly fly towards Lymond, while Lymond’s deer, flinching and swerving, turned against his one-handed grip and set on a new, panicked course sideways, towards Chancellor, alone far to its left. His own deer turned, against all the aching, ebbing strength of his arm and fled for the bank of the river as Slata Baba braked and closed on her landing-place.
The black talons, the muscular legs breeched with feathers, struck Lymond’s head, and sinking down, closed on his shoulder and arm. A foot lifted, clogged with deer blood and flesh and a gouging of fur from his coat and he dropped the reins, speaking to her, his gloved left hand up and protecting his face while his right stayed outstretched, a path for her to walk down to her proper place, where the hooked, scissored beak might look outwards, and the slashing talons might settle six inches, a foot farther off from his head and his eyes.
With vindictive perversity, she stayed where she was. She flapped her wings once, bearing hard on his shoulder and then, leaving them loose in great eaves over her gold-ruffled hackles, she felt for and gripped the lower part of the thick of his arm with her free claw. As the sledge rocked and the deer careered blindly on, behind and parallel with Chancellor’s, Lymond stayed very still, balancing, and bracing his gloved hand at his hip, held her steady. Chancellor, his left arm nearly dragged from its socket, picked up the lure with his other and flung it.
The eagle turned, glared and rose. Chancellor’s deer gave a great swerve, pulling the reins out of his hand and sending the sledge slurring towards the high snowy bank of the river. He saw Slata Baba pin the chipped lure in the air, and Lymond’s sledge turn on its side as his frightened deer bucked and stumbled, its feet trapped in the reins. He did not see Lymond thrown out because his own sleigh struck the bank at that moment, and crumpled, soft as the skin of a hare, and flung him straight into the glittering pile of ice blocks and snow and sheared glacial debris. There was a violent coloured explosion inside his head, and his mind ceased to function.
Chapter 11
He woke on Lymond’s mattress, back in the hut, with Grey, unevenly flushed, kneeling on the floor by his pillow. Behind, his two aides moved purposefully backwards and forwards with steaming kettles and handfuls of cotton: he could see the backs of two soldiers pressed against the window, outside which there appeared to be a great many people, incomprehensibly talking. His shoulder ached, and he felt very sore. He saw that the hand