The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [312]
Fergie Hoddim, for the five hundredth time, said, ‘Aye, we hear ye. But if a man says he’s going to Muscovy, how do you mean to impede him?’
‘You are not going,’ Lymond said. ‘No one is going but myself. You can get off the boat here and you can spend the night if you wish at the King of Spain’s expense, and then you can go to the devil. But you are not boarding the Primrose. Any of you.’
‘You’re falsing the doom,’ Fergie said. ‘You canna false the doom. It’s agreed, and that’s an end o’ it.’
As the sky darkened, the lights on either bank became suddenly stronger: the rowers, shipping oars, were drifting gently towards a low landing stage. Behind them, another boat was coming to shore. ‘Anyway,’ Guthrie said. ‘If you can go to Russia with impunity, why should we be less adequate?’
The other boat, swinging across, appeared to be heading straight for them. The captain of the royal barge, confident in the power of his gilded prow and three silken banners, gave a cursory shout. The other boat barely altered direction. Lymond said, ‘I am exceedingly tired of this argument.’
‘So,’ said Guthrie, ‘are we.’ He was looking over his shoulder. Immediately, it seemed, the other barge, not quite as large as their own, moved quickly forward and hung floating, side by side with the barge from Westminster, the two gunwales grazing together. An outburst of shouting exploded.
It was too neat to be quite accidental. Lymond jumped to his feet. He had backed, weaponless, one hand on the struts of the canopy when someone seized him from behind, and someone else from the side. He reacted instantly, twisting half free and ducking, with his knees and elbows and balled fists already seeking and finding their marks. In the rocking boat, two might have failed to hold him. But when a third hard body flung itself on him, helped by another and yet another, the combined weight was enough to dislodge him. His face grim, his concerted muscular strength resisting every pull, blow and thrust of his attackers, Francis Crawford was dragged from his barge and thrown headlong into the other boat while his assailants, jumping, landed on top of him. Then the second boat, pushing off, fled with its captive across the dark water.
The shock of landing knocked Lymond breathless. He was lying half over a bench, with someone pressing hard on his back and someone else gripping his right arm: ahead he could see the scuffed buskins of the first oarsman; behind, Alec Guthrie’s calf boots. The pain in his diaphragm lessened; his breath came back; power returned fully to all his limbs. While the men above him still thought him helpless Lymond drew a long, noiseless breath, and then with every ounce of spring in his body kicked and rolled over and then, rising, kicked and struck again and again, feeling the blows ring on bone and sink into flesh, planting, without mercy, the agonizing punches, on Guthrie, on Blacklock, on Hoddim, on Hislop, on d’Harcourt. On all his own men, who had taken the law into their own hands and believed they could command him.
It was Alec Guthrie who stopped Lymond as he got to the gunwale and was ready, half-freed, to dive over. Guthrie who seized him round the waist, his face marked as Lymond’s own face was bruised, but who used his hands to inflict pain and to control, so that Lymond could not quite take the last step which would take him over and into the river.
Then Francis Crawford slid his one free hand inside his coat and dragged from it the glittering blade he always carried and said, ‘Now!’ to Guthrie. And this time, it was magisterial.
It was the only word any of them had spoken. Lymond’s face held naked and uncontrolled anger: Lymond’s eyes stared into Guthrie’s and Guthrie, in silence, tightened his crippling grip. Then Francis Crawford said softly, through the great breaths he was taking above Guthrie’s head, ‘I am not to be stopped. I will sail at all costs, and not one of you is going to prevent me. If you try, I shall kill you.’
The rowers, pulling hard, had almost taken them to the