To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [86]
It was terrifying, all the same. All the royal children were there. All, that is, but the Princess Mary, Countess of Arran, at present with her children in Burgundian Bruges. And the King had no heirs.
What could be, was done. Light was brought. The elder statesmen themselves paraded an air of mild exasperation. But covertly, all the same, men scurried with bales from the stables, and mattresses and sacks from the storerooms, and laid them where they might save an inebriated boy, tumbling from the parapet to the steps, or from the parapet to the roof-tops inside, and thence to the ground. Outside, the rock at the foot of the citadel remained unquilted and bare. Nothing could save a boy, or a girl, or a man who was dropped, or was pushed, or who overbalanced over the outer side of the parapet. It was the brave little Fleming, the Baron Cortachy’s niece, who leaned over a roof and informed Sinclair which were the goal posts. His daughter Betha was fond of the girl but often said, all the same, that she was crazy.
Once the young people were all on top of the wall, they crowded into the middle and there was a short preamble fixing the rest of the rules: the first team to score two goals, one gathered, would win. They used straws to choose ends, and to see who would cast the ball for a start. The King won, and took the ball in his hands. His hair flickered like fire in the wind. He slammed the ball down at an angle and they all jumped at it and each other.
Kathi had seen the big game they held when M. de Fleury had taught them how to play, and all the damage was done. The rules adapted well enough to small teams. The two front runners on each side – the corridori – were the smallest and nimblest: Kathi and Robin, opposing Meg her mistress and Meg’s brother Mar. Behind the front line on each side hovered the two sconciatori, the spoilers, whose job was to stop the other team’s runners: Roger and Crackbene for the non-royals; Liddell and Wodman for James. And at the back of each team were the hitters, who were allowed to use hands: M. de Fleury and Martin on one side and the King and his brother Sandy on the other.
The hitters were the ones who usually scored. The King’s team had to knock the ball through the midway belvedere on the wall-walk. M. de Fleury’s side had to drive it through the door which led into the upper floors of David’s Tower itself. Two hundred feet of parapet lay between the two doors, with a crenellated wall lining its outer side. Heaped against the inner side of the walkway like an avalanche were the thatched and stone roofs of service buildings and lodgings of varying elevations and pitches, some far below the parapet level, one or two projecting above. David’s Tower at the south end was sixty feet high, rising above the wall and all other buildings, just as the Castle itself stood nearly three hundred feet above the deep valley around its three sides. The outer side of the curtain wall was quite sheer.
Kathi herself was drunk only as a starving man feels himself drunk: a euphoria born of the fresh cold air and the height and the danger; a sharpening of wits honed against other sharp wits and agile bodies. For a moment, she was a participator in the same sexless bonhomie denied her in Will Roger’s room, whose crooked roof was one of the jumble below her.
Then Robin said, ‘Kathi!’ and she saw that he had the ball at his feet, and the others were trying to take it. She raced forward, stooping and twisting, and had actually hooked it when Liddell’s shoulder pushed through and he put his foot under it. It rose over their heads and bounced once on the top of the ramp before John of Mar ran down and, catching it, punted it back to Sandy the hitter, who caught it, screaming, and began to charge forward, all five of his players around him.
It was intimidating, like a stampede. M. de Fleury said, ‘You two, let them through. Sconciatori, stand firm. Martin, it’s that ball or your