Queens' Play (47 page)

Something happened to Stewart’s face—an intake of breath, a grimace of hatred, the beginning of a smile, even. Then his whole attention, blazing, meticulous, was on the charging boar.

It was the boar’s own weakness which made him falter in the last dizzying second before the spear. The point took him, not through the yielding, breathing flesh but near the snout, where the near tush caught it, deflected it, and left the ponderous body, stumbling sideways,
to take the shaft askew in the shoulder and twist it, shuddering, out of Stewart’s wet hands. The slobbering bulk crushed him, the stinking breath took him in the face; then he was on his feet weaponless, while the boar, grazing the wall for a dozen, staggering yards, turned and faced him, tusks chattering like glass, the metal in him vibrating in the wind. The Queen Mother of Scotland dropped her scarf.

It whisked into the arena with an efficient air and lay twisted in elastic abandon, sparkling. There was silver embroidery on the hem. ‘Fetch it for me, M. Crawford?’ said the Queen.

For an interminable moment, Lymond did not move. The ladder Brusquet had used to enter the ditch lay at his feet. Such an order, capricious and intolerable as it might be, was royal. It was a command performance of chivalry; and to disobey it in public was something no man there would have done. After waiting just long enough, the herald turned and bowed; meeting the cool gaze under his lifted brows, Mary of Guise smiled. Then he swung over the rail and down the ladder, thrown swiftly into place. He stood there, gripping the rungs, while Stewart, unaware, backed towards him, the boar trampling the far side of the square.

The boar had seen and smelled the newcomer if Stewart, dazed with injuries, had not. He sidled nearer, approaching the Archer in small runs and halting as the whickering spear twisted within. Stewart waited, hands spread, oblivious of all but the tusks, the eyes, and the quivering haft of his spear. All the strength of his badly knit body, all the grudging, drearily acquired skills, came to his fingertips. He waited, traitor, conspirator, confessed assassin, in his single moment of solitary public achievement; his one honest treasure found just this side of the axe.

With the low, snoring groan of his kind the boar charged. It ran onesided, furiously, pounding the mangled earth, spitting blood and foam as it went, the spear whipping at its side. It ran past Stewart, past his hands outstretched to grasp the shaft, past the embroidered gauze snake lying supine on the soil, and straight up to the ladder. Lymond left it till the last second. Then he leaped aside as the boar sheared clean with his tusks the bottom rungs of the ladder where the herald had been. Lymond let him pass, took a single step, and laying both hands on the spear stuck in the animal’s hide, gave a powerful jerk. It caught the half-rearing creature off balance. Squealing, the boar tottered, lurched and tumbled backwards among the debris of the ladder, as Lymond pulled the spear free of the wound.

The herald got to his feet like a cat, his tabard washed with boar’s blood, lithe and gravely intent, and faced the dripping animal, the red spear in his hands. Then as the boar charged heavily for the last time, Lymond sunk the spear upright, with both hands, between the broad shoulders. The beast screamed, and its naked, neatly turned
knees suddenly shook. Then, shapeless, unshackled, spiritless as a sack of wet peat, it fell on its side, the tushes scoring the turf.

Across the bulk of it, as the dust seethed and settled, swaying, bleeding, Robin Stewart faced his daemon. The flowers were already beginning to fall, clinging to the wet tabard. Lymond caught one up and walked with it, slowly, past the dead animal. The broadsword, shattered in the early play, lay at his feet. Lifting it, Francis Crawford impaled the spray on its split point and, moving straight up to Stewart, offered the sword, balanced on his two palms.

The blood sticking about his burst clothing, his hopeless hair glued on his cheeks, his lip bitten, his eyes aching, his head ready to burst, Stewart stared at the graceful gesture, the cool splendour, the careless thief of success, and seizing the sword by its pommel, aimed at Thady Boy’s face.

Lymond was fresh, and moreover knew exactly what he was doing. The message he had failed to transmit, walking steadily to Robin Stewart, had been a warning against just this. He ducked, and brought his foot up in the same smooth, practised movement and Stewart, tripped, ended his lunge on the ground where, buffeted and bleeding, he rolled over and lay.

To a casual observer, nothing had occurred except Stewart’s collapse. Already the keepers were running on, and with them two or three Archers, in whose charge he nominally was. The cheering, except on the part of the townspeople, was dying away: excess in anything was ill-bred, and there was a need for collective speculation. The Queen Mother’s herald, moving easily over the grass to retrieve her highness’s scarf, was being given points like a greyhound, and probably knew it. Any hopes Lymond might have had of discreet anonymity on his second appearance in France had been decisively dashed. His second entrée, as it turned out, was quite as spectacular in its way as his first.

When he could walk, Stewart was taken to the King at his own request. Two tumblers were in the arena, along with a goat. From the height of the royal stand you could see plainly across to the drawbridge, where the sun shone on a cluster of admiring heads, the middle one yellow.

He had the King’s ear: filthy though he was, prisoner though he was, he had fought well. And the Queen, the Duchess, the Vidame, the Court all about him, were watching and listening too; only Lord d’Aubigny, in the last moments, had risen and gone.

Robin Stewart raised his voice, aiming it at the King, and at O’LiamRoe sitting beyond.
‘About the man calling himself Crawford of Lymond,’
said Stewart loudly and plainly, blood springing as the muscles jerked in his cut face.
‘There’s something this Court ought to know. The Prince of Barrow there will be my witness.’

He had their attention, at least. Within sound of his voice, conversation drawled to a halt; there was a second’s silence. The Constable broke it sharply. ‘You presume, sir. The gentleman is a herald of her grace the Queen Dowager of Scotland, and is no concern of yours.’

‘Is he no? Is he no? Then he’s a concern of yours, monseigneur, and a concern of the King’s, and a concern of everybody who doesna care to be made a fool of, whether he’s a pet of the de Guise family or a dressedup tumbler with a chapman’s tongue in his heid.… Ask The O’LiamRoe. Listen to the Prince of Barrow, then,’ said Robin Stewart, his voice an uncontrolled shout. ‘Tak’ tent o’ this!’

Mysteriously, like a simple-minded jack-in-the-box, O’LiamRoe’s face appeared at his side. The kind, oval face glanced over over the arena before O’LiamRoe said, ‘Death alive! Listen to what? The only soul I ever knew anything about was Thady Boy Ballagh, and him due for the block for mass murder now that our other suspect is proved white, white as the driven snow. Lymond? I met him in London. Aside from that, I know nothing of the fellow at all.’

In a single, ripe-vowelled breath out of Ireland, Stewart’s one, sweet hope of revenge had thus gone. For a moment, as he stared dizzily at O’LiamRoe’s steadfast, scarlet face, he was on the verge of denouncing Lymond regardless, in face of the ridicule and denial and the final, damning opposition of O’LiamRoe. He struggled with it, breathing heavily, while the translation was going on, aware that he was losing their attention. The King, his eye straying impatiently to the goat, said, ‘Eh bien, monsieur?’

Stewart opened his mouth.

‘Body of me, take him away,’ said the Constable briefly. ‘This is a man already half crazed. Who else would lift a sword just now against one who had just saved his life?’

The King said, ‘Did he do so?’ in the same moment as Stewart exclaimed, ‘I could have turned off the beast by myself. Devil draw me to hell, I didna need that mincing mountebank—’

The royal brow cleared. ‘Stole your audience, did he? And receives a fine reward, I see.
Below.
’

They cleared him away, shouting. He had let them bring him to France for two reasons: to implicate Lord d’Aubigny, and to expose Lymond as Thady Boy. Because of the King, Lord d’Aubigny was still free. And as a direct consequence of that, he had lost his only corroborative evidence against Lymond.

O’LiamRoe wanted Lymond exposed and degraded; but he was too soft in the guts, it seemed, to make him suffer for another man’s crimes. Robin Stewart was not. He was not to face the wheel for the better part of a week. And before he died or after it, Robin Stewart
would make sure that on Robin Stewart’s behalf, if on no other, Thady Boy Ballagh would suffer.

Gossip, bright-eyed and smiling, brought the news of this exchange to Lymond later in the afternoon and went away empty-handed. The final verdict on Robin Stewart he already knew. It meant that the affair of the Tour des Minimes and the spurious thefts were still attached to the name of Thady Boy Ballagh, and he was finding the evidence, despite his own formidable efforts, to be of a vaguely damning nature very hard to disprove. If this disquieted him, nothing of it showed to his companions of the afternoon. In the logis he shared with two others he received visitors and abstractedly exercised his charm.

There was nothing else he could do. In casting her pearls so casually before the enraged swine, the Dowager had not only risked his life. She herself made no further demands on his time; he was free, and in the absence of his afflicted tabard, in ordinary clothes. But so successfully had she marked him that he could safely go and see neither Abernaci, whom he had not met since his return, nor O’LiamRoe, whom he had last seen at Dieppe, until darkness fell.

Black Angers, from which all England was once ruled, was overflowing with the French Court and its outriders; with Scots, Irish, Italians and assorted Ambassadors, with officials, couriers, huntsmen, wagoners and other staff of the toiles, with experts on foraging and requisitioning, with prelates and physicians, with lawyers, archers and halberdiers, people’s servants, Gentlemen of the Household, musicians, pages, equerries, barbers, ushers, secretaries, hawkers, entertainers, prostitutes and officers of the college of arms. Among the throng, in a flattened way, were the Angevins themselves, making what profit they could out of the situation before the food supplies ran out and the Court passed from this grazing to the next.

It was a dark night, and the narrow streets, packed as they were, had only irregular lanterns: a discreet man who took care to avoid the liveried torch-bearing servants had every chance of escaping notice. Lymond arrived without incident at the small lodging where O’LiamRoe had taken a room; found the back door and a shutter which opened, and followed the sound of O’LiamRoe’s voice, discussing elephantine habits in Gaelic with another which was almost certainly that of Abernaci. Without knocking, Lymond opened the door and went in.

O’LiamRoe, who had only been filling time anyway, stopped abruptly in what he was saying; and Archie Abernethy, incognito out of turban and without his Oriental silks, split his dark, dry-seamed face in a grin. ‘I guessed you’d be here. Man,’ said Abernaci,
‘you’re looking a sight better set up than the last time I saw ye.… Yon was a lovely stroke at the pig.… It’s a case of finding proof against yon bastard of Aubigny, I take it?’

‘Yes. Well done, Archie. I wanted to see you. I’ll tell you why in a moment. Phelim—’

‘D’ye think,’ said Abernaci, who had something he wanted clear in his mind, ‘d’ye think he’d really try to harm her again? He would have to be wud.’

‘The smart answer to that,’ said Lymond patiently, ‘is that we are all mad. But in fact men who wreck whole ships and stampede elephants and destroy cavalcades of riders out of hand are probably less balanced than the rest. Lord d’Aubigny, if it hasn’t already struck you, is a slightly stupid man of exquisite culture who has been living for years off the fat of his ancestors’ reputations. Up until quite recently he assumed that being the King of France’s dear friend meant that you became a Marshal of France like Bernard, or Regent of Scotland as Stewart, Duke of Albany, did. When Henri took him out of prison on coming to the throne, d’Aubigny arrived fully primed for his role in history as the man behind, beside and very nearly on the throne of France. Instead, he found himself merely a foundation member of the Valois old compère society, the circle of dear old friends whom Henri had rescued from the displeasure of his father. And inside, in an exclusive circle around the King were his mistress, the Queen, the Constable the de Guises, St. André. Lord d’Aubigny wasn’t going to be the Great Man of Europe.’

‘So that after a bit he goes seeking a different throne to support.’ O’LiamRoe, his voice austere, tried a guess in spite of himself.

‘Of course. Lennox, his brother, had a claim to the Scottish throne and even to the English throne though his wife. Mary’s death would give Lennox at least a chance with the Scottish succession. And if the English King were to die, Catholicism would come back with his sister Mary—or even before, if there were a Catholic revival. The Lennox family are dear friends of Princess Mary Tudor. You can see—or at least d’Aubigny could see—a Lord Chancellorship waiting for the man who should put all this into motion by disposing of Mary of Scotland. He was going to make a new career of being brother to royalty—I shouldn’t be surprised if the original hint even came from the Earl of Lennox. So Lord d’Aubigny set out to sweep aside Mary of Scotland—of course; but also to teach a lesson to the French Court he was attempting to despise. He devised his murders like a masque … a poor, perverted vehicle for all the ingenuity of his fathers. And I think he will want to end Mary’s life with equal ceremony, now that he has the perfect theatre. I think he hopes to kill her during the English envoys’ visit, before brother Lennox’s very eyes. A triumph indeed.’