The Game of Kings

  There was a long pause. “Not very,” said Lymond rapidly. “Not at all, in fact.”

  He had lowered his arms very slowly. Ceasing to speak, he cupped his face momentarily, grimacing; then with a gesture of half-comic resignation slid like a trout through Sym’s grasp to the ground.

  And the odd thing was, as Scott bending sardonically over him discovered, that he really had fainted.

  * * *

  They had Maxwell’s permission to use the castle for one night, leaving for the capital next morning.

  In the privacy of Threave, once the prisoner had been battened down under triple guard, the chief actors expended their nervous excitement on each other. Christian, frustrated in her efforts to visit Lymond and irritated by Buccleuch’s wholesale damning of that gentleman’s anonymous ways, finally lost her temper completely and went off to bed. Scott fared little better.

  The question was one of naming his former colleagues. Accused of standing with one foot in each camp; of leaving the countryside at the mercy of leaderless cutthroats, of lack of responsibility and of owning a head full of pulp and pips like a Spanish orange, Scott replied in kind without a trace of exhaustion, and he and his father were still going at the subject hammer and tongs long after Hunter had collected his men and departed. Finally Buccleuch roared. “It’s a pity, since you’re so keen on them, ye didn’t stay with your precious friends!”

  Will, already on his feet, snatched up his cloak. “All right; I will!”

  “Ye kale-heided coddroch! They’ll cut ye in triangles if ye show your neb there after what you’ve done!”

  “Then I’ll go somewhere else!”

  “You’ll go somewhere else all right,” snarled Buccleuch, and rang the handbell as though he were twisting a cockerel’s neck. “You’ll spend the night where you can’t do any harm and where you’ll have every chance of comparing your dear old friends with your new ones—Fetch the captain.”

  Scott jumped to his feet, but Buccleuch’s heavy hand was on his sword arm. When the captain came, Wat alarmed him by continuing to shout. “Here’s another prisoner for you. I want him under lock and key for a night to clear the mud off his brain.”

  The captain was anxious to please, but unprepared. “I havena a fast room, Sir Wat. The dungeon’s blocked, and there’s only the cellar …”

  “That’s what I mean,” said Buccleuch vindictively. “Put him in the cellar.”

  The captain hesitated. “But the Master of Culter’s in the cellar.”

  “I know that, you fool!” said Buccleuch. “Put him with Lymond for a night, and let’s see if he’s hare, hound or rabbit, the fool.”

  Will Scott fought every plank of the way to the kitchen; he fought while they unbolted the heavy trap door in the floor, and he bit and kicked while they shoved him through it and halfway down the wooden steps which led to the cellar. Then the trap thudded shut above his head, the bolts clattered, and he was left alone with initium sapientiae and the Master of Culter.

  * * *

  There is nothing very jolly about being locked in a cellar with a man whom, in every possible sense, you have just stabbed in the back. As Will Scott crashed into the stair rail and heard the trap thud above him, his very thews melted with apprehension.

  The cellar had been used as a storeroom. Opposite, two barred windows near the ceiling imprisoned the night sky. There was a well in the shadows on his right, and a quantity of sacks, barrels and boxes. On two of these Lymond lay stretched at ease, a solitary candle at his side.

  Within the light, shapes and colours were sudden and strong: the butter-yellow head, impeccably neat, with a bag of meal under it; the fresh Hessian bandaging; the silver spark of burst points and the blue of the light cloth at shoulder and raised knee; at neck and cuff, the half inch of cambric glinting white. All that was unsightly had been removed from Lymond’s appearance.

  Looking for traces of the day’s humiliations or the languor of bodily weakness, Scott found neither. With the face of a Delia Robbia angel, Lymond spoke. “In a day of gimcrack cannibalism and snivelling atrocities, we have now touched rock bottom. God send,” pursued the voice as Scott, descending, made his way to a trestle by the well, “God send that somebody else is about to flay the gristle from your inestimable backbone.”

  Scott sat down. He had already had enough of physical violence. The other kind hung in the air, a raw miasma, sapping his robust and righteous anger. He said curtly, “You challenged me yourself.”

  “To attack me. Not to engineer a cheap death for Turkey Mat.”

  “It was his own fault. Father would have looked after him.”

  “Father would have had his work cut out, after your Jove-like pyrotechnics at the convent. Don’t fancy yourself the neo-Christ of Branxholm, by the way. You weren’t saving anybody. I’m used to being taken for a cross between Gilles de Rais and a sort of international exchange in young mammals, but I draw the line somewhere.”

  All the tormented emotion, the anger and fear and vexed and mauled spirit of the unfortunate Scott sprang affronted from his lips.

  “I can guess the kind of names you’d like to call me,” he said with cold fury. “I betrayed you to Andrew Hunter; I tricked you into hiding in the convent; I used a knife on you—badly; my God, how ineptly—but at least I made you wince in some sort, once, however briefly. When my father delivers you to the law, I’ll have paid the debts of the cheated dead and the warped living and the wrecked lives of four women.… Can you deny it? Am I not right?”

  “Right?” said Lymond. “You pathetic, maladroit nincompoop, you’re never right; but this time you can squat in your misconceptions like duck’s meat in a ditch, and let them choke you.”

  Scott, viciously, was on his feet. “Go on. Explain my own motives to me. Or if you won’t explain yourself, shall I try? Someone once said you hated women, and you do, don’t you? You despise everyone—even yourself—but above all you hold women cheap …”

  He got no further. “You bloody, insalubrious little fool,” said Lymond, and uncoiled like a whip, forcing Scott to retreat. “I’m not calling you names, my dear: I’m telling you facts. Today you murdered a friend of mine. You treat that very lightly. I hope his tolerance and his honesty and his infirmities break their way into your imagination and sphacelate in your insufferable vanity. That and another thing. To hell with your piddling vendetta: the bits you were bragging about never mattered, and the things that do matter you know nothing about. But what the hell,” said Lymond with fury, “what the hell do you mean by subjecting that girl to a public ordeal?”

  Scott was stunned. “It was you who—” but Lymond swept on. “If I could keep my mouth shut, surely you could take the trifling trouble to keep her out of the courtyard? You don’t care whom you sacrifice, do you, as long as you imagine it will damage me?”

  “I didn’t deceive her!”

  “Do you think I did her any harm!” exclaimed the Master. “But for your meddling she was perfectly secure!”

  “I remember,” said Scott. “You don’t like red hair.”

  The untamed face stared into his. “She was one of your four women, was she? Then it certainly seems that she lost security, reputation and peace of mind through one of us today. Who else?”

  “The Countess of Lennox.”

  “Lady Margaret was responsible for the fiasco at Heriot which nearly cost your father his life. Who else?”

  “Your brother’s wife.”

  “You know the truth of that as well as I do.”

  “Do I?” said Scott. “I was stinking drunk on the floor of your room at the time, as I remember.”

  “All right. I leave you to work out why, having seduced my sister-in-law and slaughtered my nephew, I should keep coy silence while you shuffle downstairs at three in the morning with that bantling-brained romantic done up in an oatsack?”

  For one dumb moment, Scott sympathized with the man who disgorged a sponge into water and found his throat cut. He recovered. “Becau
se you wanted rid of her, I expect. As with your young sister.”

  “As with my young sister,” agreed Lymond. Like the sun in eclipse, the candle at his back rimmed his unregenerate head; he held himself lightly and easily, the poised Roc pitying the elephant. “I should have warned you. I can wrestle with one arm as well as with two.”

  The light in Scott’s pale eyes was contemptuous. “It won’t be necessary. I know enough about you. I don’t want to know any more.”

  Lymond said delicately, “What are you afraid of?”

  “Me? Nothing!” exclaimed Scott. “If you want to fight, I’ll fight.”

  “But not with ideas? You’re beating drums and brass kettles, Scott. Thick skin and prejudice won’t keep the dragons away.”

  “I’m tired of a landscape with dragons,” said Scott violently.

  “What, then? Retreat underground into hebetude: retreat under water like a swallow: retreat into a shell like a mollusc: retreat into the firmament like some erroneous dew.…”

  “I don’t retreat.”

  “You don’t progress much, either.”

  “I scotch the dragons.”

  “And how,” said Lymond precisely, “do you know a dragon when you see it?”

  Despite every endeavour, Scott was trembling. He said, “Because I’m a human being, not a toy, a familiar, a piece of unconsecrated wax to malign your enemies with. I know you. I didn’t mean Turkey to die. I wouldn’t intentionally have hurt the girl, but it’s done, and if it had to be done again it would be worth it. You know all about the law of talion: you’ve hunted Harvey, poor devil, like a thing from beyond the grave. You’re a master—my God, don’t I know it—of the art of apposite punishment. I made damned sure you’d get a taste of both before you got out of my reach. You won’t get over the Border to kill Harvey now.”

  “Teaching you to speechify is another thing I should have my throat cut for,” said Lymond. “My appointment is broken; I may be said vaguely to be aware of that. Your intentions were majestic. To teach me to sing re, my fa, sol, and when I fail, to bob me on the noll. Only the field is now littered with other bobbed and blameless nolls and I am left, as it happens, singing ut to Johannes, which should delight you indeed. Why are you here?”

  There was a pause. Scott said nothing, and the blue eyes suddenly narrowed. “Is this, by any chance, a modest silence? Good God!” Lymond sat down. “Have you been protecting your former colleagues?”

  “I had no quarrel with them.”

  Continuing to stare at him, the Master gave a hoot of derisive laughter and sat back, nursing his injured arm. “My only success, and I was too damned preoccupied to watch it coming to the boil. Who locked you up here? Oh, your father, of course.”

  And, stretching like a cat, Lymond lay down. Mysteriously, the chill of animal danger had gone; mysteriously, there was an unwilling amusement about his mouth. “I have licked you like the cow Audhumbla from the salt of your atrocious upbringing, and am watching the outcome with a fearful joy.… Your father, as you no doubt realize, will have to argue himself into fits to get you accepted at Court again: you should tell him that the dispatches which you copied for me so resentfully in your own inimitable hand will do precisely that for you, mentioned in the right quarters. They are all in Arran’s possession. They got there, by the way, through a very wily gentleman called Patey Liddell, who should not be involved. He would in any case be deaf to questions—you’ve no idea how deaf.”

  There was a startled silence. Scott said, “Is that true?” And, quickly: “It’s a trick of some sort.”

  “It’s blackmail. I want something in return.”

  “What?”

  “Undo some of the feckless damage you did today,” said Lymond, and held his eyes. “Pull the girl clear. Drive it home to every gossiping fool that whatever Christian says, she didn’t know what she was doing when she gave me refuge. Conjure up Shamanism and the Black Mass if you like. Anything. But get it about that she was not responsible for her actions. Understand?”

  “I should do it in any case. It won’t help you,” said Scott.

  “Nothing ever does. That’s why I help myself so frequently.”

  There was another pause. “Those letters,” said the boy. “Much good they’ll do me when they find out we’ve been selling copies to England as well. In my writing.”

  “In that case it’s lucky for you that we haven’t.”

  “Haven’t traded with England? For God’s sake, I copied them myself!”

  “And for God’s sake, I tore them up.”

  “What!” Scott was halfway across to the other trestle when Lymond snapped at him. “Go back and lie down. I don’t want your coddled features singing Kassidas over me. What the hell does it matter? You’ve done your job.”

  Scott walked back. He sat on the edge of the boards and repeated: “You tore them up. If you tore them up, why did we trouble to capture them?”

  “For sixty avid reasons. Mercenaries are exceedingly mercenary, you know. And suspicious. Also, curiosity on my part.”

  “But you tore them up. Why?”

  “Because I’m on your side, you damned fool,” said Lymond.

  The cellar was very quiet. The Master’s face, closed, offered nothing to Scott’s strained scrutiny. After a moment the boy collected his own limbs and stretched back slowly on the bed. “That would be your story in Edinburgh, of course,” he said eventually. “Can you prove it?”

  There was a brief pause. “From here?” asked Lymond sardonically. “No, Mr. Scott. I have no proof now, nor am I likely to have.”

  Out of the dark and disastrous muddle, a fragment of pattern asserted itself. Scott swallowed. “Harvey? Harvey had something to do with it?”

  “I rather think so. Perhaps not. In any case, it’s too late now, isn’t it? Look at the stars.” Lymond’s eyes were on the high windows. “I offered them to you once before, on a celebrated occasion. Forth quenching go the starris, one by one; and now is left but Lucifer alone … And what can Lucifer do, with a bolt and a bar and over a hundred horseless miles between him and his illusions?—It’s a sad world, and the candle is going; so unless like Al-Mokanna you can cause moons to issue from our well, we are destined to sorry together in the dark. Good night. You’re a damned nuisance and a public danger, but so is your father. It’s a thrawnness in the vitals of the body politic which will either kill it or save it yet.”

  The voice was resigned, but not unfriendly. The light from the candle, a weak conspirator, searched the face of Scott’s celebrated prisoner, touching for a moment on its secretive ironies; and then went out.

  * * *

  Will Scott had been right in thinking that the Master of Maxwell would move not an inch to help a man of the notoriety of Lymond. Maxwell and his wife were at one of their lodges, hunting, when Hunter’s message arrived. Maxwell sent a congratulatory reply making Sir Andrew and Buccleuch free of his castle and its prisons until the following morning, and continued to hunt. He did, however, dispatch his wife home, as was fitting, to see that his guests, voluntary and involuntary, were comfortably housed.

  At eleven o’clock that night, Agnes Herries stalked into the hall at Threave, making a dozing Buccleuch jump like a rabbit over a somnolent game of prime; and demanded to know whether he was out of his senses, locking up his son with a desperate man like the Master.

  As was due to his hostess, he explained his reasons, succinctly. She questioned them. He explained, more fully. She contradicted him. At midnight Buccleuch, grousing, unbolted the trap door in the light of the torch held by Agnes Herries and called down. “Will! Are ye all right?”

  “Of course!” replied his son’s voice, rudely.

  “Then ye might as well come up,” said Sir Wat ungraciously, and abandoning the trap to Lady Herries, stumped off without waiting for the sight of his heir.

  Will Scott crossed the cellar stiffly. Lymond’s buried head did not stir. For a moment the boy stopped, looking down at him; then he turn
ed and ran quickly up the wooden staircase.

  At the top, the trap door was held open by Agnes Herries. Beyond her, he saw that three men still stood guard in the kitchen and passage, but that the guard had changed, and none of them was a Scott. He hesitated.

  “Gracious!” said Lady Herries. “After all the trouble I’ve taken to get you out, can you not walk a little quicker than that? I want to go to bed.” Her eyes under the heavy brows met his with a vigorous impatience, and as the young man set foot on the kitchen floor she dropped the trap with a thud that shook the pans on their shelves, and the bolts rattled. She straightened. “Well?”

  “All right,” said Scott, making up his mind, rather to his own surprise. “I’m half asleep, that’s all. I’m sorry. Lead on. It was very good of you to …”

  And in ten minutes he was in bed, although it was a long time before he fell asleep.

  * * *

  Long before he woke, Christian Stewart left the castle with her retinue, riding as fast as Sym would allow her. It had taken her a good part of the night to accept the fact that she must leave; and Buccleuch, who had no liking for playing the jailer or the spy, was relieved to see her go.

  At six o’clock, a fist crashed on Scott’s door, and a roar summoned him to fling on a robe and meet his father in the hall. He did so, and found a room full of cowed servitors, his hostess in a state of fluent resignation, and his father in a temper.

  “Ho!” said Buccleuch, when his son appeared. “Ho! So it’s come to it that ye canny even snib a bolt behind ye, now. Or didn’t ye mean to snib it?”

  With his new arts, Will Scott kept surmise and recollection out of his face. “What bolt?”

  “What bolt!” snarled Sir Wat. “The wee snib on the back yett to the kennels. The trap door in the kitchen, ye gomerel. They found it this morning, as free as Hosea’s wife, and yon three stookies littered in the passages with their heads dunted.”

  Scott’s mouth opened. “Then Lymond’s gone?”

  His sire was sarcastic. “Well, he didna pop out of the hole, bash three fellows on the head and pop back in again, just for the devil of it. Of course he’s gone! There’s half Threave out hunting him, but deil knows the start he’s got. And it’s your fault, ye damned fool!”