Queens' Play by Dorothy Dunnett
O’LiamRoe turned and saw it too. He saw two packets spin from the burning galley, followed by Lymond himself, moving swiftly, passing from ship to ship calling. What he said was not audible to O’LiamRoe, but he saw Francis Crawford raise his knife so that the wreathed sun shone on the blade, and throw it accurately and fast into Abernaci’s outstretched hand. The mahout gripped it and slashed.
The cord tied to Hughie’s harness sank, free. At the same moment Abernaci’s voice, in Gaelic, roared ‘Hold tight!’ and followed with something else bellowed in Urdu. The elephant turned beneath O’LiamRoe’s knees and ducking, started to swim.
Green water hit the Irishman like a scarf across mouth and teeth. Cramped fingers knotted hard in the leather, he hung on, deaf and blinded; it seemed that every box and tube in his guts was stretched and swollen with water, such was the pain. Then he broke surface, took a great, foaming mouthful of air, and saw Lymond reach the foremost boat and dive. He saw, too, Abernaci throw his wiry body kicking along the water, the cut rope fast in his fist. The mahout swam till he saw the boats veer, clear of O’LiamRoe, clear of Hughie, moving away from the rising wet head of Lymond; then he dropped the rope, took a deep breath and dived.
Before he dived like the murdered Hugh of Lincoln, he yelled. O’LiamRoe heard the call, but Hughie understood it. He squealed once, good-humouredly, because as he knew it, this was moderately good sport; and rolling flat over sank, taking O’LiamRoe with him, just as the four boats blew up—squibs, fusillades, gunpowder and all.
Take ye and bear this Collar, with the image of the most glorious Martyr St. George, Patron of this Order, about your neck, by the help whereof you may the better pass through both the prosperity and adversity of this world …’
The Collar shone round Henri’s shoulders, the twenty-six Garters with their white and red roses and the Great George blazing below. Northampton, faultless to the end, had congratulated the Stranger in the name of Edward and all the Knights Companion, and had delivered the black velvet cap, diamonds winking at the base of the plume, and the Book of the Statutes in its red velvet cover … ‘non temporariae modo militae gloriam, sed et perennis victoriae palmam denique recipere valeas. Amen.’
Amen. The trumpets had piped faintingly out, everyone had bowed, and there was the guarded ruffling of a gathering, stiff, thirsty, and overclad, which had a Solemn Mass to get through before food.
Sensibly, no one began to orate. Henri, smiling, summoned both Northampton and Garter to his side and addressed them courteously; in a moment, Mason and Pickering also went. Behind, someone had opened the doors. There was an attentive rustling among the Archers, among the servants and the gentlemen with axes. The Constable, with an eye on the sun, guessed that they had kept well up to time. He caught Stewart of Aubigny’s eye, returning from the same survey, and knew a moment’s unease, allied to a kind of defiant unconcern. Let the Gods, Popish, Classical or Reformed, take care of it. Warwick was no fool; Warwick had included Lennox and his royal wife in this Embassy just in case of accidents, and would slough them as fast as the de Guise woman had put down that fellow, should the occasion arise.
And France in his view should do the same. There was nothing in Ireland for France: let England pour her own money down that open drain. And let England think France her ally.… What could the Emperor do against both?
The King was talking a little too long. Pasque-Dieu, that fellow d’Aubigny looked green. Something was afoot, then. Montmorency, observing with small eyes, caught the Duke de Guise’s limpid gaze and sustained it warily, for a long moment.
With a sweet and tintinnabulant crash, every window in the room cracked and blew in. The great boom which had followed the crash split into a chain of detonations, ranting like brother cannon breaching a town. Round the crackling centre of sound rose its echo, a great, sonorous wall of air which seemed to seep in through the shattered glass and fill all the stuffed room.
As puppets, every plumed head jerked round. Alone, among every pinched and startled countenance, the handsome face of Lord d’Aubigny looked at ease.
The Constable, absorbing the sense of the room in one glance, noted it and sighed. The clamour broke; it sounded like a boxful of geese. Deep in the heart of it, he heard the King’s voice.
Not unpleasurably, Anne de Montmorency heaved another sigh.
The noyade was over. Queen Mary of Scotland, presumably, was dead. His wife had dressed her dolls. A pretty child, last of her race, born within days of her royal father’s death. The Constable was fond of children; he had seven daughters although, of course, now all grown up.
Thinking hard, he moved forward and took his King by the arm. ‘Some accident, Sire, which should not be allowed to discommode our friends. With your permission, I shall send to find the cause while we proceed to Chapel as planned.’
‘John Stewart will go,’ said the King. For a second only, the Constable hesitated; he saw the Duke de Guise’s eyes narrow like his own. Then—‘As you desire, Monseigneur,’ he said.
The wall of shock, moving through the turmoil of water, saved O’LiamRoe’s life. Turning even the great elephant back to belly, it lifted Phelim and wheeled him like a dolphin into the air, air scarcely less dangerous with falling wood and flaming fabric, with random fire shells and lights white and coloured, and in the midst, the white coalesced furnace of what had been four ships, blustering and hissing, hammering like a molten mallet on the jerking black waves.
Far away, an untouched boat was reaching the shore, an untouched royal head in the bows. Nearer, a raftful of prone musicians trotted and leaped with the water as they lay, eyes squeezed tight, heads helmed with pocked lute and snake-gutted viol.
Nearer still, converging towards him through the splashing water, their heads rimmed with light from the conflagration, were Lymond and Archie Abernethy, swimming matched side by side. Hands gripped his arms, a naked shoulder bore him into the air, and as Abernaci, smiling, slipped past, calling to the rearing waterfall of trumpeting anger which was Hughie, Francis Crawford held O’LiamRoe, vomiting water, firmly under his arms and set off with him to the shore; set off shearing through the smacking water like a honed blade as the feux de joie danced and sparkled, pink and blue and gold under the pall of black smoke between themselves and the sun; and crooning under his breath into O’LiamRoe’s blocked red ears.
And he did not need, after all, to swim all the way. O’LiamRoe, emerging from his stupor, found himself brought to a little rowing barge, one of those Lymond had cut free, rocking gently on its own with two pairs of oars for cargo. In a moment more he was amidships, with the shafts in his soft hands, trying to match Lymond’s unthinking, professional pull. The boat bucketed over the settling waves, making straight for the menagerie. Abernaci and the elephant, he noticed, were already halfway there.
Lymond was singing:
‘Un myrte je dédierai
Dessus les rives de Loire
Et sur l’ecorce écrirai
Ces quatre vers à ta gloire.…’
O’LiamRoe, for the first time in what seemed like hours, essayed human speech. A quack burst from him, with a good deal of spit. He hiccoughed, his green face returning to pink-. The intrusive C,’ said Lymond’s voice like a lilt over his shoulder. ‘Did the Slieve Bloom and your sitting-skins seem dear to you just now?’
Over his shoulder, half choked, ‘Last night, they seemed dear to me,’ said O’LiamRoe.
The abandoned voice behind him, speaking beat for beat with the rowlocks, altered arbitrarily in timbre. ‘I dreamed,’ said Lymond, ‘that … Cormac O’Connor was alone.’
‘He is,’ said O’LiamRoe, his eyes on the festival of lights. ‘And the woman Oonagh O’Dwyer, she is alone also.’
For a moment, the boat glided in silence. Then—‘We are two pedants, Phelim, guarding the moon from wolves. But better—I suppose better—than electing to be of the moon, or of the wolves.’
They had pulled out of the smoke. The sun struck them, cosy as an
‘What now?’ said O’LiamRoe suddenly, catching something of the power and gaiety struck from the pure light and the mood of the man sitting behind him. ‘The menagerie?’
‘Certainly the menagerie,’ said Lymond. ‘Where are your ears? The menagerie, where Artus Cholet has been trying to escape from a fat Rouen sculptor ever since you began to swallow the King of France’s new pond.’
VI
Châteaubriant: Satin and Scarlet
In the distraint of a chained dog, let a stick be placed across his dog-trough and a prohibition made that he be not fed; if he is fed after this, there shall a man trespass upon him.
As to the distraint of a poet: let his horsewhip be taken up, and a warning given that he is not to make use of it until he cede justice to thee.
Satin and scarlet are for the son of the King of Erin, and silver on his scabbards, and brass rings upon his hurling-sticks. The son of the chief is to have all his clothes coloured, and is to wear clothes of two colours every day, each of them better than the other.
SCANDAL, outrage and unauthorized bedlam were the comforts of Michel Hérisson’s gouty years.
When the three arrows arched flaming into the centre of the pond and the water filled like Palissy’s crayfish with swimming forms, when the workmen and the men at arms and all the openmouthed spectators stood limply gazing after Lymond’s vigorous head, or else scrambled with filled helmets to the flaming stand, Michel Hérisson hopped and hobbled and finally hurtled, forgetting his gout altogether, after the thickset scampering form of Artus Cholet.
Gingerbeard, to begin with, did not see him. Gingerbeard flashed down the far side of the stand like a lizard and set off, twisting and dodging, round the end of the lake where the stacked baubles and accoutrements for that evening’s pageant offered unusual cover. Past the chariots and the plaster gods lay the way to the menagerie; beyond the menagerie was the edge of the forest and freedom.
Artus Cholet ran, head down, round the wreathed wheels, past the gilded lamps for the Satyrs, into and out of a grove of grey deities. A Jupiter rocked and Hérisson, heaving his knotty bulk on to a cart-shaft, roared from his vantage point: ‘Aye, shoogle, ye pie-maker’s huddle of ooze, take to the skies! Ye’d best get back to the Nymphaeum, for by God, ye havena the tibias for a socle on earth!’
And as the maligned King of Heaven fell with a crash, disclosing the black head and ginger beard arrested popeyed behind, the sculptor let loose a bellow that roused all the keepers, and leaped from the cart. ‘To me! To me!’
A cage of doves crashed, and a frightened turtle, wings ajar, clung to his chest. He clutched it. ‘A sign! Noah, we are saved! To me! To me!’
In the distance, a lion roared. ‘Ah, puss!’ said Michel Hérisson, running like a hare, hearing ahead of him the frantic crash of Cholet’s escape and beyond that the first questioning calls of Tosh and Pellaquin and all Abernaci’s subtle crew. ‘Sing. Sing like one of Hero’s own birds piping out of a siphon. I have a naughty man here, meet to be skewered.’ And laughing like a fool at his own doubtful wit, he plunged after Artus Cholet past the first of the cages.
His broad back was the first thing O’LiamRoe saw when, already half-dried with the sun and exertion, he and Francis Crawford reached the shore. It was the first thing Abernaci saw as, comfortable on Hughie’s mighty back as a lotus erect on its pad, he bade Hughie drink his fill and bless Michel’s cotton poll with his trunk.
By then, the noise was prodigious. The explosion had rocked the menagerie, already distraught with scampering men. Among the loose animals, the Keeper’s sick camel, a lady of brittle temper, had bobbed her tassels and sunk her yellow teeth three times into unguarded flesh; the dwarf ass brayed itself hoarse and the lion cubs, dear to Abernaci’s heart, had shambled off, humping their fat, sandy rumps, to feast among the spilled milk in the wrecked kitchens.
Amongst it all Cholet ran, no longer the compact bully, the master-gunner, the man who had snored last night in Berthe’s hot bed. Trapped in a labyrinth of tent, cage and pavilion, of sudden foot-encumbering messes of food and straw, of alleys which ejected liveried men with pitchforks, black men with horsewhips, bears, drunk on rice and reeds and primed for the arena; distraught with chained leopards whose leap checked a yard from his face, by stones accurately thrown by caged apes, by the roaring bulls and trampling, screeching elephants, by the whorls of black smoke and impossible blossoming of fire and squibs and fire darts and bombards booming, cracking and detonating in the quiet lake behind him, Artus Cholet finally came to the most wilful challenge to his resources. He came face to face with a lion.
It was a very large lion, shaved to a tawny velvet, tail to ruff. The frenzied mane, fit for a Cardinal or a Chancellor and thick with gold dust, framed a blunt tulip muzzle, a seamed mouth and two pale golden eyeballs. The mouth opened, showing the pink ridges of arch and palate; the lion roared.
There was a cage at his elbow. His wet hands slipping on the metal, Cholet jumped for it and started to climb. As he struggled upwards, he could see that the stinking little alleyways of box and cage immediately around him were empty. Further afield, he discovered the reason: the menagerie itself was surrounded. Someone had organized the frolic and dispersed the volunteers; and a ring of men, keepers, mahouts, waterboys, was moving inwards quickly, the bright sun on their weapons. Nearer still was the white head of the big man who had chased him, and not far from that the turbaned head of the Keeper. Two others, fair and auburn, followed.
Over his shoulder, Michel Hérisson, avidly following every development, was addressing Lymond as he stalked forward, breathing hard, his white hair blush-pink at the roots. ‘Ha! Ye can swim like a blue-bellied viper, but what have ye done about Robin Stewart?’
His drying hair lifted about his head, someone’s short sword ready in his hand, Lymond was not responsive. ‘Left him to go his own gait for five minutes.… Christ, Michel, my leisure in the last half hour has been a little circumscribed. What does it matter? Cholet’s as good as caught in the act. D’Aubigny can’t make Stewart take the blame now, can’t do anything against Beck’s testimony, and Cholet’s, as well as Piedar Dooly’s account of what Stewart told him. Lord d’Aubigny’s guilt is clear.’
Michel Hérisson, a spear in his horny hand, dropped suddenly back. ‘But Stewart doesn’t know that. He summoned you, and you didn’t come. In Stewart’s terms, that means a knife in your back. If you don’t want three Queens mourning their darling boy, my advice would be—go and find him first, fast.’
On his other side, O’LiamRoe’s damp head unexpectedly turned. ‘There’s truth in that. He’s a queer, violent fellow, Francis; and he’s rightly vexed. You’d look the world’s fool if you or your precious Queen had a little accident in that quarter now.’
‘All right, give me a jacket,’ said Lymond. ‘Since you’re all so damned glib … I was going, naturally, as soon as we have Cholet; but not naked, for preference.’
He was pulling on Michel’s elephant-drenched taffeta when the lion roared. The mouth of Abernaci, stump-toothed in his sun-blackened face, unclasped in a charming smile of pure pleasure. ‘Per Dinci, it’s Betsy,’ he said. ‘Betsy, ma doo! Betsy, ma cabbage! Do you have him, Betsy, love?’
Artus Cholet, three-quarters way up the chimpanzees’ cage, and pinned there forever by two hairy hands tight on his buttons, saw the little turbaned figure dance into the alley, saw the lion at his heels turn its great head, and saw the Keeper walk up and scratch it cheerfully under the ear. The lion purred. ‘Ma bonny wee flower,’ the Indian said. ‘Hae ye a buss for your auld mither today?’ There was a sound of a dreadful embrace.
‘My God,’ said Lymond, halting with Hérisson and O’LiamRoe at his side. ‘Mother and daughter.’
‘Eh, tiens—and there’s Cholet like a side of beef on the cage there. Hi!’ Hérisson, pleased, waved his arms to attract his victim’s
At its foot, Michel Hérisson spread himself in luxurious stance, arms folded, head back, eyes surveying the multiplying audience and finishing, at last, on Lymond’s calm face. For a moment, under the splendid hair, the florid brow creased. ‘With the compliments of … the Hérisson family,’ he said.
Round him, his friends were silent. Above him, squat against the dying pall from the lake, Artus Cholet stared speechlessly at his fate. He had nowhere to run to; he could make nothing worthy now but sport; but unreasoning, nevertheless, he twisted suddenly and made to run. And silent through the noise of the square came a shaft of grey feathers which said that he would not run anywhere, any more.
The arrow, shot from beyond all the crowding heads of keepers and friends, took Cholet full in the throat. He turned, bent like a withy, and fell; and the monkeys clawed at his buttons in passing. Then, like a dam, the space between the cages was filled with white and silver, girded with steel. It poured amongst the livery, the wet and turbaned heads, turning them aside; it cleared a path sheer to the little group around Cholet’s dead body and surrounded it. Then practised hands fell like levers on Lymond’s damp arms, wrenched the sword from his grasp, gripped him neck and body and turned him, held fast, to face the oncoming flood. The sun glittered on white plumes and on drawn steel, and on the silver-gilt crescents of the Archers of the Royal Guard, still now, filling all the paths, crushing out the royal livery of the menagerie and leaving just room enough for their lieutenant to come forward together with a Gentleman of the King’s Household; broad, handsome, his fine dress immaculate, his face set like lard. ‘In the name of the King,’ said John Stewart of Aubigny, his voice pleasant, his bearing that of a temple god condescending to a ragged recalcitrant. ‘The King whose despicable prisoner you are … Return to your cell to await his good justice.’