“You, Richard, third Baron Crawford of Culter, laying your right hand upon this Book, must swear the truth of your complaint in all its points, from the first to the last charge in it, and that it is your intent to prove the contents to be true, so aid you God.”
“So aid me God.”
Culter’s voice was steady. Erskine proffered the book again. “Richard Crawford, third Baron Culter, laying your hand on the Book this second time, you must swear that you stand no otherwise appointed than by me, with a rapier and a dagger; that you have not any other pointed instrument or engine, small or great; no stone or herb of virtue, no charm, experiment or other enchantment by whose power you believe you may the easier overcome your adversary who here shall oppose you in his defence; and that you trust not in anything more than in God, your body, and the merits of your quarrel; so God you help.”
Richard’s voice, quietly taking the oath, and the pad of his stockinged feet as he stepped back broke the silence. There was a tightening of the figure by the window and Erskine’s even voice, slightly raised.
“Francis Crawford of Lymond, Master of Culter,” After the briefest hesitation, the man came to him. “Laying your right hand on this Book …”
Erskine’s eyes this time were intent. He read the oath still with his voice a little raised, like a challenge. At the words, “So aid me God,” repeated without emphasis, a ripple of comment made itself heard in the quiet room. Erskine ignored it. “Lord Culter. Please come forward.”
Richard moved this time after a distinct pause and took his place before Erskine at his brother’s side. Erskine captured his eyes and held them. “Take ye each other by the right hand, laying the left on the Book.”
“He won’t. Damned if I blame him,” said the man next to Gideon. Richard was grinning. “I have no right hand, Mr. Erskine.”
His temporary Constable neither argued nor pleaded. He simply observed, “I have the power to make that true, as you should know. Face your opponent and take him by the right hand.”
It was Lymond who made the move. Richard touched the proffered hand with the tips of his fingers, his left hand on the book between them so that their joined arms made the required cross, and his eyes were anarchists in the community of his hands. “I charge you,” began Erskine solemnly:
“I charge you by your faith and your right hand, which is enclosed in the hand of your adversary, that you use your power and make use of all advantages to make good your appeal, to force him to a rendering of himself unto your hands, or with your own hand to kill him before you part from this room, and so God you help.”
They swore, and the blades were lifted from the table: the thin tempered rapiers with steel quillons and counterguard; the daggers with their thick, double-edged blades, twelve inches long. Richard received his weapons: sword for the right hand and dagger for the left; and then Lymond. The Gospel was removed; the table taken away. Erskine, his eyes travelling over every face, Scots and English, gave the familiar address.
“We charge and command every man that he approach not nor that he speak, make any noise, give any sign nor by his countenance or otherwise direct either of these parties to take any advantages the one upon the other, upon pain of life and member.”
He paused, looking up at the brilliant windows and Kate’s bright chestnuts beyond. A goose, frowning, marched across the grass. Inside, the sun prinked and patterned the floor, aureoled the two white-shirted men, standing widely separated, and fell upon itself, reflected in the steel, with redoubled kisses.
“The day is far passed,” said Erskine, making the herald’s formal pronouncement. “Let them go, let them go, to do their endeavour.”
To do his endeavour, Lymond waited in the hall of Flaw Valleys, a slender, feral figure, limbs relaxed, eyes wide awake and steel in either scarred hand; and watched his brother advance. “Quicker, Richard. We’re meant to explode into action.” The voice was ribald.
Face to face with him, Lord Culter answered softly. “There’s no hurry.” And there was a flicker of movement and a click, as Lymond parried, sliding sideways to miss the twinkle of the short blade. Richard waited. He was indeed in no hurry.
“Since we are here,” said Lymond conversationally, “why not pronounce something appropriate? ‘Eh bien, dansez maintenant’? Or, ‘We came both out of one womb: so shall we lie both in one pit’? And there’s ‘Brother, whi art thou so to me in ire?’—the killing of Abel, my dear: a mine of suitable commentary.… Come along,” said the playful, savage voice. “Let us fight with sugar in our mouths like the litigating tailors of V—” And he ducked.
“Oh, no. No, no, no,” said Lymond. “Nature works in the … shortest way possible. If you really want to reach my guts …”
The sun was on his face. “I do,” said Richard. “But not immediately.” And this time he thrust, traversed and lunged again, the dagger poised and intent, waiting for Lymond to duck out of the sunlight.
He did exactly that. Richard, smiling faintly, whipped up his left arm and halted, blinded in the act by the light from his brother’s blade. “… try lunging in a straight line,” ended Lymond, serene and safe. “Useful thing, sunlight. Play up, master swordman. You’re rolling about like a pear in a pottle.” They drifted apart again.
His intention was obvious. Gideon was not inspired to laugh, but some of his men were, and he saw that Culter was aware of it. Lymond was of course behaving atrociously: he seemed prepared to make any sort of fool of himself rather than allow his brother near. Culter, by no means playing seriously himself as yet, was testing the other man’s strength, or trying to. The Master eddied around the floor, talking.
If Richard had meant to make his power felt gradually, he was forced to drop the idea. Unless he was to be a laughingstock, he must force Lymond to fight; and his brother, as well as Erskine and Gideon and the waiting men, read the sudden purpose in his face. But Lymond got in first.
“Bloodthirsty, Richard?” he asked. “Husband your humours. Think of the fair ones at home. His heart was light as leaf on tree, when that he thought on his—”
It was one quotation he never did finish. There was a growl from Richard, an unconscious yelp from the spectators, and the fighting had begun in earnest.
In all the length of the bare room, no one spoke. The long blades exploded together, cracked, chimed and clattered; the stockinged feet slid and shuffled and the two men breathed in gasps, quickly, traversing and gyrating, slipping in and out of sword-length, each in a cocoon of whirring light. A blizzard of suns on walls and ceiling enclosed them.
Culter was a master, worth seeing on any terms: worth seeing even when wrought up with anger. His brain directed; his eyes and feet, shoulders and wrists answered, and the result was sure and powerful swordplay. Lymond said once, in a breathless voice curiously close to laughter, “He’s twice the size of common men, wi’ thewes and sinewes strong,” and then retired into silence. The daggers, sparkling over and under the swords, darted like serpents.
Within the first three minutes Richard’s sword touched his brother’s shoulder. Gideon, with the rest, said “Oh!” and then smiled. There was no harm done: the shoulder was already protected by the old bandage of Scott’s thrust. The lids veiled Lymond’s eyes as they disengaged. “Reaping the eddish. Try the other side next time.”
There was no next time. They fought themselves across, to and against the ropes on the Master’s side, the watching men pressing back against the wall; and then slowly moved back to the centre. Culter was attacking fast and brutally and his brother was displaying, one after the other, every trick at his command in a prodigious effort to defend himself.
He succeeded at the cost of being whipped forward and then back again across the floor, his parrying arm taking again and again the jar of the meeting blades. He showed surprising mastery with the dagger hand, and his excellence with that was something Richard clearly had to allow for consistently: again and again it baulked his follow-through and his feint.
&
nbsp; The cost to both men was a growing tiredness, magnified by the long chase and by the emotional battle upstairs. After his first violence Richard’s speed dropped, but he fought like a textbook, missing nothing and giving nothing away. Lymond, his shirt soaked with perspiration, recoiled incessantly.
Ten minutes later, they were still fighting, and the watching room was quite silent. At Gideon’s elbow, Tom Erskine said suddenly, “I tell you: no man has ever stood against Culter’s sword for so long.”
There was trouble in Somerville’s eyes. “I could have warned him,” he said.
Erskine’s breath hissed. “If one of them isn’t fighting, I shall stop it.”
“It won’t be necessary,” said Gideon quietly. “I think Lord Culter has realized.”
It was true. Fighting against a sword so weak as to be incapable of riposte or counterthrust or attack of any sort, he had still failed to penetrate Lymond’s guard. With grim fortitude, Richard put a monstrous theory to the test. In the middle of an imbroccata he dropped his left hand, exposing his whole flank momentarily to Lymond’s right blade.
Lymond parried and withdrew, the blue eyes quite impersonal.
Lord Culter disengaged. He did more: he drew back his arm and hurled his sword quivering on the floor, his eyes bitter as squill. “Damn you to hell. You’re not fighting?”
A man’s voice called through the silence of the room. “He’s escaped!” Lymond, breathing quickly, stood without speaking.
“I’m to be your buffoon here, as everywhere else.…”
The shouting voice was nearer. It said, “Mr. Erskine, sir! The black fellow: he’s got a horse and escaped!”
Richard didn’t even pause. “You bloody-minded little vampire—how in God’s name can I hurt you enough?”
Lymond said briefly, “Don’t underrate yourself.… Erskine: if Acheson has got loose, he’ll go to Hexham. Do you know it?”
“No, but don’t worry,” said Erskine grimly. “We’ll get him before he arrives there. Richard—”
“Do what you like. I’ve business to finish here,” said Culter.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Richard,” said Lymond harshly. “Erskine: I can take you straight to where that man is going. How the hell do you expect to stop him otherwise, if you don’t know the road? Give me a horse and all the escort you like but be quick about it. I don’t give a damn who you think carried the dispatch, but Acheson knows its contents.”
Calmly Richard, picking up his sword, moved between his brother and the door. “You won’t wriggle out of it that way.”
“Richard—”
“Don’t be a fool. He’ll lead you straight to Lord Grey.”
“Then it’s a risk we must take,” said Erskine steadily. “He’s right, Culter. Let him go.”
“Not until we have finished this.”
Erskine was trying desperately hard to keep his temper. “Listen. If that message gets through …”
Richard rounded on him. “Are you relying on Lymond to stop it? Then you’re a simpleton. Go if you want to. I’m not holding you back. But you’re not taking him: I’ll kill the first man who comes near him.” And he turned, his eyes sparkling in his white face, to his brother.
“You were too superior to attack? Then you can damned well attack now.” His sword was in his hand, a fine instrument of latent death, sparkling largo to larghetto with his dagger. “The way to that door is through me. Take it, brother, if you can.”
There was a pause. Erskine said sharply, “Hob, Jamie: take your horses and try and pick up the tracks. We’ll follow as soon as we can.”
Lymond stirred. Sleek, cold, finely polished as his own steel, there was an air about him now that none of them had ever seen. “Very well,” said the voice that sixty outlaws had known. “Since you offer, I’ll take it.”
And he moved in straight to the attack.
It was as if some flawed and clouded screen had slid from the air, leaving it thin and bright; informing the white figures and pale heads, fair and brown, with an engraver’s beauty of exact and flexible outline, and lending a weightlessness and authority to their art.
For the brothers were natural swordsmen. The slipping and tapping of the fine blades, the unfurling movements growing smokelike one within the other, showed no trace of the grim and gritty striving of a moment before. It was classic swordplay, precious as a jewel, beyond any sort of price to the men watching, and concealing in its graces an exquisite and esoteric death.
They had always known Richard for a master. They now saw Crawford of Lymond grow before their eyes, the tutored power entering behind the elegance, the shoulders straight, the wrists of the temper which had withstood all the force of Richard’s long aggression and which now adventured, strong and pliant, with every trained sinew in his body.
To the two men, existence was in the end the flicker of the other man’s steel; his brown arms and wrists; a blur of white shirt and white face and the live, directing brain betraying itself through grey eyes or blue. The men watching, unable to breathe, heard the click and clash and slither of contes, froissées, beating and binding: saw first one man and then the other bring his art to the pitch of freeing his blade for the ultimate perfection, only to bow before the other’s defence.
Lymond fought consistently within measure, intensely fast, with an attacking dagger: Erskine, his heart frozen by his eyes, saw him beating constantly on Richard’s blade, moving it out of his way; out of fine; pressing it down and opening the way for a lunge.
Tap, tap went the compound riposte, the soft feet slithered—and then Richard’s blade moved, Lymond’s right arm whipped stiff, and the flat of his blade adhered to the flat of his opponent’s. There was a glottal whine. The point, glittering, slithered down and down to Culter’s counterguard until Richard, with all his compact strength, wrenched it free, slipping and flicking aside the automatic flight of his brother’s dagger. He moved forward himself, and attacked.
He was possessed by one instinct: to wipe out the insult of the last twenty minutes. In this soil there flowered a strength which lapsed sometimes, but never seriously, and which gained leisure, more and more often, to answer the astonishments of Lymond’s attack. For here, perhaps for the first time in his life, Lymond also was stretched to the limit, his breathing raucous, his concentration a tangible and frightening thing.
Very soon after Richard, he made his error. He was at the end of a thrust, his right arm rigid and his bright point nearly level, when Culter caught the blade flat with his own, pressing on the steel and then dropping his own point.
Circling his brother’s blade, Richard’s sword adhered to it gratingly, the forte of his foil acting on the foible of Lymond’s; and the intent blue eyes narrowed. This was the first step toward disarming and the Master knew it. His attention was for a second wholly concentrated on disengaging from the danger point and Richard with a single movement, took his slender chance.
He gave way suddenly with his right hand, moved quickly with his left and then with his supporting rapier; and trapping Lymond’s dagger, whipped it from his hand to the floor.
With an answering, animal-like twist the Master leaped back out of close range, the sweat running down his face and into the hollow above the collarbone, and covered himself with his single blade against the unleashed power of Richard’s following attack.
The force of it drove Lymond the full length of the room; that, and the need to keep out of measure, out of the range of Richard’s left hand. Corps à corps fighting was death to the Master now. Richard knew it and rose to his full, triumphant stature as a swordsman, the blades in his hands swooping like the many scythes of Chronos, driving the other diagonally back, into the rope and into the corner of the rectangle.
There was, throughout the room, the soft hiss of an intaken breath. Somerville, unconsciously looking away, found the palms of his hands were wet. Lymond, his back to the rope, allowed himself one fleeting glance to his side. As the skilled, tempted blade rushed toward him
he dropped like a stone, left palm to the ground in a perfect stop thrust. Richard overshot, stumbled and whipped around: Lymond was already rising, his recovered dagger in his hand.
Lord Culter was shaken. Like his brother, he was breathing in retching gasps, his hair soaked, his wrists numb with the vibration of the blows. There was, for the first time, a moment of loose play. The men about them sighed, as if in an hour’s suffocation they had purchased a little precious air, and Richard’s eyes kept for a moment their look of bewilderment and appraisal. Then his head came up; beneath the thin shirt his muscles spoke a fresh conviction, and he turned on the fair, fastidious presence of his brother with a mighty and flagellant hand.
Lymond had recovered no such resurgence of energy. He was tired, the shadow of it dragging at his brilliance; but he fought like a fiend when Culter sought to drive him again across the length of the room. Somerville, watching, saw that he was fully aware of the ropes behind; of the small traps devised for him. But what he should fear and did not was the long wall of windows with their hard girdle of seats, and below them, the rough opened pack from which Erskine had taken the damning letter betraying the Queen.
Richard was aware of it; had had it burning behind the grey eyes for five long minutes; was beyond now considering the laws of the sword and the shallow lessons of courtesy and fair play. He drove Lymond like wind whipped by rain back from the ropes, back across the room, back to the windows, and finally back across the soft, shadowed litter of the pack.
Lymond stepped back into the trap. The cloth caught him; he stumbled, and Richard, with all the power of his shoulder, brought three feet of accurate death to cleave the fair, unsettled head.