The Game of Kings (The Lymond Chronicles, #1)

by Dorothy Dunnett

Burn us into red and white rose trees. Make sweet cinders of our bloody gold. Exercise this pitiful, feckless piety you’ve discovered and reap your own trashy reward. Why the melodrama, I don’t know. If you were determined to trap me, it seems a fairly simple thing to do without the busking. If you want the satisfaction of a discussion, you won’t get it. Make your decisions, such as they are: you’re in command. I have nothing to say to you.”

“You bloody, insalubrious little fool,” said Lymond, and uncoiled like a whip,

“I’m not calling you names, my dear: I’m telling you facts.

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 ...

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.”

Tweed, throwing pebbles idly into the reaming waters. It was a restful, a delicious scene. Plump clouds like amoretti hung in a blue sky; shining rooks cawed from among shining leaves and an otter with a half-eaten fish shivered the bog orchis with his shoulder as he passed.

“I wish to God,” said Gideon with mild exasperation, “that you’d talk—just once—in prose like other people.”

That’s French diplomacy.

Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative, of imagination. They’re the curse of marriage and the after-bane of death.”

“Lute and harpsichord?” he said. “That’s pretty erudite of you.”

“Versatility is one of the few human traits which are universally intolerable. You may be good at Greek and good at painting and be popular. You may be good at Greek and good at sport, and be wildly popular. But try all three and you’re a mountebank. Nothing arouses suspicion quicker than genuine, all-round proficiency.”

stultified talent is surely the ultimate crime against mankind.

important, self-imposed embargoes, was against my sister….For God’s sake,” said Lymond, “don’t speak.”

“You can assume,” said Lymond, stirred at last into straight speaking, “that I’m trying to prevent you from getting your bloody throat cut; that’s all.”

“I could see you drop dead this minute from paralysis of the brain cells and burst into uninhibited applause.

Lymond was of course behaving atrociously: he seemed prepared to make any sort of fool of himself rather than allow his brother near.

“You bloody-minded little vampire—how in God’s name can I hurt you enough?”

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.

He wore no jacket and no boots; he was dishevelled, as might be expected, and looked tired and disreputable. He also looked, thought Lord Grey with a pang of fury, roughly as humble as Shishman, Emperor of the Slavs: Brahma finding pest in the henhouse might have worn such a look.

Brought up in France; fêted in Scotland; would-be bridegroom of Mary of Guise; would-be ruler; would-be conspirator; full of terrestrial appetites and an eagerness to feed your kindred flesh to all the feared and threatening raptors at your heels…

I was gallant at Midculter, God save me, through being most damnably drunk: but never again.”

“My dear ass, I ran like a corncrake. You can ask leading questions till you’re cross-eyed as Strabo: that’s what happened.

Skull, flesh and muscle, every fluent line and practised shade of Lymond’s face betrayed him explicitly,

You choose to play God, and the Deity points out that the post is already adequately filled.

“A mistake is something you build on: it’s the irritant that makes the pearl; the flaw that creates the geyser—but a mistake made twice is a folly. It’s cost something in terms of thought and sacrifice and even suffering to bring us tonight to speak with each other. We have a moral duty at least not to toss it away.”

THAT YEAR, as in other years, death was not man’s ultimate terror and chief source of his disquiet. Death was cheap and quick, indiscriminating and often friendly. You could die in a day, from the pest. You could die in a second in the innocent hub of a brawl. Children in thousands never came to life, or lived only hours. You could die in battle, and you could die at the minor instance of the law, for cheating and stealing and concealing disease. Death was better, often, than pain, mutilation and deformity; than starvation in banishment; than the intangible evils of sorcery and enchantment. People died suddenly, from week to week and month to month, and their disappearance had to be accepted. Death was cheap and quick.

In time of siege and foreign occupation, the doom and death of a traitor might go unnoticed. But many in Edinburgh lost fathers or brothers at Solway Moss,

answer charges of treason, of revealing and showing to our ancient enemies of England the secrets of the Queen; of treasonable intercommuning and rendering of aid and comfort to our said enemies; of murder, assault, abduction and robbery, and crimes against the Estate and Church as set forth in the indictment.

“We are asked to believe that he incurred the sympathetic interest of one of the highest ladies of the land, but that she could do nothing to help him: that while fervently supporting the Scottish cause he was feckless enough to allow a dangerous secret to fall into enemy hands: that there existed, as there exists in romances, some terrible English plot of which he happened to gain knowledge. Do all these things seem likely?”

“Such a man is Crawford of Lymond: such a man this land may pray never to see again in the difficult ways of her history. I say: busy yourself no longer about him, for he is better condemned, and most harshly dead.”

“You have amazed me, Mr. Crawford. You see in me a misery of rage which should compensate you a little for your suffering. Bequeathed a shabby and ransacked armoury, I have thrown away tempered steel. My God, M. le maître, you have done us an injury: you should have held us by the neck and shouted your wrongs into our lungs. What redress can language give you? A polite apology, and Mr. Lauder’s regrets?”