‘Oh,’ he said. The ball, flying over their heads, landed on the top of the citadel wall and for a moment seemed lost. Then James was streaking after it whooping, banging into people regardless, followed by his two younger brothers. They started up the nearest flight of wall-steps, three at a time. The ball, rebounding, had trickled safely down to a roof. Nicholas said, ‘Then I should have said that the gift is from us all, but two of us don’t realise it yet. However. I take the point. I’ll give it to Willie, and you can play on it anyway. Why are they all running up there?’ The Princess, Meg, was making a purposeful dash at the gun-ramp.
‘Because they want to win the wager,’ Kathi said. ‘I gather we are having a game of Florentine football on the parapet, six a side instead of twenty-seven. I thought it was your idea.’
It had been, earlier in the evening. The curtain wall of Edinburgh Castle was four hundred feet long and twenty-four feet in height, with a sheer drop of another thirty-odd feet on the outside. The top was wide enough to take culverin, or three people running abreast, and the inner side was lined with interesting roof-tops. It made an irresistible playing field for two teams. Two teams, all of them men. He said so.
The girl said, ‘If Meg is going, I have to go, don’t I? I don’t mind. Willie will come. We need three more to make up a side. Can’t you go and get them? Or it’ll spoil all the fun.’
He suddenly saw that it would. By the time he found Crackbene and brought him back, two other applicants had appeared. One was Robin of Berecrofts, who had apparently escorted Jodi and his nurse from the Canongate. The other was Martin of the Vatachino, stripped like the rest to his unbuttoned shirt. The pelt on his chest was as orange as sheep-dip.
Behind the broker, Kathi was conveying helpless apology. He could see her eyes gleaming. Martin said, ‘I offered to give you a hand. I’ve not a bad head for heights. Otherwise you would have lost your wager, wouldn’t you?’
He was grinning. Without losing face, there was no chance of refusing him. Nicholas said, ‘Who have the other side got?’ Straw fell on to his shoulders and hair: the ball was being retrieved. People were running up and exclaiming: household officers and servants of the Court, clerks and servants of the chapel, soldiers of the garrison. There were three hundred people quartered within the walls of Edinburgh Castle. He saw two trumpeters he knew, gesturing at Willie Roger.
A lot of torches had arrived, illuminating the uneven ground, and the houses that clustered against and under the wall, and the ramp and the two ranges of ladder-like steps fitted between them. Black against the sky, the tall rectangle of the royal palace called David’s Tower rose at one end, all its windows now lit, while far at the other end rose the round tower known as the Constable’s, guarding the staircase to the inner citadel. But the top of the wall running between was quite dark, except where its crenellations blocked out the stars, and the forms of young men running along it. He could just make out the King, along with Sandy and John, and Meg scrambling and screeching beside them. Three princes of the blood and one princess. Someone would stop them.
Kathi said, ‘They’ve called up Jamie Liddell and someone called Wodman. Who’s he?’
‘A Scottish Archer,’ Nicholas said. ‘In the employment of Jordan de Ribérac. He left the Guard after he’d killed a man, says Astorre. I like your skirts up like that. It reminds me of Sinai. The Queen isn’t playing?’
‘The King wouldn’t let her,’ Kathi said. ‘She’s to stand down here and admire him.’
‘Or catch him,’ said Mick Crackbene mildly. It was wonderful, Nicholas thought, to be about to enjoy oneself surrounded by sour faces like Willie’s and Mick’s. At least Robin appeared excited and happy while Kathi stood translated in the usual way, with the intense concentration of a pup at a rathole. His rival merchant Martin was smiling. He was probably quite happy, too.
There was no reason not to be. If he climbed quickly, it would be too late to stop it. He climbed quickly.
The high officers of the kingdom were informed and brought out quite fast, but there were not so many of them in the Castle that evening. Of the two whom the King had leaned on from boyhood, only Will Sinclair of Caithness, once Orkney, was using his rooms in the citadel. And of the very few with some hold over de Fleury, none was there but Lord Hamilton, taking wine with the Abbot of Holyrood.
Their lordships knew better than to countermand the whim of a monarch. These aberrations occurred with young men. Long rides and strenuous jousting were supposed to allay them, in between wars. Otherwise one took what precautions one could, and fingered one’s rosary.
It was terrifying, all the same. All the royal children were there. All, that is, but the Princess Mary, Countess of Arran, at present with her children in Burgundian Bruges. And the King had no heirs.
What could be, was done. Light was brought. The elder statesmen themselves paraded an air of mild exasperation. But covertly, all the same, men scurried with bales from the stables, and mattresses and sacks from the storerooms, and laid them where they might save an inebriated boy, tumbling from the parapet to the steps, or from the parapet to the roof-tops inside, and thence to the ground. Outside, the rock at the foot of the citadel remained unquilted and bare. Nothing could save a boy, or a girl, or a man who was dropped, or was pushed, or who overbalanced over the outer side of the parapet. It was the brave little Fleming, the Baron Cortachy’s niece, who leaned over a roof and informed Sinclair which were the goal posts. His daughter Betha was fond of the girl but often said, all the same, that she was crazy.
Once the young people were all on top of the wall, they crowded into the middle and there was a short preamble fixing the rest of the rules: the first team to score two goals, one gathered, would win. They used straws to choose ends, and to see who would cast the ball for a start. The King won, and took the ball in his hands. His hair flickered like fire in the wind. He slammed the ball down at an angle and they all jumped at it and each other.
Kathi had seen the big game they held when M. de Fleury had taught them how to play, and all the damage was done. The rules adapted well enough to small teams. The two front runners on each side – the corridori – were the smallest and nimblest: Kathi and Robin, opposing Meg her mistress and Meg’s brother Mar. Behind the front line on each side hovered the two sconciatori, the spoilers, whose job was to stop the other team’s runners: Roger and Crackbene for the non-royals; Liddell and Wodman for James. And at the back of each team were the hitters, who were allowed to use hands: M. de Fleury and Martin on one side and the King and his brother Sandy on the other.
The hitters were the ones who usually scored. The King’s team had to knock the ball through the midway belvedere on the wall-walk. M. de Fleury’s side had to drive it through the door which led into the upper floors of David’s Tower itself. Two hundred feet of parapet lay between the two doors, with a crenellated wall lining its outer side. Heaped against the inner side of the walkway like an avalanche were the thatched and stone roofs of service buildings and lodgings of varying elevations and pitches, some far below the parapet level, one or two projecting above. David’s Tower at the south end was sixty feet high, rising above the wall and all other buildings, just as the Castle itself stood nearly three hundred feet above the deep valley around its three sides. The outer side of the curtain wall was quite sheer.
Kathi herself was drunk only as a starving man feels himself drunk: a euphoria born of the fresh cold air and the height and the danger; a sharpening of wits honed against other sharp wits and agile bodies. For a moment, she was a participator in the same sexless bonhomie denied her in Will Roger’s room, whose crooked roof was one of the jumble below her.
Then Robin said, ‘Kathi!’ and she saw that he had the ball at his feet, and the others were trying to take it. She raced forward, stooping and twisting, and had actually hooked it when Liddell’s shoulder pushed through and he put his foot under it. It rose over their heads and bounced once on the top of the ramp before John of Mar ran down and,
catching it, punted it back to Sandy the hitter, who caught it, screaming, and began to charge forward, all five of his players around him.
It was intimidating, like a stampede. M. de Fleury said, ‘You two, let them through. Sconciatori, stand firm. Martin, it’s that ball or your head. I’ll cover you.’ Then the stampede had reached and passed her, and the players seemed to have coalesced in a buffeting mass where everyone appeared to be hitting, no matter what they were called. For a moment Martin did get the ball and she danced about, struck with awe, to see him achieve the one magnificent throw which would let her catch it, or Robin, and race with it to goal. But at that point the whole interlocked body lost its balance and tumbled kicking on to the slats, and when the ball made its appearance it was sluggish, passing from foot to foot and hand to hand like something tame. Then someone punted it hard, and soon enough the impacted mass was back again in the centre and deploying itself into its component parts, only to break loose again as the ball was slapped out of the walkway and bounced its way down a stone-slatted roof with a chimney.
This time, John of Mar was followed by his sister and Robin, and the three scrambled about in the darkness, spurred on by the shouts from above and below, their faces, hands, elbows caught here and there by the torchlight. Then Robin, his face incandescent, appeared balancing himself on a roof-ridge, the ball at his feet, and kicked it straight towards M. de Fleury, even as Meg hurled herself at his side. Then the ball was in play again on the wall-walk, bouncing between foot and hand, wall and ground as the lot of them ran, this time streaming forward towards David’s Tower.
Kathi ran and hopped in the front, looking over her shoulder. Robin joined her, soot on his face, hardly breathless. If the ball went over again, she would jump down as well. She was lighter than Robin. She was seventeen, the same age as Sandy. Robin was fourteen years old and Meg, pounding behind was eleven, and John beside her was only thirteen. Even the King, crouched and waiting for them ahead, was not yet twenty. They were all light and supple as acrobats: six youngsters at home on these heights compared with six grown men who were not. Kathi had been up on the roof-tops before: they all had. Childhood was climbing.
Childhood was also temper, especially as they got near to their goal. She could laugh at Meg, delirious with excitement, attempting to wrap her arms round Will Roger’s ankles so that he nearly toppled headlong down the steps. She found it harder to forgive John of Mar the jab in the stomach that made Robin double up, and the kick to the back of Crackbene’s knee that made the big shipmaster stagger, exclaiming. She saw the set face of the Scandinavian, prevented by protocol – as Mar well knew – from retaliating. Just as M. de Fleury had to sustain the hard knocks he repeatedly received from his grace the King and almost as often from Sandy his brother.
She was happy to see that M. de Fleury, although thirty, could look after himself. If Martin cannoned into him more than once, he failed to fall. On two separate occasions at least, as the play flowed one way or the other, he swerved in such a way that an intended blow fell upon stone, to painful effect. This did nothing, unfortunately, to cool the ardour of the King’s team, which took further umbrage when M. de Fleury’s elbow carelessly implanted itself in Mar’s eye the next time they met in a pack. Mar, staggering back palm to face, groped for his knife-sheath and turned like a being demented. The ball, appearing in front of his nose, abruptly took his attention. He jumped aside and, trapping it, staggered off.
‘Well done,’ said someone to Kathi. It was one of the other team’s spoilers. Wodman, the Archer who had killed a man once.
‘That’s all right,’ Kathi said. ‘Your side could do with some help.’ She dodged round him while he was speaking, treading on his foot as she went, in case he thought she really meant it.
Robin joined her, brightly purposeful. He said, ‘I’ll keep an eye on the Earl if you’ll watch Master Martin.’
The ball, hopping about, was moving towards the belvedere again and she could see Martin in front of the door, braced to resist. M. de Fleury was just in front, and Martin was watching him. So was John, Earl of Mar. Kathi suddenly understood what the boy had assumed she had noticed. She said, ‘Listen, look after yourself. M. de Fleury knows what he’s doing.’
‘Not always,’ said Robin.
‘Then he’ll have to learn to keep sober,’ said Kathi tartly. The ball came out at her feet and she could hardly believe it: she and Robin fled with it a full four yards before they were felled by the rush from behind. The ball, squeezed among all the bodies, squirted up in the air and began to descend again to the roof-tops below. This time, she was the quickest to follow it, sliding down slopes and crawling up inclines and jumping from one roof to another. Meg was chasing her, screaming and giggling, and, out of sheer good nature, Kathi let her have the ball.
Once returned, however and into the game, she found herself glancing from time to time to see what their red-headed hitter was doing, as she observed Robin’s gaze was following Mar. She refused to consider whether Wodman, the servant of Jordan de Ribérac, might also harbour designs against M. de Fleury. There was a limit to what one could do. The simple truth was that the whole opposing team was out to murder M. de Fleury if it led to winning the game, as he could hardly have failed to notice. She felt rather the same way herself about them. She saw Whistle Willie laughing at her, and she laughed back as she ran.
It had not occurred to Nicholas up to that point that he was the object of anyone’s concern. He was vaguely sensible that all four royals were capable of any extreme of misconduct, with John of Mar the worst offender by far. Against that, he seldom obeyed rules himself. It was true that he didn’t much like having the representative of the Vatachino at his back, but he had found ways of dealing with it which Martin didn’t much like either. The weak links in his own side were Adorne’s niece and Robin; not because they were young, but because they were vulnerable. He also felt some confused responsibility for Roger who, however willing, was far from being a natural athlete.
On the other side, he welcomed the moderating influence of Liddell, but faced a continuing enigma in Wodman.
Nicholas, after all, was a secret pensioner of the French King, and should have Wodman’s support, if he knew as much. On the other hand, accidents happened. Especially accidents to a man who had humiliated Jordan de Ribérac’s son. He thought, hazily, that it was time to start taking charge of this game. He thought it was even time that someone began scoring goals.
Down below, a spreading sense of relief caused an increase in the noise, in the shouting and even the laughter, as the wagering became less discreet, and as more emerged to jump about and comment and watch. Lamplight from windows and doors picked out the coifs and aprons of women, as the torchlight made ruddy the faces and tunics of men, and sparkled on half-armour and helmets, and picked out the gold thread of livery badges and the chain across Will Sinclair’s shoulders and the jewel in James Hamilton’s hat. The Abbot’s cloak tossed in the wind, as the smoke and flame from the torches streamed sideways and joined the peat smoke and the soot in the air. The King burned coal in his fires.
The King, it was clear, was hot enough with his present exertion not to think about fires, although the wind on the battlements was strong enough now to bustle the ball in the air, and deflect its angle of fall. It showed against the black, starry sky from time to time, a dull blister of light, and sometimes its rap could be heard amongst the pounding of feet and the chorus of twelve people shouting. The sounds descended in waves, sometimes faint and sometimes loud, with the young voice of the lassie screaming highest. Bleezie Meg. A survivor.
It had begun to seem likely now that all might be well. The outer wall of the parapet was four feet in height and the space between the crenellations was narrow. It would take a very drunk man to climb up and fall over that, and as time went on, the effects of the wine must be lessening. It silenced them still when the damned ball came thudding down yet again in the roof-tops, and two or three of them sprang whooping d
own to recover it. Twice it dropped to the ground and someone quickly threw or kicked it back to the parapet, usually for very small thanks from one side or the other that thought it had been disadvantaged. All the same, the spectators’ fears had diminished, and they were almost able to enjoy the first concerted move of the game that seemed likely, at last, to bring a score.
It started, clearly, with de Fleury’s side and was not, this time, haphazard. To James Hamilton, who had experience of the Burgundian’s cunning, it was not perhaps entirely surprising. To Sinclair, intently studying the man from a smaller acquaintance, it was as informative as watching a battle. Each of the five in the team, it was clear, had his or her orders. Also, the fiction that restricted the use of the hands had been abandoned, as had already happened in the King’s team. This time, no holds would be barred.
‘The girls are young,’ said Will Sinclair, Lord Caithness.
Hamilton smiled. ‘There are young boys on shipboard,’ he said. ‘They play a part, too, in the battle, but not the same part as the men. Watch. This is a clever man.’
‘Too clever?’ said Sinclair.
‘For some,’ Hamilton said. ‘Take the right precautions, and you have him at your heel. There he goes.’ The noise about them increased. Like embers fanned by the wind, the upturned faces burned against the dark rock, their breath rising like smoke.
*
Afterwards, it was easy to see how maddening his strategy must have been. From below, it had the look of a dance: in front, the slight forms of the runners slid round the opposing bodies as in a pavane, sometimes touching hands, sometimes diverging to skip down to a chimney or descend a few steps to run along some shallow roof before regaining the ramparts. The spoilers behind did the same, and the hitters. The ball, too, moved like a tapestry shuttle, sometimes from hand to hand, sometimes from foot to foot, or high in the air, or neatly directed to rebound from wall or gable or gutter or window-stanchion. As they drew near David’s Tower, the players even started to signal to one another, beginning with a chirrup from the musician Will Roger, answered by a seaman’s whistle from the shipmaster Crackbene, and followed by a triplet from the girl Katelijne, high above the angry shouts of their opponents. The ball followed the sound. The ball flew into the shadow of David’s Tower, and the noise suddenly redoubled and became rather more ugly. There was a sudden check, then a roar.
To Lie With Lions: The Sixth Book of the House of Niccolo Page 20