Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

  He would have gone then to his room, but the crowd behind held him stapled fast to his place. They took the dead bird out for the pot, and the owner, his beaming face red in the torchlight, lifted the victor tenderly in his thick hands and with his tongue began searching its injuries.

  Soon, stinking with curative urine, it would take a pat of sweet rosemary butter and be put to stove in the straw of its sweating basket. It had been fortunate. He had seen a fight between two wounded cocks last a couple of hours, even though the spurs were cut smooth and sharp with a penknife. As the ancients had said: in their raging pride, indifferent to pain and injury, they would fight to the end of their powers.

  Looking through the eyes of the man opposite you could, he supposed, see a barbaric magnificence in it. You could admire the quick, graceful movements of the bird they now put on the mat, with its tight glossy plumage and muscular thighs; brilliant yellow on shoulder and saddle. Or the sprightly strut of its black and red adversary, the polled head darting and glinting; the spurs growing low and wicked and curved on the white and sinewy legs.

  They liked to fight, it was said. It was their instinct. They would seek battle regardless of the presence of man, and would pine if denied it. And here, in the darting bodies, the sparring, the dodging, the high, rustling flirts when with beak, foot and spur, bird grappled with bird, there was strength and fire and a most unflinching valour for men to admire and emulate.

  Half an hour went by of the struggle. By the end of it the golden fowl, slashed and impaled, was sorely beaten, but continued steadily to attack its superb and untouched antagonist.

  Then it weakened. In silence among the screaming spectators Austin Grey watched the tired legs beginning to tremble; the beak to open; the tongue to palpitate. One barred yellow wing trailed on the mat and when, in the flurries, it sought to grip with its beak, the rich red wings of its foe beat it down, and the other’s strong spurs struck again and again, at its head, its throat or its neck, or the place in its back where, sinking through, the sharpened point would spear through its vitals.

  Austin had laid no wagers. But when, in one such bustle, the golden cock struck to the head and against all expectation, the bigger bird disengaged and dropped aside, staggering, he was glad; as if he and not the duckwing had been suffering. Then he saw what the chance blow had done. The black-breasted red had lost the use of its eyes.

  Silence fell. The yellow bird, its abdomen slit, was almost vanquished. It moved as if drunk, toppling first on its breast and then on its ragged docked tail and you could see sweat, like citrines, on the torn feathers. It lay, red eyes glaring its challenge.

  And the red, strong still, trod forward groping in darkness and found and gripped the fallen bird with its beak. Then, beating down its cut wings, it attacked and went on attacking its enemy’s body.

  It should have been the end. The yellow bird twitched and raised its stained head. It lifted itself, shivering. It stood, and might have fallen. Instead, in a single magic explosion of courage and anger, it hurled forward the naked head and caught the blinded red foe by the throat. Then springing high in the air, the yellow cock brought down its spurs in a stroke no living bird could have fended.

  The black-breasted red toppled and lay, in the jumping, glistening stream of its blood. And the yellow stepped on its back, and moved its one wing, and throwing back its gored head, crowed in triumph.

  Courage, of a noble and humbling order. Courage of the brute, subject to neither reason nor discipline. Courage which could inspire emulation or greed, or brutality. What were they celebrating now, these bellowing figures about him, but a win against odds, and the making or losing of money?

  Opposite him, the red-haired student had won his wager. The others had thrown him in the air and he descended upside down, in a rain of silver, attempting through hiccoughing laughter to semaphore to himself a serving of Auxerrois.

  It was easy now to get away from the mat. Austin Grey turned, his face unsmiling, and ran up the gallery stairs to his chamber.

  Inside was the Piedmontese cock-master and two other men, one of whom closed the door behind him and locked it. The other, as Austin snatched at his scabbard, pricked with a blade the wadded back of his doublet. They took his sword from him.

  ‘Ah, Lord Allendale,’ said the Piedmontese, indolent thumbs in his sword-belt. ‘A fine, small head; a muscular pair of shanks and a bold, smart demeanour for a game fowl. But all the same, as you will note, we have our spurs in you and you will shortly (bind the gag tightly, Demetrio) also be made, as you see, safely voiceless.

  ‘What are you trying to say? Where are we taking you? To France, of course. It will be a pleasant captivity, and short-lived, unless your uncle is foolish. But then, I don’t imagine Lord Grey could ever be foolish. And you are, are you not, as a son to him?’

  They had to shift the knife in order to bind him and he fought then with considerable success, because he had been well trained and did not care, in that moment, what they did to him. But against three, he had little chance; and soon enough his limbs were tightly corded and he had been heaved, wrapped in his cloak, into a smaller room where they dropped him on a pallet and left him.

  Bound, gagged and thrown in a corner with less accommodation than any trussed fowl in its cock bag, there was nothing Austin Grey could do but give way, breathing hard, to bitter anger.

  If Francis Crawford wishes to leave Western Europe, his uncle had said, then it is England’s duty to help him.

  And what if it is a French trap? he had answered. For of course, a man who revered bloody courage and was stirred to wildness and laughter by its apotheosis was not of his kind, and did not hold to his rules. But his uncle had trusted the fellow.

  He could not move. Through the shuttered window he could hear from the noise, surging and checking, that another cock fight had started. Perhaps the ‘Piedmontese’ had been forced to take part in it, since this was his alibi. And of course, as a travelling cocker, he would have horses and carts and a perfect excuse for leaving late at night for his next station. No one would look in his feeding sacks, or under the straw. No one would suspect he was a French spy taking back captive an Englishman.

  Of course, the cock-master was not a Frenchman. He had spoken fluent Italian, and his English, though accurate, was inflected with the same accent. Naturally, since the Queen was a Florentine, the French court was full of Italians.

  A Florentine …

  What was it Lord Grey had said, testily, only last week? The devil has a charmed life. He got a hackbut ball full in the mouth while in Italy, and all it did was shatter his dog-teeth.

  The dark and masterful man with the broken mouth was not a Piedmontese or a cocker. He was Marshal of France Piero Strozzi, one of King Henri’s most able generals. And a friend, long since in Scotland, of Francis Crawford.

  The bragging red game-cock—two of them—against the tormented yellow, indeed. And since he had a high pride of his own, although he would have denied it, Austin Grey sought about him for a weapon … a baton he could wrench out with his fingertips, a sliver of glass … anything with which to free himself, or inflict injury at least on his captors.

  What he found, lost in the straw, was an eating-knife. He felt, disbelieving, the sting of its blade, and ignoring the blood on his hand, did not rest until he had disentangled it. Then, hacking and sawing, he cut through the cords on his feet and then, in a gory mess, those on his wrists, and freeing himself from the gag, strode to the door of his prison.

  It was locked and would not give way, although he charged it again and again. Nor, because of the noise, could he make his voice carry.

  There remained the casement. He ripped open the shutters. It did indeed give on to the courtyard. Noise and torchlight streamed in, but he could not get out. The window was barred.

  He could not get out, but it wouldn’t matter, if he could attract someone’s attention. Outside were his enemies, but there were only three of them, and Francis Crawford. In th
is room, even armed with a knife, he might have little chance against four resolute men. But what chance had four men in French pay in a tavern in Douai, once the burghers knew of their presence?

  So Austin Grey snatched up his cloak, and thrusting it between the bars of his window shouted at the fullest pitch of his voice, ‘Treachery! Treachery! There are French spies among you! The cock-master with the broken mouth is Piero Strozzi!’

  Faces turned. He waved his cloak and shouted again. With careful clarity he was still calling when he heard a key grate in the lock behind him. He wedged his cloak in the bars and whipped round, knife in hand, to defend himself.

  In the doorway stood Hilary of the red hair, with steel in his hand and neither laughter nor civility in his voice. He said, ‘Come with me.’

  Behind him, the door rested invitingly open. An eating knife versus a sword made long odds again, but it was worth a leap and a stab, which the other man countered quickly. In the moment’s fighting that followed, both weapons clashed to the ground; and Austin fell with a grim and heady satisfaction on the man who had so coolly betrayed him.

  But although brave and obstinate, he had not the iron will that subdues armies. He saw coming the blow which would fell him, but unlike the gold cock, by that time had no means to parry it. It hit him cleanly, and he knew nothing more.

  *

  He had thought, in his innocence, that a Marshal of France would enter Douai with only two men to accompany him. Had Austin Grey been conscious and still at his window, he would have seen the courtyard doors swung suddenly shut and, plucked from the crowd, a circle of thirty men range themselves, sword in hand, enclosing the cockfight and all its spectators. Men oddly attired: here a tinsmith, there a clerk or a book-pedlar. But none of the three remaining Amis de Rabelais who stood where they were, staring about them.

  Staring perhaps at the fourth of their number, who had stopped in midflight, sword in hand; with two of Strozzi’s men behind him at the top of the staircase and two below, their hands ready to grasp him. The fourth student Hilary, divested at last of red moustache and wig, who stood, looking down at Piero Strozzi, with the famous Crawford hair gilt in the torchlight.

  Strozzi said, grinning, ‘La plus belle de la ville. I was not sure which you were, until you spoke to the beautiful marquis. You will have discovered. All the exits are guarded.’

  ‘Who betrayed me?’ said Francis Crawford. The voice, very different from that of Hilary, was light and level and empty and he held his sword, its point on the stairs, like an extension of his own flexible body.

  ‘Your own men,’ said Strozzi. ‘Guthrie and Blacklock and Hoddim and Hislop. They have no mind, mon fils, to go back to Russia. They want you, as all of us do, to remain with kind Mother France. You will give up your sword.’

  ‘Hardly,’ said Francis Crawford.

  ‘Then we shall have to take it,’ said Strozzi reprovingly. ‘As you see, we are clearing the courtyard. Soon all will be locked in the tavern. Then you will be one man against thirty. What can you do?’

  ‘I can kill,’ said the man on the stairs known as Lymond.

  ‘You cannot kill thirty men. Even you,’ said Strozzi, grinning again. He turned. ‘Citizens of Douai, do not be alarmed. I have not come to harm you, but to take back to France this gentleman who thought so little of King Henri’s hospitality that he decided to spurn it. In a little, we shall be——’

  Lymond hurled himself down. Someone screamed. Under Francis Crawford’s swung steel the man at the foot of the staircase perished. Still running, Lymond killed the next who opposed him, and a third rolled under his feet as a dozen more, racing, converged on him. He staggered as first one and then another crashed into him but the sword still stabbed and glittered and Strozzi, his brows drawn under the Piedmontese cap, saw a fourth stuck and collapse, choking. For a moment, it made the rest falter. Then they swarmed after, ducking, dodging, clutching at that damnable, that diabolical sword-arm.

  On that, furious, Strozzi shouted an order and the fools drew off at last and deployed, cutting off the way to the gates, so that Lymond was forced back against the doorless wall with a half circle of men crouched before him, out of reach of that swift clotted sword-blade.

  Piero Strozzi snapped his fingers and, with a fresh-lit torch in his hand, walked forward and joined the gasping group of his men.

  Crawford of Lymond watched him come, his breathing fast, his knuckle bones white on the sword hilt. He said, ‘The Kyng of Fraunce spared none … But sent for hem everychone. What have you promised them?’

  And Strozzi, holding the illuminating torch just out of reach, said calmly, ‘That the man who harms you will die. As you see, their swords are still in their scabbards. You have killed four. You may kill four more before they take your sword from you. But you cannot escape. Is Russia worth eight loyal men’s lives?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘You will have to watch me take them.’

  ‘Including mine?’ said Marshal Strozzi.

  ‘If you insist,’ said the other man pleasantly. He had recovered his breath. ‘My dear Piero, I abide and abide and better abide. How can I be made to take a command in your army? The bribe does not exist that would interest me.’

  ‘There is one, they say,’ said Piero Strozzi. ‘You had wealth in Russia, and power. You may have both in France. You may also have something they tell me Russia could not offer you.’

  ‘A loyal Florentine friend?’ Lymond suggested.

  ‘No, although you will thank me for this yet,’ said Strozzi with equanimity. ‘You cannot obtain an annulment, they say, for your marriage.’

  Distantly from the inn came the sound of voices and hammering. In the darkness someone groaned, and the dying torches, spluttering, lit the long grotesque rows of the game bags, each with its occupant. A cock chuckled and another, savagely, gave tongue in answer. Lymond said, ‘I hear gossip too. I do not always repeat it.’

  ‘This gossip,’ said Strozzi, ‘says that there is nothing you will not pay to be freed of this contract. I am to tell you that unless you come back to France you will never secure this divorce. I am to tell you that it will be granted you when you have served the King of France for a year, freely and to the best of your powers in any theatre where he may need you. And, in case you may doubt what I say, I have the promise in writing, with the Cardinal Legate’s own signature.’

  Lymond took the thrown packet and opened and read it, without relaxing his guard, in the light of the fresh burning cresset.

  Strozzi watched him.

  This time, there was no trick and Lymond would know it. The Pope, the friend of France, could withhold or grant this annulment as France requested. All that mattered now was whether gossip spoke truly. Whether, to obtain his divorce, Francis Crawford would conceivably, undertake the year’s service demanded.

  He stood for a long time, considering. Then the point of his sword moved slowly downwards, and Strozzi knew, amazed, that he had surrendered.

  ‘I have one condition,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘Les Amis de Rabelais should not suffer. They had no idea who I was.’

  Strozzi doubted it. But there was no need to quibble. ‘Am I a clod,’ he said, ‘deaf to the call of the Muses? They may return on St Luke’s Day for their doctorates. Their punishment, mon fils, must be the loss of their tenorino. So you are coming?’

  ‘I find your arguments irresistible,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘You didn’t think to introduce them before? You might have saved four soldiers’ dead pay.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Piero Strozzi, relieving him prudently of his sword, ‘I didn’t think, to tell you the truth, that marriage weighed so heavily on you. You surprise me. Does she bore you, or have you met a rich heiress?’

  ‘I am abandoning,’ said Lymond, ‘the foul yoke of sensual bondage. You’d better hurry. I sent Austin Grey for the eswardeurs.’

  They did not know whether, on the last point, to believe him, but it encouraged Marshal Strozzi to vacate the Tourn
ai quickly. And certainly Austin Grey, hurriedly searched for, was nowhere to be found on the premises.

  It hardly mattered. Of the two men he had hoped to appropriate, Piero Strozzi was bringing the jewel.

  He whistled, leaving the tavern, and on his way to the gates blithely slit, one by one, all the hooked row of hanging white cock bags.

  Before he had stepped on to the quay the serpent necks, stretching and twisting, were out of the canvas.

  Before he had sculled up the small river or the rest had reached, in their various ways, the Porte d’Arras, the Porte d’Equerchin, the Porte d’Ocre, the fighting-cocks had flounced to the earth two by two in the wide, empty yard of the Tournai; and tearing, gouging and stabbing, with dogged courage were killing each other.

  *

  Like the Duke of Arschot, Austin Grey made his escape in the pipe of a privy. How he got there he did not remember, but he awoke to find he was free and that his enemies, thwarted, had left Douai without him.

  Lord Grey’s fury over the matter, when he reported it, exceeded even his own, but seemed to derive less from the deceit than from the consequent waste of Lord Grey’s time and energy. When, some weeks later, the English army in France received notice of other consequences rather more telling, he made a point of informing his nephew.

  ‘Your man Crawford of Lymond has left Court to go south to Lyon,’ said the Governor of the English fortress at Guînes. ‘On a French mission, naturally. It really is damned inconvenient that you didn’t kill him at Douai. It was a trap. They were out to catch you. You were quite entitled to.’

  With Lord Grey, one did not make excuses. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Austin woodenly.

  ‘He’s gone to Lyon,’ said his uncle, irritably repeating himself. ‘Ostensibly to raise money, but it won’t be. The last place I want a senior French command to interest itself in. Those Spanish tacticians want their great donkey mouths pasted shut for them. First, the French find out we’re using Lyon as a mail-box. Next, they’ll hear about the German levies at Ferette. They’ve probably heard of them already. Two thousand horse and ten thousand cavalry preparing to attack Lyon once we’ve taken Saint-Quentin. And with Lyon and Paris in our hands, the war’ll be over.’