Queens' Play by Dorothy Dunnett

recklessness that Stewart could not stand. He raised a prickly eyebrow. ‘Getting a bit cocksure, aren’t you? You’re taking in paper tonight, with the King at the gates and the whole place heaving like an anthill?’
    ‘Why not? They’ll think it is another patch for the Pegasus Arch.’
    He was probably right. His paper mill was twenty miles away; his arrangements were typically neat. The cart would arrive at Rouen, bearing his marble or his clay, his new furnace or his fuel; and in the false bottom lay the quires, ready to drop by grille and chute straight into the cellars while the cart stood, innocently unloading, in the inner courtyard. In the cellar, there were cupboards everywhere: in the base of a vast sculpture, with the armatures showing like the ribs of a bog-corpse; in the floor; in the bottom of the paste trough. Stewart thought he would take Thady Boy home.
    Thady Boy had gone. Instead, a tall man in handsome blue lounged at his side. ‘Hullo, Stewart. Who’s your portly friend?’ It was Sir George Douglas; and Stewart reacted typically.
    ‘I wouldna call him friend, just. It’s Ballagh, one of the two Irish I’m bear-leading till Thursday.’
    ‘You ought to keep an eye on him. He’s over there with Abernaci. Does he talk English?’
    ‘Oh, aye, and Irish and Irish-French and Irish-Latin for good measure, the times that he’s not snoring drunk. All you can say for him is that he’s under no illusions about his master. They’re going on Thursday.’
    It happened to be news. Sir George said, ‘Oh, they’re going?’ and immediately lost all interest in whatever speculation had inspired his enquiry. He moved off, and Stewart pressed on to where he knew the turbaned head and talbot-hound features of Abernaci would be crouching.
    He was in his usual place, with Thady Boy Ballagh seated before him, the worse for drink. Thady’s breeches were stained with vermilion, and his idle gaze was focussed on Abernaci, cross-legged on the floor, his dark face hidden and his long, brown fingers curled round a knife. He was wearing robes, finely laundered and brilliantly printed, and a jewelled turban on his head. From a block of pearwood in his left hand the shavings were falling, tender and curled in the light.
    ‘Woodcuts. He’s fair away with himself making pictures,’ said Stewart ironically, towering over Thady’s right shoulder. ‘Hérissonfound him doing it one day, and asked him over to see it on the press. It’d surprise you sometimes what these natives can do. You wouldn’t credit him with a thought barring slitting your throat one dark night for your buttons. Wait till you see the face on him. Abernaci!’
    The carver looked up. Under the fine turban, the brown face was small and seamed like a walnut. Years of Indian sun had dried a skin possibly middle-aged to look like the sloughed hide of a serpent; his nose was broken-backed and ignoble, and he had a scar, running from brow to cheek, which clenched one eyebrow unnaturally high. He glanced at the two men, and then resumed his carving without a word.
    ‘Will you look at yon!’ said Robin Stewart, who was no longer feeling so remote from his guest. ‘And he can take a drop, too. Abernaci!’ He bent over the silent figure. ‘Drink—good, yes?’ He made a motion of drinking. ‘More?’
    Within the black beard, the thick lips moved. ‘More,’ said the man Abernaci gutturally; and Stewart, laughing, turned away.
    In an untidy, stained heap on his hocks, the ollave remained, watching.
    The carver looked up. The knife, razor-sharp, lay still in his hand; but his grip suddenly had changed. On the opposite wall a leather ink bottle hung with a table just below it, and on the table Robin Stewart’s white jacket lay.
    The hand with the knife moved. There was a flash, a hiss, and the blade, arching slim through the air, slit the fat-bellied bottle clean through. Ink, in a thin black stream, began to issue and splash on the table. The brown