"Dunnett, Dorothy - The Game of Kings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunnett Dorothy)

The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett.


Opening Gambit:
Threat to a Castle.

First of ye chekker sail be macioune maid
And sync efter of ye proper moving
Of every man in ordour to his king
And as the chekker schawis us yis forne
Richt so it mayc the kinrik and the crowne,
The wand and all that is therein suthlye,
The chekker may in figour signifyc.






LYMOND is back."
It was known soon after the Sea-Cane reached Scotland from Campvere with an
illicit cargo and a man she should not have carried.
Lymond is in Scotland."

It was said by busy men preparing for war against England, with contempt, with
disgust; with a side-slipping look at one of their number. LLf hear the Lord
Culter's young brother is back." Only sometimes a woman's voice would say it
with a different note, and then laugh a little.
Lymond's own men had known he was coming. Waiting for him, in Edinburgh they
wondered briefly, without concern, how he proposed to penetrate a walled city to
reach them.
When the Sea-Cane came in, Mungo Tennant, citizen and smuggler of Edinburgh,
knew nothing of these things or of its passenger. He made his regular private
adjustment from douce gentility to illegal trading; and soon a boatload of
taxless weapons, bales of velvet and Bordeaux wine was being rowed on a warm
August night over the



Nor' Loch which guarded the north flank of Edinburgh, and toward the double
cellar beneath Mungo's house.
Among the reeds of the Nor' Loch, where the snipe and the woodcock lay close and
the baillies' swans raised their grey necks, a man quietly stripped to silk
shirt and hose and stood listening, before sliding softly into the water.
Across four hundred feet of black lake, friezelike on their ridge, towered the
houses of Edinburgh. Tonight the Castle on its pinnacle was fully lit, laying
constellations on the water; for within, the Governor of Scotland the Earl of
Arran was listening to report after report of the gathering English army about
to invade him.
Below the Castle, the house of the Queen Mother also showed lights. The late