Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [309]
‘We don’t need to cross near the trees,’ Captain de Forcés said. ‘We can water the horses downstream just as well.’
‘If there’s a force in that village,’ Jerott said, ‘it can’t be a very big one.’
Lymond said, ‘Big enough to slow us down if it follows us. Big enough to hold us here for a little time if we attack it. I think that is why it is here. To send a scout to Philip’s army and hold us until a regiment gets here. A good idea. They’ve only made one mistake.’
‘What?’ said Jerott. A pistolier, irritated by the lack of action, walked over the flowering grass and raising his weapon released an explosion in the direction of the chestnut trees. With a brief thud, two returning bolts arrived, one in the grass and the other full on his cuirass, making a white dent the size of a balled fist. He fell, and two comrades scuttled out and hauled him back, gasping.
‘Good God,’ Lymond said. ‘How would you propose to get them out of those trees? Wait till they drop out from famine? We have the field gun, had you forgotten?’
They had the field gun and shot and matches and powder, and they did not need to come within crossbow range to align the cannon on the summer grove, heavy with the langours of August.
Two of the enemy shouted, parting the leaves just before the gun fired and were allowed to climb down and surrender, to be bundled off, their wrists bound up with hackbut cord. Then the gunners touched off the cannon, and reloaded and fired it again, until the grove was a mountainous graveyard of split boughs and dead birds and greenery. Two men were thrown clear, in fragments. For a while they could hear the voice of a third, under the wreckage. Then it faded to silence.
Smoke, rising white into the air, thinned and wandered, flushed rose in the sunset. ‘And now, mes amis,’ said the Marshal to the men, bright-eyed and alert crowded round him, ‘let us see what we have in those houses.’
In the houses were two companies of landsknechts and one of Spaniards, under a young captain from Brabant. The field gun, turned on the wall, breached it with a single ball, and with another brought down all the hovels next to it. Lymond dispatched a trumpet first to call for surrender, and when answered with defiance turned the mouth of the gun on the houses. When he sent his pikemen in, the drums marched with them, the roar of their beating reverberating from all the stone shells and arcades and cellars.
Jerott had once had that done to him, and knew how in a small space it deadened thought and sowed panic.
The Spaniards were brave. They stayed where they were and forced men to come in and fight hand to hand in the passages. The Germans escaped into the street and over the roofs, where the hackbutters picked them off, merry as fowlers. Like hot water thrown on an anthill, the fighting seethed, short and sharp for forty minutes. Then it was over; and the only enemy still alive were bound in the wagons.
This time, Lymond had promised his men all the booty they could discover.
The villagers in their flight had overlooked only some hens, some wine, and some onions; and below the rubble in the patched earth were a few vegetables.
Only the Spaniards were better provided. In the blacksmith’s house they found flour and biscuit and lard; on the dead bodies fine arms and shirts, money and jewellery; and in a weaver’s loft a dozen camp followers, huddled together, who lost no time making themselves pleasant to the conquerors.
The jubilation rose, hurled from building to building, as the evening sky dimmed to turquoise and the cressets flared, bright as animals’ eyes in the dusk, leaping from building to black splintered building. De Forcés, before a brilliant fire, collected the booty piled before him ready to apportion in Amiens. Food was distributed. Alec Guthrie, before a locked door, supervised the amount of wine claimed for each ensign.
They had posted sentries and outposts. But the mere fact that they were to be detained there meant