Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [310]
Some of them were in the river already. Jerott, his thirst slaked, his bodily vigour still driving him at battle pitch, left the village and strode with the rest shouting and singing to the Luce, unbuckling his straps as he went. His sergeant, his points untied, was fondling a girl with her back to the wall in the darkness: as Jerott passed he was having her, neatly and urgently.
A party of Germans, yelling to one another, lit them up with a dangling lantern and began chanting obscenities. Behind them was Jerott’s page. Jerott, grinning, began to fling him items of armour as he unfastened them until, in shirtsleeves and hose, he stood calf-deep in the red surging water, drenched and laughing among the nude hairy flesh which leaped and vaulted and screamed in the spray all about him.
A lighted brand, tossed high in the sky, lit the cream mane and tail of an Andalusian mare, and the doublet and bared head of the rider, still as a monument, looking at him.
Someone shrilled. ‘Join us, Marshal!’
The Marshal, if he enjoyed the joke, did not answer. But the Isabel flung up her head, as if a goad quite unaccustomed had been used on her. The next moment she had kicked out her heels, and snorting had plunged abruptly into the gathering darkness.
Jerott said to his page, ‘Get my horse, quickly.’
*
A single rider, at dusk, is not so hard to track in open country; the more so if he is quite reckless of pursuit, and of the noise he makes.
Late as he was in the chase, Jerott was saved by the fact that his quarry had no destination. When, discerning the hoofbeats, he first glimpsed mare and horseman streaming like smoke through the meadow-lands, he saw the Isabel virtually riderless, and knew his instinct this time was the right one.
There were hedges coming, and the slate-coloured glimmer of ditches and ponds and behind, black on the indigo sky, the crenellated line of a deep band of forest. Jerott, nursing his mount, turned its head to the trees and, converging, asked it to overtake the other uncontrolled horse, far in front of him.
Forty miles on the march had tired the Isabel but, lashed as she had been, she was far too excited to falter. She took a ditch in her stride, and another, and then, her nostrils wide, soared over the thorn hedge which guarded the woodland.
Behind, instead of firm ground, lay a quagmire. Her legs sank into it buckling, and bone jarred on bone and flesh squeezed into flesh as her smooth chestnut flanks struck the earth, twisting. She threshed once, her ribs crushed, and died, almost before Lymond stirred from the spongy ground where she had flung him.
He had broken no bones. What had gone was his bastion: the mindless violence through which thought could not seize him. Without it he stayed where he was, his hair brushing his knees, his folded arms tight as a man with a spear in him.
And so Jerott found him, and obtaining no answers, had to locate for himself what the damage was. There was none that he could find. Only a constant and uncontrollable shuddering; a visible comber of movement running through and through the arrogant body.
Jerott said. ‘Oh Christ,’ and taking the other man’s shoulders held him as if in a vice; in the obliterating grip that itself can sometimes stop thought, and re-form what is shattered below it.
After a long time, the shivering lessened, and Jerott scrupulously slackened his grip and said, ‘Francis? There’s a tree just behind you.’
And he understood that, for in a little while he pulled himself back and laid his shoulders against it. His lids, in the near-darkness, appeared to be closed, and at no time at all had he spoken.
Stillness descended. Behind them in the wood a bird called and then flew, in a ruffle of wing beats. Something brushed through the grass near the Isabel and then raced away as Jerott shifted. His own horse, its reins knotted, stood heavily, its bridle jangling as its hips altered. Jerott said, ‘It’s Philippa, isn’t it? Philippa