Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [322]
‘Be not so rude and ignorant
As is the Horse and Mule
Whose mouth without a rayne or byt
From harm thou canst not rule …
‘How long do we have? Two anons and a bye and bye is an hour and a half. Let us bind round our waists the Belt of Endeavour and get there, if we can, before the morning boat of Ra reveals our deficiencies.’
But by that time, probably, he was entertaining himself, for his six companions were already going about their business.
*
There were many people who could have told el capitán Antonio Alcantara to be wary of a blue-eyed Spaniard in a helm which should have been vaguely familiar, erupting through his sentries with an equally plausible companion, and both armed with the night’s password and nothing else.
But nobody was with Captain Alcantara but fifty men at arms, already much resentful of being turned into millers and having to spend a night away from the safety of the main encampment. The sight of two fellow-countrymen, disarmed and horseless, their very corselets torn off their backs was alarming enough. But the news that the French troops which attacked them were even now approaching the river was more frightening still.
Firmly, remembering all he had been taught, the captain put out the fires, sent his men for their weapons and posting them and himself hurriedly at all the vantage points above the village, lay waiting for the enemy to make an appearance. He remembered, thankfully, that there was one boat, and that the rest of them, at a pinch, could swim across the river. By that time, surely, the main camp would be roused and would be on the way to the rescue. He had given the junior of the two unfortunate officers his own horse on which to ride and warn them.
There was a short and nerve-racking wait, not at all assisted by the higher-ranking of the two officers who, unable to put his experience behind him, was walking up and down groaning, weeping and recounting, with a detail Captain Alcantara could well have done without, the unpleasant nature of the rout in which he had just been beaten. When without any warning at all a hackbut fired in the dark field ahead of him the captain jumped so sharply that he bit his tongue. Then he was too busy to care about anything but shouting orders, for the shots came cracking, thick and fast from the darkness.
It was the stranger who, yelling ‘Charge!’, sent them all running, pikes and hackbuts ready, as the firing began to cease and the enemy hung back from the engagement. They charged straight through the field without noting that the unknown officer had already charged in the opposite direction, arriving thus at the water’s edge where, with no one to trouble them, the rest of his party had successfully cut free both the floating mills chained to their stakes in the river-bed.
The first mill was already moving gently downriver by the time the Captain and his men at arms had discovered that there were no enemy soldiers anywhere in the field; only a quantity of burned-out flax and packets of gunpowder. And when, looking about them, they thought to run back to the village, it was to see both mills rocking off in the current with the face of Fergie Hoddim, faintly tinged with verd de mer, peering out from one of the windows. They recharged their hackbuts and fired, kneeling: they raced along the river banks, shouting; they even, in some cases, jumped into the river and swam after the swaying edifices, but to no avail. Then all they could do was catch their horses and gallop off downstream as hard as they could, to warn the troops at the bridge what was coming.
The six jubilant men in the second watermill had already had their briefing. One by one they slipped into the water and made for the bank, each taking a pride, before he left, in steering his barque, so far as possible, into the midst of the current.
It was a pity that, because they themselves had to escape in the mills, they had not been able to hold to their