Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [324]
His task was to drive the mill through the main current up to the bridge, without lodging it on either bank or blocking the second mill which must be following him.
He had hoped to use a plank to steer with, as the others had planned, or even his weight, moved from side to side of the frail wooden building. And if he could see nothing, at least surely he could hear the turmoil of midstream, and sense the quiet of the banks and deep pools he should keep from.
What confounded him there was the racket of the machinery. It was as if some monstrous milling were already in process: a crop of iron grinding between brazen rollers within walls which boomed and echoed like drumskins, crushing his mind with its violence. (O mill, what hast thou ground? Precious thy wheat! It is not oats thou hast ground, but blood-red wheat …) And if another such was coming behind him, he could not hear it, any more than he could hear the sound of the water, or the shouts of the soldiers, or the distant rap which was the firing of hackbuts.
There would have been a certain splendour in crashing straight into the bridge, except that he did not wish to be rescued unconscious; and in the river he would be his own master. So he knelt, sliding and swaying, and touched the slowmatch to the fuse, keeping it there for a long time to make sure that it caught. Then he blundered purposefully about, thrown from wall to wall of his vessel until he found the open space of the door.
For a moment he stood there, and as once Philippa had done, forbade his mind to fly to its homing.
A fisherman’s voice, heard long ago, returned to him with sudden brilliant clarity:
Ta femme sera de la sorte
Dans les parois de ta maison
Comme est une vigne qui porte
Force bons fruicts en la saison.
Then it seemed that an impatient voice said ‘Come!’ So he dropped from the mill, and the cold swirling flow of the Authie received him.
He did not know, as the others running along the banks could see, that he was in the path of the second mill, coming lurching along the surface behind him. He did not know either how short a fuse he had given his gunpowder.
It blew up when he was still very close behind, tossing the river into waves and sending out a wall of heat that struck him in the face. Planks fell. Because the charge was small, the mill did not disintegrate. It did, however, begin to burn with great fury and also to move much more quickly, so that to the men on the bridge, it looked like a fiend from hell rushing roaring and rattling upon them.
They ran for their lives. They were mostly in safety when it struck, exploding the four or five culverin. The mill broke through all the supports, dragging out ropes and chains and flinging into the air the boats which had formed part of its structure. Then, unfurling pure flame from its fragments, the mill paused, swung, and then picking up speed moved on downstream, the river slapping its banks in great copper combers behind it.
The shock sweeping back from the bridge caught the second mill for a moment and stopped it. It danced high on the crests, lifting and falling, and finally began to move forward to collide with the bridge in its turn, collecting a streamer of flame as it did so.
In sailing to the bridge, it overran a great deal of wreckage, among which was François de Sevigny, who sensibly had stopped swimming because he was hurt, and because at every stroke his head and shoulders and ribs were flailed with tumbling stone and jerking timber. Nor, of course, could he know where to swim.
… Et tes fils autour de ta table
Arrangez, beaux et verdissants,
Comme la jeunesse agréable
D’un plant d’oliviers fleurissans …
The voice stopped.
He was already sinking when the mill struck him.
Chapter 8
L’ennemi grand vieil dueil meurt de poison …
Plus ne sera le grand en faux sommeil,
L’inquietude viendra prendre repoz.
The following day the heatwave broke,