Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [98]
There was a short silence. Then Lymond said, ‘To enforce peace.’
‘Ah. And then?’ said Piero Strozzi.
‘And then to rule,’ Lymond said.
*
They had much in common, aside from the professional gossip: the tales of other men’s mistakes and eccentricities and all the low comedy which accompanies warfare. Exchanges of such a kind carried them to Cléry where, in a neglected barn beside a burned-down farmhouse, they found fresh straw and, stored behind some rotting vegetables, a chest holding a change of clothes, a napkin of food, and a wineflask. How they came there, Strozzi did not inquire and Lymond volunteered no explanation: his intelligence service, or, if you preferred it, the number of spies he was paying were his own affair.
They left Cléry rested and refreshed, since it is a stupid man who carries a slow brain and tired muscles into danger. The rest of their journey indeed was enlivened by lurid incidents in which one or other of the King’s trusted commanders took a fancy, it seemed, to put the whole enterprise to risk for the sake of an hour’s entertainment. On one occasion, to do with a fisherman, a smithy, and three German archers from Arras (‘Eine Deutscher bukt wie ein bawar’) Lymond rendered even the greatest practical joker in Italy speechless with combined hysteria and anxiety. Only later, when it was all over, did Piero Strozzi perceive that, after all, Francis Crawford was exacting retribution for Douai.
Then they were at Ardres, and ahead lay the Pale, the frontier of the English-held hinterland of Calais.
They crossed it at Leulinghen, whose thatched church once straddled the frontier, its French door in the nave, its English door in the choir. They left after early Mass by the choir door in their coarse jerkins and dusty boots, showing at Sandingfield a pass thoughtfully provided at Ardres by their host for the night. His name had been Haines, and his cousin, Lymond said, leased all the fishing in the marshes between Hâmes and Ardres. He had supplied them also with a mule and a small wicker cart containing six barrels of apples, which they collected outside the church and trundled nine miles through low hills and over the causeway to the moated walls of the city of Calais.
They showed their pass again to cross the drawbridge with the rest of the crowd at the Bullengate and made their way at a dilatory pace to the market place, displaying on the way a happy if illegal propensity to sell apples to any passer-by who requested them. At intervals the mule, a stubborn creature, chose a stance and defied all their efforts to shift it, ending in an act of total resistance at the drawbridge wardhouse of the citadel.
The tang of the apples and the sight of the red waxen mounds were too much for the pikemen on guard there. Yelling and whacking with vigour, Lymond jumped round his mule to find his fruit disappearing in handfuls behind jacks and into stuffed breeches.
He made no effort to consult his trading partner. Howling, he snatched the shapeless hat from his rough hair and jumped on it. Then, stick whirling, he charged at the soldiery.
It was afterwards revealed to Marshal Strozzi that he must have seen the approach of the Knight-Porter and his fifty armed soldiers, returning from closing the Millgate. At the time, the most distinguished muleteer in Christendom stood with the reins in his clutch, breathing stertorously, while his crazy companion ricocheted like an unwashed puppet from cuirass to mailed fist to the flailing wood of reversed and jocular halberds. A couple of hackbutters got to work with their boots and the wicker cart shuddered and tilted. With a bellow, Piero Strozzi dropped the reins and rushed into battle.
‘Bleedin’ butter-boxes!’ said with injured astonishment one of the three men he knocked