Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [109]
There were six arrows. Jerott Blyth watched them all leave the bowstring and spring through the latticed door. He also watched each in turn fall blundering against some cask or crossbar, or overshoot to drape the cannon-ball stacks. The last one alone fell into the invisible chasm where the smoke rose, but too far to the right. The thread of grey wavered in its slow passage and went on, like the fin of some frail fish, towards the shining wall of packed crates filling a third of the arsenal on their left: the gunpowder.
And all the time, below him, the dark hands of the man patiently filing never ceased although the thick bar still held, and would hold, Jerott guessed, for ten minutes yet. It was, he saw, with no more capacity for surprise, the Moor Lymond had saved. And there were only three minutes of life left for them all.
At his back, jogging footsteps. The extra water casks had been fetched. Hoarse voices; splashing, pattering, fumbling. Cloths had been drenched and rushed in, and more arrows. He watched Lymond catch and fit them, wordlessly, his face totally without expression, his whole gimcrack battery of flourishes swept clean to concentrate on speed, on deftness and on—Jerott realized—his sense of hearing.
Suddenly Lymond threw down bow and arrow and turning, snatched. It was the crossbow arriving, and with it a man whose sobbing breath rang through the cellar as he threw himself on his knees before the iron lock, flinging aside the sweating Moor, and began with shaking hands to probe.
Lymond said only two words to the locksmith, but they filled the anteroom where, quite silent now, de Herrera and his men stood, ankle deep in useless water. ‘How long?’
The smith did not look up, nor did he answer immediately. As life went ticking by, and the tang of burnt fabric filled the motionless air, there was no sound but the frantic rattle of his instrument. Then he said, still working, ‘Five minutes, sir. It can’t be opened in less. Is it enough, sir?’ And as he spoke there was a little eddy, and the smoke, leaning forward, kissed the wall of stacked wooden boxes.
In front of the door, every man drew his breath. ‘The smoke is a little ahead of the flame,’ Lymond said. ‘But it’s passing out of the long alley running from left to right in front of us, and has got to the junction of the alley at right angles to it, fronting the gunpowder. I’m afraid we must risk this thing.’
‘The crossbow?’ de Herrera’s voice was odd. The machine in Lymond’s hands was wound and set.
‘If the cannon balls fall the right way, they may crush the life out of the fuse before they break open the gunpowder. If they broach the gunpowder first, it’s the end. Anyone play pelota?’ said Lymond, a last, faint, grim smile on his lips; and for a second, a living flash of recognition and greeting and, he supposed, farewell, passed from his blue eyes to Jerott. Then he aimed, wound, and shot.
It was true. Accurate as a child’s ball at a party, the heavy bolt hissed between shelving and pillars, clearing all the useless paraphernalia of war, and crossed the space where the long, charred trail of the match must be lying, to strike an outer ball less than halfway up the pyramid, with an echoing clank.
The ball started, in a cloud of white chipped splinters, and ramming its neighbours to the right, caused them in turn to start, pouting;