Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [156]
‘I rather doubt,’ said Lymond blandly, ‘if you’ll have the energy for long arguments. If you succeed in deposing me, you will certainly qualify for a trip somewhere sunny, or even merely, somewhere uncommonly hot.… For while I shall know all your tricks by the end of the winter, I doubt if you will know mine.’
‘Why,’ said the rich, agreeable voice of the doctor Randy Bell as he sat unmoving, thumbs tucked in his jacket. ‘Have ye a sure cure for arsenic? It’s a grand preventative for broken nights.’
‘You should make the acquaintance of Archie Abernethy there,’ said Lymond, unmoved. ‘He used to give it to his elephants. You’d better come forward, Archie.… Am I to take it, gentlemen, that we are agreed?’
They were, Jerott saw: won over by the little display of disinterestedness and by the prospect of unlimited debate. They began to rise.
‘Then you ought,’ said Lymond painstakingly, ‘to take note of the fact that Mr Abernethy has just released from their stalls two hundred and fifty of our young horses and driven them out of the grounds. They are worth sixty-five angels each and cannot be replaced locally. Every horsethief in the southern uplands will therefore be after them, and pretty well every other household worth its salt, come to that.
‘Remembering that we have to live among these people without antagonizing them, you may begin rounding them up as from now. Archie will tell you directly what the stock markings are. You will of course have them here before morning: the training course proper opens at six a.m. in this hall. You might even manage some sleep. I,’ said Lymond calmly, ‘am going to bed. Good night, gentlemen. And good luck.’
It was a moonless night, and had just begun, grudgingly, to rain when his disbelieving audience found themselves outside the gates. Cantering round the soggy hilltops, lanterns jogging, and six furious mercenaries pounding behind, Jerott Blyth peered at somebody’s ill-drawn map and then at the night before him, alive like a topiarist’s nightmare with horse-shaped bush and twist, and cursed everyone but Graham Malett.
By four in the morning he had a dozen of the lost mounts, and had displayed furious tact through every kind of reception from farm and cottage in his allotted terrain. It was only now, approaching the last, that he discovered that Lymond in fact had not gone to bed. As he rode up to the porch, a tranquil voice in the darkness said, ‘You may leave this house out. A baby is just being born. Who is it? Jerott?’
‘Yes.’ Through the rain you could just distinguish horse and rider, motionless against the wet thatch.
‘How many have you recovered?’ Lymond asked.
‘Twelve. I’m expecting a report from the tally-centre.’ They had a central depot established.
‘You needn’t wait for it, then. All the horses are in. You will find some of your colleagues collected more, but you had easily the worst ground to cover. Did you enjoy it?’
Imbecile question. Jerott Blyth opened his mouth to answer it as it deserved; then was struck, as many times before in his life, by a crazy discovery. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Odd, isn’t it?’ said Lymond without surprise. ‘It is the reason, if you would recognize it, why you enjoyed being a Knight of the Order. I’ll look after your scout when he comes. If you go back now, you might just get half an hour’s sleep.’
At six a.m., alert, alive, roughly cleaned up and talking hoarsely and indiscriminately among themselves, the twenty officers of St Mary’s were all there in the hall. Lymond was there before them; not on the platform but amongst them, astride a chair and ruffling through a rainsoaked pile of notes. He bore no sign of having been out at all, but took them step by step through as nasty, and subsequently as hilarious a post-mortem of the night’s ride that Jerott had ever attended. Then he gave out details of the day’s work.
It was tough, brutal and typical of the régime they were to follow for the next six to eight weeks, with one exception. It ended at dusk. Then, over-extended and outplayed like worn guitar strings, the entire