Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [193]
In the words he had used such a short while before in Dumbarton, but in a voice very different, he snapped, ‘What are you doing here?’
Philippa’s chin jerked. She was dressed, but not cloaked, and her flat chest heaved like a colt’s. ‘I’m not going. Somervilles don’t run away.’
‘Stay, of course,’ said Lymond brutally, ‘if you like men to die for you. Where’s that fool Nixon?’
‘I can’t get her to go!’ Philippa’s host, white-faced, stood his ground. ‘Her horse is ready. The rest are all mounted outside.’
‘Go, then!’ said Philippa. ‘I’m not under anyone’s orders. I know how to fight. I can fire a gun even. I’m as good as Joleta.…’
Someone said, from two floors above, in a wild skirl, ‘They’re coming!’
‘You can keep away from Joleta,’ said Lymond quickly to this other, plain child. ‘You can leave Midculter in future alone. You can get back to Flaw Valleys when you’re told, and stay there; and if you won’t obey my orders you can take the consequences, like this.…’
He hit fast and precisely, and her jaw snapped shut under his fist. A moment later she was in Nixon’s arms and down the ladder. Another moment and, homeless, gearless, the owners of Liddel Keep had vanished south into the darkness, leaving their home and everything that they owned as a battlefield for the Kerrs and the Scotts.
To the thundering approach of many hooves, the family Scott pulled up the ladder and locked and barred the thick oaken door; and Lymond turned to find Randy Bell grinning at his shoulder. ‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘My God, you’ve a way with women, haven’t you? You must let me teach you a thing or two, if we ever get out of here.’
‘I know them both,’ said Lymond pleasantly, and exchanged a long, wordless greeting that was not a smile with Will Scott, who knew everything there was to know about Lymond’s way with women, and had done his best to apply some of it, to effect, with Grizel. Then they became very busy indeed.
No feud of many years’ standing can keep at full pitch all the time. The rivalry between the Scotts and the Kerrs flared and died and flared with events, and there were times when an affront to a peace-loving member would bring no retort, while an imagined slight could cause the more choleric to burst out and kill. Probably never before, as tonight, had the whole Kerr family been wrought to such a white-hot pitch of fury when, fellow-sufferers in a common theft, the Scotts had taken the chance, they believed, of slaughtering all their livestock without cause. And had further had the confidence to proclaim it. With that shambles of beasts just behind them, the Kerrs were out for one thing: to reach the castle and kill.
The main door to Liddel castle was on the first floor and reached by a ladder now removed. On the ground floor there was a stone-vaulted room with a well where stores and stock could be kept, and where in time of need horses might also be hidden.
The Nixons kept their grain in this place. Into it Scott had pushed at least some of the fuel; the spare ladders; the new-cut tree in the woodshed that would have made a fine ram. There was no time for more. Bell had barely time to lock the big timber door over its stout iron grille and have himself pulled up with the rest into the keep, when the first Kerrs arrived at the gate.
They arrived in a grey, antique horde, mailed, malevolent, thirsty for blood as the red dogs of Hades, and poured screaming into the yard, hurling aside cattle and sheep as they came. They put the cressets out, plunging the courtyard in darkness, so that in those first moments Scott’s men at every dark window found only shadows for targets: shadowy figures, well-briefed, well-organized, racing from building to building collecting what they required.
Lymond had been right. Cessford and Ferniehurst knew there was no time to waste. If Liddel Keep was to be taken, it must be stormed ruthlessly, and at once.
Swiftly,