Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [195]
To surrender, to climb down one by one from that narrow door and these narrow windows, was death. Their lives now lay in Gabriel’s hands.
Five minutes later, the crackling far below in the Keep had become a muffled roar, and looking out, Scott and his men could see the yard flickering red, and the fiery armour and long moving shadows of the Kerrs, standing well back and watching. No one troubled to shoot.
Very soon the smoke reached them, telling that the first floor had caught. It was black and acrid and the men on the battlements, to Lymond’s discursive decree, gave way to an equal number of men from the upper floors. The allure of Liddel Keep could not carry them all. Throughout, Lymond himself, his voice husky with coughing, sustained a wildly impertinent exposition on the scene, breaking off only once to haul a choking youngster back from a sill. ‘You have a small chance here, and none at all down there. Come upstairs and help us throw things instead. It doesn’t do the Kerrs a bit of harm, but it’ll relieve the Nixons of a hellish lot of poor ornaments.’
They loved him. You could feel it, despite the mess they were in; and most of all because he had started the fire himself, just to capture some Kerrs. Only perhaps Will Scott and Randy realized that if he had not done so, they might like lemmings have begun to rush from the Keep to die in the open, fighting, and perhaps take a few Kerrs with them still. This way, they might all live. If Gabriel came.
The flames were halfway up the stone walls when they heard it, the rumour of many hooves beating fast through the night. The Kerrs heard it too. An army was coming, an army which would round up and shackle them, liberate and comfort the Scotts, divide them for ever from their chance of revenge for the wrong done them that day. The door was burned down. The ladders were there on the grass. As Graham Malett led the company of St Mary’s as fast as horse could run down the dark turf to the tower, the besiegers, impervious to hurt, burst into the burning building and over the broken, blazing floor to the stairs. When the company arrived, in perfect formation, surrounding the yard and sweeping all the remaining Kerrs into custody, the Keep was a fiery finger in the black vale, with the clashing of swords and the cries of the maimed within rising above the even roar of the flames.
Orders, more orders. Blacklock, Guthrie, Tait, Plummer, Hoddim, de Seurre, des Roches, controlling each their part of the jigsaw, proceeded with ladder and rope to enter every possible aperture, while a chain from the bailey wells was set up to safeguard their return. Inside, their bodies raw with chance burns, their spleen savage as ever, Scotts and Kerrs reeled and struggled in hand-to-hand fighting, in space hardly enough for the sword. Gabriel’s men captured them, one by one, extricating each family and sending them willy-nilly down the ropes, or hurtling downstairs and through the charred door, over steps sticky with blood.
Lymond and Gabriel came face to face on the roofwalk, where ropes dangled from the deep crenellations and Tait was steering the traffic up and down. The fire was quietly progressing but the noise was much less. Isolated fighting only was going on still in the upper rooms, and even that would soon clearly cease. The only other sounds were from the hurt and the dying. The game the Scotts and the Kerrs played was a mortal one.
Gabriel smiled. He was pale, but his eyes in the flame-shot darkness were lucid as ever. ‘So you got safely back,’ he said. ‘We were troubled for you.’ Then he added, his voice sharpened, ‘You’re hurt?’
Inside Lymond’s burst doublet, itself covered with dirt and smears from superficial cuts and burns, there was a line of dried blood on his shirt. Lymond stared at it as if he had never seen