Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [196]
Gabriel, naturally, looked surprised. Lymond did not even register it. He walked past them both, and took up his stance again where Gabriel had found him, in a corner of the stone-flagged alure. In the rosy glow from the fire, you could see there were several men there already, kneeling or prone. Blacklock’s eyes met Graham Malett’s, and they followed him.
Will Scott was prostrate on the sweating roofwalk, his blazing hair touched to flame by the light; his face grey-white, with the boisterous, wilful vigour all gone. In place of his right arm and side was a mass of blood-sodden wrappings. On one side, Randy Bell, kneeling, held one wrist, while on the other Archie Abernethy, with hands used to gentling his animals, finished binding what was useless to bind.
A great silence fell, stirred distantly by occasional voices. The fighting had stopped. Gabriel said quietly, ‘How did it happen?’
Lymond did not speak. Randy Bell said without looking up, ‘He took the brunt of the rush for the stairs. I was in the middle, and Crawford at the top when they burst in, and he pushed past us all. It was his fight, you see.’
‘On the stairs?’ said Blacklock. ‘But how could he lose his right …’
‘How could he lose his right arm on the stairs?’ said the big doctor, laying Will Scott’s wrist down gently and rising to his spurred feet. ‘You forget, Adam. You forget. The Kerrs are a left-handed race.’ His gaze went from Gabriel to Francis Crawford and back again. ‘Don’t be sorry for him, though. He won’t live to miss it. And he’ll have died fighting the Kerrs. Isn’t that their idea of glory?’
‘No,’ said Lymond suddenly and rudely. He added, ‘Are we staying here until the bloody peel falls?’ And then, ‘Archie? What about it?’
‘We’ll have to take him down the stairs,’ said Abernethy, gazing owlishly up from his task. ‘Ye canna dangle yon frae a rope.’
And so, while the rest of the Keep was cleared of men, Lymond bent and with infinite patience lifted Buccleuch’s oldest son. The sandy-fringed lids didn’t open as Will Scott was carried from his last battlefield, nor when, slack in a horse-litter, he was borne in their midst from the yard.
He did not know how many Kerrs had been killed in this one night of savagery which he, of all his family, had been dedicated to prevent. He did not know how many Scotts had died with him on the stairs. And alone of all that silent company that set off back with Lymond to St Mary’s, he did not look round at the last turn of the hill and see among its spilled wreckage, the tall brand of Liddel Keep, a cracked finger of fire in the empty black void of the night.
A little later, Gabriel collapsed, slipping wordlessly to the ground. The wound they found in his shoulder was not dangerous, but he had lost a great deal of blood. Lymond had him placed in a second litter, and with Jerott leading the company and Alec Guthrie in the rear, they resumed the long journey home.
With their cattle, their dead and their wounded, the other Scotts had soon left them for Branxholm. The Kerrs Lymond kept under guard until, two or three miles up the road, they came upon an old fort with a light at the window, and Lymond halted the troop to bring out all those of the family Turnbull that the Hot Trodd had spared.
Repeated to Cessford’s face, the tale of the cattle killing; of the bribe paid by a stranger was not wonderfully convincing, but it was enough to give them all pause. It might have been some ruse of their enemies. They had plenty, God knew. And, cold after battle, both Sir Walter Kerr of Cessford and Sir John Kerr of Ferniehurst knew this night’s work would exact its own price.
Shortly afterwards, Lymond freed the Kerr family as well.
It was high noon when they themselves reached St Mary’s, and through all the journey Lymond had ridden back and forwards, speaking to the few who were wounded; discoursing, chatting. Trying, thought Jerott Blyth, irritated