Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [264]
‘One blessing,’ said Sybilla now reflectively to her other son as they rode. ‘I needn’t try to like Madame Donati any more.’ And as he continued silent, she said sympathetically, ‘You liked Sir Graham, didn’t you? It seems a pity, but I had really rather have you friends with Francis.’
Richard said drily, ‘Like you and Evangelista Donati, I suppose I felt I should like him. He is the only man I have ever met who had the stature to handle Francis, and the only one of whom I knew Francis afraid. It is a tragedy to Francis as well as to the Order that this is the outcome. If he survives this at all, it will leave him in unquestioned command. And he needs a master.’
‘Or a mistress,’ Sybilla remarked.
*
Very near the Border, they were seen crossing the Kielder Burn, but Cheese-wame said it didn’t matter. By that time Philippa was almost too tired to keep in the saddle, and Cheese-wame, it would seem, had lost some of his confidence as well, or he would not have turned off the main route across the high fells to take the wheel causeway to Wauchope Forest.
The scrub and windblown pine trees, black in the greying light, gave at first the illusion of warmth and shelter from the little, pestering dawn wind; but then Philippa began to shiver again, and Cheese-wame, suspecting at length their direction, stopped both horses, and lifting her down from the saddle, built a roaring fire for them both on the steep slopes of the hill, the flame blown in guttering tassels against the black pines, while they waited for light.
The soft, resinous pile underfoot made for quiet pacing. The first Cheese-wame knew of the tinker’s presence was a great blow on his back that tumbled him head over heels. It was not until minutes later when, clipped man to man by knee and elbow and wide, muscular hands, they threshed and bounded and crashed among the oak scrub and thorn that he isolated the thin, needling pain within the fading ache of the buffet and felt the tinker’s grasp slide across the thick wet of his leather back, where the blood poured from the tinker’s knife.
Philippa saw the knife between Cheese-wame’s solid shoulders. As the two men rolled downhill past her, their voices lifted in snatches of wordless, guttural anger, she plunged to her feet, and snatching a blazing stob from the fire, ran jumping after them. She saw Cheese-wame’s face, lithographic in grey and black, rear puppet-like over the tinker’s great bulk and the tinker’s shoulders begin their surge from the ground. With all the force of her arm, Philippa brought the flaming wood down on his head.
It burst like a Catherine wheel. Blazing slivers, leaping into skin and sour clothes and hair, sprayed the tinker with fire, while the unburnt stock, a club in her hands, belaboured him as he struggled, both hands to his face.
Face averted, eyes nearly shut in a grimace of insane fright and sheer Somerville resolution, Philippa went on hitting until the man, now really shouting, managed to roll over on to his front and, blazing still, hands to his raw face, to begin to lurch to his knees. Then, dropping the branch, she ran to Cheese-wame.
He was on his feet, swaying. In the dim light the black channels and patches of blood reduced him to shapeless mosaic: even his face, where it was smeared, had acquired grotesque, different salients. Philippa said, her voice shaking, ‘It’s a lot of blood, but that’s a good thing, you know. It washes away the dirt. I think if you could get on your horse I could perhaps hold you on for a bit until … until we get help. Unless,’ said Pippa Somerville, a good deal of the conviction suddenly leaving her voice, ‘you would like to use my pistol?’
But it was evident, first, that Cheese-wame Henderson was far from aiming and letting off her pistol, and secondly that unless they got away soon, the bleeding, dizzy madman crashing through