Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [241]
He had missed the lambing and the finishing of his new barns and outbuildings; the shearing; the new plantings he had decided on for the spring. For five months he had carried a sleepless sword and husbanded other, corrupt intentions.
Now he was going home. Against the red western sky the outline of the Pentland hills, each shape familiar to him, moved and fell behind him on his right. The road, climbing up into Lanarkshire, reached the high moors as the wind freshened. The sky above him, changing from turquoise to Chinese blue, drew over him the inconspicuous film of night. The horizon, lingering apple green before him, breathed out its colour scrupulously after the prostrate sun.
He had said to Buccleuch, and Dandy Hunter, seeing him off, “I’ll be at Midculter before morning”; and Buccleuch had pummelled him briskly on the shoulder and said, “Good lad. I hope it comes right for you. Kittle cattle, women, kittle cattle: but it’s wersh and wae without them.”
Bryony’s hoofs drummed in sympathy. Kittle cattle: kittle cattle. Would it come right? God knew, thought Richard—and closed his thighs like iron on the mare.
Like a wet and turgid emergence from a pool, the night became peopled with figures. Someone spoke harshly; there was a rush of soft feet and a chinking of metal against buckles. Bryony plunged, and trickling, wirelike fingers over nose and bridle secured her and then tugged and twisted at Richard himself.
Culter, kicking with his spurred boot still in the stirrup, freed his right hand and laid it on his sword, cursing himself under his breath. It was always a bad road to travel alone: it meant riding fast and staying alert, and he had been doing neither. Hell. They still had Bryony fast. There were two of them—no, three. He saw the shadow of a cudgel just in time, ducked, cut and heard a scream as he dodged and cut again.
The hands began again, twisted in his belt and pulling his leathers. The saddle became loose and he knew the girth had been slit. He slashed at the dim faces, feeling the numbness of a blow on his arm; fighting to free his sword arm from the clinging hands. The saddle was swinging, bringing him down with it. Below him, the unseen men grunted and swore; then the blade was suddenly wrenched from his grip and they leaped at him, bringing him successfully down, driving with his fists, knees and elbows into the tangle of hard bodies and then on to the road.
There was a gleam of steel: a solitary, agonized, breathless moment in which the irony of the thing struck him like a cannon ball, and then the circle of dark heads above him opened out like girasol to the sun. A brown pony, dark with perspiration, shot into the circle and decanted a thunderbolt: a dark figure which skirled and spat like a being demented.
The men about Lord Culter froze. The newcomer raged, in a language which was not English. The leader of the assassins answered, sullenly, in the same tongue and was treated to another shrivelling outburst. The other two, making an attempt to speak, were cut off by a storm of abuse. Under it, the three moved off sulkily, mounted and, without a word, disappeared as they had come into the darkness.
The owner of the brown pony remounted. Richard, shaking his head, rolled over, groped for and found his sword, and got to his feet. “I trust,” said the rider in clear but sibilant English, “that you are not hurt?” His expression, so far as it could be seen, was one of resignation rather than triumph.
Richard got back his breath. “Not at all. I would be suitably grateful if I didn’t know they were your men.”
“You have the Romany?” asked his rescuer, and there was a dim flash of white teeth. “Or only a little? Then I must explain that they attacked you through no orders of mine. We are a wayward people, my lord.”
Richard flexed his arm thoughtfully, studying the immobile, spare figure. Vivid in his mind was the firelit room at Stirling, and the stained arrows on the table. He had unfastened his jacket and,