Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [47]
“At dusk tomorrow night a supply train of wagons is due to leave Roxburgh Castle for Hume. Among other things, it will contain the month’s supply of beer for Lord Grey and the Hume garrison—”
The bang of relief and approval hit the ruined roof and brought mouldering plaster down on their regardless heads. An anonymous voice skirling through the din gave it its leitmotif. “Now you’re talking!” it shrieked. “Now you’re bloody well talking!”
Scott thought, “Don’t they realize they’re sixty to one?” And answered himself wryly. “He’s the Golden Goose. They’ll never touch him.”
He said to Mat, “Your credit.”
Turkey shook his head. “Listen. He’s had it planned for days.” He sighed. “Man, man: he can play them like a chanter.”
But Scott was listening to the Master’s voice explaining the forthcoming raid; giving times, places and numbers, and making it crystal clear that anyone attempting to force Hume Castle itself had no future whatever.
Rightly or wrongly, Will Scott called that an overstatement.
2. Sudden Danger for a Passed Pawn
To ride cross-country from Eskdale to Teviotdale is good for the liver; to do it without being seen healthier still.
The forty-five men who passed over the hills next day with Lymond and Will Scott were fortified, within and without, and sang impolite songs in discreet harmony, syncopated by beer and rough ground.
They reached the Tweed at dusk, crossed between Dryburgh and Roxburgh, and had the last of the beer and some ham and biscuits apiece, after leaving a couple of men to the north of Roxburgh. Then they lit a very small fire and settled down to a ferocious night at the dice.
The outposts came up just after midnight.
Lymond received them from a comfortable hollow in a stone outcrop, where he played a solitary game of his own with a worn pack of cards.
“They’re coming, Master!” Excited in spite of himself, the Lang Cleg was peching. “They left Roxburgh an hour back, coming the way you said. Thirty horse and five drivers; three carts and two heavy wains with oxen pulling.”
“Oxen!” Lymond looked up for the first time from his game.
The Cleg nodded. “They took them on at Roxburgh and left some of their horses. It’ll be the ordnance carts. They’re ower heavy, and the castle’s hard up for horses.”
Lymond said, dealing again, “Thirty horses. How many mares?”
“Ten geldings and twenty mares, fairly fresh. They must have come up from Berwick yesterday and rested all evening.”
“All right.” Lymond gathered up the cards and stood up.
“Scott! Matthew! They’re taking the route we thought and should be among the thorn scrub before the moon rises.”
He recapitulated briefly. Scott watched sardonically. (“The great leader in action.”)
“We aim to disable, not to kill. We take important hostages, if any, and you, Matthew, select the beer and any other goods we need. Then we split: Scott takes as many men as he needs, parcels the rest of the prisoners, loads them into a cart with any goods we don’t want, and drives them as near Melrose as he can get, joining us thereafter. Understood?”
Mat, who hadn’t heard of the latest refinement, grinned. “Melrose! Daddy Buccleuch’ll be pleased!”
Scott waited for the sour smile. It duly appeared. “Payment for goods received, let’s say. Scott concurs, don’t you? All right. Cry boot and saddle, my dears, and we’re off.”
He turned the impervious gaze on the company. “To horse, you drouthy maggots. Are you deaf?”
* * *
By the time the maggots were duly embedded, one mile south of Hume Castle, the English supply train was still toiling north and everybody in it was sick to death of the oxen.
The beasts straddled the causeway, two to a wainload, surging unprogressively through the night with poached and indolent eye. Behind them groaned the carts, tamped with humped canvas, and behind that, more carts, horse-drawn. The mounted escort, fidgetting on all sides, was in a foul temper and raw-alert.
The night, moonless and unsympathetic, stretched around them, and visibility at thirty