Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [97]
“I’ll come back as soon as I can,” said Gideon, undeceived. “Those damned guards at least will be on their toes now.”
“All right,” said his wife philosophically. “Double the guard; put the fowling pieces under the bed and call in the chickens. If this is a trick, it’ll have to be a good one to catch a Somerville sleeping, again.”
Gideon bent and kissed her, and shortly afterward, armed and mounted on borrowed horseflesh, led his men out of the yard and north after the raiders.
* * *
The raid on Flaw Valleys was the most easterly of a series of robberies which swept the south side of the Border that day and were guided and controlled by Crawford of Lymond.
While, like some fissured lodestone, Lord Wharton presided at Carlisle and drew toward him the reluctant hearties of Cumberland and Westmorland, the unmanned farms of both counties were neatly stripped also of their tenants on the hoof, and a stream of hide and wool toiled docilely to the Border, bleat and bellow mingling with soprano from the outraged hearths.
Will Scott, working fast from herd to herd, showed the marks of his three months’ apprenticeship. Meeting him in the press, Johnnie Bullo grinned. “Man, for a minute I thought it was your chief, except it’s a different sort of sneer.”
At Carlisle the Lord Warden, totally unaware, marshalled his force, conferred with his colleague the Earl of Lennox and consulted the sky, which told him that something unpleasant was probably on the way and made him very glad indeed, in the small and unkempt civilian corner of his soul, that the Earl of Lennox and not himself was going on this expedition.
In Scotland at the same time, the Queen’s forces made somewhat confused rendezvous at Lamington, as directed by John Maxwell, and prepared to march south, Lord Culter and Wat Scott of Buccleuch among them.
By nightfall, the hail was already whipping down in gusts and the raids on livestock in Northern England were coming to a systematic close. Trickles of animals met and joined, tributary met tributary and river engulfed river. By the time the Earl of Lennox left Carlisle the united four-footed Sabaoth was already ahead of him and steering at a tangent for his line of march. Beyond them to the north the Scottish army was bedded down on their line of march, the ice making faint and Aeolian music about their steel helmets.
Between England and Scotland here lay river and marsh: on the west the smooth, treacherous skins of the Sol way estuary; on the east the high, wild Roman hills. As the English army under Lennox marched through that night the lightly covered ground opened polyp mouths to their hoofs and made thick mud-slides of every bank. They foundered and staggered and trotted and cursed, and Lennox the commander spat with fury when his scouts reported out of the dark that there was a cattle blockage in the narrow road ahead.
There was nothing unusual in the wilder Border clans taking a dark night to steal some cattle on the Scottish side and drive them south. The Elliots in charge of the herd were apologetic about it and no doubt did their best to clear the road. But when Lennox and his men arrived they met nose to nose with what seemed like every beast in Scotland with four feet to it.
Lennox looked about. Deep, quaking marsh lay on his left and right; the road ahead of him was banked above it and exceedingly narrow. Fifty yards off on his right a small hill thrust up from the bog and overhung the road on its eastern edge. Between this escarpment and the western marsh the dim white of the causeway was hidden by packed and ponderous bodies. “What’s the road like beyond that hill?” snapped the Earl of Lennox.
“Wide and flat, sir,” said the Elliot. “You’ll have no trouble there.”
“You mean you’ll have no trouble,” said Lennox viciously. “We’re going to turn your herd and drive it back through the defile, my man; and then