Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [99]
After that, the rout was complete. Broken between panicking animals and remorseless archery, provisions lost, weapons lost, nerve shattered, Lennox’s troops escaped into the moss and out of it as best they could, and a good many did not escape at all. The Scots had begun to withdraw when Lord Culter noticed that the group of cattle blocking the Carlisle end of the trap had disappeared. It was trotting instead across the faint, crooked path which led to the hills in the east with men all around it, driving it on. And at the head of the circle, knotting it tight and glittering in the sudden, faint moonlight, was a bright yellow head.
Lord Culter dismounted, running, and pulled the bow from his saddle as his horse passed. He fitted an arrow and flung up his arm.
All his vision was filled by a broad, carapace back, leading a troop of men unerringly along the path of his bowshot. It was Buccleuch, bellowing as he went. “A Scott! A Scott!”
Warned, the golden head turned. Culter saw a white blur; then a curtain of arrows fell between Buccleuch’s men and Lymond. The men hesitated, drew up and turned back as the raiders, in that moment’s grace, vanished.
Standing where he had dismounted, Lord Culter, the enigmatical, the impersonal, the impervious, raised a stiff right arm and smashed an expensive yew bow like a whip on the rocks. Sir Wat, slightly discomposed, was trotting back.
“Dod, did you see who that was?”
Lord Culter said dispassionately, “How your son debases himself is no concern of mine. You might however recall that to protect a murderer and a traitor is a capital offence.”
Buccleuch, braced for rebuke, had not quite expected this. He took a whistling lungful of Border air, swallowed it down with offence and resentment, and said simply, “Man, you’re obsessed. Come on. Everyone’s waiting.”
“Just a moment. Understand me,” said Lord Culter, and his eyes for a moment were as foreign as Lymond’s. “Next time, regardless of what is in the way, I shoot.”
But Buccleuch’s patience, a slim and frangible thing, could carry no more pressure that night. With a brief, unforgivable click, it snapped. “I had rather,” said Sir Wat through his beard, “have a son tried and hanged for being driven into bad company, Richard Crawford, than be known in company, honourable or otherwise, by a name fit to spit on.” And wheeling, he drove his horse into the night, leaving Culter motionless, unseeing, at his back.
In the small hours of Sunday morning the sky cleared, the temperature dropped, and the stars described a country silted and sparkling with white. Trampled mud grew a coating of thin, icy paint and the marshes spawned their own sluggish and gelid roe. The earth became very still. In all Cumberland nothing stirred but a round, black herd of beasts, running swiftly east within a circle of horsemen.
* * *
In the valley of the Tyne, the manor of Flaw Valleys waited with vacant stable and empty byre for Gideon’s return; and in the yard and in the garden Grey’s men crammed themselves into impossible corners out of the wind and rasped together glazed palms.
The sound of hoofbeats alerted them. Kate heard it too, and opened a window, her shadow languishing, dimly sparkling, on the grass. She called, “Are they coming?” and someone above her replied, “Yes, ma’am, I see them—Allan! Get the gate open!—And good work too, ma’am. Looks to me as if he’s got the whole herd back.”
Kate’s face sparkled like a new penny. She ran for Philippa. Together they hung, fascinated, out of the window and watched the seething backs filling the yard below. Above the din they could hear men on horseback shouting, and the crack of whips combing the excited beasts back to their quarters. “Don’t they look tired?” said Kate sympathetically, of a huddle of sodden and glass-eyed ewes. “I don’t see Father, Philippa, do you?”
But Pippa’s brown eyes shone, and she turned away from the window, plaits swinging. “I know where he is! Listen!” said the child, and opened the door.
Along the corridors of Flaw Valleys poured the notes of a harpsichord, played triumphantly