Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [315]
‘Will they rise?’ Wodman said. He knew why he was being told. Now it really mattered.
‘Sandy tells himself yes, but I think almost certainly not, not in the numbers he needs. That leaves battle, and on the Border for preference; hence the artillery hereabouts. Otherwise Gloucester has to invade, with lengthening supply lines. The chance of success is much less, and he may have to cut loose and go home, with considerable losses and James still on the throne.’
‘And Sandy?’ said Wodman. ‘Back to England, and wait for another chance?’
‘Under a possibly dying king, and after an expensive fiasco? No. This is Sandy’s sole opportunity,’ Nicholas said. ‘And ours. And Gloucester’s. That brings us to the third possibility. If there is no rising, and no battle, and no captured king, then Sandy must become the prime mediator. Let him arrange Gloucester’s peaceful withdrawal, and let James reinstate him in Scotland.’
Wodman stared at him. He said, ‘Would you trust Albany to think of that?’
‘I’d trust Gloucester,’ Nicholas said.
‘I see,’ Wodman said.
Before any war, all the possibilities were discussed. Then, like this, they were abruptly reduced, and you knew where you were. And now only one thing mattered: to get the information over the river, and north.
The Archer started to calculate: how to get horses from Hume; what route to follow to Edinburgh. Once they crossed the river, it could be done in five hours. He supposed if Adorne had ever managed to come, he would have cleared off from Upsettlington by now. Everyone must think they were dead. He said, ‘We can’t get out tonight. They had a man captured yesterday over the river, and they’ve doubled the watch.’
‘All right,’ said Nicholas. ‘So, how?’
It was like a desperate comedy in the end. The Tweed was only a few miles away, and once they crossed it, they were in Scotland. But Castle Heaton was bristling with soldiers, occupying the low rises as lookouts, patrolling the distant steep banks of the Till as it darted headlong below, plummeting between mill-wheels and weirs on its crooked way to the smooth-running Tweed. And on the banks of the broad Tweed itself, the men from each nation were spaced out along either bank. Some were invisible; others were deliberately in view. Periodically one group or another would shout insults.
The bridge the artillery would use was between the Tweed and the castle, and just a mile from the mouth of the Till. Nicholas reported for duty next day with his friend Fletcher as a willing assistant, and helped drive the ox-wains there, with the mattocks and the sand and the limestone. The smell of dung steamed in the air: it had become breathlessly hot, with no wind. The river, dazzling below, looked like Paradise. ‘After,’ promised Hector the mason, a hard-working man with a kind heart. ‘After, if you’re good lads, you can strip off and give the lasses a treat.’ It led to a lot of badinage, and kept them cheerful for a while.
It was hard work. The bridge was recent, a replacement for an old timber one, and put together in haste until a better could be built. Andro, heaving up buckets of water, could hear the master’s diatribes, and Cuddie the Hod intervening and commenting. Nicholas did know a hell of a lot. Gossipy phrases floated down, to do with site-clearance, and quarrying contracts for ashlar. By the time the whistle went for a hunk of bread and a fill from the ale-cask, they were on to types of paving, and the length of the ideal abutment, and how to cut the cost of the iron and lead for the gates. He knew more about mortar, for sure, than Hector did.
It was just bad luck, Wodman thought, with a flash of yearning, that Nicholas wasn’t alone, and able to put his expertise to real use. He had a wistful vision of the cannon lumbering over from Norham, and reaching the bridge, and falling clean through it. Then the whistle blew, and it was terrible, beginning again.
They