Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [318]
This was possible. A few minutes before, a silent wave had appeared round a corner and, coursing down, had swept past with a rumbling clatter, careering north to debouch into the Tweed. Another had followed. Here, the rain was at present haphazard. Somewhere far up the Till, the purple thunder-clouds had already exploded. It was unlikely that Hector would send his men back today. Bantering aloud, and arguing under their breath, Nicholas and Wodman agreed at least one thing. The shelter was so aligned that anyone inside its primitive poles and tarred felt would be unseen from the bridge or the opposite bank.
Desperate though it all was, the daft side, as ever, threatened to destabilise Nicholas. Shouting, murmuring, singing, thinking, calculating, hammering, passing the flask, he was working at full pitch, exuberantly, the way he and Kathi used sometimes to vie with one another in Scotland, in Iceland. Andro, wearing his oyster-seller grin, could just about match him. All they had to do, really, was get the shelter half up, and get the two bowmen into it. They had knives. The wetter it got, the easier it would be.
It was like that, edging up to success, when someone screamed. When one of the men on the bridge screamed, flung up his arms, and fell headlong down into the rising water, which began to bear him away.
Nicholas stopped. Beside him, Andro jerked and then also stopped, held ferociously by Nicholas’s free hand. Beyond them both, the English archers sprang to their feet and started to run, appalled, to the river. The remaining sentry stood as if petrified. Then he turned, and began to run for his life to the opposite end of the bridge.
He might have escaped had the gate not been shut. They saw him reach it, and fling his arms over it, and then slide like a cloth to the ground. An arrow, fine as a toothpick, stuck out of his back.
Wodman said, ‘Holy Mother.’ It sounded entirely reverent, and his expression was awed. He said, ‘Adorne?’
Upriver, a bugle rang out above the thud of the water in a long, warning flourish that was repeated, closer at hand. It was too timely to be a coincidence. Nicholas had been right in his guess. The bridge had been under surveillance from the opposite side.
‘Maybe Adorne,’ Nicholas said. ‘Anyway, someone who’s going to be in trouble unless we do something, fast. Let’s pick up those bows.’ He began to run, Andro following, pelting down the side of the stream after the archers.
One was already dead when they came upon him, tumbled down the steep bank and half in the grip of the waters, his bow snapped and jerking. The next moment, a great bough swirled past, and took him into its tangle. On either side, the river was scouring high through the bushes, its lively roar melisma and counterpoint to the pedestrian thud of the thunder. The rain, hitherto desultory, began to drum down. The remaining archer turned and saw them, and whispered, ‘Go back! You’ll get killed. There are still some of them about.’ He was crouching, his bow strung, below the lip of the bank and his face, glistening with water, had lost all the flush of his drink.
Nicholas descended beside him. ‘How many? Where?’
‘On this bank. They were shooting from four different places.’
‘So maybe there are only four of them,’ Nicholas said. He saw Wodman lift up his knife.
‘Two, then,’ said the archer. ‘Davie got one. And the one that killed Davie, I got.’ Then his eyes fixed in his face, for Wodman had thrust his knife home.
Nicholas himself might not have killed; but Wodman was not sentimental. They had to escape. And if they could do it still incognito, all the better.
The man slumped, and Nicholas seized his quiver and unclenched his hand from his longbow while Andro reclaimed his knife. Looking up through the fringe of rain from his hat, Nicholas tried, against the vibration and roar of the water, to listen for trampling feet on the bank, or any cries of pursuit from behind. High above him, there was a double flash, and the roof of the sky suddenly cracked in several places,