Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [336]
To some, but not everyone. Vociferous though they were, less than half the army—less perhaps than a third—was still intent on marching off, in the time-honoured fashion, to resist the Auld Enemy. And most of these, by the sound, were leaving what remained of the camp and had begun to fight their way south.
It came to Tobie that they might not have the numbers, but that they might very well have the guns. And he did not know which side Big Tam would end up with.
He escaped a few minutes later, slithering under the rear of the tent, and finding the Napier youth, Ramsay, beside him. Will Roger had gone with the first of the mêlée, the boy said, and he wanted to find him. Tobie grunted. Without his box, with a woollen cap low on his brows, he hoped no one would recognise him. The youth, in a cloak, looked like anybody else. Neither Moriz nor John, unsurprisingly, was where he had left them. The gun park was empty, but you could see the tracks of the guns. Swearing and stumbling, Tobie followed them.
They had gone to the bridge. They were still on the bridge. The bridge and its approaches were crowded with struggling men, and the rising sun glittered on steel helms and mail-shirts; on swords and axes and pikes, knives and maces. The noise came in great throbbing waves, drowning all the natural sounds of the country. The knights like Archie Douglas and Innes didn’t have banners or surcoats: there hadn’t been time; and they were disciplining men of their own side, who knew them. Tobie didn’t see Moriz, or John, or Cochrane, or Whistle Willie. What the hell was Whistle Willie doing in the middle of this?
Then he saw that they were trying to turn the guns, to point back to the camp, to the King’s captors.
Later, he thought that Angus and Buchan and Grey would have managed to stop them: the cavalry threw itself forward, and there was a sudden and effective deployment to cut off the bridge from the rest of the dissentients. In response the crowd round the bridge seemed to thicken, and the noise increased yet again, the thud and squeal of weapons being punctuated by bouts of frenzied cheering. There were men—gunners?—clambering up on the carts, head and shoulders above the fighting about them. Two of them fell, pierced by arrows, and after a moment the others began to climb down. It was the first indication that the anti-war party might be prevailing. Driven by fear, Tobie forced his way up to the bridge, dodging weapons and ducking between horses. He heard Ramsay following. Then, suddenly, he caught sight of Moriz and John. They were in the thick of the mob by the guns, and were being set upon. Moriz was protecting his head; John was laying about him, and losing. ‘Here’s another!’ his assailants were yelling. ‘Hang him over his guns!’
Hang him over his guns?
‘You bloody fools!’ John was screeching. ‘I don’t want to fight! I’m the one who jammed the gun-carriers for you!’
‘That for a tale!’ someone roared. They’d wrapped a belt round his neck.
Tobie arrived. The impact, in the person of a middle-aged medical man who did not observe his wife’s dietary regimen, had all the violence of one of Tam’s thirty-three pounder gunstones. ‘Stop! He’s on your side! He can disable the guns! He can help you!’
They did stop, for a moment, being winded. Then, disregarding all he was yelling, they laid hands on him, and Johnnie Ramsay as well. Running out of baldricks, they were cutting up harness. John was continuing to shout. He was shouting, ‘No! No! Listen! Look! Wait!’ And all the time he was trying to point. Tobie looked.
Five years ago, he had experienced something like this; not in summer, but in winter; not in this country but in Lorraine, at the start of the battle that had obliterated the fine little company he fought with, and rendered Robin a cripple, and brought Nicholas home with barely his life. Then, it had been Swiss horns, not trumpets. Then, the snow had turned black beneath the massed hooves of the enemy cavalry,