The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [321]
After that everything became much worse. He caught his foot in the centre gutter and stopped himself from falling headlong only by crashing into something which turned out to be a well-head: his ribs acquired another bruise and, what was worse, there was quite a lot of noise. He took to his heels and found sanctuary, after a bit, behind a cobbler’s booth, but after things had quieted he managed to rouse someone’s dog, and the multiplying barking alerted his own private bloodhounds again.
This time, running, his bough snapped in two in his hands, and he was left with a stick too short to protect his hand and arm or to guide him between pilasters or about projecting flights of stone steps or past cabins or horse-blocks or water butts. His last, crazy miscalculation as they closed in on him after the latest cascade of sound was to climb, by touch, the wooden fence rising high on one side of the lane and find himself stumbling among the stacked planks in the yard of a carpenter’s shop.
The noise that time was sufficient to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind about where precisely he was. He found the fence again and followed it round, to find that it enclosed the yard completely. He strode stumbling to the side farthest from the approaching noise and finding a foothold began to pull himself up, wondering what indignity lay waiting on the other side: a cesspool or a pigsty; a henhouse or a fishmonger’s pile of stacked creels. At the same moment, before he had a proper purchase on the top, he heard a thud as someone’s feet landed inside the wall, a little along from him. And the next moment, his knife out, he was defending himself against someone who was gripping him, hand and arm.
Ludovic d’Harcourt’s voice said, ‘Don’t. It’s me. You can’t climb over there: come farther along.’
And astonished even through the stupefying pain, Francis Crawford allowed himself to be dragged along the wall by the man who had betrayed and four times tried to kill him. ‘Here,’ said Ludovic and, bending, grasped the other man with his one good arm, and lent him his shoulder to climb out of the yard, and to safety.
He had got so far when the yard gates burst open. The push d’Harcourt gave him almost unbalanced Lymond, but he held hard to the peeling wood of the fence and then, against all the thrust of d’Harcourt’s arm, half fell, half jumped down inside the yard once again. He said, ‘You can’t climb with one hand.’
D’Harcourt said, ‘You fool! You fool …!’ And as Lymond resisted his attempts to push him away, the other man broke suddenly loose and ran straight into the oncoming enemy.
Lymond heard it happen: heard his scream in the midst of the clash of steel: d’Harcourt must have had a knife also, and he must have used it. In the dark, whatever their orders, no one’s men at arms were going to be especially gentle with that. Then he heard another sound, a long bubbling moan which he had heard too often to make any mistake about. And, turning, Francis Crawford moved silently from the sound and, finding the place d’Harcourt had shown him, pulled himself achingly up, and over the top. He did not know how big the drop was. But he lowered himself until he hung by his fingertips, and then jumped.
It was a little farther than he had hoped. He arrived sprawling on the cobbles, and then, rolling over, collected himself. The men were inside the yard, arguing. In a moment, having slain his protector, they were going to renew the hunt for himself. He found he did not greatly care. Breathing in long, retching gasps he stood for a moment where he was, his head resting against the too-high fence, his mind on Ludovic d’Harcourt. And only slowly became aware of something else: a rumour of scent; a perfume