The Disorderly Knights (84 page)

Afterwards, Jerott realized that, blinded with anger, he had missed the small sounds Lymond had been waiting for: the approaching, hesitant footsteps of Archie Abernethy and Guthrie, waiting with impatience for the long interview to be over; stirred finally by curiosity and then by suspicion to come close and listen. Moving quietly as he spoke, Lymond had reached at length the dark corner of the hut where Archie Abernethy had made up his bed of dry heather, the blankets turned back where he had left it. Beside it, lying unseen in the failing light, as Jerott should have known it would be, was his sword.

Now Lymond made one sudden movement and straightening, the hilt in his hand, backed swiftly, still speaking, between Jerott Blyth and the door. ‘Your sword, Jerott,’ said Francis Crawford quietly to his boyhood friend, and Jerott Blyth, unbelieving rage rising within him, found himself looking along the steady, silver blade of Lymond’s own steel.

With an instinct sure and swift as the Order could make it in all the years of his training, he flung himself sideways and gripping the makeshift table, flung it rocking towards Lymond as he drew out his
own blade with a hiss. Lymond, expecting it, hurled himself sideways. The table, teetering, crashed on to its back where he had been, fully blocking the curtained doorway of the hut.

There was a moment’s pause while the two men stood, breathing fast, long swords ready, on opposite sides of the cabin; then the hide door-cover was ripped away from outside and Abernethy, with Guthrie behind him, laid hands on the overturned table to heave it aside and jump in.

‘All right,’ said Lymond. He was very breathless, but his eyes did not move from Jerott’s wild face. ‘This is my affair. Alec, these papers contain the case against Graham Malett as I know it so far. You know what to do with them. Archie, wait outside with Mr Guthrie. You understand that whatever happens, the Chevalier is not to return to St Mary’s. Nor is he to suffer any harm. It isn’t his fault that he’s surrounded by vile engineers and commercials. Jerott, in this space neither of us can possibly miss. Put down your sword.’

‘Talk!’ said Jerott Blyth between his teeth. ‘I have had my bellyful of talk, without respect of honour or oath. I don’t forget that you would use a living woman as your shield rather than lay down your life for the justice you talk about. I risk no one’s life but my own, and if I succeed, my prize will be a man whose stature you would not even begin to comprehend.’ His dark eyes brilliant, the young knight stopped, and raising his heavy sword high in both hands, hurled it suddenly to the opposite corner of the hut, where it fell thudding against the bare wall, and thence to the floor. ‘Stop me if you dare,’ he said, and walked steadily towards Lymond and the door.

For a second only, Lymond hesitated. Then, a moment before the other man reached him, Lymond also lifted his sword aside quietly and dropped it behind the overturned table at his side. Behind him, Alec Guthrie’s voice said sharply, ‘Crawford! Let him go!’ and Archie Abernethy called out.

Jerott paid no attention. He saw Lymond standing in the open entrance to the hut, his hands gripping the overturned edge of the board at his back, and the dimmer figures of Guthrie and Abernethy against the storm-dark sky behind. Then he jumped.

They were the same age, of the same build, and they both knew all the possible grips which would throw a man down and keep him down, and also if possible ward off outside interference as well. Lymond, his eyes wide and dark, sidestepped as Jerott thought he would, and so instead of crashing at full pelt into the dark bulk of the table, Jerott heeled off it; got clear, all but a glancing blow, when Lymond from behind it jerked it on to him; and was already round and behind Lymond before he had straightened, and finding a purchase, with knee and two toughened hands, to twist his leader’s arms
back with all the strength he possessed and throw him in Abernethy’s face.

He might have done it, despite a kick in the ankle that made him gasp, if Lymond had not chosen precisely the right moment to bend sharply and, using his trapped hands as leverage, to somersault the other man to the ground.

His breathing soft and quick, as it should be, Jerott bounced to his feet like a cat. Bit by bit, he was losing his anger, in the sheer artistry of what they were doing. He crouched, ready to engage, just as the candle went out.

And Lymond, he realized, was prepared for it: had in the last second of light already marked his next grip, and from the force of the onslaught Jerott now received, hurling him back willy-nilly into the far corner of the hut, had determined to subjugate him, with the darkness as his ally, here and now.

Then Jerott was down, as he had so often been down, suddenly, in the days of training. He answered it properly. He used his strength, which was suddenly invincible, to free the one hand that could chop, with its cast-iron edge, at the throat rising from the open-necked shirt above him; and as Lymond rolled sideways to go with the impact of the blow, Jerott surged up, kicking, and with all the force he possessed, flung himself on top of his commander and then, his hands hard in his shoulders, propelled him over and over the uneven ground until Lymond crashed back, under Jerott’s passionate thrust, straight into the spiked bulk of the table. As his back took the full force of the blow, he exclaimed aloud.

There followed absolute silence, ringing with the reverberations of someone’s shouting, abruptly cut off. From Lymond, spreadeagled under his hands, there was no further sound and Jerott, kneeling back abruptly, pushing the hair from habit out of his eyes, was able to review what he had done. It had been deliberate. He was, after all, an
homme de métier
.

A dark figure dropped from outside over the table edge and thrusting past Jerott, still kneeling, got out a candle and lit it. In the new light under his fingers, Archie Abernethy’s face was a demonaic mask: Koshchei the Deathless. ‘I wad flense ye here for the gulls, gin there was time,’ said Archie. ‘But there’s nane. Get ye gone.’

‘Now. Not so hasty, Archie.’ Alec Guthrie’s admonishing voice from the doorway struck cold into the little hut. ‘We were told that the Chevalier was not to be let go back to St Mary’s,
whatever happened
. It’s just Mr Blyth’s good luck that you’re lighting the candle and I’m standing here gaping with my chaft-blade in the air, all fit to be walloped.’

It might have been Mr Blyth’s good luck, but he was doing nothing about it. Instead, gasping still, he was looking at Francis Crawford,
lying still at the foot of the table, his skin flushed, his lids heavy, his lips cracked with fever.

Jerott shifted his feet. Archie Abernethy swore, and, sponge in hand, dropped beside the man Jerott had felled so handily, while Jerott uneasily drew back. He said angrily, ‘He chose to fight. Did he think I’d come crawling back, overcome by remorse?’

‘The charitable assumption,’ said Alec Guthrie’s grating voice, ‘is that he didn’t intend his friends to be hurt in his quarrel. Also, he had reason to believe he could teach you a suitable lesson with a raging temperature and all four limbs paralysed. He was wrong, that’s all.… Are you going, or do we have to kick you out?’

‘He’ll be mad,’ said Archie in a low voice. Under his careful hands, Lymond made a sudden, wordless sound, and his closed eyes tightened.

‘But on the other hand,’ said Guthrie coolly, ‘he’ll be in no condition to put his madness into effect. I’m sure Mr Blyth is right. To add remorse to Mr Blyth’s present burdens would, I am sure, be intolerable. Let’s keep it simple. Get out.’

For a moment more, Jerott Blyth hesitated. Then, his face grim, he rose to his feet, retrieved his weapon, and went.

Shrewd, competent, hard-headed professionals that they were, neither Guthrie nor Archie Abernethy had anticipated anything like the storm that broke upon them when Lymond came to his senses at last to find Blyth had gone. Swaying with weakness, Francis Crawford described to the two silent men exactly what they had done. And even Guthrie, sustaining those flaming blue eyes, recognized the time had come to be silent, listening, and to hope merely not to be dismissed.

But in the end they were of course dismissed, totally and finally, to go, in More’s bitter words, to kill up the clergy and sell priests’ heads as cheap as sheeps’ heads, three for a penny, buy who would. It was Abernethy who spoke as the tirade ended and Lymond turned aside to the wall, shaking with foolish exhaustion.

‘Oh, ye’ve a temper,’ said Archie consideringly. ‘And ye had a rare old time losing it, and ye were like enough justified at that. But take a thought, too. Are ye to accuse Graham Malett in the law courts from the flat o’ a bier-claith, or on two sticks like a wife wi’ Arthretica? If ye’re tae walk upright like the fine, testy gentleman ye are, ye’ll need some nursing, I’d say. So I fear Guthrie and I had best bide.’

He was prepared, philosophically, for a savage response. In fact, dropped from abrupt necessity among the tumbled rugs of his pallet, Francis Crawford sat with rock-like obstinacy and shivered, while from above, Alec Guthrie’s harsh voice went on gently, ‘Archie’s right. My dear lad, you need all the help you can get; don’t
cast it off. We were wrong to let Blyth go. I admit it. But he knows now what he risks. I think he’ll come back to you. I think they’ll all come back to you. But you and Gabriel stand opposed in all this sorry battle. Not one of us can take your place.’

Lymond turned. His eyes were brilliant with fever. He was smiling. ‘Why should they come back? They’re not all simple-minded. If I could let Joleta die, what fool is still going to trust me? Who is going to separate cowardice from moral expediency when even I, looking back, can’t now be sure …?
That
is what has driven Blyth away. Nothing but that.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ said Guthrie sharply. ‘There was no possible guarantee that the case against Gabriel would be complete on your death. It was far more likely to lose all its impetus. If you had never run up those steps, Joleta would have died at Gabriel’s hands just the same. It was opportunism—pure, brilliant opportunism to force you to do what you did, and undermine all the doubts the Somerville lassie had sown. Nobody would have been more stunned or more contemptuous than Gabriel if you had stood firm.…’

The grating voice hesitated. Guthrie said kindly, ‘As you said … we are not all simple-minded. What you have to face now is something a good deal more difficult than accepting Gabriel’s sword-thrust at the top of those steps. What you chose was not the easy way out.’

‘No. The thicket of thorns,’ said Lymond, with the flatness of utter fatigue. ‘Some day, I must take my own prolific advice and contrive to drop dead.’

Then Guthrie’s eyes met those of Archie Abernethy, moving forward with a cup in his hand. And very soon after that, doctored by something more drastic than Archie had ever had occasion to administer to him before, Francis Crawford was profoundly asleep.

*

Then the net drawing Gabriel and Lymond together began at last to close tight.

For two weeks, with men and mastiffs, the law officers of Scotland, aided by the Seigneur d’Oisel and his Frenchmen, hunted Francis Crawford and his friends among the small hills, green and soft with deep mists, long-shadowed with apricot sunshine, where the corn crowded fat in the sheaf, as it had not stood for nine warring years, and two since. It was a strange, plodding game, in which French curses and Scots rose intermingled to the mild skies, and only the chief actors were dumb.

For Lymond, it was a time to recover, despite the almost daily moves expediency demanded. And evidence continued to come in.
Adam Blacklock, back triumphant from Liddesdale, brought with him an insalubrious Turnbull who could identify a steward of Gabriel’s as having paid them to kill the Kerr cattle. And, stuttering, Adam produced something else: the sworn statement of the big tinker who had attacked Cheese-wame Henderson, and whom he had found, logically enough, lying sick in one of the Turnbulls’ appalling mud cabins.

It was Fergie Hoddim on duty that day. When Blacklock had finished his recital, Fergie took him up sharply, ‘As to evidence, now. Unless ye brought the said steward to Liddesdale to be identified, how could yon auld thief tell it was him? Did ye pay him siller to swear it?’

For answer Adam slipped from under his arm and laid on the floor the leather case he was holding. From it, he drew several sheets of thick paper, each bearing, delicately done in red chalk, the drawing of a man’s face. That on the first was, recognizably, the steward they were discussing. ‘It comes in useful … sometimes,’ he said, and met Lymond’s eyes, smiling.

Fergie’s face also had cleared. ‘Aye. That’s better. It’s a clear case o’ deadly enmity and feud. A clear case. So we need all the independent proof we can gather—evidence without fear or favour, if ye take me.’ He gazed thoughtfully at Francis Crawford’s unimpressed face. ‘Ye could even get bloodwite off him for yon beating. Nae mair nor fifty pounds, of course; but it’s not to be sneezed at. Aye. I’d advise on bloodwite; you’d be perfectly safe there.’

There was a moment’s pause and then Lymond, to Adam’s relief, began quite genuinely to laugh. ‘Well done, Fergie,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course. Whatever happens,
ad lucrandum vel perdendum
, let’s make sure of our bloodwite. It’ll do to buy a bloody memorial with.’

For no one was the waiting easy. Philippa, resolutely ensconced at Midculter despite Sybilla’s gentle pressure to return home, busied herself silently with helping Mariotta and the baby and merely appeared, a grim and bony changeling, when Adam Blacklock came, as he often did, with a fragment of news from his leader.

Kate had been told, as soon as Lady Culter could send off a horseman, of her daughter’s safety and of all that had happened; and being Kate, she had stayed, gnawing her nails, where she was, and had left Philippa to do her growing-up without interference.

Sybilla lost her nerve only once, as Adam was leaving one day.

She began mildly enough. ‘It hasn’t occurred to Francis, I take it, that there is nothing now to prevent him from awaiting the full indictment against Graham Malett from the relative comfort of prison?’