The Game of Kings (29 page)

“All right. I know my place. To the music room!” he observed, and had the satisfaction of seeing his wife and daughter laugh and make with one accord for the door. Soon Lord Wharton’s summons and the importunities of the Lord Lieutenant alike had vanished from his head, and as the winter rain fell on Flaw Valleys and its gardens and yards, on the stout, skeletal barrier trees and the Tyne, distantly hissing, and on the brown, patched hills and moors beyond, the Somervilles wrote and read and made music like bells in a campanile, and ignored the summons to Lord Wharton’s attack.

But no English family within striking distance of the Scots Border ever sold its ears completely to pleasure. Kate, listening to the concert from her adjoining bedroom, heard voices outside, and against the sound of Gideon’s voice warbling happily (“Sir, what say ye? Sing on, let us see”) she distinguished one of his men below, calling. (“Now will it be, This or another day?”) She nodded encouragingly, shut the window, and returning to the next room, interrupted Gideon ruthlessly.

“Come on, Chanticleer. There’s a crisis in the farmyard.”

He followed her down.

An agitated crowd of men broke the news. “It’s the horses, sir! Someone’s got into the stables and taken the lot. There’s not a beast in sight, sir!”

Gideon questioned them sharply. They had seen no one. The groom in charge had been felled from behind and could tell nothing. They had heard the drumming of hoofs and had run after, to see a pack of scared horses sweeping down on the gatehouse. There, the guards had rashly run out and had been engulfed; in spite of them the gates were opened and the herd disappeared down the road.

“And what about—” began Gideon, and stopped. “You—and you—and you!” he said sharply. “Shouldn’t you be elsewhere?”

As he spoke, a tumbling figure appeared, calling. Kate, standing
quietly in the background, clicked her tongue. “I thought so. Your sly old nags have been decoys for your cattle, Gideon. Someone’s emptied the byres while all our sleuthhounds were sniffing after hoofprints.”

She was right. Someone had not only emptied the byres, but stripped the farm of its livestock. Every sheep, every cow, every heifer on Flaw Valleys had gone.

The men of the household were seldom berated, but not because Gideon Somerville was incapable of straight talking when he felt like it. They listened, and then ran like hares under his voice to beg and borrow every horse his neighbours could muster and to collect food and weapons for the long chase that might be ahead.

Gideon turned to his wife. “I’m sorry, lass. Employment for the unemployed gentleman after all.”

“Oh, well. Everyone else has suave, cosmopolitan sheep: why not us? The Millers at Hepple have a ewe that’s been to Kelso three times, and they’ve never been farther than Ford in their lives.” Kate peered absently into the farm pond, and clucked again. “Thoughtless creatures. They’ve forgotten the fish.”

“I’ll come back as soon as I can,” said Gideon, undeceived. “Those damned guards at least will be on their toes now.”

“All right,” said his wife philosophically. “Double the guard; put the fowling pieces under the bed and call in the chickens. If this is a trick, it’ll have to be a good one to catch a Somerville sleeping, again.”

Gideon bent and kissed her, and shortly afterward, armed and mounted on borrowed horseflesh, led his men out of the yard and north after the raiders.

*  *  *

The raid on Flaw Valleys was the most easterly of a series of robberies which swept the south side of the Border that day and were guided and controlled by Crawford of Lymond.

While, like some fissured lodestone, Lord Wharton presided at Carlisle and drew toward him the reluctant hearties of Cumberland and Westmorland, the unmanned farms of both counties were neatly stripped also of their tenants on the hoof, and a stream of hide and wool toiled docilely to the Border, bleat and bellow mingling with soprano from the outraged hearths.

Will Scott, working fast from herd to herd, showed the marks of his three months’ apprenticeship. Meeting him in the press, Johnnie Bullo grinned. “Man, for a minute I thought it was your chief, except it’s a different sort of sneer.”

At Carlisle the Lord Warden, totally unaware, marshalled his force, conferred with his colleague the Earl of Lennox and consulted the sky, which told him that something unpleasant was probably on the way and made him very glad indeed, in the small and unkempt civilian corner of his soul, that the Earl of Lennox and not himself was going on this expedition.

In Scotland at the same time, the Queen’s forces made somewhat confused rendezvous at Lamington, as directed by John Maxwell, and prepared to march south, Lord Culter and Wat Scott of Buccleuch among them.

By nightfall, the hail was already whipping down in gusts and the raids on livestock in Northern England were coming to a systematic close. Trickles of animals met and joined, tributary met tributary and river engulfed river. By the time the Earl of Lennox left Carlisle the united four-footed Sabaoth was already ahead of him and steering at a tangent for his line of march. Beyond them to the north the Scottish army was bedded down on their line of march, the ice making faint and Aeolian music about their steel helmets.

Between England and Scotland here lay river and marsh: on the west the smooth, treacherous skins of the Sol way estuary; on the east the high, wild Roman hills. As the English army under Lennox marched through that night the lightly covered ground opened polyp mouths to their hoofs and made thick mud-slides of every bank. They foundered and staggered and trotted and cursed, and Lennox the commander spat with fury when his scouts reported out of the dark that there was a cattle blockage in the narrow road ahead.

There was nothing unusual in the wilder Border clans taking a dark night to steal some cattle on the Scottish side and drive them south. The Elliots in charge of the herd were apologetic about it and no doubt did their best to clear the road. But when Lennox and his men arrived they met nose to nose with what seemed like every beast in Scotland with four feet to it.

Lennox looked about. Deep, quaking marsh lay on his left and right; the road ahead of him was banked above it and exceedingly narrow. Fifty yards off on his right a small hill thrust up from the bog and overhung the road on its eastern edge. Between this escarpment
and the western marsh the dim white of the causeway was hidden by packed and ponderous bodies. “What’s the road like beyond that hill?” snapped the Earl of Lennox.

“Wide and flat, sir,” said the Elliot. “You’ll have no trouble there.”

“You mean
you’ll
have no trouble,” said Lennox viciously. “We’re going to turn your herd and drive it back through the defile, my man; and then I shall ride through them. If you think I’m staying here to be nudged into the marsh by a baron of beef, you’re mistaken.” And, rising in the saddle, Lennox’s men with whoops and cracking of whips cantered down the road toward the hill; and the herd, after much eye-rolling and heavy breathing and ponderous caracole, heaved itself around and trotted back the way it had—supposedly—come. The citizens of Cumberland gambolled after it.

Who can tell by what signs, on a dark, stormy night far from home, a farmer can recognize his own? Lennox’s army was just moving under the lee of the hill when the first shout rent the night. “Hey! Wait a bit! I could swear … God damn it, there’s three of my cattle over there!” It was joined by another. “Here—those are Gilsland sheep!” And an anguished recital began. “Hey! Wait! Stop! Turn them!”

Lennox, riding irritably in front, had his bridle seized by a sweaty hand. “There’s been a mistake, sir. These aren’t Scottish cattle, they’re our own; and sheep and hacks too. We’ll have to turn them.” And the speaker, releasing himself, shot past him and was followed by half the army.

Lennox stood in his stirrups and shouted himself hoarse, but no one replied. He was alone with a handful of men on the southern fringe of an inextricable mess of animals and men, and the latter were exclusively engaged in finding and rounding up their possessions. The Earl of Lennox sank back in the saddle, and at that moment, there was a hissing of wet, grey feathers and the arrows began.

They fell from the heights of the small hill to the east, and from the Scottish end of the road to the north, and as the English, abandoning their livestock, faced about—from the south as well, from over a small group of cattle which, appearing from nowhere, blocked the only way out.

Lennox’s men, pulling out bow and quiver with numbed fingers among the nudging rumps and dripping muzzles, found themselves handicapped players in an unpleasant and one-sided game. They dismounted very quickly indeed, and dodging bent among the heaving
flanks, began to make hopeless dashes like mice in a cornfield. The arrows fell faster.

On the slope overlooking the trap, Scott of Buccleuch was enjoying himself hugely. “One for Tam Scott, and one for Bob Scott, and one for Jocky Scott, and one for … Christ, they’ll make off down that Carlisle road if we’re not careful.”

“It’s all right.” One of his own officers reassured him, peering through the dark. “Someone’s driven a small herd across the south end of the road as well, and they’re fighting across it.”

“Dod, are they? Someone’s got brains,” said Sir Wat admiringly. “Well, come on then. Let’s help him.” And he swept over the hill, passing the men fighting at the top—strangers and Maxwells, he supposed. At this point he also saw something else. A shadow. An easy, competent-looking shadow, with wide shoulders and an adroit way with a horse.

Buccleuch waved on the rest of his men and let them pass him, his eyes glued to the solitary horseman. Then the figure opened its mouth to give some advice to a heifer and Sir Wat roared “Will!” in a voice unmistakable over six counties. His son wheeled.

Against an infernal fresco of heaving cattle Scott saw his father’s Red Jimmy beak and two sparks for his eyes; Buccleuch saw a hard elegance of outline and suspected an unaccustomed set to the mouth. He said, and had to clear his throat first, “Boy—will ye come back with me? Now? They won’t miss you in the dark”—speaking fast because men were coming toward them.

He thought the boy jerked, but Will only said in a low voice, “No. It’s too late … I must go,” and gathered his reins. The others were nearly on them.

“Will … meet me then. Just to talk. I won’t keep you, I swear, unless you want it. Send me word, and I’ll come anywhere. Will you do it?”

They were Lamington men coming toward him; Buccleuch watched them in a ferment of fury. Then his son nodded. “Very well. I’ll send word when I can come.” The boy lingered a moment with a look odd, and almost avid; then he wheeled and drove his horse down the road.

After that, the rout was complete. Broken between panicking animals and remorseless archery, provisions lost, weapons lost, nerve shattered, Lennox’s troops escaped into the moss and out of it as best they could, and a good many did not escape at all. The Scots had
begun to withdraw when Lord Culter noticed that the group of cattle blocking the Carlisle end of the trap had disappeared. It was trotting instead across the faint, crooked path which led to the hills in the east with men all around it, driving it on. And at the head of the circle, knotting it tight and glittering in the sudden, faint moonlight, was a bright yellow head.

Lord Culter dismounted, running, and pulled the bow from his saddle as his horse passed. He fitted an arrow and flung up his arm.

All his vision was filled by a broad, carapace back, leading a troop of men unerringly along the path of his bowshot. It was Buccleuch, bellowing as he went. “A Scott! A Scott!”

Warned, the golden head turned. Culter saw a white blur; then a curtain of arrows fell between Buccleuch’s men and Lymond. The men hesitated, drew up and turned back as the raiders, in that moment’s grace, vanished.

Standing where he had dismounted, Lord Culter, the enigmatical, the impersonal, the impervious, raised a stiff right arm and smashed an expensive yew bow like a whip on the rocks. Sir Wat, slightly discomposed, was trotting back.

“Dod, did you see who that was?”

Lord Culter said dispassionately, “How your son debases himself is no concern of mine. You might however recall that to protect a murderer and a traitor is a capital offence.”

Buccleuch, braced for rebuke, had not quite expected this. He took a whistling lungful of Border air, swallowed it down with offence and resentment, and said simply, “Man, you’re obsessed. Come on. Everyone’s waiting.”

“Just a moment. Understand me,” said Lord Culter, and his eyes for a moment were as foreign as Lymond’s. “Next time, regardless of what is in the way, I
shoot.”

But Buccleuch’s patience, a slim and frangible thing, could carry no more pressure that night. With a brief, unforgivable click, it snapped. “I had rather,” said Sir Wat through his beard, “have a son tried and hanged for being driven into bad company, Richard Crawford, than be known in company, honourable or otherwise, by a name fit to spit on.” And wheeling, he drove his horse into the night, leaving Culter motionless, unseeing, at his back.

In the small hours of Sunday morning the sky cleared, the temperature dropped, and the stars described a country silted and sparkling
with white. Trampled mud grew a coating of thin, icy paint and the marshes spawned their own sluggish and gelid roe. The earth became very still. In all Cumberland nothing stirred but a round, black herd of beasts, running swiftly east within a circle of horsemen.

*  *  *

In the valley of the Tyne, the manor of Flaw Valleys waited with vacant stable and empty byre for Gideon’s return; and in the yard and in the garden Grey’s men crammed themselves into impossible corners out of the wind and rasped together glazed palms.

The sound of hoofbeats alerted them. Kate heard it too, and opened a window, her shadow languishing, dimly sparkling, on the grass. She called, “Are they coming?” and someone above her replied, “Yes, ma’am, I see them—Allan! Get the gate open!—And good work too, ma’am. Looks to me as if he’s got the whole herd back.”

Kate’s face sparkled like a new penny. She ran for Philippa. Together they hung, fascinated, out of the window and watched the seething backs filling the yard below. Above the din they could hear men on horseback shouting, and the crack of whips combing the excited beasts back to their quarters. “Don’t they look tired?” said Kate sympathetically, of a huddle of sodden and glass-eyed ewes. “I don’t see Father, Philippa, do you?”