Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘It may be you are right,’ Guthrie said. ‘But we also perhaps saw a little that you didn’t see. She may have thought she was guided by fate, but in the end, I think she rebelled against the decree. In which case … she is likely better dead.’

  After that, the loss of vision lasted all night, and the pain and the retching. Also, although he did not lose consciousness he could hear himself speaking, or raving, or discoursing in some fashion.

  He tried to stop and succeeded, in the end, in making sensible human contact with Archie, who seemed to be bending over him, which meant his sight must be coming back. He was shivering violently and wringing wet with perspiration, as was the sheet under him. He said, ‘It can’t go on like this. Archie?’

  ‘No,’ said Archie. ‘It can’t go on. If you’re going to survive, you’ll have to buy peace. But you know the price of that kind already.’

  For a long time Lymond was silent. Then he said, ‘You advise it? Will it work?’

  ‘For long enough,’ Archie said. ‘For a long time, if you’re careful. If we can lift the strain, your sight should come back completely.’

  ‘It sounds,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘as if we have nothing to lose.’

  Archie left him. Lymond sat up. The first light of dawn was tingeing the cloth over his head and in the distance a bird was singing loudly, to be joined by another. In a moment the whole tissue of dawn song enclosed him. He shivered and, lifting his arms, peeled off the wet shirt and pulled round his shoulders the towel Archie had left by his bedside.

  The tent looked and smelt like a hospital. Distaste wrinkled his nose. He got up, his head swimming and walked to the table where he had left his maps, and the orders for next day already written. Archie came in.

  The smell of what he carried reached Lymond from where he stood: the pungent, desirable, terrible smell of the drug that had come near to killing him at Volos: from which, with the help of Jerott and Marthe, he had barely emerged with his reason.

  Jerott’s voice, low and angry from the doorway, said, ‘What are you giving him?’

  Archie’s hand closed over what he carried.

  Lymond said, ‘Something to make me sleep. It’s all right, Jerott. What wakened you?’

  ‘The sound of Archie opening the drug cabinet,’ Jerott said. ‘And I saw what he took out from it.’ To Archie he said, ‘Open your hand.’

  Archie looked at Lymond. Lymond said, ‘Open it.’

  The streaked saffron cake of raw opium lay on his palm; enough for sleep, and sweet dreams and tranquillity for many nights. Jerott struck it; and when it fell to the floor, ground it under his heel in the carpet. ‘You bloody fool. You bloody fool, Francis. This is what started it all: don’t you remember? Archie didn’t hear you screaming at Volos. Archie simply let you have as much as you wanted, whenever …’

  ‘Don’t lose your head, Jerott,’ said Lymond wearily. ‘Archie only gave me what would keep me alive till we got out. He’s doing the same now. I shall fight a better battle full of opium than I should without it, I promise you.’

  Jerott said, ‘Why should you fight a battle at all? A sick commander is excused the field. Go back to Sevigny.’

  Lymond looked at him and Jerott paled, and then slowly coloured. He said, ‘There must be something else.’

  Lymond straightened. He rubbed the towel round his shoulders and then tossing it at a hook walked back and stood before Jerott. Redder still, Jerott held his eyes angrily. Then Lymond smiled.

  ‘A dejective flag of truce. There is something else,’ he said. ‘Forget the opium. I think it is time that the French were reminded of what St Mary’s used to be, and what St Mary’s still is, and what St Mary’s can do that the lanzknechts can’t. Would you forgo another night’s sleep, if I asked you to?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jerott. He looked a little dazed.

  ‘Good,’ said Lymond. ‘Then, if you would bring Alec and Danny and Fergie to my tent at midday, we shall plan ourselves a small expedition.’

  ‘And Lancelot?’ said Jerott cautiously.

  Lymond grinned. ‘If you think,’ he said, ‘that Lancelot is up to it. Off you go. You’ll need all the sleep you can manage.’

  The smell of the ruined opium filled all the tent. Jerott had gone. Archie said, ‘Oh Jesus, lad. Are you sure, are you sure this is how you want it?’

  And Lymond said, ‘I only know that I want it.’ And then, ‘It is best done with what one has of pride.’

  Lastly, he said, ‘I have leave to go.’

  ‘I know,’ said Archie.

  *

  They left camp at sunset: seven men to fight, and four soldiers with crossbows to hide with their horses in a quarry just short of the Spanish encampment. In the same quarry they stripped off half their armour, and in full darkness set out on the exploit which from Picard farmer to farmer received the name of the affair of the corn mills of Authie.

  Burdened like a pioneer with shears and mattock, with rope and slow fuse and matches, with a knife and a cavalry bow and a few doctored arrows and last but not, feelingly, least, by a budget of gunpowder wrapped in silk and then canvas, Jerott Blyth said, ‘You devil, Francis. I haven’t been so bloody frightened since Mdina. Do you remember? There were seven of us then.’

  ‘I prefer, all sutty, blakk and unclene, the present draft,’ Lymond said. Because the arrangements had been his, he had not slept during the day as the others had, but like theirs, his face was stained with the dye of the Reiters, and neither his thoughts nor his condition were discernible. Jerott said, ‘What is that prayer of Montluc’s?’

  He had not expected Lymond to answer him but he did, without mimicking, as he could so easily do, the little man’s Gascon accent.

  ‘Mon Dieu qui m’as créé, je te supplie, garde-moy l’entendement affin qu’aujourd’huy je ne le perde, car tu le m’as donne, et ne le tiens que de toy. Que si tu as aujourd’huy déterminé ma mort, fais que je meure en réputation d’ung homme de bien, laquelle je cherche avec tant de périls. Je ne te demande poinct la vie, car je veux tout ce qu’il te plaist; ta volonté soit faicte, je remets le tout à ta divine bonté … It is a fine prayer, if you believe in such things.’

  ‘And do you?’ said Jerott Blyth, former Knight of St John.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘I spread my favours. Tonight I look to Janus the Patron of Portals.’

  Soon after that, they were speeding through darkness; sometimes running, sometimes crawling, sometimes lying in ditches until they came within reach of Dourlans and then, to its west, the river on whose upper reaches the town and citadel stood. The River Authie, which skirted the north wall of the fortress and then took its pleasant course north and west all the way to the sea. The river which King Philip would have to cross if, tiring of facing the French, he decided instead to strike north to Montreuil, or to Boulogne or to Calais itself.

  The bridge at Dourlans was under the surveillance of the town and citadel, strongly held by the French. But the next bridge fit to take regiments of marching troops and their artillery was only five miles further down the Authie. And it was held at either end, by two companies of Spanish soldiers.

  Danny, his voice rather high, had made that abundantly clear at their conference. ‘It’s a splendid idea. Domine salve nos qui perimus. I’m too young to die on a bridge. Why don’t we take all the Germans? Or no. They would all blow their noses on their very large handkerchiefs, and that would bring Philip’s whole camp down on us. What’s your idea?’

  ‘We don’t go near the bridge,’ said Lymond peacefully.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Fergie Hoddim. ‘How can you wreck a fine bridge without going near it?’

  ‘By sending something else near it instead,’ Lymond said. ‘An ox to Jupiter, a dog to Hecate, a dove to Venus, a sow to Ceres, a fish to Neptune. What, instead of Fergie Hoddim, shall we sacrifice?’

  ‘Boats won’t do,’ Guthrie said. ‘Even if you put stones in them, they wouldn’t inflict enough damage.’
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br />   ‘You could put gunpowder in them,’ Jerott said. ‘But could you be sure of finding boats?’

  Fergie Hoddim said, ‘But see. You couldna take that amount of gunpowder over the country without being noticed. They’d be shot at, in any case, long before they got to the bridge. They’d either burn and sink before they got there, or just drift up burning, and that’s not enough.’

  ‘Wait a bit,’ said Lancelot Plummer, poring over Danny’s maps. Then he sat up and looked at Lymond. ‘Is that what you mean?’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ Lymond said. ‘What is it to be an engineer. Tell the others.’

  Lancelot looked round. ‘It’s there on the map,’ he said. ‘Water-mills, two miles upriver from the bridge. One mill, or maybe two, driving down full pelt on the current would make a hell of a hole in a bridge.’

  ‘Especially,’ said Lymond, ‘if they were burning. In fact, I fancy they would crash right through and perhaps take the next bridge with them. After that, with any luck, they would burn away. I should prefer not to wreck all the bridges joining the coast road to Calais. Lancelot, what do we need? They’re held by chain and rope cable.’

  ‘A lawyer,’ said Lancelot Plummer indignantly. ‘What did I have to come back for? The Tsar only threw an axe at my ground-plans.’

  But he not only gave them good engineer’s advice, he came with them; which only went to prove, thought Jerott with a touch of cynicism, how much he wanted to impress the court if and when he came back to it.

  Once they lost sight of the lit city which was the Spanish encampment it was very dark, and they smelt and heard the river before they saw it. Normally, the ground sloping down to the water would have been thick with the hoofmarks of cattle, but it was many weeks since everything edible had been driven off from this stretch of land, and the small farms and cabins that lined the valley were all of them deserted and most of them uninhabitable.

  They had expected the little village which lay round the watermills to be abandoned by its householders as well. It was with the stoicism of veteran campaigners that they saw, scaling the rising ground behind, that this was no longer the case. One of the Count of Egmont’s foraging parties had acquired half a dozen wagons of grain and were occupying the village in a litter of burning campfires, tethered horse, sacks, chaff, discarded armour and stacked pikes and hackbuts. The floating watermills of the Authie had been in use that day, and were presumably going to be asked to grind the rest of the grain at first light tomorrow morning.

  Lymond said, ‘They’ll have sentries. Danny, go and see how many, and where they are.’

  ‘There’s a boat at the water’s edge,’ Guthrie said. ‘But we can’t use it now. And if we swim, they’ll still hear the blows of the axes, even if they don’t see us.’

  ‘There are two sentries,’ said Danny, returning. ‘And I can make out some of the voices in the village. They’re Spanish.’

  ‘That’s useful,’ said Lymond. ‘Now we want the password. Danny, do you think you could deploy your ineffable powers of invention and get the two sentries to challenge one another? And while you are arranging that, show Fergie how to avoid them so that he can get close to the buildings and check how many soldiers there are, with what sort of arms. Lancelot, we want to design an attack from that field there, using the lint and the gunpowder. Show Alec and Jerott what you want done, and then get down into the water and have a look at the mills. I want to know how long it would take to hack two of them free, assuming we can distract the men’s attention. Take Archie with you. All of you report back to me here as soon as possible. Who speaks Spanish? You do, Jerott?’

  ‘I can manage,’ said Alec Guthrie.

  ‘I used to be rather fluent,’ Plummer said. Sweat, like night rain on a window, glittered on his blackened face.

  ‘No, we need you. But if you’ll take Jerott’s kerchief and mine swimming with you, we ought to be able to clean our faces when you come back. It’s in your hands, gentlemen.’

  It’s in your hands, gentlemen. It was the way he had ended his orders in Russia, although he had not then addressed them by first names. Guthrie grunted; and Danny slipped away, grinning.

  ‘Our belly lyke as it were glude/Unto the earth cleaves fast,’ said Lymond’s voice, softly disembodied, following him. He had begun to do something, it was clear, with the gunpowder.

  ‘Be not so rude and ignorant

  As is the Horse and Mule

  Whose mouth without a rayne or byt

  From harm thou canst not rule …

  ‘How long do we have? Two anons and a bye and bye is an hour and a half. Let us bind round our waists the Belt of Endeavour and get there, if we can, before the morning boat of Ra reveals our deficiencies.’

  But by that time, probably, he was entertaining himself, for his six companions were already going about their business.

  *

  There were many people who could have told el capitán Antonio Alcantara to be wary of a blue-eyed Spaniard in a helm which should have been vaguely familiar, erupting through his sentries with an equally plausible companion, and both armed with the night’s password and nothing else.

  But nobody was with Captain Alcantara but fifty men at arms, already much resentful of being turned into millers and having to spend a night away from the safety of the main encampment. The sight of two fellow-countrymen, disarmed and horseless, their very corselets torn off their backs was alarming enough. But the news that the French troops which attacked them were even now approaching the river was more frightening still.

  Firmly, remembering all he had been taught, the captain put out the fires, sent his men for their weapons and posting them and himself hurriedly at all the vantage points above the village, lay waiting for the enemy to make an appearance. He remembered, thankfully, that there was one boat, and that the rest of them, at a pinch, could swim across the river. By that time, surely, the main camp would be roused and would be on the way to the rescue. He had given the junior of the two unfortunate officers his own horse on which to ride and warn them.

  There was a short and nerve-racking wait, not at all assisted by the higher-ranking of the two officers who, unable to put his experience behind him, was walking up and down groaning, weeping and recounting, with a detail Captain Alcantara could well have done without, the unpleasant nature of the rout in which he had just been beaten. When without any warning at all a hackbut fired in the dark field ahead of him the captain jumped so sharply that he bit his tongue. Then he was too busy to care about anything but shouting orders, for the shots came cracking, thick and fast from the darkness.

  It was the stranger who, yelling ‘Charge!’, sent them all running, pikes and hackbuts ready, as the firing began to cease and the enemy hung back from the engagement. They charged straight through the field without noting that the unknown officer had already charged in the opposite direction, arriving thus at the water’s edge where, with no one to trouble them, the rest of his party had successfully cut free both the floating mills chained to their stakes in the river-bed.

  The first mill was already moving gently downriver by the time the Captain and his men at arms had discovered that there were no enemy soldiers anywhere in the field; only a quantity of burned-out flax and packets of gunpowder. And when, looking about them, they thought to run back to the village, it was to see both mills rocking off in the current with the face of Fergie Hoddim, faintly tinged with verd de mer, peering out from one of the windows. They recharged their hackbuts and fired, kneeling: they raced along the river banks, shouting; they even, in some cases, jumped into the river and swam after the swaying edifices, but to no avail. Then all they could do was catch their horses and gallop off downstream as hard as they could, to warn the troops at the bridge what was coming.

  The six jubilant men in the second watermill had already had their briefing. One by one they slipped into the water and made for the bank, each taking a pride, before he left, in steering his barque, so far as possible, into the midst of the c
urrent.

  It was a pity that, because they themselves had to escape in the mills, they had not been able to hold to their original plan to pack them with gunpowder when, of course, one well-aimed hackbut ball would have exploded them.

  ‘If it was in England, now,’ said Fergie, emerging with streaming moustache beside Jerott, ‘ye’d be entitled tae the Admiral’s profits: waifs, flotsam, lagan and deodands, assuming in the first place that the court was willing to accept your definition of a watermill as a seaworthy object. There’s Archie. They’re all past. We can start on the road back, I should think. We’ll need to, to get to the horses while it’s still dark.… Is that Francis?’

  ‘No, it’s Trembling Sancho,’ said Danny, climbing up the bank. ‘It would be a bloody funny death, being drowned in a watermill. Where is Suo Magnifico?’

  ‘In the first mill,’ Jerott said. ‘He wanted to take it round the last bend and then set it in line for the bridge. You can see the lights of the bridge if you come up the slope a bit.’

  This was true. Straining their eyes from the bowels of the bushes they watched the mill they had just left, a black shape on the slate of the river, give a lurch as someone jumped from it. In a moment, they could see it was Plummer. Guthrie’s grey head was already in midstream, sleek as an otter. Jerott, with the others, walked noiselessly along the bank to greet them. Danny said, ‘If that’s supposed to be a straight line for the bridge, then he hasn’t had much practice in steering watermills. Ours is better placed than his.’

  ‘More of us to set it on its course,’ Guthrie said. ‘When was he going to jump?’

  Lancelot Plummer emerged from the water, hawked, and stood up, his face barred with melted black paint. ‘After he’s set the fuse for the gunpowder,’ he said. ‘Any minute now, I should think.’

  ‘What?’ said Jerott.

  ‘He’s madder than the Tsar,’ said Plummer cheerfully. ‘He swam out with the powder on his head, tied under his chin with kissing strings. His phrase, not mine. The idea was that any hackbut shots were likely to be aimed at the second mill, not the one that got away first. He’ll set the fuse when he gets squarely in sight of the bridge and then duck into the river. I left him with the slowmatch in his hand, all lit and ready.’