Checkmate (73 page)

‘Boats won’t do,’ Guthrie said. ‘Even if you put stones in them, they wouldn’t inflict enough damage.’

‘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.

‘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 current.

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.’

‘The bloody fool,’ said Guthrie angrily. ‘Hence he wanted to have the first mill to himself. I don’t suppose he is steering it. How could he steer it, if he’s got the match already lit …’

He stopped speaking suddenly. In the dark his eyes met and found Jerott’s. Then he said, ‘If he was going to set the powder off, he should have done it by now. Look how close he is to the bridge.’

Jerott Blyth said something under his breath that no one could hear. Then to Lancelot Plummer he said, very clearly, ‘Tell me something. Did he ask you to light the match?’

‘Yes,’ said Lancelot, surprised. ‘I handed it up to him in the mill. He needed a hand to get aboard because he had to keep the gunpowder dry. Then I came back to you. You remember.’ He looked round at them all. ‘What is it?’

Guthrie said, ‘He needed a hand to get aboard because he was blind. Jerott. Jerott, stop. There is nothing you can do.’

*

The Authie was lower than normal, and the current therefore was a busy one, spinning the mills round and round as well as jarring and tilting them.

It needed a strong stomach to handle the buffeting, and a strong head to keep thinking straight in spite of it. To the six men in the second mill, it had been an experience they were extremely glad to abandon. To the man alone in the first, braced against heaving wood with a burning slow match in his hand, it was a matter of assembling all the senses he had left, in the absence of the vital one just denied him.

Half-way through the work of the evening, the headache had begun to beat through all his senses, tightening into the dizzying whiteness of pain which was part of the most grandiloquent kind of seizure. It had been a gamble with providence, all through the highly satisfactory byplay in the village. The bark of the firing, when even the sound of a cough was hard
to put up with, had been the signal for the scintillating distortion, and then the blurring he had been waiting for. And now indeed he was the river, the barque and the oars in a manner more autocratic than the poet could ever have dreamed of.

His task was to drive the mill through the main current up to the bridge, without lodging it on either bank or blocking the second mill which must be following him.

He had hoped to use a plank to steer with, as the others had planned, or even his weight, moved from side to side of the frail wooden building. And if he could see nothing, at least surely he could hear the turmoil of midstream, and sense the quiet of the banks and deep pools he should keep from.

What confounded him there was the racket of the machinery. It was as if some monstrous milling were already in process: a crop of iron grinding between brazen rollers within walls which boomed and echoed like drumskins, crushing his mind with its violence.
(O mill, what hast thou ground? Precious thy wheat! It is not oats thou hast ground, but blood-red wheat
 …
)
And if another such was coming behind him, he could not hear it, any more than he could hear the sound of the water, or the shouts of the soldiers, or the distant rap which was the firing of hackbuts.

There would have been a certain splendour in crashing straight into the bridge, except that he did not wish to be rescued unconscious; and in the river he would be his own master. So he knelt, sliding and swaying, and touched the slowmatch to the fuse, keeping it there for a long time to make sure that it caught. Then he blundered purposefully about, thrown from wall to wall of his vessel until he found the open space of the door.

For a moment he stood there, and as once Philippa had done, forbade his mind to fly to its homing.

A fisherman’s voice, heard long ago, returned to him with sudden brilliant clarity: