The Disorderly Knights (46 page)

‘D …’ said Adam Black lock, and smiling and dogged, tried it again. ‘Dr Guthrie asked who would decide what the force will or won’t do.’

Lymond loosed his hands. He was now, Jerott saw, truly at ease, smiling at the big artist, glancing to the back of the hall where Archie Abernethy and his senior sergeants waited quietly, and then running his blue gaze over all the heads, red, brown, blond, black, bearded and clean-shaven.

‘When this winter is over you will be unbeatable in the world in the arts of war,’ he said. ‘More than that, you will have shared among you your judgements and your learning. Matters of policy will be settled by free discussion between us: who better could deal with it? I invite you now to criticize my views and my plans with your own. You are free to test on your own intelligence and initiative every step I take as your leader. The proviso is … that I
am
your leader. The casting vote is mine. The final decision is mine, and the unquestioned decision in emergency. And once I have issued my orders, however unlicensed the argument beforehand, I expect them to be instantly obeyed. There is only one punishment here for insubordination, and that is instant expulsion. I hope this is clear.’

‘I follow you on these terms.’ It was the quiet voice of the Serving Brother des Roches, who had held the Châtelet at Tripoli. ‘I follow you on any terms, sir. You have my respect.’

‘And ye hae mine,’ said Fergie Hoddim levelly, ‘if ye intend to argue every decision with this lot. Ye’ll hae to pull straws for who’s tae blaw out the tapers.’

‘The legal mind,’ said Lancelot Plummer caressingly. ‘If we get bored in Scotland, may we depose you and go somewhere sunny?’

‘I rather doubt,’ said Lymond blandly, ‘if you’ll have the energy for long arguments. If you succeed in deposing me, you will certainly qualify for a trip somewhere sunny, or even merely, somewhere uncommonly hot.… For while I shall know all your tricks by the end of the winter, I doubt if you will know mine.’

‘Why,’ said the rich, agreeable voice of the doctor Randy Bell as he sat unmoving, thumbs tucked in his jacket. ‘Have ye a sure cure for arsenic? It’s a grand preventative for broken nights.’

‘You should make the acquaintance of Archie Abernethy there,’ said Lymond, unmoved. ‘He used to give it to his elephants. You’d better come forward, Archie.… Am I to take it, gentlemen, that we are agreed?’

They were, Jerott saw: won over by the little display of disinterestedness and by the prospect of unlimited debate. They began to rise.

‘Then you ought,’ said Lymond painstakingly, ‘to take note of the fact that Mr Abernethy has just released from their stalls two hundred and fifty of our young horses and driven them out of the grounds. They are worth sixty-five angels each and cannot be replaced locally. Every horsethief in the southern uplands will therefore be after them, and pretty well every other household worth its salt, come to that.

‘Remembering that we have to live among these people without antagonizing them, you may begin rounding them up as from now. Archie will tell you directly what the stock markings are. You will of course have them here before morning: the training course proper
opens at six a.m. in this hall. You might even manage some sleep. I,’ said Lymond calmly, ‘am going to bed. Good night, gentlemen. And good luck.’

It was a moonless night, and had just begun, grudgingly, to rain when his disbelieving audience found themselves outside the gates. Cantering round the soggy hilltops, lanterns jogging, and six furious mercenaries pounding behind, Jerott Blyth peered at somebody’s ill-drawn map and then at the night before him, alive like a topiarist’s nightmare with horse-shaped bush and twist, and cursed everyone but Graham Malett.

By four in the morning he had a dozen of the lost mounts, and had displayed furious tact through every kind of reception from farm and cottage in his allotted terrain. It was only now, approaching the last, that he discovered that Lymond in fact had not gone to bed. As he rode up to the porch, a tranquil voice in the darkness said, ‘You may leave this house out. A baby is just being born. Who is it? Jerott?’

‘Yes.’ Through the rain you could just distinguish horse and rider, motionless against the wet thatch.

‘How many have you recovered?’ Lymond asked.

‘Twelve. I’m expecting a report from the tally-centre.’ They had a central depot established.

‘You needn’t wait for it, then. All the horses are in. You will find some of your colleagues collected more, but you had easily the worst ground to cover. Did you enjoy it?’

Imbecile question. Jerott Blyth opened his mouth to answer it as it deserved; then was struck, as many times before in his life, by a crazy discovery. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Odd, isn’t it?’ said Lymond without surprise. ‘It is the reason, if you would recognize it, why you enjoyed being a Knight of the Order. I’ll look after your scout when he comes. If you go back now, you might just get half an hour’s sleep.’

At six a.m., alert, alive, roughly cleaned up and talking hoarsely and indiscriminately among themselves, the twenty officers of St Mary’s were all there in the hall. Lymond was there before them; not on the platform but amongst them, astride a chair and ruffling through a rainsoaked pile of notes. He bore no sign of having been out at all, but took them step by step through as nasty, and subsequently as hilarious a post-mortem of the night’s ride that Jerott had ever attended. Then he gave out details of the day’s work.

It was tough, brutal and typical of the régime they were to follow for the next six to eight weeks, with one exception. It ended at dusk. Then, over-extended and outplayed like worn guitar strings, the entire camp went to bed and slept for twelve hours.

The fashioning of a great corps had begun.

*

From the beginning it was clear to Jerott that Lymond could never have achieved what he did that evening with tyros. It was because these men, whatever their profession—philosopher, architect, lawyer, painter, doctor, artist and priest—were by force of the times they lived in soldiers also, and understood that speed and skill and toughness and above all self-confidence came from being pushed again and again and again past the edge of endurance until that limit became as elastic as an extra muscle, held in reserve. That crucial night they had their first taste of each other’s quality and of Lymond’s, and they found they could laugh.

They laughed a lot, breathlessly, that winter; but in between it was work: the hardest work Jerott had ever known in his life since the days of his caravans; more punishing by far than his novitiate, with the pious exercises, the swordplay and the shooting in ordered successions.

At St Mary’s, perfection in every known branch of warfare was their professed object. Taught by queer initiates who sprang up out of the ground and then vanished, their exercise done; or by sharing their own considerable expertise, they shot and wrestled and ran and jumped; fought each other on foot and on horseback with every conceivable weapon; learned the use and practice and assembly and repair and transport of firearms from pistols to basilisks; absorbed strategy and field work and camp organization, large-scale feeding and medication, siege maintaining and breaking; pioneering and mining and mechanical means of assault.

They discussed armour and its uses and horses and their maintenance and listened to and shared a surprising amount of knowledge about other races and their methods of fighting. Salablanca continued to convey his master’s orders in Spanish, and any other foreigner Lymond imported also spoke, without translation, his own tongue. There was to begin with a nervy scramble among themselves to find an interpreter. They usually did, and after a month or two were able thankfully to dispense with him: Lymond made no concessions on the grounds of language. If they fought abroad they would be expected as a matter of course to speak as their allies did. If they did not already know several European languages, then they must learn.

He would not, to begin with, let them ride their own hobby horses at all. If Randy Bell twitted him on the absence of feminine company, if Plummer bewailed his days filled with brawny antics and Fergie Hoddim tried to start an argument about their constitutional position or lack of it; if Tait struck up a travellers’ private club with Archie Abernethy and Alec Guthrie tried to argue with Jerott about his soul and Adam Blacklock began to talk about Midculter, Lymond simply set them an exercise that lasted three days and unravelled
their sinews like crochet work. When they came back they hadn’t the strength even to curse him for it.

By then they were all caught up with it. When Lord Culter came once to visit them, bringing with him Will Scott and his father Buccleuch, Lymond stopped active senior work instantly, and instead had them all idly watching fifty mercenaries, for the tenth time that week, put up a complete camp, kitchens and pavilions and all, in two hours flat. Because none of them could keep away from it for very long, someone was arguing very soon about hackbuts with old Buccleuch, and the next thing anyone knew, targets had been set up and a lot of vigorous, loud-mouthed matches were going on.

Richard Crawford himself took part briefly in the archery and then retired, rather silent, to watch the doctor and Adam Blacklock shoot it out. Only Jerott, perched on a piece of fencing behind, heard him stroll up to his brother and say, abruptly, ‘Not for the first time, you frighten me silly.’

Lymond, who had been watching the mercenaries and not the shooting, turned quickly. ‘Why? You still shoot a good deal better than that.’

‘Thank you,’ said Richard drily. ‘I hear you sent the Queen Dowager’s gifts back.’

‘Where did you hear that? It doesn’t matter. I merely thought it might be inconvenient to have to pay for them some day,’ said Lymond. ‘So what frightens you?’ And there was, Jerott noted, the slightest possible stress on the word ‘you’.

His elder brother, grey eyes level, held his gaze. ‘Perfection frightens me,’ he said. ‘They’re too good, Francis. What do you want this axe-edge for?’

‘
To cut with
,’ said Lymond, his voice mild. For a moment longer they considered one another without speaking, then, abandoning the contest, Richard began to talk of other things.

Later, Will Scott joined them with something like envy in his eyes, and Lymond led him to speak of Grizel and the children, and from there to the unrest on the Borders. However much the three Border Wardens of Scotland and their counterparts of England met and wrangled and meted out justice, the trouble went on. Lymond said, ‘If I were Warden, I’m damned if I wouldn’t pair you off. For every Kerr head cut off, a bone-headed Scott gets the chop. That would either stop you or obliterate you, in time.’

‘Well, well. Francis Crawford, in honest leather for once.’ It was Wat Scott of Buccleuch, Will’s father, scenting blood from afar. Bear shoulders braced and grizzled beard cocked, he straddled the wet russet grass. ‘And with Tom Erskine gone and the Scotts gone and the Crawfords hell-bent on stooters, where d’ye suppose the Queen Dowager will get all her help from? France! And let me tell
you I’ve been yapped at by enough musk-stinkit Frenchmen in the last three-four years tae gar me boke at the name.’

‘Then for God’s sake stop killing Kerrs,’ said Lymond tartly. ‘It’s a signal for every other laird with inelastic opinions to treat a difference as a personal affront. A great and glorious nation of vindicated corpses: that’s us.’

‘That’s what Janet says,’ said Buccleuch gloomily. His energetic fourth wife (and son’s good-sister) was a cross he bore in cheerful despair. ‘Only in wee words.’ His expression brightened. ‘Have ye heard about Sybilla and the Italian woman?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Richard, visibly, was also cheered by a recollection. ‘Remember Madame Donati, Francis? Joleta’s duenna?’

‘
La plus gaie demoiselle qui soit d’ici en Italie
. If you insist, I do,’ said Lymond. ‘What of her?’

Under Richard Crawford’s benign eye, Buccleugh went purple, faded to scarlet, and when under normal aegis again said, ‘Well, she spoke in Italian to Joleta one day, the cheeky besom, while your mother was in the room, and not knowing that Sybilla’s fine little head is filled with useless information, she didna watch her tongue. So.…’

‘So the last thing my mother would do is betray that she understood Italian,’ said Lymond, amused. ‘What anyway was the insult, Wat, that could make a Buccleuch blush?’

Richard, serene as ever, came to Wat’s rescue. ‘Spare him, my dear. It was the old story. She thought you and I were remarkably unlike.’

‘And more, I would guess,’ said Lymond, unmoved. ‘So Sybilla found gentle revenge. How?’

‘By telling the Signora that Peter Cranston had a fortune,’ said Will Scott, and broke into howls of uninhibited laughter.

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Lymond, his calm broken.

‘Aye. She’s after him like a deer at the rut,’ said Buccleuch, satisfied. ‘Takes a glass of wine at Cranston when riding near with dear Joleta, and lights enough candles on her hocks tae warm the cockles of his bead-clicking heart. He’s daft. She’s dafter. And isna Sybilla a wee love o’ a bitch?’

‘You say the nicest things about my mother,’ said Lymond. ‘Come in and have some wine, for God’s sake, and tell us who in your opinion is sleeping with whom, and what capital you’re going to make of it.’ And they went in, Jerott following with Will Scott and moreover listening to him.

*

Lymond left St Mary’s only once in those early weeks, to ride to Boghall Castle just after Margaret Erskine came home. The
ostensible reason was to convoy a load of arms and saltpetre on its way inland from Leith, and Jerott went with him. By now it was clear that Gabriel, as usual, had been right. What he had proposed to suffer as a humbling martyrdom was proving a sharp satisfaction. He enjoyed working with Lymond. He meant, with de Seurre and des Roches to help him, first to make himself indispensable and then to educate this spiritual lout, to make … what had Gabriel said? A holy weapon out of a mercenary.

Lymond also took with him Bell and Guthrie for, it seemed likely, his own private amusement: the surgeon, breathing heavily, to stalk Lady Jenny, and Alec Guthrie to rationalize the event.