I sighed.It had not been good to watch my Robert humiliated in front of the whole valley.'He stood up to you,' I defended him, as I had done so often before.
'And he lost,' the Yorling said.
A sudden thought struck me.'You could have killed him,' I said.'Why did you not kill him?'
'It would have been too easy,' the Yorling said.'It was more fun to wallop his doup.'
Remembering the contemptuous blow that the Yorling had struck I said nothing.He spoke only the truth.
'What do you intend doing with me?'I asked in a small voice.
'Holding you in my own tower,' the Yorling replied.'You have had a long day and there is a hard ride tomorrow.Get some sleep, Lady of the Lethan.You will need it.'
He was right.I did need it although not for the reasons that he supposed.My dashing Yorling's plans were about to be thrown into total confusion in a manner that he had never dreamed.
Chapter Six
ETTRICK AND TARRAS
SEPTEMBER 1585
I heard the drumbeats of hooves and wakened from what had been an exhausted slumber.I sat up quickly, opened my mouth to shout a warning and closed it again very quickly.Thinking that it might be Father or even Robert, I lay still with my eyes open in hope.
That was perhaps the worst decision I had ever made in my life; or perhaps the best.
The horsemen came onto the sleeping camp like a torrent.They did not say a word until they were amongst us and then they gave a series of co-ordinated yells that raised the small hairs on the back of my head.
'An Armstrong!An Armstrong!'
There was instant consternation in the camp as the youths rose to meet this threat.I saw the Yorling raise his sword, to be instantly knocked to the ground; I saw the young boy who was saved from the hangman's noose bowled right over and others brushed aside as if they were stalks of barley falling before the reaper's hook.
'An Armstrong!An Armstrong!'
The cry rose like the thunder of battle, deep-throated, menacing like no other.Of course, I knew all about the Armstrongs, the most dangerous riding family in all the Borderland.Based in Liddesdale, that cockpit for half the trouble in Scotland, at their height they could raise three thousand lances and their towers and strongholds nailed Liddesdale to the blood-soaked ground.They terrorised their neighbours and raided from a few miles outside the royal castle of Edinburgh to deep inside England.Of all the reivers, they were the most notorious and the most dangerous.And now they were upon us on that exposed hillside deep in the Ettrick Forest.
'Horses!'a deep voice roared and some of the Armstrongs veered off to round up the Yorling's small herd.By that time, I had scrambled to my feet, staring.Things were happening so quickly that I could not make any sense of them.I saw the Armstrongs, tough, mature men, scattering the Yorling's young callants, slashing at them with swords and thrusting at them with lances.
The Yorling was lying still, bleeding from a wound in his head.Although it was he who had snatched me from the Lethan, I still felt that strange bond.I ran to his side, hoping to help.To do so I had to pass one of the Armstrong riders and he saw me right away.
'A woman!'he shouted, 'I have a woman!'
For the second time in two days, I was hoisted off my feet and plumped over the back of a horse.
'Stop!'I yelled, uselessly, and was rewarded with a hard crack on the back of my head that temporarily knocked all the fight out of me.I lay across the horse seeing nothing but stars as the Armstrong who had grabbed me kicked in his spurs and sped across that night-dark hill.
Only half conscious, I cannot say how long we travelled for.It may have been one hour, and it may have been twelve hours.I only know that I was aching in every muscle, hungry, parched with thirst, and totally exhausted when the Armstrongs finally stopped their mad canter across the bleak moors and hills.
'Get off.'The words were abrupt and followed by a rough shake that rattled my teeth inside my head.
'Who are you?'I asked.
'You'll know me,' the man said and tipped me roughly onto the ground.'Or you know of me.'
I lay there, dazed and sick, wondering who he was until a hard foot dug into my ribs.'Up!'
I tried to rise, but too slowly for my captor, who grabbed a handful of my hair and raised me to my feet.'I said up!'He backhanded me hard across my face, drawing blood.'Who are you?'
I looked around, desperate for hope.Instead, I experienced nothing but despair.We were outside a tower that could have been the image of Lethan, except for the armed men who lounged outside and the situation.While the hills of the Lethan Valley were cultivated and green, dotted with sheep and smeared with patches of purple heather, the hills I now saw in the background were dark with menace, scattered with grey granite rocks and reamed with the gulleys of intermittent burns.There was no beauty here, only grim rock and uncultivated moorland, with the tower in the midst of extensive moss.I knew without asking that this was the Tarras Moss, the last refuge of the Armstrongs and a place whose secret paths were known to none other.
