Читать книгу The Complete Kingdom Trilogy: The Lion Wakes, The Lion at Bay, The Lion Rampant - Robert Low - Страница 15

Chapter Four

Douglas Castle

Feast of The Visitation of Our Lady with the Blessed Saint

Elizabeth, July 1297

The Dog Boy watched the slipper bounce with every jerk of the foot it was barely attached to. The leg, bagged with red hose, flexed and spasmed with every grunting thrust of the unseen force pounding between it and the twin on the side, beyond Dog Boy’s vision.

Oh Goad, Agnes was saying. Ohgoadohgoadohgoad, a litany that rose higher and more urgent with each passing second.

Dog Boy had seen the dogs made blind and frantic by this, so much so that he’d had to reach down and guide their thrusting stiffness into the right hole when they were being bred. He knew the mechanic of it, but the madness of it was only just touching him, so that he only half understood what he was feeling.

In the butter-yellow and shadowed dim, he sat and, prickled with heat and half-ashamed, half-driven, kneaded his own tight groin while he stared at the mournful brown eyes of Mykel, head on paws and unconcerned that Agnes’s knees were locked behind the pillars of Tod’s Wattie’s arms. With every thrust Wattie grunted and Agnes squealed an answer; gradually the squeals grew higher in pitch.

Veldi snuffled hopefully, but Dog Boy had nothing for them to eat, nor looked to be getting anything until Tod’s Wattie was done. So he sat in the strawed dim of the stable, right up against the back wall and almost under the huge iron-rimmed wheels of the wagon, with the ghost-coloured deerhounds waiting patiently on their leashes, heads on the huge, long-nailed paws.

He and Tod’s Wattie and the hounds had been there two months, left behind by Sir Hal and the others, and he wondered why. Yet the idea of leaving Douglas was strange and frightening enough to catch his breath in his throat.

The castle at Douglas was all he had ever known and the people in it the only ones he had met, besides the odd peddlar or pardoner, until the arrival of Hal and all the other strangers. Now he was about to go off with this stranger, this Tod’s Wattie.

The squeals grew louder and faster. Dog Boy, uncomfortably aware of his groin, traced the iron rim of the cartwheel with one grimy forefinger faster and faster, while unable to tear his gawp-mouthed gaze from her feet and the fancy slipper bobbing furiously. A window-slipper, Agnes had called it, because it had elegant cut-outs designed to show off the red hose that went with them, like the stained windows of a grand cathedral.

Agnes had been told this by the Countess of Buchan, who had given them to her when she had left, as a gift for her tirewoman help; Agnes had worn red hose and slippers ever since – until now, Dog Boy thought, for the hose garters lay like streaks of blood nearby and the slipper he watched had slipped from her bagged heel and wagged frantically on her toes. Her last shriek was almost so piercing as to be heard only by the dogs and she jerked and spasmed so furiously that the slipper flew off.

Tod’s Wattie made a curious, childlike series of whimpers and slowed the mad pulse of him, then stopped entire. The straw stopped rustling like a rainstorm and Dog Boy shut his mouth with a click and heard their breathing, harsh and ragged.

‘Aye,’ said Agnes, in a thick, dreamy voice Dog Boy had never heard from her before. ‘Ye’ve rattled me clean oot of my shoe.’

They laughed and then the straw rustled as they tidied themselves together. Tod’s Wattie lumbered out, wisped with straw sticks, and looked over to where the dogs were, seeing Dog Boy and blinking.

‘There ye are,’ he said and Dog Boy knew he was wondering how long he had been sitting. In the end, he shrugged and passed a hand through his thick hair, combed out a straw and grinned.

‘Go to the kitchen and see if you can find some scraps for the dugs,’ he said and Dog Boy scampered off.

‘I still have a shoe on the other foot,’ said the throaty voice behind him and Tod’s Wattie blinked a bit and shook his head. He knew he and Dog Boy and the deerhounds were at Douglas because Hal thought it safer to leave his expensive dogs away from the Scots camp at Annick, where Bruce and the others sat in wary conclave with Percy and Clifford and both armies tried hard not to break into pitched battle. Worse still was to try to travel alone on dangerous roads back to Lothian.

But, he added to himself, if Sir Hal delays longer in sending for us this hot-arsed wee besom will have me worn to a nub end.

The kitchen was a swelter. At the large table, Master Fergus the Cook and his helpers split a side of salt beef for the boiling pit, spitted geese, kneaded bread; Dog Boy saw that there was milled sawdust being mixed in with the rye, which meant grain was scarce.

A scullion elbowed his way past Dog Boy with drawn water, piped cleverly from the stone cistern somewhere above; another lugged an armful of wood for the fire, which was bigger than the smith’s furnace and hotter, too. Near it, the potboys withered, trying to stir without roasting themselves, huddled behind an old damped-down tiltyard shield. In the high summer some had been known to faint from the heat and only quick hands saved those from certain death; almost all of them had the glassy weals of old burns.

‘Well, what do you want, boy?’ demanded Fergus looking up. He was no advert for his craft, being a thin, pinch-faced man from Galloway, shaved bald on head and chin to better rid himself of vermin and stay cool.

‘I beg the blissin’ of ye sir,’ Dog Boy said, ‘Tod’s Wattie asks if you can spare some meat and cleidin for his dogs.’

‘Christ’s Bones,’ Fergus interrupted in his Gaelic-lilted English. ‘Cleidin? Scraps for dogs, yet? Ask for a cone of sugar, why not? Everything is running low and little chance of it being replenished that I can see. Glad it is that almost all the visitors are after having gone, for another day would have seen us chewing our own boots.’

The implication was that some unwanted guests remained and it was a sudden, sharp pain to Dog Boy to realise that he was now one of them. In an eyeblink and a series of words from the mouth of the Lady, he had gone from the company of the castle to being a stranger.

‘It will be for him, Master,’ added one of his helpers with a grin as he worked at carefully stacking and tallying a pyramid of honeycakes without breaking them. ‘He looks as if he would eat raw meat.’

‘Perhaps if yon hunt weeks back had actually routed out something worthwhile,’ Fergus grumbled, ‘but hunted stag meat is tough and a brace of fine coneys make better eating and easier cooking. Now the game is scattered and wary and there will be no good hunting for weeks. All we had from it was a dead body and a mystery.’

He broke off and thrust a round pot at Dog Boy, bright and reeking with bloody pats, some of the blood and grease slathered on the outside.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Bring the pot back sharp, mind.’

Dog Boy grinned, nodded – then shot out one hand and grabbed a honeycake, fleeing from the new catcalls and the barrage of feral curses that brought. He was almost at the door when he slammed into something dark and a hard object that whacked him on the temple.

Dazed, he staggered, found himself held up by a strong hand clamped painfully round his thin arm and looked up, past the hilt of the dagger which had smacked him, into a smear of smile.

It was on a fox-sharp face, the eyes cold and dark, the nose speckled with old pox-marks. There was a chin but not much of one and it made the man’s teeth stick out like a rat’s from between wet lips limned by a wisped fringe of beard and moustache.

‘A wee thief,’ he said with suet-rich satisfaction and looked triumphantly at Fergus. ‘It seems my arrival is timely.’

Fergus cleaned his hands on his apron and looked at the newcomer, whom he disliked on sight. He glanced pointedly at the blood-clamp fist that gripped Dog Boy’s arm and the man raised an eyebrow and opened it with a sudden, deliberate gesture.

Dog Boy, pot in one hand, cake in the other, wanted to rub the affected bit but could only wriggle it, looking warily from the man to Fergus, who jerked his head silently at him to go. Heedless of the blood on his hands, Dog Boy crammed the honeycake in his mouth, then darted for the kennels, holding his puny biceps.

‘You are?’ Fergus said and the man lifted his head haughtily.

‘Malise Bellejambe,’ he declared. ‘Sir Malise Bellejambe,’ he added pointedly. ‘And you will lose a kitchen full of honey-cakes if you keep that attitude with wee thieves.’

‘Sir,’ Fergus declared, in a tone that made it clear he did not believe the title for a moment. ‘I remember you from before. You came with the Earl of Buchan. Now you are back. Whit why?’

Malise wanted to force the man to his properly deferential knees, but managed a shaky smile instead.

‘The Countess has become strayed from his entourage,’ he said. ‘The Earl fears she may have gotten lost and is mounted on yon great beast of a warhorse, which is not one for a woman to ride. The roads are no place for a woman alone.’

He paused and smiled, as if a little ashamed of his lord’s indulgences in letting his wife gallop around the country astraddle a warhorse, without escort or even chaperone. The memory of her escape burned him – Christ’s Bones she was a cat-cunning imp of Satan. Stole away while they all slept and managed to take the damned warhorse with her; Malise had been in a panic since, for he knew Buchan would suspect that their sleep was fuelled by drink and that they had been less than watchful. It was the truth, but not what Malise wanted to have to tell his master.

‘The Earl has sent me to guide her back. I thought she might have returned here.’

There was silence for a moment, for all remembered the noises of the Earl punishing his wife, and Fergus thought, vehemently, that it was scarce a surprise that the Countess had run off. Wisely, he did not voice it.

‘Aye – as to that I could not say,’ Fergus declared instead and rounded on the silent, still, open-mouthed scullions, raking them with his eyes until they became a sudden flurry of activity.

‘No such lady is here,’ he added. ‘The Douglas Lord and Lady, bairns and all are gone elsewhere. Thomas the Sergeant is left as steward, so you would be wise to speak to him.’

Malise stroked his chin as if considering it.

‘There was a quine,’ he said. ‘Agnes, I believe her name was. Acted as tirewoman to the Countess when she visited here. I would speak with her.’

His diffidence was a lie, for he knew the trull well enough to remember the sway of her hurdies and the lip-licking promise it gave. It was desperation to seek her out in the hope that she knew where the Countess had gone – but Malise was all rat-frantic now. Fergus raised an eyebrow.

‘She will be here somewheres,’ he said. ‘As I say – best to talk to Thomas and let him ken you are nosin’ around his charges like a spooring dog.’

The warning was sharp and Malise felt the sting of it burn him. He inclined his head, gracious, polite, innocent as a nun’s serk.

‘My thanks,’ he said, fixing his eyes on Fergus’s own. ‘I will remember you for it.’

Stepping out from gloom to bright, he squinted against the light, then spotted the skinny runt of a thief, scuttling like a rat across the Ward towards the stable block. Aha, he thought, the little listening mouse hears much. If I were he, I would run to warn this Agnes, whom he no doubt kens …

Dog Boy half turned and saw the weasel-faced stranger look directly at him, then stride purposefully on. He gibbered in fear, the pain in his arm burning in stripes like the man’s fingers.

He remembered that the hard blow on the side of his head had been made by the hilt of a dagger and the panic made him fumbling careless. He turned, half-stumbled, dropped the pot and went to pick it up, then realised how close the man was. He left it and ran. More convinced than ever of Dog Boy’s intent, Malise followed after.

Agnes, pulling her shift straight and picking straw from her hair, was coming out of the stables, leaving first to try to put some face on the unavoidable gossip. She was dreamy and sticky, the sun seemed like honey on her skin and she started to adjust her cap when Dog Boy sped round the corner and skidded to a halt.

‘Man,’ he gulped.

‘What troubles ye, my wee chook?’ Agnes purred with a grin, which froze as Malise stepped round the corner. With a whimper, Dog Boy turned and sped away.

Malise smiled, which made Agnes’s stomach lurch.

‘You are Agnes,’ he said and it was not a question. Agnes trembled, recovered and drew herself up a little.

‘Aye. You are the Earl of Buchan’s man. Malise. I mind you from before.’

She did, too, conscious then of his eyes griming over her and not liking it any better now.

‘Indeed,’ Malise replied and looked her up and down so that Agnes felt her skin ripple; she became aware, suddenly, of Tod’s Wattie’s stickiness on the inside of her thighs and prickled with a sudden shame that, just as suddenly turned to anger against this Malise for having driven away the fine moment of before.

‘I thought you left with the Coontess,’ Agnes declared haughtily and forced her legs to move, looking to get round and away from him. Malise stepped forward and blocked her.

‘I did,’ he replied and his eyes were like festering sheep droppings on her face. ‘Fine slippers ye have, mistress.’

Agnes dropped her head to look and felt him grip her chin, his fingers like the hard, horned beak of a bird. She was so astounded at it that she could not move or make a sound.

‘Too fine slippers for you,’ Malise added, soft and vicious in her ear, his breath tickling the stray strands of her sweat-damp hair. ‘They belong to the Coontess, if I am not mistaken.’

The fingers ground her jaw and, suddenly, let her go. She stumbled on weakened legs and would have fallen, but his hand shot out and held her under one arm, hauling her upright.

‘You ken where she has gone,’ Malise said and Agnes saw his other hand, resting on the two-lobed pommel that gave the weapon at his belt its name – bollock dagger. She felt sick.

‘She gave me the slippers,’ she heard herself say. ‘Afore she left …’

‘She came back, did she not?’ Malise persisted, his mouth close to her ear; his breath smelled like stale milk. ‘Ran to here – who better to shelter the hot-arsed Bruce hoor than Douglas Castle’s ain wee hot-arsed trollop, eh? Who was her tirewummin when she was first here.’

‘Never,’ Agnes said, feeling the fingers burn. Her head swam and she swore she heard the snake-slither of the dagger leaving the sheath. ‘Came back.’

‘Ye will tell me,’ Malise started to say, then something clamped on the back of his neck and jerked him backwards. Loosed, Agnes crumpled in a heap.

At first Malise thought a horse had bit him and struggled, cursing, to get free. Then a second hand swam into view, a huge grimed affair with split nails which snaked out of the dazzle of sun and locked on his throat, instantly cutting off his breathing. Choking, kicking, Malise looked up into the big, round face of Tod’s Wattie, boar-eyed with rage.

‘Ye cantrips ye,’ he bellowed. ‘I’ll maul the stanes with ye, ye bauchlin’ wee bastard. I’ll dunt ye some manners …’

Desperately, Malise half-fumbled out the dagger and Tod’s Wattie spotted it and roared even louder. He shook Malise left and right like a terrier with a rat and Malise felt the world whirl and turn red at the edges. The dagger clattered from his fingers and his vision blackened and and started to narrow.

‘Drag a dirk out on me, is it?’ Tod’s Wattie shouted and flung Malise away from him. ‘I’ll tear aff yer head and shite down yer neck, ye jurrocks.’

‘Here, here – enough of that.’

The new voice brought Tod’s Wattie round in a whirl, in time to see one of the castle’s garrison come panting up, sweating in his helmet and leather jack. He staggered to a halt and leaned on his spear, looking from one to the other.

‘What’s all this?’

Tod’s Wattie had turned to help Agnes back on to shaky legs and he felt her hanging on him like a wrung-out dishcloth, which only made him angrier. He waved a free hand at Malise, who was on his hands and knees, retching and whooping in air.

‘He was footerin’ with Agnes here,’ Tod’s Wattie declared. He knew the guard, Androu, was sweet on Agnes, so he was not surprised at the narrow-eyed look the man gave Malise.

‘Was he so?’ Androu said, then looked at Agnes. ‘Is this right?’

Agnes nodded and Androu shut one eye and glared grimly with the other, while Malise climbed, wavering, back to his feet.

‘Right you,’ Androu said, scooping up the dropped dagger. ‘You and me will see what Tam … the Sergeant … thinks of this.’

‘Mistake,’ Malise managed to croak, appalled at the ruin of his voice. He has torn my throat, he thought wildly. I will be dumb.

‘Aye,’ said Tod’s Wattie viciously. ‘It was a mistake right enough. If ye make it again it will be your last.’

Androu soothed him, then prodded Malise with the spear butt, so that he was forced to weave off. Tod’s Wattie, Agnes leaning on his arm, started to help her back to the kitchen.

‘Dog Boy,’ she said, but the Dog Boy was gone.

Dog Boy was not having the finest of days. He knew this when he ran in blind panic from the man, sure he could hear the boots scuffing after him. He went back across the Ward and found himself heading for the only safety he knew, the kennels.

He knew it was a mistake when he skidded round the wattle-and-daub corner, into the raised, curious faces of the kennel lads, carrying the dirty straw out to the courtyard. Gib and The Worm stopped and straightened.

‘Blood of Christ,’ The Worm declared, snorting snot from his nose. ‘It’s yon hawk botherer who was too fine for the like of us.’

Dog Boy saw Gib’s pig-faced pout. Almost everything irritated Gib and Dog Boy knew that included him – even more after the showing-up he’d had during the hunt and because Dog Boy had been plucked from the castle kennels to serve with the Lothian lord.

Now he wandered around with only two big dogs to see to, which was not work at all; Gib was convinced it should have been him chosen and that, somehow, Dog Boy had contrived his downfall.

‘What are you seeking?’ he demanded, slightly more curious than angry but still careful to sneer. He always sneered these days.

Dog Boy stumbled his tongue on an answer. The sight of them had been cold water on his panic and he realised, suddenly, that the man was nowhere to be seen and almost certainly not pursuing him. He felt confused and embarrassed.

‘N-n-nothing,’ he stammered eventually.

‘N-n-nothing,’ mimicked Gib in a piping voice, then chuckled nastily. ‘Looking for hawks, probably.’

The Worm hooted at this, a few others joined in and Gib’s sneering smile broadened with the audience. Dog Boy kept silent, for he knew Gib’s moods well enough. He waited, leaden with inevitability, wanting to back away and unable to move.

‘Well? Answer me, you dropping?’

Answer what? I gave you an answer. Dog Boy wanted to say this but stitched his mouth in a neat, tight hem and said nothing, sick with what he knew would come next.

‘Whore turd,’ Gib spat. He liked the sound of it and repeated it, rolling it off his tongue, savouring. The Worm laughed. Everybody laughed. Dog Boy tried one and Gib scowled at him and stepped closer.

‘Think it funny, do you?’ he snarled and cuffed Dog Boy hard. The blow stung, but Dog Boy made no sound and only half-ducked. Gib did it again, excited by the first one. It was an act worn by use, the steps in it as set as any dance, and Gib knew it well. He would strike a few more unresisted blows, then he would spring on Dog Boy, wrestle him down, punch him, then bounce on him until he had suitably shown his superiority among all the dog-boy barons. It was what always happened.

Except this time. Gib’s second blow met air and his belly met a hard nut of fist that drove the air from him. Then Dog Boy’s bare foot slammed into his cods and drove shrieking agony into him.

Dog Boy hardly knew he had done it. He wanted to leap on Gib and beat him to bloody paste, but his nerve broke as Gib, howling, fell to the filthy, dog-turd straw and writhed, curling and uncurling round his clutching hands. Dog Boy turned to run and the rest of the pack sprang on him and bore him down.

There was a confused welter of dust and flying fists, snarling faces and curses. Then came a series of sharp cracks and yelps and the bellow of a deeper voice until Dog Boy, curled into a ragged, bloody ball, found himself hauled up into Malk’s scowl, while the others nursed the marks of the whip he had used on them.

Dog Boy wiped his bloody nose. It had been a bad day. He did not think he had ever had a worse one, or that this one could grow more rotten.

He thought to revise the opinion in the dim of the gatehouse arch, where the torch flickered red light on Berner Philippe’s face. When he smeared the smile on it, he looked to Dog Boy like one of the devils cavorting on the walls of the church in the nearby town. Gib moaned.

‘Get in,’ he ordered and Dog Boy swallowed. The black square gave off a faint stink of grave rot and led to the pit of the pivot bridge, a black maw where the weighted end hung and the great pivots waited to be greased.

Dog Boy felt Gib tremble and started to shake himself; they would climb into the pit with a pot of stinking grease and a torch and, in the tomb dark of it, they would labour, smearing grease on the pivots. It was Berner Phillipe’s clever idea for punishment and Dog Boy never even dared point out that he was no longer the Berner’s to command.

‘The torch will burn for an hour,’ Philippe said, the smile still a nasty streak. ‘I will return in that time – give or take a minute or so. Take care of yon light, or you will be left in the dark.’

They stared into the pit, the dank, cold stink of it reaching out like coils of witch hair, the wood and knotted rope ladder dangling into the dark; Dog Boy sat on the edge, turned gingerly and slithered down. The grease pot was handed to him, then a shivering, weeping Gib thumped down beside him and the torch was flung in.

The trapdoor shut, cutting out the last of the dim, dappled sunlight under the gatehouse arch. With the final shunk, they were alone with torch and the flickering shadows and the huge roll of the bridge weight, locked in place by timber supports shoved through from the walls on either side.

‘Jesu, Jesu, Jesu,’ muttered Gib.

Dog Boy looked at his nemesis, at the pinch-face and the tear-streaked cheeks, then handed him one of the two flat sticks. Worldlessly, dry-eyed and shaking, he moved to the steps, climbed to one of the great pivots and began slapping grease on it. He could not believe he had been afraid of leaving Douglas and now could not wait to be quit of the place and all the folk in it.

***

Malise massaged his throat and fumed. Thomas the Sergeant had been no more than an old, scarred man-at-arms, no better in rank than Malise himself, yet he stood there like some belted earl and lectured, finally throwing Malise out of the castle.

Black scowled, Malise collected his horse and tried not to worry about bumping into Tod’s Wattie, though he saw the dim grey shapes of the deerhounds in the depth of the stable. An idea came to him.

He went out and found what he sought – the discarded pot of offal, thrown away by that little rat-runt. The flies had found the contents, but nothing else had, and Malise scooped it back into the pot wearing his gauntlets, then fumbled out a small glass bottle, unstoppered it and poured half the contents in, tossing the whole to mix it.

He went back to the stable and gingerly came close to the dogs, making kissing sounds. He laid the pot down, backed away and watched as the nearest hound sniffed, rose up, stretched front, then back and ambled towards the delicious smell, click-clicking across the flags. The other followed. Malise smiled and collected his horse.

Thomas the Sergeant, from the window nook high above, watched Buchan’s creature slither towards the gatehouse with his horse. Good riddance, he thought to himself and then shook his head. How had he gotten in? Androu, half-shamed, had thought it was probably because Crozier the Keep had recognised him from before as the Earl of Buchan’s man and saw no reason to keep him out.

‘Christ’s Wounds,’ Thomas declared, watching Malise leave. ‘You would think the year was all good crops and peace. Our lord is at odds with the English again and his enemies are everywhere.’

It had been a moment of crushing despair for Thomas when the Lady had admitted a Bruce into the sacred centre of The Hardy’s Douglas, but nothing more than he expected from the woman, who did not have much inkling of what that meant. Nor cared, he thought.

Mind you, he had expected better from the hard-eyed Sientcler lord from Lothian with his blessing of good men -but then another Sientcler, a Templar no less, had stood on the Bruce side and, of course, that high and mighty family had no thought for Douglas then, only themselves.

As if to make a mockery of it all, the Earl of Buchan had arrived at the gates not long after to find Bruce on the stone gatehouse battlements, making sure his red chevronned surcoat was clearly visible. That had been worse still, for the Comyn and Bruce hated each other and none of them, as far as Thomas knew, supported the cause of his master, Sir William.

He had stood beside the Earl of Carrick and the Herdmanston lord, Sir Hal, looking out on the patient riders on mud-spattered horses, armed and righteous and wanting entry. Bruce, Thomas recalled, looked young and petted – more two than twenty-two – and he’d felt a momentary spasm of concern about how the Earl of Carrick would handle this affair.

There had been two others on the wooden battlements -Bruce’s sinister wee shadow, the man called Kirkpatrick, who had nodded to the giant called Sim. That yin had needed nothing more than the nod to foot one worn boot into the stirrup of his great crossbow and, scorning the bellyhook, drag the thick string up by brute force and click it into place. Thomas had been impressed by the feat, yet mortally afraid of what might result.

He recalled the riders’ pale faces looking up, framed in arming cap bascinets and maille coifs, their great slitted helms tucked under one arm and shields pointedly brought forward.

‘Open in the name of the King,’ one had shouted, urging his mud-spattered horse forward a little. Davey Siward, Thomas remembered, with John of Inchmartin behind him – a clutch of Inchmartins had been there, in fact.

‘Which King is that, then?’ Bruce had asked. ‘John Balliol, in whose name you attacked me and my father in Carlisle last year? Or Edward of England, whose army you are supposed to be with? I should point out that I am here because Sir William Douglas has also absconded from that army and King Edward is less than pleased.’

Which was as sure a seal on the fate of Douglas as any Thomas had heard and he burned with indignation. Before he could say anything at all in his master’s defence, a light, easy voice rolled sonorously up like perfumed smoke.

‘Is that a shivering cross I see? Could that be young Hal Sientcler from Herdmanston?’ the Earl of Buchan had asked. Thomas remembered the way the Lothian lord had unconsciously touched that engrailed blue cross on his chest. It was an arrogance, that symbol, signifying a Templar connection and allusions to the Holy Grail, as if only the Sientclers held the secret of it beyond Jesus himself.

‘Sir William of Roslin is also here,’ the Lothian lord had replied and Thomas knew he had done it deliberately, hoping a mention of the Auld Templar might unlatch the situation a little. Buchan had sighed a little and shook his head, so that the sweat-damp hair stirred in the bold wind.

‘Well, there it is,’ Buchan answered. ‘God’s Own Chosen, the Sientclers, together with the Young Himself of Carrick, all descended here to punish a wee woman and her wee sons. Such we have been driven down to, Bruce.’

There had been a clipped, frosted exchange after that, Thomas recalled, but more to score points than for any serious questioning of intent. Buchan presented his Writ from King Edward, permitting him to go home and contain the rebels of Sir Andrew Moray. Bruce had taken his time to study it, letting Buchan savour the fact that he had no more than sixty riders, too few to tackle a castle like this, stuffed to the merlons with Carrick men.

Some had grown impatient and Sim had spotted it, for which Thomas had been grateful and furious with himself for having been so lax.

‘Is that you there, Jinnet’s Davey?’ Sim had called out in a friendly voice, and the man with a crossbow in one hand and the reins of a horse in the other looked guiltily up.

‘Yer da back in Biggar will be black affronted to see you in sich company,’ Sim chided, ‘and about to shoot from the cover of other men’s back. If ye try I will pin your luggs to either side of your face and slide ye aff that stot ye are riding.’

Thomas remembered that more for what he overheard, whispered by Bruce to the Lothian lord.

‘I have only a little idea what he said, but the sentiment seems fine.’

Thomas marvelled at it anew. The great Earl of Carrick, heir to the Bruces of Annandale, speaks court French, southern English and the Gaelic – thanks to his mother – but he has poor command of English as spoken by a good Scot.

Yet the gates of Douglas had opened and Thomas, feeling the slow burn of resentment at having had his charge swept from under him as if he was of no account, had been forced to watch as the Ward bustled, rang with shouts and horse-snorts and neighs. Bruce had stepped forward, the red chevron on his surcoat like a bright splash of blood, his arms expansively wide as he and the stiffly dismounted Buchan embraced like old friends well met.

Well, now they were all gone and the Lady and her bairns with Bruce, Thomas thought. Poor sowls – God ensure that they go where Bruce promised, to The Hardy at Irvine. No matter if they did, or ended up in Bruce’s power, or whether the Earl joined with patriots or the English, or whether Sir William The Hardy won or lost – Thomas swore that the fortress of Douglas would not fall as easily again.

He rounded on Androu and pointed an accusing finger.

‘From this moment Douglas is in a state of war, man,’ he declared. ‘I want yon Lothian man and his dugs gone from here in short order – I do not care if it puts them into danger. I do not trust any of that Lothian lord’s chiels and do not want any Lothians inside looking out for Sientclers coming back here, having wormed their way into the English peace at Irvine and looking to advantage themselves.’

Androu had not thought of the Sientclers turning their cote and wanted to defend them, to point out how they had come originally, at considerable risk, to defend the place. He opened and closed his mouth like a landed fish, but the words would not marshal themselves in any order.

Thomas frowned down at the retreating back of Malise Bellejambe, then rounded on Androu like an unleashed terrier.

‘And as soon as that ill-favoured swine is on the far side of the ditch, that yett is closed and the bridge raised, to be lowered only on my say.’

He turned away to stare out the slit window, high in the great square bulk of keep.

‘When The Hardy comes back,’ he said, half-muttering to himself, ‘he will find his castle ready for war.’

Androu, who could see Tam’s mind was made up, scurried to obey.

When the bridge trembled, Dog Boy paused, then looked at the guttering torch. Gib whimpered and it was only then that Dog Boy understood what the tremble meant. They both heard the rasping thump, felt rather than saw the supports being windlassed back. Then the massive counterweight shifted and Gib gave a moan, dropped his pot and went for the rope ladder, elbowing Dog Boy to the clotted floor of the pit.

At the top, Gib shoved at the unresisting trapdoor, then started beating on it, screaming. The counterweight, a great long roll like a giant’s stowed sleeping blanket, started a slow, downward swing, dragging the outhrust, unseen beams attached by chains to the moatbridge, hauling it up.

Gib shrieked and dropped off the ladder, his hands bloody from beating the wood.

‘Flat,’ Dog Boy yelled. ‘Get yourself flat.’

The smoothed granite went over Dog Boy, a huge, round crush of weight, moving ponderously, yet more swiftly than before with its new grease. Dog Boy felt the touch of it, the plucking fingers of it along his back like some giant’s fist.

Gib was caught by it. Dog Boy saw his wild face, the staring eyes, the red maw of his mouth, twisting with shock as he realised that he was too big, that the skinny runt he had always despised for his size could get under the rolling weight, but not him.

It scooped Gib up and carried him back, back to the far wall, and Dog Boy, head buried in his arms, heard the cracking splinter of bones and a last, despairing shriek in the cold dark.

Temple Bridge, Annick Water

Division of the Apostles Across The Earth – July, 1297

The rain lisped down, dripping from the bell hanging over their heads on the arch of the glistening wet timber bridge. Hal knew the bell was called Gloria because Bangtail Hob had told everyone so, squinting into the falling mirr to read the name etched on it and proud of his ability to recognise the letters, however long he had taken to spell them out.

The bell could be rung by tugging on a white rope, pearled with sliding water drops now, to warn the Poor Knights of the Temple Ton that travellers were coming to them in peace, seeking succour or sanctuary. Hal fervently wished he was in the small Temple out of a rain as fine as querned flour, soaking the men who were huddled on the bridge, waiting and watching the men on horseback on the far side.

His own men had taken off their quilted gambesons, trading the protection for the agility; the rain had soaked the garments heavy as armour. They had tied their right shoe into their belt or round their necks, for the right was the bracing foot, rutted into the churned earth and needing all the grip it could get. The left, shoved forward, required a measure of protection and, though it would not divert a cut or a stab or the crush of a hoof, the leather of a shoe was still a comfort.

Hal did not expect hooves. His men were bunched and dripping, a hedge of spears and blades and wicked hooks, and Hal expected that the English horse – decently armoured serjeants – would climb off and tramp on foot the length of the bridge to attack.

He wished they would not, that they would try to ride them down and suffer ruin for it. More than that, he wished they would just go away, thinking like sensible men, and that, any day – any moment – they would all be friends, with the Scots back in the King’s peace and no harm done.

More than that, he wished that John the Lamb, wherever he was, had seen sense and was not trying to bring the reived cattle out of the dripping trees and across the bridge to join them. That would be all the provocation the English needed.

The last hope was driven from him by the distant bawl of a miserable cow. Sim slid up beside him, rusted rain running off the brim of his iron hat and his crossbow swathed in his cloak to try to keep the string from getting wet and slack.

‘John the Lamb,’ he said and Hal nodded. He saw the head of the English captain come up, cocked to hear the same mournful lowing and knew, with certainty, that both were now caught in the whirling dance of it, borne along to the inevitability of blood and slaughter by honour, duty, chivalry and desperation. And all over a handful of rieved coos for a hungry army waiting for their betters to set seal to their deals.

He looked at the man’s shield, the six little legless birds on it, three on top of a diagonal stroke, three beneath. Argent, a bend between six martlet, gules, he thought automatically to himself and smiled. All those days of bruised knuckles and scowls as his father dinned Heraldry into him – no, no, ye daftie, a bird which is facing you is full aspect, any other beast similarly displayed is affronty. Repeat, affronty.

No practical use at all, for he still had no idea who the man opposite him was, or even if he was English. The only thing he did know was that the martlet marked him as a fourth son and that, in a moment, they would be trying to cleave sharp bars of iron into each other.

Furneval sat as haughtily as he could while rain slithered off his bascinet and down under the maille; his padded, quilted gambeson was sodden and weighed four times as much as normal and so would those of the rest of his men – they would feel the dragging weight when they had to dismount and fight in them, as well as the maille, the heavy shields and the lances, too long to make comfortable spears.

For now, he was watching the sudden antheap stir of the little group under the bridge-bell arch. Behind, his men shifted in their ranks, hunching down so that their rimmed iron helmets were all that could be seen above the long shields. That and the lances.

Behind that, Furneval knew, was William de Ridre, up in the trees with even more men and watching closely what happened here. Furneval felt the surge in him, a fire of pride and joy, for he had been chosen to demonstrate the power of the Percy and had his own lord, de Ridre, watching him do it.

They had chased these foragers a long way over the fields and Furneval had some sympathy for their desperate plundering – small though it was, the Scots force at Annick still needed fodder and meat – and some admiration of their skill.

Fast riders, skilled at herding the small, black cattle, he had been thinking to himself, so no strangers to such thieving, and it was right and proper that, even though a truce pertained here, such raiders were not permitted to plunder as they chose. They were, until announcements were made to the contrary, rebels after all and just a rabble of brigands. Now that Furneval had seen them for himself he was sure of the second part and suspicious of the first.

They were waiting at the far end of a narrow bridge across a steep-banked, undergrowth choked stream called the Annick Water, knowing that this was their best chance of defence. It was clever and determined, the weapons they had were like polearms only worse, so that Furneval felt a flicker of doubt, a sharp little dart that flew into his heart like a sliver of ice.

A sensible man would have let them go, with their sumpter cart of stolen rye and wheat and their handful of cattle, but de Ridre was not about to go back to Percy and admit that a raggedy bunch of Scots foot had forced back sixty mounted serjeants.

A sensible man would not try to ride down a hedge of spears, but dismount and march on them, and Furneval would do that, at least; he had seen what spear-bristling foot could do at Dunbar. He wished for some crossbows, for they had split the spear rings of the Scots apart at Dunbar. He wished for de Ridre to send him a message telling him to pull off and leave it. He knew neither wish was possible, yet he waited in the lisping rain, ever hopeful.

Then the first cow stumbled out of the woods with others at its back and men behind, running their weary, stumbling horses like shambling bears and sealing the fate of them all.

Hal watched as the rider reached up and dropped the great sugarloaf helm over the bascinet, becoming a faceless metal creature in an instant. Furneval adjusted his grip on the shield with the birds, blew out to make sure the cruciform breathing holes were clear and wished his nose was not so big, since it squashed against the full-face helm.

Hal watched him tap the helm a little to settle it, then draw out his long sword; he barked something and the men behind him climbed off their horses.

‘Ah, ye thrawn, bloody limmer,’ Hal heard himself say wearily. Too much to hope they would be stupid and try to ride them down.

‘Drop the kine, ye bliddy fools!’ hissed Sim to no-one in particular, but even if he had bellowed it, neither John the Lamb nor Dand would have heard. Even if they had heard, they would not have obeyed, for they had harried and herded this meagre handful of black cows for miles and every time they looked at the green-streaked arse of one they saw roasted beef, dripping and savoury.

Yet it was death to them and everyone knew it. The rider with the six red martlets swept his sword up like a bar of light – then brought it down and a roar went up from the horde of throats behind him as they surged past on to the bridge.

‘Stand fast, lads,’ bawled Sim, switching back the cloak and sticking one foot in the crossbow stirrup. He hauled it up without using the belt-hook, stuck in a four-sided bolt and brought it up to his chest.

‘Dirige, Domine, Deus meus in conspecto tuo viam meam.’

Hal stared at Bangtail Hob as the man crossed himself. Direct my path, Lord my God, in your sight – he had not known that the likes of Hob knew the English, never mind the Latin. Life was full of surprises, even now.

‘Christ be praised,’ roared Sim.

‘For ever and ever,’ the men roared back.

‘Mither of God,’ whined Will Elliott, and Hal watched the bobbing wall of shields and spears and helms crush itself down the length of wooden bridge, while John the Lamb and Dand veered off, heading for the bank and throwing themselves off their horses; cattle scattered, bawling mournfully.

He saw, too, in a fixed instant that seared itself on his mind, the horseman in his great helm and shield of birds turn away from the bridge and the backs of his men, watched the bunched flank muscles of the powerful beast as he spurred it towards John and Dand.

‘Sim,’ he yelled and pointed. Cursing, Sim levelled the bow and shot; the bolt hissed past the hindquarters of the horse and Sim howled with frustration, frantically spanning the weapon again.

Furneval caught up with the fleeing Dand as he plootered and plunged through the tangling bushes and undergrowth, hearing the wet thunder behind him closing in and the whimper in him rising to a scream.

‘Jump, Dand, jump.’

He heard it, saw, out of the corner of his eye, John the Lamb spring up like the beast he was named for and spin in the air, a whirl of already sodden arms and legs that hit the black ripple of the water and exploded it to spray.

He was a step away. One step and a leap and his lungs burning …

Furneval gave the sword a little wrist flick, brought it back and then forward and up. The last third of blade caught Dand on the back of his head, exploding it into black blood and shards. His body stumbled on two, three steps, then fell, tumbled over and over, then slid in a tangle down the bank and slithered softly into the water.

Furneval reined round, knowing it had been a perfect stroke and hoping de Ridre had been watching. He reached up and hauled off the full-face helm, feeling the cool blast of damp wind on his sweating face, then half turned in the saddle, stiff-necked with maille, to see what his men were doing.

He heard a bellowing, as if there had been a bull among the cows – then the second bolt from the roaring fury that was Sim took him in the centre of his bascinet-framed face, a sudden huge hissing black approach that drove life from him in an instant and shot him sideways off the horse in a great whirl of pearl sky and wet bracken that dropped him into darkness.

Sim’s great bellow of triumph was swallowed in the crashing tide of men, four wide and infinitely deep, it seemed, who rolled up to the hedge of Jeddart staffs and clashed into it, so that it rocked and slid a little before bracing on all those bared right feet. Mindless as some beast, the ranks piled on, those in front unable to move or do much more than waggle their too-long lances.

Bangtail Hob and Hal stabbed and cut. Will Elliot and Red Cloak Thom slashed and hooked, while Sim spanned his bow and shot between their heads into the packed ranks, where he could not miss. Men screamed; curses went up and the front four men, the sense crushed out of them, lost the use of their limbs and suddenly vanished as if sucked under a bog. Four more were crushed forward; the wooden archway splintered and rocked.

Red Cloak Thom’s staff snapped and he threw it away with a curse and whipped out his bollock dagger. He parried a thrust that would have skewered him, missed another and took it in the throat, went over gurgling and drowning in his own blood. Hal leaped, shrieking, to Thom’s slumped, twisting, gasping corpse, heedless of the blindly stabbing lance points. A huge figure moved forward, as if wading into a hip-deep stream, and a man went backwards with the bolt of a crossbow in the face.

Hal felt a hand grip and pull him free, then he was staring up into Sim’s scowl.

‘No more of that, ye sou’s arse,’ he growled. ‘Yer father would take ill of it if I was to let ye be killed dead here.’

‘Never fash yourself,’ Hal managed and then grinned, ashamed at his stupidity and knowing Red Cloak was dead from the moment his throat had been opened.

‘I am a lad of parts, me’ he added. ‘Such bravery is auld cloots and gruel to the likes of me.’

The archway lurched and the bell clanged. Cries and grunts and shrieks splintered their conversation and Sim dropped the crossbow and dragged out his sword, the blade of it dark with old stains and notched as a wolf’s jaw, the end honed to a point thin enough to get between the slits of a barrelled heaume.

‘A Sientcler,’ he bellowed and leaped in long enough to stab and slash before losing his balance in the slither of it all and stumbling out again

‘The bell,’ said Hal, hearing it clang as the arch swayed. The English weight shoved the Scots back, their bared feet scoring ruts in the mud; they were almost at the sumpter cart now, almost pushed away from the narrow part of the bridge. Once that happened, the English would spill out right and left and numbers would do it.

The English sensed victory and the men in the rear ranks pushed relentlessly and started to sing, while the ones in front, crushed even of breath, lost consciousness and slid under the feet of the next rank.

Hal was aware of the sea of helmets and snarls, the great bristle of spears, as if some massive, maddened hedgepig was trying to crush itself under the arch – then he felt a hot burn in his calf, slipped to one knee and felt himself falling backwards, slashed wildly with the spear. Lying on the wet, smelling the fresh-turned earth like ploughland round Herdmanston, he saw the forest of straining legs and feet and the last splinters of wood uncurl slowly as the arch buckled.

Then the bell fell, smashing the front ranks of the battering English spearmen. The great, hollow boom of it drowned their screams.

There was a pause then, while thoughts and rain whirled with the dying echoes of the tolling bell. Hal, deafened and stunned like everyone else, felt himself hauled out and up, stared, mouth open, trying to make sense of the screaming and the dying, while the ranks of men washed away from where the bell had fallen.

Gloria, Hal saw and laughed like a grim wolf, for he knew what Bangtail Hob had seen – Gloria In Excelsis Deo, lovingly engraved along the slowly rocking bell’s rim, now fluted with rivulets of blood and crushed bone.

‘Deus lo vultV

They all heard it and turned, fearing the worst. Up behind them came a rider, mailled top to toe, the pointed Templar cross blood-bright on a billowing white camilis, streaming behind him like a snow wind, another gracing the linen purity of the horse barding. Behind him came a handful of men on foot, grim in black tunics and hose and porridge-coloured, rust-streaked gambesons. Their rimmed iron hats were painted black, with white on the crown and the black cross of Christ on the front.

Deus lo vultV the knight bellowed, the words crushed and muffled inside the great, flat-topped barrel heaume. He thundered up past Hal and his pillar of Sim, while men scattered away from him. He circled his wrist with quick flick, so that the hammer in his armoured gauntlet, an elegance of gleaming steel with a fluted head and a pick on the other side, glittered like ice.

The great warhorse hardly balked at the splintered wreckage and the bell, leaping delicately over the first and round the second; a wounded man screamed as an iron hoof cracked his shins, others tried to scramble from underneath the delicately stepping beast.

The ranks on the bridge broke like a dropped mirror. They turned and ran and the knight rode them down, while the handful of men he brought charged, red mouths open, faces twisted in savage triumph. Bodies flew over the parapet of the bridge and crashed into the stream, others were bounced into the splintered planks and mashed with iron hooves, and, all the time, the arcing gleam of hammer swung right to left and back again; with every swing a head cracked like an egg.

Deus lo vult. God wills it, the cry from the time Jerusalem fell, a potage of vulgar Latin and French and Italian, the lingua franca everyone used to make themselves understood on crusade.

‘Sir William,’ Hal said dazedly.

‘Blessed be his curly auld Templar pow,’ Sim muttered and they looked at each other, heads down, hands on knees. Will Elliot was throwing up and Thom was dead; in the river, Dand turned and floated like a bloated sheep, while John the Lamb hauled himself, dripping, out of the other side. A cow bawled plaintively.

‘Aye til the fore, then,’ Sim said and Hal could only nod. Still alive. God had willed it. They almost laughed, but the great white knight reappeared, his horse high-prancing delicately over the debris and blood, the great helm tucked under his shielded arm, offering them a salute with the gore-clotted silver hammer.

His snowy robes and the horse’s barding were spattered red, so that even the small cross over his heart seemed like a splash of gore; his face, framed by maille coif and the steel of a bascinet, was as blood-bright as the cross and sheened with sweat.

‘I am thinking,’ he said, as if remarking on the rain, ‘that if ye shift, ye can gather up some of they kine and drive them across the bridge. I am thinking that the Templars of the Ton deserve a whole coo to themselves.’

Then he grinned out of the scarlet, streaming, grey-bearded face

‘Best no stand like a set mill,’ Sir William Sientcler added, ‘for it is my opinion that this brig can no longer be held.’

‘I am standing beside you there, Sir Will,’ Sim declared and went off to fetch the sumpter horse. Hal stood on wobbling legs and looked up at the Templar knight.

‘Timely,’ he declared, then sagged. ‘More than timely …’

‘Ach,’ Sir William said, his voice clearly alarmed that Hal was about to unman himself. ‘I had a fancy to some beef.’

Beef, Hal thought, watching men sort out the mess, picking their way back over the litter of corpses and blood-stained timbers, guddling in viscous muck for what they could plunder. All this was just for something to eat. He said as much aloud.

‘Ave Maria, gratia plena,’ Sim declared cheerfully, backing the horse between the cartshafts. ‘And may the Lord God help us when all this starts to get serious.’

They left the bloody-wrapped body of Red Cloak Thom to be buried at Temple Ton, whose quiet, grim-faced warrior monks went about the gentle business of piously collecting, washing and burying the English they had so recently fought. Everyone, especially John the Lamb, was painfully aware that Dand had drifted far down the Annick, but took some comfort from the assurances that he would be found and decently buried.

‘You will be in a peck of trouble for riding the Temple against King Edward,’ Hal said to Sir William and the Master, a man in a black robe and the soft hat of a monk, with the hard eyes beneath hinting at how he had been a wet-mouthed, spear-wielding screamer not long before.

‘We defended our Temple,’ the Master declared. ‘Crossing the bridge placed you on Commanderie ground and in our hospitality, so they have no-one to blame but themselves for attacking those under the protection of the Order.’

The soft-voiced Master, iron-grey beard like wool, bowed his neck to Sir William.

‘It was fortunate that the Gonfanonier was present,’ he said, and Hal heard the respect in his voice for the presence of one of the Order’s Standard-Bearers.

‘I will send money for the relief of Thom’s soul,’ Hal said awkwardly, but the Master shook his head.

‘No need. We are entitled to the escheat of the slain, though we will restrict this to weapons and equipment, so that the personal items of these poor souls can be returned. Likewise the body of their leader – Sir John Furneval, was it? He shall be returned with all possessions, save for the warhorse.’

The Master smiled, a complex rearrangment of reluctant muscles; it never quite made it to his eyes.

‘For two Poor Knights to ride,’ he added and Hal thought it a jest and almost laughed; then he saw Sir William’s sober, long-moustached face and swallowed the chuckle.

‘Ave Maria, gratia plena,’ Sir William said.

‘Christ be praised,’ answered the Master and blessed them both as they intoned, ‘For ever and ever.’

‘Anyway,’ Sir William declared when he and Hal were moving out into the mirr again, ‘all this is moot – I was coming to find ye, to let ye know that terms have been agreed.’

‘Terms?’ Hal muttered, only half-listening. He had seen the body of the English knight being lugged in, four men sweating with the weight of the man in his sodden clothing and armour. The face was a fretwork of shattered bone and flesh, fine as clergy lace.

‘Aye,’ Sir William went on cheerfully. ‘Bruce and the rest are welcomed back into the community of the realm, lands intact – though Bruce is charged to appear at Berwick and Wishart stands surety for him. Douglas is taken into custody so that his wife and weans are not taken as hostage, though Bruce is still debating as to whether he will allow his wee daughter, Marjorie, to be held at the king’s pleasure and surety for his future behaviour.’

He frowned and shook his head. ‘As well he might. Wee mite is awfy young to be so caught up in this, so you can see the point of his arguing against it.’

Hal blinked. Terms.

‘When?’ he asked.

‘Three … nay, I lie, four days since,’ Sir William said, scowling at the bloodstains on his white robes.

Three or four days ago. This bloody mess had been pointless; the war was over.

‘Aye, well,’ Sir William said when Hal spat this out, bitter as bile, ‘not quite, young Hal. Wallace is not included and is warmin’ the ears of English from Brechin to Dundee and beyond. Bands of riders skite from the hills and woods, two or three long hundreds a time. They climb off their nags and proceed to the herschip with a will.’

The herschip Hal knew well enough – he had taken part in his share of those swift, burning raids for plunder and profit – but it seemed now that the army of the noble cause was inflicting it on the very people it was supposed to defend.

‘This is true war,’ Sir William said, pulling Hal round by the arm to stare into his face with watery-blue eyes, his grey-white beard twitching like a squirrel tail. ‘Red war, Hal. Forget yer notions of chivalry – Wallace does what we did in the Holy Land against the heathen; ye scorch them, Hal. Ye leave them nothin’ and then, when they are gaspin’ with their tongues lollin’ like hot wolves, their belts notched to the backbone, ye ride out and smack them into the dust.’

‘You lost,’ Hal answered savagely and Sir William blinked.

‘To our shame and everlastin’ stain, aye. Outremer’s finest were too high and chivalric by hauf and the Saracen were fuller of guile,’ he answered morosely. ‘There will be another crusade, though, mark me.’

Until then there is here and there is Wallace – Hal said it aloud and Sir William shot him a look from under the snowed lintel of his brows.

‘I am a Templar,’ he replied piously, with a lopsided, hypocritical grin, ‘and so cannot be involved.’

God help us if it gets serious, Sim had said. Hal shook his head. It was already past that and, despite having been negotiated back to land and grace, he could not feel sure that the stones of it were settled firmly.

Annick Water

Feast of St Swithun, July 1297

The fires were small, but a welcome warmth to the long hundreds of Scots huddled under rough shelters listening to the rain drift. In the dying light of a summer’s day which had never been graced by much sun, the shadows brought chill and the men huddled, enduring and mournful, waiting for the moment when they could all go home, trailing after the lords who had finally agreed on a peace.

Bangtail Hob was more furious than mournful, for the bodies he had plundered the day before had turned out to have cheated him.

‘Bloody hoor’s by-blows, the lot,’ he muttered again, a litany which those nearest now endured with an extra sink of the shoulders, as if hunching into more rain.

‘Bloody crockards. Pollards.’

Hal and Sim exchanged looks and wry smiles. Soon Sim would have to have words with Bangtail before he rasped everyone raw, but there was a deal of sympathy for man stuck with crockards and pollards, debased foreign coinage now flooding the country thanks to English reforms a decade since. Silver light, they looked like sterling English money until you brought them close.

It was yet another layer of misery to spread on the death of Dand and Red Cloak Thom the day before and the gratitude of hungry men for beef only went a little way as salve. The army, if you could call it that, was now all Carrick men, for the other nobles had taken their forces and gone their separate ways, having promised to turn up at this or that English-held place and bring their sons, daughters or wives as surety for their future good conduct.

Douglas men were trailing homeward, fretted and furious at having seen The Hardy taken off. That was bad enough, Hal thought, but he had been told by those who witnessed it that Percy had insisted on chains and The Hardy had been bound in them, kicking and snarling; it had not been a pleasant sight.

Even Wishart had gone, leaving Bruce to argue out the last hard-wrung details with Percy, who had already sent triumphal messages south to King Edward and his grandfather, De Warenne, that the rebellion had been dealt with. Yet Clifford’s forces were fumbling northwards, trying to bring Wallace to bay and having no luck.

Hal would leave, too, he had decided. Tomorrow, he said to himself. I have had enough of the community of the realm – let them kick spurs at each other like cocks battling for a dung-hill …

‘Forty bloody days,’ Bangtail announced bitterly, which was different enough to bring some heads up.

‘Forty days?’ John the Lamb repeated. ‘Is that how long yon crockards and pollards last before turnin’ into powrie mist?’

Men groaned; they had hoped to hear no more about the contents of Bangtail’s dull-clinking purse.

‘Rain,’ Bangtail spat back scathingly.

‘St Swithun’s day if thou dost rain; for forty days it will remain,’ he intoned.

‘Christ’s Bones,’ said Red Rowan, scrubbing his autumn bracken head, ‘you are a bowl of soor grue, man.’

‘Aye, weel,’ Bangtail muttered back sourly. ‘I was thinkin’ of Tod’s Wattie, warm and fed and dry an’ rattlin’ the hot arse off that wee Agnes. I had some hopes for that quim, save that we were untimely torn apert.’

‘Man, man,’ said Will Elliot admiringly, ‘Untimely … it is just like yon tale of the Knight and the Faerie. Ye ken – the yin where the Knight …’

‘O God, who adorned the precious death of our most holy Father, Saint Benedict, with so many and so great privileges,’ declared a sonorous voice in good English; it brought all heads round to where the silver-grey figure moved.

‘Grant, we beseech You, that at our departure hence, we may be defended from the snares of the enemy by the blessed presence of him whose memory we celebrate. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.’

‘Amen,’ men muttered, crossing themselves.

‘Christ be praised,’ Sim offered.

‘For ever and ever,’ they all repeated.

The monk squatted by the fire and took his hands from the sleeves of the rough, grey-white habit. His cadaverous face, flooded with firelight, became a death’s head of shadows.

‘We have some meat,’ Hal offered and the monk showed some teeth in a bearded smile.

‘This is a meatless day, my son. I came to offer both blessing and advice.’

‘The blessing is welcome,’ Hal answered warily, expecting a sermon on the defilement of a meatless day; the rich smell of the roasting beef wafted betrayingly. The monk laughed softly from the depths of his cowl.

‘The advice is this – the picket guard is one Fergus the Beetle,’ the monk said. ‘He is not one of God’s sharpest tools, but honest and diligent. I fear, though, he is out of his depth with the visitors who have arrived at his post. He can understand only that your name was mentioned.’

He put his hands back in his sleeves and moved off, seeming to drift between the men, who crossed themselves humbly as he passed and tried to hide marrow bones. Sighing, Hal got up, looked at Sim and the pair of them went to find Fergus, the picket guard.

Fergus watched the company ahead of him closely, especially the rider with a face like a fat moon and the air of someone too close to the crotch of another’s ancient hose. Fergus was from the north and, like all those men, disliked anyone from south of The Mounth ridge, who dressed peculiarly and spoke in ways hard for an honest man to understand. Further south than that, he knew, were men who scarcely warranted the name, soft perfumed folk who curled their hair and spoke in strange ways.

Hal and Sim, coming up behind the guards, saw the huddle of kerns and the short, dark little man, made darker by the black wolf cap and pelt he wore over bits and pieces of maille and leather filched from dead enemies. The black, hardened leather jack he wore made him look like some beetle, newly surfaced from the forest mulch, but no-one would voice that; they all knew the killing reputation of Fergus and his men who came from north of The Mounth with all the strangeness that implied.

‘Atweill than,’ Fergus declared to the haughty rider, ‘this wul dae brawlie. Gin ye haed spoke The Tongue at the verra stert, ye wad hae spared the baith o us aw this hatter. Tak tent ti whit Ah hae ti say an lippen ti me weill – ye maun bide ther until I lowse ye.’

The rider, mailled and coiffed, flung up his hands, so that wet drops flew up from his green-gloved fingers, and cursed pungently in French.

‘I am Sir Gervaise de la Mare. Do you understand no language at all?’

‘Ah prigg the blissin o the blue heivins on ye,’ Fergus scowled back. ‘There are ower mony skirrivaigin awhaurs, so bide doucelyke or, b’Goad’s ane Wounds, Ah wul …’

‘Fergus,’ Hal said and the dark man fell back and turned, his black-browed face breaking into a wary grin.

‘Yersel,’ he greeted with about as much deference as he ever gave and then jerked his head contemptuously at the rider.

‘This yin an’ his muckle freends came sklimming the heich brae, aw grand an’ skerlet and purpie. Luikin to spier you somewhiles.’

‘You can understand this oaf?’ demanded the rider. ‘Thanks be to God – I seek one Hal of Herdmanston and would be obliged if you … him … anyone, would find him.’

‘I am Sir Henry Sientcler of Herdmanston,’ Hal declared and Gervaise blinked once or twice from under his hooded riding cloak.

‘You …’ he began, then a rider moved from the shadows and laid a hand on his arm to silence him. Hal looked at this newcomer, sensible in brown and green though the cloth was quality. He had a long face made longer by the great droop of a wet moustache from his top lip and the washerwoman look of his arming cap, while his eyes were large and seal-soft.

‘I am Sir Marmaduke Thweng,’ he announced and Hal felt his eyebrows raise. The man did not, he said to himself, look like one of the foremost knights in Christendom. A walrus in mourning, perhaps, but not Sir Galahad.

‘I have two folk to deliver safely,’ Sir Marmaduke went on and offered a wan smile, the rain sliding off the length of his moustaches.

‘Sir Gervaise is proud of his skills with foreign tongues,’ he added, ‘but seems to have met his match here.’

‘Ye have not the Scots leid, then,’ Sim scoffed, which was rich coming from him, since even he barely understood what Fergus was saying and Hal frequently lost track of it altogether.

Gervaise, wet and ruffled, drew himself up and tilted his nose even higher to look down it at Sim, who was not about to give the noble his due, with a ‘my lord’ and deferential bow.

‘I speak Spanish to my wife, Latin to my God, French to my king, English to my mistress and German to my horse,’ Gervaise declared, then leaned forward a little and smeared an ugly little smile across his face.

‘I speak Scots only when I bark back at my dog.’

‘Deliver your visitors, Sir Marmaduke,’ Hal interrupted, feeling Sim start to struggle forward and barely held by an arm and Hal’s command.

‘Bigod,’ Sim bellowed. ‘Let me loose on him the bauchlin’ wee …’

‘Steady,’ Hal interrupted harshly and Sim subsided, breathing like a mating bull. Hal turned to Thweng, whose mourn of a face had never altered.

‘Take this wee papingo away before his feathers are plucked.’

‘Only one visitor is for you,’ Sir Marmaduke replied mildly and waved a hand. This brought up a palfrey and a small man on its back, hunched and dripping.

‘This is one Bartholomew Bisset,’ Sir Marmaduke said. ‘He arrived without warning or writ in the English lines, saying he was bound for you and no other. Not even the Earl of Carrick, he says, to whom my other charge is due.’

Bisset? Hal knew the name but could not place it, and the wee fat man sat on the horse, drenched in rain and misery and silence. Then, out of the shadows, came a huge beast of a stallion that Hal knew well enough and his heart skipped. Sir Marmaduke’s other charge.

Sitting on Balius, swathed in a dark cloak, Isabel, Countess of Buchan offered Hal a weary smile.

Bruce was with Kirkpatrick in his panoply, a sodden flap of red and white sail canvas reeking of old mildew, wet wool and stale sweat. It was scattered with a discard of hose, boots, maille chausse, and a squire worked furiously at ridding good leather boots of water stains.

‘The Comyn is out,’ Bruce had said to Kirkpatrick and did not need to add anything. The Lord of Badenoch, kin to Buchan, had clearly been sent back north from Edward’s Flanders-borne army to help bring Moray’s rebellion to heel. Though all of that branch were known as Red Comyns because of their shield colours, the Lord of Badenoch was called John the Black as a grim joke on both his demeanour and his implacablity.

His return to Scotland meant that all the disgraced and dispossessed enemies of the Bruces had been restored to their rights and Kirkpatrick could almost hear Bruce’s teeth grind on it. It was as well, he thought, that we were all bound for Lochmaben and some comfort, else The Bruce’s bottom lip would trip him every time he stepped.

There was a noise from outside and a guard stuck his wet head inside.

‘A knight, my lord. Sir Marmaduke Thweng …’

Bruce was on his feet even before the man stepped through the flap on to the wooden boards.

‘Sir Emm,’ he bellowed.

‘Sir R,’ Thweng replied, grinning. It came out as ‘sirra’, which was the jest in the piece, and they both growled like delighted dancing bears as they hugged and slapped.

‘Bigod, it is fine to see you,’ Bruce exclaimed. ‘When was the last time we met?’

‘Feast of Epinette,’ Thweng replied. ‘The tourney at Lille four years ago. You did that trick of facing a fully armed knight on a palfrey and daring him to hit you. Fine feat of horsemanship – but you were young then and reckless. Besides, they were all full of the French Method at Lille that year.’

‘Ha,’ Bruce roared back. ‘The German Method will always defeat it.’

Kirkpatrick sat quietly and if he thought anything of being ignored it never showed in his face. In fact, he was so used to being overlooked that he was actually trying to recall what the French and German Methods were – and smiled when he remembered. A tourney style of fighting, the French Method involved training a warhorse to run full tilt and bring an opponent down by sheer momentum of horse and rider. The German was to use the dexterity of a much lighter horse to avoid such a rush, wheel round and reach the opponent before he could re-engage.

Thweng accepted the wine a squire brought him and sat, shoving aside a puddle of clothing. He looked pointedly at the smiling Kirkpatrick and Bruce waved one hand.

‘My man, Kirpatrick of Closeburn,’ he announced. ‘Kirkpatrick, this is Sir Marmaduke Thweng of Kilton. He is kin – a cousin by marriage, is it? More than that, a friend from the tourney circuit.’

‘My lord,’ Kirkpatrick replied softly, with a short bow. ‘Your reputation goes before you.’

Thweng nodded and sipped, while Kirkpatrick showed nothing on his face at all. More than a mere landless Bachelor knight of the household, Thweng thought as he studied the man. Less than a friend.

‘What brings you forth from Yorkshire, Sir Emm?’ asked Bruce.

‘I bring greetings from your father in Carlisle,’ Sir Marmaduke said and watched Bruce’s face grow cold, though he managed a stiff nod of acknowledgement and thanks. Thweng drank and said nothing more on the subject, though there was a lot more he could say – Bruce the Father had spat and snarled like a wet cat and the pith of it was not what his son had done but that he had dared to do it at all. This was the first time young Bruce had acted for himself in matters of the Kingdom and it would not, Thweng knew, be the last.

‘I am off to Berwick from here,’ Thweng said and looked sideways up at Bruce. ‘Edward is no fool. He in no wise believes Percy’s assurances that the north is safe, but has held it up to the others so he can get the army off to Flanders to fight the French. However, he has kicked the Earl of Surrey off his estates to come up with another army to finish this Wallace off. I daresay the Scots are unimpressed by an old man who complains of the cold in his bones when he comes north – but come he now must and Treasurer Cressingham waits impatiently in Roxburgh. Ormsby is in Berwick, telling all who will listen about how he fought like a lion to escape the clutches of the infamous Wallace at Scone.’

‘A tale of marvels, for sure,’ Kirkpatrick offered wryly, and Sir Marmaduke smiled.

‘I hear he ran out of a window,’ he said and had it confirmed by a nod. Thweng laughed, shaking his long head.

‘The wolves gather, then,’ Bruce said moodily. None more ravening than Edward himself, the Faerie mist of him drifting steadily, mercilessly northward like a pall. Longshanks, Bruce thought, will not be pleased at having this Scots boil erupt on his kingdom’s neck and still remain unlanced. His interests are in France – further still, if truth be told, in the Holy Land.

Yet he was old and such temper was not good for an old man …

‘How is the English Justinian these days? Choleric as ever?’

Sir Marmaduke smiled at the new name given to King Edward, only half in scathing jest, as he rampaged through the laws of the land creating and remaking them to suit himself as he went. It was not, Thweng was sure, anything approaching the legendary codifying of the Roman emperor.

‘Liverish,’ he replied diplomatically. ‘The wool business has caused him problems as you might imagine, while he will not debase the sterling coinage against all the crockards and pollards from abroad. That decision, at least, is a good one.’

Bruce stroked his beard – in need of trim, Thweng noted – and pouted, thinking. The wool business – seizing the entire country’s output on the promise to pay for it later -had caused most of the dissent in Scotland, mainly because it was Cressingham as Treasurer who had ordered the Scots to conform to it and no-one believed his promises of future payment, never mind Edward’s. The profit from it had been eaten by armies for all the wars King Edward seemed to embroil England in and his own barons were growing tired of it. Wishart’s timing had not been out by much, Bruce realised.

‘The Jew money will have run out,’ he mused and Thweng nodded. The Jews of England had been summarily thrown out of the country not long since and all their assets taken for the Crown – again, eaten by armies.

‘At least you are returned to the loving grace of the English Justinian,’ Thweng declared, ‘so proving that you are not so reckless as the youth I traded lances with at Lille.’

‘Just so,’ Bruce replied and Kirkpatrick saw his eyes narrow a little, for he could sense a chill wind blowing from Sir Marmaduke. When it came, it was pure frost.

‘I also came bringing a visitor,’ Thweng went on, savouring the wine. ‘One who asked for you particularly. Before I deliver your guest, let me once again congratulate you on maturing into a man and leaving the furious, reckless boy behind.’

Now the hairs on Kirkpatrick’s arms were bristled and you could stand a cup on the thrust of Bruce’s bottom lip.

‘You will do right by this guest,’ Thweng declared, leaning forward and lowering his voice. ‘The sensible course. You will know what it is.’

He rose, idly tossed the empty cup to a frantically scrabbling squire, then stuck his head out of the tent flap. When he drew back, Isabel entered.

Bruce saw her, the hood of her cloak drawn back to reveal the copper tangle of her hair, the damp twisting it tighter still, the eyes bright and round, blue as sky and feverish – he thought – with longing.

He was, as ever, wrong. The wet had soaked her to the bone and the long ride on Balius had made her weary to the marrow, yet none of that had dented the hope she felt, the hope that blazed from her eyes.

His face shattered it.

She saw him blink and, in the instant before he spread a great, welcoming smile on it, saw the flickers of annoyance and irritation chase each other like hawk and heron across it. It had been forlorn hope, of course and she had known it in the core of her. Love was not anything deep between them but she had hoped for a better affection than what she saw. He would not take her into the safety of his arms, his castle and away from Buchan, and the weight of that descended on her.

She had taken her chance on the road back to Buchan, knowing that her refuge at Balmullo was probably gone from her, that she would be cloistered in some lonely Keep until such time as arrangement were made to cloister her somewhere more holy and uncomfortable. The aching memory of the bruises and angry lust Buchan had inflicted added urgency to her escape; getting away from the oiled skin-crawl of Malise only sauced the affair.

Yet it was all for nothing – Bruce would not help. Even as it crushed her, she cursed herself for having given in to the foolishness of it. There had been similar in her life – an older knight and, after him, the ostler boy, neither of whose names she could remember. All she recalled was the delicious anguish, the laborious subterfuge to be in that part of the world at the same time as they were. The smile to be treasured, the fingertip touch that thrilled, the sticky paste in a pot that was valued simply because his fingers had touched it.

She had, she remembered, thought such tender secrets were her own, hugged them to herself because of that fact alone – with a murdered father and all her other kin seemingly uncaring, it was a slim path picked through thorns to the vague promise of a distant garden.

Only her old nurse had noted it all and the truth of it came out later – too late, when Trottie lay, dying slowly and gasping out her last secrets. Then there was shared laughter over the wonder and worry of a nurse confused by her charge’s seemingly bad fetlocks that needed such a pot of evil-smelling ointment.

The self-inflicted pain of it, married to the pleasure, had been a game. You need suffer only as much as you need and the promise of something real a finger-length away was an awareness that grew less innocent the closer you approached to it. When it came to losing that innocence, she knew what to do with it and put away, she thought, the foolishness of love.

Until Bruce. Until she dared hope for the distant promise of that garden.

Even as she stepped into the sun of that smile, she felt the hope shred away, like a mist before a cold wind, and it made her sag against the length of him so that, for him, it felt like a flirting.

Over her head, Bruce looked at Thweng’s long mourn of a face and knew now what the knight had meant – Isabel had to be returned, quietly and without fuss, to her husband.

There had been a time when she helped salve the loss of his wife, Marjorie’s mother, and the thrill of bedding her and cuckolding his enemy had been heady. Now the first was palling and the second was, as Thweng had hinted, too much of a risk in awkward times.

He nodded and Thweng returned it. Isabel felt his chin move on the top of her head and almost wept.

‘It was her right enow, eh?’ Sim growled, hunched up with a corner of cloak over his head and the drips sliding along it like bright pearls. Beside him, the exhausted Bartholomew Bisset snored and they could do nothing with him until he woke, that was clear.

Hal and Sim now knew who he was, for he had managed to get that out, voice slurred with fatigue – Ormsby’s scrivener and notary, the one Wallace had sworn to find and the signature on the documents pertaining to the mason’s death.

Hal had almost forgotten about the entire affair and the arrival of Bisset was an amazement in more than one way – he been sent on his way under a writ from Wallace that promised, in return for his life, that he put his tale at the disposal of Sir Henry Sientcler of Herdmanston. When the said Sir Henry was satisfied and quit him of his obligation, Notary Bisset was free to go.

‘I am told to speak to you and no-one else, not even The Bruce,’ the fat little man had said, swaying with weariness and drenched to the bone. ‘I beg you – let me sleep before you put me to the question.’

Sim had been astounded, but Hal had more than a touch of admiration, both for Wallace’s unshakeable trust in certain folk and the fact that the little scrivener, who could simply have run off, seemed to have more chivalric honour in his butter-barrel body than any of the nobles who had spent weeks here haggling like horse-copers.

‘It was her, for sure,’ Sim repeated, dragging Hal away from studying the sleeping Bisset.

Hal said nothing. It had been her. Run away yet again and come straight to The Bruce. He felt a sharpness in him at that thought and quelled it viciously. Stupid, he thought, to go rutting after an earl’s leman. It was only what old Barnabus, the local priest, had said would happen – time had healed over the scars of his wife and woken his loins.

Any lass with her clothes inside out, as the law demanded of whores, would do, he thought viciously, while the nag of Isabel, Countess of Buchan, fern-tendrilled hair dripping like wet autumn bracken, blue eyes weary, her smile still warm on his face, all made the dreich of this place even harder to bear.

That and Bisset, who snored softly, each one a tearing nag at Hal’s heart, for he sounded like wee John when he slept. Well, his son slept now and made no sound at all. Slept forever …

Christ, Hal thought savagely, can matters get worse?

‘Sir Hal. Sir Hal.’

The voice brought their heads round and they stared in wonder at the pair, lurching out of the dark, propelled by the stiff, haughty Sir Gervaise.

‘More little barking dogs,’ the knight said and pulled the head of his mount round and away. Hal stared at Tod’s Wattie, the Dog Boy a shadowed skelf close behind, hugging himself against the rain.

‘Christ’s Bones,’ Tod’s Wattie bellowed, ‘am ah glad to see ye. Ye will nivver ken whit has happened.’