The Lion Rampant
Robert Low
The third book in Robert Low’s stunning new trilogy about the making of Scotland.It is 1314. Robert the Bruce has reigned for eight hard years, driving out his English enemies with fire and sword. Lives have been shredded by war – wives, daughters and lovers slain or imprisoned. His men have lost almost everything.But three great fortresses in the Kingdom remain under English rule: Roxburgh, Stirling and Edinburgh. Bruce must capture each stronghold after another to come face-to-face with Edward II, the English King humiliated by defeat and determined to put down his Scottish enemy once and for all. And the last great battle for the Scottish throne will be decided on a bloody field called Bannockburn.
The Lion Rampant
ROBERT LOW
To all Scots, everywhere
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u6266ab9d-2953-566f-b802-33380f730e1b)
Dedication (#uf5dcda92-8f67-55a2-ba7f-0750b032fdfa)
Map (#ua3ed4221-4d8c-538c-adbc-e43518f61ae6)
Being a chronicle of the Kingdom … (#ud465b430-01f6-5c89-9cf7-31b6aead4f58)
Chapter One (#u7131e26f-e0f5-57a7-8bb8-dfaef3cbf476)
Chapter Two (#ua3ad870f-04db-5d23-b922-8881ba0b9eef)
Chapter Three (#u451c62e7-e147-5460-a51e-5cce4d8b00e8)
Chapter Four (#ubb9b3475-2790-59b6-8ea9-3099b6b3a43f)
Chapter Five (#u25ac632a-9433-513e-b681-44f1742aeb6d)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Characters (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Robert Low (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Being a chronicle of the Kingdom in the Years of Trouble, written at Greyfriars Priory on the octave of Septuagesima, in the year of Our Lord one thousand three hundred and twenty-nine, 23rd year of the reign of King Robert I, God save and keep him.
In the year of Our Lord one thousand three hundred and fourteen, the King had reigned for eight hard years, driving his enemies with fire and sword so that the Balliol and Comyn were crushed out of the realm and those still alive fled to the south. The aged Earl of Buchan, wasted by the harrying of his people and lands, died there, pleading with the English King Edward for help while ensuring that his former wife, Isabel, languished in a cage on the walls of Berwick for daring to support the Bruce cause. Buchan’s henchman, the cruel Malise Bellejambe, was left as her keeper, a task he pursued assiduously.
But this second King Edward was not his father. He had abandoned all attempts to exert his power in Scotland, preferring to squabble with his own barons, who sought to remove his favourite, Piers Gaveston, and impose restrictions – Ordinances – on his rule.
Thusly, with a free hand, good King Robert chased the occupying English and their Scots allies from the realm. At the start of this year of Our Lord, in all the Kingdom there remained but three great fortresses of major note still held by the English: Roxburgh, Stirling and Edinburgh.
It was now that our king chose to bring the Kingdom to freedom and determined to remove these last bastions from the enemy, so he came and closed off all of these great castles all around. But, without proper weapons of sieging war, it did not look as if the Scots would prevail and the English took heart from this.
Then Sir James Douglas came to Roxburgh …
ISABEL
Heaven is dark and God is ugly. Yet may He do ye hurt. Liar. Fornicator. Torturer. Murderer. May He send ye toads beneath your serk, ants in your beard and up your nethers and flies into your eyes, auld wickedness. Please God in Your mercy let me become the wildfire abune the marsh and let me lead him into the sucking pit. Praise God for ever and ever, let me be the white hart that leads huntsmen to the wolves of the forest that I may lure him to their fangs. Blessings of Heaven, make me the wasp that might fly about his head and never give him peace. God in Your Mercy let me bury him so deep he will never find his way up to Judgement Day, so deep even worms cannot find him. Or give me leave to die, Lord, rather than suffer longer in this Berwick cage from the vile of Malise Bellejambe.
CHAPTER ONE
Roxburgh,
Shrove Tuesday, 1314
Frixco de Fiennes scurried across the cobbles into the shelter of the gatehouse in a drizzling dusk as miserable as wet ash. It matched his mood, especially when he saw the dark shape lurking under the cullis, bouncing slightly and swaying left to right: Aggie, nursing her bairn.
He sighed and went to them, peeling off his hat and beating the drops from it.
‘Aggie,’ he said wearily. ‘You should not have met me here.’
‘None can hear. The guards are in their wee cubbyhole,’ she retorted tartly. ‘Asleep.’
Frixco cursed silently and made a note to rout them out when this business was done; somewhere behind him came a burst of laughter from the main hall, where they were already deep into celebrating the Shrove feast, stuffing their faces on the eve of Lent.
‘Aye, you need not worry,’ Aggie added bitterly. ‘You will not be long with me – the same time it took to make this wee mite.’
Frixco managed a weak smile and wished the woman a hundred miles away and the child with her.
‘I can spare a few silvers only,’ he wheedled and saw that she knew it for the lie it was. Desperation made her lips a thin line and she merely nodded, holding out one free hand for the bag of coin.
Even this was passed over reluctantly and, not for the first time, Frixco cursed the castle cook’s daughter even as he prayed she would keep her mouth closed on who the father of the child was. The image of Sander and his meat cleaver made him close his eyes briefly and then offer a last weak smile.
He had back scorn for it, started for the main hall, remembered the sleeping guards, turned and shuffled past her; Aggie heard him vent his wrath on the luckless pair as she drew up her shawl to cover herself and the babe before stepping out of the shelter of the gatehouse into the mirr.
She did not go back to her cookhouse bed, all the same, to the scowls and the demands her father made to name the man who had filled her belly with bastard. Even now she found it hard to believe that she had let Frixco have his way – but she knew the why of it, in the end. He was brother to the seneschal, with power of a sort, had coin when he could be parted from it and seemed, for one bright summer, her escape from Roxburgh.
Climbing up to the rain-smeared night of the gatehouse battlement she recalled the Prisoner, the one she had brought food to every day for as long as she could safely carry the bowl, spoon and cup without spilling any – seven years at least. He and I are the same, she thought, held in this stone gaol, stitched in on three sides by water. She was fifteen and her life was over.
She went up, above the gate and close to the brazier, sizzling coals spitting as the drizzle landed on them. The wind swept in, blowing the loop of wool off the baby and she covered him up quickly.
‘Away, lass,’ said a voice and she turned into the helmeted smile of Leckie. ‘Ye should tak’ the mite down to the warm and away from this wind. Ye’ll catch yer death of chill and so will the bairn.’
Aggie liked Leckie, if only because he never looked at her askance, or asked what everyone asked about her baby. He was kind, too, and frequently shared his bread and cheese when she came up here, to feel the wind and smell the promise in it, the taste of somewhere else.
Now she nodded and smiled and moved away, anxious now to be in warmth and shelter, pausing for one last look out beyond the raised bridge and the rutted track that led to it – and led away from it, to that fabled Somewhere Else.
‘Nae rebels on a night like this,’ Leckie declared firmly, thinking she was fretting about the dark beyond the fortress, and she smiled again. Rebels preoccupied everyone’s thoughts now. Roxburgh was one of the last big fortresses held against them in this realm; everywhere else had fallen to the usurper king, Robert Bruce, and now panic was rife.
But nothing moved in the deep pewter dim save for a grazing scatter of black cattle, shadows in the mirk. She moved off, crooning to the babe.
‘Hush ye, hush ye, the Black Douglas will no’ get ye the night.’
At the foot of the gatehouse rock, half a dozen black kine milled slowly, as if searching out the lusher grass that grew around the jakes fall. When one put an elbow in something wet and noxious, his curses were immediately hissed to silence by the others.
Sim Craw, fumbling furiously, threw off his black cloak in a fury of frustration and fought the coiled ladder off his back.
‘Aye,’ said James Douglas, merciless and bitter. ‘Ring a bell, Sim. Let them hear where we are.’
‘The hooks were stabbin’ me,’ Sim muttered back. ‘And I have crawled in shite besides.’
‘Whisht, the pair of you, or we are undone.’
The other two turned at the sight of the wet, scowling face thrust at them. A wee wet mirror of the Black Jamie Douglas, Sim noted. The only folk who have not noted that Jamie and Dog Boy are kin are the pair themselves. James the Black because he is lord of Douglas and will not admit that the Dog Boy, a mere cottar of no account, is a byblow of his father. Dog Boy because, even if he suspects it, will not want to shame his boyhood friend and now liege lord with it.
Sim, as ever, never voiced any of it, but simply scowled back at the pair of them.
‘I hope you have the spear, Dog Boy,’ he whispered harshly and had back an exasperated grunt.
‘I have, shoved through the grass as I crawled. And it is Aleysandir, not Dog Boy. I have said this afore.’
‘Aye, aye,’ muttered Sim, untangling the confection of rope and wood and iron. Dog Boy had never been the same after finding out that he had a real name. Sim recalled how and when that had been uncovered: from the houndsman rolls at Douglas Castle when Jamie and Dog Boy had raided it. Christ betimes, a fistful of years ago now.
That was when Sir James had found his own new name – the Black Douglas – for what he had done to the English garrison in his own dispossessed keep. He had taken it from the occupying English by as clever a ruse as the one they now planned, but knew he could never hold the place – so he had wrecked it.
He and his men had soiled everything spoilable, from fodder to well, stacked the cellar with loot, pissed on it, and then lopped the heads off the surrendered English – and their Scots lackeys – before roasting the lot in a fire. The Douglas Larder, they called it with grisly humour and the memory of it was as black as the stones they left. Blacker still was the scowl of Jamie, but only because he had had to do this to his boyhood home and his rightful inheritance.
There was no scowl on him now, all the same, only the mad gleeful grin that always made Sim’s flesh ruched as goose-skin.
‘Ah, you are a cunning man, Sim Craw,’ James Douglas enthused in a hissed whisper, clapping the man on his sodden shoulder. ‘This will take the shine off Randolph.’
Sim eyed the dark, wild-haired lord sourly. As if this is for the glory of Douglas over Randolph, the latter sitting at Edinburgh and wondering how to take its castle, us sitting at Roxburgh and pondering the same. Now the lord of Douglas is out to scoop Roxburgh in a single blow and it is mainly to put Randolph’s nose askew … not for the first time, Sim marvelled at how the diffident, lisping lord of Douglas could turn, in an eyeblink, into a red-handed killer with a heart the same shade as the Earl of Hell’s own cloak.
Using my cunning to further himself, he added moodily to himself as the ladder finally unveiled its grapple-hooked top, with the slot for a spearshaft. Twenty feet of it was coiled up, the rope steps bolstered with wool-padded wood to keep them just far enough from the wall for a foot to fit – his da and other well-diggers had taken the idea from the miners at Leadhouse and Sim had recalled it from his boyhood, and then adapted it for this one purpose.
Now he moved to the crag of rock on which the blocky gatehouse was built and looked up, shaking mirr from his eyelashes. He nodded to Dog Boy, who put his back to the rock and cupped his hands, while Sim took the long pike-spear and shafted it into the slot on the ladder, handing it to James Douglas.
Then he stepped into Dog Boy’s hands, heard him grunt and curse.
‘You are getting fat, Sim.’
Fat and auld, Sim agreed, stepping on to the Dog Boy’s shoulders, then up to a toehold on the rock, then higher still on the treacherous wet until he could climb no more. He reached out one hand and felt the slap of the spearshaft in it, and raised it, waving it as high as he could, balanced precariously with the sibilant mirr making tears on his face. Teetering, he lifted it higher still with two hands, straining until he felt the ladder on top of it slide over the crenellation; he heard the grate of it catching.
He tugged the cord and the ladder unravelled with a soft pattering, as if a cat ran down the stones. Sim felt a touch on his boot, looked down and saw the Black himself staring anxiously up.
‘Are you certes you want to be first?’
Sim did not answer. He knew the reason for the Black’s concern: too old for this sort of work. But it is my ladder, Sim thought to himself. Mine. So he said nothing at all, tugged hard to make sure it had settled, and then started to climb.
Frixco, mollified by shouting at the gate guards, hurried back through the wet to the main hall, aware of the glares at his back – more so than ever before, he knew. It was the way of things, as arranged by custom and so by God, that those he had power over would resent it and scowl when they were sure they would not be seen.
But Frixco, for all the time he had been here – Christ’s Bones, eighteen years at least – had always been seen by the English as a Gascon and by the Scots as an interloper, no matter his stripe. Gascons had been preferred under the old Edward and under the new – especially under the new, for Gaveston, the King’s favourite, had been a Gascon.
But Gaveston was dead and the lords who had murdered him circled and scowled and barked at the King and his loyal barons, two dog packs with bristling hackles. Now every Gascon serving King Edward was under suspicion from all those not of the King’s mind: a warden had been appointed to Roxburgh town, forced on the King by his Ordinancer barons to ensure the loyalty of the castle’s Gascon garrison commander, Sir William de Fiennes, Frixco’s brother.
Inside the hall, the blast of heat and noise drowned Frixco in delight for a moment, so that he took his time shaking out his wet cloak and chaffering with those feasters nearest him, but he had one task left before he could join in and hurried after it, out of the hall and up the steps to the private chapel.
The Prisoner knelt, a humble supplicant, before the carved wooden panels brought out specially for this day: the fourteen Stations of the Cross. The Prisoner, permitted this worship for the Holy Day, knelt at the ninth, the third Falling of Christ, and Frixco hoped the man was not about to argue for lengthy prayers at all fourteen; he had come to return him to his prison and then get to the food and the drink.
‘It is time,’ he said and had no response, so he repeated it, more loudly.
Hal did not hear him, lost in the carving, which was very beautifully rendered, every agony transcribed lovingly. Christ prone, held up by one hand, the other gripping the crushing weight of his Cross. He remembered all the other times he had attended Confession at the wee stone chapel in Herdmanston, waiting in the queue, Lord Hal or no, while others shuffled in. There had hardly been time to babble out a sin because there was only Father Thomas issuing pardons.
Father, I have stolen. Father, I have sworn. I ate meat at Lent. I beat my wife. I drink. Most folk knew already what others would murmur in supposed secret and those who took longer went on the end of knowing nudges and looks from those waiting impatiently. Must have done red murder, or robbed a bishop at least, they would offer with irritated scowls.
Were any prayers ever answered? Were God and His saints asleep? Was the Lord still a refuge? Non accedet ad te malum – there shall no evil befall thee.
Seven years. For her, too … He wondered if Isabel’s prayers had been answered and hoped, at least, that she was no longer in a cage. Yet he thought that unlikely. The treacherous Isabel MacDuff had been hung on the walls of Berwick by old King Edward, with the tacit agreement of her husband, the Earl of Buchan. Longshanks had done it because she had dared to place the crown on the head of Robert Bruce and Buchan had agreed to it as a warning to cuckolding wives everywhere. He would have killed the cuckolder, Hal, if he had been able.
Hal’s attempt at seeking her out in a dashing rescue had ended with his own capture and, for a time, it looked as if Buchan would have his final triumph – but then the old King Edward had died. A miracle, Hal thought, which left him held at the new king’s pleasure, inviolate until he was remembered and dealt with.
The new Edward had had more to occupy his mind and now Hal had been here in Roxburgh, forgotten, for seven years. The stumbled Christ looked back at him with blank wooden eyes and Hal admitted that the Lord might well still be a refuge – for certes, Hal no longer feared anything, though he was relieved, every day, to discover that this was not because he no longer desired anything.
Freedom. Isabel. The words rang him like a bell and the carved Christ seemed to shift, though it was the light from wind-wafted candles. He remembered, as he did every day, the promise he and Isabel had made to each other never to be parted. You should be wary of swearing oaths to God, for the Devil is always listening.
Yet God was always watching, Hal thought, staring at the blank wooden eyes of Christ. You Yourself refused to be carried by the angels and wounded Your feet on the stones of the way. For this You came into the world in a stable on a winter’s night. You love my lost Isabel, too, and I hope You keep her safer than I did …
The blow on the back of his head blasted him back to the moment and he half fell, recovered and turned into the scowl of Frixco, who had cuffed him.
‘Hear me now?’ the man demanded and Hal nodded dumbly.
‘Time to go,’ Frixco growled, weary of it all. Seven years they had tended this one, waiting for some word from someone – anyone – as to his fate. None had come and even Frixco had almost forgotten what the lord of Herdmanston – wherever that was – had done.
Murder, Frixco recalled vaguely. And a Scots rebel. He would hang one day or the next and it could not come soon enough for Frixco de Fiennes, set the task of caring for him. Down below he heard shouts and bellows and scowled even more deeply – he was missing the best of the night’s feast.
Leckie heard the peculiar pink-pink sound, could not place it, cocked his head and strained. Silly wee sound, he thought. Like a wee moose dancin’ in clackety shoes. Or a faerie redcap, whetting his steel claws. He crept, following the noise past the brazier, away to the dark corner of the gatehouse battlements, where he caught the gleam of metal where none should be.
His heart skipped and he moved to it, saw the hooks and blinked, stunned, barely comprehending. A wee powrie’s steel-clawed fingers, right enough, he thought, hanging off my wall. He looked at the far side, to where Aggie crooned to her bairn, wanted to call out to her to get away, and then looked back at the steel talons, heard the pink-pink as they grated, shifting slightly from side to side.
Because something – someone – was climbing up the ladder they were attached to. The realization was a dash of ice down Leckie’s back. He should have made for the alarm iron. He should have bawled his lungs raw. Instead, he went forward and peered over the edge – and came face to face with a grey-haired man with an ugly grin.
‘Boo,’ said Sim, shot out a hand, grabbed Leckie by the front of his tunic and hauled him over and away before as much as a squeak had passed the man’s lips.
A little way below and climbing steadily, Jamie and the Dog Boy saw the blurring rush, heard the dull crunch. There was a muffled curse as the men waiting to climb dealt with the shock of a man cracking his brains and bones at their feet.
‘Christ betimes,’ Jamie hissed. ‘What was that?’
‘Sim at work,’ Dog Boy answered grimly and they climbed on.
Up on the battlements, Aggie had had enough of crooning and hoping. She turned to go, paused to wave farewell to Leckie, but saw only the vague shape in the far shadows, so she shrugged and turned away heading for the stairhead; the babe wailed a little as the rain hit his wee face.
‘Hush you, hush you,’ she sang, folding him into the safe warmth of a cloak corner. ‘The Black Douglas will no’ get ye the night, wee lamb.’
‘In truth, wee lamb,’ said a voice in her ear, even as a horned, calloused hand closed off her screams, ‘your ma is almost completely mistook in that regard.’
Frixco, following Hal to the top of the wind of stair that led to the hall, paused uncertainly. Screams had never been part of a Shrove feast before. Nor the clash of steel and shouts – perhaps a fight had broken out? Frixco was anxious not to miss it and turned to scowl and urge Hal on, saw the Prisoner’s face and whirled to look behind him.
Horror shrieked up the steps at him, one eye dangling from a bloody cord, his face a mass of gore and his mouth wide, every tooth outlined in red.
‘Back,’ his brother screamed. ‘Back. Up the stairs and bar the door. The Black is here …’
Frixco, stunned as a slaughter-ox, stood open-mouthed at the bloodied vision of his brother and the men spilling after him, turning fearfully to guard his back with drawn knives. William de Fiennes, his face a raw agony, half-blind and wholly afraid, slapped his brother’s gawp from him in a fury of panic.
Behind him, Hal saw Jamie Douglas, a flash as if scrawled against the dark by a bolt of lightning and as sure to him as if seven years had not passed at all: wild black hair flying, a sword in one hand, a dirk in the other. And at his back, as strange as a two-headed calf, was another Jamie Douglas, standing fierce guard on a shivering girl with a swaddled wean in her arms.
It was only after, shoved and kicked into the chapel, with men piling up what little furniture there was against the door – all fourteen carved Stations included – that Hal realized that it had been Dog Boy he had seen.
Sim saw the men on the stairs, falling back with shields up to protect their lord; he was hurt bad was Sir William de Fiennes, for Sim had done it with a backlashed blow from a dirk and panted that out to Jamie Douglas as they crashed into the hall.
‘Poked oot his eye,’ he declared and Jamie nodded thoughtfully; both men agreed that such a wound might colour a man’s decision to resist.
They did not debate it long, for a sudden rush of new foes spilled on them and Sim crashed through a scatter of benches towards them, his breath harsh in his ears. There were men running away from him, to the back of the hall where there was no way out. On the table to his left, Red Rowan kicked through a slurry of sauce and meat and gruel, kicking trenchers like a boy jumping in puddles; he turned to grin at Sim and then seemed to be hauled backwards, though Sim knew fine well it was the force of the quarrel hitting him with a deep shunk of sound.
Sim leaped towards the man with the latchbow, who gave up feverishly attempting to span it, tried to swing it like a club, shrieking out his fear and anger. Sim’s sword blurred in the hazed candle-reek and cut into the man’s neck, so that his shouting was choked off in a gurgle; Sim kicked the body away with his boot, scooping up half a round of cheese on the way, so that it flew into the air.
‘Aaahh!’
Sim spun, blocking the snake-like blow with a frantic movement, though the stun of it almost lifted the sword out of his hand. The man who had rushed at him, yelling, was elderly, with a white beard and rheumy eyes; he jumped back and waved his weapon threateningly.
A fire iron, Sim saw. He is attacking me with a fire iron. A retired soldier, said the thought flickering through his mind as he chopped hard at the man’s knee. The man dodged; Sim felt his foot skid on a soggy trencher and then was on his arse, legs and arms flailing.
The old man screamed, wet-mouthed, and raised the fire iron high – but the point of a sword erupted out and upwards from his chest so hard and fierce that it went on into the underside of his jaw. He wailed, high and thin, falling away to reveal the grinning face of Jamie Douglas, staggering as the man’s weight dragged the sword down; he struggled to work his blade free.
‘Christ betimes, that was almost too good to waste: a brace of auld yins at it like Rolands. You will have little better entertainment at this feast.’
Sim’s mask of disgust was ignored and, grinning broadly, Jamie hauled him to his feet, put his boot against the old man’s dead neck, using the leverage to drag his sword free; the blood crept sluggishly out in a viscous tarn, lapping at the apples and plums, the buttered capons, the Shrove griddle cakes and bread spilled from the tables.
Another bloody larder for the Black, Sim thought bitterly as he heard more shouting and turned to it, aware of his weariness. He saw Dog Boy and raised his bloody blade in salute.
Dog Boy had been charged with the woman and her bairn, though he did not know why the Black set such store by it. For all that, he kept her close and grinned as friendly as he could every time he caught her eye; it did not seem to help the tremble in her.
He lost the grin in the hall, with everyone running and shouting and clashing steel. He saw a party break away and head for the stairs and a measure of safety. He saw Sim and Jamie cut down a brace of fighters and thought it was all over until a last knot of men ran at him, wailing desperately. They were led by a big man with a bald head like a flesh fencepost, so that the knob of his original chin alone showed where there had once been a neck. He had a meat cleaver and a deal of trapped-rat courage.
Dog Boy thrust the woman behind him and leaped at this fat giant, hacking overhand with his sword to make the man block with his cleaver, the dirk curving round in his other hand and sinking into the fat man’s belly. He thought he heard a scream from behind him and fought the urge to look and see if the woman and her bairn were under attack.
The fat man reeled away, clutching his belly and looking alternately at Dog Boy and the blood on his palm, a bemused disbelief in his whipped-dog eyes. Another man surged in, Dog Boy struck out and had the blow parried with a small shield – it was only later that Dog Boy saw it was a pot lid – the man grunting as it took the blow. Then he stabbed out with a vicious carving knife.
They are servants, Dog Boy realized suddenly, getting his sword in the way and managing to turn the blow. At his side, Patrick slapped down the knife, smashed his studded leather shoulder into the man’s pot-lid shield and sent him staggering back; a bench caught him just behind the knee and he went over with a despairing cry.
Patrick, snarling like a mad hound, lunged after him, his elbow flailing like a fiddler at a dance, the longsword rising and falling, spraying gleet and blood.
Dog Boy turned and saw the woman, clutching her wailing brat to her and staring, open-mouthed with horror. Aye weel, he thought, hearing the wet, ugly sounds of Patrick making sure his opponent was truly dead, such sights would give you pause.
‘Dinna fash,’ he panted, leaning on his sword, knowing the worst of the matter was done with. ‘The Black ordered you safe and safe you shall be.’
Patrick appeared, his bluff face speckled with blood, and offered her a grin of his own as he cleaned gore and bits of brain from his blade with the hat of the man he had killed.
‘Hot work,’ he offered, but the woman merely buried her face in her swaddled bairn and wept, so he shrugged.
‘Ach – weemin,’ he said. ‘Have you told the quine she is safe?’
‘I have,’ Dog Boy answered firmly, but frowned and added loudly: ‘So it is a puzzle why she is weepin’ so.’
The woman surfaced, tear-tracks streaking through the grime of her face and pointed a shaking hand at the quivering giant, who had dropped his meat cleaver, sunk like a stricken ox and bled to death through the fingers clutching desperately at the hole Dog Boy had put in his belly.
‘That was my da.’
Hal marvelled on that vision of the two Jamies all the rest of that night, strangely detached from the fetid sweat of fear in the chapel, where men crouched like panting beasts listening to the thud and crash on their battened door.
Sir William roared curses back at them and wheedled courage into his own before he collapsed, breathing like a mating bull; one of his men-at-arms mercifully severed the last shreds of his eyestalk and then tried to hand it to Frixco, who shied away in horror.
By morning, it was clear to everyone that Sir William was dying and that Frixco was no leader, so Hal was unsurprised when a man – the same who had physicked the eye off Sir William’s cheek – came and knelt beside him in the stale dim, where the tallow candles gasped. He announced himself as Tam Shaws, a good Scot, and said as much with an air of challenge. Hal said nothing, though he had his own ideas on what made a good Scot.
‘Is he set on red murder, or will the Black spare us?’ Shaws demanded, which was flat-out as a sword on a bench.
Hal shrugged. Truth was, he did not know. He had heard, as had everyone, of Jamie Douglas and his savagery and could only vaguely equate it with the youth he had known. But Dog Boy was with him and, for the life of him, Hal could not see Dog Boy indulging in such tales as were told, with wide-eyed, breathless horror, under every roof in the Kingdom. He said as much and saw the man-at-arm’s eyebrow lift laconically.
‘It is not your life,’ he answered dryly, which was only the truth. Hal rose up, stiff after sitting so long.
‘Is it your wish to surrender provided no harm comes?’ he asked and, after a pause and some exchanged glances – one of them with the whimpering Frixco – Shaws nodded.
‘Unbar the door,’ Hal ordered.
It came as a shock to Jamie Douglas when the clatter of moving furniture heralded something imminent, for he had not thought the defenders had that much courage in them. Still, he thought savagely, better this way – I need this place taken and swiftly.
‘Ready, lads,’ he called out, and the black-cloaked men on the stair behind and trailing into the bloody ruin of the hall, still picking wolfishly at the wreck of the feast, flexed chapped knuckles on their weapons.
Dog Boy, standing guard over the crouched woman – Christ betimes, hardly more than a girl in the pewter dawn light of the hall – saw her tremble and touched her shoulder reassuringly; she had wept most of the night and hugged her bairn to her, so that the episode of killing her da had fretted Dog Boy more than a little and he felt she should know other folk cared yet for her.
‘The Black has placed you under his cloak, yourself and bairn both,’ he reminded her and saw the wan smile.
The door above creaked open and everyone tensed, waiting for the last mad leap of the desperate. Instead, a man stepped through, nondescript in hodden, with a matted tangle of iron hair and beard. Folk squinted, not knowing who he was.
‘Young Jamie,’ the man said quietly. ‘They will surrender if you spare them. It would be sensible to consider it.’
Only Sim knew, as soon as he heard the voice, and looked up.
‘Sir Hal,’ he yelled and Jamie Douglas jerked like a stung beast. Recovering, he grinned and shook his head in awe at this, a hero sprung like a tooth sown by Cadmus – a man, he was forced to admit, whose presence in Roxburgh he had shamefully overlooked.
‘Sir Hal of Herdmanston. Here you were, a prisoner we came to free,’ he called out for the others to hear, for it did no harm to stamp your mark on the moment, ‘and here you are, having taken this wee fortalice of your ain accord.’
ISABEL
The nuns are here, the one called Sister Constance and the other, Alise. What kind of name is Alise for a nun? One for a nun who thinks herself boldinit and more mighty than the Almighty, that’s what kind. Wee Constance is kind enough in her way, though she believes what she is told, of this hoor of Babylon kept in a cage on the walls of Berwick until Hell calls her for a seat at her personal bad fire. The convent they come from is the same one where I was held for ransom by Malenfaunt long years since, but all his charges have been scourged from it – I wonder what became of the little oblate, Clothilde? She and all the rest have been replaced, Constance told me primly, by decent, Christian women. Well – all but Alise, who is a goad in the hands of one of Satan’s lesser imps. From woman sprang original sin, she tells me often, and all evil and all suffering and all impurity – with a sly little smile that tells me she does not include herself as any kin of Eve in it. Who is without sin? Even an Order Knight would need to live in a desert to obey God’s Law in this kingdom. I said as much to her at first and saw the little cat’s-arse purse she made of her lips at having been so spoken to, though she could do nothing then. Afterwards, the number of folk allowed into the bailey to gawp seemed to increase for a time, and had been encouraged to jeer until they were stopped by, of all folk, Malise, who does not like his authority over me challenged, never mind by a mere nun. Sister Alise hates being one of those given the task of sleeping across my door each night on a straw pallet, to make sure nothing ungodly happens and no visitor takes advantage. Not unless it is Malise Bellejambe, of course. What does she know of me, this Alise? What do any of them know, slobbering and laughing below me like I am some babery beast? I am Isabel MacDuff and I am loved. My Hal lives yet – I would know if he did not – and he will come. Miserere nostri. Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla. Pity us. Dreaded day when the universe will be reduced to ashes.
Amen.
CHAPTER TWO
Edinburgh Castle,
Feast of St Fergna of Iona, March 1314
They came up to the glowering rock and the black fortress on it through a haar-haze hung thick as linen, with Hal sore and tired from unaccustomed riding. They passed a huge cart tipped back and weighted so that the trace pole could support the carcass of a hog; the gory butchers paused to look and wave and call out good-natured greetings to Jamie as he passed.
‘The Good Sir James,’ Sim said, nudging his mount easily alongside Hal so that he could speak soft. ‘Darling of the host, is the Black Lord of Douglas. A derfly, ramstampit man o’ main.’
Hal met Sim’s eye, saw the mock in it and managed a smile. He saw, too, the white of Sim Craw – he had got used to it now, though it had come as a shock, all that snow on his lintel. It had come to him, when the Dog Boy suggested he brighten himself for the arrival of the Earl of Carrick, that he himself was old – each pewter curl that fell from his clipped head, courtesy of the spared girl, Aggie, told of that. And Sim was older by only a handful and a half of years.
Since no one had had much care for the style of a prisoner, wee poor noble or not, Hal had not realized how he’d looked until sat in front of the water-waver of a bad mirror and witnessed this apparition with a greasy tangle of grey hair matting its way into a madness of bushed beard.
Only the eyes, grey-blue and blank, could be seen and when Hal looked in them he was dizzied, for it felt as if there was someone else looking back at him, as if his body had been rented like an abandoned house. When his beard vanished, the gaunt lantern-jawed man who appeared was no more familiar.
Aggie, rocking her bairn in a shawl looped across her back while she clipped, tongue between her teeth, eventually announced that she could do no more. The result, Dog Boy announced critically, was suitable and Hal, seven years removed from the gawky youth who had cared only for dogs, was astonished by this new Dog Boy, a muscled, skilled warrior and the shadow of the Black himself. He was even called Aleysandir now, a fine set-up man with a name and the style and wit to know how a wee lord from Lothian should be seen by an earl. Yet he was still Dog Boy to those who knew him well.
Hal had heard some matters of the outside world in his prison, enough to know that he had missed even more, but the arrival of the Earl of Carrick had confused him. He had been expecting the Bruce, but it was the brother who came and Hal cursed himself for a fool.
Had he not been there when the Earl of Carrick became king? Now brother Edward was Earl of Carrick – and the last of the brothers, too. The memory of the others, dead and gone in the furtherance of Robert Bruce to the throne, had soured the fête of Edward Bruce’s arrival at Roxburgh, a day after Hal’s release.
He and Hal had met once the mummery had been done with: the greetings and fine speeches, the official surrender and promises made. Sir William Fiennes, barely clinging to life, left in a litter with Frixco, uncaring little bachle, trailing after and hugging close to the bier as if the dying brother was a sealed surety for his own safety. Dog Boy saw Aggie hawk and spit pointedly and scornfully as he went; she was clearly bright with the wonderful possibility of being allowed to go where she would and with a sum of money to keep her and the bairn for a time.
Edward had been all delight and grins, his face flushed, fleshy and even broader than it had been, though there were harsh lines at the corner of eye and mouth which spoke of the hardships of the seven years since Hal had last seen him.
‘Aye, times have changed and for the better,’ he had growled, handing the fresh-shorn Hal a horn cup of wine. ‘The King wants Edinburgh, Stirling and Roxburgh in his grip by summer. It is an ambitious swoop – but, by God, the Black has opened the account well.’
‘As well he chose this yin first,’ Hal had answered, ‘else I would be in prison still.’
‘Isn’t it, though?’
Edward had walked to the tent entrance and stood for a moment, shaking a sad head.
‘A pity,’ he had said in French. ‘It is a pretty place, Roxburgh, and shame on us for having to tear it down.’
Hal knew why: they could not garrison it sufficiently to keep the English out if they came back and Roxburgh, like Edinburgh and Stirling, was a bastion for the English in the Kingdom, a fount of supply and centre of domination. Still, there were others.
‘Even if they all fall, the English will still have Berwick and Bothwell,’ he’d said and Edward nodded.
‘Aye, and Dunbar, but none are as brawlie as the great fortalices of Stirling, Edinburgh and here. Besides, taking them throws most of the last garrisons of English out of the Kingdom and sends a sign to English Edward’s enemies that, once again, he is the weak son. Not a Longshanks, for all his length of leg.’
He’d paused, swilled wine in the goblet, frowning at it as if some clegg had flown in.
‘I know why you speak of Berwick,’ he’d said suddenly and Hal jerked with the gaff of his words. They stared at each other for a moment.
‘She is there still?’
The question hunched itself like a crookback beggar with a hand out and was not answered for a long time. Then, however, Edward had shifted slightly.
‘Isabel MacDuff is there still. In a cage hung from the inside wall. The King ordered us to try Berwick’s castle two years since. Got one of Sim of Leadhouse’s fancy ladders up and disturbed a dog on the same battlement. It set up a din of howling and barking, so that the guard came to kick its arse and found us.’
He’d stopped, shaking his head at the memory of the mad scrambling retreat.
‘You left her because of a wee dug,’ Hal had said and it was not a question; it had enough bleak censure in it for Edward’s eyes to blaze and his head to snap up.
‘My sister Mary was in a similar cage – Christ’s Bones, if ye had looked up at any time ye would have seen her hanging on Roxburgh’s battlements. My other sister Christina is held in a convent. My niece is held in yet another and the Queen’s whereabouts is not even known. D’ye think we do not care, Lord Henry?’
Hal saw he had gone too far and with no justice in it, so he’d nodded grudgingly.
‘For the first year they kept me close and mainly in the dark,’ he’d told Edward blankly, and for all the light his tone made of it his eyes were as smoked as the locked dim he’d had to endure for so long.
‘They hourly expected word from English Edward,’ Hal had gone on, hearing his voice as if it belonged to someone else, conscious of his pathetic attempt to be wry and matter-of-fact, ‘but he was busy dying, so it never came and the son became too busy with his catamite and his annoyed barons. In the end, they brought me out and treated me better – but Princess Mary was gone by that time.’
Mollified, Edward Bruce had subsided a little, finishing his wine and pouring more.
‘Aye. Beyond our reach – so you know the taking of Roxburgh was not on her account,’ he had growled.
Nor on mine, Hal had thought grimly to himself, for all Jamie Douglas gave out that it was. When he’d said it aloud, Edward had agreed with a curt nod.
‘So also with Berwick,’ Edward had added pointedly, ‘which will be taken in the end and the doing of it will be less about Isabel MacDuff and more to deny it to the English.’
He’d then thrown himself into a curule chair, draping one leg over the arm.
‘Yet we care about our womenfolk, Lord Hal. I would not be so free and easy with the King as regards these matters. He is not the man you knew, being fresh to the kingship then.’
He’d stared moodily, glassily, into the wine and had spoken almost to himself.
‘Now he is fixed on securing matters, on ensuring that everyone kens he is king. Nothing else matters but that and you step soft round him these days.’
‘I have read the Declaration of the Clergy,’ Hal had told him and had back a surprised look.
‘Have you indeed? They were solicitous of your welfare in the end, to fit you with a copy of that in your cell. Shame we had to poke out Sir William’s best eye, then, for it seems he did not deserve it – what did you think of that document?’
Hal remembered what that question had raised in him. Aggie, the girl who had served him meals, had brought it and she had plucked it from the kirk door, one of the many expensive and laboriously made copies nailed there. She had wanted to know what was in it but could not read, nor dared take it to anyone in Roxburgh who might.
What was in it? At first, the joyous honey of a candle, the first Hal had seen up close in an age and even the blur of tears it brought to his squinting eyes was a joy. The second was the smell: the musk of the parchment, the sharpness of the oak-gall ink – the breath of Outside. That, in the end, was worth more than the Declaration of the Clergy itself, a pompous piece of huff and puff to make Robert Bruce seem the very figure of a king and his sitting on the throne far removed from any hint of murderous usurping.
‘Smoke and shiny watter,’ Hal had told Edward eventually. ‘Bigod, though, they almost convinced me that the Bruce is descended from Aeneas o’ Troy himself. A Joshua and white as new milk on a lamb’s lip.’
Edward had laughed then, sharp and harsh, spilling wine on his knuckles and sucking it off. It came to Hal that the Earl of Carrick was mightily drunk and that it was no strange thing for him.
‘Ah, Christ’s Wounds, we have missed you, Lord Hal – but it is as well you were safe locked up, for plain speaking is not the mood of now, certes. I would not share your view of the bishops’ fine work with my brother. If you even get to see him.’
He’d paused moodily.
‘I mind you were close to him, mark you. You and Kirkpatrick. Like a brace of clever wee dugs working sheep for their master.’
There was old envy and bitterness there, which Hal had decided was best to ignore.
‘How is Kirkpatrick?’ he’d asked, suddenly ashamed that he had not thought of the man since he had been released.
‘Auld,’ Edward had replied shortly. ‘You may not see the King at all,’ he then said. ‘And if you do, it will not be a straight march in to where the Great Man sits, taking your ease in the next seat. Naw, naw. There are steps, neat as a jig: walk forward and stop. Kneel. Never look at him. Never speak to him unless invited.’
This kingdom is not large enough for the pair, Hal had thought, hearing the savage bile in his voice. Then Edward had recovered himself and smiled, drained the goblet and risen.
‘Well, good journey to you. I am away to kick the stones out of Roxburgh. Pity – it is a pretty place.’
Prettier than here, Hal thought now, looking up at the rotting-tooth rock of Edinburgh Castle, while they wound a way through the siege lines.
They passed tents, a black Benedictine who was crouched like a dog to hear confessions, a sway-hipped gaud of shrill, laughing women who stared brazen invites at the newly arrived heroes of Roxburgh. Somewhere behind them a pair coupled noisily while the camp dogs circled, looking to steal anything vaguely edible.
Hal felt the heat of forges, tasted the sweat and stale stink of a thousand unwashed, the savour of cook and smith fire as they picked their way through the tangle and snarl of a siege camp. He was fretted and ruffled by the place even as it seemed to him that he moved in a dream, too slowly and somehow detached from it all.
Too much, too quick after seven years of being a prison hermit, he thought, yet the sights and sounds flared his nostrils with old memories.
The world passed him like a tapestry in a long room: a ragged priest singing psalms; squires rolling a barrel of sand through the mud to flay the maille in it of rust; a hodden-clad haughty with his lord’s hawk on one wrist; two men, armoured head to toe but without barrel-helms, running light sticks at each other in practice tourney, pausing to raise greeting hands to Jamie. Only their eyes could be seen in the face-veiled coifs of maille.
Out beyond them, close under the great rock and walls, was a line of hurdles, pavise protection for the crossbows and archers. Beyond that, close under the looming hunch of Edinburgh’s rock, a cloak of murderous crows picked mournfully through the faint stench of rot and the festering corpses of men who were too far under the enemy bows to be recovered for decent burial.
Men moved in blocks, drilling under the bawls of vintenars; Hal saw that some had only long sticks, as if the spearheads had been removed from their shafts, and that too many were unarmoured, with not even as much as an iron hat.
‘Thrust – thrust. Push.’
The sweating men clustered in a block, hardly knowing right from left, half of them unable to speak the other half’s tongue and none of them having met before; they staggered and stumbled and cursed.
The ones who had done this before, the better-armed burghers and armoured nobiles of the realm, moved smoothly through the drills, but they did not laugh at the rabble; they would all depend on each other when push came to thrust.
Hal moved through this misty, half-remembered world of noise and stink and death, made more grotesque by the shattering bright of banners and tents and surcotes dotting it like blooms.
Brightest of all was the Earl of Moray’s flag, big as a bedsheet, fluttering in the dank breeze. It did not show the arms Hal remembered, but the old lessons dinned into him by his father surfaced like leaping salmon: or, three cushions within a double tressure flory counterflory gules. It was the arms of Randolph, right enough, but new-wrapped in the red and gold royal trappings of Scotland.
He saw Jamie Douglas jerk at his reins, black-browed, but then order his own banner dipped; Sim Craw, knee to knee with Hal, gave a quiet coughing bark of laughter and touched Hal’s arm as the entrance of the rich yellow panoply parted to reveal Randolph himself.
‘The paint is scarce dry on his new earl’s arms,’ Sim whispered hoarsely. ‘Jamie resents having to hand Randolph his due as Earl o’ Moray, him being a mere lord of Douglas. Resents, too, the royal mark in that shield that reminds folk Randolph claims the King’s kinship.’
‘Good Sir James,’ Randolph called in French, sweet as milk so that the grue in it was almost masked. ‘I hear you have triumphed at Roxburgh. Bigod, you are a byword for trickery, certes.’
Hal expected wildness and ranting, but Jamie lost his black brow almost at once and threw back his head; the mock of laughter he flung out was more stinging than any curse.
‘Bigod, Thomas, are you still sittin’ here?’ he lisped back. ‘Would you like some ideas on taking fortresses?’
Flushing, Randolph managed a twist of smile.
‘His Grace the King, of course, demands to see the Good Sir James – and the rescued Sir Henry of Herdmanston. Welcome, my lord. Seven years gone from us and now plucked forth like a plum from a pie.’
Hal, taken aback by the sudden focus on himself, managed only a weak nod, but Randolph had never been part of the circle round Bruce seven years ago, so neither man knew the other save by repute – and Hal’s had moss on it.
The moment was broken by a distant thud and all the heads swivelled and craned skywards.
‘There.’
Hal saw the shaped stone arc downwards, scurf up a huge wad of mud and bounce harmlessly almost to the foot of the hurdles; a protesting smoke of crows rose up off their old feasts.
‘They are trying lighter stones out of the fortress,’ Sim muttered. ‘You will note what is absent on our side of the siege.’
Engines. Not a trebuchet nor a mangonel – not so much as a springald. No towers or rams. Nothing.
Jamie Douglas inclined his head in a curt, mocking bow to Randolph.
‘You have sat here since last winter, my lord earl,’ he noted with mock sadness. ‘Shame there does not seem to be a balk of timber that can be laid one on the other, or any trickery to supplant it. Still, I have it that you will persevere, certes, though it is my fervent hope that your lordship manages it before a big stone rolls over your curly pow. It is no good look for an earl, that. God be praised, my lord.’
He went off, laughing and chattering either side to the adoring, trailing everyone after him and leaving the thundercloud of Randolph in his wake. They quit the dripping sour of the camp, cavalcading down from under the black rock along the sullen mile of cramped houses and wynds that led to the peace and dry of Holyrood Abbey, where the King demanded to see the darling captor of Roxburgh.
The way of matters, Sim explained on the way, is not as it was. Randolph and Douglas and the last brother, Edward Bruce, were mighty captains, seasoned in the wars with the Buchan and Comyn which had finally exterminated all Bruce’s enemies.
‘A sore slaughter that,’ Sim declared, grimed with the memory of it and shaking his head in sorrow. ‘The Comyn are harrowed and ploughed under; the Earl of Buchan himself fled south and turned his face to the wall years since, poor auld man that he was – killed of a broken heart, they say.’
He looked sideways at Hal, but saw only a blank stone stare back at him, though Hal had his own thoughts on the poor auld man who had died of a broken heart. If the Earl of Buchan ever had one, Hal wanted to say, you could not have smashed it with hammer and anvil – but he did not have to voice it and was aware that Sim was still able to read him even after seven years.
Buchan, Isabel’s husband and the nemesis of their loving for a decade and more, was gone like smoke. As if he had never been. Hal wondered if Isabel knew. It was as likely that someone would tell her for spite as they would keep her from the comfort of knowing, in marriage at least, she was free at last.
There was more, spilled out from Sim while Jamie Douglas climbed into his finery in order to come formally into the presence of the court. Hal, it seemed, had been forgotten already, though that suited him well enough, as did the corner of canvas and stick that Sim shared as part of the Douglas retinue. Sim, of course, was more outraged than Hal.
‘You are the lord o’ Herdmanston,’ he fumed. ‘Christ betimes, we rescued wee Jamie from the grip of the English when he was a snot-nose, carted him to safety and his da.’
‘Aye. You cuffed his ears if I remembrance it right,’ Hal said with a twist of grin. ‘Has he forgave you yet?’
Sim glowered.
‘He barely had fluff on his balls then, but I should cuff his lug again for this, which is no little insult to a lord of Sientclers. Ignored by the King ye served fine well and stuck in a corner of the Douglas panoply like lumber? It is not proper. And where is your kin of Roslin in this, eh?’
‘That was then, Sim Craw. This is now. Now I am lord of nothing at all, for Herdmanston is still a ruin, you tell me. Roslin’s Sientclers have done enough in keeping the wardship of the place alive at all. Besides, even a corner of this is better and lighter than the stone room I have lived in until recently.’
Sim had no answer to that. He sat with his head bowed, bleared by the memory of the last time he had seen Herdmanston, still black with the seven-year-old stain of fires, the floors fallen in and the weeds sprouting from the rotting-tooth of it. All the Herdmanston folk had gone to Sir Henry Sientcler of Roslin, yet their own field strips were at Herdmanston and too valuable to let lie, so some were back at the plough and the harvest, living in cruck houses under the ruins of the old tower.
‘It would not take much to return it,’ he added after telling Hal this, but then fell silent. None of the old riders remained, the ones who had once followed Hal, sure of that lord’s ability to pluck gold out of a cesspit; they had died at Stirling’s brig and Callendar’s woods and on every herschip since. Those who had survived had long since grown too old for the business after – Christ’s Wounds – fifteen years of fighting.
‘Nearer twenty,’ Hal corrected when Sim hoiked this up and Sim grew even more morosely silent at the truth of it. Out of all that time, Hal thought bleakly, Isabel and I have had no more than a year and a day in total together, tallied in months here, a week there.
Yet he would give as much for the same again.
‘The new lord of Badenoch keeps her fastened,’ Sim said suddenly, as if reading Hal’s mind. Hal looked up and saw the grim gimlet of Sim’s eyes, pouched and rheumy, but hard enough still.
The new lord, Hal thought, and almost laughed aloud. The youth Kirkpatrick had almost killed in Greyfriars, until Hal had prevented it, thinking enough blood had been spilled on a holy altar with the death of the father, the Red Comyn.
‘Aye,’ Sim agreed, seeing that chase itself across Hal’s face. ‘The stripling is grown to man and come into his lordship of Badenoch and all the attainments thereof. Mind you, the most of it he can actually lay his hands on without an army at his back consists of Malise Bellejambe and Badenoch has confirmed that man in the duty once given him by the Earl of Buchan: keep her in her cage.’
Bellejambe. Sim saw Hal’s eyes turn to haar on grey water.
‘I had hoped Malise Bellejambe was gone down the brae,’ Hal said flatly. ‘Then hoped the opposite, for I want to end his life myself.’
‘He lives yet,’ Sim said, and then laughed dryly. ‘Greyer, as we all are these days, but his heart is as black as ever, I hear.’
Bellejambe, who was guilty of murder by knife and poison, who had snaked his way after Isabel on behalf of her husband until, finally, he had coiled round his capture. Hal did not want to think of what he had done to her, was almost rushed off the bench he sat on with the mad, frantic urge to charge down to Berwick.
It washed over him like fire, sank and ebbed, leaving him trembling and bitter with the reality. Seven years detached from swordplay or even wearing maille or riding a horse. Nothing left of his Herdmanston lands but the title. No men at his back and no future at his front. Some gallant rescuing knight, he thought, who has even been forgotten by the King I helped put on the throne.
But not by Isabel. He was sure of that and it nagged him like a knife in the ribs, the knowledge that she had squatted in her cage for seven years, willing him to her rescue. It was a scorching force that, every now and then, drove him to his feet as if to rush there alone and beat the walls down. The effort of staying shook him like ague and it had been this way for all of the seven years; the old weals on his knuckles told of the blood he had spilled hammering uselessly on stone and door.
An hour later, the world changed again when a squire came up and declared that the King requested Sir Hal of Herdmanston’s presence in his chambers. The boy said it politely enough, for he was court-skilled enough to realize that there might be more to this old man than poor clothes and a bad haircut, since the King was not only seeing him in private, but had requested it.
‘Come as you are,’ the servant added, seeing Hal hesitate and look down at his tunic. Sim laid a hand on Hal’s wrist as he started to move after the servant.
‘Dinna fash when you see him,’ he hissed, his Lenten fish-breath close to Hal’s ear.
Which was not a comfort to a man anxious about meeting a king he had not seen for so long. Eight years ago, the Bruce had been freshly crowned, awkward under it and hag-haunted by what he had done to the Red Comyn in Greyfriars.
Even behind Roxburgh’s walls, Hal had heard the argument, the monks of Bishops Wishart and Lamberton piercing the stones with their shouted debates, that it had not been red murder because there was no ‘forethocht’ in it. Rather, according to the carefully primed monks, it was a chaude-melle, a ‘suddenty of temper’ brought on by the lord of Badenoch’s provocations. Besides, Hal thought as he clacked into the great nave on his thick-soled shoes, the new Joshua of Scotland could not be so base as to have deliberately sought the murder of a rival.
But he remembered the stricken Bruce, seemingly struck numb and appalled at his act of temper. Seemingly. Even now, Hal was hagged by the possibility of mummery, for the speed of Bruce’s recovery, the smoothness with which Kirkpatrick and himself had been sent to make sure the Red Comyn was indeed dead, all left an iced sliver of doubt.
The bloody altar and the high, metal stink rolled out of Hal’s old thoughts, so that he paused and stood, mired in memory. The way Badenoch’s heels, those vain, inch-lifted heels on his fancy boots, had rattled like a mad drummer as he kicked his way out of the world, splashing his own puddled gore up even as Kirkpatrick made sure …
‘Sir Henry.’
The familiar voice wrenched him back and he stood in front of a clean altar under the great bloom of stone and glass that formed the nave window of the abbey. A figure, silhouetted against the stain of light, walked forward and the servant boy stepped back, bowing.
‘Hal. God be praised.’
‘For ever and ever,’ Hal repeated by rote and then, remembering too late, bobbed his head and added: ‘Your Grace.’
He was aware of figures and the servant, dismissed with a wave, sliding off into the shadows, then he looked up from the floor, blinking, as Bruce swung round into plain view.
The height and the body were the same, tall and hardened, unthickened by age – he must be in his fortieth year, Hal thought wildly, yet his hair is still mostly dark.
But the face. Hail Mary, the face …
It had coarsened, the lines of age in it deepened to grooves, the skin lesioned and greyish, so that he looked older than his years – Christ’s Wounds, Hal thought, he looks older than Sim. The right cheek – that old wound, Hal remembered, given to him by Malenfaunt in a tourney à l’outrance – was a thick weal of cicatrice. As if in balance there was the slash taken in the fighting round Methven, a gully of old scar tissue that began above the left brow, broke over the eye and continued down the inside of his cheek almost to the edge of his mouth.Two such dire wounds would have been bad enough, but there was more in that face than hard usage, Hal realized with a sudden shock. There was now clear reason for the whispers of sickness – or even the famed Curse of Malachy.
Yet the eyes were clear and quizzical, the smile a wry lopsided twist as he saw Hal’s shock. He should look at himself, Bruce thought, and was not as sure as he had been when Kirkpatrick convinced him that Hal was the very man for the task he had in mind.
Seven years had not been kind to the lord of Herdmanston; he was too lean, too stooped, too grey – Christ in Heaven, too old. And had not handled weapons for all that time, so that the rawest squire could probably beat him.
He had pointed this out to Kirkpatrick, who had waved it away with a dismissive ‘tschk’.
‘He will muscle up and recover his skills as we go,’ he had argued, then put the only argument likely to win the moment. ‘Who else can you trust for a task like this, my lord king, but the auld dugs?’
So Bruce took Hal’s hands in his own and smiled into the recovering eyes.
‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘Your king is pleased to see you back in the world and back in his service.’
It was the ritual jig of kingship, played for long enough now that Bruce had forgotten any other way and the next words were an old part of it.
‘What reward can your king bestow on his faithful subject?’
The answer should have been a low bow and something about how new freedom was the only reward required, with a profuse bouquet of thanks for it.
‘The Countess of Buchan.’
There was a sharp suck of breath that turned Hal’s head to the prelate who made it, standing with his eyes shock-wide in his smooth, bland face. The one next to him was older, more seamed, less shocked; he even seemed to be smiling.
The silence stretched as Bruce blinked. No one had spoken like this for some time and his mind was whirled back to the times when he and Hal’s Lothian men had shared fires in the damp mirk. The one who now served Jamie Douglas – Dog Boy – had been one of them and they had all been plain speakers; he had taken delight in that then and the memory of it warmed him now.
‘I should have expected no less from you,’ he answered with a slight bark of laugh. Then he indicated the two prelates.
‘This is my chaplain, Thomas Daltoun, and Bernard of Kilwinning, former abbot of that place and now my chancellor. Sirs, this is the bold Sir Hal, proving that seven years’ captivity has not dulled him any.’
The prelates nodded and then, sensing the mood, made their obeisances to the King and left, whispering away across the flags with an armful of seal-dangled scrolls. Bruce watched them go – waiting until they were out of earshot, Hal saw.
‘The Countess of Buchan’, he said, turning the full weight of his blunt-weapon face on Hal, ‘is married to Henry de Beaumont.’
He waited, viciously long enough to see Hal’s stricken bewilderment, and then laughed again, a sound like shattering glass.
‘Alice Comyn inherited the title when the Earl died, for he repudiated Isabel at the last. The lands are actually held by me, as king, of course. Henry de Beaumont married Alice and now claims to be Earl of Buchan, a vellum title only. He does not care for me much and not only over his Buchan lands – he was twice handed Mann by the Plantagenet and twice had it removed by the Ordainers. Since I took it last year, he has precious slim chance of ever getting that isle back and less of claiming the lands of Buchan.’
He paused, his face now looking like a bad clay mask.
‘Isabel MacDuff is now no more than a lady from Fife,’ he went on. ‘Though I am sure the title was never the attraction between you and her.’
Bruce did not add – did not need to – that he once had an interest there himself when he was younger and Hal, who had known it then and come to terms with it well enough since, simply nodded.
He wondered, though, if kingship had driven all obligation for Isabel’s sacrifice out of him.
‘A lady of Fife in a cage,’ he dared, aware that this exchange was Bruce’s revenge for his bluntness and fighting the anger it brought, at the easy way Bruce assumed he was ‘back in service’, with no questions asked of seven years’ captivity. More galling yet was the realization that it was true, since there was little else for him and no other way to set about freeing Isabel.
‘Indeed,’ Bruce answered smoothly. ‘As was my sister until recently. And she and my wife and daughter are all held captive – but we shall soon have release for them all.’
He lost the frost in his voice, fuelled it with a smile.
‘I have not forgotten Isabel’s bravery in defying husband and Comyn entire to be a hereditary MacDuff Crowner,’ he added gently, and then drew himself up a little, shaking the soft from him like a dog coming out of a stream.
‘Events are moving,’ he said portentously. ‘I have issued an ultimatum to those Scots lords still serving King Edward, so that they have until November of this year to swear fealty to me or be dispossessed of their Scots lands.’
Hal thought about it, but could only see that this would bring the English down on their heads, which was no help to taking Berwick or freeing Isabel, and said so. Bruce’s smile widened; the cheek stretched and seemed almost to be parting.
‘Just so. King Edward will have no choice. He must muster an army and come at us. And I shall take his last fortresses from him, so they cannot be used in the furtherance of his rampage.’
Hal saw it then, acknowledging it with grudging admiration. The English would plooter north in the old style, achieve nothing and, because they had no firm bases or supply, would suffer even more quickly than usual and retire, because Bruce would not face them in the field.
‘Indeed,’ Bruce confirmed, touching two fingers to the cheek, as if to reassure himself that it was not split and leaking. It was an old habit, Hal saw, ingrained over the years.
‘When Edward Plantagenet fails again, it may be that his own disaffected will round on him,’ the King went on. ‘The Scots lords who follow him will see sense and abandon him. The Kingdom will be secured.’
Your crown will sit steadier, certes, Hal thought; he wondered if he had said it aloud and was flustered enough to say the next thing that came into his head. ‘A decent enough plan. If they ask a truce, then the release of captives will be part of it.’
Bruce, eyebrows raised, offered him a slight mocking bow, so that Hal flushed with his own presumption.
‘I need your service, Lord Hal,’ Bruce went on but Hal was not sure what use he could be and said as much, adding – again forgetting he addressed a king – that he was equally unsure if he had the belly for the work now.
Bruce nodded, as if he had considered the matter, which was true. He also knew that he had already captured the man, yet the triumph of bending Hal to the royal will was not as savage a joy as with others he had snared; it seemed like calming a fine stallion you must geld.
‘If it will provide belly, let me tell you that the reward will be our utmost effort to free Isabel and her safe delivery into your care,’ he answered. ‘If events work out as planned, Berwick will fall to us. At worst, we will negotiate the freedom of all captives.’
He saw the gaff of that go in.
‘As for your abilities,’ he went on, ‘they are well remembered.’ He paused and smiled, lopsided so as not to strain the cheek. ‘Betimes, someone vouches for you.’
He raised one hand into the red and gold stain of light from the nave window. There was a pause, and then a figure stepped forward from the shadows, limping a little, moving slow and silent across the flagged floor.
An auld chiel, Hal thought. Another wee monk?
Then the light poured through the nave on to the iron-grey head, turning it to blood and honey and a shock of the familiar.
‘Ah, Hal,’ said Kirkpatrick, almost sadly. ‘You were ever a man for good sense, save ower that wummin.’
ISABEL
He came to me in the night. He does not do it often these days – so little that, may God forgive me, I was almost glad to see him in my loneliness, for he has long since ceased to pain me with his foulness, which is harder for him to achieve each time. He blames me and beats me for it, but even that strength is going from him. You gave me Malise Bellejambe, Lord, an image of Man in my world, for there is no other here save those I can remember. Is it my own sins that make You even more cruel than he is? I do not understand, O God, for what he does to me is surely cruelty to Yourself. May it be that this is a mirror to make me understand that nothing can protect me, O God, unless it is the shield on which there is no device, but all the heavens and the sun displayed. The only pure thing I have to offer You is my mind. Take it, Lord, and offer me that shield.
CHAPTER THREE
Palais du Roi, Paris
Feast of St Joseph of Arimathea, March 1314
The stink of it swamped from the Île des Juifs, pervasive and acrid, wrapping round them like snake coils so that the Queen of England had to raise a scented hand to her nose. It was an irony that the fire which had burned Isabella’s hands and arms so badly the year before should now be of a help; the wounds had festered and she wore scented gloves to hide the glassy weals.
Out on the Seine, the daring were collecting the ashes of her godfather, Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Temple, burned the day before alongside Geoffroi de Charney, Master of Normandy. They had recanted their confessions publicly and her father had ordered the pyre built and the two Templars roasted slowly on it. Too slowly, as it turned out, for de Molay had uttered a long and pungent curse prophesying that his tormentors would be in Hell within the year.
Isabella thought her godfather’s name would live a long time in memory, as a martyr to the Order and not least because of the Curse he had brought down on the Pope and her father. She said it aloud, which made Beaumont, Badlesmere and the young Earl of Gloucester shift a little at the daring in it. They were well used to this slip of a queen having the cunning of a fox and more backbone than her husband, but they kept those thoughts to themselves.
As they did their views on the Templars – but publicly at least, the Order had been condemned at Vienne two years since and England’s king had followed the Pope’s instructions on it. Now the Knights of St John were taking over the Templar holdings and, for all he might gnaw his nails, Edward could do nothing about it without annoying the Holy Father, whom he needed.
‘Will my father see us?’ Isabella asked and the envoy, bland face setting itself like a moulded pudding into regret and sadness, began to expound on why King Philip of France would not. The curt wave of the scented glove cut him off in mid-flow and no one marvelled at the 18-year-old girl’s poise and command.
Well, there it was. Her father, it seemed, was in mourning for what he had had to do and she wondered if it was genuine contrition, or because he had been cursed. If she knew her father at all, he would be gnawing his knuckles with concern, as much about the macula on his glory as on his soul. Both agonies, she thought, will last long after the smell and the ashes have blown away.
This was the Philip the Fair she remembered, the handsome, cunning, treacherous, vain father and king she had known. The one who could commit the vilest acts, yet agonize over the stain on his relationship with God – but even that man seemed strangely diminished by what had happened, as if this last act of spite had sucked all the juice from him. That and the six-year search for the Templar treasure which Isabella knew had spawned this plot in the first place, a search which had uncovered … nothing.
She had no doubt that the news of the latest outrage on the last Grand Master of the Order of Poor Knights would be speeding to all the hidden ears; she wondered what they would do with their hidden treasure, these last angered Templars of the Order.
Not hand it over to her desperate husband for his wars, certes, so he would have to rely on Isabella, who had to persuade her ailing father to permit King Edward of England to mortgage the ducal dues of Gascony to the Pope, since Philip of France was Edward’s liege lord for those lands. In return, the Pope would loan Edward the money to help finance his latest enterprise, a war against the Scotch.
It was a complex dance that Isabella knew well, the intricate gilded steps that took in the wool-eager mercantile houses of Pessagno in Genoa, the Bardi and Peruzzi of Naples. None of them bothered in the slightest that their biggest rival, the Florentine Frescobaldi, had ruined themselves with similar speculative loans to Edward I.
It was simply the work of mercantiling, where a mistake would plunge you to the depths and a success make you richer than God. It was, as Isabella had long realized, the true sinew of war: gold into a muscle to fight with.
So it would be no fault of hers if the entire intricate cat’s cradle of it failed and her husband never got the money for his new invasion. So sad. A great pity that he would then have to suffer the bit and bridle on his powers by his own barons. Not her fault …
Yet, even as she flirted with the indecent treachery of it, she knew that her husband’s curbing and the fall of his latest detested favourite would need to be better planned. In the end, she would get him what he needed – God send her a sign – but let him fret a little first, as he fretted her with so many small humiliations …
‘Isabella.’
The voice turned her into the smiling face of Blanche, her brother’s wife. She smiled in return, embraced her, admired her prettiness and her dress and all the time wondered if the rumours about her adultery were true – and how God seemed so speedily to answer her.
Both Blanche and Marguerite, her brothers’ wives, were vapid creatures, bored and beautiful. She would find out the truth of the rumours, she determined, and they would tell her, for she was young and could play bored and smile and nod, clap her hands at the thought of diversion and pretty young men. Perhaps what she discovered would further keep her father from discussing loans from the Pope a little longer and that would suit her. So sad. Not her fault …
Beaumont watched the exchange, the fox-sharp smiles of his queen, the eager Blanche, anxious to ingratiate and to be diverted by something new.
Beware, little chick, he thought, my king’s wife is a snake who will swallow you whole.
The tang of burned flesh trailed through the window, bringing back the sorry mess of the Templar burnings and de Beaumont wished he also had a scented glove. He wondered what rich secrets de Molay had taken into the flames rather than hand over to Philip of France, the accursed king.
Where had all the wealth of the Poor Knights gone?
Edinburgh
Octave of St Benedict of Montecassino, March 1314
The air thrummed and cracked with the roars from hundreds of throats, enough to filter through the slit window and raise Bruce’s head a little, so that he smiled; Jamie Douglas was drilling his block. Again.
‘He is keen,’ Abbot Bernard commented wryly when Bruce voiced this and did not betray anything on his bland face when fixed with a challenging, quizzical stare. Instead, he merely moved the document a little closer and hinted that the wax was cooling.
‘He is furious,’ Bruce went on, studying the scroll. ‘Randolph has taken Edinburgh’s fortress and by as rare a stratagem as the Black himself concocted at Roxburgh. If he does not vent his spleen, young Jamie will explode.’
He looked up at his Chancellor, who was searching out a bar of wax.
‘When I seal this, the Brothers who cannot be called by name will have the fortress at Glaissery. Much good may it do them.’
‘It may do you much good,’ Bernard replied portentously and Bruce levered himself up from the table; his bones ached more and more.
‘Besides,’ Bernard continued smoothly, ‘they are known only as the Benedictine Brothers in Christ these days.’
‘So you and others of your like have convinced me – but you are Abbot of Arbroath and must make it clear to your brothers in Christ that they may call themselves whatever they choose provided there is no mention of the Poor Knights of the Temple in it. This is not a commanderie, nor will there be a new Templar Order with me as Grand Master.’
He stared at the charter and shook his head.
‘No one will be fooled by these supposed Benedictines, who wear a sword underneath their scapular – unless folk can be persuaded that the penance of Hail Mary has been replaced by something harsher and more sharp.’
The Chancellor laughed dutifully but Bruce was serious.
‘The Templars believe that because this kingdom is under interdict I can defy the Pope and give them succour. Remind them that I am not under interdict by choice, Abbot Bernard; sooner, rather than later, I will be reconciled to Mother Church and will not make it harder by giving comfort to every condemned heretic in the world.’
‘They know this, my lord,’ the Chancellor replied softly and with a taint of bitter steel in the tone, not missed by Bruce. ‘That is why they offer what they offer. There is no Order of Poor Knights in Scotland, as anyone will confess, only some mendicant Benedictines in the wilds of the north. With a deal of coin to lend and the whereabouts of an armoury to purchase with it.’
‘Whisht on that,’ Bruce declared, breaking from French in his alarm. ‘No mention here of siller or arms.’
‘Even between us alone?’
‘Voices travel, Chancellor,’ Bruce muttered, hearing the distant cries. And God is listening, he added morosely to himself. Worse still, Malachy is listening and that wee saint hates me.
His curse on the Kingdom was the unsteadiness of the crown on my head, he brooded, which makes all the folk who should be trading with us less than eager to commit. For certes, it was not possible to find one wee cunning merchant willing to loan the rebel King of Scots any sum, on any promise.
So I am fallen back on heretics and fables of Templar treasures, he thought, pushing away from the table and walking to the slit window, hands behind his back and twisting this way and that. And two auld dugs …
Far out on the green beyond the castle rock, horsemen galloped back and forth – four hundred at least, lances glittering. It was an illusion, all the same – and one Bruce had used to his advantage more than once – for these were no knights, nor even armoured serjeants. They were mounted infantry in padded coats with long, wicked spears, who finally came together like a flock of sparrows, hurling from their shaggy garrons to form up in a thick block bristling with twelve-foot pikes while the horse-holders led away fistfuls of excited, plunging mounts.
There was confusion, a few fell here and there and even from this distance, Bruce fancied he could hear the poisonous roars of their vintenars, each one determined that their twenty-man command would not be a disgrace.
He craned to see better, but could not distinguish anyone and certainly not Jamie Douglas, who was simply one man in the crowd of them. Closest to the pennant, certes, Bruce thought. At least his block has proper arms and not merely long poles – he wondered if Kirkpatrick and Hal of Herdmanston would succeed and vowed more candles to St Malachy to ensure that they did.
There was a flurry behind him and he heard mutter, turning to see his chaplain Thomas Daltoun scurrying up. Come to give the King confession? It was not on any list Bruce remembered and he frowned.
‘Your brother is here, my lord,’ the chaplain declared and Bruce’s frown started to become painful over his eyes. Edward here? He had been sent to Stirling to prosecute the siege – had demanded the command, in fact, and Bruce had relented, for he knew that he had a trinity of troublesome commanders on his hands, not just Randolph and Douglas vying for glory.
He had thought Edward wanted to devise some equally cunning and glorious way to take Stirling and, if he dared admit it, had manufactured that ploy as surely as he had pitted Randolph against Douglas for the same reason.
But Edward was here in Edinburgh – surely he could not have taken Stirling by storm?
He came in, big and bluff and broad. He nodded to the exiting Chancellor but his usual beaming grin seemed forced and Bruce grew apprehensive.
‘Brother,’ he said, ignoring – as he always did – the lack of protocol Edward used. ‘You have news of Stirling – Mowbray is in chains, the fortress is ours and your glory outshines all others.’
‘It is your glory I am polishing,’ Edward declared grimly, and then glanced pointedly at Daltoun. Bruce said nothing and, eventually, Edward took the hint, though he scowled at the favour shown the chaplain. He took a deep breath, as if about to plunge into freezing water – and now Bruce was frankly afraid.
‘Mowbray is on his way south to English Edward,’ his brother said quickly, as if anxious to spit the words from him before his mouth was stopped up. ‘He carries news of the truce we made, him and I, that Stirling will be surrendered if not relieved by an English army by the Feast of the Nativity of St John.’
The words hung like black smoke, slowly dissipating. Bruce blinked and his head reeled with it, could only gape at his brother and, gradually, felt the thunder in his temples as his brother’s cool, challenging stare would not be broken.
Daltoun shrank as the moment stretched and seemed to thrum like a taut rope.
‘What were you thinking, brother?’ Bruce asked eventually, his voice trembling. ‘Were you thinking?’
Edward flushed a little and the arrowed furrow between his eyes deepened – but he held his temper, which amazed Daltoun and confused his brother.
‘I was thinking that something had to be done,’ he answered slowly and Bruce gave a strangled gasp.
‘Something was done,’ he roared, before catching himself and standing, breathing heavily, his face a strange mask of red flush and unhealthy pallor; Daltoun, fascinated, saw the cicatrice bead with clear drops.
‘You issued an ultimatum to the Scots still with the Plantagenet,’ Edward declared truculently and Bruce exploded.
‘I did,’ he bellowed. ‘I did, brother. I tied the Plantagenet to a time. Now you have shackled me to a place. Have you gone mad, brother? Do you think YOU are king here?’
The French was spat out so that Daltoun swore he saw the words form in the air, though it might, he concluded afterwards, simply have been spit. But the last statement lurched out like a sick dog and sat there festering while the air twisted and coiled between the two.
It was what he wanted, Bruce thought bitterly, wildly. He is not content with Carrick, my last brother …
Edward Bruce leaned forward on the balls of his feet and, for a wild moment, Daltoun thought he was about to do the unthinkable and assault his brother. Assault the King …
‘The opposite, brother,’ Edward replied, sinking back a little, his voice sibilant-soft. ‘I thought to secure you the throne.’
Bruce, stunned, could only gawp and open his mouth like a landed fish. Edward forced a lopsided wry smile.
‘You want the Scots lords on your side? Win them,’ he went on, suddenly pacing to and fro. ‘This Plantagenet is not his father. This one is idle and apathetic and took himself to the brink of warring with his own barons over his catamite. Now he seeks revenge for the catamite’s death.’
He paused and turned.
‘This is the man you will not fight, brother? This is the man you taunt and then run from? How will that sit with the lords whose fealty you want – or even with those whom you already have?’
Bruce said nothing, could only stare while his head rang like a bell with the words ‘Curse of Malachy’.
‘You usurped the throne,’ Edward said flatly and Daltoun heard himself suck in his breath. ‘Took it by force and there is no shame in that – but if you want to keep it, brother, you will have to fight for it. Running away may be the German Method, as you have pointed out many times – but it will not keep this prize in the end.’
Daltoun knew that the German Method was a way of tourney fighting which involved avoiding the charge of your enemy, moving nimbly to one side and then attacking. Bruce had used it to advantage many times, in and out of tourney, but it was frowned on by all those chivalrous knights who believed the French Method – a fierce charge to tumble horse and rider in the dust – was the only honourable way of fighting.
Daltoun had time to dredge this up from the depths of his memory as the silence spread, viscous as old blood and broken only by the brothers’ heavy breathing, like galloped stallions. Then Bruce shifted slightly.
‘Get you gone, Edward,’ he said wearily and, when his brother made no move, looked up sharply at him. ‘Get out of my sight,’ he roared and Daltoun, seeing the storm clouds gather on Edward’s brow, forced his legs to move at last and cleared his throat so that both heads turned to him, as if seeing him for the first time.
The tension snapped; Edward scowled at his brother, spun and strode away; the heavy door banged. Daltoun followed him, almost colliding with the returning Chancellor, who had heard everything even beyond the thick door.
‘Christ betimes,’ Bruce spat. He turned and said it again, this time slamming his fist on the table so that the papers and wax jumped.
Typical of Edward. There is the enemy, set your lance, lift your shield – charge. No matter the odds or the sense in it, one good charge might win all …
Yet he was the last of them, his brothers. All gone to his regal desires; ambition, he thought, is the Devil.
Rash, he thought. Rash brother Edward – and with his own Devil, too. This kingdom is too small for both of us, when one is a king and the other desperately wants to be …
His brother’s words were a scourge, all the same, a rasping cilice on common sense. Edward was right, of course – he had a crown but not a kingdom, and until he faced the Invader he never would. Too soon, he thought. We are not ready – not enough trained men, not enough arms or armour …
Yet there never would be, not if he lived his three-score and ten – and he would not make that, he was sure. Not without losing some vital bits along the way, he thought with chill wryness.
I am forty, he thought to himself. If not now, then when?
Bernard, who did not like the flush on the face of the King, saw that the cheek scar was leaking fat, slow, yellow drops. He dropped a fresh blob of wax on to the parchment, his hand shaking, and pushed it towards Bruce.
The King blinked, touched his cheek, inspected the tips of his fingers and, for a moment, looked weary and afraid. Then he shoved his fist and the royal seal stamped his authority on the parchment giving Glaissery Castle, lately ripped from the MacDougalls of Loch Awe, to the heretic remnants of the Order of Poor Knights, whatever they called themselves now.
Now it was done, he thought bleakly and, thanks to my brother, suddenly I need the secret Templars and what they can provide.
Above all, I need Kirkpatrick and Hal, those old dogs, to succeed more than ever, else I will be facing the might of England with sticks and poor hope.
Irish Sea
At the same moment
It was a scawmy water, a stained-iron bleakness of shattered gulls, heaving in slow, deep swells, sluggish as old skin; Hal hated it but that was less to do with the heaving deck than with his inability to cope with it, despite the patience of Gerald de Villers.
‘Again,’ he said and the robed figure, black scapular removed, merely inclined his head graciously and came at him once more, the great broadsword arcing left, right, feinting, coming in again. Sweating, unsteady and wheezing, Hal blocked, parried, and then stumbled from weariness; he felt the sharp kissing wind of de Villers’s blade whick past his cheek.
‘Better,’ said the monkish figure, splitting his spade beard with a grin. ‘You are growing stronger each day.’
Sourly, Hal allowed himself to be hauled up, wrist to wrist, and the man’s sword vanished into the sheath strapped round his white kirtle with its discreet red cross over the heart. In turn, that all vanished under the plain black robes – yet, no matter the lack of markings, Hal thought, no one could mistake these men for mere monks.
Kirkpatrick watched the grey-faced Hal peel off the maille coif and then bend at the waist to shake himself like a dog until the hauberk slithered off and pooled at his feet. It took the tunic with it, so that Hal sluiced water from a bucket on his naked top half.
Ill-used, Kirkpatrick thought, seeing the glassy weals. And too lean, so that the muscle is wasted. He felt ashamed, as he always did when he remembered that last night, the night Hal was taken; it was hard to speak of it to anyone, let alone Hal himself, though they had done it in the quiet of dark, talking as if their words were halt and lame, remembering the murder and betrayal that had taken them into and then out of Closeburn Castle. Almost to safety …
What happened, Kirkpatrick had asked, after you sat me on the horse and sent it off? Hal had heard the depths of shame and bitterness in his voice and was surprised at it; to him it had been no more than sense: Kirkpatrick had secrets best not tested with the Question, there was one horse that would not carry them both and, besides, Kirkpatrick was wounded. Of course, there was the sick in it, the callous way Kirkpatrick had used him for his own ends by pretending that they were rescuing Isabel rather than red-murdering another target of the Bruce.
Even so, there had not been a conscious tallying of all that, merely a matter of seconds to leg the bleeding Kirkpatrick on the beast and slap it into a gallop, and turn to face the men and dogs coming for them.
He had killed the snarling dogs, losing the sword in the last of them, so that all the men who came up rushed him and forced him to the ground. When he told this, in fits and starts, Kirkpatrick nodded.
‘It must have been sore,’ he said simply and Hal wanted to tell him the truth of it. Kicked and punched and smacked with sword hilts, with John Fitzwalter bellowing out to take him alive, by God. Smashed by the studded gauntlet of the Hospitaller Oristin del Ard, while young Ross of Wark screamed at him to get up. Get up – why? So you can knock me down again?
A boot into his cheek and nose, so that his head rang; that’s for the killing of the Master of Closeburn. Not me, Hal thought. Kirkpatrick did that. To his own kin, no less.
A flurry of kicks in the ribs and half of his face; that’s for the Jew prisoner. Not a Jew, Hal thought, a wee Languedoc Cathar, physicker to Bruce and holder of some secret that could not be allowed out, the true nature and condition of the Bruce’s sickness. The Master, his own kin, Kirkpatrick did for pleasure, Hal had wanted to shout, but he was sent to do the physicker down to Hell, dragging me in his wake with his lies. All the same, Hal only yelped and groaned as he took the painful price for Kirkpatrick’s killings: a vicious flurry of stamps that broke fingers and an elbow.
A further series of savage whacks with something heavy – a spearshaft or the flat of a sword – which drove the air from him and agony in, so that he threshed and gasped, thinking, Jesu, they have done for me now. For Dixon, someone yelled. Poor auld Dixon.
The gaoler, clanking his keys, Hal thought. Kirkpatrick did that. Or perhaps it was the servant who had lain across the door to the Master’s solar and was killed in his sleep – Kirkpatrick did that as well. Or one of the guards on the postern gate – I confess it, I killed the pair of them, though Kirkpatrick helped.
Blood on blood, a trail of it and most left by Black Roger Kirkpatrick. I should not even have been there, Hal had wanted to tell them, save that Kirkpatrick led me to believe I was rescuing Isabel, who was long gone.
To a cage in Berwick.
Hal had thought of that every day he woke in Roxburgh, nursing his injuries and his anger, trying to stare through the dark, imagining a similar cage mere feet of stone away, where Bruce’s sister languished. By the time they had allowed him to hobble up to the battlements for air and exercise, Bruce’s sister was gone. Just like that, cage and all, and it had taken a deal of wheedling persuasion to discover that she was not dead, merely so sick that she had been removed to the care of nuns to recover.
Hal had wondered if Isabel had sickened; for a long time he did not even know if she still lived and had only been sure of it when the King had spoken of her. King Robert … the title was still strange to Hal.
He wondered, having recently seen the King’s face as everyone else must have seen it, if the murder to cover up whether Bruce had lepry or not had been worth seven years behind Roxburgh’s stones. He wondered it aloud now, sitting on the tarred deck under the flapping belly of the sail, staring into Kirkpatrick’s face.
There was silence for a moment, smeared with the creak of rigging and rope, the slap of wave on the cog’s hull and the dull flap of the huge square sail, puffing with weak breath, like a man dying.
‘Well,’ answered Kirkpatrick at length, ‘it seemed so at the time, with our backs to the wall and the ram at the gates. Later, when the King fell ill – near to death, in fact – the rumours grew stronger than ever. Worth it? Not for you, I am thinking, but you will have a warmer welcome at Closeburn these days.’
Hal had heard how Bruce had handed the liberated Closeburn lands to his faithful dog, Roger Kirkpatrick, so that he was now Lord Roger Kirkpatrick. Same name as the kin he had killed on that night and there was the Devil’s hand in that contrivance.
‘All I need is a knight’s dubbing, promised this very year, and I am achieved of all,’ Kirkpatrick went on proudly. ‘Nigh on twenty years’ service to the Bruce, mark you.’
‘Aye,’ Hal answered slowly. ‘You have been raised.’
Kirkpatrick fell silent, realizing how far Hal of Herdmanston had fallen and ashamed and angry at himself for letting his pride get in the way of appeasement. He smiled, trying to recover a little.
‘I will change my device,’ he said, attempting to make amends. ‘Those fat sacks on a shield are too arrogant and mercantile for my taste.’
‘Arrogant and mercantile,’ Hal repeated and found himself smiling at this new-found knightly fire from Kirkpatrick, who had the decency to flush a little and make a wry smile of his own.
‘I hear you are eyeing up a wife as well,’ Hal added and Kirkpatrick nodded, trying to make light of it, though the lady in question was an heiress with a good few acres.
‘What happened to the wummin whose man stabbed you for yer dalliance?’
The question was, as usual from Hal, a bolt that took away Kirkpatrick’s breath, though he reeled away from it and recovered quickly, the memories fleeing through him like panicked deer. He had used an old love as cover for their task and shamelessly taken advantage of her former regard. He remembered Annie and himself in the cellar before they gained entrance to Closeburn’s castle. Nicholl, her man, coming out of the dark later, weeping angry at Kirkpatrick’s ruining of his nice life and taking revenge.
He was supposed to have horses for their escape, but delivered a dagger instead; Kirkpatrick felt the burning memory of where it had gone in his back and all but crippled him. It had taken a long time to recover and he never fully had – but it had given him time to plan vengeance.
‘Fled,’ he answered thickly, though it was only half the truth and he had spent a deal of time and silver tracking them both down. ‘He could scarce remain in Closeburn with me as lord and master.’
‘And the wummin – what was her name? Annie?’ Hal queried and saw the flat stare of Kirkpatrick, so that he knew the truth of it; Annie’s man, Nicholl, had not survived Kirkpatrick’s wrath. It was the mark of the man that Hal could not be sure that Annie had, childhood sweetheart or no. Blood and blood, Hal thought, a trail of it, thick and viscous as a snail track, leading always back to Kirkpatrick.
‘For your new device,’ he said harshly, ‘you should consider a hand with a bloody dagger in it. Fitting.’
Kirkpatrick did not even blink.
‘You must take better care of that maille,’ said a voice in French, splitting the moment like a wedge in a tree; they both turned into the spade-bearded face of Rossal de Bissot.
‘The sea air will rust it unless you do,’ he went on blandly, ‘though it is good that you wear it constantly, to get used to the weight again.’
Hal, in the act of heaving it up and slithering back into its cold embrace, was less smiling about the affair, but de Bissot’s approval was genuine and his enthusiasm uplifting.
‘By the time we reach Crunia,’ he beamed, clapping Hal on his metalled shoulder, ‘you will be as before – fit to be a Poor Knight of the Order.’
‘Slight chance of that these days,’ Hal replied shortly and Rossal nodded.
‘God wills,’ he answered, and then smiled again, thinly. ‘There was a time when you were considered for such an honour,’ he went on, to Hal’s astonishment. ‘Your kinsman, Sir William, approached your father on the matter.’
‘Sir William? The Auld Templar?’
De Bissot frowned at the term, but nodded.
‘Yes, so you called him. It was shortly after the loss of your wife and child. Sir William asked to approach you and was refused, since you were sole heir to Herdmanston and your father did not want to lose you as well.’
Hal was astounded. Sir William Sientcler of Roslin, the Auld Templar, had never mentioned it, nor had his father. It could easily have been done, too, for Hal’s grief at losing his wife and young son had been great enough to have driven him to the monkish life of a Templar, while Sir William, as Gonfanonier – banner-bearer – of the Order, had the clout to arrange it.
De Bissot saw his look and his smile broadened the grey-streaked spade beard.
‘Yes. You might have been standing here with us,’ he said and Kirkpatrick shifted a little at that.
‘Kneeling,’ Kirkpatrick corrected and de Bissot turned to see de Villers and Sir William de Grafton at prayer.
‘Terce,’ Rossal said, still smiling. ‘Time is given by God and should not be wasted. I will join them.’
‘They spend a deal o’ time on their knees,’ Kirkpatrick noted sourly, watching de Bissot join his fellow knights. ‘If they had climbed up off them long enough they might still be in the Holy Land.’
‘They fight well enough when they are on two feet,’ Hal noted, remembering. ‘Callendar Woods.’
Kirkpatrick let the words drift like acrid smoke. Callendar Woods, where Wallace’s army had been helped to shattered ruin by Templars, a Christian Order fighting Christians; Kirkpatrick had not been there, but knew that the odious taint of it had stained the Order and added to its final ruin.
Yet here they were, sailing with disbanded heretics of the Templars, carrying Templar treasure to a former Templar stronghold in Spain to fetch stored Templar weapons.
It was a deal brokered on behalf of the King of Scots with the Order of Alcántara, the Spanish who had taken over the former Templar fortress; in return, Hal knew, de Bissot and the others had been given a rickle of land and a castle somewhere in the north that they might call their own, provided no mention was made of Poor Knights.
It was, to say the least, the strangest quest he had been on with Kirkpatrick and he had been on a few. A royal request, of course, which is to say only slightly less of a command than from God.
Desperate, too, Hal had realized. Bruce sends out his two faithful auld hounds because he can trust no one else to exert their utmost, in ingenuity, strength and, above all, loyalty; he felt his grin twist wryness into his face.
Loyalty. Kirkpatrick will do it for a dubbing, a blade on the shoulder that ranks him with the other nobiles of the Kingdom. I would give mine back, if it were possible, he thought, to not be here at all.
Only for Isabel. Only for her.
He and Kirkpatrick sat in silence for a while as the ship wallowed on, the crew trying to make themselves look busy so that Pegy Balgownie would not give them something worse to do in his scowling temper at the lack of wind.
‘Matins to Compline and during the night as well,’ Kirkpatrick muttered, watching the kneeling men and reluctant to let go of his Templar bone.
‘“O Lord, You will open my lips and my mouth shall declare Your praise,”’ Hal intoned with mock piety. ‘The Order Knights have a deal of questions to ask of God, who seems to have abandoned them. Unlike the King.’
Kirkpatrick shook his head.
‘The King will not openly support the Order of Poor Knights, which no longer exists, according to the Pope. But he will not cast aside folk he owes – nor will I.’
The last was said with quiet vehemence and Hal knew why. De Bissot had once plucked Kirkpatrick from certain death and had been quietly instrumental in garnering support and information for the beleaguered Bruce, even before Hal’s capture.
And now, Hal thought, he brings even more. He met Kirkpatrick’s eyes and was sure they shared the same golden thought; snugged up in the depths of the Bon Accord’s foul swill of ballast was a nest of stout, bound boxes as full of riches as any eggs. Templar riches, plucked from the ruin of their collapse.
A stir on deck made them turn to see the other richness that nestled in the cog’s belly: a fragrant drift of periwinkle-blue dress, a lush curve of lip, two large eyes, dark as olives in a fine, breath-stopping beauty of a face. Her black hair was caught up in a net of pearls and she moved sinuously, aware that every eye was on her.
Yet Hal thought the Doña Beatriz Ruiz de Castro y Pimental’s beautiful face had a sharp look, like a razored heart. She was the one sent by the Order of Alcántara to finalize the details of this secret deal and if ever anything marked the difference between the two religious commands, it was Doña Beatriz, walking like a gliding dream, shadowed by her Moor, Piculph. The Templars did not care for Moors – and for women even less.
Kirkpatrick’s soft chuckle turned Hal’s head to where the man gazed: the supposed Benedictines, rising hastily and moving away, as politely as they could, but pointedly nevertheless.
‘If nothing else betrayed them,’ Kirkpatrick said, ‘then their Order’s disdain for weemin is as clear as a Judas kiss.’
They watched as Rossal de Bissot, braced stiffly, walked to the lady and inclined his head in a curt bow, and had it in return. Piculph, after a short pause, moved away – out of earshot, Hal thought – and the lady began to walk quietly along the deck, with Rossal falling in beside her, his every celibate step as if he walked barefoot on nails.
Hal saw that the other black-robed knights watched Piculph, while the rest of the crew moved from their path, throwing surreptitious looks at Doña Beatriz which left little to anyone’s imagination. They were a rag-bag collection of ill-favoured lumpen pirates, Hal thought, but Pegy Balgownie keeps them in line and he, according to Kirkpatrick, is to be trusted.
He had an idea what Rossal and the lady discussed, but he only knew that Doña Beatriz had come to Rossal from Villasirga in Castile, a Templar hold now handed to the new Order of Alcántara; the lady’s brother, Guillermo, was high in it, close to the Grand Master.
There was little brotherly love or fellow Christian charity here, Hal thought moodily. The Order of Alcántara needed money and was prepared to sell the former Templars their own weapons and the unlikely pairing now strolling the deck were brokering the deal.
‘“The company of women is a dangerous thing,”’ Kirkpatrick muttered, quoting from the Rules of the Order.
‘Aye,’ said a savage growl of voice, ‘the pair o’ you would know that best, for sure.’
They turned into the tinged face of Sim Craw, clutching a huge bundle to him and looking liverish. If there is one who hates the sea more than me, Hal thought, it is Sim.
‘You have ceased feeding the fish,’ Kirkpatrick responded viciously and Sim nodded, though there was no certainty in it.
‘I am fine when matters are moving,’ he answered, ‘but wallowing here is shifting my innards.’
Hal looked at the sail, filling weakly and sinking again; down at the tillers, a muscled red-head teased the cog into what wind there was while the barrel-shaped Pegy Balgownie scowled at the fog bank, swirling ahead as proof there was no wind.
‘You should set that bairn on deck,’ Kirkpatrick mocked Sim, ‘afore you lose it ower the side when you are boaking.’
‘Would make little difference,’ Sim mourned back, glancing sadly at the swaddled bundle of his arbalest. ‘Soaked or safe, the dreich will rust it.’
He paused, looked Hal up and down meaningfully.
‘And your maille, lord …’ he began, but paused, blinked a little and headed feverishly for the side of the cog, clapping a hand over his mouth.
Pegy was scarcely aware of the retching and the good-natured jeers, too busy with fretting over the lack of wind. Next to him, Somhairl bunched the muscles needed to shift the heavy tiller and grumbled, in his lilting Islesman English, about wetting the sail.
He had the right of it, for sure, Pegy thought. A good man, Somhairl, who learned his craft crewing and leading birlinn galleys for Angus Og of the Isles. Somhairl was a raiding man every bit as skilled as any old Viking and called Scáth Dearg – the Red Shadow – by those who feared to see him oaring up swift and silent, with his red hair streaming like flame.
No chance o’ that here, Pegy mourned. Scarce enough wind to shift as much as the man’s brow braids and even soaking the sail would not gain them much; they were moving, but slowly. Now would be the time, he thought bitterly, when the Red Rover would appear out of yon fog, with myself close behind, to pluck some becalmed chick.
But the pirate scourge de Longueville, better known as the Red Rover, had long since thrown in his lot and was now married into the nobiles of Scotland and calling himself Charteris. While his auld captains, Pegy thought bitterly, were left scrambling for the favour of kings. I liked life better when I was a wee raider – though he crossed himself piously for the heresy of such thinking.
As if in answer, a sepulchral voice boomed out from above.
‘Sail ho, babord quarter.’
It was not God, it was Niall Silkie high in the nest, but even as Pegy sprang for the sterncastle for a better look, he knew that the De’il’s hand was in this.
ISABEL
My God, You have chastised me by this man’s hand and I have learned submission, I swear it on Your mother’s life. I have suffered and learned about the power of the body over us and how, by way of it, the soul is branded. Grant me, O Lord, that I have learned, that I may not have to bring this branded body to You broken also, as this Malise would wish, given away by him as waste goods. Your will has compassed me round, O Lord, and closed all other ways to me.
CHAPTER FOUR
Irish Sea
Octave of St Benedict of Montecassino, March 1314
A white flag with a red cross, that was what Niall Silkie, squinting furiously, declared he could see. On his mother’s eyes he swore it. Fluttering – limply – from the topmost mast of another cog. The pegy mast, ironically, which was what John of Balgownie was ekenamed after.
‘A Templar flag?’ Kirkpatrick demanded, and the black-robed figures looked at one another and chewed their drooping moustaches. The English flew three golden pards on red, so it was not them.
Finally, de Grafton stared meaningfully at Rossal de Bissot.
‘We sent out decoy ships, Brother, did we not?’
Rossal, stroking his close-cropped chin, nodded uneasily.
‘Two from Leith and another, the Maryculter, two days before we sailed ourselves,’ he replied thoughtfully. ‘It could be the Maryculter.’ He looked at Pegy Balgownie. ‘Can you tell from here?’
‘A cog is a cog,’ Pegy said, after a pause. ‘Twenty-five guid Scots ells long, six wide, with fighting castles and a sail – they look much similar, yin to another. Nor do we fly any flag … but the captain of the Maryculter is Glymyne Ledow, as smart a sailor as ever tarred his palms on a rope. He might ken me and my Bon Accord.’
Hal did not see how, since the one that approached them was the same as the one he was on: an ugly, deep oval bowl with a pointed bow and a squared stern and two fighting castles of wood rearing at both ends. The prospect of a fight on it did not fill him with confidence.
‘Mind ye, he would ken it as the Agnes,’ Pegy went on, peering furiously up at ropes and sails, as if to spring something to life, ‘though it is presently named Bon Accord.’
He paused and beamed at Kirkpatrick.
‘After the watchword on the night our goodly king took Aberdeen.’
‘Very apt and loyal,’ growled Kirkpatrick dryly, ‘but of little help.’
‘I named it Agnes,’ Pegy went on, almost to himself, ‘after my wife.’
He paused again, before bellowing a long string of instructions which sent men scurrying. Then he hammered a meaty fist on the sterncastle.
‘She was also a wallowing sow who could not be made to move her useless fat arse,’ he roared at the top of his voice. Someone snickered.
Rossal’s quiet, calm voice cracked in like a slap on a plank.
‘Mantlets to the babord,’ he said and the black-robed figures sprang to life. Rossal smiled, almost sadly, at Hal.
‘Assume that this is not the Maryculter and not friendly,’ he said in French. ‘Brother Widikind, please to escort the lady to the safety of below and guard her well.’
The big German Templar blinked, paused uncertainly, and nodded, the forked ends of his black beard trembling with indignation. Doña Beatriz, with a slight smile, swayed to the companionway that led below, the dark Piculph at her back.
‘That’s a tangle of “nots” ye have there, Brother,’ Sim said, unwrapping his swaddled bundle and bringing the bairn – a great steel-bowed arbalest – into the daylight. ‘I hope you are mistook.’
Unlikely, Hal thought. If Pegy Balgownie could not tell the Maryculter from any other cog, then the reverse held true – yet no ship would flaunt that Beauseant banner of the heretic Templars unless it knew at whom it was waving.
‘And if it is not the Maryculter,’ Kirkpatrick finished, after Hal had hoiked this up for everyone to consider, ‘then it is flying a false flag in order to gull us anyway.’
‘Which means it expected us and was lying in wait,’ Hal added and the rest was unspoken: we have a traitor, who might even be aboard. He met the eyes of Kirkpatrick and Rossal, saw the acknowledgement in them – saw, too, a lack of surprise that thrilled anger into him; this pair have knowledge kept from me, he thought bitterly. As if this old dog was not capable of learning the new trick of them, or did not matter in the scheme of it.
Kirkpatrick, oblivious to Hal’s bile, sucked a whistle through his teeth and grinned at Sim.
‘Bigod, man, that is a fearsome weapon you have. Sma’ wonder the Pope has banned it.’
‘Holy Faithers has scorned this, our king, the Kingdom an’ these Templars,’ Sim growled back. ‘Seems to me like every wee priest who sticks on yon fancy hat wants to put a mock on something.’
‘Lord bless and keep ye,’ Kirkpatrick answered, signing the cross over Sim, but it was hard to tell whether it was in chastisement or admiration, while his wry smile did not help.
‘God be praised,’ Sim answered, checking that the winding mechanism of his fearsome beast was oiled and smooth.
‘For ever and ever.’
The rote reply went almost unnoticed, while Sim worked methodically.
‘Are you fit for this?’ Hal asked and felt a fool when Sim looked at him and frowned, all trace of sickness burned away by the fire of imminent action. He said nothing, but his look hurled the same question back and Hal was not so sure he could answer it truthfully.
‘Aye til the fore,’ Sim said suddenly, grinning at him, and Hal felt the rush of years, like a whirl of leaves in a high wind. Still alive – the greeting that they had given one another as they staggered, amazed at the miracle of it, out of other lethal affairs.
Aye til the fore. The names of all the others who had fought reared up in his head and he wondered where they were – those he had last seen alive, at least. Sore Davey and Mouse; Chirnside Rowan and Jeannie’s Tam and a handful of others. Auld men, he thought, like me. If they lived yet.
Then he thought of Dog Boy and wondered where he was and if he was safe.
Herdmanston, Lothian
At the same moment …
Dog Boy could not help glancing behind him every other minute, for the sick lure of the Herdmanston remains would not stop itching a spot between his shoulderblades.
There, high in that arched folly of a gaping window, was where he had shinned down in the dark and sneaked off to find help when the tower was besieged by the Earl of Buchan and Patrick, the son of the March Earl. Now that same Patrick had taken the title and Dog Boy wondered if the ruin of his face, scalded by boiling water during the assault, was still as sorry a sight as the tower, gawping at the rain, draped with misery and withered grass.
There was where he had sneaked through Herdmanston’s garth, stumbling over the bodies of his slaughtered deerhounds, but then he’d had to scale the barmkin wall and now it was more gap than drystane.
The wee chapel was sound enough and had managed to take some of Jamie Douglas’s riders in shelter from the rain, though they had crept in, crossing themselves piously and apologetically to the blind-eyed Magdalene and the recumbent weathered stone tombs in which mouldered Hal’s parents. Beyond the chapel stood the solid haloed cross that marked where Hal’s wife and son lay buried; it was there, Dog Boy recalled, that the besiegers had assembled their springald, whose bolts had burst in the yett …
‘See anything?’
Dog Boy started guiltily at the voice, turning to see Jamie Douglas approach with his lithe, purposeful stride. He shook his head automatically.
‘Be a better view on the tower,’ he said and Jamie nodded, grinning.
‘I heard that you scrauchled down it once. You would be hard put to shin back up now, though, despite the handholds nature has provided.’
He peeled off his bascinet and shoved the maille coif back off his head like a hood, peering into the dying mirk of a wet day.
‘They are there,’ he growled. ‘I can feel them and smell them, like dung on my shoes.’
Dog Boy had no doubt that the Black was right, for the man could spy English in a mile round and only his hate was greater than his uncanny ability. Besides, they had seen a scatter of mounted men an hour before and only natural caution on both sides had kept them apart.
‘Gules semy of crosses paty and a chevron argent,’ Jamie intoned darkly and Dog Boy, though he spoke no French, knew that Jamie was reeling off the fancy words for the banner they had spotted: red, covered with wee white crosses and with a big white chevron.
Sir Hal had the same skill, but he would have known whom the banner belonged to; wisely, Dog Boy did not voice this to the scowl of Jamie Douglas.
‘It is not the Earl of March,’ Jamie said, almost to himself. ‘His device is a rare conceit involving a lion rampant to remind everyone that Patrick of Dunbar thinks himself regal enough to be considered for the throne, like his da before him.’
He scrubbed his dark hair with confusion.
‘So who is it?’
‘No matter,’ Dog Boy answered. ‘They are unlikely to be friendly to us this close to Dunbar, for if Edward the Plantagenet stops of a sudden, wee Earl Patrick will be sticking his biled face up the royal arse.’
Jamie gave a harsh chuckle and clapped Dog Boy on the shoulder.
‘Little room up there,’ he answered. ‘Despensers an’ Gascon relations of Gaveston are elbowing for space.’
There was a long pause while the curlews wheeped in a rain-sodden sky. Dog Boy saw the ruin of fields round him, ones he remembered thick with oats and barley, studded with sheep. Sir Hal would be sore hurt to see his demesne in such a state, he thought.
Not that the rest of the land was better; Dog Boy had seen nothing but fields of rot all spring, for the early harvest had been ruined by rain and now folk were slaughtering livestock they could not feed. When all that was gone, starvation would set in and the rising leprous heat was now withering late-planted crops and forage. Coupled with the war that was clearly coming, it would be a harsh year for the Kingdom, where folk would eat grass.
It did not help that he was part of their bad luck – Jamie Douglas was raiding, with fast wee pack ponies and a couple of lumbering carts to load cut fodder and grain bags, his men all mounted to herd kine and sheep; the army slinking round Stirling like wolves on a kill needed a lot of feeding.
They had torn and scorched furrows back and forth across the Lothians, concentrating on the holdings of those they knew still supported the enemy. Then they had been chased by mounted men, whom they presumed came from Dirleton or Dunbar and had been running now for three days; Jamie Douglas did not like to run, Dog Boy thought, even when it was prudent.
‘I would like to ken them better,’ Jamie Douglas said and Dog Boy jerked out of his revery to look at him, and then followed the Black’s steady, meaningful stare. The top of Herdmanston tower.
‘Can you do it?’ Jamie demanded and Dog Boy grinned at him, sharp-toothed as any wolf.
‘Bigod, does a wee hound go three-legged at a tree? I came down it once, so I can get up it as well.’
Nor far away, Addaf took a knee and rubbed his grizzled chin. He knew there were riders somewhere ahead of him, but he could not be sure what they were – the Scots put everyone they could on tough, half-wild ponies, so it was more than likely just a band of ragged-arsed raiders, for he was sure he had seen scrubby little black cattle with them.
Yet the thought that they might be men with maille and lances made him uneasy and he did not like the feeling, not least because he was called Addaf Hen these days, which meant both old and respected for the cunning and knowledge it brought. Henaint ni ddaw ei hunan – old age does not come by itself, he thought, which is a comfort every time I climb up off my aching knees.
He looked round at his own men, a long hundred of whey-faced and grey-grim Welsh archers. Well they might look like corpses, he thought moodily, which was no more than they deserved for drinking the soured wine given to them to wash the heads of their own horses.
Mixed with water and applied carefully, it repelled the vicious flies and soothed their bites – Addaf’s own little mare had a forehead of fat lumps from them – but drink, no matter how foul, was never to be wasted by a good Welshman on sluicing a horse.
So they had swallowed it down and now groaned and shat noxiously down their legs and over their horses, for Addaf, viciously, would not let them rest. Scout the area, he had been told, and so that is what he forced them to do, even though the task was tedious. The point of it was to deter the Scotch from scouring it clean of anything that might help the King’s army when it arrived.
Small good the drink had done them. Now they had soiled the good coloured tabards issued by Sir Thomas Berkeley, complete with his badge on the breast; they would wipe their arses with the banner, too, Addaf was sure, if they got the chance. Sir Thomas would not like that – but Sir Thomas was not within a hundred miles of this hot, damp, flyblown, God-cursed place.
Hwyel came to his elbow, silent and narrow-eyed, taking a knee with a grunt that let Addaf know his innards stabbed him. He spared the man a glance, taking in the dark, close-cropped beard and the filth-grimed lines; he remembered the man when he had been young and colt-eager, full of irrepressible humour. It had been a long time since he had heard Hwyel laugh and the men now called him Hwyel Cuchiog – the Frowning.
‘Dduw bod ‘n foliannus,’ he grunted – God be praised. Addaf stared unpityingly into his jaundiced eyes and gave him the rote response.
‘In ois oisou.’ For ever and ever.
‘Now that we know that enemies of Christ do not inhabit us,’ Addaf went on wryly in a fluid cough of Welsh, ‘save for the devils in your belly, have you any thoughts on who might be ahead of us and, more to the point, where?’
‘None,’ Hwyel growled back. ‘Does it matter? If we go to them, there they will be and we can shoot them to ruin, same as ever, Mydr ap Mydvydd, for we are better than they.’
Mydr ap Mydvydd. Aim the Aimer was another of Addaf’s hard-earned names, though the truth of that these days was less than honest, since Addaf’s eyes were not what they had once been and he was sure folk knew it but stayed quiet, out of deference.
He half turned, glancing at the sour sky and then at the men waiting patiently beside their horses; he heard one retch and saw Lowarch suddenly thrust the reins to his neighbour and dart off, half squatting and moaning even as he moved.
Then Y Crach moved to him like a scowl, his roseate face flaring in the leprous heat.
‘Ye needs must punish these,’ he said in his singsong way and now Addaf matched him for frowns. Y Crach – Scab – was thin and wiry, a good archer but with no great muscle on him. Some said he had been a priest, licked by a sickness known to be a killer, yet he had survived untouched but for his plaguey face and was convinced the Hand of God was in it. Now he was hot for the Lord and hotter still to do His work against the heathen Scotch, but it made him careless of hierarchy.
‘Bedd a wna bawb yn gydradd,’ Addaf answered, pointedly dismissive – the grave makes everyone equal. Y Crach bristled and Hwyel laughed, but then winced as another fierce reminder of his transgression rippled his bowels.
‘Well, are we after fighting, or can we go home?’ he asked and Addaf cursed him for cutting to the core of matters. Of course they could not go home, even if they had one, without having done what they had been told to do. They were now in the retinue of the Berkeleys and, even if Sir Thomas was not here, his son Maurice was, fretting about his sick wife back in England and unlikely to be consoled by failure.
Addaf looked pointedly at Y Crach until the man took the hint and went away. Then he levered himself up.
Hwyel rose up with Addaf, taking in the silver and iron look of the man, the hump of muscle on one shoulder that made him look like a crookback. Hwyel had been with Addaf for seven years of hard life and killing and knew it had infected his leader with a disease which had driven out joy.
He wondered what Addaf had once been like, in the part long burned away by war. For a moment, he remembered his own younger self and grinned as Addaf turned to him.
‘We will make them dance, we will make them kick,’ he said, ‘with a clothyard shaft and a crooked stick.’
The echo of the boy he had been fell like dull pewter between them; Addaf’s gaze was sour.
‘Teg edrych tuag adref,’ he answered – it is good to think of home. Which was a lie for him, who had not thought of his little patch, two brothers and mam in many a long year.
Mam will be dead and gone, he thought with a sudden, vicious wrench of all that he had abandoned. Brothers, too, likely … and if they live yet it will no longer be my patch, but will belong to them now and the babanod they have made who grew up into it after them. No one there would know me if I walked into the centre of the place.
He shook it all off like a dog from water and went rolling away on bad knees.
Hwyel watched Addaf’s lumpen back as he hirpled away towards the others, barking orders; he wondered how long it would take and what he must endure to become as black-avowed as him.
An hour later, he found out.
Irish Sea
At the same moment …
Niall Silkie skinned down from the mast-nest on a tarred rope, swinging on to the sterncastle like some long-armed babery. He landed lightly, almost on the toes of the scowling Pegy Balgownie.
‘It is my sure opeenion’, he said, ‘that yon weirman weltering astern is afire.’
Pegy blinked and Hal saw the bewilderment in Rossal’s eyes.
‘He says the warship astern of us is burning.’
‘There’s after being a wheen o’ smoke,’ Niall Silkie persisted and Pegy stroked his beard, scowling at Rossal.
‘Perhaps it really is the other ship, this Maryculter,’ de Grafton offered in French, his spade-bearded face heavy with concern. ‘In which case, we must help, surely, if only to discover why it is afire and who attacked it.’
‘A ruse,’ Kirkpatrick countered, tension thickening his Braid Scots. ‘Designed to play on the chivalry of your graces … aw, it is creishie wi’ cunning, for they must ken that we have proper Knights of the Order here, who once wore the white mantle rather than the grey of lesser lights. They will rely on your nobility and honour blinding you, sirs, whether you are disbanded or no’.’
Rossal’s brow lashed itself with frowns and Pegy, sensing the balance, glanced at the filling sail, then at the fog bank.
‘The wind is up a notch. Two nicks on the steerin’ oar to farans and we can be in the haar and vanished like wraiths, my lord.’
Somhairl, looking up through the castle planks at the booted feet and able to hear every word, leaned expectantly on the starboard-quarter tiller, bunching his muscles to turn the ship at Pegy’s order. Men waited with coiled rope to lend their muscle to haul the unwieldy vessel quickly on to a new course; the moment clung and sucked the breath away.
Then Rossal shifted.
‘Bring in your sail, captain,’ he said firmly. ‘We will await the arrival of this burning vessel.’
Kirkpatrick made a disgusted growl in the back of his throat and Pegy, after a short pause, nodded and bawled out the orders; men sprang to obey and the Bon Accord balked and then started to roll and pitch. Sim gagged and stumbled to the thwarts.
‘Leave a gap in the mantlets,’ de Villers called out, almost joyously, ‘so our comrade can lose his belly over the side in peace.’
Below, Widikind heard the laughter and began to take his leave of Doña Beatriz, offering her a stiff little bow from the neck.
‘Are you afraid?’
He heard her voice, light and musical, the French tinged with a delicious accent; his eyebrows went up at the question.
‘If there is to be a fight, the Lord will hold His Hand over me – or He will lift me up and I will be gathered into His Grace. What is to fear?’
Her laugh was a trill and she unloosed the net of pearls, signalling Piculph to help; Widikind found the sight of the Moor-dark man running his fingers through her hair to tease the net free disturbing and uncomfortable.
‘I meant of me,’ she replied and he blinked, then recovered himself.
‘We believe it is a dangerous thing for any religious to look too much upon the face of a woman.’ He recited from memory the old catechism. ‘The Knighthood of Jesus Christ should avoid, at all costs, the company of women, by which men have perished many times.’
‘The Rule of Benedict,’ she answered, which astonished him; she saw it and smiled sweetly. ‘Though I remember the Rule as being that the Knighthood of Jesus Christ avoid, at all costs, the embraces of women rather than simply the company.’
Widikind felt himself prickle with an awkward heat and could not speak.
‘My brother is of the Order of Alcántara, whose knights have taken over your holdings in Castile,’ she went on. ‘He is, as are they all, Cistercian in his rulings and he says that all Templar Knights follow the Benedictine belief, which is altogether too harsh. He says you – when you were not a heretic, pardon me, Brother – slept in shoes, shirt and hose in order to avoid the sin of being catamites to each other. Do you still hold to that, Brother, even though your Order is dissolved?’
Widikind’s mouth opened and closed and he was aware of how stupid he must look, while his French grew thick with his Cologne accent, so that it sounded crow-harsh to his own ears.
‘Not seemly,’ he managed at last. ‘This talk. I must join my brethren. Battle.’
She waved a languid hand and slapped Piculph’s wrist as he tugged too hard.
‘La, sir, this is the slowest pursuit since Aesop’s Tortoise. There will be no fighting for an hour or more and none at all unless we are foolish enough to allow it. Which is worse?’
The last question sent Widikind reeling and he gaped, flustered and feeling his face flame.
‘Worse?’
‘Lying with men or with women? Which is worse for your Order … former Order?’
Widikind was staggering now, unable to think clearly or protest further. He wanted to turn and go, he wanted to spit out that all monastic life was a war against passions which women were ill equipped to resist. But he was rooted and saw, with the last edge of his eyes not locked like a stoat-fixed rabbit on the lady’s face, the slight mocking sneer on the lips of the Moor.
‘Men,’ he managed to gasp and Doña Beatriz snapped her fingers, a sharp sound that seemed to cut the strings that fixed Widikind to her face; he half fell, and then righted himself and, appalled, straightened. He felt the sweat roll down his back and forehead.
‘So,’ she said, softly vicious. ‘You avoid speaking or having contact with my sex, sir, because the Rule of Benedict considers the embrace of women to be … dangerous.’
She leaned forward, her beauty like a blade.
‘Yet the embrace of men is worse,’ she concluded, light as the kiss of a razor on a cheek, ‘and you are happy to consort with them freely. I do not understand this. Perhaps you can enlighten me, since I am a mere woman?’
Widikind blinked and grew suddenly cold. This was the Eden serpent, for sure, and an added coil was the sly, sneering Moor at her back. But Widikind von Esbeck was of the Order, his grandfather had been Master in Germany and, even interdicted and abandoned by the Holy Father, he would not be afraid of evil …
‘As you say, lady, you are a mere woman. Filling you with such enlightenment would be like pouring fine wine into a filthy cup. A pointless waste.’
He nodded briefly, turned on the spot and fumbled his way up the steps and on to the deck, feeling the sudden breeze like balm; behind, he heard the soft chuckle of the Moor.
Doña Beatriz waited until his shadow was gone.
‘Typical,’ she murmured, ‘and revealing. There is steel in these Knights of Christ, but a waft of perfume and a girlish laugh unmans them easily enough.’
She turned to smile at Piculph.
‘He imagines I am Satan’s own daughter, with a Moorish imp as a servant – did you see how he stared at you? If you had brought out a forked tail he would not have been surprised.’
Piculph, who was a good French Christian and a serjeant in the Order of Alcántara, nodded, though his smile was a bland cabinet that hid his own secrets.
‘This Widikind and his so-called brethren were once Templar Knights, the wearers of white. You should be wary of thinking them the same as those grey-clad lay dogs you saw scampering away from Villasirga, señora.’
‘When the time comes,’ Doña Beatriz replied, ‘wile will win over weapon, Piculph.’
She heard the drumming of feet on the deck above, felt the lurch and sow-wallow of the ship and frowned.
‘We are slowing. Surely these fools are not about to fight. They do not even know how many enemies lie in wait on that boat.’
Piculph’s eyes narrowed and he folded the net of pearls neatly.
‘That is what I mean, señora. Fighting is what they do and they do not consider odds.’
Herdmanston
An hour later …
The odds, as Y Crach had declared, loudly and with relish, were perfect… . four carts, a scatter of sumpter ponies, a milling herd of long-horned black cattle and a handful of men, half-crouched with spears waving, clustered with desperate courage in front of the wagons.
Hwyel – the traitor, Addaf thought blackly – had agreed.
‘We will make them dance,’ he bawled out and Addaf saw the men who agreed, grinning and nodding between sick belches. Too many sick belches and more so than last time.
Reluctantly, Addaf signalled for his men to dismount, the younger ones grabbing handfuls of reins and dragging the horses away as the old hands slid easily into familiar ranks and heeled their bows, running the string up to the nock in a smooth movement.
Addaf looked at his own bowstave, the ribbon on the tip fluttering softly so that he knew the wind speed and direction. Twenty men oppose us, he thought, no more. Twenty and a handful of dogs for driving the kine – five to one he outnumbered them and one single volley would pin them to the turf.
So why was he so fretted? Because Y Crach seemed to have taken charge of this? He eyed the black ruin of the tower, the weathered cross and the battered chapel and did not like the omen of this place at all; his men, bows smarted and drooped to the ground, waited for the command that would lift the arrow points up, draw back the braided horsehair and silk string to the ear and release an iron sleet on the enemy.
There was a flurry from the spearmen then and heads turned from watching Addaf to anxiously scan the enemy, for everyone knew that the only hope for the rebel Scotch was to run at the archers instead of standing like a set mill. They did not want these shrieking caterans closing on them, with their rat-desperate bravery and sharpened edges.
But there was no frantic, screaming rush. Instead, bewilderingly, the front rank seemed to have melted away, scurrying for cover behind the carts, leaving the others to face the arrows. One of them, dunted by a hurrying shoulder, tilted and fell over, the spear falling. Another leaned slowly sideways as if drunk.
False. Addaf saw it the same time as everyone else. A front rank of men, now under cover, had hidden the truth of hastily made dummies of lashed crosspoles and twisted grass, capped with a helmet, draped with a tunic.
False.
Even as it rang in him like a bell, he heard the savage shrieking yell, that blood-chiller the archers knew so well.
Then, behind them, the ground drummed with the mad gallop of garrons, every one with a nightmare of wet-mouthed savagery wielding that wicked Jeddart staff, with blade and spear and dragging hook.
And in front, wild dags of black hair flying, bearded face twisted in a snarl of anger and utter hate, a rider swung a hooked axe in one fist, split the skull of young Daiwyn and scarcely seemed to notice.
Addaf did not know who it was, only what it was. It was time to be somewhere else and in a running hurry.
Irish Sea
At the same moment …
It is, Niall Silkie declared in a shrill yell from the nest, showing a deal of smoke from the sterncastle. And it has lost its flag for another, a red horsehoe.
The cog was so close that Hal and everyone else could see that for themselves, peering out from behind the hastily lashed mantlets that provided cover from arrows. A thread of smoke and a red flag with a downward curve, like a droop of moustache.
Pegy went red-faced and furious then, bawling and screaming orders that sent men lurching at ropes; the sail banged down and filled, heaving the Bon Accord ponderously forward. Others of the crew fetched out long knives and two near-identical brothers, copper-haired and wiry, sprang up to the sterncastle, one with a bow, the other with arrows.
‘Not a horseshoe,’ Pegy growled at the grim assembly beside him. ‘A crab.’
He managed a mirthless smile at the anxious faces round him.
‘A wee jest on his name. Jack Crabbe was yin o’ Red Rover’s better captains afore the Rover embraced the Kingdom’s cause. Now Jack Crabbe’s ship, the Marrot, is a skulking moudiewart in the service of any who will pay – or more likely his own self.’
‘Hardly his own, I fancy,’ Rossal answered in steady, unaffected French. ‘He is not here by happenchance, flying a banner of the Order.’
He was not, Hal thought, and the thread of smoke nagged at him while the brothers, Angus and Donald, argued about who should shoot first.
‘The range is too great,’ Angus declared. ‘Give it to me – I have the muscle for the work.’
‘You? Ye couldna hit a bull’s erse if ye clung to its tail.’
‘In the name o’ Christ an’ all His bliddy saints – God forgive me – will yin o’ ye shoot.’
Pegy’s exasperated bellow made everyone wince, but Donald drew back until the bow creaked protest, then almost flung the arrow from him. It splashed a score of feet short.
‘Ye see? Ye bummlin fruster – wait until she closes.’
The brothers scowled at each other, but Hal had finally worked out what the smoke was and the chill of it tumbled the words from him like frost.
‘They will not close, nor have need to. They will fire off that engine they have up the sharp end and drop carcasses on us until we burn.’
‘Christ’s Blood.’
The words were out of Rossal’s mouth before he could stop them and he crossed himself at once and fervently offered penance for his sin at the first opportunity. Kirkpatrick grunted out a laugh at Hal’s elbow.
‘I hope you have the chance,’ he added and then glanced at the sail and the fog bank; he noted wryly that the more wind there was shoving the ship, the more the fog bank receded in front of them. It was a grim humour folk had come to expect from Kirkpatrick, but the rasp of it was a grate on the nerves for all that.
There was a dull thud of release, a deeper burst of smoke and a brief flowering of red. Then a tailed star shot up, trailing an arc across to them; it hit the water with a gout of sizzle and splash.
‘In the name of Christ,’ muttered Angus. ‘Yon’s a bad sight – but I am pleasured to see that they can shoot no better than you, brother.’
‘A warning,’ de Villers declared, adjusting the fold of his maille coif so that it covered all of the lower part of his face. ‘This Crabbe does not want us burned to the waterline. He knows what we carry.’
Yet again unspoken words hung above them like a corpse from a gibbet: they had a traitor.
Painfully, the pursuing ship overhauled them, for all Pegy’s bawling and the frantic bucket chain soaking the sail to garner more wind, for all Somhairl’s muscled skill at tillering the bulky cog to suck up the last puff.
Another star trailed smoke out and this time the gout of steam and the splash were far closer. Hal saw Sim climb to the forecastle, stick a foot in the stirrup of the arbalest and begin to wind it; he wanted to call out for the auld fool to watch his white pow, but smiled at himself, standing half-naked and ill-armed and almost as ancient.
‘They want us to heave to,’ Niall bawled from his mast-nest.
‘Signal them to eat shite,’ Pegy howled back and men laughed, though it was mirthless and tied with tension like a harsh twist of cord. Angus did his best to obey, baring his buttocks and pretending to eat the contents, so that the men laughed, harder and more shrill.
Hal could now see small figures on the other ship, using iron rods to carefully lift the burning ball of oil-soaked withies; it was so like the ribs of some beast that men called it a carcass. Drop it, he wished wildly; if you roll yon on your own deck there may be a chance for us this day.
He looked at the sail and then over his shoulder; the fog bank was a cable length away and he groaned – he knew that the pursuers could not risk them escaping in the haar and that this shot would be for a hit. They were close enough that they might actually manage it, too.
Rossal and the others knew it; knew also that the target would be the huddle of black-robed men on the sterncastle, so clearly the ones who mattered that they might as well have waved their own Beauseant banner.
‘Away,’ Rossal said gently. ‘If you value your lives.’
At the same time, Pegy hammered his feet on the deck in a mad dance to signal Somhairl, bellowing at him to heel over hard to farans, to put the enemy off their aim.
Somhairl was leaning hard on the tiller, obediently turning the heavy ship to starboard, when the world whirled from behind him and blasted him to blackness. Uncontrolled, the tiller waved and the cog floundered.
Pegy felt it, yelled out furiously and men turned from their tasks to see, amid the sudden flutter of men spilling from the sterncastle, the slumped form of the Red Shadow; at once Donald and Angus sprang to the tiller and strained, cursing.
‘Dunted,’ Kirkpatrick said, kneeling by the slumped form of the big Islesman. ‘There, ahint the ear. Bigod, it is as well his braid took the brunt, else he would be standing before his Maker.’
A blow, Hal thought, designed to kill, not just to lay the man out for a while. He and Kirkpatrick exchanged glances, each knowing the thoughts of the other at once, from long association; the traitor was here, on board. Hal’s eyes flitted from sailor to black-clad knight; de Villers met his stare and then turned away, while de Grafton laid his shoulder to the tiller and helped the straining brothers. It could have been anyone in the shadows under the sterncastle, Hal thought bitterly.
‘Brace,’ bawled Pegy and the threat of the carcass scorched back on them.
Up on the forecastle, Sim had loaded and rested the arbalest on the merlon, squinting at his target. Bigod, age is a terrible thing, he thought, for I can scarce see more than a blur.
But a blur was fine, provided he could tell man from mast. He shot and the deep whung of the release brought heads round.
Up on the forecastle of the Marrot, Jack Crabbe’s expensively hired ingéniateur studied the roll of the wave, waiting for the second just before it started on the rise. He was a Gascon expert, was Ferenc Lop, even if shooting a mangonel from a moving ship was a new experience and he had, he was pleased to see, mastered it as he had mastered everything else to do with engines.
His hand was up and men watched for the cutting swathe of it, the signal to release. The bird-wing whirr of the crossbow bolt took them by surprise and they recoiled from it, the one with the release rope among them. The latch clicked, the mangonel arm flung forward – just as Ferenc slammed back into it, pinned through the chest.
The power of the muscular mangonel ripped him forward and sent him over the side in a bloody whirl of arms and legs. The carcass, balked out of the spoon, shot sideways, ploughed a burning furrow through the nearest men, spun off the castle and hissed into the sail, where it clung for a moment, before dropping to the deck and rolling a trail of sputtering fire, ponderous as a blazing snail. Flames and smoke shot up, broiled with screams.
Over on the Bon Accord, men stared in awe as the Marrot veered, the smoke obscuring her and the flames clearly leaping up the sail. They turned to where Sim was winding the arbalest, elbows working like two mad fiddlers, and broke into howls of delight. Sim affected nonchalance, shot one more bolt into the smoke, and slithered down to the deck as the first witch-fingers of comforting haar enveloped him.
‘Christ betimes,’ Kirkpatrick declared, beaming, ‘as fine a shot as any by a man half your age.’
‘Aye, aye,’ Sim acknowledged easily, pulling out a rag to clean the steel-bowed arbalest as the crew crowded in to admire it and him. It was only later and only to Hal that he admitted he had been aiming at what he thought was Jack Crabbe – a span of hands to the left of the man he hit.
Doña Beatriz stood, apart from the delight and shadowed by Piculph, watching Pegy and the two stupid brothers attending to the giant Islesman. She was frowning at what she had seen done to him and about the man who had done it, wondering how best to use the knowledge to her advantage.
Herdmanston
Two hours later …
They came up, fox wary and stepping in crouched, swinging half-circles, arrows nocked on smarted bows, heedless of the rain and what that would do to strings.
Addaf knew the Scotch would be gone and his lungs burned from the long run, a frantic hare-leap of panic amid the scattering of their own horses. Now, on foot, they padded back like slinking hounds, for Addaf had lost forty-five men, all the horses and a deal of dignity, which trailed in shreds behind him with the mutters of his men.
They had recovered four horses so far and found all their missing men, though it did them little good: most were dead and at least nine had their right hand or more missing and had died of the blood loss or the horror of it happening. Taken alive, everyone saw, and badly handled.
Five were alive, but none of them would see day’s end. They had used their one good hand and teeth and any thonging or laces they could find to tie off the raw stumps so that the blood did not pump out of them. But they had lost too much and Addaf ordered the bindings cut, to let them slip into the mercy of a long sleep as they lay in sluggish red tarns.
He was aware of Y Crach as a feverish heat at one side of him, but the man – wisely for once – kept silent round him; yet, when Addaf looked, he was head to head with others, who were nodding and scowling.
Addaf had not time for it. He knelt at Hywel’s side, seeing the grey face and the blued lips, the slantwise horror of his severed forearm.
‘No time, the man said,’ Hywel echoed in a soft, twisted wheeze, ‘for niceties. Like taking off our thumbs. The other one, the one called Dog Boy, said his leader would be hard. Hates archers above all his enemies, he said. Hates Welsh more than he hates English, for the Welsh should know better than to serve English Edward.’
Hywel gripped Addaf’s arm hard with the last bloody-fingered hand he had, so that the cloth bunched between his knuckles.
‘Dog Boy, he said he was. Said if any of us lived we should tell the others, all the Welsh, that they are on the wrong side.’
‘The right side is the one that wins,’ Addaf replied, looking into the misting eyes.
‘The other one lashed our right hands with ropes, had a man hold us and another haul our arms out. Then he went down the line of us with his axe. Like he was coppicing …’
‘Who? Who did this? This Dog Boy?’
Hywel was more out than in this world, Addaf realized, but his eyelids flickered and his voice was a last breath.
‘Douglas,’ he said, so slight that Addaf had to put his ear to the lips. ‘The Black himself.’
Then, suddenly, in a clear, strong voice with laughing in it, he said: ‘We will make them dance, we will make them kick …’
Addaf closed the eyes.
‘Bedd a wna bawb yn gydradd,’ he said grimly. The grave makes everyone equal.
ISABEL
O God, whose charity is more painful than Your harshness. In all the years since his father’s death in Greyfriars, the new lord of Badenoch has never visited, simply paid Malise his stipend for guarding me – as his Comyn father did before – on behalf of his kin, my long-dead husband. Yet, Lord, You brought Badenoch to the Hog Tower this year, accompanied by a simpering Malise, anxious for his quarterlies to be continued. A little mirror of his murdered father, this new Badenoch, freckled, red-haired and bantam. He looked round at my straw-strewn stone niche, the window that is a door and the cage beyond it. Then he looked me up and down and slowly wondered at my state and age, not having realized it before. Not quite the Hoor o’ Babylon, wee Johnnie, I told him and watched how prettily he pinked. He ordered my whim for pots and paints and women’s essentials ‘in remembrance of the man who spared me’ – but confirmed Malise in the constant caring of me. The man who spared wee Badenoch was Hal, on that day in Greyfriars when this frowning little lord was a lad, brought to say last farewells to his murdered da to find the killers returned to make sure of it. Kirkpatrick would have done for him, save for my Hal; Malise fled and young Badenoch clearly remembered it, for his look flushed Bellejambe to the roots of his pewter hair. Later, Malise took his revenge with me and, as always, lost more than he gave. I suffered his grunting, futile foulness and learned that Badenoch did not come only to see me, but to put Berwick in order; the English are coming in midsummer, to put an end to Bruce. You may dream of it, I told Malise, and, for once, he had no strength left to punish me. So a victory for endurance – let us hope, O Lord, that this is not a beguilement of empty hope for the Kingdom.
CHAPTER FIVE
Westminster
Feast of St George, April 1314
The Pope was dead and the shiver of it added to the cold ache in the bones. Drip and ache, that was Easter, thought Edward, every miserable cunny-rotted day of it, when the damp crept up your back and no amount of stoked fire could keep the wind from looping in and up your bowels until you coughed and shat hedgepigs.
Like Father. He threw that thought from him, as he always did when it crept in like a mangy dog seeking shelter. Shitting his life down his leg; for all his strength and longevity brought low by a foul humour up the arse, king or no.
Death did not care for rank. The Pope had found that, just as Jacques de Molay had promised from his pyre. Edward, even as the delicious chill of it goosed his flesh, could not help the hug of glee that he was not his father-in-law, the King of France, who had also been cursed in the same breath.
Still, there was room enough for Edward to wonder if his own treatment of the Order of Poor Knights had inherited a waft of that smoke-black shriek from de Molay. He had been light on the Templars, but followed the Pope’s edict and handed their forfeited holdings – well, most of them – to the Hospitallers. Much good may it do them, he thought, though it does me very little for I cannot see the Order of St John coming to my army. The Templars made that mistake by joining my father’s army and the lesson in it is plain enough for a blind man to see.
He wished someone would come to his army, all the same.
‘Who has not responded?’ he demanded and de Valence made a show of consulting the roll, squinting at it in the bright glow of wax candle which haloed the small group in the dim room. No one was fooled; everyone there, the King included, knew he could recite it from memory.
Lancaster, Arundel, Warwick, Oxford, Surrey: the greatest earls of his realm. Plus Sir Henry Percy, bastion of the north.
‘We issued summons to all earls and some eighty magnates of the realm to prepare for war with the Scots,’ de Valence pointed out, as if to say that these six were nothing at all. Edward shifted in his seat, scowling and aching.
Summons to eighty magnates and every earl – even his 13-year-old half-brother, Thomas, Earl of Norfolk – not to mention Ulster and personal, royal-sealed letters to twenty-five rag-arsed Irish chieftains. But the realm’s five most powerful and the north’s shining star, Percy, had all refused and the gall of it scourged him almost out of his seat.
‘When we defeat Bruce, my liege, all matters will be resolved,’ de Valence went on, hastily, as if he sensed the withering hope of the King. ‘We will have twenty thousand men, including three thousand Welsh, at Berwick by this time next month, even without these foresworn lords.’
With smiths and carpenters, miners and ingéniateurs, ships to transport five siege engines and the means to construct an entire windmill sufficient to grind corn for the army. Plus horses – a great mass of horses.
Edward thought sourly of the man who had just left, elegantly dressed, with a plump face that had yet to settle into anything resembling features. But Antonio di Pessagno, the Genoese mercantiler who was as seeming bland as a fresh-laid egg, held the realm of England in his fat, ringed hand, for it was his negotiated loans which were paying for the Invasion.
Edward did not like Pessagno, but the Ordainers – Lancaster, Warwick and the other barons who tried to force him into their way – had banished his old favourites, the Frescobaldi, so he had no choice but to turn to the Genoese. The same earls who ignored him now, Edward brooded, feeling the long, slow burn of anger at that. The same who had contrived in the death of my Gaveston …
‘They claim’, he rasped suddenly, ‘what reasons for refusing my summons to defend the realm?’
‘That they did not sanction the campaign.’
The answer was a smooth knife-edge that cut de Valence off before he could speak. Hugh Despenser, Earl of Winchester, leaned a little into the honeyed light.
‘They say you are in breach of the Ordinances,’ he added with a feral smile.
No one spoke, or had to. They all knew the King had deliberately manipulated the affair so that he breached the imposed Ordinances by declaring a campaign against the Scots without the approval of the opposing barons. Honour dictated they should defend the realm, no matter what – but if they agreed, then they supported the King’s right to make war on his own, undermining everything they had worked for. Their refusal, however, implied that they were prepared to let the Scots mauraud unchecked over the realm and that did no good to their Ordinance cause.
They were damned if they did and condemned if they didn’t, so the King won either way, though he would have preferred to have them give in and send their levies. Still, it was a win all the same and, since Despenser had suggested the idea, he basked in the approval of the tall, droop-eyed Edward while the likes of de Valence and others could only scowl at the favour.
Yet Edward was no fool; Despenser was not a war leader and de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, most assuredly was. Better yet, the Earl hated Lancaster for having seized Gaveston from his custody and executing him out of hand and Edward trusted the loyalty of revenge.
Edward leaned back, well satisfied. All he had to do was march north, to where this upstart Bruce had finally bound himself to a siege at Stirling and could not refuse battle without losing face with his own barons.
‘Bring the usurper to battle, defeat him and we win all – roll the main, nobiles. Roll the main.’
Roll the main, de Valence thought as the approving murmurs wavered the candle flame in a soft patting like mouse paws massaging the royal ego. But the other side of that dice game was to throw out and lose.
That is why they call it Hazard, he thought.
Crunia, Kingdom of Castile
Feast of St James the Less, May 1314
The port was white and pink and grey, hugged by brown land studded with dusty green pines and cypress – and everywhere the sea, deep green and leaden grey, scarred with thin white crests and forested with swaying masts. Light flitted over it like a bird.
Crunia was the port of pilgrims, those who had wearily travelled from Canterbury down through France and English Gascony into Aragon and Castile and could not face the journey back the same way. The rich, or fortunate beggars, would take ship back to Gascony, or even all the way to England – the same ships which brought the lazy or infirm to walk the last little way to the shrine at Compostella and still claim a shell badge.
Hal stared with bewilderment at them, the halt and twisted, the fat and self-important, shrill beldames and sailors, those who thought they could fool God and those footsore and shining with the fervour of true penitents. He had never seen a foreign land and it made his head swim with a strange fear that Kirkpatrick noted with his sardonic twist of smile.
‘Can suck the air from you, can it not,’ he said gently and laid a steady hand on the tremble of one shoulder. Hal looked at him, remembering what he had learned of Kirkpatrick’s past in the land of Oc, fighting Cathars in a holy crusade. Oc was not so far from here, he thought, though he had trouble with the map of it in his head – trouble, too, with the realization that Kirkpatrick was the closest to a friend he had left other than Sim, who came rolling up the quayside as if summoned.
‘No’ very holy,’ Sim growled, staring at the huddled houses before kneeling and laying a hand flat on the cobbles. ‘Mark you, any land is fine after yon ship. Bigod, I can hardly walk straight on the dry.’
No one walked straight on the dry, but Hal tried not to turn and gawp as they helped unload the heavy, precious cargo into the carts they had hired, making it seem as anonymous as dust.
Everyone, pilgrim and prostitute, seemed moulded from another clay entirely, while the stalls were a Merlin’s cave of jeweller’s work and carpets, tableware worked in silver, glass and crystal, ironwork made like lace.
There were Moors, too, swarthy and robed, turbanned and flashing with teeth and earrings; Hal would not have been surprised to meet a dog-headed man, or a winged gryphon on a leash.
‘Are we stayin’ the night?’ demanded Sim. ‘I had a fancy to some comfort and a meat pie.’
‘Little comfort in this unholy town,’ Kirkpatrick answered grimly, ‘and you would boak at the content of such a pie, so it is best we shake this place off our shoes. We will be escorted by the Knights of Alcántara, no less, to a safe wee commanderie some way on the road to Villasirga.’
Hal had seen the Knights arrive, a score of finely mounted men sporting a strange, embellished green cross on their white robes – argent, a cross fleury vert, he translated, smiling, as he always did, at the memory of his father who had dinned heraldry into him.
The new Knights were all in maille from head to foot, with little round iron caps and sun-smacked faces that made them almost as dark as the trading Moors, at whom they scowled in an insult that would have had them skewered in Scotland.
‘They frown at everyone,’ Kirkpatrick answered, when Hal pointed this out, ‘save Doña Beatriz.’
It was true enough – the leader of the Knights bowed and fawned on the elegant, cool and sparkling lady, and then was presented to everyone who mattered as ‘el caballero Don Saluador’, followed by a long string of meaningless sounds which Kirkpatrick said was the man’s lineage. Don Saluador looked at everyone as if he had had Sim’s old hose shoved under his nose.
‘But they hate those ones even more than they hate the Moors,’ Kirkpatrick added, nodding towards a group of men shouldering arrogantly through the crowds. Dressed richly, they had faces as blank and haughty as the statues of saints and wore billowing white blazoned with a red cross which looked like a downward pointing dagger.
‘Fitchy,’ Hal said, still dizzy with the sights and smells of it all.
‘Just so,’ Kirkpatrick confirmed. ‘The cross fitchy of the Order of Santiago – the wee saint’s very own warriors. The Order of Alcántara is so new it squeaks and yon knights never let them forget it.’
‘You have it wrangwise,’ Sim answered, wiping the sweat from his face, and Kirkpatrick, scowling, turned to him.
‘There are others they hate even harder,’ Sim went on and nodded to where the black-robed former Templars walked, stiff-legged and ruffed as dogs, refusing to be anonymous or duck under the scorch of stares from all sides. For all that they sported no device, everyone knew them by their very look, though none dared call them out as heretics.
Christ betimes, Hal thought, the world is stuffed with God’s warrior monks, and it seems the only fighting they do is against each other.
By the time the carts were loaded and ready, the sun was brassed and high, the road crowded with pilgrims fresh from Mass and still in the mood to sing psalms along the dusty road, as if their piety increased with the level of noise they made.
The locals knew better and sneered, both at the singing of these lazy penitents and their foreigner stupidity at walking out in the midday heat. They did not sneer at the Knights of Alcántara, Hal noted, who were riding out in the midday heat with four carts and a motley of strange foreigners.
Rossal and the others took their leave of de Grafton, who had volunteered to stay with the Bon Accord, as if only he was capable of defending it; they needed the ship victualled and ready if they were to succeed, so it seemed sensible – but Hal saw Kirkpatrick frowning thoughtfully over it and wondered at that.
Beyond the port, the air was so clear that it seemed you could see every tree on the foothills that led to the dust-blue horizon etched against the gilding sky. The pilgrims rapidly ran out of enthusiasm for psalms and the column began to shed them like old skin, each one tottering into some panting shade and groaning.
‘Fine idea,’ Sim declared, mopping his streaming face. ‘If I was not perched on a cart, I would be seeking that same shade.’
‘You would not,’ Kirkpatrick answered grimly and jerked his chin to one side, where distant figures squatted, patient as stones.
‘Trailbaston and cut-throats,’ he said with a lopsided grin. ‘Waiting for dark and the passing of the fighting men to come down and snap up the tired and weary, like owls on mice.’
‘Christ betimes, they are robbing pilgrims,’ Sim said, outraged.
‘So they are – almost. The wee saint’s warriors are busy protecting the proper pilgrim route, the Way of St James. Since there are two roads to Santiago, it takes them all their time – though the northern route is used less these days, now that the Moors have been expelled from the road from Aragon to Castile.’
‘This is what happens when you try and cheat God,’ Hal added with a grin.
He had lost the humour in it by the time the day died in a blood and gold splendour, wiped from his lips by too much heat and dust, the ten different languages that made the psalms a babble, the quarrels that broke out on every halt, the stink that hung with them in the dust.
Hal was sharply aware that this was but a lick of what Crusaders had experienced here and that it was worse by far further south and east, in the Holy Land itself; his estimation of his father went up when he thought of him enduring this in the name of God. By the time they turned off the road and into a tree-shaded avenue, Hal was heartily sick of the Kingdom of Castile and the commanderie of St Felix was a blessed limewashed relief.
Stiff-legged, he climbed off the palfrey he had been given and had it removed by a silent figure, blank and shadowed as the dark which closed on them. Led by flickering torches, Hal and the others were escorted into a large room with a stout door to the right and a curtained archway to the left; there were tables and benches, fresh herbs and straw.
‘It is not much,’ said a smooth voice, the French accented heavily, ‘but it is what we use as bed and board.’
They turned to see a tall man with the Alcántara cross on a white camilis that accentuated the dark of his face and the neatly trimmed black beard; his smile was as dazzling as his robe and Doña Beatriz hung off his arm with a familiarity intended to raise the hackles of the black-robed Templars, even if it was only his sister.
‘I am Don Guillermo,’ he announced, raking them with his grin. ‘I assure you, this is really how we live – you see, we can be as austere as Benedictines. Up to a point.’
Rossal, unsmiling, bowed from the neck; the others followed and Hal saw the scowl scarring the face of the German.
‘Our thanks for your hospitality and escort. I will see to my charge before prayers.’
‘Of course,’ Guillermo answered smoothly. ‘Be assured, our best men guard those carts.’
‘I have no doubt of it,’ Rossal answered. He turned to look briefly at Kirkpatrick and then went out, trailed by de Villers. Sim stretched noisily and farted.
‘Not a bad lodging, mark you,’ he declared, glancing at the wall whose bare, rough whiteness was broken by a trellis of poles supporting a short walkway reached by an arched doorway. It was the height of two tall men from the floor.
‘A gallery for minstrels,’ he said and grinned. ‘Some entertainment later, eh, lads?’
In a commanderie of a religious Order? Hal looked at Kirkpatrick, who held the gaze for a moment, and then moved to the nearest door, which was beneath the gallery. It was clearly locked. The curtained archway on the other side of the room led to some steps and Kirkpatrick was sure they reached up to a belltower he had seen on the way in.
‘As neat a prison as any you will see,’ he offered to the returned Rossal, who nodded grimly, and then turned to the door he had been escorted through; the rattle of the locking bar was clear to everyone and he frowned.
‘Where is Brother Widikind?’
The Lothians
At the same time
They roared through the March, looting and burning and with no care now that they had rid themselves of the Welsh. Using fire, using blade, using lies and deceit, they harried the wee rickle of fields and cruck houses in Byres, Heriot, Ratho and Ladyset. They felled ramparts and broke wooden walls, ravaged the Pinkney stronghold at Ballencrieff and showed their faces to the frightened burghers of Haddington.
Fell and bloody were the riders of Black James Douglas, who gorged on fire and sword and pain and never seemed to have enough of it to drive out the hatred he felt for all that had been taken from him.
Then they came down on the weekly market at Seton, because that lord was firmly in the English camp and Black Jamie wanted him scorched for it. They rampaged through the screamers, scattering them with half-mocking snarls and a waved blade. There was little of fodder anywhere, Dog Boy noted, and Jamie nodded, pointing to the church.
‘You can rely on God to make sure of his tithe,’ he said, and bellowed at the others to be quick and to take only the peas and barley, the live chooks and the dead coneys.
They were good, too, careful when loading the stolen eggs and ignoring trinkets – well, in the main. Everyone took a little something, as a keepsake or a token for a woman somewhere, while a bolt of new cloth was blanket and cloak both on a bad night.
Jamie and Dog Boy rode up to the stout-walled tithe barn and Dog Boy skipped off the garron and kicked open the double doors; it was an echoing hall, bare even of mice, and Jamie’s eyebrows went up at that. At the nearby church, the door of it clearly barred from the inside, the priest stood outside, defiant chin raised.
‘The silver is buried,’ he said bitterly, ‘and you are ower late to this feast – others have beaten you.’
Jamie, leaning forward on the pommel, calm as you please, offered the man a smile and a lisping greeting in good Latin.
‘Father Peter,’ the priest replied, clearly unable to speak the tongue, which Dog Boy knew was common enough among parish priests, who understood only the rote of services and would not know Barabbas from Barnabas.
‘Your wealth is safe enough – silver-gilt chalice, is it?’ Jamie replied easily. ‘A pyx, of course – silver or ivory? A silver-gilt chrismatory, a thurible, three cruets and an osculatorium.’
Dog Boy turned to stare in wonder at Jamie, but the priest was unimpressed.
‘One cruet, for we are not rich here. And a pewter ciborium, which you forgot – but since this is the minimum furnishing for a house of God, as any learned man knows, I do not consider you to have the power of Seeing.’
‘God forbid,’ Dog Boy offered and everyone crossed themselves.
‘These others who came’, Jamie went on lightly, ‘were equally restrained, it appears, and only took fodder – unless you have also hidden the contents of your tithe barn.’
‘I wish it were so. They sought food only, as you do,’ the priest replied coldly. ‘Came out of Berwick, but were no skilled raiders, only poor folk starving in that place.’
‘Berwick …’
Dog Boy knew why Jamie was so thoughtful. Berwick was a long way off and if the residents were scourging the country from that distance, then they were starving right enough. Which was news enough for Black Sir James to smile, wish the priest well – and his women and weans, too, which brought a scowl, but no denial.
It was all friendly enough, but Dog Boy threw the first torch that fired every house in the vill, so that they rode away from it leaving flames and weeping and sullen stares in the smoke. I am filled to the brim with shrieks and embers, Dog Boy thought, and wondered if there would ever be an end.
Commanderie of St Felix in the Kingdom of Castile
Feast of the Invention of the Cross, May 1314
He was called Brother Amicus, though there was nothing friendly about him.
‘You should repent and confess your sins, Brother,’ he spat. ‘If you go unshriven, you go to Hell, to be broken on the wheel by foul demons, smashed over and over for the sin of pride. You will be thrown into freezing water until you scream for your arrogance. You will be dismembered alive by gibbering imps armed with dull knives for your impiety, thrown into a boiling pit of molten gold for your pride, forced to eat rats, toads and snakes in remembrance of your greed.’
He paused, breathing heavily and frothing at the corners of his mouth.
Widikind laughed through his burst lips, the words coming slowly because his arms were twisted up behind him and fastened by chains, which suspended his whole weight and constricted his breathing. He was naked and streaked with his own and other people’s foulness.
His voice came in spurts for he found it hard to get air into his flattened lungs – but he had breath enough for this.
‘You may dream of it, torturer. I have suffered all that and more in the service of God and the Temple, even to the eating of toads and snakes. However, I am sure you can verify your visions – I will be seeing you in Hell, certes.’
The Inquisitor scowled and turned away, leaving Widikind in his pain. The start of it had been the blow, sharp and sudden, which had whirled stars into him as he went to check the carts. Even as he went down, he knew what it was, even if he did not quite know who.
He learned that soon enough, knew it even when he could not raise his head to look – her perfume, spiced and insidious as a snake’s coils, left him in no doubt as he hung in the shadow-flickering room.
‘You would do well to speak, Templar,’ Doña Beatriz said softly. ‘My brother needs what you know and he will not be kind.’
Widikind was more ashamed of his nakedness than concerned for future agonies, but he knew now that his soul was safe and he only laughed; he knew, by the stiffness in her body, that she was irritated, felt the grip in his beard as his head was raised. The Moor, her servant, held Widikind’s stained beard in one fist so that he could see both their faces; his was unsmiling as a stone, but hers was a blaze of fury.
‘You will speak,’ she said, her voice a razor, and smiled like a sweet sin as she waved another man into Widikind’s eyeline. This one was lean, grizzled and seemed nothing – until you looked in his eyes. There was nothing in them at all, save a bland, studied interest and Widikind knew what he was at once.
‘This is Rafiq,’ Doña Beatriz said. ‘Buscador de demonios.’
She turned away and left. For a moment, Piculph hesitated, flicking his eyes sideways to the blank-eyed Rafiq, and then he relinquished his grip, so that Widikind’s head fell forward and he lost sight of them all.
But he was aware of Piculph’s going, more aware still of the one they called ‘seeker of devils’ stepping close; Widikind heard him crooning, soft and melodious as a monk at plainchant, wondered if it was a psalm against evil, or a spell.
He would have been surprised to discover that it was a lullaby. He was not surprised to discover that Rafiq was an expert and that his skill was in pain. He hoped that he had been missed, though he expected no rescue, for the others would now have their fears confirmed.
He would have been gratified to hear them discuss his absence.
‘It seems your fears may be justified,’ Rossal admitted grudgingly to Kirkpatrick. ‘In which case, we should take some precautions.’
‘What is happening?’ demanded Sim, an eyeblink before Hal did. Rossal issued crisp orders and the other two began turning tables up on their ends.
‘I was of the opinion’, Kirkpatrick answered slowly, ‘that this Guillermo and his lady sister would make some move against us.’
‘The gold …’
‘Aye, just so.’
There was no urgency in the man, nor in Rossal now that the tables had been upended like a siege pavise, and Hal could not understand why this Guillermo and his sister should wish to attack them – and why everyone seemed acceptingly calm about it. He said so and Rossal clapped him on the shoulder.
‘In a moment, we will know whether this Guillermo is to be trusted.’
‘Look to your weapons, mark you, in case he cannot,’ Kirkpatrick added, ‘but keep behind our defences – I am sure he has used that wee minstrel gallery before this.’
Minstrel gallery, Hal thought. And pigs have wings.
‘If they mean to red-murder us and steal the gold,’ Sim blustered, confused and angry at the feeling of it, ‘then we should not be sittin’ here like a set mill.’
‘Doucelike, Sim Craw,’ Kirkpatrick said, laying a hand on the man’s big shoulder and smiling into the bristle of his beard. ‘I may have it wrangwise. We might be locked in for our own safety.’
‘Pigs have wings,’ Hal muttered.
The Seeker of Demons was Satan’s own creation, Widikind was sure of it. He caressed with blades, peeling back skin until the pain was so burning intense that the German felt the rawness like ice. He worked through the long hours, while Widikind hung and dripped sweat, blood and vomit.
At some point – Widikind did not know day from night – the Seeker of Demons broke off to eat bread and cheese and refresh himself with wine, and began on the hot irons.
The smell of his own flesh roasting nauseated Widikind, but he swallowed it rather than give the torturer the satisfaction of knowing it. But this time the pain was enough to make him call to God, to the Virgin, and he found himself babbling in German. But he knew what he said and it was nothing they wanted or could use.
He slipped into a grey veiled world, was aware of figures moving in it and recognized the perfume of the lady. The man with her, his voice clearly used to command, snapped at another, his voice sharp and grating with annoyance, and the man’s soothing assurances confirmed him as Brother Amicus, who called the one he spoke to ‘Don Guillermo’.
He heard Guillermo speak again, softer this time and in French, rather than the elegant Castilian of the court.
‘This de Grafton – is he to be trusted?’
‘No, darling brother, but he can be relied on to serve our interests as long as he is serving his own.’
Doña Beatriz’s voice was a sneer and Widikind heard her brother laugh.
‘Go to Crunia. Search the ship – the treasure must be there. Send word in a hurry.’
‘What of the crew?’
There was silence, which was answer enough.
Afterwards – it might have been a minute, an hour or a week – the Seeker of Demons took Widikind’s eye with a white-hot iron, a lancing shriek of agony that had him bucking and twisting as he dangled in chains, feeling his flesh bubble and dissolve in the heat, pouring down his cheek, sizzling like meat on a skewer.
He surfaced from the cool dark of oblivion into the agony of life.
‘Where is the Templar treasure?’
It was the first thing the Seeker of Demons had asked, the first time he had spoken and the only sound he had made other than the crooning gentleness of song.
Widikind, who wondered what he had babbled while his mind cowered elsewhere, grinned a bloody grin, for he knew by the question that he had said nothing of value. He remembered the feeling of his own flesh melting on his cheek like gold and what Brother Amicus had promised. For his pride. He was proud of resisting, yet aware that such arrogance was unfit for a Templar, proscribed or no.
Yet he could not resist it.
‘Found any demons?’ he mushed and laughed his way back to the coverlet of dark.
The sluice of cold water slashed him into the light again, into the world of pain the torturer had made with vicious beatings. He could feel his arms and realized he had been lowered a little and refastened so that his hands were now bound with rope rather than chain and the suspension on his dangling arms could be alleviated if he raised himself on the balls of his feet.
Whose toes had been broken, so that doing so seared agony through him like a knife.
He raised his wobbling head and stared with his one good eye into the face of the torturer and saw no pleasure in the other’s witnessing of his realization. Which was, he thought, worse than a leering grin; Widikind let his head loll, though he could see the man’s face through the spider-legs of his remaining lashes.
The Seeker of Demons, his face still blank, touched the white-hot iron to Widikind’s abdomen and, for the first time, showed emotion: surprise at the lack of response.
He wonders if he has gone too far, Widikind thought.
‘Where is the Templar treasure?’
Widikind heard the querulous note in his voice and knew it was time. He wanted him near, wanted him close with his hot iron. He felt fingers at his neck, checking pulse, felt the length of forearm on his chest, so he knew where the Seeker of Demons stood. He was a Knight of the Temple and had the power of God still with him …
He swept his legs up and locked them round the man’s waist, crossing his ankles until his broken feet flared howls from him; he welcomed the pain, for there was more triumph and anger in it now and the agony fuelled his strength like fire in his veins. God give me strength …
The man was strong but Widikind had trained every day for years in every facet of horsemanship; his feet were broken, but the thighs and calves on him were crippling and the Seeker of Demons arched and shrieked, unable to break free. He tried to beat Widikind with his one free hand, the one with the hot iron in it, but each time he began, Widikind crushed him further until something snapped. The man twisted and screamed.
‘That was a rib breaking,’ Widikind told him, so close that the blood from his cracking lips spotted the Seeker of Demons’s cheek. ‘There will be more if you do not do as I say. If you resist me further, I will break your back and you will never stand unaided again.’
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