The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (108 page)

‘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.