The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (114 page)

He wondered if he had that strength himself and was taking up the rope when a soft voice stopped him; he turned to see Rossal de Bissot, a shadow at the top of the belltower stairs.

‘Take this,' the Templar said, holding out his sword, ‘and give me your own. I would not see this fall into the hands of Guillermo and can think of no one better to wield it with honour. You are a Sientcler, after all.'

Numbed and dumb, Hal took the sword and handed over his own; the new one felt heavier, though it slid into his sheath easily enough – all but a fingerwidth of blade below the hilt.

‘Hubris,' Rossal declared with a smile like a sickle moon in the dark. ‘That sword is longer, heavier and has more decoration on it than was ever proper for a Poor Knight.'

‘I am honoured to wield it – though you put a deal of faith in the Sientcler name,' Hal growled, dry-mouthed with the moment and aware, yet again, of that peculiar Sientcler connection with the Order, so that every member of that family seemed to have drunk from the Grail itself. And all because a female ancestor had once been married to Hugues de Payens, the founder.

‘You will not disgrace the blade,' Rossal answered and Hal was not sure whether it was a statement or a command. Below, he heard de Villers chanting:
Vade retro Satana, nunquam suade mihi vana
– begone Satan, never suggest to me thy vanities.

He knew the Knight was facing his own fear and desire for life, rejecting any possibility of salvation. Preparing to die.

Hal glanced at de Bissot and saw nothing of fear or regret, only a slight sadness when the man revealed that Widikind had already died. The Templar raised his hand in a final salute and was gone like a wraith.

Hal stood for a moment, and then crossed to the stone lip, wriggled his hips to the balance point and, with a final fervent prayer for his own salvation, slithered over the edge.

Vade retro Satana
, he heard as he scrabbled in a blind sweat for footholds.
Ipse venena bibas
. Begone Satan. Drink thou thine own poison.

Hal, his hands straining, the sweat in his eyes, wondered how in the name of all Hell had Dog Boy ever managed this.

 

 

 

ISABEL

Now am I ripe in the understanding of what the love of God means. You sent me the little nun, the one called Constance, who whispered to me briefly, so briefly I hardly believed I had heard it all. He is free, she said to me. Roxburgh is taken and Hal is free. Blessed is the Lord.

Chapel of St Mary and the Holy Cross, Lothian

Feast of the Invention of the Cross, May 1314

Dog Boy wondered how he had done it. He had never killed a woman before and felt strange about the fact of it, even though it had not been deliberate.

They had caught the raiders off guard; those who didn't have their thumbs up their hurdies were howkin' lumps of fresh meat out of a boiling pot with their stolen livestock lowing and cropping grass nearby – the lucky beasts that were not jointed and bloody under sacking in the carts.

Hunger was the reason the men had raided out so far and it had been their ruin, for they should just have taken their scourings and run for it, not stopped to boil beef. But there were no skilled fighting men here, only shoemakers and fishmongers, tanners and labourers from Berwick, out on a desperate herschip for supplies because none were coming up from the south and bread was ten times the usual price.

The fact that they raided into the lands of the Earl of Dunbar, who was on their side, did not matter to them when their bellies were notched to their backbones. The fact that they were eating the badly boiled kine of the lord of Seton, another ally, did not count one whit.

Dog Boy was of the opinion that they should have left the raiders alone, since they were doing Black Jamie's band a service with their ravaging and, besides, most were Lothian men themselves. Some of them, it was clear, knew one end of a spear from the other and probably served in the Berwick town garrison. They might have kin standing with the army sieging Stirling for the Bruce. Some might even have kin among the men here.

The Black considered Dog Boy when he had voiced this in the growing dark, frowning to show he was giving it serious thought, because that last part had made his men think. No one was fooled as to what he would decide in the end, all the same.

After a long moment of considered mummery, he had shrugged and met the knowing, feral grins of the others with one of his own.

‘As you ken, I hate the Welsh worse than the English and God will stand witness that I truly hate the English.'

He paused for the effect of it.

‘But I hate yon Plantagenet Scots worse than either.'

‘Is there any your lordship likes?' asked a voice, daring in the dim. Patrick, Dog Boy thought. It will be Patrick and the mouth that will get him hanged this day or the next.

‘I am not overfond of you,' Jamie Douglas answered, soft and sibilant. ‘But if you fasten your lip and follow where I lead, you will earn my liking by and by.'

The laughter was quiet and knowing, from men willing to follow the Black anywhere so that those left holding the horses were sullen at being left out of it. The others filtered a little closer to the red flowers of enemy flame, creeping like foxes on a coop; the Black shrilled out a piercing whistle and they rushed down on ragged men, blowing on barely cooked lumps of meat to cool them enough to cram down their throats.

No finesse, no spearwork in the tight formations they had been drilling in for weeks, just a slavering, howling madness of long knives and little axes, a growling rush that came up between tethered horses, Jamie bawling to ‘look out for rope'.

Dog Boy was so busy watching for the thin sliver of dark that would betray the horse tether, belly height and as good as a gate, that he did not realize these men had staked their horses to their own reins until he tripped on one of the pegs and fell, sprawling like a new-born calf to roll almost to the feet of an astonished man.

Gaping, the half-raw beef falling slowly from his open mouth, the man was so stunned that Dog Boy was able to spring to his feet, slashing with the little axe; that woke the man up and he fell back, screaming a spittled cream of pink froth, scrabbling away from this horror.

Dog Boy followed, battering him with the axe, hearing the flung-up forearm crack, the shriek of the man as the blade chopped lumps off his hands, flailing like desperate bird wings to ward off the swings to his head.

A blow finally cracked his skull and he rolled away, moaning; Dog Boy saw a flicker among the mad, dancing shadows and screams around him and half turned into the snarl of a new opponent, a rusted sword up and falling on him.

He jigged sideways, fell into the man and heard the long puffed roar of the air being driven out. Staggering, he had time to recover and backhand a swipe with the axe, for the man was on his knees and trying to suck in breath from lungs that were not working. The blow slipped the top of his head off, neat as tapping out a boiled egg, but Dog Boy had no time to admire the work of it; another snarler was coming from his left.

He flung the axe, watched it whirl, saw the man jerk his head sideways so that the weapon whined past his ear and struck the woman behind him in the chest, a dull thump Dog Boy could hear above the rest of the howling din.

He had time to see the woman fold round the blow like a half-empty bag – and then the man he had missed was on him, slashing right and left with a long knife as notched as a broken dyke.

Dog Boy only had the estoc left. That and the axe were the preferred weapons of men who stood in tight spear ranks, for when you dropped the spear and went for the fallen men-at-arms, you wanted a blade to bash in a face unprotected by a fancy bucket helm, or a thin flat needle to shove through the eyeslit of one that was.

The man Dog Boy faced was not a fancy man-at-arms, with maille and a bucket helm, though he dreamed of it, Dog Boy was sure. Instead, he was a garrison man in hodden grey, whose metal-flaked leather jack lay somewhere nearby with his iron hat and who had snatched out the knife because he had nothing else to hand.

He would be good at standing gate guard, or raiding the defenceless, Dog Boy thought, crabbing round in a half-circle, but he is no match for a good knifer in a deadly wee jig such as this. He said so and the man already knew it, licked his dry lips and kept his eyes fixed on Dog Boy's blade as if the winking light fascinated him.

Should be watching my eyes, as I watch his, Dog Boy thought. Yet it was Dog Boy who made the mistake; he heard the woman gasp and cry out, the one who had taken his axe in the chest with a noise like a stone dropped on a slack drum, and he half turned his head. The man sprang forward and Dog Boy saw it at the last, knew it to be the last – but then the man careered sideways, stood for a moment and shook his head.

‘Warra?' he demanded and Dog Boy saw Patrick stare at the back of the man's head where he had thrust his own estoc; then he gazed at the bloody length of thin blade he had shoved into the base of the man's neck and finally, bewildered as to why the man had not gone down like a felled ox, looked at Dog Boy.

‘Gurrurr,' the man said, the side of his face gone slack. One eye had drooped almost shut, but he grasped his knife and rushed at Dog Boy. Away sideways, like a mad crab, straight through the fire where he fell over and lay, slobbering softly and smouldering up smoke as his limbs moved pointlessly, still running and not even aware that he lay on his side, burning.

‘Nivver seen that afore,' Patrick declared, grinning madly, moving to finish the man. ‘Must have cut somethin' loose in his head.'

Dog Boy was only vaguely aware of it, for he was with the woman. She was already dead, blood all over her mouth and her chest cracked inside, for sure. Not old nor young, once pretty and now nothing at all, as if she had never been.

He sat now and looked at where she had lain before the other women – captives, it was clear – came and took her away to be decently buried in the dark. He watched them filter back to the fires while his fingers turned and turned the axe that had killed her. He wondered if she had been kin to the other women, or even known to them.

They were wary, these women, but had nowhere else to go, as they said to Patrick and the others round the fire.

‘These yins you slew took us from our hearths,' one declared, a big beldame with arms she could barely fold over her bosoms. ‘They were too hungered to bother us much – but it is timely, your arrival.'

‘You may not think so,' Leckie's Tam leered loudly, ‘for we have already eaten.'

‘You daur approach myself an' I will clap yer lugs, you muckhoon',' countered another, equally formidable woman, jutting her chin out defiantly. ‘I had thought better of you, with our own menfolk off to the aid of King Robert.'

It could have been true, Dog Boy thought. The ragged-arse folk had never been needed for wars before, since armies were gathered up from tenants and burghers who could afford at least an iron hat and a stout spear. Not now, though. Now there were bare-footed chiels arriving in the siege litter round Stirling at the behest of their lieges, stripping vills and farms bare and looking to be fed and armed and trained, for the call had gone out that the Invader was coming with the biggest host ever seen and their king needed them. That and the ruin war had made of their lives made most of them bring their families, following their own stolen fodder and cattle in the hope of leaching a little of it back.

‘Aye, weel, we are braw, brave fighters for the King,' Rowty Adam declared to the women, ‘so what you give to us, as it were, is no loss to your menfolk and a service to His Grace, King Robert.'

‘There will be no harm done to you,' said a firm voice and Jamie stepped in to be blooded by firelight, his black dags of hair down round his cheeks. He put one foot up on a log bench and neck-bowed politely to the big beldame with the bosoms. ‘You have the word of Sir James Douglas on it.'

You could see men's crests fall at the sound of that, but no one as much as whispered against it, while the big beldame grew red in the face and the other women simpered. Dog Boy was sure any one of them, gripped by an arm and led into the dark by the Black Douglas, would have gone eagerly, swaying her hips and with no thought of her missing man.

‘Weel,' Leckie's Tam said bitterly when Jamie had gone, ‘since the Black has put the reins on us, it seems we will have need of entertaining ourselves – a tale it is and your turn to tell it, Parcy Dodd.'

Dog Boy sat and twirled the axe as Parcy Dodd began his tale, thinking on how he had once sat with Bruce himself, before he was king and a wheen of years since. They had discussed the merits of knightly vows and Bruce had been drunk. ‘Nivver violet a lady,' Dog Boy had said then, for he had been younger and more stupid; well, younger, at least.

He glanced to where the dead woman had lain, the stain on the grass merely one more shadow in the shadows. He had ‘violeted' a lady now and though it was more than stupid to dwell on it, he thought he could feel the stain on him, as if he had foresworn some knightly vows.

‘So,' Parcy Dodd was saying, ‘I am stravaigin' with Ill-Made Jock, when—'

‘Ill-Made?'

They all turned to Dog Boy and Parcy, flustered and left threadless in his tale, blinked once or twice.

‘Aye – him who was with Bangtail Hob when he was murdered by the Wallace …'

He tailed off, aware of the frantic, silent eyes like headshakes; he sat with the air of a man who had plootered into a sucking bog and could neither go forward nor back.

‘That was me that was with Hob,' Dog Boy said, bitter with the awareness that Parcy did not, in fact, know Ill-Made and had probably never met him. ‘Ill-Made died at Herdmanston, during the siege of it. Button your lip on folk ye never knew.'