The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (119 page)

Cage-freed, she stood high on the battlemented wall beside Malise – grey-haired now that one, Dog Boy saw – with a loop of cloak over her own head, which still seemed fox-russet bright. They stood like lord and lady above the crowds and anyone who did not know the truth would have been fooled by it.

Dog Boy dragged at her with his eyes, willing her to look – and then she did. He was sure of it, saw the jerk in her like a hooked fish, was certain she had seen and recognized him – but the arrival of the witch threw up a surge and a roaring bellow that snapped the lock between them.

The woman moved in the midst of a coterie of censer-swinging priests and an intoning canonical. She stumbled forward draped in a clinging shift and a hagging terror between spear-armed, grim-faced guards lent by the castle; her face was a cliff, grey with the numb of fear.

Dog Boy knew her. Knew her and her accuser, the wee pinch-faced man who walked with his chin triumphant and defiant, basking in having caused all this. Frixco de Fiennes looked right and left and never behind at the woman he had condemned. Dog Boy wondered dully where Aggie's bairn was.

It was easy to read the truth between the long, rambling pronouncement, half-drowned in the shrieks and howls of the baying mob. Frixco had declared Aggie the traitor who had let the Scots into Roxburgh, using foul Satanic spells to hide them from view. The fact that the Church was promoting the woman's death and not the seneschal of Berwick showed that the Common Law considered the evidence flimsy at best. The Church needed no other evidence than the woman's confession and her bloody fingers and bruised face showed how that had been achieved.

Now she was a witch. Not a woman, for each inquiring priest would have to look himself in the mirror glass of his soul after what had been done to a woman, but
you shall not suffer a witch to live
so the broken, split-lipped, weeping ruin they fixed to the stake was a witch, spawn of Satan and not any human thing at all.

Fastened with chains, Dog Boy noted dully, since ropes would burn through and roll her messily to the feet of her accusers and the gaping, howling mob. If Christ Himself walked among them, they would deceive Him, he thought.

The priests smeared her soles and jellied legs with pitch, daubed it on the shift and made it cling more provocatively; a red-faced soldier, all drink-broken veins and bad teeth, clutched his groin and bellowed out that this was her last chance for a decent fuck outside of Hell.

‘Ye brosy-faced hoorslip,' Dog Boy growled and elbowed him hard enough to double the man over, gasping and boaking cheap ale over all the shoes nearest him.

Nivver violet a lady. Never was a lady more violated than Aggie, finding the harsh truth of what lay beyond the confines of Roxburgh. Not adventure and freedom, but turning slowly to a shrieking horror of black, with a sweet stink so like pork as to make you retch at the saliva it brought to starving mouths. The priests solemn and canting, invited the last blister of Aggie to repent her sins; it was, Dog Boy realized with a sour curl to the lip of him, an Ember Day.

Through the haze of smoke and witch-hair tendrils of haar, Dog Boy found Isabel's eyes again – or thought he did – before he turned away and slouched through the crowd, heading back down to Scotch Gate and the bridge, hunched and moody and careless.

Frixco de Fiennes was more than a little drunk, on wine and fame both. He had watched his brother die of the festering wound he had taken at Roxburgh and discovered that, without him, he was that worst of creatures, a noble so low and Gascon he might just as well have been dung.

He had taken work – welcome to a man with scarce two coins to rub against each other – with the harassed officials still trying to carry out King Edward's writs in a land where he had no power. It had taught him, in short order, that the years of juggling accounts in Roxburgh had honed a talent for tallying, where a merk was two thirds of a pound, a shilling of twelve silver pennies one-twentieth of a pound and the penny the only actual coin in all of it.

It had taught him, too, that there was a new-fangled way of tallying, using some foul heathen Moorish numbering system which made it all easier, according to the young, thrusting clerks who promoted it. Frixco saw the tallying up for his own talents and the bleak future of it soured him.

It was Aggie's misfortune to stumble on him at that moment, pleading for help for ‘his bairn'. Turning her in had been desperation – but it had also netted him a reward, which he had spent on clothes and wine. Now he was staggering from the burning stink and wondering where he could make more such coin.

He collided with the man, the pair of them as much at fault as the other. Frixco, alarmed at having annoyed one of the hundreds of rough, armed men slouching and reeling about the streets, stammered out an apology – and then saw the face.

He blinked, puzzled, for he knew the face but could not place it … the knowledge crashed on him like the apple in Eden flung at his forehead; he saw the black, dagged hair and the bearded face, saw it as he had at Roxburgh, the scowl arched over a fistful of steel.

Dog Boy and Frixco stared at one another for a long moment and Dog Boy knew he had been recognized, knew it was all up with him in Berwick and felt a sudden, savage exultation.

‘Nivver violet a lady,' he growled and slammed a horny-handed fist into Frixco's face, wishing he had a dagger in it. He leaped over the mud-spattered sprawl of the man and was off down the street like a new lamb. He ran no more than a few paces, fell into a swift walk and filtered on down through the throng lurching away from the remains of the pyre.

He was a hundred ells away before he heard the distant shouts, but they floated clear and eldritch through the encroaching sea-haar.

‘The Black is in Berwick. Ware. The Black Douglas is in Berwick.'

The sea, off Colonsay

At the same time

The
Señor Glorioso
was like a ship, Pegy declared, in that it floated and had sails. Other than that it might well have been an ox cart to him and, despite the alleged generosity of Grand Master Ruy Vaz in presenting it in exchange for the half-sunk
Bon Accord
, Pegy was sullen and convinced that they had had the worst of the deal.

He said it loud and often, all the struggling way back towards Scotland, and Hal, drifting in and out of wound fever, knew it was because the new beast was a long-runner more suited to the Middle Sea, whose ropes and spars and sails were as strange as a six-legged foal to the cog-men of the old
Bon Accord
. They knew it as a carib, the best way they could pronounce the Moorish word for it:
qar
í
b
.

The lateen rig, with its huge, unwieldy yardarms, defeated the best efforts of Niall Silkie, Angus and Donald, while the single big rudder confused Somhairl. Pegy, unable to judge the speed of ‘the ugly baist', was barely able to work out where they were never mind where they were going; he knew the cargo was overloaded, too, and prayed for good weather.

Somewhere, the Devil laughed.

A wind rose and freshened as they came up round the shoulder of Colonsay – Pegy was fairly sure it was Colonsay – and the sailors brought in as much sail as they thought might work, only to find the
Señor Glorioso
blundering and pitching like a mad, blind stot.

Then, whirling away the sea-haar and the sunshine, the gale backed up with a witch's shriek, backed up full south and west and hurled them like a driven stag towards the coast.

Berwick town

Some hours later

His back hurt from crouching, so that he swore he heard it crack when he finally straightened and began to move into the dark and the fog, out of the stinking alley he had been hiding in since God forged the world, it seemed.

Surely, Dog Boy thought, they would have given up by now. It had been hours since the alarm was raised, was now dark and the sea-haar had witch-fingered in and grown thicker and stronger. He had heard the soldiers calling for
couvre-feu
at least an hour ago, so the streets were dark, wet and should have been empty.

Save that they were not. Torches, lambent in the swirling mist, showed the bobbing presence of men in packs, still searching, relentless as an avalanche; the Black Douglas was trapped in Berwick and, sooner or later, would be found. Dog Boy cursed his likeness to Jamie. Then, for the first time, he cursed his own stupidity.

Not long after that he was found.

He came creeping out of the shadow of the Holy Trinity and practically ran into a barrel of a man with a sputtering flambeau and a face which had the pucker of an old scar running from the patch of his left eye down through cheek and jawbone.

‘The Bla—' he yelled before Dog Boy's wild lashing smashed the hilt of his sword into the man's forehead, felling him like an ox. But it was enough; the cries went up, the marsh-light flames trailed towards him and he ran.

Flitting into the wynds, night-black as Auld Nick's serk, up steps, skidding on cobbles, over courtyards and through deep wynds like writhing tunnels, Dog Boy wraithed like a running fox.

He turned and twisted away from every pale light which appeared, trying, always, to work his way to the bulk of stone that had once belonged to the Friars of the Sack, for next to it was the Briggate, portal to the ford and freedom.

He swooped like a mad crow from space to space, leaped up wynd stairs and paused once to tip a waterbutt down on too-close pursuers. Later he paused again, long enough to unsneck the door of a sty to let out a charge of swine, and then left them, laughing.

Balked by a blind alley, he sprang sideways to a lintel, then a balcony, along it with a leap into a new courtyard, bombarding his pursuers with mad curses and laughter, pots and, once, a pie dish set out to soak in the rain. Doors and shutters banged, children and women shrieked, dogs barked and howled.

He skipped and skidded along steep-pitched roofs, tore off slates and flung them, swung down past the leering, open-throated faces on the fine guttering and, once, swung into a carelessly unshuttered window.

The women inside shrieked like harpies and he stopped only long enough to offer them a mocking bow and a grin from a sweat-sheened face before scooping up the night-bucket and emptying it out of the window. He heard the gratifying curse and sizzle as he headed for the door, the stairs and the way out to the back court.

Finally, somewhere in Silver Street, he sprang for a lintel, swung up to a folly of a balcony, then up the newel post of that to the slated roof, where he sat, astraddle the steep pitch as if on a horse, his back to the gable stack. He panted and the sweat trickled down him like running mice, but the torches milled and confused voices shouted.

He had foiled them. For now.

For all that, he was only a little closer – he saw the bulk of the Red and White Halls of the foreign wool merchants and knew them. That placed him close to the Maison Dieu, which had its own gate through the ditch and stockade walls, near enough to the ford to chance it when the torches slid away.

The flames bobbed and circled. Dog Boy blessed the silversmith whose house this was, for his vanity in having a silly wee balcony, so built that you could only access it through windows both shuttered and barred and even then would have to half crouch to enjoy the view from it.

Yet it had permitted him access to the steeply pitched roof, hard slated to foil any wee thieves who might be tempted to dig their way into the smith's home and down to the shop, where the shine would be.

Up here, Dog Boy thought, I am safe until the dawn and the vanished mist. Which gave him some hours yet to let the row die down. Below, he heard the pained calls of his staggering pursuers and smothered an exultant laugh at complaints of injuries and pigs.

Then he heard the horse, slap-clopping up the cobbles from the Briggate, heard the voices hail him – out after
couvre-feu
and mounted, Dog Boy thought, makes him a knight or a man-at-arms, a chiel of worth and on important business.

Not important enough, he saw with a sickening lurch of his belly, that he could not take a torch and join in the search, standing in the stirrups and raising the flame high to search the rooftops. For the reward, no doubt, Dog Boy thought, as well as the glory of being the man who captured the dreaded Black Douglas. The irony of it twisted a wry smile on his sweating face.

He watched the horseman and his trembling flambeau come closer, leaving the men on foot to search the ground-level shadows. Hot and encumbered, he managed to wriggle out of the padded jack, but was reluctant to lose it, so dropped to the cobbles as lightly as he could with it bulked in one arm like a shield, sword in the other; the chill fog cut into his sweat-drenched serk like a knife.

He saw the Silver Street courtyard with its little mercat cross, a squat affair ringed at the top and mounted on a dais of two steps – and the idea struck him with a clarity that made him laugh out loud.

He arranged it swiftly with his jack and his iron hat, frowned a little at the sacrifice of his
estoc
but rammed it left to right through the jack, the sharp needle of blade pinning the right sleeve up to the chest. He stood back, admired his handiwork briefly and laughed again, before darting out to where the slow, peering horseman could see him.

Then he turned, running back into the courtyard as if he knew he had just been spotted, was gratified to hear the sudden scrape and rasp of iron hooves as the beast was urged on by the horseman.

The rider came in at a trot and heaved up at the sight of the man standing, waiting, a blade winking faint light in a bar across his chest. He had an iron-rimmed hat on and did not look to be running, which made the rider grin; the horseman was mailed and coiffed and armed, and was a skilled fighter, as were all the royal couriers who wore the jupon with the pards of England. Bigod, the others would be envious of what the capture of the notorious outlaw Sir James Douglas would bring him.