The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (131 page)

‘The sun is going down,' he declared as if he had been personally responsible for it. ‘They will try no more until the morn.'

Bruce nodded and sucked in a long, deep breath; below, Randolph's schiltron
was uncurling like a cautious hedgepig, waving their sharpness and hurling jeers at the backs of the retreating knights.

The day had gone well, Bruce thought. Yet tomorrow it would all have to be done again – or else tonight we will have to be gone. And smartly, too, since it is the shortest night of the year.

He wondered, suddenly, why his brother was here at all and not with his own command, turned to ask and saw the broad grin widen further as Edward nudged his horse aside to reveal the men he had been hiding.

Bruce stared. Kirkpatrick was dappled with sweat and leaning wearily on the cantle of his mount's saddle. Beside him, with a great half-bruised face and a bound arm, swaying with fatigue but grim and steady as ever, sat Hal of Herdmanston. Behind them prowled a slew of Campbells, all bristle-bearded and proud, but scowling to have arrived too late for this day's fighting.

His brace of dogs returned. He blurted it out before he could think and saw Hal's raised eyebrow and Kirkpatrick's lopsided smile.

‘Aye, betimes,' Kirkpatrick answered, ‘with our jaws stuffed with retrievals.'

‘There are cartloads coming,' Edward Bruce declared, unable to keep silent any longer. ‘Weapons and armour and more of the same.'

His face was shining with it as he stared at his regal brother.

‘Now we can stand and fight.'

 

 

 

ISABEL

They can feel it, the irregular heartbeat of it. The seneschal here, a fat and fussy man, has banned Malise from my side by order of the new warden, John de Luka. It is not pity nor mercy that does it, but Your Hand, my Lord. That and the fact that, if all goes badly, I might be a counter for bargaining a truce of peace for this town, as good as gold to some folk. So here I am, curled in my cage like a cat, prinked and preened and dyed and painted and dressed, with one hand clutching an ivory sieve holding balls of musk and crushed amber, the other carefully hidden because of what Malise has done to the nails and fingers. I have a barbette edged with cloth of gold. Nestling between my breasts is a gift from the warden himself, a fat enamelled pendant which has two lovers kissing on one side and, on the other, a grinning Death; it is a common enough theme, but it reveals more sensibility than I saw in the hard face of that royal squire. I wonder if he chose it himself or had someone do it? Either way, Your Hand is in it, Lord. I am still on display, but more gilded and most of those who still come to gawp think I have a toad hidden somewhere the better to curse them, or suck on an emerald in my sleep to preserve my seeming youth.

Let them. I am Isabel MacDuff, with a dowry portion of Fife. I am a long ways past girlhood, yet I am ready to receive my lover. God wills it that he comes soon.

Bannockburn

Midsummer's Night, June 1314

The dusk was soft and blue like woodsmoke, though there was a haze of that, too, from the small flowers of a thousand flames. Looking out, Dog Boy could see the scatter of English fires, like the tail of a long-haired star.

He ate from a wooden bowl, horn-spooning in oats and barley savouried with a good stock bone which had even had some meat on it. There was bread to sop it up and some small beer, but no ale or wine; Dog Boy thought that was deliberate, to prevent everyone getting drunk with little or no time to sleep it off.

He heard the whine and spang of music from a viel, accompanied by the heartbeat thump of a drum and great growling barks of laughter and raised voices; the Islesmen, or the Campbells, who had their own drink and would not be stopped from it. For all that they looked longingly and thought of the fiery drink, none of the Lowlanders would risk arriving uninvited at such a fire, so they sat and stared morosely at the flames until blinded by the light.

‘Good, this,' Yabbing Andra declared, slurping the last and scraping the bowl noisily. ‘This is fine fare, is it no', lads? I mind the time …'

People sighed, for the only time Andra was ever silent was when he was eating and, even if he scraped shavings off the inside of his bowl, there would be precious little left in it to occupy his mouth for long.

Then, to everyone's surprise, Troubadour Tam interrupted him. He seldom said anything at all, seemed to speak only through the bowing of his viel, but he seemed to have lost his touch for it this night, for he crossed into Andra's ramble with a slashing few words of his own.

‘Mak' the best of it – there will be precious little else this winter. Hunger is coming.'

Those who worked the land knew it and nodded. Patrick, who worked cattle more than he did fields of oats and barley, announced that the saving grace of Our Lord in all this was that the English would be visited by the same bad-crop famine – and they had more fields given to wheat and less to livestock or hardy oats.

‘So? What use is that to us?' demanded Horse Pyntle and Patrick explained it to him, shaving little cuts off a splinter and curling them into the fire for amusement.

‘They will only have beasts left to them. When we raid, as raid we must for food, then we will have meat and lots o' it.'

There were grim snarls of laughter at this, save for Parcy Dodd, who said that too much meat made you sick. Since none there had ever had enough meat to make them sick, there were growling, jeering questions fired back at him.

‘Aye, aye,' he declared defensively. ‘I never said I had ever been sick from too much meat. Tainted meat, aye – and it tak's precious little of that to make ye boak. But my ma had experience in curin' folk – rich folk, you ken – whose shitholes and insides were choked up with too much meat.'

‘Good, was she?' demanded Sweetmilk, while everyone had that wary look you got round Parcy Dodd, since you could never trust anything he said at all, on any subject.

‘In a godly fashion,' Parcy declared, frowning, ‘though I have long since hauled myself away from her notion that what galled ye or made ye boak was a blessin'.'

‘Every mother is the like,' Geordie offered and there were growls of assent at that; there was a vagrant coil of the wild music of the galloglass warriors from the north and west; and Dog Boy saw Troubadour Tam's head come up, cocked to listen to it like a dog sniffs the wind.

‘Aye, mayhap and mayhap no',' Parcy replied. ‘I have no experience of Geordie's ma, nor none else but mine own, who brewed physick that would gag a hog. She would clutch my neb until I had to breathe – then pour it down my thrapple.'

Dog Boy heard them, bleared with memories, chuckle at this shared moment, but it was not for him; he could barely remember his ma at all these days and certainly not her face.

‘Did it work?' demanded Horse Pyntle and Parcy flapped a loose hand.

‘It did what it was aimed at – once swallied, ye had better have a bush to boak in.'

‘Aye, well,' Patrick murmured dreamily, ‘here you are – so it must have been good.'

‘Not to my way o' considering it,' Parcy answered. ‘Once, as a wee laddie, I swallied a penny. A whole siller penny, my da's rent-price for our ox. So it was out with the physick – and back came the money, so sick it would not spend.'

‘Away, Parcy ye liar!'

Parcy held up his hands.

‘May the Lord bliss and keep me, the truth it is I am telling you here. The wee reeve said it was a crockard. Rang hollow, he said. Well, it was fine when I ate it, but it comes as no surprise to me that my ma's physick ruined it. It would strip the shine from anythin', that brew.'

‘At least they ne'er burned her as a witch,' Sweetmilk said, ‘if her brew was so bad.'

He jerked his head up, realizing what he had said and suddenly worried that he might have stumbled into a mire. Parcy let him dangle for a long moment, and then shook his head; Sweetmilk's obvious relief made everyone laugh.

‘Not for the want of folk trying, mark ye,' Parcy went on. ‘Cost an Inquisitor dear.'

‘You nor your ma never saw such,' scoffed Geordie, which was as good as a waved rag to a bull.

‘He came to our vill,' Parcy insisted indignantly, ‘a wheen of years back, when such black crows were permitted into the Lowlands to seek out the heresies of the Temple. The folk came out shouting that my ma was a witch and should be burned. Burn her, burn her, they were yellin', and demanded the good Brother Inquisitor put her to the test.'

He paused and the wind flared up sparks, as if it was part of the story.

‘The Inquisitor, who was interested only in the foulness of Poor Knights, was weary of a deal of the same. Scotland, he had discovered, was full of kindly, helpful folk who seemed determined to broil and roast their neighbours. “What makes you think she is a witch?” he demanded and they told him she stank of old sulphur when she farted. “Burn her. Burn the witch.”

‘“So do I,” the Inquisitor admitted. “She has a third nipple,” they told him and demanded that he burn the witch. He frowned. “I have a wart which might be mistaken for the same,” he sighed back at them.

‘“She takes the Lord's name in vain,” they flung at him. “She must be burned. Burn the witch.” The Inquisitor, who had had enough of this, flung down his scrip of blessed relics in disgust. “I have also taken the Lord's name in vain,” he announced. “Particularly when faced with the likes of folk such as yourselves.”'

Parcy stopped and shook his head in mock sorrow.

‘Well, he thought he had brought sense to them, for they stopped and muttered among themselves for a minute or two, then raised their heads and untied my ma. “Forget the auld wummin,” they said, looking at him with flames in their eyes. “Burn the witch.”'

There were dry chuckles, but mostly silence as folk marvelled at the tale.

‘What happened to your ma?' demanded Yabbing Andra into the head-shaking admiration. ‘Did her neebors burn her as well as that Inqueesitor?'

‘For certes not,' Parcy said without hesitation. ‘They let her go and concentrated on the unhappy black priest – so she went back to our house and turned them all into toads, first chance she had. That vill is now empty save for her and some hopping croakers and their gener. None will visit it, not even myself.'

‘Bigod,' Patrick declared, ‘the Auld Carl himself never told such fibs. I am not surprised your ma made brews to make ye boak, if you kept telling her tales like that.'

‘I had a physick once,' Yabbing Andra began and people groaned. Dog Boy got up and moved away, feeling strange, at once part of them and not part of them. Perhaps it was their talk of mothers. Perhaps it was the new livery he wore, a smart jupon that was still fresh enough to be clean, fixed with the badge of a royal houndsman.

He had taken it from the hands of Bernard the Chancellor, whom he'd been advised to see as soon as possible and had found as a dry thin stick of a priest in plain brown wool, worse dressed than the gaggle of clever clerks who served him.

‘Aleysandir,' he declared when the name was given to him, consulted the rolls and frowned. He issued orders and, in short order, Dog Boy had his new badged clothes and a chinking bag of money.

‘You have a stipend, paid quarterly,' the Chancellor declared. He had a face dominated by pink-rimmed eyes and a knife-cut of a mouth, a manner made haggard by the amount of work he had before him. Yet he managed what passed for a smile.

‘The King's hounds are at Turnberry. Or Lochmaben – no one is sure. Once this unpleasantness is dealt with, you may take up your duties proper.'

And that was it. Stipended, by God. A rich man …

And severed by it from the others, he realized as he moved off through the fires, drawn back over Coxet to the baggage camp. He hung like a mote between Heaven and earth, too low-born for the company of Jamie Douglas, too raised for the likes of Patrick and Parcy Dodd to feel comfortable with.

Now he was looking for Hal and, if truth be told, it was not simply because he wanted to speak of the loss of Sim Craw, or hear the adventure of how Kirkpatrick and the lord of Herdmanston had brought a great load of weapons and armour all the way from Spain. He knew where Spain was – beyond England and further south through Gascony until folk stopped speaking either English or French – but he could not envisage how far it was, or of ever going there.

The truth was that Dog Boy was happy that Hal had survived it all, while the hurting loss of Sim Craw had sunk in him like a wound and would scab over in time. No, the truth of what irked him was that the lord of Herdmanston had not sought him out.

Why should he? We were parted long before he went into Roxburgh's depths, he thought, and he was seven years in that; he is nothing to me, nor me to him. Yet he recalled that once they had been close and wished for that comfort again.

So here I am, he admitted wryly, looking.

The lord of Herdmanston's banner was not hard to find even in the confusion of the baggage camp, tight huddled like sheep in the lee of Coxet, stuck to the side of it like a bloom of fungus. Dog Boy threaded a way through the skeins of doggedly patient men and harassed clerks of Bernard the Chancellor, working by rush lights and against the swoop of a night too short to properly darken, tallying and issuing the weapons and armour. He reached the panoply of Sir John Airth, commander of the camp, where a bored, half-asleep guard stood hipshot under a limp banner on a pole.

He was friendly and informative, which let Dog Boy marvel at the power of his new station in life; before, he would have been told to shift away but now he had a cote with a royal badge on it and was treated politely.

He learned that ‘auld Sir John' was asleep, while Sir Henry of Herdmanston had gone off with another Sientcler lord, the one from Roslin. They had gone to the Sientcler camp – the engrailed cross banner was plain to see, the guard added, since the high and mighty Sientclers raised it on a taller pole than anyone else.