The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (25 page)

‘So?'

‘My … I am sorry … you took me by surprise,' Hal stammered and turned his back. She snorted and then laughed.

‘There is not much you do not know of me now, Hal. Whore of Babylon is the least of it. Unhappy wife, certes. Unhappy and spurned lover. Showing my unbound hair to man not my husband or kin is the least of it.'

She sank on a long bench. ‘No worse than having to be restrained by outraged monks from actually putting a mulch of leaves on a sick man's navel.'

‘I was not expecting the hair,' Hal said.

‘I admit it needs a comb and a wash,' she answered, ‘but surely it is not as ravaging as a basilisk to the eye?'

‘No … no,' began Hal, then saw her wry little smile. ‘No. I was not expecting so much of it – I only saw it once down and in the …'

He stopped, realising the mire he had blundered into and the widening of her eyes.

‘When was this?'

He felt himself prickle and flush.

‘Douglas,' he admitted. ‘I saw you and The Bruce … young Jamie's shield and gauntlet …'

It was her turn to redden.

‘You were spying on me,' she accused and he denied it, spluttering, then realised she was laughing at him and stopped, scrubbing his own head ruefully.

‘Aye,' she said, seeing this, ‘the pair of us will have to shave like clerics to rid ourselves of all that is living in it.'

‘Like your spital,' Hal answered, straight-faced, ‘it seems to have offered space to all the poor souls who can cram in.'

Now it was her turn to smile and the sight warmed Hal. Outside, someone started to scream and Isabel's head came up.

‘Maggie of Kilwinning,' she said, frowning. ‘Her man is with Moray's
mesnie.
She was brought in raving about tigers of flame tearing her body. Four other pregnant women were brought in, spontaneously aborting. Three of them will probably die.'

Her shoulders slumped and he found his hand on her head before he knew he had even done it. She straightened and looked at him, halfway between flight and astonishment. He took it away and then she stirred and smiled.

‘I would wash that if I were you,' she said.

‘There are those who will say it is possession by demons,' Hal offered cautiously. ‘A punishment for the sin of rebellion. A sign, perhaps, that God has forsaken us.'

‘Bollocks,' said Isabel savagely and Hal jerked. Their eyes met and both smiled.

‘So,' Hal said finally. ‘A sickness. Of the mind, perhaps? The madness of the doomed?'

It was shrewd and Isabel acknowledged it with a nod of approbation into those cool, grey eyes. Then she shook her head.

‘There are herbs that do that, though not so violently as this.'

‘Poison, then?' Hal suggested and they looked at one another. She knew he was thinking of his dogs and Malise; for a moment she shivered, then shook it off.

‘No,' she answered, ‘nothing so murderous – St Anthony's Fire.'

Hal had heard of it though he did not know what it was.

‘The curse of a saint,' she said. ‘Which is never dismissed lightly. Ask the Earl of Carrick.'

she sighed and rubbed her tired eyes.

‘One day we will find how the saint does it and why it is always the poorest of the sma' folk who suffer. I have no proof of it, but I suspect the bread. Or the herbage they put in potage. The poor do not have the luxury of refusing even the stuff that looks worst.'

‘You know a deal on medical matters,' Hal said and she looked sideways at him.

‘For a Countess, you mean? Or for a woman?'

‘Both.'

she sighed.

‘Well, remember I was once the daughter of MacDuff. My father was murdered, by his own kinsmen. The true lord of Fife is a a wee boy and a prisoner in England. I had no great expectations, even of a good marriage and, certes, not one by choice of my own hand.'

‘Unlike Bruce's mother,' Hal said tentatively and saw the flicker of her lips at the memorable tale of how the Countess of Carrick had kidnapped the young man, Bruce's father, come all the way from the Holy Land to tell her that her first husband, Adam de Kilconcath, had died.

‘Aye – maybe I should have followed her and locked up the son until he agreed to carry me off,' Isabel sighed. ‘Then, he is not his father and holds that kidnapping up as yet another indication of how little spine his father has, to be so overcome by a woman.'

‘Would it have been worth it, such a kidnap?' Hal asked cautiously.

‘No, for certes,' she answered with a frankness that stunned him. she saw his face and managed a grim little smile.

‘Once I thought there was love in it, but I always thought the Earl of Carrick was as good a refuge from the Earl of Buchan as I would find,' she said and her face darkened as she spoke of Buchan. ‘That one behaves as if I was a dunghill hen to his rooster – the day he realises I cannot give him the egg he wants will be the one that dooms me to a convent, I am thinking. As you can see, lord Hal, I am not suited to a cleric life.'

‘You cannot have childer?' he blurted and the concern in it was balm enough for her to reply without anger.

‘It would seem not,' she answered. ‘I am young yet, but women with those years on them have a brood and more.'

The bitterness in it was a wormwood Hal could almost taste himself, so he sought to dilute it.

‘Or are dead in the birthing,' he pointed out, then saw the bleak that scorched her eyes grey as ash.

‘Better that,' she said softly and he saw the lip tremble, just the once.

‘So – this is why you study the medical?' he asked hastily, levering matters back on track.

‘At first,' she answered flatly, ‘but that was not for a daughter, let alone one of Fife. I contrived a deal of it on my own, though books and treatises are hard to come by – and none of it was any help. Strangely, as the Countess of Buchan I had better freedom to indulge it and my own house at Balmullo.'

She stopped and he saw the beautiful eyes of her pool with tears, which she shook away with an impatient gesture.

‘I have books there and kept Balius stabled at it,' she went on. ‘My husband will want to burn it to the ground after this unless I prevent him.'

Hal did not want to know how she would prevent him. He did not want to know that she was returning to Buchan at all, or that he was the jailer taking her. Yet the thought of what might happen if the English stormed into this camp, all vengeance and victory, made him take her by the hand, so suddenly that it was moot who was more surprised by it.

‘We could leave,' he declared. ‘Tonight – afore the battle …'

She blinked once or twice, disbelieving – then the great warm rush of it hit her like a wave and it did not matter if they stayed or left, only that he had offered. She took her hand back, gently.

‘You have done enough, Lord Hal,' she said and meant it. ‘Go home. As I must.'

There was silence, long and aching.

‘I even contrived to have a master from Bologna visit once,' she declared, suddenly brittle bright. ‘The Earl was pleased, since it would keep me from shaming him at home.'

‘Bologna?'

‘Buchan no doubt hoped I would find humility, but I was gulling him. I said he was a priest from Rome.'

She broke off, sighed and shook her head.

‘I have treated Buchan poorly and have sympathy for the man,' she added bleakly, ‘but only to the point when he goes red in the face and punishes me, one way or another. Yet I have treated him as ill, in my way.'

‘Does this excuse beatings?' Hal growled. ‘A knight is supposed to protect a lady.'

Isabel smiled sadly.

‘Ah, would it not be nice if the world was Camelot,' she answered. ‘It is not, of course, so I cheated him to get this Master Schiatti from Bologna, for the best medical teachers are there at the University. What in the name of God and all His Saints I thought to do with what he taught I do not know -but I learned, among other matters, that even the most recalcitrant can be persuaded, for a price, to teach some of their art to a woman. Some of it was valuable, other aspects less so. I was good with the astrology, but mediocre with pigs at best.'

‘Pigs?' asked Hal. Talking to this woman was like learning to skate on thin ice.

‘Nearest to humans in anatomy and skin and bone,' Isabel replied. ‘In Bologna, real corpses are kept for examinations and most everyday work is done on pigs. Strangled, burned, poisoned and buried for a day, a week, longer. Bologna is a dangerous place to be a pig, sir Hal.'

‘If I ever take sim Craw to the Italies, I will bear it in mind,' Hal said laconically, ‘since his manners clearly endanger him with dissection. Mark you – it seems Balmullo is no place to root for acorns either.'

she looked at him sideways a little.

‘You are not fond of physickers?'

Hal started to deny it, unwilling to annoy this woman, but the truth choked him. The ague was a pest which began as innocent as a shiver on a warm day, as if some sudden unseen breeze had caressed the spine. In three days or less, the shiverers were rattling their teeth on a rack of sweat-soaked bedding, the air in their chest wheezing like leaky forge bellows. They complained of the cold and burned away to a greasy husk before your eyes.

Others got it, too – from the vapours of the fetid, warm marshes according to the physickers and lazar priests – and some of them died swiftly, while others were abandoned even by their fearful priests and died of neglect.

One, the lovely young Mary of the saltoun Mill, crawled from her sickbed and slipped into the river, drawing the cool water over her like a balming coverlet. After they found her, the same saltoun priests who had abandoned her refused her consecrated burial, since she had taken her own life.

Not that they were any use when they found the courage to remain with their charges. Rosemary and onions, wormwood and cloves, vinegar and lemons, all mixed with henshit like some bad pudding or capon stuffing and smeared on the forehead and under the arms.

A live toad, fastened to the head. A live pullet, cut in two and held, bleeding and squawking, to anything that looked like a sore – though sores were no part of the ague that took Hal's wife and son, only a shaking sickness that boiled them away to wasted sweat, to where death was a merciful release.

She listened to him in silence, feeling the bile, the venom pus of it. When he had finished, she laid a hand on his arm and he felt strange and light-headed.

Another scream echoed and he saw her leap up, then waver uncertainly before recovering.

‘Have you eaten?' he asked and she stared at him for a moment, then shook her head.

‘Well, if you provide the wine, I will provide some oatcakes and a little cheese,' he said with forced cheer.

She didn't argue, so that they sat in a makeshift House of God and ate.

‘Cygnets' Hal said, rinsing the cling of oatcake from the roof of his mouth.

‘What?'

‘Cygnets,' Hal repeated. ‘A teem of cygnets. The game you like to play.'

He saw her face flame and her head lower. The oatcake turned to ash in his mouth.

‘Pardon,' he stuttered. ‘I thought …'

It tailed off into silence and he sat, mouth thick with oats he could neither spit nor swallow.

‘It was a silly game for lovers,' Isabel said at last and raised her head defiantly, staring him in the face. ‘To see who would be horse and who the rider.'

Hal forced the lump down his throat, remembering as he gagged, the high table at Douglas and her triumphant shout as she beat Bruce with her blush of boys. Ha, she had declared. I come out on top.

He found her hand thrust at him and a cup in it.

‘You will choke,' she said and he forced a smile.

‘Water,' said Hal with certainty, ‘has fish dung in it.'

Then raised the cup in salute and drank.

‘Which is as good a reason as any to avoid it and keep to wine.'

‘That is Communion wine,' Isabel said wryly and Hal spluttered, then put the cup down carefully, as if would bite him. Isabel chuckled.

‘You have already swallowed enough to be allowed to sit at the feet of Christ Himself,' she said and Hal found himself grinning. They could both be ducked, or even burned at the stake for what they did here, drinking Holy wine and laughing blasphemously, her unchaperoned.

‘shrews,' she said suddenly and Hal blinked. The silence stretched and then she raised her head and looked into his grey eyes.

‘A rebel of shrews,' she declared and added softly, ‘I win.'

The thunder of blood in his ears drowned the sudden arrival, so that only the blast of air snapped the lock of their gaze. Like the opening of a chill larder door, the man crashed in on them.

‘Ah might have weel kent ye would find the cosiest nook,' growled the voice. ‘Wine and weemin – I taught ye well, it appears.'

Hal whirled, as if caught fondling himself in the stable, stared up into the fierce, grey-bearded hatchet face.

‘Father,' he said weakly.

The Abbey Craig, Stirling

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Solemnity of the Most Holy
Trinity – August 11, 1297

They came to him just before dawn, as the sky lightened in a sour-milk smear, two earnest men already accoutred for war and clacking as they walked. Thweng watched them, seeing the grim eagerness in their hard young eyes, flicking over the blazons that let him know who they were. In the midst of their differing heraldry, a little badge in common – st Michael with flaming sword.

‘The Wise Angels request a boon,' one of them said, bowing, and Thweng sighed, trying not to let it out of him in a weary puff. Mummery. Chivalric posturing from folk gripped by Arthur and the Round Table – yet, beneath it, the very real courage and skill that might win the day. So he forced himself. ‘Speak, Angel.'

‘The Wise Angels request to be your boon companions in the Van this day, lord.'