The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (9 page)

Hal and Sim looked at each other. It was an expert stroke from a particular weapon and only a man who killed with it regularly would keep a dagger like that about him. Wildly, Hal almost asked Buchan if he and Bruce had hunted in these woods before and had lost a henchman. He thought of the two deerhounds, slathered with balm and praises, and the dead
alaun
t, bitterly buried by the Berner.

‘So,' Sim declared. ‘A particular slaying – what make ye of this, Hal? When the slayer was throwin' him down, d'ye think?'

It was a cloth scrap, a few threads and patch no bigger than a fingernail, caught in the buckle of the dead man's scrip baldric. It could have been from the man's own cloak, or another part of his clothing for all the cloth was rotted and colour-drained, but Hal did not think so and said as much.

Sim thought and stroked the grizzle of his chin, disturbed a louse and chased it until he caught it in two fingers and flicked it casually away. He turned to Hal and Buchan, who was wishing he could leave the festering place but was determined, on his honour and duty as an earl of the realm, to stay as long as the others.

‘This is the way of it, I am thinking,' Sim said. ‘A man yon poor soul knows comes to him, so getting near enough to strike. They are in the dark, ken, and neb to neb, which is secretive to me. Then the chiel with the dagger strikes …'

He mimicked the blow, then grabbed Hal by the front of his clothes and heaved him, as if throwing him over on to the ground. He was strong and Hal was taken by surprise, stumbled and was held up by Sim, who smiled triumphantly and nodded down to where the pair of them were locked, buckle to buckle, Sim's leg between Hal's two.

Hal staggered upright as Sim let go, then explained what had just happened to the bewildered Buchan, who had understood one in six words of Sim's explanation in Lowland Lothian. Like wood popping in a fire, the earl thought.

‘Aye,' Hal said at the end of it, ‘that would do it, right enough – well worked, Sim Craw.'

‘Which does not explain,' Buchan said, ‘who this man is. He is no peasant with these clothes – Kirkpatrick said as much when he was here.'

‘Did he so?' mused Sim, then looked closely at the dead man, half yellow bone, half black strips of rot, some cloth, some flesh. An insect scuttled from a sleeve, down over the knucklebones, slithering under a mottled leather pouch. Sim worried the pouch loose, trying to ignore the crack of the small bones and the waft of new rot that came with him disturbing the body. He opened it, shook the contents on to the palm of his hand and they peered. Silver coins, a lump of metal with horsehair string attached, a medallion stamped with the Virgin and Child.

‘No robbery, then,' Hal declared, then frowned and indicated the brown, skeletal hand.

‘Yet a finger has been cut.'

‘To get at a tight-fitting ring,' Sim said, with the air of man who was no stranger to it, and Buchan lifted an eyebrow at the revelation.

‘Yet no other rings are taken,' he pointed out, and Hal sighed.

‘A wee cat's cradle of clues, right enow,' he declared, looking at the contents of the purse. The medallion was a common enough token, a pardoner's stock in trade to ward off evil, but the teardrop metal lump and string was a puzzler.

‘Fishing?' Buchan suggested hesitantly and Hal frowned; he did not know what it was but fishing seemed unlikely. Besides, it was knotted in regular progression and unravelled to at least the height of a man.

‘It is a plumb line,' Sim said. ‘A mason uses it to mark where he wants stone cut – see, you chalk the string, hold the free end and let the weight dangle, then pluck it like a harp string to leave a chalk line on the stone.'

‘The knots?'

‘Measurement,' Sim answered.

‘A mason?' Buchan repeated, having picked that part out ‘Is this certes?'

Hal looked at Sim, eyebrows raised quizzically.

‘Am I certes? Is a wee dug bound by a blood puddin'?' Sim answered indignantly. ‘I am Leadhoose born, up by the wee priory of St Machutus what the Tironensians live in. My father was lifted to work with the monks, who were God's gift for buildin'.'

‘Tironensians. I know that order,' Buchan said, recognising that word in the welter of thick-accented braid Scots. ‘They are strict Benedictines, finding glory in manual labour. They are skilled – did they not do the work at the abbeys in Selkirk, Arbroath and Kelso? You think this mason is a Benedictine from that place?'

‘Mayhap, though he is not clothed like any monk I ken,' Sim declared. ‘But my da was lifted from the cartin' to work with them at the quarrystanes and then came to Herdmanston to dig a well. Until I was of age to go off with young Hal here, I worked at the digging and the drystane. I ken a plumb line – the knots are measured in Roman feet.'

He closed his eyes, the better to remember.

‘Saint Augustine says six is the perfect number because the sum and product of its factors – one, two, and three – are the same. Thus a thirty-six-foot square is the divine perfection, much favoured by masons who build for the church. Christ be praised.'

He opened his eyes into the astounded stares of Hal and the Earl of Buchan and then blinked with embarrassment as they stumbled over the rote response, almost dumbed by the revelation of a Sim with numbers.

‘Aye, weel – tallyin' is not my strength, though I ken the cost of a night's drink. But my da dinned plumb lines into me, for ye can dig neither well nor build as much as a cruck hoose without it.'

‘You think it was a mason from St Machutus?' the earl demanded, narrow eyed and cock-headed with trying to understand. Sim shook his head.

‘It's a mason, certes. And a master, if his fine cloots are any guide.'

‘Aye,' Hal said wryly. ‘Since English Edward knocked about some fine fortresses last year, I daresay there are a wheen of master masons at work in Scotland.'

‘Not our problem,' Buchan said suddenly, eager to be gone from the place. He plucked weight, string, medallion and coins from Sim's palm and tossed them carelessly back into the mess on the table.

‘Evidence,' he declared. ‘We will wrap this up and deliver it to the English Justiciar at Scone. Let Ormsby deal with it. I have a rebellion to put down.'

Irvine

Feast of St Venantius of Camerino, May, 1297

The sconces made the shadows lurch and leer, transported a bishop to a beast. Not that Wishart looked much like the foremost prelate in Scotland, sitting like a great bear in his undershift, the grey hair curling up under the stained neck of it above which was a face like a mastiff hit with a spade.

‘More of a hunt than you had bargained, eh, Rob?' he growled and Bruce managed a wan smile. ‘Then to find a corpse … Do we ken who it is, then?'

The last was accompanied by a sharp look, but Bruce refused to meet it and shook his head dismissively.

‘Buchan carted the remains off to Ormsby at Scone. I said to go to Sheriff Heselrig at Lanark, but he insisted on going to the Justiciar.'

He broke off and shot looks at the men crowded into the main hall of the Bourtreehill manor.

‘Did he know? Did Buchan know that Heselrig was already dead and Lanark torched?' he hissed and Wishart flapped an impatient hand, as if waving away an annoying fly.

‘Tish, tosh,' he said in his meaty voice. ‘He did not. No-one knew until it was done.'

‘Now all the realm knows,' growled a voice, and The Hardy stuck his slab of a face into the light, scowling at Bruce; Hal saw that he was a coarser, meatier version of Jamie. ‘While you were taking over my home, Wallace here was ridding the country of an evil.'

‘You and he were, if the truth be told, torching our lands around Turnberry,' Bruce countered in French, swift and vicious as a stooping hawk. ‘That's why my father was charged to bring you to heel by sending me to Douglas – as well, my lord, that I had less belly for the work than you, else your wife and bairns would not be tucked up safe a short walk away.'

‘You were seen as English,' The Hardy muttered, though he shifted uncomfortably as he spoke; they both knew that The Douglas had simply been taking the opportunity to plunder the Bruce lands.

‘That was not the reason Buchan tried to have me killed,' Bruce spat back, and The Hardy shrugged.

‘More to do with his wife, I should think,' he said meaningfully, and Bruce flushed at that. Hal had seen the Countess early the next day, mounted on a sensible sidesaddled palfrey and led by Malise out of Douglas, with four big men and the Earl of Buchan's warhorse in tow. Headed back to Balmullo, he had heard from Agnes, who had been her tirewoman while she stayed in Douglas. Ill-used to the point of bruises, she had added.

‘He tried to have me killed,' Bruce persisted and Hal bit his lip on why Kirkpatrick had been loose in the woods with a crossbow, but the sick meaning of it all rose in him, cloyed with despair; the most powerful lords in Scotland savaged each other with plot and counterplot, while the Kingdom slid into chaos.

‘Aye, indeed,' Wishart said, as if he had read Hal's mind, ‘it's as well, then, that Wallace here put a stop to the Douglas raids on the Bruce, in favour of discomfort to the English in Lanark. A proper blow. A true rebellion.'

Douglas scowled at the implication, but the man in question shifted slightly, the light falling on his beard making it flare with sharp red flame. The side of his face was hacked out by the shadows and, even sitting, the power of the man was clear to Hal and everyone else. His eyes were hooded and dark, the nose a blade.

‘Heselrig was a turd,' Wallace growled. ‘A wee bachle of a mannie, better dead and his English fort burned. He was set to assize me and mine for a trifle and would have been savage at it.'

‘Indeed, indeed,' Wishart said, as if soothing a truculent bairn. ‘Now I will speak privily with the Earl of Carrick, who has come, it seems, to add his support to the community of the realm.'

‘Has he just,' answered Wallace flatly and stood up, so that Hal saw the size of him – enough of a tower for him to take a step back. Wallace was clearly used to this and merely grinned, while The Hardy followed him as he ducked through the door, arguing about where to strike next.

Wishart looked expectantly at Kirkpatrick and Hal, but Bruce started to pace and glower at him.

‘They are mine,' he said, as if that explained everything. Hal bit his lip on the matter, though he knew he should have walked away from the mess of it, before the wrapping chains of fealty to the Roslin Sientclers shackled him to a lost cause.

He glanced over at Kirkpatrick and saw the hooded stare he had back. Noble-born, Hal thought, and carries a sword, though he probably does not use it well. Not knighted, with no lands of his own – yet cunning and smart. An intelligencer for The Bruce, then, a wee ferret of secrets – and a man Bruce could send to red murder a rival.

‘So – you and Buchan, plootering about in the woods like bairns, tryin' to red murder yin another?' Wishart scathed. ‘Hardly politic. Scarcely
gentilhommes
of the community of the realm, let alone belted earls. Then there is this ither matter – ye never saw the body, then?'

Bruce rounded on him like a savaging dog, popping the French out like a badly sparking fire.

‘Body? Never mind that – what in God's name are you up to now, Wishart? The man's a bloody-handed outlaw. Barely noble – community of the realm, my arse.'

Wishart sipped from a blue-glass goblet, a strangely delicate gesture from such a sausage-fingered man, Hal thought. The bishop stared up into Bruce's thrusting lip and sighed.

‘Wallace,' he said heavily. ‘The man's a noble, but barely as you say. The man's an outlaw, no argument there.'

‘And this is your new choice for Scotland's king, is it?' Bruce demanded sneeringly. ‘It is certainly an answer to the thorny problem of Bruce or Balliol, but not one, I think, that your “community of the realm” will welcome. A lesser son, a family barely raised above the level? Christ's Bones, was he not bound to be a canting priest, the last refuge of poor
nobiles?

‘Aye, weel – some become bishops,' Wishart answered mildly, dabbing his lips with a napkin, though the stains down the front of his serk bore witness to previous carelessness and Bruce had the grace to flush and begin to protest about present company. Wishart waved him silent.

‘Wallace is no priest,' he answered. ‘No red spurs nor dubbing neither, but his father owns a rickle of land and his mother is a Crawfurd, dochter of a Sheriff of Ayr – so he is no chiel with hurdies flappin' out the back of his breeks. Besides, he is a bonnie fighter – as bonnie as any I have ever seen. As a solution to the thorny problem of Bruce or Balliol it takes preference over murder plots on a
chasse,
my lord.'

‘Is that all it takes, then?' Bruce demanded thickly. ‘You would throw over the Bruce claim for a “bonnie fighter”?'

‘The Bruce claim is safe enough,' Wishart said, suddenly steely. ‘Wallace is no candidate for a throne – besides, we have a king. John Balliol is king and Wallace is fighting in his name.'

‘Balliol abdicated,' Bruce roared and Kirkpatrick laid a hand on his arm, which the earl shook off angrily, though he lowered his voice to a hoarse hiss, spraying Wishart's face.

‘He abdicated. Christ and All His Saints – Edward stripped the regalia off him, so that he is Toom Tabard, Empty Cote, from now until Hell freezes over. There is no king in Scotland.'

‘That,' replied Wishart, slowly wiping Bruce off his face and staring steadily back at the pop-eyed earl, ‘is never what we admit. Ever. The kingdom must have a king, clear and indivisible from the English, and Balliol is the name we fight in. That name and the Wallace one gains us fighting men – enough, so far, to slay the sheriff of Lanark and burn his place round his ears. Now the south is in rebellion as well as the north and east.'