The Lion Rampant (17 page)

‘You have seen enough to satisfy the Plantagenet?’

The voice was rough and rheumed and the face, when it was presented to the filtered light inside the still, close tent, was a stone to the temple; Sir Marmaduke jerked a little and blinked before he recovered his wit.

‘A deal of men,’ he answered, staring at the lesioned skin and the wounds. A scar down the left eye – Methven for that, he recalled – and the ruin of his right cheek. A tourney wound, he remembered, though that had been long since and if it had never healed there was something festering wrong; there had been rumours of sickness and reports that the usurper King of Scots was taken to his bed, feverish and practically dead, but Sir Marmaduke had always dismissed them as wishes. Now he was not so sure and he fought for more sense to his words.

‘A deal of men,’ he repeated, ‘in rough wool and drilling with sticks.’

‘For all that,’ Bruce said, stiff as old rock, ‘Plantagenet will find us here when he finds the courage to seek us out. And we will have sharp on the sticks.’

‘So I understand, sirrah,’ Thweng answered and heard the court of shadows suck in their breath at this breach of protocol. But the King smiled a little at the old joke only the pair of them knew, stretching the cheek – bigod, Sir Marmaduke thought, there is discolour on it all the way back to the ear …

‘I have a gift,’ Bruce declared suddenly. He turned to take an armful of folded cloth from one of the shadows behind him and then shook it out.

‘Return this to my lord Berkeley – he lost it recently in my domains.’

The bloodied, torn Berkeley banner taken by Jamie Douglas seemed to glow balefully as Thweng reached out and gathered the rough brocade, folding it into a loop over his arm, and all the time could not take his eyes from the face of the man he had known from youth.

God blind me, he thought, the changes in him. The fierce ambition had always been there, though Thweng had not realized what the young, chivalrous knight that had been Robert Bruce had had to sacrifice for it. It was as if the stains on his soul had manifested themselves, for all to see, on his face.

Thweng shook the idea from him as a bayed stag does a hound; he had his own stained liege and enough personal sins not to want to burden himself with others. And he had his own tasks. He steeled himself, couched his lance and dug in his spurs.

‘A gift for a gift,’ he replied, ‘and a counterweight to the knowledge I have garnered: Strathbogie has fallen from your chaplet.’

It was a strike, sure as point on shield. There was a long silence, followed by a moth-wing murmur from the unseen shadows as the news went round. David of Strathbogie, Earl of Atholl, had been a recent convert to the Bruce cause, despite being married to the daughter of the murdered John Comyn of Badenoch. His defection back to the English would send a shiver through the other titled lords who supported Bruce; they were few enough and he depended on them for the best of his army.

‘It seems’, Sir Marmaduke went on, driving home the spike of it, ‘he did not care much for your brother’s shift of dalliances to the daughter of the Earl of Ross. I am told wee Izzie Strathbogie is blinded with snot and red-eyed with weeping.’

Edward growled a little and leaned forward, flexing his knuckled hands on the table, for it was his seductions that had brought this about; Bruce cleared his throat and Edward, black scowling, straightened a little.

‘Fair exchange,’ Bruce said flatly. ‘And your observations on the reasons for it are cogent – you would know, of course, of the problems women can cause. How is Lady Lucy?’

Sir Marmaduke fought down his own hackles, admiring Bruce’s smooth parry even as he did so; Lucy Thweng’s wayward, single-minded progress through lovers, husbands and even abductions was a scandal to the Thwengs in general and himself, her uncle, in particular. Yet he fought the flicker of a wry smile on to his walrus-moustached face.

‘A splendid animal,’ he answered, which was how his own king had described her, grinning knowingly and nudging Despenser as he did so, for the rumours that old Sir Marmaduke had also plucked his niece’s fruit was rife. It had clearly reached here, too, for someone tittered in the dark behind Bruce and muffled it swiftly.

There was silence after that and Sir Marmaduke realized he had probably been dismissed, was turning to clack his way across the stones when the Bruce voice harshed out again.

‘You have seen our sticks, sir. Tell Plantagenet we will defend this realm with the longest one we have.’

And Thweng, nodding a lower bow, heard the last whispered phrase as he found his way back to sunlight.

‘Farewell, Sir M.’

Bruce watched him go with a dull ache of another lost friend settling stonelike in his belly. An old friend – he had been surprised at the sunk cheek, the white wisp of hair, yet now wondered why he had been so shocked; Sir M had to have sixty years lying on his shoulders – at least. He had seemed old when he and Bruce had tourneyed together – bigod, he must have been the age I am now.

A long time of friendship, now smoked away as if it had never been. Small wonder folk spoke of being raised to the throne – it was a place as high and lonely as any eyrie.

‘Did he see, d’ye think?’

Edward’s voice was harsh with eagerness, his great broad face shining, but his brother’s eye was jaundiced when it turned on him, blood-filled with Edward’s misdemeanours.

‘Sir M misses nothing,’ he answered shortly and Edward, sensing the mood, wisely tightened his lips, aware that the Strathbogie business was too raw; he could feel the accusing eyes of all the other
nobiles
searing his back.

‘He saw the work, Your Grace,’ Jamie confirmed, and then frowned. ‘Though I cannot see why you had men digging pretend holes as well as true.’

‘I want the Plantagenet blocked from coming up Dere Strete,’ Bruce answered patiently. ‘When he moves round to the north, as he then must if he wishes to officially relieve the siege on Stirling, I want him to believe I have trenched to our front there, too. That way he will think I wish to stand and fight.’

‘But you must,’ blurted Jamie and Edward’s sharp bark of laughter drowned the disapproving murmurs at this breach of etiquette.

‘If I fight at all,’ Bruce answered, slow and cold as a glacier and as much to them all as the flustered Jamie, ‘I will not be standing, my lords. This will not be Falkirk.’

The air was heavy with the sudden tense interest of all the others, who hung on whether the King would stand and fight. And Jamie understood it, sudden as a flaring light: if the area between the armies was trenched it would be as much a barrier to the spear blocks they had been drilling in and they needed to stay tight and together as they moved. That was why the holes were pretend: Bruce would not wait for the English; he would attack them, as Wallace did at the brig.

He almost exclaimed it out loud, but then recovered himself and bowed like a bobbing hen.

‘If Your Grace stands to fight,’ he added.

Bruce favoured him with a twist of smile.

‘Just so. If that is the case, you will attend in my own Battle on the day, with your
mesnie
. Until then, I want your men mounted and riding.’

‘We are not horse, Your Grace,’ Jamie argued lightly in French. ‘You have Sir Robert Keith’s men for that.’

‘The Earl Marischal’s horse are few and needed,’ Bruce answered. ‘Your men are good riders and I want them broken in two – yon Dog Boy will command the other half – and riding about the Lothians making a deal of noise and fire and smoke.’

‘Aleysandir? He is not stationed enough for command.’

‘Stationed or not, he is vital,’ Bruce replied. ‘I will tell you why, good Sir James, since I am your liege lord and king and can do so where others tremble – he is your double. The twig does not fall far from the tree and whether your difference in stations admits that you are sired by the same loins, the truth is palpable each time you stand side by side.’

He saw Jamie Douglas stiffen and frowned.

‘Loose your hackles, lad – I need the country in turmoil. I need every handful of horsemen as heralds of the terrible Sir James. If the Black can be in two places at once, all the better.’

Jamie Douglas saw it and his flattered anger subsided slowly. He glared round the other lords, daring them to comment on this shame on his father’s name – though the truth was that all of them could name some wee common woman tupped by a noble relative.

‘I need herschip, but of a particular sort,’ Bruce went on. ‘Fetch back all the iron you can carry from Northumberland’s smiths and forges. Strip it from the Church if needs be – we will need as much as we can, to beat ploughshares into swords.’

Nor will there be enough, he thought to himself, if the weapons fail to arrive from Spain.

‘Above all,’ Bruce added, ‘you watch. Put eyes on the road from Berwick and do not remove them until you can ride and tell me proud Edward is coming over the Tweed with his host, by which route and how many.’

He watched Jamie Douglas stride off and heard Randolph clear his throat.

‘The Earl of Atholl is a sore loss.’

Indeed. As if I had not realized that – Bruce almost spat it back, but swallowed it and offered an insouciant shrug instead.

‘If the great and good cannot be persuaded to fight for their king, then the sma’ folk can be persuaded to fight for their kingdom instead, my lord,’ he replied in English, and then turned to the shadows, picking one out from the others; Sir Henry Sientcler of Roslin bowed.

It was unkind and Bruce knew it as he spoke, but fear made him careless of the Roslin lord’s feelings.

‘And if your Herdmanston kinsman and namesake falters, my lord,’ he declared to the stricken lord of Roslin, ‘we will, in truth, be defending this realm with nothing better than long sticks.’

Crunia, Kingdom of Castile

That night …

They made a plan, of sorts; Sim levered himself up and flung himself into the turmoil of the streets like a man plunging into surf, while Hal stayed with a flask of watered wine in the maelstrom of cockfighters, waiting to see if Piculph returned.

The day slid to a groaning end, the sun a raw, bloodied egg trembling on the horizon. The cockfights filtered to an exhausted finish and the victors fed and watered their weary, wounded champions, before cosseting them carefully in the dark comfort of linen bags, which they hung high on posts to thwart the vermin. The losers made more pragmatic arrangements and chicken stew was cheap on the tavern bill of fare.

Sim ate his with considerable gusto, but Hal neither liked the taste nor the idea that the white and red might be mixed in with the green and gold – though the truth was that the dying light brought out hordes of fluttering insects, mad for the sconces and, in the dim, Hal could not tell what had started out in his stew and what had landed since, drunk with light.

Sim, presented with this, paused, shrugged and spooned on, observing only that the folk of Compostella could take perfectly good food and make it ‘as heated as the Earl of Hell’s hearth’. Yet he ate Hal’s bowl as well and, at the end, slid it away from him, belched and sighed.

‘They ken how to bliss saints, mark me well,’ he observed, swallowing watered wine and grimacing at the water. ‘The seven holy men have been duly worshipped, I can tell you. The wee saints they name Segundo and Tesifonte had a good stushie at the entrance to a street, though I think it had more to do wi’ the fact that tanners carried one and cobblers the other. And Cecilio cowped off his bier and crushed a wee nun, so she and God are not on speaking terms.’

‘God be praised,’ Hal said, to protect Sim from his own blasphemy.

‘For ever and ever – did yon Piculph come back?’

‘He did not,’ Hal answered. ‘Did ye spy out the ship?’

‘I did,’ Sim said, slurping; he paused and belched again. ‘Yon fightin’ chooks is fightin’ back … It is a good swim out in the bay,’ he went on, ‘unless we can find a wee boatie.’

They mulled this in silence, for neither of them swam well; none of the crew of the
Bon Accord
did, apart from Niall, who was called Silkie – half-man, half-seal – because he could dog paddle a bit.

‘There is not a sign of any of yon fancy Order Knights with the green crosses, either on board the
Bon Accord
, or anywhere in the town,’ Sim offered as a ribbon of hope. ‘Nor at yon Doña’s house on the hill.’

‘You went there? That was reckless.’

‘Not close,’ Sim soothed. ‘But we need to ken where it lies.’

Which was true enough, though Hal’s feathers were not smoothed by the lack of presence of the Alcántara men; it could be that they had slithered out of maille and marking surcotes, the better to spy out the pair they sought. Sim, frowning, considered this and reluctantly admitted, between belches, that it might be true, though he had thought any in the Holy Orders considered it a sin to be out of their garb as well as their cloistered commanderie.

The Order of Alcántara, Hal pointed out, was not like the Poor Knights and Sim had also to admit the truth of that.

‘Still,’ he added. ‘We can hardly bide here like a millstone. The crew are in that house, according to Piculph, and needs be freed.’

‘I would prefer to know more of what is also in that house. Piculph would answer it – if we knew where he was,’ Hal said.

‘Fled,’ Sim declared. ‘You said he was doing so when we stumbled on him.’

Their mood matching the gloom, they sat until darkness fell and slid away from the tavern into the drunken streets, moving carefully until the crowds thinned and straggled to an end and the streets grew steep and broad. Then Sim’s hand halted Hal.

‘That’s the place.’

It was a walled edifice, menacingly dark, which could mean that it was empty or a trap. Hal heaved in a deep breath and brought the hidden sword out from under his ragged robes. Sim, frowning at the gurgle in his belly, shouldered the bulk of the wrapped arbalest and brought out his knife, which was much better for close work.

They looked at each other, sweat-gleamed faces tense and ghostly in the dark.