by Robert Low
Hal rode to Isabel, who fought her wet skirts back over the wagon to where the Dog Boy, her devoted slave, waited to leg her up on to her horse again.
‘Are you well?’ Hal asked, suddenly anxious at her limp. Isabel turned, a poisonous spit of a reply already wetting her lips, when she saw the concern on his face and swallowed the bile, which left her flustered, as did the sudden leap inside her, a kick like she had always imagined would come from a child in the womb.
‘Bruised,’ she replied, ‘but only from riding, Sir Hal. Who were they?’
Hal was admiring of her acceptance of events and almost envied the Dog Boy his closeness to her when she got back into the sidesaddle.
‘Wallace men,’ Hal said, ‘the worst of them, if they are still Wallace men at all and not just trail baston, club men and brigands off on their own. There will be a deal of that from now on.’
‘As well The Bruce thought of sending me with yourself,’ Isabel replied. ‘You seem to have acquainted yourself well enough with a warhorse for a ploughman.’
Hal acknowledged the compliment and the implied truce, then carefully inspected Balius, relieved to find not a mark. He handed it to the care of Will Elliot and mounted Griff, then found the garron suddenly too low and too slow and wished he had never ridden the big warhorse at all.
They collected themselves, loaded the dead ostler on to a wagon, got Jock back on his horse, then slithered cautiously down the muddy road to the inn.
It was, as Hal had feared, burning, though the sodden timbers and thatch of it had conspired to reduce it from a conflagration to a slow-embered, sullen smoulder. There was a fat man at the entrance with his throat cut. A woman lay a little way away, stuck with arrows so deliberately that it was clear she had been used as sport.
‘Ach, that’s shite,’ declared Bangtail Hob, hauling off his leather arming cap and scrubbing his head with disgust.
‘What?’ demanded Will Elliott, but Hob simply turned away, unable even to speak at the loss of Lizzie. He had been rattling her silly only a few hours before and it did not seem right to be standing there seeing her like a hedgepig with arrows and the rain making tears in her open, sightless eyes.
Out on the road, Hal was of the same mind.
‘Well,’ he said grimly, ‘there is no shelter here, for sure. We will push on across the bridge to the town and politely inform the English commander here that he has Scots raiders on the road.’
Sim nodded and stood for a while, watching the caravan of wagons and horses and frightened people rushing past the inn and down the road after Hal and the unfurled Templar banner, the Beau Seant, held high by Tod’s Wattie in one massive fist.
Despite ‘baws’nt’, that fancy flag, Sim was sure they were sticking their heads in a noose the further north they stravaiged. He just wondered how tight the kinch of it would be.
Chapter Six
Edinburgh
Feast of St Giles – August 1297
The church of St Giles was muggy, blazing with candles and the fervour of the faithful. Hot breath drifted unseen into the incense-thick air, so that even the sound of bell and chant seemed muted, as if heard underwater. The wailing desperate of Edinburgh crowded in for their patron’s Mass, so that the lights fluttered, a heartbeat from dying, with their breathy prayers for intercession, for help, for hope. There were even some English from the garrison, though the castle had its own chapel.
The cloaked man slipped in from the market place, slithering between bodies, using an elbow now and then. In the nave, the ceiling so high and arched that it lost itself in the dark, the gasping tallow flickered great shadows on stone that had never seen sunlight since it had been laid and the unlit spaces seemed blacker than ever.
In the shade of them, folk gave lip-service to God and did deals in the dark, sharp-faced as foxes, while others, hot as salted wolves, sought out the whores willing to spread skinny shanks for a little coin and risk their souls by sweating, desperate and silent, in the blackest nooks.
‘O Lord,’ boomed the sonorous, sure voice, echoing in dying bounces, ‘we beseech you to let us find grace through the intercession of your blessed confessor St Giles.’
The incense swirled blue-grey as the robed priests moved, the silvered censers leprous in the heat. The cloaked man saw Bisset ahead.
‘May that what we cannot obtain through our merits be given us through his intercession. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. St Giles, pray for us. Christ be praised.’
‘For ever and ever.’
The murmur, like bees, rolled round the stones. The cloaked man saw Bisset cross himself and start to push through the crowd – not waiting for the pyx and the blessings, then. No matter … the cloaked man moved after him, for it had taken a deal of ferreting to get this close and he did not want to lose him now. All he needed to know from the fat wee man was what he knew and whom he had told.
Bartholomew was no fool. He knew he was being followed, had known it for some time, like an itch on the back of his neck that he could not scratch. Probably, he thought miserably, from the time he had left Hal Sientcler and the others at Linlithgow long days ago.
‘Take care, Master Bisset,’ Hal had said and Bisset had noted the warning even as he dismissed it; what was Bartholomew Bisset, after all, in the great scheme of things?
He would travel to his sister’s house in Edinburgh, then to Berwick, where he heard the Justiciar had taken up residence. He was sure Ormsby, smoothing the feathers that had been so ruffled at Scone, would welcome back a man of his talents. He was sure, also, that someone had tallied this up and then considered what Bartholomew Bisset might tell Ormsby, though he found it hard to believe Sir Hal of Herdmanston had a hand in it – else why let him go in the first place?
Yet here he was, pushing into the crowded faithful of St Giles like a running fox in woodland, which was why he had turned into Edinburgh’s High Street and headed for the Kirk, seeking out the thickening crowds to hide in. He did not know who his pursuer was, but the thought that there was one at all filled him with dread and the sickening knowledge that he was part of some plot where professing to know nothing would not be armour enough.
He elbowed past a couple arguing about which of them was lying more, then saw a clearing in the press, headed towards it, struck off sideways suddenly and doubled back, offering a prayer to the Saint.
Patron Saint of woodland, of lepers, beggars, cripples and those struck by some sudden misery, of the mentally ill, those suffering falling sickness, nocturnal terrors and of those desirous of making a good Confession – surely, Bisset thought wildly, there was something in that wide brief of St Giles that covered escaping from a pursuer.
The cloaked man cursed. One moment he had the fat little turd in his sight, the next – vanished. He scanned the crowd furiously, thought he spotted the man and set off.
Bartholomew Bisset headed up the High Street towards the Castle, half-stumbling on the cobbles and beginning to breathe heavy and sweat with the uphill shove of it. The street was busy; the English had imposed a curfew, but lifted it for this special night, the Feast of St Giles, so the whole of Edinburgh, it seemed, was taking advantage.
In the half-dark, red-blossomed with flickering torches, people careered and laughed – a beggar took advantage of a whore in the stocks, cupping her grimed naked breasts and grinning at her curses.
Bisset moved swiftly, head down and peching like a mating bull – Christ’s Wounds, but he had too much beef on him these days – half-turned and paused. He was sure he saw the flitting figure, steady and relentless as a rolling boulder; he half-stumbled over a snarling dog tugging at the remains of a bloated cat and kicked out at it in a frenzy of fear.
That and the sheer tenacity of the pursuer panicked Bisset and he swept sideways into Lachlan’s Tavern, a fug and riot of raucous bellowing laughter and argument. He pushed politely into the throng, to where a knot of drovers, fresh down from the north, were starting in to singing songs off key. Big men, they smelled o
f sweat and earth and wet kine.
The cloaked man ducked in, blinking at the transfer from dark to dim light, the sconce smoke and the reek of the place attacking his nose and eyes – sweat, ale, farts and vomit, in equal measure. He could not see the fat little man, but was sure he had come in here – sure also that the fat man now knew he was being followed, which made matters awkward.
Bisset saw the man, a shadow with a hood still raised, no more than two good armlengths away. He whimpered and shoved the nearest drover, who lurched forward, careering into a clothier’s assistant, spilling ale all down his fine perse tunic and knocking the man off-balance into a half-drunk journeyman engraver, who swung angrily, missed his target and smacked another of the drovers on one shoulder.
The cloaked man saw the mayhem spread like pond ripples from a flung stone. He cursed roundly as a big man, a great greasy shine of joy on his fleshy face, lurched towards him swinging. He ducked, hit the man in the cods, backed away, was smashed from behind by what seemed the world and fell to his knees.
Bisset was already in the backland, stumbling past the privy, hearing the shouts and splintering crashes from inside Lachlan’s. The Watch would arrive soon and he hurried off until he was sure he was safe, then he stopped, hands on thighs and half-retching, half-laughing.
He reached the safety of his sister’s house moments later, found the door unlatched and fixed it carefully behind him, leaning against it and trying to stop the thundering of his heart – yet he was smiling at what he had left behind. That will teach the swine, he thought with savage joy.
He was still laughing quietly to himself when the hand snaked out of the dark and took him by the throat, so hard and sudden that he had no time even to cry out, even as he realised he had not been as clever as he had thought. An unlatched door. On a silversmith’s house – he should have known better …
‘Happy, are we?’ said a voice, so close to his ear he could smell the rank breath. From the side of one eye, he caught the gleam of steel and almost lost the use of his legs.
‘Good,’ the voice went on, soft and friendly and more frightening because of it. ‘A wee happy man is more likely to give me what I need.’
The shadowed man came in through the back court, limping slightly and almost choked by the smell from the garderobe pit. The windows here were wood shutters over waxed paper and no match for the thin, fluted blade of his dagger, but there were bars beyond that, installed by a careful man, with wealth to protect. He moved to the backcourt door, which was stout timbers, nail-studded to thwart savage axes – yet it was unlatched, so that he was in the dark, still room in a few seconds.
He stood for a moment, listening, straining against the thunder of his heart blood in his ears, feeling the matching throb of his cheek and the knuckles of one hand; the drover who had done the first and received the second had the bones of his face broken, but it was small comfort for the cloaked man.
He had come here because it was Bisset’s sister’s house and the place where he had picked up the Edinburgh trail of the fat wee man who had – he was forced to admit – cunningly contrived to thwart him at the tavern.
Now he listened and peered into the grey-black, took a step, then another and stopped when he crunched something under one foot. Glass or pottery, he thought. Smashed. He heard soft scuttling and froze, then heard it again and felt slowly into his belt, fishing out fire-starter and a nub end of candle. He took a deep breath and struck.
The sparks were dazzling in the dark, even through the veil of his closed eyes and, after the first strike, he waited, alert and ready. No-one came; something scuttled at floor level. He struck sparks until the treated charcoal caught, then he fed the wick to the embers and blew until it caught, flaring like a poppy.
He held it up, saw the overturned chair, the smashed crockery, the spilled meal and the mice scattering away from it. He fetched up a fallen candlestick holder, found the fat tallow that had been in it, replaced it and fed that from his nub end.
Better light, held high, flooded yellow-butter around him, glowing sullenly off the rock crystal board and the spill of chess pieces. He turned slowly; gryphon and pegasus stared unmoving back at him, their winking silver bouncing light that turned the tarn of blood to a dark pool. A woman – the sister, he imagined – white face bloody, eyes wide and one of the straw rushes stuck to her cheek with her own blood. Naked and bruised. Knifed, too, the cloaked man saw, with as expert a stroke as he had ever seen – or done himself.
She had let her murderer in herself, quiet in the dark and had not, the cloaked man decided, died easy. Not a lover, then, he decided, but a clever man who knew how to imitate the voice of the woman’s brother. Let me in, hurry in the name of God – he heard it as if he had been there himself, hoarse and urgent in the dark.
She had let him and the stark purple finger marks round her face showed she had been silenced, forced to strip off her flimsy nightdress. Used, he thought, then killed, all without her having said a word.
Yet not silent, all the same. The next body was not far off, a man in his nightshirt – the sister’s husband, armed with a fire iron and fresh from bed, following the whimpers and scuffles of a savage man and a terrified woman. A journeyman silversmith, thinking his gryphon and pegasus were under threat from a wee nyaff of a thief, finding his wife violated, probably already dead, for the red curve along the silversmith’s throat showed he had been taken by surprise. Fixed by the horror of seeing his wife, dead and naked, the cloaked man thought, easy prey for a murderer as ruthless as this one appeared.
He was dry-mouthed and sweating, moved cautiously, rolling along the length of his feet, although he was sure the murderer was long gone, and cursed the brawl in the tavern. He had been lucky to get away from that when the English soldiers from the garrison waded in, cracking heads and shouting. A good trick, Bartholomew Bisset, he thought … you delayed me a long time.
He found the fat man near the door, so near it that he knew Bisset had barely stepped inside before he had been attacked. He had been stripped and lay with his hands above his head and still tied by the blue-black thumbs; looking up, the cloaked man saw the lantern hook and the length of line from it.
Strung up and ill used, he thought grimly, by someone who not only knew the work but liked it and had the leisure to indulge himself, because he knew everyone else in the house was dead.
If Bisset, the poor doomed sowl, had not contrived to delay me with fighting drovers and determined guards chasing me ower the backcourts, I might have been here in time to save him, the cloaked man thought.
He peered more closely, saw the single wound, a lipless mouth that led straight up and into the heart, killing the little fat man so completely and suddenly that he had barely bled. A death stroke, then, from a man with a flat, sharp-edged dirk who had learned as much as he would get, enjoyed as much as he dared and had no more use for Bartholomew Bisset.
The cloaked man heard noises in the street, people passing and calling out to each other, guttural as crows; he blew out the candle and stood, thinking. Nothing here, then. Back to the Lothian man, Hal Sientcler, though the cloaked man was sure that lordling had nothing to do with this.
As he wraithed back out past the choke of the garderobe pit, the cloaked man wondered who did.
The Abbey Craig, Stirling
Feast of Saint Lawrence – August 10, 1297
For two nights the Earl of Surrey’s host had been watching the dull red glow that marked the Scots campfires, across the valley and up to the piously named crag beyond. Like the breath of a dragon, Kevenard had said, which made the rest of the men laugh, the thought of a good Welsh dragon being a comfort to the archers.
Addaf did not think about dragons when he marked it; he thought about Hell and that the Devil himself might be up there for once, when the wind had changed, they all heard the mad skirl and yell of them, like imps dancing.
‘Hell is not up there, look you,’ Heydin Captain had growled, sucking broth off the en
d of his moustache. ‘Hell will be in the valley, where it is cut about with ponds and marsh and streams. It is there we will have to stand and shoot these folk down and when we start in to it, they will not be singing, mark me.’
In the Keep of Stirling, Sir Marmaduke Thweng watched the ember glow and thought about all the other times he had seen it – too many times, standing in one mass of men about to try to hack another mass of men to ruin.
If he had known Heydin Captain at all, he would have been able to nod agreement to the Welsh file commander; the carse, that low-lying meadow beyond Stirling Bridge cut about by waterways the locals called ‘pows’, was just the place the archers would stand to shoot ruin into the rebel foot.
‘They have no horse at all,’ De Warenne had been told, and the lords who revealed it, shooting uneasy looks at Cressingham and Thweng and Fitzwarin as they did so, would be the ones to know. James the Steward and the Earl of Lennox, fresh from negotiating their way back into Edward’s good graces, now offered to try the same with Sir Andrew Moray and Wallace.
‘I doubt it will do much good,’ De Warenne declared, ‘since Moray might grovel his way back to his lands and titles, but Wallace will not be granted anything, my good lords. Not even a quick death.’
‘For all that,’ Lennox said morosely, ‘it would be worth the try and you lose nothing by it – you are waiting for Clifford.’
‘Ha,’ snorted Cressingham and De Warenne shot him an ugly glare. Thweng said nothing, but he could see the two Scots lords look round them all, then to each other. No-one offered an explanation, but Thweng knew, as they left, that they would find out soon enough – Robert De Clifford, Lord Warden of the English March and the man who had been assiduously gathering troops for the Earl of Surrey’s host, had been sent packing by Cressingham. He had been turned back as ‘not needed’, Cressingham ranting about the cost of defraying Clifford’s expenses when the army was already large enough to deal with a rabble under a mere brigand.