by Robert Low
He yawned and his eyes half-closed, so that Hal saw the weariness slide into the etched face of the man. Tomorrow, this giant would take the weight of the kingdom on his broad shoulders and lead Scotland’s army against their enemy.
Tomorrow, I will be gone from here, Hal thought. I can leave the Countess here and say I delivered her as far as safety allowed – which was no lie, he tried to convince himself. If I had taken her to the English in Stirling, only to find her husband was now actively a rebel, I would have delivered her into the hands of his enemies. Taking her to the rebels on Abbey Craig, on the other hand, placed her in hands which, at least, would not use her as ransom. Yet.
Not for the first time, Hal cursed the whole uncertain business, as he had done, silent and pungent under his breath, all through the town, under the brooding scowl of the English-held castle and out over the brig to Abbey Craig.
Yet he remembered the long days up to Stirling as ones marked by glory. As Sim said when they were rumbling up Bow Street, you would not think the world was about to plunge into blood and dying.
‘You will be wishing yourself back behind the plough, Lord Hal,’ Isabel said to him, gentle and smiling. He was glad of the smile, since it had been fading the closer they got to the northland of Buchan.
Back at Herdmanston, Hal said, it would be the barley harvest, the big one of the year. With luck, he told her, there would be no scab on sheep, or foot-rot, or cracked udders on cattle, or staggers or overlaid pigs. Even as he spoke, he felt the crushing weight of knowing that there were too many men away from home and not enough to get the harvest in, a tragedy repeated across every homestead in Scotland.
Every day the sky was faded blue, streaked with thin, cheese-muslin clouds. The barley and rye was ripening, waiting to be reaped, tied and winnowed without blight or burning, just enough rain had fallen to turn the millwheels and fill the rain-butts. Yet the land was empty, for everyone was with the army.
Yet the memory of Herdmanston bleared him as he spoke. You will, he told her, feel the first breath of autumn, cool, but not cold. It would be a place of precious metals, the sun shining through a soft silver, lying green-gold on the harvest fields. In a sea of haze, great iron bull’s head clouds would float up from the west and the breeze, he added, has a trick of rising suddenly, running through the trees.
She listened, marvelling at the change in him when he spoke of the place, finding that same strange leap deep in her.
There would be sunsets, he began to tell her – then stopped, remembering the last one he had seen, etching the stone cross stark against the dying blaze of day.
She knew of the dead wife and son from others.
‘What killed them?’ she asked and the concern in her voice robbed it of sting.
‘Ague,’ Hal answered dully. ‘Quartan fever – she died of the same disease as Queen Eleanor, my boy a week after his mother. I had the idea for the stone cross from all the ones the king put up for her.’
‘Longshanks loved her,’ Isabel said, ‘hard man though he is.’
‘Aye,’ Hal said and shook himself from the memories. ‘We share that pain, if little else.’
‘One other thing you share,’ Isabel said impishly, ‘is a horse. The king’s favourite horse is Bayard and the Balius you ride is from the same stock.’
Bayard, Hal knew, was the name of a magical bay from children’s stories, a redhead with a heart of gold and the mind of a fox and would have been a good name for Isabel herself. He said as much and she threw back her head and laughed aloud, a marvellous construct of white throat and rill that left Hal grinning, slack and foolish.
‘I heard he rode Bayard at Berwick,’ Sim growled, coming up in time to hear this last, crashing into it like a bull through a bad gate. ‘Leaped the wood and earth rampart and led his men in for the slaughter, so it is said. We are nearly at St Mary’s Wynd – do we cross the brig and join the rebels up on Abbey Craig?’
‘Join the rebels,’ she had said and laughed.
Hal shook himself from his revery, back to the present. Easy for you to laugh, Lady, he thought bitterly, who are never done rebelling, one way or another. Yet I have been charged to see you safe and so it must be …
Wallace had nodded off and Hal felt a sharp sympathy with the sleeping giant, hair spilling over his face, one grimed fist a finger-length from the hilt of the hand-and-a-half. Keeping all these men together was a hard enough task, never mind trying to turn them from fighters into soldiers, trying to outthink the enemy, trying to plan how to win a battle against the finest cavalry in the world.
Join the rebels. By God, not again, Hal thought. Bringing the Countess here was the safest course for her, Hal thought, since her husband was a Comyn and so more kin to the rebels than English Edward. Now that it was done …
He stepped out into the night air, hearing the strange, wild sound of sythole and viel and folk wheeching and hooching in a dance, as if tomorrow was just another day, with time enough to work off a bad head. The world was racing towards dawn and Hal felt a leap of panic to be away from here before light …
‘Let us hope they dance as well the morn,’ said a voice and Hal spun to where Moray stepped from the shadows. He was young, thick-necked and barrel-trunked and would go to fat like his da, Hal thought, when he got older. For now, though, he was a solid, formidable shape in fine wool tunic and a surcoat with a blue shield and three stars bright on it, even in the dark. Behind him came the foreign knight who spoke French but was Flemish with some outlandish name Hal scourged himself to remember.
‘He’s asleep,’ Hal said jerking his head back into the tent. Moray nodded and shrugged.
‘No matter, the ring is arranged and all that remains is for us to take our partners and jig.’ Moray said, breaking into French for the benefit of his companion, then paused, a smile, half-affection, half bitter rue on his face.
‘I came to make sure The Wallace followed the steps,’ he added. ‘He has a habit of dancing away to his own tune.’
‘Will you join us tomorrow, Lord Henry?’ the foreign knight asked and Hal blinked, then realised the knight – Berowald, he remembered suddenly, Berowald de Moravia, the Flemish kin of the Morays – was inviting him to be part of the hundred or so horse, all that the Scots army possessed and almost none of it heavy warhorsed knights and serjeants.
He shook his head so vehemently he thought it might fall off. Balius belonged to Buchan and could not be risked in a battle like this, he babbled, while Griff was too light to be of much use. Andrew Moray nodded when this was laid out.
‘Aye, well, it will be a painful dunt of a day,’ he declared grimly, then nodded to Berowald as he spoke to Hal.
‘The winning of it,’ he added in French, ‘will depend on the foot and not the horse, for all my kinsman here wishes it otherwise.’
Berowald said nothing, but the scowl spoke of his distrust at relying on ragged-arsed foot soldiers who were wildly dancing away the night before they had to stand and face the English horse. A thousand lances, Hal had heard, and he shivered. A thousand lances would do it – Christ, half that would plough them under, he thought.
He thought of Isabel and what would happen to the camp and the women and bairns in it if the battle was lost and panicked at that – the pull of her was iron to a lodestone.
She was in with the Grey Monks, the Tironensians from Selkirk, who had made a good shelter from tree branches and tent cloth, consecrating it into both a chapel and a spital for the sick and, soon, the dying. Hal found her arguing with a frowning cowl about how best to treat belly disease.
‘Chew the laurel leaves, swallow the juice and place the mulch on the navel,’ she said wearily. ‘He chews the leaves and swallows, not you. I would not stray far from the jakes now if I were you.’
The monk, pale faced in the shadows under the cowl, nodded and reeled away; Isabel turned to Hal, raising eyes and brows to the dark. She jerked her head and he followed her to a curtained-off chamber, where, once inside, she
hauled off her headcovering and scrubbed the spill of dark unbraided red-auburn hair which fell to her shoulders, like a dog scratching fleas and with every sign of enjoyment.
‘God’s Wounds, that feels good,’ she exclaimed. ‘All I need now is a chance to wash it.’
She became aware of Hal’s stare and met it, the headcovering dangling in one hand like a limp, white snakeskin. Under his frank, astonished stare she felt herself blush and became defiant.
‘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.