by Robert Low
Not that the King was enthroned for receiving – exactly the opposite. The new king of Scots lay on the tiles, arms outstretched and his scarred cheek pressed to the embossed pattern of the one in front of the chapel altar. The tiles were all different, each one a coat of arms of Les Neufs Preux, the Nine Worthies, and Kirkpatrick was not certain whether the King thought the pattern on that particular tile would have some holy benefit. Hector, he saw, the hero of Troy.
The King, a cruciform of repentance and thanksgiving, was naked save for the play of red and blue light streaming down from the stained windows to pool exactly where he lay. He stirred, looked sideways up at Kirkpatrick and smiled wanly.
‘I am breathing in the smell of holiness,’ he declared, half muffled by the press of his cheek. Holiness seemed a little like scented smoke to Kirkpatrick, though that might have been the remains of incense clinging to him from the Mass the King had recently attended with Abbot Thomas. Like wasps, priests droned somewhere in the distance.
Kirkpatrick watched Bruce raise himself and sit naked and crosslegged, his still-flat belly stained red and blue with light. He knew, more than anyone, what had sucked the juice from Bruce, all the same, after a flurry of activity that had seen the new king trail his weary mesnie north as far as Aberdeen to put the fear in those supporters of the Comyn.
Bruce had extorted money from east coast ports and flung merchants into prison as hostage for it, demanded military service from Perth and elsewhere, threatened the Earl of Strathearn with hanging if he did not swear to the new king. His supporters had captured Brechin, Cupar and Dundee.
Now, though, it was beginning to unravel. Percy and Clifford were methodically scouring the southwest. Dumfries had fallen to them, as well as Ayr – and Tibbers, where the luckless John Seton had been dangled by the neck like bad fruit.
None of that was what had driven the King to the altar of a private chapel. A simple roll of vellum had done that, brought by two Templars, one of them the same Rossal de Bissot who had snatched Kirkpatrick from the long drop to the floor of St Olave’s, who had gifted the Rood for the coronation.
Kirkpatrick did not know exactly what it said, but the rumour of it was flowing out, coupled to the feverish, gleeful cries of the Comyn supporters – the new king, usurper and murderer, was about to have the Holy Church’s saving grace withdrawn from him and the Pope’s writ of excommunication was due any day.
‘Everyone else enters life unsullied,’ Bruce murmured, half to himself while Kirkpatrick tried to ignore the raising hairs on his arms. ‘I entered already cursed by a saint and now I am burdened with such a panoply of sin. The Devil stalks me, Kirkpatrick.’
There was not enough cynic in Kirkpatrick to ignore such a statement and he peered right and left, as if to see it lurking, even in such holy shadows. Last year, near the Tweed, a priest had come upon an imp which had a lamb held in sharp-toothed jaws and had beaten it with his holy staff until it had finally dropped the beast and run off.
The local abbot had confirmed all this and Kirkpatrick had no reason to doubt it, so that a king – and all those who supported him – left without holy aid in a world of Satan was a doom better not contemplated. It was hard to ignore it, all the same, with Bruce’s peeling nose and raddled cheeks cause for fascinating concern that the Devil had already paid him a visit and smacked leprosy into him.
Suddenly, Bruce unreeled a list of instructions, hurried and hoarse, as if he wanted the taste of it out of his mouth; Kirkpatrick struggled to take it all in – the Cathar physicker had disappeared and Bruce feared the worst in it. Find the Cathar physicker and make sure he could never speak of the medical secrets he had been privy to. On the way, ride with two Templars, one of them Rossal de Bissot, the knight who had rescued him in St Olave’s, and make sure the pair reach Berwick safely.
Kirkpatrick nodded, as if he had fully understood, which was a lie since he did not see the need to hunt down and kill the little physician – unless, as he thought later, the wee heretic knew more than Kirkpatrick himself regarding Bruce’s condition.
The idea of that soured him, but he growled out a repeat of his instructions and said that it would be done, though he marvelled quietly at how God tests you even as you are planning your life and thinking it your own.
Once before he had dealt with Cathars and the stink of the burnings had so choked him that he had vowed then to have nothing more to do with such an unholy Holy War. Now his vows would have to be broken. Deus lo vult. He did not realize he had spoken aloud until the King replied.
‘Ave Maria gratia plena,’ Bruce said beatifically, smiling at the dubious Kirkpatrick, whose loose-jawed gape was only a mild irritant on the peace he now felt.
‘Do not worry,’ he added as a soothe to Kirkpatrick’s face. ‘God has a Plan.’
Kirkpatrick, mindful of the new protocols even with a naked king, had bowed and backed out, his heart thundering, his body in flames and his mind like a fish in a cauldron about to come to the boil. He only hoped God’s Plan included reminding the new king to put on some clothes before he stepped from his private chapel.
He could not shake the sight from him all the way down to Cupar with the two disguised Templars – the King with his skelpt-arse face and his naked body of parti-coloured light and, above all, that gentle, sure smile as if it was the most natural thing to be holding court with his pintle hanging like a dog and his soul hovering on the brink of eternal damnation.
The Templars did not help Kirkpatrick’s cat-ruffle; for all their attempts at discreet, they rode like knights dressed like poor merchants, while they prayed and crossed themselves so often that a blind man could see they belonged to the Order. It was, Kirkpatrick thought moodily, head sunk into his shoulders against the summer mirr and the flies, more than likely that the Bruce Curse of Malachy had finally been translated, like the red pox, to himself.
Which is why it came as no surprise when they ended up in the middle of the Welsh archers. Round a bend, down a straight portion of ruts, round another, with the peewits’ call descending like a mourn at the end of the day and all their thoughts misted as breath on glass.
None of the three had anything in his head but a desire for hot food and a decent bed –and did not realize they were taken until the men were round them, grinning and jabbering.
Then the Templar called Jehan had whipped out his sword from under his cloak and launched himself with a hoarse cry of ‘Deus lo vult’ which did not help. Kirkpatrick grabbed de Bissot’s bridle, dragged his horse away as the knight fought his own weapon out.
‘Leave him – he is giving you a chance,’ he roared and Rossal de Bissot saw it, even as Jehan cut down two archers, the palfrey circling and baiting. It was no warhorse, all the same and Kirkpatrick saw the Welsh, cursing and scattering, were recovering themselves and dragging big arrows on to their warbows.
Rossal wrenched the head of his horse round just as Kirkpatrick’s attention was locked on the desperately fighting Jehan and his hand on Bissot’s bridle – the jerk wrenched it from his fist and himself from the back of his own horse, the whirling tumble of it a momentary confusion, the thump that bellowed the air from him a harsh pain.
None of it drove out the leaden sound of hooves drumming off into the distance – and the harsh irony of how he had saved de Bissot at the cost of himself.
There was the sudden scuffle of feet, a spray of muddy grit into his face, a sauce for it of Welsh curses, harsh as a spitting fire. Then he was hauled up into the square block of face belonging to an archer wearing a studded jack and a dark scowl; behind him, he saw Jehan’s horse struggle to its feet, limping. The knight lay face down in the mud.
The dark scowl, clearly the leader, did not have much time for anything other than to make sure Kirkpatrick was disarmed before de Valence appeared, bareheaded but armoured and accoutred – Kirkpatrick knew him at once, the blue and white striped magnificence trailing a mesnie of serjeants behind him.
Then a figure shoved from be
hind the proud hawk of de Valence and Kirkpatrick felt the spear twist inside him at the sight of that battered, stained face.
‘Kirkpatrick,’ Malise Bellejambe said, his voice juiced with the relish of it. He sat back in his saddle while de Valence and the Welsh scowl exchanged information and, for a moment, there were only two men, Malise and Kirkpatrick, alone in the whole of splendid creation and horn-locked at the eyes.
‘God is good,’ Malise said and twisted his bruise of a face into a long, brown smear of smile, then turned as de Valence dismounted.
‘Make sure he has no daggers hidden about him, Your Grace,’ Malise informed de Valence viciously, fawningly climbing off his own horse so he would not be looking down on his betters.
De Valence did not like Bellejambe, the spy of the Earl of Buchan – but the Comyn earl was now England’s friend and so had to be appeased and his creatures treated with some courtesy.
De Valence had drawn the line at Malenfaunt, all the same, a knight who had foresworn himself before God in a tourney à l’outrance with Bruce himself. Well beaten, he had been thrown out of all respectable company, tongue-split in a just and fitting punishment. De Valence, who thought Malenfaunt should have been properly killed in the duel, did the foresworn knight the courtesy of treating him as if he were actually dead; he would not permit Malenfaunt anywhere near him.
The twist in that was that he had to accept this Bellejambe instead, though he did his best to ignore the man where possible. Like now, as he turned his back on Malise and looked at the muddied, dark apparition held firmly by two of his armoured serjeants. Swarthy, a secretive, sly-looking scum, he thought to himself. Just the sort to be up to no good.
‘You were with these Templars?’ De Valence demanded and Kirkpatrick saw Jehan being hauled upright and away, his toes furrowing the mud; senseless, but alive, he thought to himself. There’s a blessing at least.
‘Peaceful travellers,’ he began in French, which was designed to show his breeding but was brought up short when Malise snorted with derision, leaning forward with all the vengeance of the past welling like pus from his twisted soul.
‘Liar,’ he said and de Valence turned, his handsome face puckered in a frown of censure, for it was clear Kirkpatrick was something well-bred, if not a knight, and demanded some deference of rank. Malise wrenched all that from Kirkpatrick with his sneering hiss.
‘This is the red murderer of the Lord of Badenoch.’
Near Cupar Castle, Fife
Next day – the English Feast of St Margaret of Scotland, June, 1306
The monk’s face was inflamed, even over the wind-chilled redness that had chapped his cheeks and his dark olive eyes were brilliant with outrage. De Valence sighed and shifted in the saddle; his buttocks ached and the damp that was not quite rain, not quite mist seeped straight through the layers of leather and linen, maille and padding to gnaw his very bones.
He wanted a fire and hot food and something warm and spiced. He did not want an outraged Italian abbot.
‘In God’s holy name,’ this annoyance persisted stubbornly. ‘You must put a stop to this. It is against Heaven.’
Aymer de Valence agreed. He was also aware that this figure, trembling more with outrage and cold in his white wool swaddling, was Abbot Alberto of Milan, sent from York to ensure that the holy presences of Bishops Lamberton and Wishart were not harmed by their rebellion.
Before that, the shivering, sallow little priest had been sent from Rome to investigate the increasingly disturbing reports of outrage among the Templar knights in England – and the wilds of war-ravaged Scotland. He was finding more than he had expected, de Valence noted grimly, on that matter.
What outraged the good abbot was a murmur among the rain-darkened trees, trunks and twisted branches so black it seemed they had absorbed their own shadows. It was, in truth, a stark, eldritch horror which, under other circumstances, de Valence would have ridden down, shouting for God’s help and swinging a cleansing blade.
Not now, all the same. Now the dragon had been raised and the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ were caught in the vice of it – Aymer thought that was rather good. The vice of it; he had little sympathy nowadays with the Templars, whose arrogance and faked poverty had been annoying and whose blasphemies, if reports were to be believed, were vile – did his own men not say, grinning and nudging each other, that they were ‘going to the Temple’ each time they visited a brothel?
Still, what was being done was not exactly chivalrous, but that was the nature of matters when the dragon was raised by an angry king – it would breathe its fire on all, even an Order Knight who had contrived to entangle himself in a war he should have avoided.
Breathing fire was what the dragon was doing, if the Welsh could ever stir it to life. De Valence needed those dark, vengeful half-pagan little Welsh dwarves happy and, most of all, not focusing any resentment on himself. If that meant turning them loose to do what they pleased on a hated enemy, so be it.
Yet the abbot wore a ring on one finger which had the biscione engraved on it, a marvellous depiction of a coiled serpent seemingly eating a man but, in actual fact, giving birth to him – de Valence was sorely tempted to point out the heathen origins of that symbol.
He did not, for the symbol was the coat-of-arms of the Viscontis of Milan, one of the most powerful families in Lombardy and the conduit to papal sanction. Alberto may have been the least scion of it, but he was still a member and he had a slew of Inquisition priests at his back, the sinister black Hounds of God, the Dominicans.
‘My dear Abbot Alberto,’ he said through a smile like a sewer grating, ‘you must see that I cannot put a stop to it. This Templar has put himself beyond the pale and contrived to slay some of the Welsh in his attempts to evade capture. I have influence, no more – and it seems that my influence does not stretch to interfering with their … singular observances.’
‘Singular,’ shrilled the abbot, lifting the word out of himself so that de Valence fancied he saw the monk step out of his own shoes. ‘Observances.’
The little Italian opened and closed his mouth, the words so crowding his mouth, like gulls falling on abandoned fish, that he could not get a single one out. Taking advantage, Aymer waved one metal-gloved hand.
‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘These are Welsh, from the distant mountains of my lord’s kingdom and only recently gathered unto God’s blessing, for all that priests like yourself have waved censors and crosses and prayers over their peaks and forests for centuries. It is hardly surprising that they have … odd practices.’
‘Odd!’
It was a shriek now, so loud that it brought the heads of the Welsh round and de Valence closed his eyes and hoped they would not be offended. He felt the wolf stare of the one called Addaf fall on him and offered a prayer; if that one started in to be outraged, there would be a blood-bath and, though he had no doubt he and his handful of knights would kill them, it would certainly mean an end to the service of all his Welsh. The smoke of the badly-burning fire cloaked over them like a vile benediction.
Mark you, Aymer said to himself, ‘odd’ was perhaps the wrong choice of words for what was happening in the clearing a little way away.
In it was a piled heap of damp faggots that the Welsh were trying to fan into life. In the centre of it, staked fore and aft, was a mercifully dead horse – a fine destrier, Aymer noted wistfully, that had deserved a better fate than to be throat-slit and then staked upright, as if still alive. And one, he added viciously to himself, that a supposed Poor Knight should never have been riding.
The Poor Knight was riding it still, lashed to the dead animal in his armour, bucket helmet on, broken arms fitted with shield and a lance bound to his shattered fingers. Fully armed and mailled, the Templar sat the horse, his mouth gagged under the helmet, still alive and waiting to burn.
If the Welsh could ever get the fire lit.
A stocky, cadaverous man wearing a studded jack and a green hood shouted instructions and the Wel
sh obeyed Addaf, fetching more wood, more lit torches, fanning the flames while the pyre sputtered and smoked; the edifice rocked a little as the desperate knight struggled.
The Welshman and the abbot from Rome had bristled and scowled at each other when they had met, one making warding signs as well as the cross with string-calloused fingers, the other crossing himself and offering a clasp-handed prayer. Like barely leashed mastiffs, de Valence thought wearily; my money is still on Addaf, the Welsh archer they called Mydr ap Mydvydd – Aim the Aimer.
‘Madness,’ Abbot Alberto spat. ‘This is madness. The Pope shall hear of it.’
‘The Pope shall hear of the mischief of the Order,’ de Valence retorted, irritated now. ‘Besides – if you find the evidence you seek, what will become of those Templars Holy Mother Church finds guilty?’
There was silence, no-one wanting to admit, of course, that they would burn, no differently from what the Welsh were doing now.
‘You may have the other one when we capture him,’ de Valence added in a conciliatory fashion. ‘One Rossal de Bissot by name. Once the King’s justice has finished with him.’
‘They should not be party to secular justice,’ the abbot persisted. ‘They are of the Church and only the Pope may punish them. He will hear of this.’
‘You have mentioned that once already,’ de Valence spat back, then leaned forward a little in the saddle. ‘Be assured, dear Abbot, that the Pope may be deafened to complaints by all the accusations against the Order. That and the sound of victory over his excommunicated enemies, which forgives all sins.’
‘The end does not always justify the means,’ intoned the abbot, drawing himself up. Behind him, a coterie of monks and clerics nodded and clasped pious hands.
Go home, Aymer wanted to say. Go home and help Galeazzo and all the other Viscontis dominate Milan and the Pope. Leave the serious business of the day to fighting men, who can see the madness in this and in everything to do with war yet persist in it, like a peasant ploughing a stony field.