by Robert Low
There was a flurry from the spearmen then and heads turned from watching Addaf to anxiously scan the enemy, for everyone knew that the only hope for the rebel Scotch was to run at the archers instead of standing like a set mill. They did not want these shrieking caterans closing on them, with their rat-desperate bravery and sharpened edges.
But there was no frantic, screaming rush. Instead, bewilderingly, the front rank seemed to have melted away, scurrying for cover behind the carts, leaving the others to face the arrows. One of them, dunted by a hurrying shoulder, tilted and fell over, the spear falling. Another leaned slowly sideways as if drunk.
False. Addaf saw it the same time as everyone else. A front rank of men, now under cover, had hidden the truth of hastily made dummies of lashed crosspoles and twisted grass, capped with a helmet, draped with a tunic.
False.
Even as it rang in him like a bell, he heard the savage shrieking yell, that blood-chiller the archers knew so well.
Then, behind them, the ground drummed with the mad gallop of garrons, every one with a nightmare of wet-mouthed savagery wielding that wicked Jeddart staff, with blade and spear and dragging hook.
And in front, wild dags of black hair flying, bearded face twisted in a snarl of anger and utter hate, a rider swung a hooked axe in one fist, split the skull of young Daiwyn and scarcely seemed to notice.
Addaf did not know who it was, only what it was. It was time to be somewhere else and in a running hurry.
Irish Sea
At the same moment …
It is, Niall Silkie declared in a shrill yell from the nest, showing a deal of smoke from the sterncastle. And it has lost its flag for another, a red horsehoe.
The cog was so close that Hal and everyone else could see that for themselves, peering out from behind the hastily lashed mantlets that provided cover from arrows. A thread of smoke and a red flag with a downward curve, like a droop of moustache.
Pegy went red-faced and furious then, bawling and screaming orders that sent men lurching at ropes; the sail banged down and filled, heaving the Bon Accord ponderously forward. Others of the crew fetched out long knives and two near-identical brothers, copper-haired and wiry, sprang up to the sterncastle, one with a bow, the other with arrows.
‘Not a horseshoe,’ Pegy growled at the grim assembly beside him. ‘A crab.’
He managed a mirthless smile at the anxious faces round him.
‘A wee jest on his name. Jack Crabbe was yin o’ Red Rover’s better captains afore the Rover embraced the Kingdom’s cause. Now Jack Crabbe’s ship, the Marrot, is a skulking moudiewart in the service of any who will pay – or more likely his own self.’
‘Hardly his own, I fancy,’ Rossal answered in steady, unaffected French. ‘He is not here by happenchance, flying a banner of the Order.’
He was not, Hal thought, and the thread of smoke nagged at him while the brothers, Angus and Donald, argued about who should shoot first.
‘The range is too great,’ Angus declared. ‘Give it to me – I have the muscle for the work.’
‘You? Ye couldna hit a bull’s erse if ye clung to its tail.’
‘In the name o’ Christ an’ all His bliddy saints – God forgive me – will yin o’ ye shoot.’
Pegy’s exasperated bellow made everyone wince, but Donald drew back until the bow creaked protest, then almost flung the arrow from him. It splashed a score of feet short.
‘Ye see? Ye bummlin fruster – wait until she closes.’
The brothers scowled at each other, but Hal had finally worked out what the smoke was and the chill of it tumbled the words from him like frost.
‘They will not close, nor have need to. They will fire off that engine they have up the sharp end and drop carcasses on us until we burn.’
‘Christ’s Blood.’
The words were out of Rossal’s mouth before he could stop them and he crossed himself at once and fervently offered penance for his sin at the first opportunity. Kirkpatrick grunted out a laugh at Hal’s elbow.
‘I hope you have the chance,’ he added and then glanced at the sail and the fog bank; he noted wryly that the more wind there was shoving the ship, the more the fog bank receded in front of them. It was a grim humour folk had come to expect from Kirkpatrick, but the rasp of it was a grate on the nerves for all that.
There was a dull thud of release, a deeper burst of smoke and a brief flowering of red. Then a tailed star shot up, trailing an arc across to them; it hit the water with a gout of sizzle and splash.
‘In the name of Christ,’ muttered Angus. ‘Yon’s a bad sight – but I am pleasured to see that they can shoot no better than you, brother.’
‘A warning,’ de Villers declared, adjusting the fold of his maille coif so that it covered all of the lower part of his face. ‘This Crabbe does not want us burned to the waterline. He knows what we carry.’
Yet again unspoken words hung above them like a corpse from a gibbet: they had a traitor.
Painfully, the pursuing ship overhauled them, for all Pegy’s bawling and the frantic bucket chain soaking the sail to garner more wind, for all Somhairl’s muscled skill at tillering the bulky cog to suck up the last puff.
Another star trailed smoke out and this time the gout of steam and the splash were far closer. Hal saw Sim climb to the forecastle, stick a foot in the stirrup of the arbalest and begin to wind it; he wanted to call out for the auld fool to watch his white pow, but smiled at himself, standing half-naked and ill-armed and almost as ancient.
‘They want us to heave to,’ Niall bawled from his mast-nest.
‘Signal them to eat shite,’ Pegy howled back and men laughed, though it was mirthless and tied with tension like a harsh twist of cord. Angus did his best to obey, baring his buttocks and pretending to eat the contents, so that the men laughed, harder and more shrill.
Hal could now see small figures on the other ship, using iron rods to carefully lift the burning ball of oil-soaked withies; it was so like the ribs of some beast that men called it a carcass. Drop it, he wished wildly; if you roll yon on your own deck there may be a chance for us this day.
He looked at the sail and then over his shoulder; the fog bank was a cable length away and he groaned – he knew that the pursuers could not risk them escaping in the haar and that this shot would be for a hit. They were close enough that they might actually manage it, too.
Rossal and the others knew it; knew also that the target would be the huddle of black-robed men on the sterncastle, so clearly the ones who mattered that they might as well have waved their own Beauseant banner.
‘Away,’ Rossal said gently. ‘If you value your lives.’
At the same time, Pegy hammered his feet on the deck in a mad dance to signal Somhairl, bellowing at him to heel over hard to farans, to put the enemy off their aim.
Somhairl was leaning hard on the tiller, obediently turning the heavy ship to starboard, when the world whirled from behind him and blasted him to blackness. Uncontrolled, the tiller waved and the cog floundered.
Pegy felt it, yelled out furiously and men turned from their tasks to see, amid the sudden flutter of men spilling from the sterncastle, the slumped form of the Red Shadow; at once Donald and Angus sprang to the tiller and strained, cursing.
‘Dunted,’ Kirkpatrick said, kneeling by the slumped form of the big Islesman. ‘There, ahint the ear. Bigod, it is as well his braid took the brunt, else he would be standing before his Maker.’
A blow, Hal thought, designed to kill, not just to lay the man out for a while. He and Kirkpatrick exchanged glances, each knowing the thoughts of the other at once, from long association; the traitor was here, on board. Hal’s eyes flitted from sailor to black-clad knight; de Villers met his stare and then turned away, while de Grafton laid his shoulder to the tiller and helped the straining brothers. It could have been anyone in the shadows under the sterncastle, Hal thought bitterly.
‘Brace,’ bawled Pegy and the threat of the carcass scorched b
ack on them.
Up on the forecastle, Sim had loaded and rested the arbalest on the merlon, squinting at his target. Bigod, age is a terrible thing, he thought, for I can scarce see more than a blur.
But a blur was fine, provided he could tell man from mast. He shot and the deep whung of the release brought heads round.
Up on the forecastle of the Marrot, Jack Crabbe’s expensively hired ingéniateur studied the roll of the wave, waiting for the second just before it started on the rise. He was a Gascon expert, was Ferenc Lop, even if shooting a mangonel from a moving ship was a new experience and he had, he was pleased to see, mastered it as he had mastered everything else to do with engines.
His hand was up and men watched for the cutting swathe of it, the signal to release. The bird-wing whirr of the crossbow bolt took them by surprise and they recoiled from it, the one with the release rope among them. The latch clicked, the mangonel arm flung forward – just as Ferenc slammed back into it, pinned through the chest.
The power of the muscular mangonel ripped him forward and sent him over the side in a bloody whirl of arms and legs. The carcass, balked out of the spoon, shot sideways, ploughed a burning furrow through the nearest men, spun off the castle and hissed into the sail, where it clung for a moment, before dropping to the deck and rolling a trail of sputtering fire, ponderous as a blazing snail. Flames and smoke shot up, broiled with screams.
Over on the Bon Accord, men stared in awe as the Marrot veered, the smoke obscuring her and the flames clearly leaping up the sail. They turned to where Sim was winding the arbalest, elbows working like two mad fiddlers, and broke into howls of delight. Sim affected nonchalance, shot one more bolt into the smoke, and slithered down to the deck as the first witch-fingers of comforting haar enveloped him.
‘Christ betimes,’ Kirkpatrick declared, beaming, ‘as fine a shot as any by a man half your age.’
‘Aye, aye,’ Sim acknowledged easily, pulling out a rag to clean the steel-bowed arbalest as the crew crowded in to admire it and him. It was only later and only to Hal that he admitted he had been aiming at what he thought was Jack Crabbe – a span of hands to the left of the man he hit.
Doña Beatriz stood, apart from the delight and shadowed by Piculph, watching Pegy and the two stupid brothers attending to the giant Islesman. She was frowning at what she had seen done to him and about the man who had done it, wondering how best to use the knowledge to her advantage.
Herdmanston
Two hours later …
They came up, fox wary and stepping in crouched, swinging half-circles, arrows nocked on smarted bows, heedless of the rain and what that would do to strings.
Addaf knew the Scotch would be gone and his lungs burned from the long run, a frantic hare-leap of panic amid the scattering of their own horses. Now, on foot, they padded back like slinking hounds, for Addaf had lost forty-five men, all the horses and a deal of dignity, which trailed in shreds behind him with the mutters of his men.
They had recovered four horses so far and found all their missing men, though it did them little good: most were dead and at least nine had their right hand or more missing and had died of the blood loss or the horror of it happening. Taken alive, everyone saw, and badly handled.
Five were alive, but none of them would see day’s end. They had used their one good hand and teeth and any thonging or laces they could find to tie off the raw stumps so that the blood did not pump out of them. But they had lost too much and Addaf ordered the bindings cut, to let them slip into the mercy of a long sleep as they lay in sluggish red tarns.
He was aware of Y Crach as a feverish heat at one side of him, but the man – wisely for once – kept silent round him; yet, when Addaf looked, he was head to head with others, who were nodding and scowling.
Addaf had not time for it. He knelt at Hywel’s side, seeing the grey face and the blued lips, the slantwise horror of his severed forearm.
‘No time, the man said,’ Hywel echoed in a soft, twisted wheeze, ‘for niceties. Like taking off our thumbs. The other one, the one called Dog Boy, said his leader would be hard. Hates archers above all his enemies, he said. Hates Welsh more than he hates English, for the Welsh should know better than to serve English Edward.’
Hywel gripped Addaf’s arm hard with the last bloody-fingered hand he had, so that the cloth bunched between his knuckles.
‘Dog Boy, he said he was. Said if any of us lived we should tell the others, all the Welsh, that they are on the wrong side.’
‘The right side is the one that wins,’ Addaf replied, looking into the misting eyes.
‘The other one lashed our right hands with ropes, had a man hold us and another haul our arms out. Then he went down the line of us with his axe. Like he was coppicing …’
‘Who? Who did this? This Dog Boy?’
Hywel was more out than in this world, Addaf realized, but his eyelids flickered and his voice was a last breath.
‘Douglas,’ he said, so slight that Addaf had to put his ear to the lips. ‘The Black himself.’
Then, suddenly, in a clear, strong voice with laughing in it, he said: ‘We will make them dance, we will make them kick …’
Addaf closed the eyes.
‘Bedd a wna bawb yn gydradd,’ he said grimly. The grave makes everyone equal.
ISABEL
O God, whose charity is more painful than Your harshness. In all the years since his father’s death in Greyfriars, the new lord of Badenoch has never visited, simply paid Malise his stipend for guarding me – as his Comyn father did before – on behalf of his kin, my long-dead husband. Yet, Lord, You brought Badenoch to the Hog Tower this year, accompanied by a simpering Malise, anxious for his quarterlies to be continued. A little mirror of his murdered father, this new Badenoch, freckled, red-haired and bantam. He looked round at my straw-strewn stone niche, the window that is a door and the cage beyond it. Then he looked me up and down and slowly wondered at my state and age, not having realized it before. Not quite the Hoor o’ Babylon, wee Johnnie, I told him and watched how prettily he pinked. He ordered my whim for pots and paints and women’s essentials ‘in remembrance of the man who spared me’ – but confirmed Malise in the constant caring of me. The man who spared wee Badenoch was Hal, on that day in Greyfriars when this frowning little lord was a lad, brought to say last farewells to his murdered da to find the killers returned to make sure of it. Kirkpatrick would have done for him, save for my Hal; Malise fled and young Badenoch clearly remembered it, for his look flushed Bellejambe to the roots of his pewter hair. Later, Malise took his revenge with me and, as always, lost more than he gave. I suffered his grunting, futile foulness and learned that Badenoch did not come only to see me, but to put Berwick in order; the English are coming in midsummer, to put an end to Bruce. You may dream of it, I told Malise, and, for once, he had no strength left to punish me. So a victory for endurance – let us hope, O Lord, that this is not a beguilement of empty hope for the Kingdom.
CHAPTER FIVE
Westminster
Feast of St George, April 1314
The Pope was dead and the shiver of it added to the cold ache in the bones. Drip and ache, that was Easter, thought Edward, every miserable cunny-rotted day of it, when the damp crept up your back and no amount of stoked fire could keep the wind from looping in and up your bowels until you coughed and shat hedgepigs.
Like Father. He threw that thought from him, as he always did when it crept in like a mangy dog seeking shelter. Shitting his life down his leg; for all his strength and longevity brought low by a foul humour up the arse, king or no.
Death did not care for rank. The Pope had found that, just as Jacques de Molay had promised from his pyre. Edward, even as the delicious chill of it goosed his flesh, could not help the hug of glee that he was not his father-in-law, the King of France, who had also been cursed in the same breath.
Still, there was room enough for Edward to wonder if his own treatment of the Order of Poor Knights had inherited a waft
of that smoke-black shriek from de Molay. He had been light on the Templars, but followed the Pope’s edict and handed their forfeited holdings – well, most of them – to the Hospitallers. Much good may it do them, he thought, though it does me very little for I cannot see the Order of St John coming to my army. The Templars made that mistake by joining my father’s army and the lesson in it is plain enough for a blind man to see.
He wished someone would come to his army, all the same.
‘Who has not responded?’ he demanded and de Valence made a show of consulting the roll, squinting at it in the bright glow of wax candle which haloed the small group in the dim room. No one was fooled; everyone there, the King included, knew he could recite it from memory.
Lancaster, Arundel, Warwick, Oxford, Surrey: the greatest earls of his realm. Plus Sir Henry Percy, bastion of the north.
‘We issued summons to all earls and some eighty magnates of the realm to prepare for war with the Scots,’ de Valence pointed out, as if to say that these six were nothing at all. Edward shifted in his seat, scowling and aching.
Summons to eighty magnates and every earl – even his 13-year-old half-brother, Thomas, Earl of Norfolk – not to mention Ulster and personal, royal-sealed letters to twenty-five rag-arsed Irish chieftains. But the realm’s five most powerful and the north’s shining star, Percy, had all refused and the gall of it scourged him almost out of his seat.
‘When we defeat Bruce, my liege, all matters will be resolved,’ de Valence went on, hastily, as if he sensed the withering hope of the King. ‘We will have twenty thousand men, including three thousand Welsh, at Berwick by this time next month, even without these foresworn lords.’
With smiths and carpenters, miners and ingéniateurs, ships to transport five siege engines and the means to construct an entire windmill sufficient to grind corn for the army. Plus horses – a great mass of horses.