by Robert Low
‘Aye, weel, we are braw, brave fighters for the King,’ Rowty Adam declared to the women, ‘so what you give to us, as it were, is no loss to your menfolk and a service to His Grace, King Robert.’
‘There will be no harm done to you,’ said a firm voice and Jamie stepped in to be blooded by firelight, his black dags of hair down round his cheeks. He put one foot up on a log bench and neck-bowed politely to the big beldame with the bosoms. ‘You have the word of Sir James Douglas on it.’
You could see men’s crests fall at the sound of that, but no one as much as whispered against it, while the big beldame grew red in the face and the other women simpered. Dog Boy was sure any one of them, gripped by an arm and led into the dark by the Black Douglas, would have gone eagerly, swaying her hips and with no thought of her missing man.
‘Weel,’ Leckie’s Tam said bitterly when Jamie had gone, ‘since the Black has put the reins on us, it seems we will have need of entertaining ourselves – a tale it is and your turn to tell it, Parcy Dodd.’
Dog Boy sat and twirled the axe as Parcy Dodd began his tale, thinking on how he had once sat with Bruce himself, before he was king and a wheen of years since. They had discussed the merits of knightly vows and Bruce had been drunk. ‘Nivver violet a lady,’ Dog Boy had said then, for he had been younger and more stupid; well, younger, at least.
He glanced to where the dead woman had lain, the stain on the grass merely one more shadow in the shadows. He had ‘violeted’ a lady now and though it was more than stupid to dwell on it, he thought he could feel the stain on him, as if he had foresworn some knightly vows.
‘So,’ Parcy Dodd was saying, ‘I am stravaigin’ with Ill-Made Jock, when—’
‘Ill-Made?’
They all turned to Dog Boy and Parcy, flustered and left threadless in his tale, blinked once or twice.
‘Aye – him who was with Bangtail Hob when he was murdered by the Wallace …’
He tailed off, aware of the frantic, silent eyes like headshakes; he sat with the air of a man who had plootered into a sucking bog and could neither go forward nor back.
‘That was me that was with Hob,’ Dog Boy said, bitter with the awareness that Parcy did not, in fact, know Ill-Made and had probably never met him. ‘Ill-Made died at Herdmanston, during the siege of it. Button your lip on folk ye never knew.’
‘Aye, aye,’ Parcy answered suddenly and Leckie’s Tam hauled him free of the morass with a joke and the conversation flowed shakily back.
‘You are ower harsh,’ said a voice and Dog Boy turned into Jamie Douglas’s half-amused stare. ‘He only gilded his tale a wee bit, with some name he thought the others would recall.’
‘Ill-Made?’ Dog Boy answered, bewildered, and Jamie chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder.
‘Ill-Made Jock, Bangtail Hob, Sir Hal Sientcler,’ Jamie recited. ‘All famous men who fought with the Wallace and some now with the King.’
Then, seeing the bemused stare persist, he leaned a little closer.
‘Yourself, Aleysandir of Herdmanston,’ he declared with a wry grin. ‘A legend, with a name folk huddle closer to, as if they can take some heat and comfort out of it, like a good fire.’
Stunned, Dog Boy could only sit and think about Ill-Made Jock, who had died coughing in his own blood while folk hammered axes on the door of Herdmanston. He had not looked anything like a hero all the long, sore time he took doing it.
Now he is a hero warrior of the Kingdom. Like Aleysandir of Herdmanston.
I am not, neither one nor the other. I am Dog Boy, worn to a nub by war and who has just ‘violeted’ a lady. It will not be the last vow broken, he thought, for this struggle has grown mean.
Crunia, Kingdom of Castile
Feast of the Siete Varones Apostólicos, May 1314
Sun-ripened, breathing air heady as peaches, they came down to the mottled, dun-coloured roofs of the port amid the bang and clatter of the Seven Apostolic Men, a perfume of incense clinging to every sill of the unshuttered windows brocading the street.
Anonymous as dirt, Hal and Sim blessed the foresight that had paid two Compostella-sated pilgrims for their ragged filth of robes, they happy with the knowledge that not only had they extirpated their sins but they now had the silver to go home by ship – blessed be the Name of God.
Now those robes blended in with the rest of the throng as Hal and Sim came down to the chanting town, a sound at first muted as sea-surf, rising and falling like a distant marker bell on wrack, barely a disturbance to the birdsong and the smell of warm green and myrrh.
By the time Hal and Sim had traded ruts and dust for rough cobbles, heading for the last clear sight of the ships crowding the harbour, they were plunged into a sweaty noise and a swirl of perfumed smoke.
Torquatus, his painted nose already dented, wavered uncertainly, rising and falling in a sea of eager hands; Ctesiphon ploughed grimly through the throng, with Sts Hesychius and Secundius seemingly battling each other for some undetermined precedent. The rest of the Seven Apostolic Men were lost in the chants and the shouts.
‘Christ betimes,’ Sim bawled out, ‘how are we to achieve anythin’ in this conflummix?’
‘Keep moving,’ Hal said, shoving and jostling. Find the Bon Accord first – down to the harbour. In the end he had to bellow and point. Sim elbowed his way through, cursing folk roundly until they reached the fringes of the crush and popped out like pips from a squeezed apple.
‘Bloody lumes,’ Sim fumed. ‘Moudiewarts – look at my cloots.’
He pulled the filthy ragged robes out indignantly and Hal eyed him back with a raised brow until even Sim had to laugh ruefully; if there was a new stain or tear on his robe there was no way of telling.
Hal looked at the haven they had found, discovered the stone faces of men with brown arms folded across their chests and knives prominently displayed.
‘It looks like a tavern or an inn,’ he said and then realized why the men stared; paid to keep out the riffraff, they were plainly considering which way Hal and Sim should leave: upright or horizontal, with balance favouring the latter. Sim scowled back at them, which was no help and only served to have the men look one to the other and, as if on some unseen signal, start to move.
Hal, swift as winking, hauled out his purse, held it up like the dangle of a fresh-neutered sheep bollock and jingled it; as if spellbound the two men stopped, faces broadened into brown grins and they stood aside like two opening doors.
Beyond, the yard was as much a mayhem as the street outside, though the worship was different; here, men bellowed and waved fistfuls of deniers and silver pennies, tournois and grossi while a Savoyard with a black cloth over one eye grabbed them, matched them and, in some way neither Hal nor Sim could fathom, accepted the bet and the odds.
Beyond this quarrelling shriek was a cleared square where two men half crouched, the docked birds churring and baiting in their hands, one gold and green, the other red and white, their shaved necks stretching and straining like serpents.
‘Cockfight, bigod,’ Sim declared with delight, just as the men let go and fell back. Released, the birds sprang forward like tourney knights, their gilded spurs glittering, dashing towards each other with a clash, beak to beak. There was a pause, a strange sound like a sheet in a mad wind and then they fell on each other, wings flailing, beaks snapping, leaping and twirling in a mad dance as they struck out with their deadly feet.
A man screeched as the white drew blood with a strike, flinging up his arms, knocking his neighbour’s hat off and elbowing Sim in the ear; Sim swore and elbowed him back, hard enough to make the man grunt and double up, but Sim’s heart was not in it, for he was roaring for the white and red.
Hal spared the winded man a glance, no more, just to make sure he was not about to take revenge when he got his breath back – and then he saw Piculph moving through the crowd, oblivious to their presence. Hal almost cried out, but buckled it in his mouth. Widikind had said Piculph was on their side, a spy for Ruy V
az, but Hal was no longer sure whom to trust.
There was a great roar and a surge forward; the gold had sunk one spur into the neck of the white and red and the fight was all but done. When Hal looked back, Piculph was gone; he caught Sim’s arm and dragged him close enough to shout what he’d seen in the man’s ear. Sim swivelled madly left and right while, out on the mud-bloody sand, the white cock staggered.
‘Do not look round.’
The voice was pitched low, no louder than normal and almost in Hal’s ear, so the first thing he did was start to turn until a knuckle drove into his kidneys.
‘Do not look, I said.’
It was Piculph. Hal caught himself, stared to the front, where the white cock reeled, a splash of blood forming a red cross on its breast, the spurs glittering and flashing still in the dust and the roars. Like a Templar, Hal thought. Like Rossal and the others, dying in their own final pit.
‘I thought you were all dead.’
The voice was tense and harsh, close enough so that Hal could smell the man’s wine breath and feel the hot flicker of it on his lobe; any minute now, Hal thought, Sim will turn and see this, ruining any further subterfuge in it. He spoke quickly.
‘Kirkpatrick and myself and Sim escaped. Kirkpatrick is gone to your Grand Master, who will now have proof of Guillermo’s treachery.’
He hoped this was true, though he had last seen Kirkpatrick as a wraith in the dim, vanishing in the opposite direction from the one he and Sim took from the base of the tower.
‘Then my master has won and there is hope,’ answered Piculph. ‘I am watched and suspected – in truth, I was abandoning this enterprise when I saw you as you saw me. De Grafton has worked out that the treasure, if not in the carts, was some Order magic I do not understand. He now knows that your king was warned long beforehand. That trail leads to me.’
‘De Grafton has told of this?’ Hal asked and felt the nod behind him.
‘To Doña Beatriz. He wishes the Templar called Rossal brought to him here, but the lady does not entirely trust him.’
A snake-knot of plots, Hal thought. Out on the sand, the white’s beak fell open, gasping, and the tongue trembled like a snake; one wing trailed and the gold and green battered it with a frenzy of wingbeats and slashes.
‘Doña Beatriz saw him fell the big steersman with a blow behind the ear,’ Piculph declared, ‘and so forced him to join her. He is sent by the enemies of your king to make sure no weapons arrive for your army but he has long fallen from the Grace of God and his Order; I am sure he sees profit in this now for himself.’
‘The crew?’
‘Held in the lady’s house,’ the voice replied. ‘The big white one to the west of the harbour on the hill above it. They were led by the Judas goat of de Grafton, told they were to be feasted and fêted – drink, whores and all. Instead, they found themselves locked in the emptied wine cellars. Your ship is guarded by Guillermo’s men of the Alcántara, and the plan was to use them to kill your crew – but they will abandon Doña Beatriz if they find this plot is unveiled and Guillermo exposed.’
‘Someone should let them know,’ Hal replied, seeing Sim turn in his direction. The white raised its stained head, twitching and shivering and, in a single moment, a miracle of energy and courage and anger, hurled itself into the fray for the last time, the whirl of spurs scything round to strike its enemy’s golden, red-crowned head.
‘It is dangerous—’ Piculph began.
‘Anything you do now is dangerous,’ Hal pointed out, just as the light of recognition went on in Sim’s head and the scowl came down on his brows.
‘Here,’ he began and then a great bellowing roar went up, jerking him back to the fighting birds.
‘There is still de Grafton and Doña Beatriz,’ Piculph said uncertainly, his voice drowning in the clamour, but still loud enough for Hal to hear the fear in it. ‘I do not want go there.’
For terror of the Knight or the lady? Hal could not work it out, but told Piculph he must; Sim swung back, his face sheened with sweat and excitement.
‘Blinded, bigod. The white has blinded the gold … where is yon moudiewart?’
‘Whisht,’ Hal said and fingered his lips to strengthen it, He half turned. Piculph had vanished.
On the sand, the gold spun and reeled in its terror of sudden darkness while the white gathered the last of itself and slashed and slashed the green plumage to bloody ruin. Then, one wing dragging a bloody line in the sand, it half crawled on to the barely moving body and wavered out a crowing triumph while the crowd went mad.
They love to fight, Hal had heard folk say. Bred in the bone of them, an instinct. Like a parfait, gentle knight. Like a Templar.
As I am supposed to be.
The siege lines at Stirling
At the same moment
It was already warm and fly-plagued, Thweng saw. In a week, perhaps less, there would be real sickness here, as always when too many folk gathered with no sense of where to safely shit. It was not, he noted, what King Robert would want the likes of him to see, but exactly what Aymer de Valence and the others would want to hear.
Clustered round the slabbed fortress on its great raised scab of rock, the mushroom sprout of shelters and tents brought back a shiver of memory to Sir Marmaduke Thweng; the last time he had been at Stirling was the disaster at the brig, when Cressingham had died and de Warenne fled from Wallace. Then Sir Marmaduke Thweng had taken charge of the defence of the castle – and had had to surrender it and himself in the end.
Mowbray saw his look and thought Thweng was studying and worrying on the besieged castle.
‘We will hold, my lord,’ he said, reassuringly cheerful, ‘until Midsummer’s Day.’
He had back a look as mournful as a bull seal on a wet rock.
‘So I thought myself, once,’ Thweng replied. With a jolt, he realized that he had been ransomed after Stirling fell in return for one of this Mowbray’s kin. Comyn connections, he recalled, which accounts for their change of cote.
Seventeen years since; the thought made his bones ache and he wondered, yet again, at the wisdom of dragging his three-score plus years all the way from the peace of Kilton to another round of Scottish wars.
At least this duty was simple if onerous: escort the commander of Stirling’s fortress under safe writ through the Scots siege lines and back to his castle where he would await, as per his agreement with Edward Bruce, the outcome of events.
‘Take careful note as you go,’ de Valence, Earl of Pembroke had said to him. ‘Ascertain if Bruce will stand and fight.’
Stand and fight, Sir Marmaduke thought. Pembroke and Beaumont think it is all a matter of bringing the army north and forcing the Scotch rebels to battle. The King himself, a copy of his father in everything but wit and wisdom, scarcely cares what happens after, only that a victory here will settle matters with Lancaster, Warwick and all the other disaffected. The King’s worst fear is that the Scots will run back to the hills.
He and Mowbray had come up Dere Strete, as much on a scout as ambassadors charged with the official chivalry of the upcoming affair round Stirling. They had taken the straight road to the castle, as the army would when it arrived, with the great loom of Coxet Hill on their left, heading to meet Bruce and the other lords at St Ninian’s little chapel.
Mowbray, his face sharp and ferret-eager with watchfulness, pointed out the pots dug at the crossings of the Bannock stream, each hole’s flimsy covering hiding the sharp stake within; beyond, to the north, a line of men sweated and dug.
‘Dangerous for horse,’ he pointed out, as if Thweng was some squire in need of instruction. ‘Trenches and pots, my lord: it means the Scotch will stand and fight as the King wishes.’
After what he had seen, the drilling men and the numbers of them, the grim hatred and the entire families they had brought – which you did not do if you thought of defeat – Sir Marmaduke felt a small needle of doubt lancing into the surety of an English success.
And yet �
�� he knew Bruce of old, from the stripling days when he had been a tourney fighter of note and the pair of them had clattered round the circuit in a welter of expensive saddlery, horses and gear. They had shared bruises, victory, drink and jests – he was Sir M, Bruce was Sir R, which sounded like ‘sirrah’ and was the laugh in the piece.
The tourney-fighting Bruce he knew had not liked a straight pitched battle then, the French Method of fighting where you trained horse and rider to bowl a man over. His was the German Method, mounted on a lighter horse and avoiding the mad rushes to circle round and strike from behind.
His tactic was to grab knights round the waist and drag them bodily from the saddle, so that the Kipper – the man on foot with a great persuading club – could invite the lord to surrender himself to ransom. He and Bruce had played Kipper for each other, time and about for one profitable, glorious season, and Thweng recalled it with a dreamy mist of remembrance.
He has waged war the same way, Thweng thought as they rode up through the litter of men and shelters, avoiding anything that looked like a full commitment of all his force. He did it in ’10 and long before that. He’d had Wallace as teacher for it – why would he contemplate changing it now?
They passed Bannock vill, a rude huddle of cruck houses and drunken fences, where men leaned on spears and watched them; one spat pointedly. Nearby, hung from the shaft of a tipped-up and weighted two-wheeled cart, a festering corpse turned and swung, smoked with flies.
A black reminder about pillage, Thweng thought; the wee households in this hamlet had not fled, though they risked kitchen gardens and chooks, because armed men and Bruce’s bright writ ensured no looting.
That was order and organization and Thweng felt a slim sliver of cold slide around his backbone; when you see your enemies in discord, fill your cup and take your ease. When they are grim and resolved and of one mind, gather your harness and set your shield …