by Robert Low
The Firth of Lorn
Feast of St Ronan of Locronan, June 1314
Unshaven, snowed with spindrift, hollow-eyed and tired beyond anything they had known, the crew staggered into the merciful wind-dropped morning and called greetings, messages and obscenities.
The bread was sodden and moulded, the cheese so rancid it was thrown over – and Hal realized how bad it had to be for sailors, who would eat almost anything, to contemplate that. They chewed bacon, which was as hard as the peas that went with it, washed it down with water filtered through a linen serk to get rid of the worst in it, while the Señor Glorioso pitched and rolled, heavy with cargo and sodden with leak.
Hal, the sweat rolling off him in drops fat as wren’s eggs, ate nothing and Sim was too busy boaking to try to put anything down the other way.
‘If it holds like this,’ Pegy said cheerfully, looking at the sky, ‘we will be in Oban in a week, or less.’
Hal, the arm throbbing in time to his every heartbeat, heard the false in Pegy’s voice.
‘If it holds?’
Pegy shrugged. The truth was that he did not like the iron and milk sky in every direction and thought they had pierced through to the eye of a vicious smack of weather which would be on them in less than half a day. He did not say any of this, but realized he did not need to to the lord of Herdmanston.
‘How is yourself bearing up?’ he asked instead. ‘Have ye had yer wound seen to this morn?’
Hal grunted, the memory of it sharp as the pain Somhairl had inflicted, his great face, braids swinging round it, a study of lip-chewing concentration as he squeezed the pus from it.
‘Green it was,’ Hal reported, ‘as Sim’s face. I take it there is slim chance of getting to Oban without worry, at this time of year and without weather?’
Pegy frowned and sucked his moustache ends.
‘Weel… we have to try, for there is little choice else, other than to put into some wee island and wait for it to blaw away.’
‘Which might take hours, or days – or weeks,’ Hal replied with a rueful smile, wincing as he adjusted his arm. ‘I have little liking to spend weeks in a driftwood shed, living on crabs and herring. Besides that, we will have failed in our endeavour.’
‘Aye, right enough,’ Pegy answered. ‘Ye are poor company for shed-life, but tak’ heart, my lord, at least the wind blaws away the midgies.’
‘If it blaws us back to where the Bruce waits,’ growled a familiar voice, ‘it can howl all it pleases. Where are we, Pegy?’
The captain turned to Kirkpatrick, his face a sour smear of disapproving.
‘Ye will change that tune when the howling wind makes ye jig to the dance it makes,’ he answered. ‘Besides, we are in the Firth o’ Lorn, coming up to the narrow of it and the last run to Oban. It is no place to be at the mercy of a storm wind.’
‘Christ betimes, this is summer,’ Kirkpatrick exclaimed bitterly. ‘You would think there would be kinder weather.’
Those nearest laughed, none heartier than Somhairl, shaking his head mockingly at Kirkpatrick, who gave him a scarring scowl in return and then turned to Pegy.
‘Clap on all sail, or whatever you mariners shout. Sooner we are back in Oban, sooner this cargo is in the keeping of the King.’
‘And Sim’s innards are back in his belly,’ Hal answered, sitting suddenly as the rush of fever-sweat swamped him.
‘Oh aye,’ Pegy replied, knuckling a forehead dripping as much with spray as sarcasm. ‘Clappin’ on sail, yer lordship, as ordered. Now if only any of us here had a wee idea of what that might actually do to this baist o’ a boat …’
They plodded on, heavy and sodden as a wet cow in pasture, with the wind full from the east, the men singing as much to raise their spirits as any sail.
Hal stayed on deck and up at the beakhead, until his face was stiff and salted, his eyes bloodshot and his brow ridged; Pegy found him there and had Angus and Donald cart him to the shelter for the storm was rising again. Hal already knew this, since his raggled hair was straight out and whipping either side of his face as he stared ahead and Pegy had to shout above the moan and whine of a rising wind.
The sea greened round the stern, washing over the stepped deck that rose up there – the nearest to a castle it had, since there was none at all in the fore – and the sails flapped and ragged, the men struggling to bring them in.
It became clear to everyone, with each man Pegy put to bailing and pumping, that the ship was taking on too much water, was too loaded to ride this out.
‘We are sinking,’ Pegy reported to Kirkpatrick and Hal, blunt as a blow to the temple. ‘We need to make landfall.’
‘Where?’
They were shouting, hanging on to lines, buffeted and shoved by a bulling wind. Pegy bawled out where he thought they were and Kirkpatrick squinted; it had started to rain, squalling and hissing, stippling the wet deck.
‘We are closer, then, to Craignish. We could be up that wee loch to Craignish Castle and the Campbells, who are good friends to our king.’
Pegy closed one eye and contemplated, and then spoke, slow and hesitant.
‘Aye, we are. If the weather and wind stay as they are we could be in Craignish watter as you say. Run up through the sound at Islay and then hope the wind has changed a wee, to beat back north.’
‘I dinna ken much,’ Kirkpatrick roared, ‘but I ken that is a long way for a short cut. Can we not go on as we are, straight up to Craignish, round Scarba?’
‘Shorter, but in this wind …’ Pegy bawled back, though the truth was that he did not think he or the crew could handle this bitch-boat well enough. He did not want to admit it, but it was clear in his seamed face, pebbled with spray and rain.
‘If she is sinking,’ Kirkpatrick persisted, with Gordian blade logic, ‘we have no time for a wee daunder to gawp at the sights, Pegy. Besides – taking her through the Islay Sound as she is risks being driven ashore and those island rats will strip her bare with nae thought for the ruin that will bring our kingdom. Run her truer than that.’
Pegy’s hesitation was underlined by the thrum and moan of wind, the crack of the lateen sails. Hal saw him wipe his mouth with the back of one hand and knew it was not wet he washed away, but exactly the opposite.
‘But?’ Hal answered, feeling the sudden dry crack of his own mouth.
‘Aye, yer lordship is smart as a whip,’ Pegy replied, half-ashamed at being so transparent. ‘But … if we are caught by the wind, on the tack it is on now, we will be hard put not to be driven on to the weather coast of Jura, or Scarba itself. Or through the Corryvreckan.’
Those who heard it stopped what they were doing. An eyeblink of pause only, it held more menace than any shriek of fear and both Hal and Kirkpatrick noted it and looked at each other; here was the real reason for Pegy’s concern.
‘Bad, is it?’
‘They say the Caillaich Bheur washes her great plaid at the bottom of the sea in that place,’ Pegy declared, ‘and makes the waves whirl.’
The Cally Vaar – even Hal had heard of this old pagan hag, icy goddess of winter, and he crossed himself.
‘Coire Bhreacain,’ Somhairl declared solemnly, and then added, with a face like an iron cliff. ‘The Corryvreckan: cauldron of the speckled sea.’
‘Ach, away with the pair o’ ye,’ Kirkpatrick replied shakily. ‘Bigod, sailors are worse auld wummin than my granny. Run round this cauldron and get us safe to Loch Craignish.’
‘Aye, aye, lord,’ Pegy replied and the crew moved aching muscles, unflaking ragged lateen-rigged sails and cursing the ropes that burst the pus-filled welts on their water-softened palms. Slowly, like a tired carthorse, the Señor Glorioso turned towards the unseen shores and wallowed on and Pegy, cursing and praying in equal measure, swore he heard the Devil laugh, though it could have been the wind.
Hours later, with a precision of navigation Pegy could only admire as hellish, the wind rose to a mad shriek, the Señor Glorioso balked like the filthy mule he
had always considered her to be and started to run with the bit clenched firmly.
Nothing the sweating sailors could do would rein her in, not Somhairl’s skill and all the extra muscle on the tiller, not Angus, Donald nor any of the others daringly skipping on wet deck, swinging on wild, windlashed line, dragging in sail until there was practically no more than a bladder’s worth.
Slammed by a wind from the south and west, bent on the De’il’s course, Pegy thought, the chill of it settling in him like winter haar on his skin.
To the Corryvreckan.
Hal heard it before he saw it, a dull roaring that had him peering out at the outline of islands, hazed through the rainmist. Then he saw the white swirl of it, the great wheel of the maelstrom; a head appeared alongside his and Sim, white hair flying, face etched with misery, looked on the horror of mad sea they were driving towards.
‘Christ be praised.’
‘For ever and ever.’
The Corryvreckan was dirty with weather, gleeful with malice, ringed round with a loom of dark hills and the promised grit of unseen reefs.
‘The gullet of Hell,’ Pegy roared, almost in defiance, as the Señor Glorioso swirled into the throat of it and started on the harvest of the less able. The first vanished, slapped with a wave that came from nowhere, spiralled over in a despairing shriek and a whirl of arms and legs.
The next was his friend, who sprang to try and save him, calling out for them to stop and turn, which would have been a fine jest if it had not been a tragic misery; he half turned accusingly, let go the line he gripped to appeal with both hands and vanished with the next crashing pitch of the carib.
‘Hang on, lads,’ Pegy yelled. It was all they could do now, Hal realized. Hold on and ride the mad stallion of it, like a charging knight in a mêlée. He thought, suddenly and incongruously, of Isabel in her cage and hoped it was not raining like this where she was …
The wheel of dancing, capricious water caught the Señor Glorioso and flung the ship sideways – but the weight of the cargo, shifting below decks now, spun it back out of the wheeling water like a released dancer from a whirling jig, into the smack of a tidal race.
It seemed to Hal as if the water exploded beneath the ship; it flung up like a rearing horse, throwing spars and planks and men in the air like chaff from a winnowing and their shrieks were lost in the exultant gale.
Hal clung on, desperate and afraid, his arms shrieking louder than the wind or the doomed; the ship crashed down with a boom like a bell, half spun, rolled crazily. The mast cracked, the white wood of it like bone, and then splintered away to ruin, the rigging and sails falling half in and half out of the vessel, tangled with men. She jerked and lurched and fled out of the whirlpool, dragging the dying trap of her own ruin with her.
Hal heard Kirkpatrick yelling, half turned in time to see something huge and black swing round from his left, grow as large as the world and smack him into blackness and oblivion.
Newminster, Northumberland
Feast of St Erasmus of Formiae, June 1314
There was a drone and stink that John Walwayn had come to realize was the mark of a mustering host. The former was made up of mutter and demand, discontent and greetings, the latter of dung, leather, the rank sweat of too many unwashed and the acrid stench that he liked to imagine was fear but, in truth, was more than likely the great wash of pish that spilled from everything with legs.
The other mark of a muster was the sheer press of people, a smother of them which grew thick as damask the closer you got to the King and Walwayn elbowed and shouldered through them, scornful to his lessers – though there were not many of them – and bobbingly apologetic to his betters.
But he was a clericus peritus lege – a man skilled in the law, a scribe to the Earl of Hereford, permitted to attend assizes and given the commission of oyer and terminus – the right to examine and judge – on behalf of his master, the Constable of England.
Which was why the great and good, knowing whose little secrets-ferreting agent he was, were forced to give way and hem their mouths tight when he was preferred through them towards the presence of the King.
He felt their eyes searing his back. He heard growls and someone spoke in a thick, foreign way which was probably German or Brabant. Hainault’s men, he thought, and was mercifully glad he could not understand what had been said and so did not have to react to it.
Inside the sweltering room, he knelt dutifully and waited. It had been the abbot’s room, but the simple austerity of that monk had been washed away in the comforts of a royal household which took a score of wagons to transport.
Flames danced in the mantled hearth, which had seldom seen such a luxury of sparks – and did not need it on such a muggy night, Walwayn thought – while the blaze of expensive tallow gilded the oak panelling and a long table festooned with parchments and dangling seals. A dish of diced spiced meat covered with breadcrumbs was half-buried under the scrolls, the debris of it trailing here and there where careless fingers had spilled it.
The King was sitting at one side of the table, dressed in a simple wool robe of green, his hair curled and gilded, a habit he had begun years before in order to emulate the golden cap of the now-dead Gaveston. Surreptitious as any mouse, Walwayn glanced up from under lowered lashes and bowed head, thinking the King looked liverish, though that might have been the green robe.
The chamber jigged with mad shadows from the disturbed candles; another mark of muster, Walwayn thought to himself, is the way no one seems to sleep if the King does not – and he, for certes, is too feverish to sleep. Feverish, bordering on panic, to get his army gathered and on the move.
‘My lord John of Argyll is with the fleet?’ the King demanded and Walwayn heard the deferential, almost soothing affirmative from one of the cluster around the table; Mauley, he recognized, seneschal and commander of the King’s Royal Household troops.
‘The Red Earl is muttering about visiting his daughter,’ a voice interrupted – Beaumont, the one who wanted to be Earl of Buchan. Walwayn knew that his own master, the Earl of Hereford, had a grudging respect for Henry de Beaumont, if only because he was a fighting man with a long pedigree and a reputation for adventurous daring.
‘The Red Earl may ride where he pleases,’ the King answered waspishly. ‘It is not him I need, but the Irishers he brought with him. And his daughter remains safe in Rochester – tell him so.’
Walwayn knew the Red Earl of Ulster would be dealt with politely, since his support was vital and his situation awkward – the daughter safely shut in Rochester was Bruce’s wife and effectively the Queen of Scotland. Not that anyone there acknowledged there being a king in Scotland; their adversary was always, simply, ‘the Bruce’, or now and then ‘the Ogre’.
‘I need foot, my lords,’ Edward declared, his voice rising, almost in a whine of panic. ‘As fast as it accumulates, it melts. I need foot.’
‘We have two thousand horse, my liege,’ a voice answered, liquid with balm. ‘More than enough to crush the rebellious Scots.’
The King turned his drooping eye on this new face: the Earl of Gloucester, the young de Clare who vied with Despenser for the royal favour and who, despite being the King’s nephew, was losing out to the charms of ‘the new Gaveston’.
‘I have fought the Scotch before, my lord of Gloucester. Foot will be needed, trust me,’ Edward said flatly. He said it kindly, all the same, and Despenser scowled, but then saw his chance, leaping like a spring lamb into the silence.
‘Besides – we have Sir Giles back with us.’
The name buzzed briefly round the room and made the king smile. Sir Giles d’Argentan was the third-best knight in Christendom, it was said – with the other two being the Holy Roman Emperor himself and, annoyingly, the Bruce. Imprisoned by the Byzantines, Sir Giles had been freed because the King had paid his extortionate ransom and summoned him to fly like a gracing banner above the army sent to crush the Scots.
Walwayn saw the others – Sir Payn
Tiptoft, Gloucester, de Verdon – nod and smile at the thought. As young men barely into their twenties they and others – Gaveston and his own lord, Humphrey de Bohun among them – had been in the retinue of the King when he was still a prince. Idolizing the older, brilliant dazzle of d’Argentan, they had all trooped off with him to a tourney in France, leaving the Prince’s army hunting out Wallace in the wilds. Twenty-two of them had been put under arrest warrants by a furious Edward I and they all wore that now like some badge of youthful honour binding them together.
That had been eight years ago and the gilded youth of then were tarnished and no wiser, it seemed. Particularly the King himself, who now turned to the patient, kneeling Walwayn.
‘You are?’ he began, but nodded and answered it himself. ‘Hereford’s clerk and lawyer – well, take this to your master.’
He paused, rummaged and helpful hands found and gave him the seal-dangling scroll he needed. Walwayn looked up then and, over the King’s shoulder, saw two faces. One was the triumphant leer twisting the handsome face of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester; the other the long mourn of bad road that belonged to Sir Marmaduke Thweng, his walrus moustache ends silver-winking in the light.
Like angel and Devil on the royal shoulders, Walwayn thought, wildly trying to gather himself as he took the scroll from the King’s hand.
‘Your master and the Earl of Gloucester are appointed commanders of the Van,’ the King declared, more for the benefit of any who did not already know than for Walwayn.
The clerk blanched, hesitated.
‘Your Grace?’ he quavered and the King’s eye drooped. Even as a parody of the fierceness of his father, it was frightening enough to the little Hereford lawyer.
‘Are you witless? Deaf?’
Walwayn caught the angel Thweng’s warning eye and simply bowed and backed out, sick to his stomach at what he had to carry back to his master.
Sir Marmaduke saw the clerk scuttle off, knew what he felt and why.
Joint commanders. The de Clares and de Bohuns were bitter rivals and appointing them to jointly command anything was a surety for disaster – yet Thweng knew the King had done it to promote his nephew, young de Clare. The Earl of Hereford, Constable of England, would be furious, but de Clare was the new Favourite. There is always a favourite with Edward, Thweng thought. For all the tragedy of Gaveston, the King has learned nothing – and, behind him, he could feel the flat hating gazes from the Despensers.