by Robert Low
They chose the Black Bitch, as much for the aptness of name as for it being the worst stew in the town, and now Dog Boy shoved his way towards it, forcing through the frenzy of people; he could scarcely tell the difference between those frantic to leave and those frantic to squeeze the last measure of brittle pleasure from the place – but the fear was the same.
Yet there was a strange unreality. Silversmith apprentices paraded a wooden bier with a fat, ornate nef, a gorgeously worked fretwork ship of silver blazoned with Mary and Child and an enticement to customers to visit their shop. Butchers, slipping in their offal, bellowed the prices of pork and capon – originally high, they were falling rapidly because doom galloped at them and everything had to be gobbled. A pair of beadles led a whoremonger to the stocks, shuffling him through the dung close to a horse trough which would provide the dirty water he was to be soaked in.
Normal, as if the sky was not falling; Dog Boy ducked into the sweltering roar of the Bitch and his appearance swelled the bellow of it with a joy of noise from the six men who had ridden into Edinburgh with him and now dominated the tavern. The others in it, even the scarred and hard, kept to the sidelines of them.
Shining with sweat and drink, his men thrust a horn beaker of ale into one hand and hailed him loudly; he was their darling now, was the elevated Dog Boy.
‘The Royal Dog Boy he is now,’ bellowed Patrick and the others roared their approval once again, while Troubadour Tam Napier struck up his battered old viel in a tune that set everyone jigging.
Buggerback Geordie shoved forward a woman, dark-eyed and dark-haired, half-moon sweat under the arms of her dress and her smile only partly ruined by some missing teeth. She had the finest pair of breasts Dog Boy had seen in a time and, coyly batting her eyes, she pulled them out for him to see.
‘This is Dame Trapseed,’ said Archie Gower, known to everyone as Sweetmilk, for no reason anyone could fathom. ‘We brings her as Yer Honour’s gift on this night and hopes she elevates ye higher still.’
‘Ma Dame,’ Dog Boy said with a mocking, courtly bow and the laughter rang into the rafters. He went to a bench in the deeper shadows of the flickering tavern and took her on his knee, felt the heat of her through the dress as she wriggled on his lap and giggled at what she was creating underneath her; her breasts were slick.
‘If you do not sit still,’ Parcy Dodd yelled at her across the fug and noise, ‘you will stop our captain thinking entire, as God ordained.’
‘God? Whit has God to do wi’ this?’ demanded the woman, who had fumbled loose the ties on Dog Boy’s braies by feel alone. She adjusted herself, hiked her dress a little and Dog Boy could not believe the skill of her when he felt the heat and wet and knew what she had done.
‘God it was who created Man,’ Parcy went on, ‘and gave him both a pyntle and a keen and cunning mind. In His wisdom though, he ordained that Man could only use one of them at a time.’
The crowd roared and demanded more. Parcy obliged. Dame Trapseed wriggled and bounced a little, so that Dog Boy grunted in the half-dark.
‘Once,’ Parcy began, while folk shushed their neighbours, ‘there was a great rain, a gushing scoosh that some folk thought was the second Flood sent by the Lord.’
Dog Boy, anticpitating a gushing scoosh of his own, tried to concentrate on Parcy.
‘They ran to their priest, a good wee man, who went out into the pour of it all, even down to the banks of the burn, which rose in spate as he begged and pleaded with the Lord. The watter rose up roon his ankles and the reeve came up to ask if he would no’ be better climbin’ oot – the reeve would help. The priest refused, saying that the Lord would save him, and the reeve went on his way.’
The woman was in a rhythm now, a gentle sway, like reeds on a riverbank; Dog Boy gave up with Parcy.
‘The watter rose up to his waist and still the priest begged the Lord to save him. His own sire rode up on a fine horse, all drookit but come to save the wee priest from the flood. But the priest refused, allowing that only the Lord would save him, and the sire rode away as the river spouted on.’
Dog Boy bit the back of the woman’s shoulder, for the place was silent now save for the rhythmic swish of the woman and the sound of her ragged breathing. No head even bothered turning to them, all the same.
‘Finally, the watter was at the priest’s neck and up comes the King himself in a boatie, rowin’ like a bloody raider frae the isles, demanding that the priest save himself by climbin’ in. But the priest refused, claiming that God would save him – and the King swept on doon the river.’
‘What happened?’ demanded an incredulous voice and Parcy paused for the effect, spoiled by the sudden shrill whine of the woman, who felt Dog Boy’s moment arrive.
‘He drooned, of coorse,’ Parcy scathed and the place roared with laughter, drowning out the final noises from Mistress Trapseed.
‘Then he went to Heaven and stood before the Lord God Himself, a wee bit annoyed at not having had his prayers answered, for all he had been a good priest an’ Christian his entire life. God be praised.’
‘For ever and ever,’ the crowd answered in a rushing moth-murmur. Parcy held up one hand to silence them, a master of his art.
‘He carps about havin’ been abandoned. So the good Lord scowls at the wee priest. “I sent ye a reeve, a sire and the King himself to save ye. What more did ye want?”’
The crowd roared and thumped the tables in approval, demanded more; Dame Trapseed slithered off Dog Boy’s lap and he tried to cover himself as best he could, though he had to stand to lace his braies while the woman, sheened and smiling with triumph, turned out of the shadows to Buggerback Geordie and demanded her money.
Buggerback, grinning round his gap of gums, held out his hand to Patrick and had a scowl and a handful of coin, some of which went to the woman.
‘I did not believe she could hump ye in the middle o’ the tavern,’ Patrick complained bitterly to Dog Boy as Geordie went off, jingling the coin in his palm. ‘Ye may be practically nobile these days, but ye are worse than Horse Pyntle Johnnie there, who would swive a knothole. Yer foul, lowly lusts have cost me a pretty penny.’
Dog Boy, greasy with the ale and the moment, grinned back at him and then froze as the tavern door crashed open. Like a cold wind, the Black strode in and surveyed the silence, aware that those who did not know who he was knew what he was.
‘I am truly sorry to spoil yer doings,’ he said, nodding to Dog Boy. ‘But the English are at Berwick and on the move north. Shift yourselves.’
Then he closed the door on a boiling panic.
Kilmartin Glen
At the same time
Push. Drive. Plod. Tug, strain at wheels, eat dust and then eat the mud that sweat made of it on your face. Work the sun up and work it down again. Hal laboured at it, heaving into the grind of it so that his head thundered and his shoulder ached.
At the end, though, he could fall into a patch of scrubby heather, wrap himself in a cloak and sleep without dreaming of Sim, whirling down and round in the maelstrom with his white crown wisped like maidenhair.
In the days after he had fallen in a dead faint, slowly recovering while Kirkpatrick and Campbell dragged the weapons out of the stricken ship and gathered up every wheeled contrivance and pulling beast, Hal had stumbled down to the water’s edge and walked the breathing shingle in hope. Kirkpatrick sent a man with him every time, sometimes Niall, sometimes Somhairl, just to make sure he didn’t fall in another dead faint, this time face down in a rock pool. And Campbell sent one of his own, a cateran called, in the English, Duncan; he had been a drover and so spoke the southron enough to be understood.
They found bodies, but none Hal knew and only one Niall recognized, kneeling beside the fish-eaten, crab-gnawed face and squinting.
‘They are seldom returned by Carry Vaar,’ Duncan lilted, seeing Niall’s distress. ‘She is in her sleeping with them all.’
Hal was torn between finding Sim with his water-bloated fac
e like curdled cheese and not finding him at all. In the end, it was as if he had simply vanished and, by the time they were ready to leave, Hal had to force himself away from the place.
‘It’s a sore loss,’ Kirkpatrick offered awkwardly on the day the Campbells set out to join the King, already having to lever the laden wagons up stony, rutted tracks. Kirkpatrick did not expect an answer; he had seen the yellow-blue ruin of the face and the haunt in the eyes and thought, with a sudden shift of concern, that Hal of Herdmanston was all but done.
The struggle of the next few days made him wonder at the fevered strength in the Lothian lord and, though he wished he could tell the man to slow himself, the truth was that they needed everyone’s strength.
There were not enough carts and beasts – Campbell of Craignish, frowning, said that his men did not make war in that way. Once the blazing cross had been fired from crest to crest and the men gathered, they would pack some oats, ready cooked into a slab with water, add a portion of herring for the salt in it, then make a fast lick across rock and heather.
Kirkpatrick could believe it; the Craignish men wore onion-dyed tunics in varying shades, from deep yellow to faded mustard, had bare legs like spurtles and bore burdens an ass would have scorned, forging over tussock and hill with corded muscle and the ease of having been born to it.
They bore the residue of what would not fit in the carts, a man-packed collection of iron hats, maille, spearheads and other items labouring down to meet Campbell galleys at Kilmory, which would sail them on to Largs. There, the angels would take the Lord’s share, a tithe that would mysteriously vanish, while every Craignish man would arrive at Stirling better accoutred than any man-at-arms.
Yet the journey down to Kilmory was fraught, a Satan twist of bad road and steepness through places with names like Black Crag and worse. When they entered the defile of Kilmartin Glen, the men fell silent, for this was a place of stone rings and underground kists, a land of the sidhean, the sheean, who could spirit you away in the night and not return you for a hundred years. Their great faerie hill of Dunadd dominated the area and the panting chatter and good-natured chaffering fell to silence.
Campbell of Craignish, though he preferred to be thought of as an enlightened Christian nobile, was as much worried about the sidhean as any of his men.
‘Pechs? Bogles?’ Kirkpatrick challenged, though gently, and Campbell, half-ashamed, waggled his head from side to side.
‘My folk believe it. Myself, though, I am after being more concerned about the time it is taking to get these carts to Kilmory. There are MacDougalls loose.’
Kirkpatrick’s head came up at that and he was sharp with Campbell when he spoke.
‘You kept that close to you – mark me, I can see why. Having your enemies stravaigin’ as they please through your lands is not a matter to trumpet.’
Campbell admitted it with a nod and no sign that he was put out.
‘They are like lice,’ he declared. ‘Ye think ye have combed them all out and suddenly they are back, annoying ye with their wee itch.’
He glanced at Kirkpatrick.
‘It is because I am taking so many of my own to join Sir Neil. There will be long hundreds of Campbell men standing with the King when he fights and little or none to protect our lands. My castle is safe, but these MacDougalls will plooter about for a while, causing trouble, then go home – bigod, most of them are fled to Ireland as it is but, mind you, if they see a chance at a lumbering great slorach of over-laden men and carts they will take it.’
Kirkpatrick acknowledged the commitment of the Campbells and fell silent, staring at the popping fire and knowing the lord of Craignish was right – if it hadn’t been for the arrival of Hal, Kirkpatrick and all this cargo, the Campbell men would already be in their galleys and sailing for the Ayrshire coast to join the army at Stirling.
A little way away, Duncan lay on one side of a fire and contemplated the sight of his lord in conversation with the dwarf-dark man called Kirkpatrick. The other, the brooding and wounded lord from the Lothians, sat apart even from that – even from himself, Duncan thought.
These southrons were different, right enough, and he had been away from the droving roads long enough to feel and see it almost for new. These men could not enjoy life as it moved through them; they wanted to take it and make something, as if they could shape it to their own way.
They did not talk of deer and cattle and hill, or let themselves soak in the weather; they spoke of crops and power and business and did not notice the different greens of leaves, or even the sun until its lack was enough to chill them.
Once, on the drove road, he had been sparking a southron woman at Carlisle and they had walked out beyond the gate, which he knew was a great daring for her in the first place, never mind to be doing it with a strange creature from beyond the Mounth.
He knew then, as now, that he could whisper filth in her ear in the True Tongue and she would wriggle and blush, for it was just a liquid trill to her ear, as seductive as it was strange. He recalled, as he spoke and slid an arm round her soft waist, that his free hand had found a winter-woken toad on the rock next to him.
It was sluggish and still cold, hoping for the sun on the rock to give it new life. It blinked its great gold-coin eyes, iridescently green throat pulsing and as beautiful as anything he had ever seen. So he was surprised when the woman, presented with the sheer jewel of it, screamed and ran away.
No woman of his own people would have done so, but the southrons were strange – even their names. But, then, names were dangerous matters and the knowing of a man’s true name gave you power over him, for he lay deep inside his name, underneath his talk and his acts, moving like everyone else, yet living in secret and alone. He wasn’t concerned that they knew his name was Duncan, for they did not know the whole of it, nor in the tongue of the True People.
The Lothian lord, he had decided, noticed nothing at all, as if some veil had dropped between him and the world. As if – and Duncan shivered at the thought – he is moving with unseen sidhean, who are lifting him quietly out of the midst of us and into their timeless kingdom.
He took comfort from the quiet murmur, the men sitting crosslegged or lolling round the flames, attending to a blackened pot and wiping smoke tears from their eyes. Somewhere, an owl screeched and Duncan lay back, tasting the woodsmoked night and letting his eyes close.
Tomorrow they would be at Kilmory, loading this southron matter on to the galleys and away from this place of faerie shadows.
When it came, the next day, the working of the sidhean was harsh and sudden.
Hal was stumbling along in the ruts of a cart which seemed to be his own particular curse, a wheeled imp of Satan which stuck more times than it rolled. He was enjoying the roll of it now, the fresh breeze on the sweated bruise of his face and the piping of peewits, while quietly marvelling at the bulging calf muscles of the bare-legged man ahead, the one called Duncan.
I find it hard enough to walk in serk and braies, burdened only by a baldric and sword, he thought, yet this one carries his own weight on his back.
The man, wearing only a sweat-darkened saffron tunic, belted so that a dirk could be thrust through a ring on it, hefted the waterproofed burden a little higher on his back and strode on. Then he gave a yelp, a stumble and fell over.
Hal moved to him, thinking he had tripped, bending to help him to his feet; the flick of the shaft over his head was like the crack of a whip and he knew the sound well, felt the clench and sickening plunge of his belly as he flung himself to the ground beside Duncan. The arrow that had felled the man was now clearly revealed, buried deep an inch below the man’s collarbone.
More arrows flew and men tumbled and yelped.
‘Sluggorm. Sluggorm.’
The call echoed, the bundles flew away as the Campbells went for their weapons and Hal, raising his head, saw the arrows had been only the heralds of a leaping mass of shrieking men, wild-haired, wet-mouthed and armed: the MacDougalls.<
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Kirkpatrick, a few carts down from the fallen Hal, heard the cries of ‘sluagh-ghairm’, the gathering cry. Campbell of Craignish hauled out a hand-a-half, waved it in a circle above his head and bellowed ‘Cruachan’; men flocked to him like a pack of wolves. He looked right and left to see how many he had, grinned at Kirkpatrick and then plunged exultantly forward. Wearily, cursing, Kirkpatrick was dragged in his wake.
Hal was half-crouched and rising when the wave of MacDougalls fell on him and the snarling Campbells round him, though Hal could not tell one from the other and did not care when faced with an armed man wanting to poke sharp metal in him.
The first one tried to spear him, clumsy and running, so that Hal only had to bat the shaft to one side, dip a shoulder and let the man run on to it; braced, he knocked the man off his feet and drove the wind out of him, so that the sword stroke that took him in the neck barely managed a last squeak from him.
Hal barely heard, half turned for the next rushing man, ducked the flail of a spear slash and cut back so that the man stumbled past, bewildered as to why his stomach was emptying out and tangling his ankles.
They were desperate with fear, Hal realized, too few and relying on speed and rush to overwhelm. They should not have done it at all, he thought wildly, but they were madmen from beyond the Mounth, as strange as two-headed calves. The saving Grace of God in all of this was that he was fighting alongside equally mad men, who had recovered from the shock of attack and flung themselves forward with eldritch screeching and a sheen of ecstasy.
Hal cut and parried and made a space round him – but then there was a sudden flurry and a new rush of men, so that Hal spun and slashed to keep the swordlength of space until, through the bewildering whirligig of faces and bodies, he saw one he knew.
Kirkpatrick held up his hands and Hal, sucking in breath in ragged gasps, let the swordpoint drop; gore slid greasily from it and pooled round the tip.