The Complete Kingdom Trilogy

by Robert Low

  The memory soured him, as did the sight of Henry de Bohun, who was already an acknowledged master of the joust, that one-on-one test of arms altogether too popular for d’Argentan’s liking and replacing the mayhem of the mêlée these days.

  He saw the splendour of youth in the de Bohun brat and wanted his own back again, so that he did not have to think about the three decades and more of his own life, least son of four and owning nothing but a name and the distinction of being the third-best knight in Christendom. Not even the second, which title belonged to the very Bruce they were going to fight.

  The years were falling on him like a charging mass of knights and he did not like the fear it lanced him with.

  ‘You stick to almond milk, child,’ he growled, more harshly than he had intended and heard the mocking oohs and aahs from his coterie at this clear challenge. He also saw de Bohun half rise, before a voice cut through the din.

  ‘You provoke my nephew’s honour, Sir Giles, so you provoke mine own.’

  Sir Giles acknowledged the Constable of England with an apologetic bow.

  ‘If your nephew wishes redress,’ he said, ‘I am sure we can find time to run a friendly passage at dawn.’

  ‘As you wish and when you wish,’ Henry retorted sharply.

  A pantler went over suddenly, by accident or tripped by the howl of knights at another table, and the clattering clang of his dropping tray was echoed by the baying laughter. He picked himself up, collected as many of the pastries as he could and served them anyway, straw and all; servants and scullions fought the dogs to snatch those he missed.

  It snapped the tension and Hereford went back to his close-head mutterings with his clerk, Walwayn; Thweng saw that little man, aware that he was being watched, turn and stare insolently back at him.

  Walwayn sweated with secrets, so that any stare made him twitch, but the one from that droop-moustached cliff of a face made his bowels turn; Sir Marmaduke Thweng, he recalled briefly, a lord from Yorkshire reputed to be a hunter of trailbaston and brigands for the head-reward. The thought made him shiver and Hereford scowled, thinking he was not being paid enough attention.

  ‘Stir yourself. You say Lord Percy sent a man, a Templar heretic, to spy out some plot with that discredited Order and the Scotch?’

  ‘Just so, my lord,’ Walwayn answered in a softer hiss, appalled at the lack of discretion in Hereford’s voice. The Earl saw it and frowned, but tempered his volume.

  ‘What plot? Is the excommunicate King about to visit us with heretic Templars?’

  Walwayn shook his head furiously.

  ‘I do not know, my lord. The Lord Percy understands it is more to do with acquiring weapons. Or treasure.’

  Hereford stroked his beard while the noise swirled, thick and hot. The famed Templar treasure was a gleaming lure that would not be banished, but Templar weapons, even the expertise of the Order’s former knights, would be formidable – and God forbid that Bruce had enlisted fled Templars to his cause.

  And Percy, already firmly in the camp of the King’s opponents, had said nothing. A thought hit Hereford.

  ‘Who is Percy’s spy?’

  Walwayn, who wanted away to drink and women, blinked sweat from his eyes.

  ‘A Knight formerly of the Order is all I understand, lord.’

  Hereford nodded, thought for a time longer, and then patted Walwayn on the shoulder.

  ‘Keep track of it and keep me informed.’

  Walwayn, released at last, merely nodded and slid away. He did not ask if Hereford would inform the King; he thought it unlikely – all was rumour, though Walwayn could taste the truth of it. Hereford would wait until matters were firmer and there was advantage in it for himself, but Walwayn would have to be the one setting such an advantage. Until then, there was drink and women …

  There were no women of any worth, Thweng noted, which accounted for the knights’ behaviour. There were serving trulls, who would be caught and tupped before the night was over, and a wet nurse sitting by the fire with someone’s babe, but no woman of quality to put a curb chain on the revels, for this was war and even if the entire court travelled with the King, the Queen and her women did not.

  He dropped the fish and wiped his fingers on his tunic front; he thought the sweet taste was less to do with spices and cooking than incipient rot, which echoed the entire court as far as he was concerned.

  He watched the great Sir Giles, scarred paladin of the first rank, his red jupon with its silver grail-cups stained with meat juice and his own piss, glowering at the fiery de Bohun nephew.

  Young Henry’s uncle, finished with his clerk and his rank established like the big-ruffed wolf in a pack, returned to stabbing a finger at the younger Earl of Gloucester. No doubt pointing out that, as Constable of England and a veteran of the Scots wars, it should have been his right to command the Van alone and not in tandem with an inexperienced sprig of the de Clares. Politely and with due deference to rank, of course.

  ‘What say you, my liege lord?’ d’Argentan bellowed at the King. ‘A chivalric passage of arms on the morrow, to set the start of a glorious day?’

  He spoiled the moment of it by belching and Thweng saw the droop of the royal eyelid. Bad idea to mention time to the King, he thought, since he was running out of it. They would be hard put to make it to within three leagues of Stirling by the Feast of St John the Baptist as it was and even then would have to leave all the foot and baggage behind. Delaying for a ‘passage of arms’ was not an option.

  Sir Giles was too canny a court rat to argue the point, bowing graciously and then leering at Henry de Bohun. A hurrying wench, goosed by one of the Nevilles, clumsily dropped a torch and there was a furious moment of stamping, sparks and soot; a dog took the opportunity to filch Miles de Stapledon’s meat from his plate and he chased it round, bellowing and threatening until it gave up and dropped it.

  Thweng, sweating in the leprous heat, looked at the mortrews and gristle on his plate, the nightlife fliers which seemed to congregate on it and wished he were somewhere else. Anywhere else.

  The whole court was here, squeezed into the great ugly fortification of the Pele at Linlithgow, Longshanks’s unsubtle stake in the heart of Scotland. He had built it round a former royal residence and swallowed the church of St Michael as he did so, turning that holy place into a storehouse.

  It had never been spacious or comfortable at the best of times, was less so now that the fleeing Scots had wrecked it as they had wrecked every other possible refuge and store, and so Hall struggled with Chamber.

  The pantlers, cellarers, scullery and scalding house of Badlesmere’s stewardship fought for space with Chamberlain Despenser’s staff, who in turn elbowed with Charlton’s Office of the Privy Seal and ignored the growls of Brotherton’s Marshalsea, responsible for all the horses, carts and carriages that moved everyone. A hundred horses of them alone belonged to the King, forty of which were prime destriers.

  I have two, Thweng thought moodily. Both of them cost a small manor apiece and the chances are that one or both will be ruined by the time this affair is over. He wished, again, that he was somewhere else.

  For all the excitement and freedom this campaigning threw up, Edward also wanted to be somewhere else and would have been surprised to find that he and Sir Marmaduke Thweng were more alike than either of them imagined – they were both, at heart, country knights who preferred building a wall than coping with the backstabbing, fervid hothouse of intrigues that was the court.

  It did not help that the clerics were carping on and on about the missing banners of Beverley and St Cuthbert and the grate of it was thrumming on Edward’s nerves; he could hear those two old farts, the Bishops Ely and Winchester, discussing it.

  ‘I am sure the Lord will overlook it,’ Bishop Sandale of Winchester said, but the fish-eyed stare he had back from John Hothum, Bishop of Ely, gave lie to it.

  ‘The Lord sees all,’ Hothum grunted, worrying at the remains of a bone. The weight of his ornat
e robes made sweat bead his brow – he did not need to wear them, but liked the trappings of his Treasury office; more than that, he liked people to see his power and none more so than the Chancellor Bishop of Ely.

  ‘It might still be possible to fetch the Beverley,’ Sandale offered hesitantly. ‘A fast rider …’

  ‘The Lord is not fooled.’

  The voice was a thin rasp, like a nail on slate, the speaker swathed in black and white. Like a magpie, Edward thought sourly, looking at the Pope’s envoy, the Dominican Father Arnaud.

  ‘So the damage is done?’ he snapped and saw the Dominican’s tonsured head raise up, the fat little currant nose twitch like a coney. It was a plump, friendly, avuncular face and a lie; this was the Pope’s best Inquisitor and you had to tread carefully for he had flames in those blackcurrant eyes.

  He had come with a party of Clement V’s Inquisitors – Dieudonné, Abbot of Lagny, and Sicard de Vaur, Canon of Narbonne – complete with finger-wag abjuration on how, despite there being no torture permitted under England’s Common Law, King Edward had better not interfere with the Church’s treatment of heretics. God willed it.

  The combination of Pope and French King was too strong for Edward to oppose and he had been forced to relinquish the Templars he held into the grip of the Church. Now matters had changed and Edward was warmed by a secret smile he never allowed to get to his lips: Clement was dead and the cardinals couldn’t agree. There was no Pope. Sede vacante.

  That will teach the Church to preach to me …

  ‘Do you preach so, Father Arnaud?’ he persisted, fired by the wine and moment. ‘As your late master did regarding heretics?’

  ‘The Holy See and the Inquisition have saved the lands of the west from heresies, my lord king,’ the Dominican replied. ‘I humbly offer that I have had a small part in this great work.’

  ‘You give yourself too little credit,’ Edward answered. ‘If you mean by “saved” that you have reduced the tax-paying tenants of France, you are correct. Though a little late for some, it seems, if you believe Grand Master de Molay was in league with the Devil.’

  ‘He was,’ Arnaud said, his voice rising. ‘And your lands are as palsied with such. Must be cleansed. God wills it.’

  ‘God forbid it,’ Edward snapped back, thinking what a sadistic child this new Inquisition was, a vicious dangerous toddler, petulant and prideful. Then he twisted his mouth in vicious smile. ‘I would concentrate on France, priest, where it seems a heretic’s curse can bring down king and Pope both.’

  ‘Of course,’ interrupted the smooth blandness of Sandale, sensing the banked fires rising in the Dominican, ‘His Grace the King is always cognizant of the decisions of the Pope regarding such matters. Even kings avow the necessity of bringing God’s Kingdom to fruition on earth.’

  ‘As your father acknowledged,’ Arnaud added to the King, smiling sweet as rot, ‘when he oathed himself to another Crusade. The holy places of Outremer must be returned to us.’

  The implication of Edward taking on the role was clear and the King’s eye was jaundiced when he stared at Sandale; the Bishop wished the Dominican had taken a vow of silence.

  ‘Death absolves all oaths,’ the King replied eventually.

  ‘I am sure such matters will be more roundly discussed,’ the Bishop of Ely offered, ‘once the excommunicate Scotch are brought into the Grace of God and the Holy Father … when we have a Holy Father,’ he added slyly and Edward barked a mirthless laugh.

  ‘Aye – until then, Father Arnaud,’ he said, ‘there are only unholy Scotch. That land is full of heretics.’

  He leaned forward, hawklike and stooping, it seemed to the Bishop of Ely.

  ‘But that land, pretend king or not, is part of my kingdom, which is not under abjuration and where we have no torture. Be aware of it, Dominican – especially since you have no Holy Father to appeal to.’

  Arnaud said nothing, though the hatred hazed off him like sweat from a running horse. No, there was no torture permitted in England, he sneered quietly to himself, not when cold, starvation, chains and the odd over-zealous beating would suffice. You would not find a rack, a thumbscrew or a hot iron anywhere in Edward’s realm – yet men died being put to the Question, all the same.

  Edward, losing interest in the argument, called for a song and his troubadour, Lutz, appeared from where he had been perched in some clean rushes. There were groans and a few mutters; Edward knew they were sneering at how the King surrounded himself with ‘Genoese fiddlers’ and even those he favoured said so.

  They know nothing, Edward thought, gnawing his discontent like a bone. They sneer in secret at their king for having the ways of a simple country knight – and again for having the sensibilities to enjoy fine music, well played. None of them, of course, knew an Occitan master of music from a Genoese street performer. Or a lute from a lark’s tongue.

  Lutz was a lark’s tongue with a lute, Edward thought and was pleased with the poetry of that, repeating it in his mind and working out ways to voice it for general approval. Then, like everyone else, he was captured by song.

  The troubadour from Carcassone sang a few swift verses of the Fall of Troy, another couple of stanzas of the Quest for the Grail. Then he began the Song of Roland and, gradually, the place fell silent as his voice, sweet and silk-smooth, rose up and coiled round the expert fingering.

  ‘With Durandal I’ll lay on thick and stout,

  In blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown.

  Felon pagans to th’ pass shall not come down;

  I pledge you now, to death they all are bound.’

  Thweng marvelled, then, at how it changed, how all those knights grew silent, how eyes misted. All in a moment, they were altered to something close to what they strove for and, when it was done, they embraced it with quiet, respectful pats on the table.

  Even the lines that spoke of hardship in the service of a lord, of having to endure great heat and great cold.

  Even of being parted, flesh from blood …

  ISABEL

  O for your spirit, holy John, to chasten lips sin-polluted, to loosen fettered tongues; so by your children might your deeds of wonder meetly be chanted. In honour of the eve and the day, the nun called Constance brought me St John’s wort and sat and combed my hair, a blessing in itself. Better yet was hearing the unseen street player, scaling out the monk’s chant on his instrument – Ut Re Mi Fa Sol La – to offer his own prayer to the blessed St John.

  Ut queant laxis

  Resonare fibris

  Mira gestorum

  Famuli tuorum,

  Solve polluti

  Labii reatum

  Sancte Ioannes

  I sang the words with him then: So that these your servants may, with all their voice, resound your marvellous exploits, clean the guilt from our stained lips, O St John.

  As the blessed St John heralded the coming of Our Lord, so this feast heralds the coming of mine. Keep the hearts of Thy faithful fixed on the way that leads to salvation.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Bannockburn

  Vigil of the Feast of St John the Baptist, June 1314

  The sun was tipping past noon, a glaring orb searing grass to gold, the half-dried velvet of the great hill sweltering beyond. It glittered the leaves of trees, darkening the long shadows to a tempting coolness – but no one wanted the balming relief of the Torwald’s shade; it was safer out here under the fist of a sun which hammered on their maille and leather, wilted the fine plumes and turned jupon and gambeson and haketon to ovens.

  Addaf had ordered his men off their horses, because they were mounted foot when all was said and done and that made sense to the commanders of the Van. Now, while they lolled or squatted in the shade of shelters made from their unstrung bows and the corner of a cloak, the proud knights and men-at-arms stayed mounted, their only saving grace being that they were not on their warhorses.

  Sir Marmaduke, the sweat coursing down him, noted that the finer of the nobi
les were not even fully armoured and so had that curse yet to come – yet, if it came to plunging into the dark greening lurk of the Torwald, they would pile all the new-fangled plate-armour bits they could on and wish for more against the evils they imagined waiting for them there.

  Evil was there, certes, Thweng thought, though all they saw of it was a handful of Scots riders led by Sir Robert Keith, who had brought the seneschal of Stirling to King Edward, as was right and proper under the terms of siege and relief. When de Mowbray was done informing the King that, by all the accepted terms – coming within three leagues of the besieged fortress – he had effectively fulfilled the terms of the agreement, he would return under the same escort.

  What Mowbray thought it might mean remained a mystery, Thweng thought. Did he seriously imagine everyone – Scot and English – would simply nod, smile, turn round and ride off, writ fulfilled? Yet the ritual dance had to be gone through, step by step. By all means, Thweng thought grimly to himself, let us observe the niceties; later we can rip the gizzard from a man in a chivalric and honourable fashion.

  He watched the Welsh enviously, wishing someone had the sense to order the rest of the Van to emulate them, but Hereford and Gloucester were hazed with as much hatred as heat; the de Bohuns and de Clares clustered in clearly defined knots apart from each other and were not about to agree on anything.

  Thweng, too, had his knot of riders, not only his own mesnie of four men-at-arms but the coterie of young knights who had come, as they always did, to beg to ride with him. They had formed – again as they always did – little ad-hoc groupings of brotherhood, sworn to great deeds or death. This one, Thweng remembered, was called the Knights of the Shadow – from the psalm, the lord of Badenoch had informed Sir Marmaduke; the one about singing in the shadow of His Wings. It was clear he did not know any more than that, nor wanted to.

  Sir Marmaduke had studied the Comyn lord for a long moment, taking in the red-gold dust of hair, the sandy lashes and brows, the snub nose. He looked like a lean, truculent piglet, Thweng decided, but the Yorkshireman had some sympathy with the young Scot – seeing your father murdered by the man who went on to be hailed as king would have an effect. Standing with only seventeen years on you and your boots in the tarn of your da’s blood, watching the killers argue about whether to murder you, too, would make you swear vengeance as a Knight of the Shadow.