by Robert Low
‘Yield, my lord?’ he asked, out of politeness’ sake, and Sir Thomas Gray, his senses rushing back into the dubious blessing of a world of pain, could only nod.
A few feet away, Davey the Cooper fought the splintered length of lance from the neck of Bannock and rolled him away – helpful feet kept him going, feeding him out of the ring as it drew back. Peel o’ the Bannock, Davey thought, the hero of Linlithgow who had driven the haywain under the cullis and stopped it dropping long enough for men to spring through and take the place. It is a weeping shame to be leaving him in his own blood for the birds to peck, him who had sworn to defend his own birthplace. Him and a dozen others, he saw, torn and savaged to death by only three knights.
He examined the boy at his feet, hearing him softly moaning out of his smashed face.
‘Swef, swef,’ he soothed, though he knew the lad – Will, he thought the name was – had been sore hurt. Christ’s Bones, you could see the half-moon circle where the iron-shod hoof had caught him full in the face, the bloody furrows where the raised shoenails had gouged him.
‘Candle,’ he heard the boy mush out of his ruined mouth; somewhere, men shouted out a warning and Davey had no more time to think about it, drew his knife and slit the boy’s throat, the blood scalding on his hands.
No candle would bring light to the poor boy, he thought, wiping his fingers down the front of his tunic. Not when his eyes have been torn from his head and his face so monstered his own ma would not recognize him. Better this way …
He helped the press to roll the boy out and rose up, shouldered into a space and braced for the rest of the English to arrive.
Clifford was near weeping with frustration and had torn his helmet off, flinging it away with a bawled curse so pungent it would strip the gilding off a saint’s statue. Beaumont, horrified at what had happened, saw that the entire Battle was in disarray.
There were knights flung to the ground trying to fight their horses for control, others who had failed were streaming away in all directions on mad bolters and a good long hundred or so had compromised with their mounts and were rolling forward against the spear ring but at a steady foam-mouthed canter and all strung out.
‘Form. Form,’ Clifford roared and those remaining fought their plunging mounts into some semblance of tight knee-to-knee order – but the act of this, familiar and tantalizing, simply fanned the flames as the warhorses fought for their heads, squealing and blowing like whales.
‘Advance,’ Clifford called in desperation and, like a bolt from a springald, the relax of reins sent the whole pack raggedly forward in a fast canter. Throwing up his iron fists, Clifford gave in and followed, his own mount held in a steel grip that Beaumont could only admire, smiling and nodding his praise.
Clifford scowled back at him.
‘This is your fault, my lord,’ he said as he swept past and Beaumont, floundering for a reply, could only fume in his wake.
In the end, they could only circle the ring, kept at bay by stabbing spears, reduced to hurling their lances and maces. Beaumont cantered round once, threw his lance, thought about hurling his helmet into the sea of wet, open-mouthed scum, but considered the pointless expense and kept it.
His excellent mount, at a trot, picked a delicate step over the flung bodies, snorting at the dust and blood as Beaumont searched for Sir Thomas.
If God had been just, he thought, he would have discovered Gray alive and bloodied, been able to climb off his expensive warhorse and present it to the man and so expunge his odious obligation. But there was no sign of Gray, only the battered and bloodied remains of his horse, something that might have been Sir William Deyncourt – and, to Beaumont’s added horror, young Reginald Deyncourt as well, who had clearly decided to avenge his elder brother and paid the price for it.
He swung round as Clifford, red-faced and hoarse with shouting, galloped up to him, flinging one hand behind him. Lifting the fancy visor of his new bascinet, Beaumont squinted; there were more men coming out of the woods, spears up and hedged.
Bruce sat and watched the three riders crash to ruin; Jamie Douglas gave an admiring shout as they did so, even as he shook his head at the futility of it. He had uncowled himself from maille and bascinet so that his tousled dark hair stood up in sweat-spikes and his face was bright with joy.
He loves all this, Bruce thought as he massaged the ache of his right hand, pulling off gauntlet and maille mitt to study it; he carefully wiggled his fingers and noted the signs of blue bruising, mottled and ugly. Count the blessings of Heaven, he thought wryly, at least you can still feel all your fingers. And toes.
‘Do you wish me to go to the Earl of Moray’s aid?’
The tone was bland but the question was as loaded as any latchbow; when Bruce turned, Jamie Douglas had a face and smile as innocent as a nun’s headscarf.
‘Let my nephew bide a wee,’ Bruce answered laconically. ‘He seems to have matters in hand.’
And if you go to his aid, Jamie Douglas, he thought, it will only be to preen and wave the rescue of it at Randolph for the rest of his life, so that he will not forgive either you or me.
They watched while the horsemen rode up in ragged skeins and then balked and circled. One dashed in and the horse went down – men cheered as the rider was clearly pounced on by the dirkmen and sent, as Patrick announced cheerfully, ‘all the way tae his ain Hell’.
Other horses were downed, but the riders weaved and staggered away, half walking, half falling. Eventually, as if tiring of the entertainment, Bruce turned back to Jamie Douglas.
‘Move your men to the line of the wood. No farther, Sir James, upon your honour.’
Jamie pouted, but then grinned, for he knew what his king was up to and he turned to the waiting men, winking at Dog Boy.
‘Rank up, lads. Make some noise, too, just to let the bloody English ken who we are.’
They marched out, shouting and singing as if it was a parade of apprentices on the spree – but, as Bruce had planned, the English saw reinforcements arriving. There was a flurry among them, the distant faintness of shouting and then a horn blew.
Bruce sat deeper in his saddle, suddenly aware of the tension leaking out of him like grain from a burst bag; his arm and hand pulsed with a vicious heartbeat. He heard horsemen and turned to see his brother ride up, grinning like a shark out of his broad face and waving vaguely at the sky.
‘The sun is going down,’ he declared as if he had been personally responsible for it. ‘They will try no more until the morn.’
Bruce nodded and sucked in a long, deep breath; below, Randolph’s schiltron was uncurling like a cautious hedgepig, waving their sharpness and hurling jeers at the backs of the retreating knights.
The day had gone well, Bruce thought. Yet tomorrow it would all have to be done again – or else tonight we will have to be gone. And smartly, too, since it is the shortest night of the year.
He wondered, suddenly, why his brother was here at all and not with his own command, turned to ask and saw the broad grin widen further as Edward nudged his horse aside to reveal the men he had been hiding.
Bruce stared. Kirkpatrick was dappled with sweat and leaning wearily on the cantle of his mount’s saddle. Beside him, with a great half-bruised face and a bound arm, swaying with fatigue but grim and steady as ever, sat Hal of Herdmanston. Behind them prowled a slew of Campbells, all bristle-bearded and proud, but scowling to have arrived too late for this day’s fighting.
His brace of dogs returned. He blurted it out before he could think and saw Hal’s raised eyebrow and Kirkpatrick’s lopsided smile.
‘Aye, betimes,’ Kirkpatrick answered, ‘with our jaws stuffed with retrievals.’
‘There are cartloads coming,’ Edward Bruce declared, unable to keep silent any longer. ‘Weapons and armour and more of the same.’
His face was shining with it as he stared at his regal brother.
‘Now we can stand and fight.’
ISABEL
They can feel
it, the irregular heartbeat of it. The seneschal here, a fat and fussy man, has banned Malise from my side by order of the new warden, John de Luka. It is not pity nor mercy that does it, but Your Hand, my Lord. That and the fact that, if all goes badly, I might be a counter for bargaining a truce of peace for this town, as good as gold to some folk. So here I am, curled in my cage like a cat, prinked and preened and dyed and painted and dressed, with one hand clutching an ivory sieve holding balls of musk and crushed amber, the other carefully hidden because of what Malise has done to the nails and fingers. I have a barbette edged with cloth of gold. Nestling between my breasts is a gift from the warden himself, a fat enamelled pendant which has two lovers kissing on one side and, on the other, a grinning Death; it is a common enough theme, but it reveals more sensibility than I saw in the hard face of that royal squire. I wonder if he chose it himself or had someone do it? Either way, Your Hand is in it, Lord. I am still on display, but more gilded and most of those who still come to gawp think I have a toad hidden somewhere the better to curse them, or suck on an emerald in my sleep to preserve my seeming youth.
Let them. I am Isabel MacDuff, with a dowry portion of Fife. I am a long ways past girlhood, yet I am ready to receive my lover. God wills it that he comes soon.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Bannockburn
Midsummer’s Night, June 1314
The dusk was soft and blue like woodsmoke, though there was a haze of that, too, from the small flowers of a thousand flames. Looking out, Dog Boy could see the scatter of English fires, like the tail of a long-haired star.
He ate from a wooden bowl, horn-spooning in oats and barley savouried with a good stock bone which had even had some meat on it. There was bread to sop it up and some small beer, but no ale or wine; Dog Boy thought that was deliberate, to prevent everyone getting drunk with little or no time to sleep it off.
He heard the whine and spang of music from a viel, accompanied by the heartbeat thump of a drum and great growling barks of laughter and raised voices; the Islesmen, or the Campbells, who had their own drink and would not be stopped from it. For all that they looked longingly and thought of the fiery drink, none of the Lowlanders would risk arriving uninvited at such a fire, so they sat and stared morosely at the flames until blinded by the light.
‘Good, this,’ Yabbing Andra declared, slurping the last and scraping the bowl noisily. ‘This is fine fare, is it no’, lads? I mind the time …’
People sighed, for the only time Andra was ever silent was when he was eating and, even if he scraped shavings off the inside of his bowl, there would be precious little left in it to occupy his mouth for long.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, Troubadour Tam interrupted him. He seldom said anything at all, seemed to speak only through the bowing of his viel, but he seemed to have lost his touch for it this night, for he crossed into Andra’s ramble with a slashing few words of his own.
‘Mak’ the best of it – there will be precious little else this winter. Hunger is coming.’
Those who worked the land knew it and nodded. Patrick, who worked cattle more than he did fields of oats and barley, announced that the saving grace of Our Lord in all this was that the English would be visited by the same bad-crop famine – and they had more fields given to wheat and less to livestock or hardy oats.
‘So? What use is that to us?’ demanded Horse Pyntle and Patrick explained it to him, shaving little cuts off a splinter and curling them into the fire for amusement.
‘They will only have beasts left to them. When we raid, as raid we must for food, then we will have meat and lots o’ it.’
There were grim snarls of laughter at this, save for Parcy Dodd, who said that too much meat made you sick. Since none there had ever had enough meat to make them sick, there were growling, jeering questions fired back at him.
‘Aye, aye,’ he declared defensively. ‘I never said I had ever been sick from too much meat. Tainted meat, aye – and it tak’s precious little of that to make ye boak. But my ma had experience in curin’ folk – rich folk, you ken – whose shitholes and insides were choked up with too much meat.’
‘Good, was she?’ demanded Sweetmilk, while everyone had that wary look you got round Parcy Dodd, since you could never trust anything he said at all, on any subject.
‘In a godly fashion,’ Parcy declared, frowning, ‘though I have long since hauled myself away from her notion that what galled ye or made ye boak was a blessin’.’
‘Every mother is the like,’ Geordie offered and there were growls of assent at that; there was a vagrant coil of the wild music of the galloglass warriors from the north and west; and Dog Boy saw Troubadour Tam’s head come up, cocked to listen to it like a dog sniffs the wind.
‘Aye, mayhap and mayhap no’,’ Parcy replied. ‘I have no experience of Geordie’s ma, nor none else but mine own, who brewed physick that would gag a hog. She would clutch my neb until I had to breathe – then pour it down my thrapple.’
Dog Boy heard them, bleared with memories, chuckle at this shared moment, but it was not for him; he could barely remember his ma at all these days and certainly not her face.
‘Did it work?’ demanded Horse Pyntle and Parcy flapped a loose hand.
‘It did what it was aimed at – once swallied, ye had better have a bush to boak in.’
‘Aye, well,’ Patrick murmured dreamily, ‘here you are – so it must have been good.’
‘Not to my way o’ considering it,’ Parcy answered. ‘Once, as a wee laddie, I swallied a penny. A whole siller penny, my da’s rent-price for our ox. So it was out with the physick – and back came the money, so sick it would not spend.’
‘Away, Parcy ye liar!’
Parcy held up his hands.
‘May the Lord bliss and keep me, the truth it is I am telling you here. The wee reeve said it was a crockard. Rang hollow, he said. Well, it was fine when I ate it, but it comes as no surprise to me that my ma’s physick ruined it. It would strip the shine from anythin’, that brew.’
‘At least they ne’er burned her as a witch,’ Sweetmilk said, ‘if her brew was so bad.’
He jerked his head up, realizing what he had said and suddenly worried that he might have stumbled into a mire. Parcy let him dangle for a long moment, and then shook his head; Sweetmilk’s obvious relief made everyone laugh.
‘Not for the want of folk trying, mark ye,’ Parcy went on. ‘Cost an Inquisitor dear.’
‘You nor your ma never saw such,’ scoffed Geordie, which was as good as a waved rag to a bull.
‘He came to our vill,’ Parcy insisted indignantly, ‘a wheen of years back, when such black crows were permitted into the Lowlands to seek out the heresies of the Temple. The folk came out shouting that my ma was a witch and should be burned. Burn her, burn her, they were yellin’, and demanded the good Brother Inquisitor put her to the test.’
He paused and the wind flared up sparks, as if it was part of the story.
‘The Inquisitor, who was interested only in the foulness of Poor Knights, was weary of a deal of the same. Scotland, he had discovered, was full of kindly, helpful folk who seemed determined to broil and roast their neighbours. “What makes you think she is a witch?” he demanded and they told him she stank of old sulphur when she farted. “Burn her. Burn the witch.”
‘“So do I,” the Inquisitor admitted. “She has a third nipple,” they told him and demanded that he burn the witch. He frowned. “I have a wart which might be mistaken for the same,” he sighed back at them.
‘“She takes the Lord’s name in vain,” they flung at him. “She must be burned. Burn the witch.” The Inquisitor, who had had enough of this, flung down his scrip of blessed relics in disgust. “I have also taken the Lord’s name in vain,” he announced. “Particularly when faced with the likes of folk such as yourselves.”’
Parcy stopped and shook his head in mock sorrow.
‘Well, he thought he had brought sense to them, for they stopped and muttered among
themselves for a minute or two, then raised their heads and untied my ma. “Forget the auld wummin,” they said, looking at him with flames in their eyes. “Burn the witch.”’
There were dry chuckles, but mostly silence as folk marvelled at the tale.
‘What happened to your ma?’ demanded Yabbing Andra into the head-shaking admiration. ‘Did her neebors burn her as well as that Inqueesitor?’
‘For certes not,’ Parcy said without hesitation. ‘They let her go and concentrated on the unhappy black priest – so she went back to our house and turned them all into toads, first chance she had. That vill is now empty save for her and some hopping croakers and their gener. None will visit it, not even myself.’
‘Bigod,’ Patrick declared, ‘the Auld Carl himself never told such fibs. I am not surprised your ma made brews to make ye boak, if you kept telling her tales like that.’
‘I had a physick once,’ Yabbing Andra began and people groaned. Dog Boy got up and moved away, feeling strange, at once part of them and not part of them. Perhaps it was their talk of mothers. Perhaps it was the new livery he wore, a smart jupon that was still fresh enough to be clean, fixed with the badge of a royal houndsman.
He had taken it from the hands of Bernard the Chancellor, whom he’d been advised to see as soon as possible and had found as a dry thin stick of a priest in plain brown wool, worse dressed than the gaggle of clever clerks who served him.
‘Aleysandir,’ he declared when the name was given to him, consulted the rolls and frowned. He issued orders and, in short order, Dog Boy had his new badged clothes and a chinking bag of money.
‘You have a stipend, paid quarterly,’ the Chancellor declared. He had a face dominated by pink-rimmed eyes and a knife-cut of a mouth, a manner made haggard by the amount of work he had before him. Yet he managed what passed for a smile.
‘The King’s hounds are at Turnberry. Or Lochmaben – no one is sure. Once this unpleasantness is dealt with, you may take up your duties proper.’