by Robert Low
Hereford, his temples thundering, watched them ribbon their way obliquely across to the dark line of Edward Bruce’s Battle and felt the tic kick under his eye as he saw another line, this one to the left of the Bruce brother and more distant. It had the blazing banner of the lion rampant marking where Bruce himself marched. Beyond that, further to the left of it, was another growing line, the banners in it proclaiming a third command.
The Earl of Moray, Hereford thought, coming up on his master’s left. The Scots were in an echelon of Battles, as steady ranked as any Macedonians of Alexander, and Hereford, with a sickening lurch, knew that Gloucester was right – there was no time left. No time at all.
Hew stumbled and fell to his knees, had curses and kicks for it as the ranked men baulked and tried to get round or walk over him. A hand took him by the collar and hauled him up as he struggled like a beetle in the forest of legs and feet.
He tried to mutter thanks, but the sweating mass was an animal that did not care, simply hammered him in the back with a curse and a call to keep moving.
He kept moving, spearless, the axe in one hand, the dirk in his belt and in his free hand a fist of the dirt and grass he had grabbed when he fell. Bad soil for digging, Hew thought. Not stable. Looks fine now, but it will be as dangerous as scree when it rains here; the ground will seep water. If you came here after rain, he thought, and thumb-tested the ground as was proper, you would lose most of the digit up to the first joint.
Cannot dig a ditch in such, he thought, half falling again, the motes and dust swirling with the grunt and clack and clatter of the sweating press. You need no more wet in the ground than a thumbnail-length entry for a good ditch. Incline the walls away, to prevent fall-ins. Most folk did not know that a square ell of soil weighs as much as a full-armoured knight on his big stot and if that falls on you, you are in the grave, certes.
He heard the men next to him shout out and grunt, saw hands flex and heard the great bawling roar that was Edward Bruce, the King’s brother himself, standing in their sweating, stinking midst and bellowing for them to keep going, that it was only a wee man on a big horse.
A square ell of soil, Hew thought, moving fast on four legs and about to fall on someone …
There was a noise like a clatter of cauldrons on a stone path and the great block Hew was in trembled like a fly-bitten horse’s haunch; men rippled away from the front. Someone shrieked, high and loud, and voices called out, but they kept moving, forcing Hew onward.
You should properly shore up steep sides – wood if it is no more than a ditch, but good stone cladding if it is a decent, perjink moat …
He stepped on something that moved and groaned, fell forward with an apology as he tried to skip round it, appalled that he had put his foot on a wounded man.
‘Kill him, man,’ someone growled, forcing past him and Hew saw the groaning figure was a knight, helmed and mailled and lying on his shield. There was blood on his metal links and he had no surcote. Hew started to try and turn him, to see the device on the shield – there was a lot of expensive war gear on this one for him to be a simple man-at-arms – but feet trampled and baulked and cursed him.
‘He has no mark, is of no account. Kill him and be done with it,’ the voice savaged at him and Hew looked up, blinking into the great, broad, red face, sweat-gleamed and truculent as a thwarted boar. He saw the surcote beneath it, stained and torn but blazing with the device of Edward Bruce.
With a last, annoyed snort, the great lord moved on and Hew, swallowing, took his dirk and began to prise open the downed man’s fancy new visor. It took some time and he gave a sharp cry when it finally popped up to reveal the half-dazed, rolling-eyed face beneath. A young face, grimaced with pain and with blood on his teeth.
‘Yield …’ said the man, but Hew the Delver had been given his orders by the Earl of Carrick, who was James to Jesus as far as the ditcher was concerned. He hauled out his axe and blessed the man with the blade of it – the sign of the cross, writ bloody in a blinding stroke across the eyes and then one which split the face from brow to nose.
He looked up, wiping the sweat and a splash of blood from himself, saw the retreating backs of the block he had lately been in, saw it stop. More men came trotting up, a loose leaping of axe and dirk men, like a fringed hem to Edward Bruce’s battle.
‘What are you after having there, wee man?’ demanded a voice and Hew stood up into the gaze of a mailled and well-armed man with a proper shield and the air of a lord. One of the Gaelic spitters from north of the Mounth, Hew thought, and was clever enough to be polite.
‘I dinna ken, lord, He has no device. I was told to slay him.’
The north lord called out and men came running up, obedient as dogs, and bent to roll the dead knight off his face-down shield so he could turn it to see who he was; Hew glanced at the solid line of backs down the slope and licked his lips, wondering when he could get back to the dark, sweating forest of it. Wondering if he wanted to, while the sun shone here, on this sandy loam of hill.
‘Christ’s Bones.’
The curse jerked him from his reverie and he saw the Gaelic lord staring at the dead knight’s revealed shield. Then he turned to Hew.
‘Run to the King – that way. Look for the great lion banner and the man with a crown on his helm,’ the lord spat out in his sibilant, singsong way. ‘None of mine can speak your tongue well enough, so it has to be you. Tell him that Neil Campbell of that ilk begs to inform His Grace that the Earl of Gloucester has been slain.’
He paused.
‘What is your name?’
‘Hew. Hew the Delver.’
‘Tell him you did it.’
Neil Campbell watched the man trot off and shook his head. A great shout from his front made him look up and set his shield, feeling the heat beat on him like a fist.
A great lord is dead of a ditch-digger, he thought. There will be more of that this day.
Garm did not like the scattered bodies, the horses that were down, screaming and kicking in a frantic fury to get back on all fours, the slicked skid of entrails and slimed fluids. He had been trained to ride into anything if his master insisted, but was cat cautious and prancing over the bodies.
Thweng was grateful. He saw no sign of Gloucester, but caught the flash of blood-smeared jupons and dead eyes all around him, saw Badlesmere and others circling and bellowing, stabbing and throwing and as ineffectual as a breeze on a stone wall.
They suffered for it. As he rode up to the bristling, snarling dyke of spears, which had stopped and braced, Thweng saw the stained, crumpled heap that had once been Sir Payn Tiptoft, crushed and bloody underneath his still-kicking horse.
Thweng, moving no faster than a trot, turned sideways and rode the length of the hedge, stabbing with the lance, hearing the clack of it on the long spearshafts, felt the tremble of it up his arm. At the end of the line, he threw it like a javelin, wheeled left as he drew his sword, circled and came in again, avoiding the mad rush of Badenoch and a fat knot of the Shadows, forcing forward to impale themselves on the shrike’s hedge.
Then, suddenly, in the gilded haze of raised dust, he saw the bright flash of a familiar shield, raised aloft by some saffroned warrior at the rear of the wall of spears – the de Clare arms. Gloucester was there, on that slope of hillside behind the Scots, and Thweng spurred Garm mercilessly so that the horse chested into the ranks, then reared on command, striking out with his great iron-shod hooves.
Points lanced, clattering off his shield. A hook snagged in the horse barding and Garm crashed down on all fours with more force than intended, screamed aloud as he landed on a bloody hoof, speared through when he struck out.
Stabs and slashes spilled expensive cotton padding from the horse-armour, drove the breath from Thweng with a few well-aimed blows which did not penetrate, but reeled him in the saddle. Then he saw sense and turned Garm away, rode him hard for a few steps and reined in.
Sweating, trembling, Garm stood, the injured leg raised
so that only the point of one hoof touched the ground. Cursing, Thweng levered himself out of the saddle, feeling his legs buckle as he hit the hard earth and the full weight of his harness fell on him. Too old, he thought. Too God-cursed old for this. And the Earl of Gloucester was down – taken, he hoped, but recalling the triumphantly waved shield he felt a sick horror at what that might mean.
He was examining Garm’s wound when he felt the sightless open eyes of a dead man staring at him. He turned to the gore-spattered ruin of a face. The arms on the tabard and shield belonged to the Comyn of Kylbryde, but Thweng would not have known the man after what spear and a tearing hook had done to his face.
‘Should not have thrown away his helm.’
The bleak voice spun Thweng round into the grim stare of Badenoch, his own face sheened with sweat and the loss of yet another of his kin. Yet his concern was all for Sir Marmaduke.
‘Are you injured, my lord?’
Thweng shook his head.
‘Need a new mount. I will lead this one off and find my squire.’
He paused, feeling the madness of the moment as he sought to find words of consolation while shrieks and bellows and dying whirled round them; the ground was now a churned red mud.
‘I am sorry for your loss.’
Badenoch nodded, as if he had expected no more. Then he took a breath, as if about to plunge underwater, slid the domed helm over his head and reined back into the fray.
Wearily, trying to avoid the mad, plunging arrivals of the rest of the horse, Thweng led the limping Garm back across the blood-red mud to where the ground firmed and the dust billowed like cloth of gold.
Deep in the clacking forest of spears, surrounded by the grunts and pants and squealed curses, Tam Shaws thought this the worst moment of his life. He had thought this before, from the moment the heidman of Shaws had picked him for the wool path.
It was bewildering then. Tam, who had never been away from Shaws, had travelled down to Coldingham Shore with six others and the staple, that year’s wool from Shaws. That had been a mazed journey, almost a dream to Tam and gilded with the knowledge that fifty pounds of the fleece-wrapped wool on those three pack ponies was his.
He remembered his old life as part of that same dream, now. At the height of that summer he had, with the others of the vill, driven the sheep in fours to the pool, ducked them, rubbed them with ashes, doused them with fresh water and then let the herders shoo them, complaining loudly, to a prepared fold in the hay meadow.
All that day the sun had smoked the water off them and the next Tam had joined in the back-aching work of shearing, trying not to scab them with careless clip and having to dab the wounds with hot tar when he failed. Then, their shaved arses daubed with a varying swirl of ochre shapes, the beasts were sent bounding and kicking back to pasture and men grinned wearily, backs aching but glowing with the knowledge that the job was done.
‘Up beyond the Mounth,’ Davey’s Pait announced, ‘they pluck the wool aff their sheep, like taking feathers from a chook.’
‘Away!’
But Davey’s Pait swore he’d had the truth from his auld grandsire and they went off, marvelling at the work involved in plucking sheep.
When the wool was delivered safe to Coldingham Shore, where packmen would take it on to Berwick and beyond, the heidman had come to Tam and told him he was chosen again – this time to go as a sojer. Lord had picked Tam as the Shaws obligation to their liege, Earl Patrick, because Tam had no wummin or bairns dependent on him.
So Tam, done up like a kipper in a padded jacket and iron hat, a big, awkward spear in one hand and a dirk bouncing strangely at his hip, had endured the jeers of the others and knew it had been more out of relief that it was him and not them.
He had been handed two silver pennies for the journey, told to report to the steward at Dunbar’s castle and announce that he was ‘the obligation from Shaws’.
Four years ago. Tam Shaws had thought, then, that the worst moment of his life was being sent as garrison, first to Edinburgh, then to Roxburgh, clearly never to be returned to Shaws after his forty days were up. He thought, often, of simply leaving but did not trust in the Law that much.
After a while, bitter as aloes, he realized he had been forgotten by the lord of Shaws and by God Himself; he had grown accustomed to the life, settled to it. Not long after that, the rebels had come to Roxburgh and Tam thought that had been the worst moment of his life, for he had come face to face with the dreaded Black Douglas and had actually surrendered the castle to him, because his commander was dying and unable to even speak.
He had, in fact, surrendered to a wee lord from Lothian, a man who had been prisoner in Roxburgh for seven years. Tam had been sure this Lothian lord would be vengeful but, to his surprise, the garrison survivors had all been spared. Sure of what would happen if he stayed in his old ‘obligement’, he had switched and joined the rebels, which moment he had been sure was truly the worst of his life.
He had been wrong all along, he realized, looking round him at the blood and the shrieking. Nearby was Davey the Cooper, the man who had mourned the loss of his friend, the man who had cut the throat out of the blinded boy yesterday. Davey had three arrows in him, buried to the fletchings, and even as he knelt by him Tam heard the whirring hiss of more arriving. Like clippers and us the fleece, he thought, and then they hit, like stones thrown against a wet daub wall.
Someone behind Tam grunted as if slapped; the man in front seemed to have been hit by a forge hammer, lifted off his feet and flung past Tam like a loose-packed grain bag.
‘Up, lad.’
The voice dragged up Tam’s head until the iron rim of the helmet dug into his shoulders. He saw the maille and the jupon and then the great, frowning, bearded face of the Earl of Moray himself.
‘No hiding place there, lad,’ Randolph declared, as careless of the arrows as if they were spots of rain. ‘Besides, you are needed.’
An earl needs me. The thought made Tam get up, wobbling on shaky legs; he glanced out to where the enemy archers stood, on the far side of the steep-banked stream and with a clear shot. Randolph, with a satisfied grunt, turned away and shouldered into the struggling, howling mass of the schiltron as if he was only trying to get to a friend across a crowded courtyard.
The men in front of Tam suddenly seemed to tremble and stir, then braced with a great stream of sibilant curses – the English horse, spiked like shrike offerings, were being rammed into the wall of spears by the blind eagerness of those behind.
This, Tam thought, leaning his shoulder against the man in front and bracing, his head down at the man’s waist, seeing shit-streaks down the naked legs and sucking in the stench of it, really is the worst moment of my life.
Kirkpatrick felt the pressure of his bladder and tried to ease the crush of maille and gambeson on it by shifting himself slightly in the saddle. That made the warhorse think movement and action was imminent, so it dragged the bit and jerked him forward. Cursing, he reined it savagely back, clattering lance against shield; the visor of his fancy new bascinet dropped with a clang and blinded him.
‘You need to pinch that.’
Kirkpatrick, fumbling with four things and only two hands, raised the visor into the sardonic grin of the Earl of Ross, sitting easily on his own mount. He made a gesture with one gauntleted hand, the lance locked upright in the crook of his arm and firmed into the stirrup fewter.
‘Smithing nips,’ he elaborated, beaming. ‘Get your man to pinch the hinges a little, so that it stiffens and remains up until you want it down. That’s what I did with mine.’
Kirkpatrick hated him and his good advice, hated the bloody warhorse which had cost an entire season’s wool tolts and hated the beast’s name – Cerberus – which he was starting to realize was because it had clearly been spawned in Hell.
Above all, he hated being here in the metal huddle of Sir Robert Keith’s horse, nervous and awkward on a baiting destrier, being clumsy with shield and lance. Aware tha
t his skills with weapons and horse were not only inadequate, but marked him as a rank beginner to the armoured men around him, he knew they watched and sneered, enjoying the sight of Bruce’s loathsome ‘auld dug’ trying to be a true knight of the realm.
‘Thank you, my lord,’ he managed to grit out and Ross nodded politely, but then frowned.
‘Would you not be better with the baggage, Sir Roger?’ he asked innocently. ‘For certes you seem a little out of place. Should you be here?’
Kirkpatrick, rocked back and forth by the head-tossing Cerberus, felt the rush of blood through him at this casual viciousness, washing away the cold sweat on his spine.
‘No,’ he answered thickly. ‘For certes I should not. Nor any of us. Nor would I be if it had not been for those less than loyal.’
Which made the Earl of Ross jerk so hard with shock and anger that his own horse threw its head up and squealed. Kirkpatrick’s smile was a twisted ugliness, for he thought Ross more than deserved the lick of a viperish tongue; here was the man who had been on the English side until recently, who had broken the sanctuary of a holy place to capture Bruce’s queen and sisters seven years ago, sending them to captivity and Bruce’s brothers to death.
And Isabel MacDuff, Kirkpatrick recalled suddenly. As well Hal is not here, since he would care even less than myself for Ross’s rank. As the King should have done, instead of gathering this earl into his peace with a forgiving kiss … the things you do when you want to wriggle your arse to fit on a throne.
‘Bigod,’ Ross spat out eventually. ‘When this matter is done …’
‘I will be back to my old tasks,’ Kirkpatrick finished and Ross clicked his teeth shut in his sweating face, remembering the fearsome reputation of the King’s right-hand man. He tried to pull his own visor down to cover his confusion, but it had stuck and Kirkpatrick grinned.
‘You need to loose the hinges on that,’ he offered in a voice like poisoned silk. ‘I have a wee sharp dirk that will do it.’