The Lion at bay tk-2

by Robert Low

  Red John felt the blow, could scarcely believe that Bruce had dared to strike him and then, with a sudden, savage twist of fear, felt the tug and heard the suck of the dagger coming out. There was a burning sensation and his legs trembled.

  Bruce stared at what he had done. The thunder of it was loud as a cataract in his head and he saw Badenoch teeter backwards on his high heels and start to bend and sag, so he dropped the dagger and reached out to support him, an instinctive gesture.

  The blade clattered on to the stones, bounced and twisted, little drops of blood flying up like rubies, the sound ringing like a bell; every head came up.

  Seton got to the centre of it first, with a bull roar to alert Hal and the Dog Boy, dragging his sword out with a grating hiss.

  He was a step ahead of Red John’s uncle Robert, whose bellow of outrage drowned Seton and rang round the Greyfriars stones. He sprang towards Bruce, his own blade clearing the scabbard and whirling above his head.

  Seton grabbed Bruce by one arm, spilling the Earl backwards even as he cut viciously down on the springing Robert Comyn. Hal saw the blow slice into the flesh of the man’s neck, heard the sinister hissing of it and the surprised little yelp Robert Comyn made as his head parted company with the rest of him, all save for a raggle of flesh.

  ‘Get him away,’ Hal yelled to the Dog Boy, who bundled the flap-handed, stumbling Bruce away while Hal and Seton, panting like mad dogs, closed shoulder to shoulder, backing away from the fallen, bleeding figures; Robert Comyn’s body writhed, his feet kicking furious splashes from the lake of his own blood.

  Malise wanted no part of this. Cheyne of Straloch, equally paralysed, was starting to haul his blade out and Malise had no doubt that the thick-headed, barrel-bodied lout would plunge forward like a ravening wolf…

  ‘Murder,’ he yelled and sprinted for the back door of the chapel. ‘Murder. A Comyn! Murder.’

  Hal and Seton looked at each other and backed off towards the kirk’s front door while Cheyne plunged towards them, stopped uncertainly, then knelt by the fallen Badenoch, unable to do much than flap a free hand while watching Hal and Dog Boy slither backwards out of the chapel.

  Whatever happened now, Hal thought wildly, red war has returned to the Kingdom.

  An hour later

  The smoke was pall-black, thick as egret feathers and the English justiciars sat under it, miserable with surrender; Sir Richard Giraud wisely flung open the doors of the castle and Bruce men spilled into it, led by Edward, his great slab of a face grim as black rock. The English hovered uncertainly, fearful of what might be done to them and not even sure what had happened.

  They were not alone in their confusion. In the hall of the fortress, the brothers Bruce and a few chosen straightened up overturned benches and sat, the Bruce himself a silent, floor-staring effigy.

  ‘Has he spoke?’ Edward demanded suddenly, rounding on Kirkpatrick, who pointed to the head-hung Bruce and didn’t have to say anything more. Edward tore off his maille coif and scrubbed his head with frustration; he had learned that there had been a ‘tulzie’, that Badenoch and his uncle were down, probably dead and the perpetrator of it sat shivering and muttering about the ‘curse of Malachy’.

  Edward fought his own rising panic about that Bruce plague. He had sent riders to inform their supporters to gather their forces and had managed to take Dumfries from the quailing English by bluster and threat of burning. The Comyn, though, were still around and no doubt sending out for their own forces — the whole affair was as messy as dog vomit and his brother, the head of the family, was a gibbering uselessness.

  ‘Innocent blood.’

  The voice turned him round, into the anxious, raised face. Edward looked at his brother and thought he looked as he had when he was six and in trouble; it was not a look he cared to find on the Earl of Carrick and Annandale, the man who would be king.

  ‘What happened, brother?’ he demanded, for the umpteenth time. He had heard from Hal and Seton and the dark youth they called Dog Boy, but had not learned much about what his brother had actually done to Red John Comyn. Stabbed him, he had heard — but there was a pinking poke and there was a paunch-ripping thrust and Edward did not know which his brother had done.

  Bruce’s grip was sudden on Edward’s wrist, a talon that pulled him close, into the anguish.

  ‘God forgive me, Edward, for I have sinned. In a house of God, no less — the curse of Malachy…’

  ‘In the name of Christ,’ Edward thundered, snatching his hand back so vehemently that his brother was almost jerked from the bench, ‘what did ye do to him?’

  ‘No doubt I have killed him.’

  The answer was low and hoarse and filled with pain and fear. Hal almost went to the man to lay the comfort of a hand on his shoulder, but that was a step too far and he hovered on the brink of it.

  ‘Ye doubt ye have killed him?’

  The question was sharp and harsh, bringing all heads round to where Kirkpatrick, eyes feral and narrowed as a hunting cat, looked from the stricken Bruce to the brothers, one by one.

  ‘By God, no,’ Alexander said suddenly, seeing the way of it, while Niall and Thomas blinked and shuffled uncertainly. Without Robert, Hal realized suddenly, they are lost.

  ‘You have a good heart, brother,’ Edward said to Alexander, his French thick and hoarse, ‘but one unacquainted with such work as this. Use your vaunted head, all the same — you are clever enough to see how this must be played out.’

  There was silence for a heartbeat while this sank in; the timing was rotten as wormed oak, but the sense of it was clear — there was no going back from an attack on the Lord of Badenoch. The Bruce faction was now at war with both Comyn and English and, if they were to have a chance of winning, the head of it must be declared king of Scots. The eyes turned to the figure on the bench, still shaking and now gnawing his nails.

  ‘No point to any of it,’ Kirkpatrick growled, ‘if Red John still lives.’

  The truth of it hung over them, heavy as the smoke pall outside.

  ‘Red John was the impediment to matters,’ Kirkpatrick went on and would have said more, but Edward interrupted him.

  ‘See to it,’ he ordered. ‘Then we must be away from here…’

  ‘God in Heaven,’ whispered Bruce. ‘The curse of Malachy…’

  Edward rounded savagely on him, almost unmanned himself by the summoning of that old Bruce plague.

  ‘Enough, brother — get yer wit back. What’s done is done and the path we ride now needs clear heads.’

  ‘Will ye come?’

  Hal stared at the grim-eyed Kirkpatrick, knowing with sickening surety what was intended and that Kirkpatrick could not carry it out on his own.

  ‘Mak’ siccar,’ Kirkpatrick added. Hal nodded.

  They came out into the twilight streets, where the stone houses of the rich were the colour of old blood and the shutters barred. No-one walked abroad save themselves, prowling like a pack of wolves, all ruffed and snarling; Ill-Made and Mouse and Sore Davey followed Dog Boy and Kirkpatrick and Hal, turning this way and that, flexing anxious knuckles on drawn weapons, for there was little need of propriety now.

  Somewhere lurked the Comyn and their supporters, who had been surprised and scattered, though it would not be long before they recovered themselves — at which point, it would be best to be elsewhere, Hal thought.

  James Lyndsay of Donrod agreed, wiping his dry mouth with the back of one hand and shifting nervously from one foot to the other. He had been set to watch the front of Greyfriars with a parcel of his own men, equally hackled.

  ‘Aye, he is in there yet,’ he answered when Kirkpatrick asked about Red John. ‘They have brought nobody out, though many have gone in — monks and the like, with clean linen and scurrying like squirrels. I have set men at the back and have had no word back o’ any leaving by there.’

  ‘So some of them live yet,’ Sore Davey muttered, picking a scab.

  ‘Not Sir Robert,’ Hal replied, remembe
ring the half-severed head of Red John’s uncle, lolling in a spreading pool of thick blood.

  ‘So,’ Kirkpatrick said grimly. ‘Red John it is who is alive yet.’

  ‘Are ye for going after him, then, Kirkpatrick?’ Lyndsay demanded and then eyed the chapel uncertainly. ‘There are a wheen of men inside.’

  ‘Then bring yerself an’ yer mesnie,’ Kirkpatrick declared, then looked round them all, his eyes lingering longest on Hal.

  ‘Be set on it,’ he warned hoarsely. ‘There is one matter only here and that is the death of Red John. Everything else is thrall to it.’

  He raked them all with one last glance, while the shadows dipped; somewhere a lonely dog barked, then howled.

  ‘Are ye set?’

  Not nearly, Hal thought to himself. Not nearly at all for dire murder in a chapel. But he nodded into the chorus of grim grunts of assent.

  They hit the chapel door at a rush and stumbled in, falling over each other in a fury of desperate fear, fired to roaring anger at what they were having to do. A priest squealed and dropped a ewer of bloody water; a man with sword up and shield ready was swamped and bundled backwards by Ill-Made and Mouse, while Sore Davey cut the legs from underneath him.

  There was a confused whirl of echoing screams and bell-clanging metal, which Hal plunged into blindly, Kirkpatrick at his heels. A figure loomed up, all leather jerkin and unfocused eyes — but the blade in his fist was sharper than his sight, so that Hal ducked, half-turned and scythed; there was a piercing shriek, almost high enough for only hounds to hear.

  Kirkpatrick knelt by the prone figure, swathed in bloody linen, the budded mouth slack and the face pale as milk, so that even the neat little beard seemed to have faded to wheat-straw. He was aware of Hal above him, bull-breathing and dripping pats of slow blood from his blade; someone was screaming.

  Hal stared in appalled disbelief at the foot he had severed, still in the raggles of a boot, which leaked blood in front of him. Strange, Hal thought with that detached madness that came on in the middle of carnage, to be lying there looking at your own foot where it should not be.

  Kirkpatrick knew Red John was dying, that all the padded linen cloths, sodden with blood, were not choking the flow of life from him. His own fluted dagger seemed an irrelevance, but he slid it in anyway, so that Red John gave a little jerk, a final flicker.

  ‘Da.’

  The voice snapped heads up and they all saw the youth, half-sheltered behind a whey-faced Malise Bellejambe. Two panting men-at-arms stood to one side, blades bloody and faces desperate — Mouse was already closing on one.

  The boy. Red John’s boy, a gawky seventeen-year-old, brought to say his farewells… the realization of it hit Hal and Kirkpatrick at the same moment, but Lyndsay of Donrod was quicker still.

  ‘Ach, no — would ye?’ he gasped out, clutching Kirkpatrick’s arm and half-hauling the man back to his knees as he rose, grim as a rolling boulder and the knife bloody. With a savage curse, Kirkpatrick swept his free hand like a closing door, slapping Lyndsay in the face and sending him arse over tip to the flagstones.

  Malise saw him coming, his worst nightmare, blood-dripping blade and all and he shrieked, backing away, almost thrusting the boy at him. Hal saw it and, in a flicker of time, curled a sneer into the wide eyes of Bellejambe — then turned and slammed his fist into Kirkpatrick’s face.

  He was holding his sword when he did it, and it was only fate that made the flat of it slam Kirkpatrick forehead to chin, while the hilt-hardened fist knocked teeth from him and sent him spilling backwards to join Lyndsay.

  The pair of them struggled like beetles until they righted themselves, Lyndsay scrabbling away from Kirkpatrick, who came up bellowing and blowing blood from his split lip.

  ‘Would you?’ demanded Hal, his blade held pointedly at Kirkpatrick. ‘A boy, now. Why no’ hunt out the mother and cousins, bring them to the altar and drown it in Comyn blood?’

  Kirkpatrick saw, out of the corners of his eyes, the Herdmanston men moving subtly to defend their lord and realized he would make no headway here, though the anger and pain thundered in him. Dog Boy stepped closer to him, his face set as a quernstone and his foot on Kirkpatrick’s spilled dagger. Kirkpatrick glared, then lashed it back to Hal.

  ‘I will remember this, Herdmanston,’ he spat. Dog Boy tipped the dagger towards him with the toe of one shoe, a tinkle of sound that was suddenly bell-loud in the silence. Kirkpatrick scooped it up, whirled like a black cloud and spun away.

  Hal turned to the men-at-arms, half-crouched and wary; Malise had gone, but Red John’s son still stood, pale and determined, his mouth a thin seam. The footless man had passed out or died, his final whimpers trailing echoes round the chapel.

  ‘Take the boy an’ run,’ Hal told the men-at-arms, ‘’afore Kirkpatrick has mind to return.’

  He stood while they hurried off, looking at the bloody bag that had been the Lord of Badenoch; he saw the boy’s face again, grey with that shock of having your world reel and tip, of having the great tower and rock of someone you thought immortal vanish like haar. Hal knew that loss well and the needle of it was still sharp.

  Lyndsay of Dornod let out his breath.

  ‘Christ be praised,’ he growled.

  ‘For ever and ever,’ everyone replied.

  Hal’s added laugh was a mirthless twist at this parody of piety in a place drenched with blood and sin.

  Tibbers Castle, Dumfries

  Feast of St Kevoca of Kyle, February, 1306

  Thrushes and blackbirds and fluttering white doves spun the black smoke from the burning thatch of the outbuildings while a handful of grim, blackened men lounged against the remains of a stable wall and watched, chewing crusts.

  Yet the hall of Tibbers had dogs gnawing bones and chickens scratching hopefully among the rushes; somewhere in the rafters baby sparrows were learning to fly, as if the world had not turned upside down.

  Hal sat and watched Bruce and a huddle of others scatter vellum, plucked from the Rolls Chest with its brightly-painted coat-of-arms, a white trefoil-ended cross on black — sable, a cross flory argent, he said by rote to himself.

  The owner sat at the far end of his own hall, face blank as scraped sheepskin, hands resting on his knees and flanked by two more of the Bruce men. Hal felt sorry for Sir Richard Siward, sitting there tasting the ashes of his outbuildings and the bitterness of defeat.

  Tibbers had been added to Dalswinton and Caerlavrock, all castles swept up by the Bruce mesnie, as if desperate to stamp authority on what had happened — all but this one had been burned entirely, which would have made Tibbers singular enough.

  More importantly, it was where Bruce woke up as if from a sleep, started issuing orders to his scowling brother, who had become used to independent command and now had to knuckle to it; he had been sent off with the other Bruce brothers to secure Ayr as a sop.

  Now Bruce was feverishly explaining to a barely comprehending John Seton that Tibbers must be held by him, for it could not easily be slighted. The faces the desperate John Seton glanced at were less than helpful — the Lindsays, Bruce’s taciturn nephew Thomas Randolph, Crawford of Ayr all presented the same stare, flat and iron as a shield. Even his own kin, Alexander and the grim Christopher Seton, seemed to grin ferally back at him, offering no help.

  He is out of his depth, Hal thought, seeing John Seton’s white face. We all are — burning out the Comyn stronghold of Dalswinton, capturing Tibbers and all the rest was simply thrashing about and achieving nothing. They could not afford to garrison other than Tibbers and had ruined the rest, which only annoyed the owners into the English camp.

  Blinded by Comyn, Hal thought and did not realize he had muttered it aloud until the silence fell and he became aware of the eyes on him.

  ‘You have something to say, my lord of Herdmanston?’

  The voice was clenched as a fist, the hood-shrouded face glowering and both were the mark of the new Bruce, emerged like a foul phoenix from the aft
ermath of Red Comyn’s murder.

  ‘You are fixed on the Comyn,’ Hal declared, realizing the mire he had walked himself into but plootering determinedly on, aware of Kirkpatrick’s burst-lip sneer at the far end of the table. ‘You are forgetting the English, who will simply come and take back everything here.’

  Bruce needed Hal, so he was prepared to be patient, aware that his two hunting hounds had finally snarled and bit one another and well aware of why.

  ‘Fhad bhitheas craobh ‘sa choill, bithidh foill ‘sna Cuiminich,’ he said with a grim smile, then translated it for those who did not have the Gaelic. ‘While in the wood there is a tree, a Comyn will deceitful be.’

  Those surrounding him chuckled dutifully and Bruce let a parchment roll snap shut with a flutter of seals.

  ‘You must never lose sight of the Comyn, my lord of Herdmanston,’ he said, still smiling. ‘They will come at you sideways, like a cock on a dungheap.’

  He saw Hal jerk at that and knew why — Kirkpatrick had shared that confidence with him, a quote from Hal’s father warning of how Buchan would strike in revenge for his wife. He heard Kirkpatrick’s crow laugh harshing into the silence that followed.

  ‘We lost sight of one Comyn, certes,’ he growled bitterly, ‘who should not have been allowed out of it.’

  Bruce spoke quickly into Hal’s rising hackles.

  ‘The Comyn will require to be rooted out,’ he said smoothly, ‘the young son of Badenoch among them, so Kirkpatrick is right enough in that. Perhaps not there and then, all the same. There was enough blood spilled to affront the Lord in that wee chapel.’

  ‘Christ be praised,’ muttered John Seton uneasily.

  ‘For ever and ever.’

  It fluttered round the room like the fledgling sparrows and Bruce stood for a moment, what could be seen of his face etched with lines. Then he shook himself like a dog.