Kingdom 01 - The Lion Wakes

by Robert Low

  Out on the road to Cambuskenneth’s Abbey, far enough from Craig for the fires there to be pale flowers in the dark, Bangtail Hob wrapped himself tighter in his cloak and brooded, half-dreaming of Jeannie the miller’s daughter, who could get you cross-eyed with just hands and lips. It was a fair trod to get to her at Whitekirk, but worth the shoeleather . . . he heard the hooves on the road and raised his head above the tussocks he hid behind.

  The wind sighed, damp off the carse, and the loop of wide river was a black shining ribbon in the last light. The rider, hunched on the back of a plodding mount, was a silhouette heading down to the great campanile tower which marked where the abbey stood.

  Since the only road led down from under the Abbey Craig, it meant the visitor had come either from the Scots camp, or across the brig, up the causeway and along under the Abbey Craig. There had been a few desperate refugees earlier, all handcarts and hurry, but none for some time.

  Bangtail watched the rider vanish towards it, then settled back into his half-dream. Stop folk getting out of the Abbey, he had been told – so anyone coming in was not a problem. He glanced up to the distant balefire lights of Stirling’s hourds, then across the stretch of dark to the flowered blossom of fires on the hill and wondered what it might be like to be there, waiting on the morrow.

  He was certain Sir Hal knew what he was about, trying to avoid the great scourge of soldiery coming up on Stirling, full of vengeance against all matters Scots. Heading for the rebel camp was dancing along a thin edge, all the same – on the one hand, Hal would be seen as a Bruce man and so on the English side. On the other, he had the Countess of Buchan with him and she was the wife of the Earl who, if not actively supporting Wallace and Moray, had contrived to turn a blind eye to their doings, permitting them to unite here.

  There were other reasons, Bangtal Hob was sure – or else why would he be sitting here, making sure no wee stone carver crept out of Cambuskenneth in the dark? Yet he did not fully understand them – nor needed to. He had been told what to do and he settled to it, huddling into his cloak against the chill.

  Up on the crag, Dog Boy sat in the lee of the striped tent, watching the nearby fires and, beyond that, the little red eyes, like weasels in a wood, that marked where the English walked the walls of Stirling Castle.

  He sat listening to the nearby men chaffering each other, arguing about this and that, fixing leather straps, honing the points of the great long spears. He had been watching the spearmen, fascinated, for days; they were being drilled in how to work together, hundreds and more in a block. Level pikes. Ground pikes. Support pikes. Butt pikes. Charge pikes. The Dog Boy had watched them stagger round, clashing into each other, cursing and spitting and tangling up.

  Some, he saw, were more advanced than others – the men of Moray’s army – and these were a joy, moving and turning like a clever toy. Wallace’s kerns did not like the work, but were whipped to it by the lash of his great booming voice and the expert eye of Moray’s commanders.

  Hal sat nearby and watched the Dog Boy watching the flames of cookfires flatten and flicker in the wind up on Abbey Craig. He was waiting to speak to Wallace and curiosity -Christ, now there was a curse on him – had driven him within earshot of the tent, where he could hear the arrived lords try to persuade Wallace and Moray to give in.

  ‘So you stand with the English,’ Wallace said and Hal heard Lennox and John the Steward splutter their denials through the canvas.

  ‘So you stand with us.’

  This time there as silence and then Moray’s bland, calming voice broke a silence so uncomfortable Hal could feel it from where he sat.

  ‘You have our thanks, my lords,’ he said in French. ‘Take to Surrey our fervent wish that he withdraws from here and the realm.’

  ‘Surrey is not the power here,’ John the Steward answered, ‘Cressingham will lead the army in the morning.’

  Wallace’s laugh was a bitter bark.

  ‘He is no leader of men. He is a scrievin’ wee scribbler, who would skin a louse for the profit of the hide,’ he growled. ‘Tell him that, if ye like – but mark me, nobiles, there will be no repeat of Irvine here.’

  ‘Those negotiations held the English there. Bought you the time for all this,’ Lennox answered sullenly in French, and Hal heard Wallace clear his throat, could almost see the scowl as he made it plain he wanted no more French here, which he could understand much less than English. Quietly, Moray translated.

  ‘You bought your lands back,’ Wallace answered bluntly. ‘With a liar’s kiss and betrayals. Soon, my lords, you will have to choose – tak’ tent with this; those come last to the feast get the trencher only.’

  ‘We will not fight with ye, Wallace,’ the Steward said defiantly, preferring to irgnore the insults. ‘It is the belief of the community of the realm that a peaceful settlement is by far the best, no matter the considerations.’

  ‘That will never be from my hand,’ Wallace answered, bland as mushed meal and speaking in carefully modulated English. ‘I wish you well of your own capitulation. May your chains sit lightly on you, my lords, as you kneel to lick the hand. And may posterity forget you once claimed our kinship.’

  There was silence, thick as gruel, then a voice thicker still with anger; the Steward, Hal recognised, barely leashed.

  ‘You have nothin’ to lose, Wallace, so casting the dice is hardly risk from your cup.’

  ‘And from mine?’ Moray asked lightly. There was silence.

  ‘We will not stand against ye,’ Lennox persisted.

  ‘So declared another of your brood, Sir Richard Lundie, afore he leaped the fence to the English,’ Wallace answered, his voice bitter. ‘He now thinks Edward is the braw lad to put this realm in order and has joined them to fight us. That is what came of your antics at Irvine. If you fine folk persist in grovelling, there will be a wheen more like him.’

  ‘By God, I’ll not be lectured by the likes of you,’ the Steward thundered. ‘You’re a come-lately man, a landless jurrocks with a strong arm and no idea of what to do with it until your betters tell ye . . .’

  ‘Enough.’

  Moray’s voice was a harsh blade and the silence fell so suddenly that Hal could hear the ragged bull-breathing through the canvas.

  ‘Go back and tell the Earl of Surrey, Cressingham and all the rest that we await their pleasure, my lords,’ Moray added, gentle and grim. ‘If he wishes us gone from here, let him extend himself and make it so.’

  Movement and rustle told Hal that Lennox and the Steward had gone. There was silence, then Wallace rumbled the rheum out of his throat.

  ‘Ye see how it is?’ he declared bitterly. ‘Apart from yourself, the community of the realm spits on me. We can never mak’ Wishart’s plans work if there is only us pushin the plough of it.’

  ‘Never fash,’ Moray said. ‘For all they think it, it is not the community of the realm who fight here the morn. It is the commonality of the realm and you are their man. Besides – the nobiles of this kingdom follow us because neither the Bruce nor the Comyn can walk in the same plough trace. In the end all we have is a king, for Longshanks has broken Scotland’s Seal, stolen the Rood and purloined the very Stone of kings. There is no-one else to dig the furrow, so we must.’

  The Dog Boy had only half-heard this, understanding little, watching the feet come and go. He was an expert on feet, since it was usually what he saw first from the rabbit crouch he always adopted, halfway between flight and covert.

  He saw the horn-nailed bare feet of men from north of The Mounth, who scorned shoes for the most part save for clogs or pattens in the deep winter. These were the wild-haired men with wicked knifes and round shields and long-handled axes, who spoke either a language the Dog Boy did not understand at all, or one which he recognised only vaguely. They sibilated in soft, sing-song tones and made wild music to dance to.

  There were turnshoes and half-boots, ragged and flapping some of them, belonging to men from Kyle and Fife and the March. These we
re the burghers and free men, ones who could afford iron hats and fat-padded jacks with studs, the ones who carried the long spear, the pike, in the marching formations which so fascinated the Dog Boy. Schiltron. It was a new word, to everyone else as much as the Dog Boy; he rolled it round his mouth like a pebble against thirst.

  The men from Ayrshire and those from Fife contrived to sneer at each other for their strange way of speaking – and both walked soft around the men from the north. Yet they were here, all facing the same direction, and the Dog Boy was aware, as if he had lain back in grass and started to look clearly at clouds, of the vastness of that revelation.

  They were here because, for all they might dislike each other and the men from north of The Mounth look on the likes of Bruce and Moray and Comyn as incomers, the one thing they hated more was the idea of being ruled by invaders from the English south.

  The Dog Boy had also seen the fine leather boots, or the maille chausse with leather sole that marked a knight or man-at-arms, but there were precious few of those iron leggings. He had thought of Jamie Douglas then and had asked round the campfires until he had found men from Lanark, one of whom knew the tale of it.

  ‘Away to France,’ he told the Dog Boy in the guttering red light. ‘Away to safety with Bishop Lamberton, since his da is taken off in chains.’

  The man who told the Dog Boy looked at the boy’s pinched, sunken-eyed face as he added that Jamie’s da was unlikely to be seen again, carried off to the Tower from his cell in Berwick, where he raved, ranted and finally annoyed his gaolers once too often. Beatings, he had heard, and worse. The Hardy would not be back in a hurry, his woman and Jamie’s siblings were living with her relations, the Ferrers, somewhere in England – and Douglas was now an English castle.

  The Dog Boy had wandered in a daze back to the lee of the striped tent where Hal found him. Douglas held by the Invaders. Jamie in France. The Dog Boy only had a vague idea that France was somewhere south of England, which was south of Berwick; it seemed a long way off, even if the high and mighty spoke the language of the place to one another and there was actually a man from France here, on Abbey Craig.

  In the middle of the flickering fires, like roses in the dark, the men huddled close and the Dog Boy felt utterly alone, felt the great, black brooding of the surrounding trees, sighing and creaking in the dark.

  Jamie, Douglas Castle – everything he had known was gone, even the Lothian lord’s fine dogs. Now most the few men he knew – Tod’s Wattie and Bangtail and the others – were far across the night and the swooping loops of the river, down where the faint pricking lights marked Cambuskenneth Abbey. He was glad that Sim and the Lord Hal were close.

  ‘Get yourself to Sim,’ Hal said to the huddled Dog Boy, the tail-down hunch of him wrenching his heart. ‘He is by a fire with something in a pot.’

  The Dog Boy went into the night. Hal heard the tent rustle again as Moray left it and then Wallace’s bass rumble slipped through the canvas.

  ‘Ye can stop skulking at the eaves, Hal Sientcler, and come and tell me about a stonecarver.’

  Wearily, Hal levered himself up and went in to where the air reeked of stale sweat and wet wool. Wallace lay slumped in a curule chair, the hand-and-a-half no more than a forearm length from his right hand. He listened as Hal told him about the Savoyard stonecarver.

  ‘Forty days, is it? We never have forty days, Hal. We have the night and the morn and, God willing, if battle be joined as we wish it, the morn’s morn.’

  Hal shifted slightly and inwardly cursed the great giant lolled opposite. He wore better clothes these days – even hose and shoes, as befitting one of the saviours of the realm – but it was still the same brigand Wallace.

  ‘I can hardly assault Cambuskenneth,’ Hal declared. ‘The man has sanctuary for forty days. He has thirty-seven of them left. He cannot get out without being seen, for I have posted men to watch every way away from the place.’

  Wallace heaved a sigh and shook his shaggy head.

  ‘The army had been here a week waiting for the English to relieve out threat against Stirling. I cannot believe the man was under my nose for that time,’ he said and then grinned ruefully. ‘Ye did good in tracking him, more praise to ye for that.’

  Hal did not feel comforted; it had not exactly been difficult to work out that Manon de Faucigny would head for the abbey at Stirling – Cambuskenneth was perfect for a man of some quality, with skills and tools specific to kirk stonecarving and the history of having worked at Scone.

  Since he was a Savoyard, it was not hard to find out that he was in residence – but the questioning had revealed their presence and the abbot, initially smiling and helpful, returned grim-faced to tell Hal that the man they sought was now in sanctuary. In forty days, he would have to leave, until then he was inviolate. He did not want to see or be seen by Hal or anyone else.

  ‘Well,’ Wallace answered. ‘After the morn, all matters will be resolved, win or lose. The abbey included.’

  Hal did not doubt it; here was a man who had sacked Scone, who had burned Bishop Wishart’s house – in a fit of temper some said, after hearing that his mentor had given in at Irvine. The likes of an abbey was no trouble to the conscience of a man like that, yet Hal did not like the idea of sacking it and said so.

  ‘A wee bit too much brigand for ye, Sir Hal?’ said Wallace, his sneer bitter and curled.

  ‘Did clerics do ye harm afore?’ Hal countered, stung to daring. ‘When ye were up for the priesthood?’

  Wallace stirred from his scowling and grinned, slack with weariness.

  ‘No, no – I was a bad cleric always – though a good man, John Blair, tried to put me on the path. But my wayward young nature had mair affinity with Mattie.’

  He glanced up and smiled wryly.

  ‘Son of my uncle, who was a priest,’ he added. ‘Like all such, he was neither sheep nor wolf and suffered because of it. Wanting no part of priesthood and yet stepping into the robes, like myself. What dutiful sons we were – I am sometimes sure that bairns weep at birth because they know the estate they are born into.’

  Hal recalled the few priests sons he had known, pinch-faced boys living in a nether world where they were unacknowledged and yet given the advantages of rank as if they had been. Even Bishop Wishart had sons, though no-one called them anything other than ‘nephews’.

  ‘Mattie,’ Wallace went on, dreamy-voiced with remembering, ‘showed me the way of survival as an outlaw, mind you, so the life clerical was not all wasted time.’

  Hal had heard vague tales of the wayward Wallace, of the robbing of a woman in Perth. He mentioned it, quivering on the edge of fleeing at the first sight of black on the Wallace brow.

  ‘She was a hoor,’ Wallace admitted ruefully. ‘She robbed us – but it did not look good, a fully fledged cleric regular and a wee initiate boy visiting her in the first place. So we took what we could and ran. Not fast enow, mind – but since Mattie was a priest and I was so young, they let us off.’

  ‘Is that why ye gave Heselrig a dunt, then?’ Hal asked. ‘I had heard it was because of a wummin.’

  ‘I have heard this,’ Wallace answered slowly. ‘No wummin and no petty revenge for an assize that freed us. I went after Heselrig because he went after me – I had a stushie with a lad who fancied I had no right to wear a dagger and made his mind up to remove it.’

  He paused and shook his head – in genuine sorrow, Hal saw.

  ‘I was a rantin’ lad then, a hoorin’ brawler in clericals and aware that the cloots did not fit me. I did not want the Church, Sir Hal, nor did it care much for me – but there was little other course open for a wee least son of a wee least landholder.’

  He paused, frowning and pained.

  ‘I did no honour to my father with such behaviour and am not proud o’ it.’

  ‘What happened?’ Hal asked. ‘With the lad ye argued with?’

  Wallace glanced up from under lowered brows, then stared back at the scarred planks of the floo
r.

  ‘He was a squire to some serjeant in Heselrigg’s mesnie, who contrived the quarrel in order to put down a wee strutting cock of a Scottish lay priest.’

  He stirred at the memories of it, hunched into himself like a great bear.

  ‘It should have been a matter for knuckles and boots, no more,’ he went on bleakly. ‘Yet there was a dirk involved in the quarrel and, in the end, I gave it to him – though it did him little good, since it was buried in his paunch. He did not deserve such a fate and the Sheriff of Lanark agreed. No matter my guilt – aye and shame over the affair – I was not about to stand around like a set mill and be assized for it. So matters took their course.’

  He was silent for a time, then shook his head and stirred.

  ‘Such tales do not endear me to the nobiles, he noted grimly. ‘They have no use for a wee outlaw, a landless apostate clerical of the Wallaces.’

  ‘Hardly wee,’ Hal returned wryly. ‘Betimes – ye have a wealth of brothers and cousins, it appears.’

  ‘Peculiarly,’ Wallace said bitterly, ‘this is timely with my elevation to the status of Roland and Achilles. I could not beg a meal at Riccarton, Tarbolton or any other Wallace house afore now. Only Tam Halliday in Corehead ever gave me room and board and he was kin only by being married on to my sister.’

  He yawned and his eyes half-closed, so that Hal saw the weariness slide into the etched face of the man. Tomorrow, this giant would take the weight of the kingdom on his broad shoulders and lead Scotland’s army against their enemy.

  Tomorrow, I will be gone from here, Hal thought. I can leave the Countess here and say I delivered her as far as safety allowed – which was no lie, he tried to convince himself. If I had taken her to the English in Stirling, only to find her husband was now actively a rebel, I would have delivered her into the hands of his enemies. Taking her to the rebels on Abbey Craig, on the other hand, placed her in hands which, at least, would not use her as ransom. Yet.