by Robert Low
‘Indeed,’ De Warenne agreed sternly. ‘I will have my due from you, Treasurer. Remember your place.’
Cressingham thrust his great broad face into the Earl of Surrey’s indignantly quivering beard. Sweat sheened the Treasurer’s cheeks and trembled in drips along jowls the colour of plums.
‘My place,’ he snarled, ‘is to make sure you do the king’s bidding. My place is to get this army, gathered at great expense, to do the job it is supposed to and destroy this rabble of Scots rebels. My place is to explain to the king why the Earl of Surrey seems determined not to do this without spending the entire Exchequer. If you wish to stand in my place before the king himself, my lord earl, please feel free.’
He stopped, breathing like a mating bull; the coterie waited, watching the Earl of Surrey, who closed his eyes briefly against the hot wind of Cressingham’s breathing.
He wanted to slap this fat upstart down with a cutting phrase, but he knew the Treasurer was correct; the king wanted this business done as quickly and cheaply as possible and the last thing De Warenne wanted was to have to face the towering menace of Edward Plantagenet with a monstrous bill in one hand and failure in the other. He gathered the shreds of himself and turned to the Scot.
‘As you see, Sir Richard,’ he declared, mild as milk, ‘the ink-fingered clerks will not permit delay. I am afraid your war-winning strategy will have to be foregone in favour of Cressingham’s crushing delivery.’
Then he turned to Cressingham, his poached-egg eyes wide, white brows raising, as if surprised that the scowling Treasurer was still present. He waved a languid hand.
‘You may proceed across the river.’
***
Hal stood to the left of the little pike square, the front ranks heavy with padded, studded gambesons and iron-rimmed hats, the back ones filled with bare heads and bare feet, trembling, grim men in brown and grey.
A hundred paces in front of him was a long, thin scattering of bowmen, right along the front to right and left and for all Hal knew there were some four hundred of them, it looked like a long thread of nothing at all.
There were shouts; a horseman thundered past and sprayed up clods so that everyone cursed him. He waved gaily and shouted back, but it was whipped away by the wind and he disappeared, waving his sword.
‘Bull-horned, belli-hoolin’ arse,’ Sim growled, but the rider was simply the herald for Wallace and Moray. Hal saw the cavalcade, the blue, white-crossed banners and then the great red and gold lion rampant, with Moray’s white stars on blue flapping beside it. Wallace, Hal saw, wore a knight’s harness and a jupon, red with a white lion on it. He also rode a warhorse that Hal knew well and he gaped; Sim let out a burst of laughter.
‘Holy Christ in Heaven, the Coontess has lent Wallace your big stot.’
It was Balius, sheened and arch-necked, curveting and cantering along the line of roaring squares as Wallace yelled at them. When he came level, Hal heard what he said clearly, a shifting note as the powerful figure, sword raised aloft, rode along the line, followed by a grinning Moray and the scattered band of banner-carriers.
Tailed dogs.
As a rousing speech, Hal thought, it probably fell far short of what the chroniclers wanted and they would lie about it later. Six thousand waited to be lifted and not more than a hundred would hear some rousing speech on liberty, with no time to repeat it, ad infinitum.
‘Tailed dogs’ repeated all the way along the long line did it this time: the ragged, ill-armoured horde, half of them shivering with fear and fevers, most of them bare-legged and bare-arsed because disease poured their insides down their thighs, flung their arms in the air and roared back at him.
‘Tailed dogs,’ they bellowed back with delight, the accepted way to insult an Englishman and popularly believed as God’s just punishment on that race for their part in the murder of Saint Thomas a-Becket; the Scots taunt never failed to arouse the English to red-necked rage.
Hal leaned out to look down the bristle of cheering pikes to where his father stood, leaning hip-shot on a Jeddart staff which had the engrailed blue cross fluttering from a pennon. He had his old battered shield slung half on his back, the cock rampant of the Sientclers faded and scarred on it – that device was older even than the shivering cross.
Beside him stood Tod’s Wattie, offered up as standard-bearer in a cunning ploy by Hal to get him close enough, so that he now struggled with both hands to control the great wind-whipped square of blue slashed with the white cross of St Andrew. He had that task and the surreptitious protection of the Auld Sire to handle and he did not know which one was the more troublesome.
The great cross reminded Hal of the one he wore and he looked at the two white strips, hastily tacked over his heart in the X of St Andrew. A woman with red cheeks and worn fingers had done it when he had taken Will Elliot to Isabel in the baggage camp, finding her with the woman and the Dog Boy, moving among those already sick.
‘This is Red Jeannie,’ Isabel declared and the bare-legged woman had bobbed briefly and then frowned.
‘Ye have no favour,’ she said and proceeded to tack the strips on Hal’s gambeson while he told Isabel that Will Elliot was here to guard her and the Dog Boy should the day go against them.
‘He will keep ye safe,’ he added. ‘Mind also you have that Templar flag, so wave that if it comes to the bit.’
She nodded, unable to speak, aware of the woman, tongue between her teeth, stitching with quick, expert movements while Hal looked over her head into Isabel’s eyes. She wanted to tell him how sorry she was, that it was all her fault that he was here, trapped in a battle he did not want, but the words would not come.
‘I . . .’ he said and a horn blared.
‘You had best away,’ Isabel said awkwardly and Red Jeannie finished, stuck the needle in the collar of her dress and beamed her windchaped face up into Hal’s own.
‘There, done and done,’ she said. ‘If ye see a big red-haired Selkirk man with a bow, his name is Erchie of Logy and ye mun give him this.’
She took Hal’s beard and pulled him down to her lips so hard their teeth clicked. He tasted onion and then she released him as fiercely as she had grabbed him.
‘God keep him safe,’ she added and started to cry. ‘Christ be praised.’
‘For ever and ever,’ Hal answered numbly, then felt Isabel close to him, smelled the sweat-musk of her, a scent that ripped lust and longing through him, so that he reeled with it.
‘Go with God, Hal of Herdmanston,’ she said and kissed him, full and soft on the lips. Then she stepped back and put her arm round the weeping Jeannie, leading her into the carts and sumpter wagons and the wail of women.
The kiss was with him now, so that he touched his gauntlet to his mouth.
‘Here they come again,’ Sim declared and Hal looked down the long, slope, sliced by the causeway that led to the brig. On it, small figures moved slowly, jostling forward, spilling out like water from a pipe and filtering up.
‘Same as afore,’ Sim said. ‘It seems they are awfy fond with walking back and forth across the brig.’
‘Good of them to show us the way of matters afore they did it for true,’ said a voice and they turned into the round red face of John Fenton, steward to the Auld Templar. He was nicknamed The Son Of Roslin by Hal and Sim and the others who had all gone rabbiting or hare coursing together, long days ago.
A good joke for young boys, since John’s cheeks were always fiery as the sun at summer noon; now they flared in the constriction of the bascinet helm, his dark-brown beard sticking over the lip of his maille coif like horsehair from a burst saddle.
The sight of it brought back smiling memories for Hal, of himself and John Fenton, young Henry Sientcler and his wee brother William, who had gone to the Church in England. The Sientclers, all Henrys, Johns and Williams, had rattled around the lands of Roslin and Herdmanston in company with the older Sim Craw and other lesser lights, sons of herdsman, ploughman and miller, causing mischief and bei
ng young. Hal grinned at the memory.
‘How’s your sister?’ Sim asked and John nodded his thanks for the inquiry.
‘Bearing up,’ he said. ‘The children keep her busy – Margaret is a handful.’
Fenton’s sister, Alice, was married to the imprisoned Henry Sientcler. She would be sitting close to tears in Roslin, Hal knew, trying to find soothing explanations for a toddling girl and two boys – John and William. Christ’s Wounds, Hal thought – John, William and Henry, do we have nae better names to pick for Sientclers? What was the collective for Sientclers, he wondered? A gaggle? A clutch? A brooding?
John Fenton looked up at the sky, squinting, then smiled.
‘Nice weather for it,’ he said. ‘A wee bit rain earlier to add damp and make it hard going for men on heavy horse, dry enough for foot to skip when it comes to it.’
‘Are we skippin’ then, young John Fenton?’ Sim asked laconically.
‘In a whiley, Sim Craw,’ John Fenton answered mildly. ‘You’ll hear a horn blaw when my Lord Moray decides enough English have been served up for breakfast. Then we will fall on them, like the wolf on the fold.’
‘Christ betimes,’ Sim declared with a lopsided grin, ‘ye have become a fair battler since the days when Fat Davey used to wrestle ye into the mud.’
There was a moment of shared memories, of the reeve’s great bully of a son, bigger even than Sim, who had terrorised them for years until, under Hal and Henry Sientcler, the other lads had joined forces and jumped him. They had tied him to a tree in the bull’s field, with a long red streamer of cloth whipping in the wind and, when his furious father had finally released him, Fat Davey the Reeve’s Boy was a wiser shadow of himself.
John Fenton took a breath or two, slapped the bascinet harder on his head and looked from Hal to Sim and back.
‘Fat Davey,’ he said with a grin, ‘is a score of paces from ye, grippin’ a bull’s horn and waiting on me to tell him when to blaw.’
Then was gone from them, shouting.
Chapter Seven
Cambuskenneth Brig, Stirling
Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity – August 11, 1297
This was no place for a bowman, and Addaf, jostled and elbowed, was not the only one to think it. As he cradled the bow-bag to his front, protecting the fletches and shafts from the crush as if it was a babbie, he heard other voices curse in Welsh.
‘Make room for us,’ Heydin Captain bawled, red-faced. ‘Make room.’
There was no room; the horse had crossed and the foot after that, but the line of enemy was a distant raggle of spearpoints – about ten times our killing range, Addaf thought, measuring it with one closed eye as they staggered in the press.
The horse was closer, waiting impatiently for the crush of foot to sort themselves out from a mass of iron-rimmed hats and skull caps, spears, round shields, bucklers – not one of them, Addaf thought to himself, is armed the same as the next. Only the Welsh, he corrected, as a knot of them panted past in padded jacks, their spears and shields ready and the trailing red and green braid round their kettle helmets marking who they were.
He saw the last of them run off the bridge, lumbering like upright bears.
Far away, a horn blared.
Malise came up the causeway from Cambuskenneth at a fast lick on the horse, fearful that the Lothian men were hunkered and hidden, even though he had risked this throw of the dice by betting on all of them not wanting to miss the fight.
It had come as a shock to find the Abbey surrounded by hidden men – the thought that he had ridden so close to the likes of Tod’s Wattie made his hole pucker enough to shift him in the saddle.
Having arrived, he found himself no closer to the Savoyard Bisset had told him of – the stone carver had panicked at having an enemy so close and had sneaked off. How he had got out was a mystery to Malise but, he thought savagely, it left me the one seeking sanctuary.
On his right, the Abbey Craig loomed like a hunchback’s shoulder. Malise glanced to his left, seeing the banners and pennons waving, the fat white flags with red crosses snapping in the breeze, the St Andrew’s cross flags whipped steadily in answer. No sign of hunting men . . .
Let them fight, Malise sneered to himself. If things contrived out the way he had planned it, he would skirt the left of Wallace’s rebels and come up into the camp. There he would find the Countess – at last – and remove her. There, too, he might find the Savoyard, or a clue as to why the Lothian lord Hal hunted him and, more importantly, for whom he did so; there was Bruce in it, Malise was sure of it and he wanted to take the certainty of it to his master, the Earl of Buchan.
The horse skidded on the muddy road almost pitching him off and he cursed, steadied and slowed a little – no sense in panicking now. Careful and steady . . . Far away, a horn blared.
Almost in his ear, it seemed, a horn blared. Here we go, God save us. Hal heard someone yell it and then the whole line of hedgepig squares surged forward, like stones dropping from a castle wall. As if he was tethered like a goat, Hal felt himself move too, half stumbling over the tussocked, boggy ground, while the great murmuring beast-growl began, low and rising, to hackle his neck.
‘They are coming,’ shouted a voice, high and thin with disbelief and Thweng turned to where the man was pointing. Dear God preserve us, he thought bleakly, Moray has gulled us after all.
‘Whoever heard of foot attacking horse?’ demanded a voice and Thweng turned into the astonished gaze of the Wise Angel who had craved to be at his side. The dark little imps of the Welsh for one, he wanted to say, and those Englishmen who had been in those wars would know that – but few of them were here.
He said nothing, for it made no difference – if the Scots kept going they would roll down and trap the Fore Battle in the loop of the river. Water on three sides, no room to form anything coherent, no way back save across the brig, two at a time. Only one way out and that was ahead, into the shrike’s nest of points.
‘Cressingham,’ he bawled and the fat Treasurer saw it, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly, the growl and roar and wind whipping the words away.
‘. . . charge them, my lord. Charge.’
Thweng saw the Treasurer’s sword come up and the Van knights stirred like a pack on the scent. The sword came down and the horse moved out at a walk, growing faster with each pace.
There was no other way to buy time for the foot, especially the archers, Thweng saw. All of them Welsh – the irony was not lost on him and he wondered, briefly, if the likes of Addaf would stand and fight.
He slipped into the great cave of his helmet and adjusted his shield, then moved out after Cressingham, hearing the sudden rise of song, high and firm. Young Angel voices, their sweetness not yet muffled by the steel of their great helms.
Foolish men, buried in evil, listen.
The Almighty shines all His power of joyous faith into your hearts,
May not the serpent drive you back to former perdition.
Our best and true Redeemer will restore you to His kingdom
And his wise angels will conquer by the sign of the Cross.
They were singing. Hal could hear it faintly as he loped past the archers, who were lobbing high, ragged shots into the mass of men crushed between the shining snake coils of the river. The Selkirk men were snatching up what shafts remained in front of them, for they heard the singing too, saw the movement of horse towards them and wanted away from it, back to safety behind the relentless boulder-grind of pike squares.
The slow, rolling roar of those squares drowned out the voices of angels. It swelled, red and angry, bloated with fear and fury, almost in pace with the approaching horses, now into a flogged trot, until it vomited out in a great, throat-ripping scream as the pikes stopped raggedly and braced.
The front ranks dropped their chests on to the left knee, supporting the pike, right leg trailing. The men behind raised their long pike spears over their heads and heeled the butt of the front
man’s pike into the soft ground with the stamp of a left foot, then leaned their weight to keep it fixed. The men behind them thrust long shafts between heads, resting them on shoulders in front of them when the weight became top heavy, butting the shafts into their own cloak-padded shoulders against the expected impact.
Breathing hard, sweating like bulls, roaring like wet-mouthed beasts, they stood in their own stink and fear, close as lovers, waiting for the curling wave of spurred horse to fall on them.
Time flowed, thick and golden as honey. Sheltered in the rear of his father’s pike square, Hal saw the horses, each barded, snorting, mad-eyed beast, the waving lances, the bouncing shields – white swans, red boars, chequered, ermined. The breath crawled in and out his nose, his palms itched and his groin felt drawn in, tight and hard; he wanted to run, to piss, to scream. It did not seem possible to resist . . .
They struck, with a crashing splinter like falling trees, and time howled back. Horses shrieked and flailed and reared, yellow teeth gnashing, necks snaking this way and that. Men screamed and stabbed, fell into the grinding, mud-splattering whirl of hooves and metal to be chewed and pounded.
Hal heard someone yelling meaningless sounds, discovered it was his own voice and started to move, crabbing into the maelstrom whirl that had the hedged knot of pikes at the centre of it, looking for the fallen and the dazed. A figure crawled, shoving and pushing out from under the dead weight of his horse, barded in thick padding and leather studded with bronze rings. He wore maille and a surcoat of the same leather and bronze, emblazoned with a blue lion on a yellow shield. He saw Hal and staggered weakly upright, holding out his hands to yield.
Knights did not die in tourney melee. Knights lost, were unhorsed and taken as ransom. Even in battles, only the ill-armed scum died. The slash of Hal’s sword brought reality slicing in on the knight, a cut that spilled the fine wool padding from his cuisses and the blood from the thigh beneath it. He had time to feel the pain and shock of it, then the point of Hal’s sword, growing as large as the whole world, came in through the slit of his helmet and stole his life.