by Robert Low
There were fires and folk fought to defend the wood of their old tables, their carts and chairs. There were no horses or ponies – if there ever had been for some of them – and the meat was either carefully hidden, or bartered for other foods and fuel.
This was the price of red war, on both sides – the victorious Scots starved because the harvests rotted unreaped in the fields. The defeated English starved because the Scots harried them in the herschip, vicious raids for the plunder of food as much as riches, raids that ravaged Northumberland from Cockermouth to Newcastle.
They ravaged the lands under the sheltering bulk of Barnard Castle and, if any noted that this was Balliol’s English fortress, they stayed their lip and kept to a slaughter made bloodier still by the vengeful battle cry of ‘Berwick’.
All this barely kept the army alive, though there was little of it left; men were taking what they could and going home in the hope of feeding their own kin through the winter.
The desperate came after the army like crows round a plough, risking the danger in it for the chance of a meal. Hal watched well-armed men arrive with a cart and start doling out maslin bread, the flour mixed with sawdust, saw the snatching hands and darting feet of those clutching the prize and wary of others lurking on the fringes to take it from them.
Hal, Sim and the others from Herdmanston had been stunned to find themselves riding into the midst of the slowly disintegrating Scots army and the desperate hopeful who trailed after it like gulls following a fishing boat. It was the Dog Boy who pointed out the lack of children, which made everyone realise it and look the harder, finding none; like their parents, the children were too cold, too tired from lack of food and there was no play, only forage.
A child found gnawing the stone of the chapel at Balantrodoch was taken to the Chaplain himself, Walter de Clifton, and, before the girl died, she claimed that the walls were made of gingerbread and that she was in the Land of Cockaigne, where fences were made from sausages and grilled geese flew directly on to your tongue.
She said this, smiling through a mouth of blood, and even the stern Sir Walter felt beaten by the hopelessness of it all -though the Templar Master of Scotland himself was unmoved and more concerned about the interruption to the Order’s routine. He called himself Brother John of Sawtrey and, for all his pious devotionals, Clifton thought, was a haughty void of Christian charity.
‘Christ’s Bones, Hal, this is a poor sight,’ Sim growled, shaking his head. ‘Winter has not even bitten hard yet.’
Hal had half expected something like this and was not so surprised by it, though the bleakness wasted his heart.
He and the other Herdmanston men had quit the herschip in mid-October and gone home. Wallace had permitted it, Hal knew, because he had seen the sickness in Hal’s soul over the capture of his father, the death of Tod’s Wattie and the knight, Fitzralph – and the loss of Isabel, who had simply disappeared from view. Not even Wallace knew if she lived or died – but offered the consolation that she had last been seen in the company of a knight fleeing Stirling, which meant ransom sooner or later. No-one would pass up the cost of a Countess.
The army had wandered, seemingly aimless, with little discipline and only one purpose – to winter itself on the English. After a few weeks of mindless burning and harrying had scorched the anger out of him, Hal wanted away and Wallace agreed, his own gaunt face blazoned with eyes as haunted as a midnight graveyard.
Hal and the others had ridden home with their share of plunder, to the cold comfort and tears of those left to care for the solid square tower and barmkin of Herdmanston. Tod’s Wattie, wrapped and kisted up, had been delivered weeks before and decently buried at Saltoun, so the Herdmanston men trooped out to pay their respects and then shouldered their bags and burdens, nodded to one another and went home to their pinch-faced weans and wattle-and-daub hovels.
The Auld Templar, wasted by cold and effort to a husk of himself, rode over from Roslin because he knew the burning concern folded into Hal’s soul – knew also that the young lord blamed him for the capture of his father.
He tried to make some amends, with news he knew Hal would want and, if the truth was told, had called in favours with Templars everywhere to find it out, driven by his own sense of guilt that Hal was right, that he had asked too much of others in pursuit of his own devisings. Pride, anger and worse, he thought, while he knelt in the cold of Herdmanston’s wee church, aware of the garishly painted tree, each branch holding one depiction of the Seven Deadly Sins.
God save me, he prayed, but there was no comfort in it and less in Hal’s face when, eventually, they met in Herdmanston’s hall.
‘Taken south, I hear,’ he said into the flat, cold stare of Hal’s welcome. ‘Her and yer father both. We have Stirling Castle under siege and, with a tait of luck, it will fall sooner rather than later, which will give us Sir Marmaduke Thweng, Fitzwarin and a wheen of lesser lights to trade.’
When Hal said nothing at all, the Auld Templar bowed his head.
‘We will get the Auld Sire back, never fear, and mayhap the Countess Buchan as well – whoever holds her will demand ransom soon enough.’
Then he raised it up, for nothing could keep him staring at the floor for long.
‘Though I doubt ye will find much happiness returning her to her husband.’
Then came the litany of deaths that left Hal in the great grey emptiness that was now Herdmanston and sent the Auld Templar south on his pilgrimage to fetch the body, scourged by guilt. He stopped at Herdmanston to tell Hal what he planned and spoke only to Sim, riding away with two servants and a cart, no more than dark figures on a rimed landscape.
On that same day, of hissing wind and snow swirling into the half-frozen mud, Hal stood by the grey stone cross and watched a robin sing lustily, flaming breast puffed out as if it was spring.
Nearby, the small, half-built stone chapel that his father had petitioned the Franciscans at Saltoun to build was a rime of ice, no more than a cold catacomb for his mother’s bones and a mortuary jar with her heart. Now her husband would lie beside her and Will Elliott patiently, painstakingly, carved out the marks that Father Thomas, the Franciscan from Saltoun who had been part of the price for the chapel, had scratched as a guide on the kist.
Hic est sepultus Sir John de Sientcler, miles militis.
In time, the bones of Hal’s wife and son would be translated into the chapel. In time, he was to enlarge it for the glory of the Sientclers of Herdmanston and, in time, he would lie in it himself. Yet, for all the black dog of it, Hal could not think fully on that chill place, or the cross itself, for thinking of where Isabel was and how she fared.
Sim had no-one waiting for him, save a brace or two of women who would welcome him, and no other home but the tower at Herdmanston. He found, to his surprise, that he and the others were greeted as lions and heroes, that anyone who had fought with Wallace at Cambuskenneth was entitled to respect and a fete.
The Dog Boy found the delight of a straw mattress by a fire and two hot meals a day, mean though they were. Yet he missed Tod’s Wattie, like the nag of something valuable mislaid.
When they clacked into Balantrodoch, they found the Auld Templar standing over the kisted up remains of Hal’s father, the lid off to show his swaddled body, bared face stiff with rime, sunken and blue . . . it was so cold there had been little need of the lead lining for the box, but the Auld Templar had done it anyway and rumour had it he had stripped it from the gutters and roof of Hexham Priory.
His own face shocked all who saw it, for the death of his son, following hard on the loss of John Fenton, chewed on him, harsh as a dog’s jaw. His pale cheeks were sunk, the eyes violet rimmed and, to those who had always thought the Auld Templar indestructible, the stoop of his bony shoulders frightened them. Hal remembered him, scant few months before, charging over the bridge with his hammer swinging left and right and, for a moment, felt some of the old love he’d had for this man.
It came to Hal that, i
f he thought grief hugged Herdmanston, then it must be throttling Roslin, where a woman wept now for her dead brother, her missing husband and the husband’s dead father, while her weans stood, bewildered. The Auld Templar, Hal thought, was the mortar that kept Roslin from dissolving into tears and for all I find him guilty of driving my da to his doom, I cannot hate him entirely.
And all this to the victors.
The Auld Templar greeted Hal with a nod, was surprised at the brief, shared moment of warmth that was no longer than the beat of a bird’s wing.
‘Christ be praised,’ the Auld Templar managed to husk out.
‘For ever and ever,’ came the litanied response and men crossed themselves.
There was precious little else to be shared round at Balantrodoch – when they came out of the crowded entrance to the Temple precincts, a sullen crowd, half begging, half resentful, watched them and their horses hungrily.
‘Stay here,’ Hal said to the Bangtail Hob, looking round. ‘Sim and I will find out if there is a possibility of quarters here. If we leave our mounts they will be eaten by the time we get back.’
Bangtail nodded, looking at Ill Made Jock, the Dog Boy, Will Elliott and the handful of others who made up the party; he wished they had come properly armed.
Inside, his breath smoking in the chill stone of the place, Hal came to a halt in mid-step, so that Sim had to dance to one side to avoid walking up his heels. He glared, then saw what had stopped Hal in his tracks.
‘Herdmanston,’ said Bruce, nodding in a grim way. He looked groomed and trimmed, healthy and young in his swaddling, fur-collared cloak, his shadow Kirkpatrick behind him. There were grim, spade-bearded knights behind him, crow-black save for the white cross that marked the Order of St John and that made Hal pause.
‘You made good time, my lord,’ Hal managed, ‘seeing as how my father is not more than a five-day dead.’
Bruce grunted, his lip pensive, thought about the lie of it, then decided Hal needed better.
‘I did not come for your father,’ he declared, ‘though it is a sore loss, all the same. A good man lost – though the cause he fought for was fine.’
He cocked his head sideways a little and smiled.
‘Ye fought in it, I hear,’ he added. ‘A born rebel Scot, it appears, Sir Hal – ye even contrived to rebel against me at the time.’
‘A happy anticipation,’ Hal answered flatly, which made Bruce lose his smile.
‘As well ye won, then,’ he countered, ‘otherwise you would not be back in the fold of my care.’
Hal said nothing, aware that he was still shackled to Bruce thanks to his fealty to Roslin. For all his passion to oppose the captors of his kin, the Auld Templar was not fool enough to attach himself to Wallace, victor or not. After what had transpired, Hal thought bitterly, it is good, if a little late, that the Lord of Roslin reins in his nature.
Bruce mistook Hal’s silence for passive acquiesence to his censure, which mollified him. He smiled at Hal, nodding his head to where a familiar figure, bulked in wool, rolled through the clamouring press of begging hands, ignoring them all with a bland, fixed smile.
‘I came down from the parliament at Torphichen with John the Steward there,’ Bruce said, his face like an ice wall, ‘to tell Wallace that Moray died. Since it seems he is too busy to attend it in person.’
‘Died on St Malachy’s day,’ the Steward boomed, coming into the tail end of this; Hal saw Bruce wince and wondered at it, but only briefly. Another death – but he was now so numbed by them that the loss of Sir Andrew Moray, who had been hovering at the edge of it since the battle at Cambuskenneth, was muted.
‘It was a curse for him, if no-one else,’ the Steward said pointedly and Bruce managed a wan smile, while inwardly heaping another curse of his own on the pile dedicated to all those who offered continual, harping references to St Malachy.
‘A curse for everyone,’ Kirkpatrick muttered, ‘since it leaves Wallace as the realm’s sole hero and commander of the army.’
The Steward shot him a glower, then drew his cloak round him, shivering.
‘Just so. Now we will confirm him a sole Guardian, as we agreed at Torphichen.’
‘In the name of King John Balliol,’ Bruce added, his voice slathered with bitterness.
‘Indeed,’ the Steward replied blandly. ‘Bishop Wishart would say the same were he not fastened up in Roxburgh, prisoner of the English – which is a sore loss to the Kingdom.’
He smiled into the storm of Bruce’s face.
‘At least all the nobiles of the Kingdom are together at last. You and the Earl of Buchan, the Comyn of Badenoch and all the rest of us gentilhommes will stand side by side as we did at Torphichen’s parliament, smile and agree to it. God’s Wounds, if I can thole it, then you can as well.’
They would, since the alternative, Hal saw, was either the Red Comyn of Badenoch or The Bruce as Guardian, and neither faction would agree on that. Small wonder that the parliament had been held at Torphichen, with its preceptory to the Knights of St John a long-known sanctuary unlikely to be breached by murder. He wondered what Wallace had to say and wished he had not come here at all, plootering back into the mire of it all. At least Herdmanston had been a relief from that.
He made enough small talk to be polite then left, conscious of the gimlet eyes of Kirkpatrick following him, making the small of his back itch. Hal did not care for Kirkpatrick, thought him no better than Buchan’s man, Malise. The death of Fitzralph and Tod’s Wattie both burned and haunted him, for he knew who had done it – Christ’s Wounds, they all knew who had done it – but had no proof to offer that would bring the man to justice.
It was a day for the black dog to howl, a dreich, frozen world of misery, from the hungry suffering of the living, to the cowled loss of the dead. Loading his father on to a cart was almost an afterthought in the swirl of events, for the real business of Balentrodoch was for the great and good to agree that Wallace be made sole Guardian now that Moray had died.
It was not an easy business for anyone, especially Hal and the Herdmanston men, for the Earl of Buchan stood no more than a score of paces away with his kinsman, the little stiff-faced Red John Comyn standing in for his father, the sick Black John, Lord of Badenoch.
For all Buchan was an Earl, it was the vain little strut of Red John who mattered, since he was, after Balliol himself, invested with the main claim to the Scots throne in opposition to the Bruces.
The Buchans and Comyn glowered at Bruce and Hal alternately, while Hal and the others had to stand, ruffed as guard dogs and barely leashed, watching Buchan and the skulker at his back – Malise Bellejambe. It gave them no pleasure to see his battered, broken-nosed face, though he had the sense to stay quiet and keep it out of the line of sight of men he knew trembled on the brink of springing at him with blades.
They had come to append seals to previous agreements, now written up in crabbed writing by a slew of inky-fingered clerks. There were few surprises in the entire affair save one and it was clear that it was not a surprise to the Steward or the Bruce entourage, though it stunned everyone else, even Wallace. Numbed with a genuine grief over the death of Moray, he walked like a man underwater, saying little while argument, mostly for the sake of it and to score points one off the other, rolled over his head between Bruce and the Comyn.
In the end it came down to a half-hearted excuse by the Comyn that Wallace was not a knight, so could hardly be elected sole Guardian, commanding the gentilhommes of the community of the realm.
‘A fair point,’ the Steward admitted, stroking his neat beard, his shaved-fresh cheeks like spoiled mutton in the cold of the Temple chapel. Buchan looked at Red Comyn and they both scowled suspiciously back at the noble; they had not been expecting agreement.
‘Time he was made a knight, then,’ the Steward decreed and Bruce, on cue, stepped forward grinning, to be handed a naked sword unsheathed by Kirkpatrick in a slither of noise that made everyone give ground a little and clap hand to
hilt.
‘Kneel, William Wallace,’ Bruce commanded and the man did so, like some stunned ox about to be slaughtered. Hal saw the Comyn faces blazing with anger at having been so outflanked and upstaged – and having to swallow it until they choked.
The ceremony was over in an eyeblink. No vigil, or final blow either – even Bruce could not find it in himself to strike Wallace. Someone should, Hal thought, if only to wake the man up; he turned away, ruffled as a windblown cat by the whole affair.
He had planned on finding lodging for the night at the Temple, but that seemed unlikely and it was now late; it would be a long night’s ride back to the nearest shelter, a farmstead with a decent – and starving-empty – cruck barn on the road back to Herdmanston.
Hal was giving orders for it when the Chaplain came up, white robes bright in the twilight.
‘Sir William requested lodging for you and your party,’ he said. ‘He would deem it a considerable favour if you would stay and attend him later. Of mutual benefit, he says.’
For a moment, Hal was confused, then realised the ‘Sir William’ was Wallace. The title did not sit well even with the man himself, who was with three others in a cramped room of the guest quarters. One was Bruce, the second was the brooding Kirkpatrick and the third, Hal saw with some surprise, was the grim hack face of the Auld Templar.
‘Well,’ Wallace was saying as Hal was ushered in by a hard-faced kern, ‘ye have had your wee bit fun – now ye will have to live with it.’
Bruce flapped a dismissive hand.
‘That was Buchan and Badenoch,’ he answered curtly. ‘They will say black if I say white. I would not put much stress on what they think of your knighting.’
‘Sheep dressed as lamb,’ Wallace spat back. ‘At best. Gild it how ye will, tie what bright ribbons ye care on it – I am still the brigand Wallace, landless chiel of no account.’
He paused then and offered a lopsided grin out of the haggard of his face.
‘Save that I am king in the name and rights of John Balliol,’ he added softly. ‘And the commonality of this realm esteem me, even if the community does not.’