by Robert Low
Let the boy have his thatching and ditch-digging a while longer, but in the end, he would buckle to the dignity, to what it means to be heir to the Crown, or, by God’s Holy Arse, Edward would make him . . .
The truth of it was that he knew God had a Plan for him and that it was to rescue the Holy City. With the Welsh and the Scots securing his north and west, he could turn his will to Crusade; the thought drew him up into the glory of it, though the reality of God’s Paladin was not what he thought.
The assembled lords saw the unnaturally tall, slightly stooped figure, long-armed and lean, his hair, once a gold cap, now swan white and straggling out of the customary coiffure of curls round his ears, his beard curving off his chin like a silver scimitar. His eyes were pouched and violet-ringed, because his dressers had all their paste and powder arts in a lost sumpter wagon and so could not produce the illusion of his health and vigour.
Now everyone could see that the skin of his face had sunk and seemed to want to peel back over the cheekbones, while the one drooping eye gave him a sly look, as if he was about to visit some corner of Hell on them all. Which, thought De Lacy, might well be the truth.
‘You wish congress, my lords,’ Edward said flatly and his dislike of it was plain.
De Lacy cleared his throat. The Earl of Lincoln was the closest thing to a confidant Edward had, yet even he was not sure how far friendship stretched.
‘The army is starving,’ he declared. ‘Desertion is rife. The Welsh are . . . fretful.’
Someone sniggered and Edward could hardly blame him for it. Fretful was a serious understatement for what those black dwarves from the mountains had perpetrated, even on each other. For a time it had seemed as if the only battle fought on Scottish soil would be between drunken Welshmen and everyone else they staggered across. In the end, English knights had charged the worst of them down and killed eighty; now the Welsh were muttering about going over to the Scots.
Which had all been his own fault. A ship arrived and those expecting food had found its cargo to be wine. To offset the disappointment, Edward had issued it to the army, the Welsh had sucked it up and, on empty bellies, had gone fighting mad – he’d had to let Aymer de Valence lead a charge of horse to bring order back and Welshmen had been killed. Now the rest were sullen.
The Devil with them all, Edward thought savagely. Let the Welsh desert to the Scots – at least then I will know the enemy and can shove them back into Satan’s arse, where they all fell from in the first place.
First – find your enemy.
‘No news, my Earl of Lincoln?’
De Lacy heard the mocking tone, but also the underlying desperation in it. If the Scots army was not found, and quickly, they would have to leave for the south and do it all again next year. The realm of England and its king, De Lacy knew, could not afford that.
‘Sir Brian de Jay and his Templars seek them out, my lord king.’
That, at least, was a fillip for the Crown – a handful of English Templars, seeking royal favour, had come to join Longshanks using the excuse that their actions had separated the Scots rebels from the community of the Church. Handily, Bishop Bek had readily agreed – though not many had been persuaded and the Scots Templars had been even more reluctant recruits, for all that their Scottish Master, John de Sawtrey, was with the army.
It did not matter – the Templars brought a fearsome reputation far in excess of their meagre numbers and, with two Masters riding at their head, brought God Himself to the side of the English host, now slathered round the lands of the Temple Commanderie at Liston, waiting for news of the Scots.
Yet the army, expensively and painstakingly gathered, was melting as fast as the costs were mounting, Edward thought – Christ’s Wounds, he had summoned men as long ago as February, while he was still conducting a war in Flanders, and sent them north to bolster De Warenne. There had been 750 lances and 21,000 foot at Christmas – and only 5,000 by the end of March, so that the whole business had had to be done again, using Welshmen and foreigners.
He wanted it done. He had a wedding to attend and it had cost him dear – a truce with Philip of France and a sixteen-year-old bride called Marguerite. Christ, he was nearly sixty – yet she had come with the real prize, a cartload of gold and the key city of Guienne, so he could afford to ignore the sniggers. Behind his back, of course, never to his face – but he heard them, all the same,
‘I will decide on the morrow,’ Edward said, disgusted at his compromising tone, turning away before any of the lords decided – foolishly – to press the point. Back in the cool of his panoply, he slumped in a curule chair, took wine and slopped it into his mouth.
All through the rest of the day, heavy with heat, hazed with woodsmoke, leather, horse dung and shit, the army sat and muttered, or dreamed of food.
Riders came and went; the sun slithered wearily to a glorious death and insects started to sizzle and die in the sconces.
Then, like the balm of rain, riders came out of the dark, forcing slope-necked horses wearily up to the king’s tent. They were Scottish and the guards were wary but, in the end, the leaders they escorted were presented to the king’s person and stood, stained with the sweat of hard travel.
Earl Patrick of Dunbar and Gilbert D’Umfraville, Earl of Angus, were Scottish nobiles who professed to be as English as Edward himself but he looked at them balefully, since he distrusted everyone. They saw the violet cast round his eyes, the sinister droop of one lid, and did not prevaricate.
‘Thirteen miles away,’ Dunbar declared.
‘In the Wood of Callendar,’ added D’Umfraville. ‘Beside Falkirk.’
Edward permitted himself a smile. Treachery, as ever, worked its wiles and he had found Wallace.
Chapter Twelve
The woods at Callendar, near Falkirk
Feast of St Mary Magdalene, July, 1298
They were singing, which reminded Hal of the last time he had heard voices glorifying God – at Stirling, when they had been raised sweetly over the smell of churned earth, the stink of fresh blood, shite from horses and men and the high, thin acrid smell of fear.
‘Brabancons,’ muttered Sim knowingly. ‘Celebrating Mass.’
The whole English army was celebrating mass in the midst of some colourful tentage, as if there was no hurry. They had arrived like a great, slow wave that radiated power and numbers, so that Hal could see men near him shift in their saddles, looking uneasily from one to the other. Strathearn and Lennox, he saw, Mentieth and the Stewards, all trying to make their mouths summon up some spit.
There were retinues from Carrick and Comyn here, too, Hal noted – but no Earl of Buchan or any Badenoch or Bruce with them. Wallace saw the strained look on the Lothian lord’s face as he glanced at the small – God’s Hook, pathetically small – mesnie of Scots horse.
Aye, well may ye worry, young Hal, he thought bitterly. They all had good reasons for being elsewhere, none more so than Buchan, who had brought his men personally weeks ago, riding like a sack of wet grain and waspish as a damp cat.
‘I am with ye in spirit, Sir William,’ he had announced, ‘but I go to keep the north in order.’
‘Does it need so kept?’ Wallace countered and Buchan had merely smiled and flapped a dismissive hand.
‘It always needs order,’ he answered politely. ‘God keep you safe – and the English at a distance. Where are they anyway?’
‘Under the smoke they make,’ Wallace had answered laconically and had then watched Buchan ride away, looking right and left constantly. Looking for the Lothian lord, Wallace thought, So I know what business Buchan has and where. At least his quarrel with his wife and her new wee lover is a genuine, if selfish, excuse and not some callow tale like others presented to justify their absence.
But their lack had been noted by those of the nobiles who had turned up, sitting in their fine trappings on barded horses – few of them the fearsome and expensive destrier – feeling their bowels turn to water.
Nun
bitten wir den Heiligen Geist
Um den rechten Glauben allermeist
It drifted on the wind, sometimes louder, sometimes fading, but a constant reminder of what Longshanks had brought. Thirty thousand, some said he had gathered – the largest army ever seen. Not now, the sensible heads pointed out, for there is less than half of it left.
But even that was more than enough and Hal could see the nobiles knew it. Brabancons, Gascons, Welsh spears and bows, the scouts reported with assurance – and, above all, three thousand heavy horse. We have ten thousand men, Hal thought bleakly, with only five hundred of it horse and not all of that fit to match the English knights if his own men were anything to judge – twenty hard fighters on tough little garrons, with latchbows, Jeddart staffs, daggers, little axes and less armour.
Dass er uns behute an unserm Ende,
Wenn wir heimfahr’n aus diesem liende.
‘Christ, I wisht they would be doucelike,’ said a voice, thick with fear. Hal swivelled; Sir William Hay of Lochwarret, desperate to wipe his mouth and face, kept raising his hand, then remembering his steel-segmented gauntlet and letting it fall again.
‘What are they chantin’?’ demanded Ramsay of Dalhousie, his bascinet-framed face the colour of spoiled suet.
Kyrieleis!
‘I do not ken,’ Wallace answered languidly, grinning, ‘but I jalouse they are done, so it matters little.’
‘Ye mun find,’ said a gruffer voice, ‘that they are calling on the Holy Ghost to protect them. It is also the first of several verses, so they are not done with it yet.’
Hal knew the grizzled Robert de Ros of Wark by sight, though he had not known the man was any expert on the Brabancon. Wallace, however, resplendent in his Guardian’s gold jupon, blazoned with the red lion of Scotland, did not seem surprised. He had cut the tangle of his hair into a style more suited for the Guardian of Scotland and clipped his beard short and neat – but the man beneath had not been changed one whit.
‘Aye, weel,’ he said, turning from one to the other of the clustered knights, a grim, lopsided grin twisting his face. ‘It is a nice tune. I have brought you to the ring, gentilhommes. Now ye dance if ye can.’
He nodded to Hal and then jerked his head to send him and the hobilars, the light horse, far out to the right flank, into the trees to hide and watch and, hopefully, fall on the rear of English knights once they had fallen foul of the great ring of men which stood there.
Wallace watched them go. He liked the new lord of Herdmanston and wished him well – the man had uncovered the business with Bruce and the Stone with skill and stuck to his word, though Wallace did not know what to do with the knowledge of it.
On the one hand, a valuable relic of the realm had been saved. On the other, red murder had been done, by Bruce and the Comyn. If we still stand by the end of the day, he thought, I will have to think more on it.
He shifted and looked right and left at the nobiles of Scotland. Steady as an egg on a stick, he thought morosely, and those who are not thinking on how to get advantage over their immediate neighbour and enemy are wondering how to hang on to their lands and titles.
They will run, he thought.
Sim thought so, too, and said as much, though Hal tried to ignore him. It was that Sim Craw rasp, perhaps, that prompted Nebless Clemmie to force out from the ranks and alongside, turning his ruin of a face towards Hal.
It was not entirely true to call him Nebless, since he had half the proboscis left, though the wen that had caused the loss had left a disturbing hole. For all that, it was an honest face and a Herdmanston one, which was the meat of his words.
‘The lads,’ he said to Hal in his rheumy voice, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure they were still agreed, ‘wish it known that they are all proud to be at yer stirrup, my lord. Ye ken us and you are auld in the horn when it comes to red war.’
Hal blinked, a little stunned by this. Since he had been old enough to know his place, he had taken his rank as a given, however slight it may be in the eyes of greater lords. Riding a shaggy pony across to a rickle of sticks with the Herdmanston oxen in tow for some poor plough got him a knuckle on a seamed forehead from a peasant who relied for his life on the loan of the beasts.
Rattling around with the Henry and others, Hal had even abused his rank, only sometimes realising that the food and drink he and his band took from a blank-faced family was more than they could afford.
Even later, into the full of himself, there had been times when he considered that his fruitful raiding into the English Borders had been the saving of Herdmanston in lean times. Later still, of course, he had come to realise that it was his father’s constant, sure and steady stewardship which provided.
Now it was his hand. The Lord of Herdmanston – in time, he thought, I might have become the Auld Sire of Herdmanston save that a covetous king and a beautiful wummin got in the road of it and placed it all at hazard.
He shook the mordbid thoughts just as a rider came up, with men at his back; he did not need Sim’s warning growl to know who it was – the red lion shield told him and sent a block of ice into his belly.
MacDuff of Fife, Isabel’s kin, his florid face and wisped hair like autumn bracken in snow, a distant ghost of herself.
‘Herdmanston,’ MacDuff called out and Hal stopped. Behind the man was his mesnie of men-at-arms, a dozen men in maille and surcoats and lances, lacking only the slap of a sword on shoulder and a decent horse to rank them beside any knight on the field.
‘Ye impugn my honour, sirra, and I am Fife. Ye have been gallivanting with the Countess of Buchan, I hear. Bad enough that her name should be tied with The Bruce, but he at least is an earl. You are of no account at all.’
That was flat out as an unsheathed blade and Sim’s eyes narrowed.
‘Have a care . . .’ he began and Hal laid a hand on his arm to silence him. He was fighting for words and against angry ones when a shadow fell on them both, making them turn into the blazing blue of Wallace’s eyes.
‘Ye are not Fife,’ Wallace said and, though it was low and soft, everyone heard it grating across the pride of MacDuff like an edge on maille. ‘The Lord of Fife is a wee laddie, held by the English these last dozen years. Fife is now the provenance of the Crown until he is returned to it – and in the absence of a king, it is held by the Guardian. Who is me.’
He leaned forward a little and MacDuff, before he could resist, leaned back.
‘So who is Fife, my wee lord?’
There was silence and Wallace smeared a savage smile on his face and slapped his jupon. ‘It is me.’
He waved a hand behind him, never taking his eyes from MacDuff’s pallid face.
‘Down there, beyond the pows and a burn or two, is the enemy. Turn your ire on them, my lord, not yer own.’
He nodded to Hal.
‘On yer way, as commanded.’
Hal kicked Griff and moved under the scowl of MacDuff, his men trailing after him like a snow wind. It took MacDuff a yard or so before he recovered his voice and enough anger to substitute for courage, though he glared at Hal’s back first, before he dared turn it on Wallace.
‘This is what we have become then,’ he snarled, reining round. ‘Petty lords and brigands rule in these days. It will not stand, sirra. It will not stand.’
Neither will you, Wallace thought bitterly.
Hal and the hobilars rode away from it, feeling the imagined heat on their backs, past the right flank, upwards of a thousand men in a ring that was being called schiltron. It was a word from the old time and the north that meant Shield Troop, though half of the men in it would not know that and the other half would not care much: they were busy hammering stakes all round themselves, out to four or five feet distant, linking them with a tangle of ropes.
There were four such rings in a line, with at least a thousand, not more than two, in each one. In between, the tall, muscled Selkirk men waited quietly, bows still unstrung, checking arrow flights and trying to ignore
the galloping of their commander, Sir John Steward, riding up and down with instructions, exhortations, a manic energy that would not let him or his slathered horse rest.
‘They will run,’ Bangtail muttered and Hal realised he was talking of the knights, glanced back to the shift and stamp of Scotland’s finest.
No Bruces, or Balliols, or a single Comyn lord; for all they had sent men they stayed away because they would not be second to each other and certainly not to the upstart Wallace. Knighted or not, they sneered – though never to his face – he is still a brigand of little account.
At least, that would be the excuse of it, Hal thought, but the lie in it was more to do with their terror of Longshanks and what they could do to placate the beast.
They will run, Hal said to himself and the dull cold of it sifted into his belly, chill as wet rock.
The cloy of the communion wine, too sweet for Edward’s taste, made his mouth feel thick. His ribs hurt where the fool of a groom had let his own warhorse step on him the previous night – it gave the king no comfort to know that the groom was nursing his own ribs and most of his striped back.
If truth was told, Edward thought moodily to himself, his ribs only ached worse than the rest of him – sleeping like a spearman on the wet ground, wrapped in a cloak, may perform wonders for his image but it did nothing for his joints.
Stabat Mater dolorosa, iuxta crucem lacrimosa, dum pendebat Filius.
The Templars, on this day dedicated to their favourite, the Virgin Herself, were almost as ecstatic as the crazy Brabancon, Edward thought, and smiled grimly. Good – let the Mournful Mother weep at her station by the Cross if it left Sir Brian de Jay and Frere John de Sawtrey rolling-eyed with martial fervour.