by Robert Low
Murder, Frixco recalled vaguely. And a Scots rebel. He would hang one day or the next and it could not come soon enough for Frixco de Fiennes, set the task of caring for him. Down below he heard shouts and bellows and scowled even more deeply – he was missing the best of the night’s feast.
Leckie heard the peculiar pink-pink sound, could not place it, cocked his head and strained. Silly wee sound, he thought. Like a wee moose dancin’ in clackety shoes. Or a faerie redcap, whetting his steel claws. He crept, following the noise past the brazier, away to the dark corner of the gatehouse battlements, where he caught the gleam of metal where none should be.
His heart skipped and he moved to it, saw the hooks and blinked, stunned, barely comprehending. A wee powrie’s steel-clawed fingers, right enough, he thought, hanging off my wall. He looked at the far side, to where Aggie crooned to her bairn, wanted to call out to her to get away, and then looked back at the steel talons, heard the pink-pink as they grated, shifting slightly from side to side.
Because something – someone – was climbing up the ladder they were attached to. The realization was a dash of ice down Leckie’s back. He should have made for the alarm iron. He should have bawled his lungs raw. Instead, he went forward and peered over the edge – and came face to face with a grey-haired man with an ugly grin.
‘Boo,’ said Sim, shot out a hand, grabbed Leckie by the front of his tunic and hauled him over and away before as much as a squeak had passed the man’s lips.
A little way below and climbing steadily, Jamie and the Dog Boy saw the blurring rush, heard the dull crunch. There was a muffled curse as the men waiting to climb dealt with the shock of a man cracking his brains and bones at their feet.
‘Christ betimes,’ Jamie hissed. ‘What was that?’
‘Sim at work,’ Dog Boy answered grimly and they climbed on.
Up on the battlements, Aggie had had enough of crooning and hoping. She turned to go, paused to wave farewell to Leckie, but saw only the vague shape in the far shadows, so she shrugged and turned away heading for the stairhead; the babe wailed a little as the rain hit his wee face.
‘Hush you, hush you,’ she sang, folding him into the safe warmth of a cloak corner. ‘The Black Douglas will no’ get ye the night, wee lamb.’
‘In truth, wee lamb,’ said a voice in her ear, even as a horned, calloused hand closed off her screams, ‘your ma is almost completely mistook in that regard.’
Frixco, following Hal to the top of the wind of stair that led to the hall, paused uncertainly. Screams had never been part of a Shrove feast before. Nor the clash of steel and shouts – perhaps a fight had broken out? Frixco was anxious not to miss it and turned to scowl and urge Hal on, saw the Prisoner’s face and whirled to look behind him.
Horror shrieked up the steps at him, one eye dangling from a bloody cord, his face a mass of gore and his mouth wide, every tooth outlined in red.
‘Back,’ his brother screamed. ‘Back. Up the stairs and bar the door. The Black is here …’
Frixco, stunned as a slaughter-ox, stood open-mouthed at the bloodied vision of his brother and the men spilling after him, turning fearfully to guard his back with drawn knives. William de Fiennes, his face a raw agony, half-blind and wholly afraid, slapped his brother’s gawp from him in a fury of panic.
Behind him, Hal saw Jamie Douglas, a flash as if scrawled against the dark by a bolt of lightning and as sure to him as if seven years had not passed at all: wild black hair flying, a sword in one hand, a dirk in the other. And at his back, as strange as a two-headed calf, was another Jamie Douglas, standing fierce guard on a shivering girl with a swaddled wean in her arms.
It was only after, shoved and kicked into the chapel, with men piling up what little furniture there was against the door – all fourteen carved Stations included – that Hal realized that it had been Dog Boy he had seen.
Sim saw the men on the stairs, falling back with shields up to protect their lord; he was hurt bad was Sir William de Fiennes, for Sim had done it with a backlashed blow from a dirk and panted that out to Jamie Douglas as they crashed into the hall.
‘Poked oot his eye,’ he declared and Jamie nodded thoughtfully; both men agreed that such a wound might colour a man’s decision to resist.
They did not debate it long, for a sudden rush of new foes spilled on them and Sim crashed through a scatter of benches towards them, his breath harsh in his ears. There were men running away from him, to the back of the hall where there was no way out. On the table to his left, Red Rowan kicked through a slurry of sauce and meat and gruel, kicking trenchers like a boy jumping in puddles; he turned to grin at Sim and then seemed to be hauled backwards, though Sim knew fine well it was the force of the quarrel hitting him with a deep shunk of sound.
Sim leaped towards the man with the latchbow, who gave up feverishly attempting to span it, tried to swing it like a club, shrieking out his fear and anger. Sim’s sword blurred in the hazed candle-reek and cut into the man’s neck, so that his shouting was choked off in a gurgle; Sim kicked the body away with his boot, scooping up half a round of cheese on the way, so that it flew into the air.
‘Aaahh!’
Sim spun, blocking the snake-like blow with a frantic movement, though the stun of it almost lifted the sword out of his hand. The man who had rushed at him, yelling, was elderly, with a white beard and rheumy eyes; he jumped back and waved his weapon threateningly.
A fire iron, Sim saw. He is attacking me with a fire iron. A retired soldier, said the thought flickering through his mind as he chopped hard at the man’s knee. The man dodged; Sim felt his foot skid on a soggy trencher and then was on his arse, legs and arms flailing.
The old man screamed, wet-mouthed, and raised the fire iron high – but the point of a sword erupted out and upwards from his chest so hard and fierce that it went on into the underside of his jaw. He wailed, high and thin, falling away to reveal the grinning face of Jamie Douglas, staggering as the man’s weight dragged the sword down; he struggled to work his blade free.
‘Christ betimes, that was almost too good to waste: a brace of auld yins at it like Rolands. You will have little better entertainment at this feast.’
Sim’s mask of disgust was ignored and, grinning broadly, Jamie hauled him to his feet, put his boot against the old man’s dead neck, using the leverage to drag his sword free; the blood crept sluggishly out in a viscous tarn, lapping at the apples and plums, the buttered capons, the Shrove griddle cakes and bread spilled from the tables.
Another bloody larder for the Black, Sim thought bitterly as he heard more shouting and turned to it, aware of his weariness. He saw Dog Boy and raised his bloody blade in salute.
Dog Boy had been charged with the woman and her bairn, though he did not know why the Black set such store by it. For all that, he kept her close and grinned as friendly as he could every time he caught her eye; it did not seem to help the tremble in her.
He lost the grin in the hall, with everyone running and shouting and clashing steel. He saw a party break away and head for the stairs and a measure of safety. He saw Sim and Jamie cut down a brace of fighters and thought it was all over until a last knot of men ran at him, wailing desperately. They were led by a big man with a bald head like a flesh fencepost, so that the knob of his original chin alone showed where there had once been a neck. He had a meat cleaver and a deal of trapped-rat courage.
Dog Boy thrust the woman behind him and leaped at this fat giant, hacking overhand with his sword to make the man block with his cleaver, the dirk curving round in his other hand and sinking into the fat man’s belly. He thought he heard a scream from behind him and fought the urge to look and see if the woman and her bairn were under attack.
The fat man reeled away, clutching his belly and looking alternately at Dog Boy and the blood on his palm, a bemused disbelief in his whipped-dog eyes. Another man surged in, Dog Boy struck out and had the blow parried with a small shield – it was only later that Dog Boy saw it was a p
ot lid – the man grunting as it took the blow. Then he stabbed out with a vicious carving knife.
They are servants, Dog Boy realized suddenly, getting his sword in the way and managing to turn the blow. At his side, Patrick slapped down the knife, smashed his studded leather shoulder into the man’s pot-lid shield and sent him staggering back; a bench caught him just behind the knee and he went over with a despairing cry.
Patrick, snarling like a mad hound, lunged after him, his elbow flailing like a fiddler at a dance, the longsword rising and falling, spraying gleet and blood.
Dog Boy turned and saw the woman, clutching her wailing brat to her and staring, open-mouthed with horror. Aye weel, he thought, hearing the wet, ugly sounds of Patrick making sure his opponent was truly dead, such sights would give you pause.
‘Dinna fash,’ he panted, leaning on his sword, knowing the worst of the matter was done with. ‘The Black ordered you safe and safe you shall be.’
Patrick appeared, his bluff face speckled with blood, and offered her a grin of his own as he cleaned gore and bits of brain from his blade with the hat of the man he had killed.
‘Hot work,’ he offered, but the woman merely buried her face in her swaddled bairn and wept, so he shrugged.
‘Ach – weemin,’ he said. ‘Have you told the quine she is safe?’
‘I have,’ Dog Boy answered firmly, but frowned and added loudly: ‘So it is a puzzle why she is weepin’ so.’
The woman surfaced, tear-tracks streaking through the grime of her face and pointed a shaking hand at the quivering giant, who had dropped his meat cleaver, sunk like a stricken ox and bled to death through the fingers clutching desperately at the hole Dog Boy had put in his belly.
‘That was my da.’
Hal marvelled on that vision of the two Jamies all the rest of that night, strangely detached from the fetid sweat of fear in the chapel, where men crouched like panting beasts listening to the thud and crash on their battened door.
Sir William roared curses back at them and wheedled courage into his own before he collapsed, breathing like a mating bull; one of his men-at-arms mercifully severed the last shreds of his eyestalk and then tried to hand it to Frixco, who shied away in horror.
By morning, it was clear to everyone that Sir William was dying and that Frixco was no leader, so Hal was unsurprised when a man – the same who had physicked the eye off Sir William’s cheek – came and knelt beside him in the stale dim, where the tallow candles gasped. He announced himself as Tam Shaws, a good Scot, and said as much with an air of challenge. Hal said nothing, though he had his own ideas on what made a good Scot.
‘Is he set on red murder, or will the Black spare us?’ Shaws demanded, which was flat-out as a sword on a bench.
Hal shrugged. Truth was, he did not know. He had heard, as had everyone, of Jamie Douglas and his savagery and could only vaguely equate it with the youth he had known. But Dog Boy was with him and, for the life of him, Hal could not see Dog Boy indulging in such tales as were told, with wide-eyed, breathless horror, under every roof in the Kingdom. He said as much and saw the man-at-arm’s eyebrow lift laconically.
‘It is not your life,’ he answered dryly, which was only the truth. Hal rose up, stiff after sitting so long.
‘Is it your wish to surrender provided no harm comes?’ he asked and, after a pause and some exchanged glances – one of them with the whimpering Frixco – Shaws nodded.
‘Unbar the door,’ Hal ordered.
It came as a shock to Jamie Douglas when the clatter of moving furniture heralded something imminent, for he had not thought the defenders had that much courage in them. Still, he thought savagely, better this way – I need this place taken and swiftly.
‘Ready, lads,’ he called out, and the black-cloaked men on the stair behind and trailing into the bloody ruin of the hall, still picking wolfishly at the wreck of the feast, flexed chapped knuckles on their weapons.
Dog Boy, standing guard over the crouched woman – Christ betimes, hardly more than a girl in the pewter dawn light of the hall – saw her tremble and touched her shoulder reassuringly; she had wept most of the night and hugged her bairn to her, so that the episode of killing her da had fretted Dog Boy more than a little and he felt she should know other folk cared yet for her.
‘The Black has placed you under his cloak, yourself and bairn both,’ he reminded her and saw the wan smile.
The door above creaked open and everyone tensed, waiting for the last mad leap of the desperate. Instead, a man stepped through, nondescript in hodden, with a matted tangle of iron hair and beard. Folk squinted, not knowing who he was.
‘Young Jamie,’ the man said quietly. ‘They will surrender if you spare them. It would be sensible to consider it.’
Only Sim knew, as soon as he heard the voice, and looked up.
‘Sir Hal,’ he yelled and Jamie Douglas jerked like a stung beast. Recovering, he grinned and shook his head in awe at this, a hero sprung like a tooth sown by Cadmus – a man, he was forced to admit, whose presence in Roxburgh he had shamefully overlooked.
‘Sir Hal of Herdmanston. Here you were, a prisoner we came to free,’ he called out for the others to hear, for it did no harm to stamp your mark on the moment, ‘and here you are, having taken this wee fortalice of your ain accord.’
ISABEL
The nuns are here, the one called Sister Constance and the other, Alise. What kind of name is Alise for a nun? One for a nun who thinks herself boldinit and more mighty than the Almighty, that’s what kind. Wee Constance is kind enough in her way, though she believes what she is told, of this hoor of Babylon kept in a cage on the walls of Berwick until Hell calls her for a seat at her personal bad fire. The convent they come from is the same one where I was held for ransom by Malenfaunt long years since, but all his charges have been scourged from it – I wonder what became of the little oblate, Clothilde? She and all the rest have been replaced, Constance told me primly, by decent, Christian women. Well – all but Alise, who is a goad in the hands of one of Satan’s lesser imps. From woman sprang original sin, she tells me often, and all evil and all suffering and all impurity – with a sly little smile that tells me she does not include herself as any kin of Eve in it. Who is without sin? Even an Order Knight would need to live in a desert to obey God’s Law in this kingdom. I said as much to her at first and saw the little cat’s-arse purse she made of her lips at having been so spoken to, though she could do nothing then. Afterwards, the number of folk allowed into the bailey to gawp seemed to increase for a time, and had been encouraged to jeer until they were stopped by, of all folk, Malise, who does not like his authority over me challenged, never mind by a mere nun. Sister Alise hates being one of those given the task of sleeping across my door each night on a straw pallet, to make sure nothing ungodly happens and no visitor takes advantage. Not unless it is Malise Bellejambe, of course. What does she know of me, this Alise? What do any of them know, slobbering and laughing below me like I am some babery beast? I am Isabel MacDuff and I am loved. My Hal lives yet – I would know if he did not – and he will come. Miserere nostri. Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla. Pity us. Dreaded day when the universe will be reduced to ashes.
Amen.
CHAPTER TWO
Edinburgh Castle,
Feast of St Fergna of Iona, March 1314
They came up to the glowering rock and the black fortress on it through a haar-haze hung thick as linen, with Hal sore and tired from unaccustomed riding. They passed a huge cart tipped back and weighted so that the trace pole could support the carcass of a hog; the gory butchers paused to look and wave and call out good-natured greetings to Jamie as he passed.
‘The Good Sir James,’ Sim said, nudging his mount easily alongside Hal so that he could speak soft. ‘Darling of the host, is the Black Lord of Douglas. A derfly, ramstampit man o’ main.’
Hal met Sim’s eye, saw the mock in it and managed a smile. He saw, too, the white of Sim Craw – he had got used
to it now, though it had come as a shock, all that snow on his lintel. It had come to him, when the Dog Boy suggested he brighten himself for the arrival of the Earl of Carrick, that he himself was old – each pewter curl that fell from his clipped head, courtesy of the spared girl, Aggie, told of that. And Sim was older by only a handful and a half of years.
Since no one had had much care for the style of a prisoner, wee poor noble or not, Hal had not realized how he’d looked until sat in front of the water-waver of a bad mirror and witnessed this apparition with a greasy tangle of grey hair matting its way into a madness of bushed beard.
Only the eyes, grey-blue and blank, could be seen and when Hal looked in them he was dizzied, for it felt as if there was someone else looking back at him, as if his body had been rented like an abandoned house. When his beard vanished, the gaunt lantern-jawed man who appeared was no more familiar.
Aggie, rocking her bairn in a shawl looped across her back while she clipped, tongue between her teeth, eventually announced that she could do no more. The result, Dog Boy announced critically, was suitable and Hal, seven years removed from the gawky youth who had cared only for dogs, was astonished by this new Dog Boy, a muscled, skilled warrior and the shadow of the Black himself. He was even called Aleysandir now, a fine set-up man with a name and the style and wit to know how a wee lord from Lothian should be seen by an earl. Yet he was still Dog Boy to those who knew him well.
Hal had heard some matters of the outside world in his prison, enough to know that he had missed even more, but the arrival of the Earl of Carrick had confused him. He had been expecting the Bruce, but it was the brother who came and Hal cursed himself for a fool.
Had he not been there when the Earl of Carrick became king? Now brother Edward was Earl of Carrick – and the last of the brothers, too. The memory of the others, dead and gone in the furtherance of Robert Bruce to the throne, had soured the fête of Edward Bruce’s arrival at Roxburgh, a day after Hal’s release.