by Robert Low
Hal had wondered if Isabel had sickened; for a long time he did not even know if she still lived and had only been sure of it when the King had spoken of her. King Robert … the title was still strange to Hal.
He wondered, having recently seen the King’s face as everyone else must have seen it, if the murder to cover up whether Bruce had lepry or not had been worth seven years behind Roxburgh’s stones. He wondered it aloud now, sitting on the tarred deck under the flapping belly of the sail, staring into Kirkpatrick’s face.
There was silence for a moment, smeared with the creak of rigging and rope, the slap of wave on the cog’s hull and the dull flap of the huge square sail, puffing with weak breath, like a man dying.
‘Well,’ answered Kirkpatrick at length, ‘it seemed so at the time, with our backs to the wall and the ram at the gates. Later, when the King fell ill – near to death, in fact – the rumours grew stronger than ever. Worth it? Not for you, I am thinking, but you will have a warmer welcome at Closeburn these days.’
Hal had heard how Bruce had handed the liberated Closeburn lands to his faithful dog, Roger Kirkpatrick, so that he was now Lord Roger Kirkpatrick. Same name as the kin he had killed on that night and there was the Devil’s hand in that contrivance.
‘All I need is a knight’s dubbing, promised this very year, and I am achieved of all,’ Kirkpatrick went on proudly. ‘Nigh on twenty years’ service to the Bruce, mark you.’
‘Aye,’ Hal answered slowly. ‘You have been raised.’
Kirkpatrick fell silent, realizing how far Hal of Herdmanston had fallen and ashamed and angry at himself for letting his pride get in the way of appeasement. He smiled, trying to recover a little.
‘I will change my device,’ he said, attempting to make amends. ‘Those fat sacks on a shield are too arrogant and mercantile for my taste.’
‘Arrogant and mercantile,’ Hal repeated and found himself smiling at this new-found knightly fire from Kirkpatrick, who had the decency to flush a little and make a wry smile of his own.
‘I hear you are eyeing up a wife as well,’ Hal added and Kirkpatrick nodded, trying to make light of it, though the lady in question was an heiress with a good few acres.
‘What happened to the wummin whose man stabbed you for yer dalliance?’
The question was, as usual from Hal, a bolt that took away Kirkpatrick’s breath, though he reeled away from it and recovered quickly, the memories fleeing through him like panicked deer. He had used an old love as cover for their task and shamelessly taken advantage of her former regard. He remembered Annie and himself in the cellar before they gained entrance to Closeburn’s castle. Nicholl, her man, coming out of the dark later, weeping angry at Kirkpatrick’s ruining of his nice life and taking revenge.
He was supposed to have horses for their escape, but delivered a dagger instead; Kirkpatrick felt the burning memory of where it had gone in his back and all but crippled him. It had taken a long time to recover and he never fully had – but it had given him time to plan vengeance.
‘Fled,’ he answered thickly, though it was only half the truth and he had spent a deal of time and silver tracking them both down. ‘He could scarce remain in Closeburn with me as lord and master.’
‘And the wummin – what was her name? Annie?’ Hal queried and saw the flat stare of Kirkpatrick, so that he knew the truth of it; Annie’s man, Nicholl, had not survived Kirkpatrick’s wrath. It was the mark of the man that Hal could not be sure that Annie had, childhood sweetheart or no. Blood and blood, Hal thought, a trail of it, thick and viscous as a snail track, leading always back to Kirkpatrick.
‘For your new device,’ he said harshly, ‘you should consider a hand with a bloody dagger in it. Fitting.’
Kirkpatrick did not even blink.
‘You must take better care of that maille,’ said a voice in French, splitting the moment like a wedge in a tree; they both turned into the spade-bearded face of Rossal de Bissot.
‘The sea air will rust it unless you do,’ he went on blandly, ‘though it is good that you wear it constantly, to get used to the weight again.’
Hal, in the act of heaving it up and slithering back into its cold embrace, was less smiling about the affair, but de Bissot’s approval was genuine and his enthusiasm uplifting.
‘By the time we reach Crunia,’ he beamed, clapping Hal on his metalled shoulder, ‘you will be as before – fit to be a Poor Knight of the Order.’
‘Slight chance of that these days,’ Hal replied shortly and Rossal nodded.
‘God wills,’ he answered, and then smiled again, thinly. ‘There was a time when you were considered for such an honour,’ he went on, to Hal’s astonishment. ‘Your kinsman, Sir William, approached your father on the matter.’
‘Sir William? The Auld Templar?’
De Bissot frowned at the term, but nodded.
‘Yes, so you called him. It was shortly after the loss of your wife and child. Sir William asked to approach you and was refused, since you were sole heir to Herdmanston and your father did not want to lose you as well.’
Hal was astounded. Sir William Sientcler of Roslin, the Auld Templar, had never mentioned it, nor had his father. It could easily have been done, too, for Hal’s grief at losing his wife and young son had been great enough to have driven him to the monkish life of a Templar, while Sir William, as Gonfanonier – banner-bearer – of the Order, had the clout to arrange it.
De Bissot saw his look and his smile broadened the grey-streaked spade beard.
‘Yes. You might have been standing here with us,’ he said and Kirkpatrick shifted a little at that.
‘Kneeling,’ Kirkpatrick corrected and de Bissot turned to see de Villers and Sir William de Grafton at prayer.
‘Terce,’ Rossal said, still smiling. ‘Time is given by God and should not be wasted. I will join them.’
‘They spend a deal o’ time on their knees,’ Kirkpatrick noted sourly, watching de Bissot join his fellow knights. ‘If they had climbed up off them long enough they might still be in the Holy Land.’
‘They fight well enough when they are on two feet,’ Hal noted, remembering. ‘Callendar Woods.’
Kirkpatrick let the words drift like acrid smoke. Callendar Woods, where Wallace’s army had been helped to shattered ruin by Templars, a Christian Order fighting Christians; Kirkpatrick had not been there, but knew that the odious taint of it had stained the Order and added to its final ruin.
Yet here they were, sailing with disbanded heretics of the Templars, carrying Templar treasure to a former Templar stronghold in Spain to fetch stored Templar weapons.
It was a deal brokered on behalf of the King of Scots with the Order of Alcántara, the Spanish who had taken over the former Templar fortress; in return, Hal knew, de Bissot and the others had been given a rickle of land and a castle somewhere in the north that they might call their own, provided no mention was made of Poor Knights.
It was, to say the least, the strangest quest he had been on with Kirkpatrick and he had been on a few. A royal request, of course, which is to say only slightly less of a command than from God.
Desperate, too, Hal had realized. Bruce sends out his two faithful auld hounds because he can trust no one else to exert their utmost, in ingenuity, strength and, above all, loyalty; he felt his grin twist wryness into his face.
Loyalty. Kirkpatrick will do it for a dubbing, a blade on the shoulder that ranks him with the other nobiles of the Kingdom. I would give mine back, if it were possible, he thought, to not be here at all.
Only for Isabel. Only for her.
He and Kirkpatrick sat in silence for a while as the ship wallowed on, the crew trying to make themselves look busy so that Pegy Balgownie would not give them something worse to do in his scowling temper at the lack of wind.
‘Matins to Compline and during the night as well,’ Kirkpatrick muttered, watching the kneeling men and reluctant to let go of his Templar bone.
‘“O Lord, You will open my lips
and my mouth shall declare Your praise,”’ Hal intoned with mock piety. ‘The Order Knights have a deal of questions to ask of God, who seems to have abandoned them. Unlike the King.’
Kirkpatrick shook his head.
‘The King will not openly support the Order of Poor Knights, which no longer exists, according to the Pope. But he will not cast aside folk he owes – nor will I.’
The last was said with quiet vehemence and Hal knew why. De Bissot had once plucked Kirkpatrick from certain death and had been quietly instrumental in garnering support and information for the beleaguered Bruce, even before Hal’s capture.
And now, Hal thought, he brings even more. He met Kirkpatrick’s eyes and was sure they shared the same golden thought; snugged up in the depths of the Bon Accord’s foul swill of ballast was a nest of stout, bound boxes as full of riches as any eggs. Templar riches, plucked from the ruin of their collapse.
A stir on deck made them turn to see the other richness that nestled in the cog’s belly: a fragrant drift of periwinkle-blue dress, a lush curve of lip, two large eyes, dark as olives in a fine, breath-stopping beauty of a face. Her black hair was caught up in a net of pearls and she moved sinuously, aware that every eye was on her.
Yet Hal thought the Doña Beatriz Ruiz de Castro y Pimental’s beautiful face had a sharp look, like a razored heart. She was the one sent by the Order of Alcántara to finalize the details of this secret deal and if ever anything marked the difference between the two religious commands, it was Doña Beatriz, walking like a gliding dream, shadowed by her Moor, Piculph. The Templars did not care for Moors – and for women even less.
Kirkpatrick’s soft chuckle turned Hal’s head to where the man gazed: the supposed Benedictines, rising hastily and moving away, as politely as they could, but pointedly nevertheless.
‘If nothing else betrayed them,’ Kirkpatrick said, ‘then their Order’s disdain for weemin is as clear as a Judas kiss.’
They watched as Rossal de Bissot, braced stiffly, walked to the lady and inclined his head in a curt bow, and had it in return. Piculph, after a short pause, moved away – out of earshot, Hal thought – and the lady began to walk quietly along the deck, with Rossal falling in beside her, his every celibate step as if he walked barefoot on nails.
Hal saw that the other black-robed knights watched Piculph, while the rest of the crew moved from their path, throwing surreptitious looks at Doña Beatriz which left little to anyone’s imagination. They were a rag-bag collection of ill-favoured lumpen pirates, Hal thought, but Pegy Balgownie keeps them in line and he, according to Kirkpatrick, is to be trusted.
He had an idea what Rossal and the lady discussed, but he only knew that Doña Beatriz had come to Rossal from Villasirga in Castile, a Templar hold now handed to the new Order of Alcántara; the lady’s brother, Guillermo, was high in it, close to the Grand Master.
There was little brotherly love or fellow Christian charity here, Hal thought moodily. The Order of Alcántara needed money and was prepared to sell the former Templars their own weapons and the unlikely pairing now strolling the deck were brokering the deal.
‘“The company of women is a dangerous thing,”’ Kirkpatrick muttered, quoting from the Rules of the Order.
‘Aye,’ said a savage growl of voice, ‘the pair o’ you would know that best, for sure.’
They turned into the tinged face of Sim Craw, clutching a huge bundle to him and looking liverish. If there is one who hates the sea more than me, Hal thought, it is Sim.
‘You have ceased feeding the fish,’ Kirkpatrick responded viciously and Sim nodded, though there was no certainty in it.
‘I am fine when matters are moving,’ he answered, ‘but wallowing here is shifting my innards.’
Hal looked at the sail, filling weakly and sinking again; down at the tillers, a muscled red-head teased the cog into what wind there was while the barrel-shaped Pegy Balgownie scowled at the fog bank, swirling ahead as proof there was no wind.
‘You should set that bairn on deck,’ Kirkpatrick mocked Sim, ‘afore you lose it ower the side when you are boaking.’
‘Would make little difference,’ Sim mourned back, glancing sadly at the swaddled bundle of his arbalest. ‘Soaked or safe, the dreich will rust it.’
He paused, looked Hal up and down meaningfully.
‘And your maille, lord …’ he began, but paused, blinked a little and headed feverishly for the side of the cog, clapping a hand over his mouth.
Pegy was scarcely aware of the retching and the good-natured jeers, too busy with fretting over the lack of wind. Next to him, Somhairl bunched the muscles needed to shift the heavy tiller and grumbled, in his lilting Islesman English, about wetting the sail.
He had the right of it, for sure, Pegy thought. A good man, Somhairl, who learned his craft crewing and leading birlinn galleys for Angus Og of the Isles. Somhairl was a raiding man every bit as skilled as any old Viking and called Scáth Dearg – the Red Shadow – by those who feared to see him oaring up swift and silent, with his red hair streaming like flame.
No chance o’ that here, Pegy mourned. Scarce enough wind to shift as much as the man’s brow braids and even soaking the sail would not gain them much; they were moving, but slowly. Now would be the time, he thought bitterly, when the Red Rover would appear out of yon fog, with myself close behind, to pluck some becalmed chick.
But the pirate scourge de Longueville, better known as the Red Rover, had long since thrown in his lot and was now married into the nobiles of Scotland and calling himself Charteris. While his auld captains, Pegy thought bitterly, were left scrambling for the favour of kings. I liked life better when I was a wee raider – though he crossed himself piously for the heresy of such thinking.
As if in answer, a sepulchral voice boomed out from above.
‘Sail ho, babord quarter.’
It was not God, it was Niall Silkie high in the nest, but even as Pegy sprang for the sterncastle for a better look, he knew that the De’il’s hand was in this.
ISABEL
My God, You have chastised me by this man’s hand and I have learned submission, I swear it on Your mother’s life. I have suffered and learned about the power of the body over us and how, by way of it, the soul is branded. Grant me, O Lord, that I have learned, that I may not have to bring this branded body to You broken also, as this Malise would wish, given away by him as waste goods. Your will has compassed me round, O Lord, and closed all other ways to me.
CHAPTER FOUR
Irish Sea
Octave of St Benedict of Montecassino, March 1314
A white flag with a red cross, that was what Niall Silkie, squinting furiously, declared he could see. On his mother’s eyes he swore it. Fluttering – limply – from the topmost mast of another cog. The pegy mast, ironically, which was what John of Balgownie was ekenamed after.
‘A Templar flag?’ Kirkpatrick demanded, and the black-robed figures looked at one another and chewed their drooping moustaches. The English flew three golden pards on red, so it was not them.
Finally, de Grafton stared meaningfully at Rossal de Bissot.
‘We sent out decoy ships, Brother, did we not?’
Rossal, stroking his close-cropped chin, nodded uneasily.
‘Two from Leith and another, the Maryculter, two days before we sailed ourselves,’ he replied thoughtfully. ‘It could be the Maryculter.’ He looked at Pegy Balgownie. ‘Can you tell from here?’
‘A cog is a cog,’ Pegy said, after a pause. ‘Twenty-five guid Scots ells long, six wide, with fighting castles and a sail – they look much similar, yin to another. Nor do we fly any flag … but the captain of the Maryculter is Glymyne Ledow, as smart a sailor as ever tarred his palms on a rope. He might ken me and my Bon Accord.’
Hal did not see how, since the one that approached them was the same as the one he was on: an ugly, deep oval bowl with a pointed bow and a squared stern and two fighting castles of wood rearing at both ends. The prospect of a fight on it
did not fill him with confidence.
‘Mind ye, he would ken it as the Agnes,’ Pegy went on, peering furiously up at ropes and sails, as if to spring something to life, ‘though it is presently named Bon Accord.’
He paused and beamed at Kirkpatrick.
‘After the watchword on the night our goodly king took Aberdeen.’
‘Very apt and loyal,’ growled Kirkpatrick dryly, ‘but of little help.’
‘I named it Agnes,’ Pegy went on, almost to himself, ‘after my wife.’
He paused again, before bellowing a long string of instructions which sent men scurrying. Then he hammered a meaty fist on the sterncastle.
‘She was also a wallowing sow who could not be made to move her useless fat arse,’ he roared at the top of his voice. Someone snickered.
Rossal’s quiet, calm voice cracked in like a slap on a plank.
‘Mantlets to the babord,’ he said and the black-robed figures sprang to life. Rossal smiled, almost sadly, at Hal.
‘Assume that this is not the Maryculter and not friendly,’ he said in French. ‘Brother Widikind, please to escort the lady to the safety of below and guard her well.’
The big German Templar blinked, paused uncertainly, and nodded, the forked ends of his black beard trembling with indignation. Doña Beatriz, with a slight smile, swayed to the companionway that led below, the dark Piculph at her back.
‘That’s a tangle of “nots” ye have there, Brother,’ Sim said, unwrapping his swaddled bundle and bringing the bairn – a great steel-bowed arbalest – into the daylight. ‘I hope you are mistook.’
Unlikely, Hal thought. If Pegy Balgownie could not tell the Maryculter from any other cog, then the reverse held true – yet no ship would flaunt that Beauseant banner of the heretic Templars unless it knew at whom it was waving.