The Lion Rampant (The Kingdom Series)

by Robert Low

  The last question sent Widikind reeling and he gaped, flustered and feeling his face flame.

  ‘Worse?’

  ‘Lying with men or with women? Which is worse for your Order … former Order?’

  Widikind was staggering now, unable to think clearly or protest further. He wanted to turn and go, he wanted to spit out that all monastic life was a war against passions which women were ill equipped to resist. But he was rooted and saw, with the last edge of his eyes not locked like a stoat-fixed rabbit on the lady’s face, the slight mocking sneer on the lips of the Moor.

  ‘Men,’ he managed to gasp and Doña Beatriz snapped her fingers, a sharp sound that seemed to cut the strings that fixed Widikind to her face; he half fell, and then righted himself and, appalled, straightened. He felt the sweat roll down his back and forehead.

  ‘So,’ she said, softly vicious. ‘You avoid speaking or having contact with my sex, sir, because the Rule of Benedict considers the embrace of women to be … dangerous.’

  She leaned forward, her beauty like a blade.

  ‘Yet the embrace of men is worse,’ she concluded, light as the kiss of a razor on a cheek, ‘and you are happy to consort with them freely. I do not understand this. Perhaps you can enlighten me, since I am a mere woman?’

  Widikind blinked and grew suddenly cold. This was the Eden serpent, for sure, and an added coil was the sly, sneering Moor at her back. But Widikind von Esbeck was of the Order, his grandfather had been Master in Germany and, even interdicted and abandoned by the Holy Father, he would not be afraid of evil …

  ‘As you say, lady, you are a mere woman. Filling you with such enlightenment would be like pouring fine wine into a filthy cup. A pointless waste.’

  He nodded briefly, turned on the spot and fumbled his way up the steps and on to the deck, feeling the sudden breeze like balm; behind, he heard the soft chuckle of the Moor.

  Doña Beatriz waited until his shadow was gone.

  ‘Typical,’ she murmured, ‘and revealing. There is steel in these Knights of Christ, but a waft of perfume and a girlish laugh unmans them easily enough.’

  She turned to smile at Piculph.

  ‘He imagines I am Satan’s own daughter, with a Moorish imp as a servant – did you see how he stared at you? If you had brought out a forked tail he would not have been surprised.’

  Piculph, who was a good French Christian and a serjeant in the Order of Alcántara, nodded, though his smile was a bland cabinet that hid his own secrets.

  ‘This Widikind and his so-called brethren were once Templar Knights, the wearers of white. You should be wary of thinking them the same as those grey-clad lay dogs you saw scampering away from Villasirga, señora.’

  ‘When the time comes,’ Doña Beatriz replied, ‘wile will win over weapon, Piculph.’

  She heard the drumming of feet on the deck above, felt the lurch and sow-wallow of the ship and frowned.

  ‘We are slowing. Surely these fools are not about to fight. They do not even know how many enemies lie in wait on that boat.’

  Piculph’s eyes narrowed and he folded the net of pearls neatly.

  ‘That is what I mean, señora. Fighting is what they do and they do not consider odds.’

  Herdmanston

  An hour later …

  The odds, as Y Crach had declared, loudly and with relish, were perfect… . four carts, a scatter of sumpter ponies, a milling herd of long-horned black cattle and a handful of men, half-crouched with spears waving, clustered with desperate courage in front of the wagons.

  Hwyel – the traitor, Addaf thought blackly – had agreed.

  ‘We will make them dance,’ he bawled out and Addaf saw the men who agreed, grinning and nodding between sick belches. Too many sick belches and more so than last time.

  Reluctantly, Addaf signalled for his men to dismount, the younger ones grabbing handfuls of reins and dragging the horses away as the old hands slid easily into familiar ranks and heeled their bows, running the string up to the nock in a smooth movement.

  Addaf looked at his own bowstave, the ribbon on the tip fluttering softly so that he knew the wind speed and direction. Twenty men oppose us, he thought, no more. Twenty and a handful of dogs for driving the kine – five to one he outnumbered them and one single volley would pin them to the turf.

  So why was he so fretted? Because Y Crach seemed to have taken charge of this? He eyed the black ruin of the tower, the weathered cross and the battered chapel and did not like the omen of this place at all; his men, bows smarted and drooped to the ground, waited for the command that would lift the arrow points up, draw back the braided horsehair and silk string to the ear and release an iron sleet on the enemy.

  There was a flurry from the spearmen then and heads turned from watching Addaf to anxiously scan the enemy, for everyone knew that the only hope for the rebel Scotch was to run at the archers instead of standing like a set mill. They did not want these shrieking caterans closing on them, with their rat-desperate bravery and sharpened edges.

  But there was no frantic, screaming rush. Instead, bewilderingly, the front rank seemed to have melted away, scurrying for cover behind the carts, leaving the others to face the arrows. One of them, dunted by a hurrying shoulder, tilted and fell over, the spear falling. Another leaned slowly sideways as if drunk.

  False. Addaf saw it the same time as everyone else. A front rank of men, now under cover, had hidden the truth of hastily made dummies of lashed crosspoles and twisted grass, capped with a helmet, draped with a tunic.

  False.

  Even as it rang in him like a bell, he heard the savage shrieking yell, that blood-chiller the archers knew so well.

  Then, behind them, the ground drummed with the mad gallop of garrons, every one with a nightmare of wet-mouthed savagery wielding that wicked Jeddart staff, with blade and spear and dragging hook.

  And in front, wild dags of black hair flying, bearded face twisted in a snarl of anger and utter hate, a rider swung a hooked axe in one fist, split the skull of young Daiwyn and scarcely seemed to notice.

  Addaf did not know who it was, only what it was. It was time to be somewhere else and in a running hurry.

  Irish Sea

  At the same moment …

  It is, Niall Silkie declared in a shrill yell from the nest, showing a deal of smoke from the sterncastle. And it has lost its flag for another, a red horsehoe.

  The cog was so close that Hal and everyone else could see that for themselves, peering out from behind the hastily lashed mantlets that provided cover from arrows. A thread of smoke and a red flag with a downward curve, like a droop of moustache.

  Pegy went red-faced and furious then, bawling and screaming orders that sent men lurching at ropes; the sail banged down and filled, heaving the Bon Accord ponderously forward. Others of the crew fetched out long knives and two near-identical brothers, copper-haired and wiry, sprang up to the sterncastle, one with a bow, the other with arrows.

  ‘Not a horseshoe,’ Pegy growled at the grim assembly beside him. ‘A crab.’

  He managed a mirthless smile at the anxious faces round him.

  ‘A wee jest on his name. Jack Crabbe was yin o’ Red Rover’s better captains afore the Rover embraced the Kingdom’s cause. Now Jack Crabbe’s ship, the Marrot, is a skulking moudiewart in the service of any who will pay – or more likely his own self.’

  ‘Hardly his own, I fancy,’ Rossal answered in steady, unaffected French. ‘He is not here by happenchance, flying a banner of the Order.’

  He was not, Hal thought, and the thread of smoke nagged at him while the brothers, Angus and Donald, argued about who should shoot first.

  ‘The range is too great,’ Angus declared. ‘Give it to me – I have the muscle for the work.’

  ‘You? Ye couldna hit a bull’s erse if ye clung to its tail.’

  ‘In the name o’ Christ an’ all His bliddy saints – God forgive me – will yin o’ ye shoot.’

  Pegy’s exasperated bellow m
ade everyone wince, but Donald drew back until the bow creaked protest, then almost flung the arrow from him. It splashed a score of feet short.

  ‘Ye see? Ye bummlin fruster – wait until she closes.’

  The brothers scowled at each other, but Hal had finally worked out what the smoke was and the chill of it tumbled the words from him like frost.

  ‘They will not close, nor have need to. They will fire off that engine they have up the sharp end and drop carcasses on us until we burn.’

  ‘Christ’s Blood.’

  The words were out of Rossal’s mouth before he could stop them and he crossed himself at once and fervently offered penance for his sin at the first opportunity. Kirkpatrick grunted out a laugh at Hal’s elbow.

  ‘I hope you have the chance,’ he added and then glanced at the sail and the fog bank; he noted wryly that the more wind there was shoving the ship, the more the fog bank receded in front of them. It was a grim humour folk had come to expect from Kirkpatrick, but the rasp of it was a grate on the nerves for all that.

  There was a dull thud of release, a deeper burst of smoke and a brief flowering of red. Then a tailed star shot up, trailing an arc across to them; it hit the water with a gout of sizzle and splash.

  ‘In the name of Christ,’ muttered Angus. ‘Yon’s a bad sight – but I am pleasured to see that they can shoot no better than you, brother.’

  ‘A warning,’ de Villers declared, adjusting the fold of his maille coif so that it covered all of the lower part of his face. ‘This Crabbe does not want us burned to the waterline. He knows what we carry.’

  Yet again unspoken words hung above them like a corpse from a gibbet: they had a traitor.

  Painfully, the pursuing ship overhauled them, for all Pegy’s bawling and the frantic bucket chain soaking the sail to garner more wind, for all Somhairl’s muscled skill at tillering the bulky cog to suck up the last puff.

  Another star trailed smoke out and this time the gout of steam and the splash were far closer. Hal saw Sim climb to the forecastle, stick a foot in the stirrup of the arbalest and begin to wind it; he wanted to call out for the auld fool to watch his white pow, but smiled at himself, standing half-naked and ill-armed and almost as ancient.

  ‘They want us to heave to,’ Niall bawled from his mast-nest.

  ‘Signal them to eat shite,’ Pegy howled back and men laughed, though it was mirthless and tied with tension like a harsh twist of cord. Angus did his best to obey, baring his buttocks and pretending to eat the contents, so that the men laughed, harder and more shrill.

  Hal could now see small figures on the other ship, using iron rods to carefully lift the burning ball of oil-soaked withies; it was so like the ribs of some beast that men called it a carcass. Drop it, he wished wildly; if you roll yon on your own deck there may be a chance for us this day.

  He looked at the sail and then over his shoulder; the fog bank was a cable length away and he groaned – he knew that the pursuers could not risk them escaping in the haar and that this shot would be for a hit. They were close enough that they might actually manage it, too.

  Rossal and the others knew it; knew also that the target would be the huddle of black-robed men on the sterncastle, so clearly the ones who mattered that they might as well have waved their own Beauseant banner.

  ‘Away,’ Rossal said gently. ‘If you value your lives.’

  At the same time, Pegy hammered his feet on the deck in a mad dance to signal Somhairl, bellowing at him to heel over hard to farans, to put the enemy off their aim.

  Somhairl was leaning hard on the tiller, obediently turning the heavy ship to starboard, when the world whirled from behind him and blasted him to blackness. Uncontrolled, the tiller waved and the cog floundered.

  Pegy felt it, yelled out furiously and men turned from their tasks to see, amid the sudden flutter of men spilling from the sterncastle, the slumped form of the Red Shadow; at once Donald and Angus sprang to the tiller and strained, cursing.

  ‘Dunted,’ Kirkpatrick said, kneeling by the slumped form of the big Islesman. ‘There, ahint the ear. Bigod, it is as well his braid took the brunt, else he would be standing before his Maker.’

  A blow, Hal thought, designed to kill, not just to lay the man out for a while. He and Kirkpatrick exchanged glances, each knowing the thoughts of the other at once, from long association; the traitor was here, on board. Hal’s eyes flitted from sailor to black-clad knight; de Villers met his stare and then turned away, while de Grafton laid his shoulder to the tiller and helped the straining brothers. It could have been anyone in the shadows under the sterncastle, Hal thought bitterly.

  ‘Brace,’ bawled Pegy and the threat of the carcass scorched back on them.

  Up on the forecastle, Sim had loaded and rested the arbalest on the merlon, squinting at his target. Bigod, age is a terrible thing, he thought, for I can scarce see more than a blur.

  But a blur was fine, provided he could tell man from mast. He shot and the deep whung of the release brought heads round.

  Up on the forecastle of the Marrot, Jack Crabbe’s expensively hired ingéniateur studied the roll of the wave, waiting for the second just before it started on the rise. He was a Gascon expert, was Ferenc Lop, even if shooting a mangonel from a moving ship was a new experience and he had, he was pleased to see, mastered it as he had mastered everything else to do with engines.

  His hand was up and men watched for the cutting swathe of it, the signal to release. The bird-wing whirr of the crossbow bolt took them by surprise and they recoiled from it, the one with the release rope among them. The latch clicked, the mangonel arm flung forward – just as Ferenc slammed back into it, pinned through the chest.

  The power of the muscular mangonel ripped him forward and sent him over the side in a bloody whirl of arms and legs. The carcass, balked out of the spoon, shot sideways, ploughed a burning furrow through the nearest men, spun off the castle and hissed into the sail, where it clung for a moment, before dropping to the deck and rolling a trail of sputtering fire, ponderous as a blazing snail. Flames and smoke shot up, broiled with screams.

  Over on the Bon Accord, men stared in awe as the Marrot veered, the smoke obscuring her and the flames clearly leaping up the sail. They turned to where Sim was winding the arbalest, elbows working like two mad fiddlers, and broke into howls of delight. Sim affected nonchalance, shot one more bolt into the smoke, and slithered down to the deck as the first witch-fingers of comforting haar enveloped him.

  ‘Christ betimes,’ Kirkpatrick declared, beaming, ‘as fine a shot as any by a man half your age.’

  ‘Aye, aye,’ Sim acknowledged easily, pulling out a rag to clean the steel-bowed arbalest as the crew crowded in to admire it and him. It was only later and only to Hal that he admitted he had been aiming at what he thought was Jack Crabbe – a span of hands to the left of the man he hit.

  Doña Beatriz stood, apart from the delight and shadowed by Piculph, watching Pegy and the two stupid brothers attending to the giant Islesman. She was frowning at what she had seen done to him and about the man who had done it, wondering how best to use the knowledge to her advantage.

  Herdmanston

  Two hours later …

  They came up, fox wary and stepping in crouched, swinging half-circles, arrows nocked on smarted bows, heedless of the rain and what that would do to strings.

  Addaf knew the Scotch would be gone and his lungs burned from the long run, a frantic hare-leap of panic amid the scattering of their own horses. Now, on foot, they padded back like slinking hounds, for Addaf had lost forty-five men, all the horses and a deal of dignity, which trailed in shreds behind him with the mutters of his men.

  They had recovered four horses so far and found all their missing men, though it did them little good: most were dead and at least nine had their right hand or more missing and had died of the blood loss or the horror of it happening. Taken alive, everyone saw, and badly handled.

  Five were alive, but none of them would see da
y’s end. They had used their one good hand and teeth and any thonging or laces they could find to tie off the raw stumps so that the blood did not pump out of them. But they had lost too much and Addaf ordered the bindings cut, to let them slip into the mercy of a long sleep as they lay in sluggish red tarns.

  He was aware of Y Crach as a feverish heat at one side of him, but the man – wisely for once – kept silent round him; yet, when Addaf looked, he was head to head with others, who were nodding and scowling.

  Addaf had not time for it. He knelt at Hywel’s side, seeing the grey face and the blued lips, the slantwise horror of his severed forearm.

  ‘No time, the man said,’ Hywel echoed in a soft, twisted wheeze, ‘for niceties. Like taking off our thumbs. The other one, the one called Dog Boy, said his leader would be hard. Hates archers above all his enemies, he said. Hates Welsh more than he hates English, for the Welsh should know better than to serve English Edward.’

  Hywel gripped Addaf’s arm hard with the last bloody-fingered hand he had, so that the cloth bunched between his knuckles.

  ‘Dog Boy, he said he was. Said if any of us lived we should tell the others, all the Welsh, that they are on the wrong side.’

  ‘The right side is the one that wins,’ Addaf replied, looking into the misting eyes.

  ‘The other one lashed our right hands with ropes, had a man hold us and another haul our arms out. Then he went down the line of us with his axe. Like he was coppicing …’

  ‘Who? Who did this? This Dog Boy?’

  Hywel was more out than in this world, Addaf realized, but his eyelids flickered and his voice was a last breath.

  ‘Douglas,’ he said, so slight that Addaf had to put his ear to the lips. ‘The Black himself.’

  Then, suddenly, in a clear, strong voice with laughing in it, he said: ‘We will make them dance, we will make them kick …’

  Addaf closed the eyes.

  ‘Bedd a wna bawb yn gydradd,’ he said grimly. The grave makes everyone equal.

  ISABEL

  O God, whose charity is more painful than Your harshness. In all the years since his father’s death in Greyfriars, the new lord of Badenoch has never visited, simply paid Malise his stipend for guarding me – as his Comyn father did before – on behalf of his kin, my long-dead husband. Yet, Lord, You brought Badenoch to the Hog Tower this year, accompanied by a simpering Malise, anxious for his quarterlies to be continued. A little mirror of his murdered father, this new Badenoch, freckled, red-haired and bantam. He looked round at my straw-strewn stone niche, the window that is a door and the cage beyond it. Then he looked me up and down and slowly wondered at my state and age, not having realized it before. Not quite the Hoor o’ Babylon, wee Johnnie, I told him and watched how prettily he pinked. He ordered my whim for pots and paints and women’s essentials ‘in remembrance of the man who spared me’ – but confirmed Malise in the constant caring of me. The man who spared wee Badenoch was Hal, on that day in Greyfriars when this frowning little lord was a lad, brought to say last farewells to his murdered da to find the killers returned to make sure of it. Kirkpatrick would have done for him, save for my Hal; Malise fled and young Badenoch clearly remembered it, for his look flushed Bellejambe to the roots of his pewter hair. Later, Malise took his revenge with me and, as always, lost more than he gave. I suffered his grunting, futile foulness and learned that Badenoch did not come only to see me, but to put Berwick in order; the English are coming in midsummer, to put an end to Bruce. You may dream of it, I told Malise, and, for once, he had no strength left to punish me. So a victory for endurance – let us hope, O Lord, that this is not a beguilement of empty hope for the Kingdom.