by Robert Low
‘May the Lord bliss and keep me, the truth it is I am telling you here. The wee reeve said it was a crockard. Rang hollow, he said. Well, it was fine when I ate it, but it comes as no surprise to me that my ma’s physick ruined it. It would strip the shine from anythin’, that brew.’
‘At least they ne’er burned her as a witch,’ Sweetmilk said, ‘if her brew was so bad.’
He jerked his head up, realizing what he had said and suddenly worried that he might have stumbled into a mire. Parcy let him dangle for a long moment, and then shook his head; Sweetmilk’s obvious relief made everyone laugh.
‘Not for the want of folk trying, mark ye,’ Parcy went on. ‘Cost an Inquisitor dear.’
‘You nor your ma never saw such,’ scoffed Geordie, which was as good as a waved rag to a bull.
‘He came to our vill,’ Parcy insisted indignantly, ‘a wheen of years back, when such black crows were permitted into the Lowlands to seek out the heresies of the Temple. The folk came out shouting that my ma was a witch and should be burned. Burn her, burn her, they were yellin’, and demanded the good Brother Inquisitor put her to the test.’
He paused and the wind flared up sparks, as if it was part of the story.
‘The Inquisitor, who was interested only in the foulness of Poor Knights, was weary of a deal of the same. Scotland, he had discovered, was full of kindly, helpful folk who seemed determined to broil and roast their neighbours. “What makes you think she is a witch?” he demanded and they told him she stank of old sulphur when she farted. “Burn her. Burn the witch.”
‘“So do I,” the Inquisitor admitted. “She has a third nipple,” they told him and demanded that he burn the witch. He frowned. “I have a wart which might be mistaken for the same,” he sighed back at them.
‘“She takes the Lord’s name in vain,” they flung at him. “She must be burned. Burn the witch.” The Inquisitor, who had had enough of this, flung down his scrip of blessed relics in disgust. “I have also taken the Lord’s name in vain,” he announced. “Particularly when faced with the likes of folk such as yourselves.”’
Parcy stopped and shook his head in mock sorrow.
‘Well, he thought he had brought sense to them, for they stopped and muttered among themselves for a minute or two, then raised their heads and untied my ma. “Forget the auld wummin,” they said, looking at him with flames in their eyes. “Burn the witch.”’
There were dry chuckles, but mostly silence as folk marvelled at the tale.
‘What happened to your ma?’ demanded Yabbing Andra into the headshaking admiration. ‘Did her neebors burn her as well as that Inqueesitor?’
‘For certes not,’ Parcy said without hesitation. ‘They let her go and concentrated on the unhappy black priest – so she went back to our house and turned them all into toads, first chance she had. That vill is now empty save for her and some hopping croakers and their gener. None will visit it, not even myself.’
‘Bigod,’ Patrick declared, ‘the Auld Carl himself never told such fibs. I am not surprised your ma made brews to make ye boak, if you kept telling her tales like that.’
‘I had a physick once,’ Yabbing Andra began and people groaned. Dog Boy got up and moved away, feeling strange, at once part of them and not part of them. Perhaps it was their talk of mothers. Perhaps it was the new livery he wore, a smart jupon that was still fresh enough to be clean, fixed with the badge of a royal houndsman.
He had taken it from the hands of Bernard the Chancellor, whom he’d been advised to see as soon as possible and had found as a dry thin stick of a priest in plain brown wool, worse dressed than the gaggle of clever clerks who served him.
‘Aleysandir,’ he declared when the name was given to him, consulted the rolls and frowned. He issued orders and, in short order, Dog Boy had his new badged clothes and a chinking bag of money.
‘You have a stipend, paid quarterly,’ the Chancellor declared. He had a face dominated by pink-rimmed eyes and a knife-cut of a mouth, a manner made haggard by the amount of work he had before him. Yet he managed what passed for a smile.
‘The King’s hounds are at Turnberry. Or Lochmaben – no one is sure. Once this unpleasantness is dealt with, you may take up your duties proper.’
And that was it. Stipended, by God. A rich man …
And severed by it from the others, he realized as he moved off through the fires, drawn back over Coxet to the baggage camp. He hung like a mote between Heaven and earth, too low-born for the company of Jamie Douglas, too raised for the likes of Patrick and Parcy Dodd to feel comfortable with.
Now he was looking for Hal and, if truth be told, it was not simply because he wanted to speak of the loss of Sim Craw, or hear the adventure of how Kirkpatrick and the lord of Herdmanston had brought a great load of weapons and armour all the way from Spain. He knew where Spain was – beyond England and further south through Gascony until folk stopped speaking either English or French – but he could not envisage how far it was, or of ever going there.
The truth was that Dog Boy was happy that Hal had survived it all, while the hurting loss of Sim Craw had sunk in him like a wound and would scab over in time. No, the truth of what irked him was that the lord of Herdmanston had not sought him out.
Why should he? We were parted long before he went into Roxburgh’s depths, he thought, and he was seven years in that; he is nothing to me, nor me to him. Yet he recalled that once they had been close and wished for that comfort again.
So here I am, he admitted wryly, looking.
The lord of Herdmanston’s banner was not hard to find even in the confusion of the baggage camp, tight huddled like sheep in the lee of Coxet, stuck to the side of it like a bloom of fungus. Dog Boy threaded a way through the skeins of doggedly patient men and harassed clerks of Bernard the Chancellor, working by rush lights and against the swoop of a night too short to properly darken, tallying and issuing the weapons and armour. He reached the panoply of Sir John Airth, commander of the camp, where a bored, half-asleep guard stood hipshot under a limp banner on a pole.
He was friendly and informative, which let Dog Boy marvel at the power of his new station in life; before, he would have been told to shift away but now he had a cote with a royal badge on it and was treated politely.
He learned that ‘auld Sir John’ was asleep, while Sir Henry of Herdmanston had gone off with another Sientcler lord, the one from Roslin. They had gone to the Sientcler camp – the engrailed cross banner was plain to see, the guard added, since the high and mighty Sientclers raised it on a taller pole than anyone else.
There were fires under the shivering cross and a dull regular clang that spoke of a smith somewhere. Folk moved like drifting shadows and one, sudden as a hunting owl, was facing him and smiling.
‘Bigod, Dog Boy, you’re as braw as shiny watter still, so you are.’
Dog Boy blinked at the woman, her hair a raggle, wearing only a shift dress in the heat and a shawl with a memory of blue in it shrugged across her shoulders. She carried a knife and a basket, while a bairn stood looking up at him with solemn eyes, thumb in her budded mouth.
The face was blurred with years, but the beauty in it was there yet. Bet’s Meggy. The sight of her crashed him back to Herdmanston in the heat of another summer, when he and others had played at the kirn, throwing scythes to cut the last stook of corn. He had won and presented it to Bet’s Meggy amid the cheers and jeers, for her to make into the kirn-baby, a sure sign that she was next for a wedding.
‘Meg,’ he said awkwardly and she cocked her head to one side and then shook it with mocking disbelief.
‘Come high in the world, Dog Boy. How do I call you these days?’
He found himself and grinned back at her.
‘Now we are reacquainted,’ he said, ‘ye dinna have to call at all – just reach out a hand.’
He beamed at her obvious delight and burst of laughter. She had lost the bloom of youth he remembered, the perfect heart of her face had roughened
and coarsened a little, the body was thicker – a wean will do that, he thought. Yet he was older himself and the feral-thin girl he’d known then was no longer such a rampant attraction, while the woman who swayed back to her fire was.
She spooned gruel into a bowl, just as a boy came up, staring at Dog Boy with a watchful, defiant eye; Bet’s Meggy looked at him and then at Dog Boy as she lifted bread from the basket.
‘Fetch a bowl and spoon,’ she said. She indicated the thumb-sucking girl: ‘This is Bet,’ and Dog Boy smiled; of course it would be, he thought.
‘And this is Hob,’ she said to the boy. He was dark, Dog Boy thought, and rangy, though there was the promise that good food and care would slide some real muscle on him. He thought the lad was about nine, but his skill in judging age was nearly all to do with dogs, so he could have been mistaken.
‘Where have ye been?’ Bet’s Meggy demanded and Hob blinked away from Dog Boy’s face and thrust out his hand, which had a coin in it.
‘I took the Sire to the forgeman, as he asked,’ he replied. ‘He gave me a whole siller penny.’
The wonder in his voice was dreamy as Bet’s Meggy took the coin and dropped it into her cleavage; it would not find a way out of the bottom of them, Dog Boy thought admiringly and remembered that Midsummer’s Night when she had danced the Horse Dance, naked under a green shift dress fixed with madder ribbons and wearing the straw mummer’s horsehead.
Clear across the stubbled fields she had pranced, to no more than a whistle and drum, the chants of others dancing and singing behind her and the faint, sonorous prayers of the priest, determined not to let folk lose sight of God in this whiff of heathenism.
She had danced until her feet bled on the stubble, which was the point of it, blessing the fields with her virgin blood. Then, when the field had been acknowledged as watered, Dog Boy had gathered her up and carried her into the night while folk called good-natured filthy advice after them. He had washed her feet gently in the burn on that Midsummer’s Night, the pair of them wearing rue against the threat of Faerie pixie-leading them off to spend a hundred years or longer in their hidden sidhean mounds.
Despite the rue, something had touched them that night; perhaps they had truly been transformed into virgin Queen and handsome King of Summer, for they had coupled like writhing snakes and, in between, rubbed fern seed on their eyelids and sat crosslegged and naked with the rue tight in their fists, in the hope of seeing the Faerie but escaping being taken by them.
Towards dawn – too short a night, Dog Boy recalled, same as this one – she had sighed and laughed about how she would never dance the Horse Dance again now, for he had broken her yett gate for ever.
Now here she was, as if sprung from a faerie hill.
‘I heard ye married,’ he blurted and she paused, frowning at what her attempt at cutting the bread had brought; it had broken to crumbs of shrivelled beans and peas, mixed with rye and a little wheat. Dog Boy, remembering the good bread he had eaten earlier, felt ashamed.
‘I did,’ she answered, scooping the crumbs into the bowls and handing them out. Dog Boy refused the one she handed to him and she looked relieved, fed more crumbs to it and stirred them in.
‘John the Lamb,’ she answered and Dog Boy nodded. He had been a score of years older than her.
‘A good man,’ she answered defiantly, as if he had spoken aloud. Then she smiled softly. ‘Perfect, in fact – away for days at a time tending the sheep and always bringing back a peck of wool or a tait of mutton.’
Her eyes clouded.
‘Died two – no, I lie, three – years since. Cold and a hard winter and age took him.’
She scowled at Hob, who was eyeing the gruel with distaste.
‘Eat that. Learn to like it or go hungry – there is little else.’
She sighed and turned apologetically to Dog Boy.
‘He disnae care for the meat in it, which is horse.’
Dog Boy nodded; horse was the one meat they were not short of now and he wondered if the fine English who had donated it knew of the fate of their proud mounts.
‘You are chewing on the most expensive meat there is,’ Dog Boy said to Hob and explained why. The boy’s dark eyes flickered with interest, but the scowl remained.
‘The priest says it is a sin to eat the flesh of the horse,’ he persisted and Dog Boy shrugged as if it did not matter at all.
‘If it is still Father Thomas who is priesting you, then he has knowledge of it, for sure,’ he answered, staring idly at the fire. ‘He was happy to eat it when Herdmanston was sieged.’
‘Away …’
The blurt was out and Hob took the scowling censure of his mother and fell silent.
‘Besides,’ Dog Boy went on, ‘Jamie says the French eat it – he was in that land for the learning in it. He says it was the Northmen who so upset the priests, for they used to fight prize stots and sacrifice the winner in their heathen rites, eating the meat. Since wee priests hate the raiding Norsemen, horses got called all kinds of bad cess.’
‘I likes it.’
Dog Boy grinned back at the smiling little Bet and then looked at Hob, who was half scathing, half impressed.
‘Jamie,’ Dog Boy added, ‘is Sir James Douglas. Good Sir James. He eats horse when he can get it.’
‘The Black,’ Hob blurted out admiringly and Dog Boy laughed. Somewhere music struck up and people cheered as flames leaped; they were lighting the balefires for Midsummer’s Night and Dog Boy glanced at Bet’s Meggy with a look of remembrance that made her flush and shift a little. Then he turned back to the boy.
‘Sir James is known as that as well.’
Bet’s Meggy, smiling, nudged her son.
‘Give thanks for being put right on matters,’ she said and Hob, gingerly spooning gruel to his mouth, found the scowl again, though it was uncertain this time.
‘I dinna ken who he is, Ma,’ he offered and she beamed, looking from him to Dog Boy.
‘He’s your da, boy.’
Bannockburn, the English Camp
Midsummer’s Night, June 1314
Like Mongols, Giles d’Argentan bawled into the retelling of the Clifford charge. Round and round and round – a pity they had no bows.
The other laughed and Ebles de Mountz, daringly drunk, shouted out that d’Argentan had never seen a Mongol; for a moment the sweating night was chilled – but Sir Giles threw back his head and roared out a laugh.
‘I have too – the Emperor in Constantinople has some. They look like this.’
He put thumbs to the side of his face, pulling back his eyes and squinting, while another finger shoved his nose up to a pig snout. Folk cheered and beat their thighs.
‘Begone,’ shouted one of the Berkeleys. ‘Nothing looks that ugly.’
‘It does if it is sired by Satan,’ d’Argentan replied and folk crossed themselves, then went back to wassailing one another with loud shouts and laughter.
‘Like Mongols,’ d’Argentan persisted, louder than ever so that it would carry through the leprous night to where Clifford’s mesnie huddled, morose and silent, round their own cookfires. ‘Round and round …’
The laughter shrilled out and then died as d’Argentan held up a stilling hand.
‘Of course,’ he declared, owlishly drunk but not reckless, ‘I offer a salute to the brave fallen, who knew their duty. To the Deyncourt brothers and Sir Thomas – I am glad to know that Sir Thomas Gray is held for ransom and not dead. God preserve him.’
Solemnly, the knights gathered at the food-littered trestle raised their cups. Somewhere beyond, the rest of the knights cursed the dark and the steep-sided streams as they coaxed or forced horses across the hasty bridges made from doors and planks culled out of Bannock vill.
It would take them all night, Thweng thought, and the foot are still straggling up and will have precious little rest – the bulk of the baggage will be lucky to have made it before dawn.
‘Mongols,’ d’Argentan bawled, which was enough to
set the roisterers off on another cackle; Thweng moved off into the dark, seeking his own fire. His baggage was a long way off in the dark, so he had no tent and comforts and had only eaten because he had shared the King’s table. He had
only done that because Edward was anxious, needing reassurance and all the advice he could get.
‘Will they stand?’ he asked everyone and it was the very question, the caged corpse swinging in the tree of the affair. Would the Scots stand and fight, or melt away? Everyone at the meal had knowledge of the Scots, had fought them before this – Beaumont, Segrave, de Valence, himself. Even the King was no beginner at the work, having been in the campaign of ’04 under his father and ones in ’07 and ’10 in his own right.
‘The Scotch will not stand,’ Segrave growled, shaking his head while the black-clad wraith that was his son, Stephen, echoed him like a shadow. ‘They have run each time we have sent a host at them.’
Which was not quite true: they had stood at Methven, which de Valence was quick to point out with a pompous flourish, since that had been his battle and he had beaten Bruce soundly. Thweng tried and failed to prevent himself pointing out that Bruce had also stood against de Valence at Loudon Hill only a year later – and repaid that lord in full. He wisely did not then add to the black scowl of the Earl of Pembroke by mentioning that he had only won at Methven because he had unchivalrously broken an arranged truce and attacked by surprise.
But it was true enough that the Scots had avoided battle on the two occasions since then that English armies had rolled north. Not once in seven years had they stood to fight, Thweng thought.
The talk rolled on, with Edward’s head swinging from side to side to take in all the good advice he was getting, though the best of it was lost on him, it appeared to Sir Marmaduke. When your veterans of the Scottish wars advise waiting another day so that the army can recover strength and morale, you ought to listen.
Eventually, Thweng lost interest in the King’s refusal to see that sense, managed to move off unnoticed, a little way into the dark – then found d’Umfraville and Badenoch at either elbow and became aware of their grim looks.