The Lion Wakes k-1

by Robert Low

  Sturgeon bones, De Warenne thought wildly. God’s Wounds, this whole enterprise could fall because we don’t have enough fish heads.

  Men and food, the endless problem since armies had started marching. De Warenne felt the crushing weariness of it all – the whole business of this pestilential country was a clear message that Longshanks had displeased God and He had turned His Wrath on them. More to the point, De Warenne thought sourly, Longshanks has displeased the likes of me and, one day soon, I will turn my wrath on him, together with all the other lords fretting under the divine right.

  Yet the king was not the throne and De Warenne, Earl of Surrey would defend that to the death. His grandfather had been uncle to the Lionheart himself, his father had been Warden of the Cinque Ports and every De Warenne had been a bulwark against the foes of God, for whoever attacked the throne of England assaulted God Himself. John De Warenne, Earl of Surrey, Warden of Scotland, would hold His Fortress against all the rebel scum of the earth.

  The thought drew him up a little, even as a cold wind curled the length of the hall, stirring the smoke into swirls and eddies.

  Strike north. Find this Wallace and cut him down shorter than Longshanks, so that the king would be pleased with his earl at that. The thought made De Warenne bark out a laugh.

  ‘Then there are the Welsh,’ Cressingham declared and De Warenne looked at him with a curled lip. Like a fly, he thought, buzz-buzzing in the ear. One good slap…

  ‘What of the Welsh?’ Sir Marmaduke asked and watched as Cressingham fussily arranged his blue robe – bad choice of colour for a pasty man, Thweng thought – and imperiously waved at some distant servant. An instant later a man slouched through the far door from the kitchen and across the floor to be eyed up and down. He studied them back from a face dark as an underground dwarf, black-eyed and challenging.

  A fist of a face, the beard on it cropped to stubble, but with a great gristle of moustache, as if some giant black caterpillar had crawled under his nose. Cheekbones like knobs and a single scowl of eyebrow – typical Welsh, Sir Marmadule thought, from the south, where the archers are, for the north are mainly spearmen. He said so and De Warenne nodded. Cressingham pouted and scowled.

  ‘Look at him,’ he said, quivering. ‘Look at what he is wearing.’

  Not much, Sir Marmaduke thought – a ragged linen tunic in a distant memory of red, a great shock of dark hair like a sprout of bush on a rock. Nothing on his legs but his bare feet, though there were shoes hung round his neck. He had a leather bracer on one arm, a bow the same size as himself in a bag of some strange-looking leather and a soft bag of the same hanging from one side of a belt, a long, wicked-looking sheathed knife from the other.

  In the bag at his hip were arrows, though they were all neatly separated by leather to keep the fletchings from fouling, and the way the bag swung told Sir Marmaduke that it had damp clay shaped to the bottom of it, to prevent the points bursting through.

  Across the powerful shoulders, one humped slightly as if he was deformed, hung a long roll and fall of rough wool fabric which had been russet-brown once and was now just dark.

  ‘A Welsh archer,’ Sir Marmaduke said, ‘with bow, a dozen good arrows and a knife. The thing round his shoulders is a called a brychan if I am not mistaken. Serves as cloak and bed both.’

  ‘Well, you would know that, certes,’ Cressingham declared with a sneer, ‘since you have spent a deal of your life fighting such. No help in present cirumstances, mark me.’

  ‘Is there a point to this, Treasurer?’ De Warenne sighed. Cressingham made a show of plucking a paper from Frixco’s fingers.

  ‘Item,’ he said. ‘Welsh archer, cap-a-pied, with a warbow of yew, one dozen goose-fletched arrows, a sword and a dagger.’

  He thrust the paper back at Frixco.

  ‘This is what is being paid for from the Exchequer,’ he declared triumphantly. ‘And this is what I expect for the price. Cap-a-pied. Which means one hat of iron, one coat of war, either maille or a leather jack, studded for preference. One sword. One yew bow and a dozen finest shafts. That is what is being paid for and that is what we do not have. This man is a ragged-arsed peasant with stick and string, no more.’

  Addaf had followed a deal of it, despite their being English, for that tongue was now heard more and more in Wales and it was a sensible man who learned it and spoke it well. Then, he thought, they turn round and speak an even stranger tongue, the French, which wasn’t even their own but belonged to the people they were fighting. Among others.

  He had listened quietly, too, for it was also a sensible man who realised that fighting against these folk was now old and done, though the defeat in it was still a raw wound no more than a handful of years gone. Yet taking their money to fight with them was almost as good a revenge for Builth and the loss of Llewellyn and better than starving in the ruin war had made of the valleys.

  Yet peasant was too hard for a man of those same valleys to bear.

  ‘I am Addaf ap Dafydd ap Math y Mab Lloit Irbengam,’ he growled in English, ‘and no peasant with an arse of rags.’

  He saw the look on them, the same as the look on folk’s faces when they had seen the two-headed calf at the fair the year he had left. The fat one looked bemused.

  ‘Do. You. Speak. English?’ this one demanded, leaning forward and talking as if Addaf was a child. The tall one with the long face, the one pointed out as having fought Welsh once, twitched the mourn of his moustaches into a brief smile.

  ‘You are annoying a Welshman, Treasurer,’ he said, ‘for English is what he is already speaking.’

  Addaf saw the fat one bristle like an old boar sow.

  ‘His name,’ Sir Marmaduke explained, speaking English, both clear and slow, Addaf noted, so that everyone would understand, ‘means Addaf son of David, son of Madog, though the last part confuses me a little – The Brown Lad With The Wrong Head?’

  He knew the Welsh – Addaf took to this Sir Marmaduke at once, for he had once been a bold adversary and he knew the Welsh a little and the English as spoken by True People; Addaf heaved a sigh of relief.

  ‘Dark and stubborn, I am after believing it is in your own tongue,’ he said and added ‘Lord,’ because it did no harm to mark the trail of matters politely.

  ‘I am from the gwely of Cilybebyll,’ he explained earnestly, so that these folk would know with whom they dealt. ‘I have a cow and enough grazing land to feed eight goats for a year. I am a free man of the True People, by the grace of God, sharing an ox, a goad, a halter and a ploughshare with three others in common. I am not a serf with ragged arse.’

  ‘Did you understand any of that?’ Cressingham demanded waspishly. Sir Marmaduke turned slowly to him.

  ‘You have offended him, it appears. In my experience, Cressingham, it does no good to offend a Welshman. Particularly bowmen – see you the shoulder? That hump is pulling muscle, Treasurer. Addaf here has some twenty-odd summers on him and I’ll warrant at least seventeen of them have been used to train with that bow until he can pull the string on one taller than a well-made man and thick as a boy’s wrist, all the way back to his ear. The arrows, I will avow, are an ell at least and are fletched, not with goose, but with peacock, which means they are his finest. This man can put such a shaft through an oak church door at a hundred paces and then another ten or so of its cousins within the minute. If he does his job aright, he will not need iron hat or studded jack or maille – all his enemies will be dead in front of him.’

  He broke off and stared fixedly at Cressingham, who did not like the look of him nor of the scowling black-faced Welshman.

  ‘Christ be praised,’ murmured Brother Jacobus and crossed himself into the twist of Addaf’s smile.

  ‘For ever and ever,’ they intoned – Addaf louder than the rest, just so the crow of a priest would get the point.

  ‘I would take our Welshman as is, Treasurer,’ Sir Marmaduke added gently, ‘and be glad of it.’

  ‘Just so,’ De Warenne added and th
umped the table. ‘Now, Treasurer, you can carry on doing what you do best – scribbling and tallying up how to get my army, well fed and in good humour, to where I can meet this Wallace Ogre and defeat him.’

  Sir Marmaduke watched Addaf the Welshman slap barefoot back across the flags, dismissed with barely controlled fury by Cressingham, who now closed his head with the Black Friar and his ink-fingered clerk. De Warenne, hugging himself in his cloak, fell back on complaint.

  It was bad enough, Sir Marmaduke thought wearily, that the pair of them were in charge of this battue without there being a Wallace at the other end of it.

  Blind Tarn’s tavern, near Bothwell

  Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ, August 1297

  He came down on the road on a tired horse, hood up and cloak swaddling him. The horse was being nagged on and did not like it much, balking now and then, tugging Malise’s arm and stumbling. It was no wise thing to be out on the roads alone at the best of times and certainly not now.

  Even so, Malise was half-asleep and daydreaming of himself on one of the Buchan’s great warhorses, or a captured stallion of The Bruce, all fire and rearing, a stiff prick with iron hooves. He was riding down fleeing men and closing in on a woman, who ran screaming, until he got close and found himself, suddenly, off the powerful horse and staring at her. She lay helpless, bosom heaving after the running – but gave him a knowing smile and a look, then put one finger between her impossibly red lips and sucked it. She was Isabel and he had his hands on her thighs…

  The sudden clatter startled him and he jerked awake, in time to see a man duck out of a sacking-covered doorway, unlacing his front and cursing as he stumbled over a discarded bucket. He gave Malise the merest bleary glance, then directed a stream of steaming relief on the dungheap, farted noisily and stared with unfocused eyes at the wattle-and-daub wall of what Malise realised was not a stable for the tavern, but the man’s home.

  Malise blinked once or twice and forced the tired mount down the length of road where buildings straggled, separated by drunken fencing and strips of bare, turned-earth plots. Ahead lay the great ramshackle arrangement of an inn, two storeys high and timber-framed on stone; the smell of food flooded Malise.

  A woman appeared from one of the houses, driving a cow to be staked on a small patch of communal grass. It dropped dung with a splatter and, without breaking stride, she scooped it up in a basket and went on, looking briefly at Malise, who glared back from under his hood until she dropped her eyes.

  She might well have been pretty once – her dress had the memory of bright colour in it somewhere – but she was long severed from cleanliness or good manners, with a face roughened by wind and weather, yet pasty and pinched under the windchape. Malise slithered off the horse at the tether pole, hearing movement inside the inn and a burst of laughter; the horse sagged, hipshot and relieved.

  The inn was dim inside and the moment of stepping from light to dark left Malise disorientated, so that he panicked and fumbled for the hilt of his dagger. Then the stink hit him – thick air, old food, spilled drink, farts, shit, vomit and, with a thrill that made him grunt, the thin, acrid stink of old sex. The place was also a brothel.

  When his eyes adjusted, he was in a large room with a beaten earth floor and roughcast walls laced with timber. There were rushes strewn on the floor between the tables and benches, but it was clear they had not been changed in some time. Two great metal lanterns with horn panels hung on chains from the main rafters, together with tray-pulleys, for hauling drink and food to the gallery that went all round the square of the place. Up there, Malise reckoned, were sleeping rooms and the stair to them was behind the earthen oven and the slab of wood that served as a worktop. It was altogether a fine inn.

  A girl was wearily slopping water on the slab of wood and raking it back and forth with a cloth; she looked up as he stood blinking, his hood still up. She was dirty, the ingrained dirt of a long time of neglect and her eyes were dull, her hair lank, lusterless – yet it was tawny somewhere in the depths of it and those dead eyes had sparkled blue as water once.

  ‘We are not open,’ she said and, when he did not respond, looked up and said it again.

  ‘Please yourself,’ she added with a shrug when he stood there with his mouth open. He almost started towards her with a fist clenched, then remembered what he was after and stopped, smiling. Honey rather than Hell.

  ‘What have we here, then?’ demanded a loud voice and a shape bulked out a door at the far end of the room. Naked from the waist, the man was a huge-bellied apparition, hairy as a boar, with the remnants of a moustache straggling greasily through many chins, though the hair on his head was cropped to iron-grey stubble. He was lacing up braies under the flop of the belly and beaming in what he fondly imagined was genial goodwill.

  Malise was appalled and repelled. The man looked like a great troll, yet the swinging cross on his chest belied that. ‘Tam,’ he announced.

  ‘You don’t look blind to me,’ Malise managed and the man chuckled throatily.

  ‘My auld granda,’ he declared proudly, ‘dead and dead these score of years. A father-to-son wee business this.’

  ‘Sit,’ he said, then slapped the dull-eyed girl on the arm. ‘Stir yourself – start the fire.’

  Malise sat.

  ‘Come from far?’ Tam rumbled, scratching the hairs on his belly. ‘Not many travel up this road since the Troubles.’

  ‘Douglas,’ Malise lied, for he had actually travelled in from Edinburgh, where he had spent a fruitless time searching out the Countess after the events at Douglas. He had missed her there, tracked her to Irvine and knew she was headed for The Bruce, the hot wee hoor. But he had missed her there, too, and the money the earl had given him was all but run out; soon, he would have to return north and admit his failure. He did not relish the idea of admitting failure to the Earl of Buchan, even less admitting that the bloody wee hoor of a Countess had not only outwitted him by escaping, but continued to do so.

  ‘A long journey,’ Tam said jovially. ‘You’ll bide here the night.’

  Then his brows closed into a single lintel over the embers of his eyes and he added, ‘You’ll have siller, sure, and will not mind showin’ the colour of it.’

  Malise fished out coin enough to satisfy him, then had to seethe silently as it was inspected carefully. Finally, Tam grinned a gap of brown and gum, got up and fetched a flask and two wooden cups.

  ‘Fine wine for a fine gentle,’ he declared expansively, splashing it into the cups. ‘So the road is safe? Folk are travelling on it?’

  He would be interested in the trade, of course. Malise shrugged.

  ‘What is safe?’ he replied mournfully, graciously accepting the cup of wine. ‘A man must make a living.’

  Tam nodded, then called out to the girl to fetch him a shirt, which she did, dusting her hands of ash. Malise drank, though he did not like the thin, bitter taste.

  ‘What is your business?’ Tam demanded, licking his lips.

  ‘I negotiate contracts,’ Malise said, ‘for the Earl of Buchan.’

  Tam’s eyebrows went up at that.

  ‘Contracts, is it? For what?’

  Malise shrugged diffidently.

  ‘Grain, timber, wool,’ he answered, then glanced sideways at the man, watching the chins of him wobble as he calculated how much he could dun and how much profit there was to be had out of this meeting. Malise handed him an opportunity.

  ‘I also look out for his wife,’ he said carefully. ‘When she is travellin’ up and doon the roads, like, on the business of Buchan.’

  Tam said nothing.

  ‘I was thinking, perchance, ye had heard if she’d passed this way,’ Malise persisted. ‘A Coontess. Ye would know her in an instant – she rides a warhorse.’

  Tam turned the cheap red earthenware round and round, pretending to think and studying Malise. A weasel, he decided, with a tait of terrier there. No contract scribbler this – a rache, huntin’ the scent of some poor
soul. A Coontess, he added to himself, my arse. Alone? On a warhorse? My arse.

  Malise grew tired of the silence eventually and spread his hands, choosing his words carefully.

  ‘If the road keeps clear and the garrison at Bothwell chases away its enemies, ye might get a customer or two.’

  ‘God preserve the king,’ Tam said, almost by rote and leaving Malise to wonder which king he was speaking of. Malise was about to start placing coins on the table when a frightening apparition appeared at the head of the staircase.

  The face had once been pretty, but was puffed and reddened by late nights and too much drink. Malise saw a body made shapeless by a loose shift, but a breast lolled free, darkened by a bruise.

  ‘What a stramash,’ she whined, combing straggles of hair from her face. ‘Can a quine not get sleep here?’

  She saw Malise and made an attempt at a winning smile, then gave up and stumbled down to slump on a bench.

  ‘Where’s your light o’ love?’ demanded Tam sarcastically.

  ‘Snoring his filthy head off – Tam, a cup?’

  Tam grunted and poured.

  ‘Just the single Lizzie, my sweet. I want you at the work the day.’

  ‘What for is wrong with that bitch upstairs?’ Lizzie whined and Tam grinned, lopsided and lewd.

  ‘You ken the way of it. It is your affair if you stick yer legs in the air when you should be sleepin’, but this is your day for the work.’

  Lizzie’s teeth clacked on the cup and she drank, coughed, wiped her mouth, then drank again.

  ‘Ye have to have rules,’ Tam said imperiously to Malise, ‘to run a business in these times. This place will be stappit with sojers the night, seeking out a wee cock of the finger an’ a bit of fine quim.’

  He nudged Lizzie, who forced a winsome smile, then looked at Malise, sparked to curiosity now that wine was flooding her.

  ‘What are you selling – face paints and oils?’ she asked hopefully.