The Lion Wakes k-1

by Robert Low

  No sensible horse will suffer this, so what you have is a mad beast on four legs – and if you add a rider who fears only displeasing God you have a combination fit to punch a hole through the Gates of Hell.

  The mad beasts broke into a canter; someone whimpered and Hal saw that it was the whey-faced boy, his filthy face streaked with tears.

  ‘Stay in the ring. Hold to the ring.’

  Wallace’s bellow went out on a rising note, growing more shrill as the ground trembled; the last file captains beat and chivvied their men, the last men-at-arms, the armoured nobiles who had opted to fight on foot, braced themselves and hunched into their jazerant and maille.

  ‘Hold to the ring.’

  Beyond, the black tide curled on them, their iron-rimmed kettle hats painted black round the rim, white on the crown and with a great red cross to the fore. Their reins were loosed entirely, leaving both hands free, and the crosses on their black shields were like streaks of blood.

  ‘Hold to the ring.’

  Deus lo vult.

  The Templars throated it out on the last few thundering strides and came in like a ram, knee-to-knee and at a rising canter where, all day, no horseman beyond the first clatter of them had managed better than a fast walk.

  There should have been a great shudder, a splintering of spears, a loud lion roar of desperate, defiant Scots – but the ring, too thinned by bolts and arrows, too worn by fear, shattered like an egg hit by a forge hammer.

  The whey-faced boy was plucked from Hal’s side and torn away with a vanished, despairing shriek as a lance skewered him; the rider swept past Hal like a black wind. On the other side, a great shaft went over Hal’s head, slamming into men like a swinging gate – Hal fisted his battered shield into the rider’s armoured foot, braced straight out and high on his mount’s shoulders and the man reeled wildly, then was gone, tilting and crashing into the mass of men.

  The Templars carved through the struggle of foot like claws through an apple, bursting out the far side, lances splintered or tossed aside, their great warhorses rutting up the blood-skeined turf in ploughed riggs as they fought to turn. The riders hauled out swords or little axes.

  ‘Run,’ yelled a voice, but Hal was already moving. A lumbering bear he seemed, his limbs moving as if he was underwater, fighting a current – yet he remembered hurdling a dead horse, remembered the whip and smear of thin branches, the collision with a tree that spun him half-round and lost him his shield.

  Then he was on his knees spitting blood, the world a whirl of sky and trees and torn earth that smelled of autumn.

  ‘Up,’ said a voice, as mild as if lifting a bairn from a puddle. Hal leaned in the iron grasp, looked up into the blood and mud of Wallace’s face and had back a grin.

  ‘Aye til the fore,’ the Guardian said, then glanced back over his shoulder, to where the milling riders were slaughtering the slow. ‘Into the woods.’

  No sensible knight risked a good warhorse by forcing it into a tangle of undergrowth and trees, where his vision, already no more than a narrow slit, was arrowed down to nothing by leaves and branches, so that it was impossible to resist the temptation to rip off the heavy constriction of helm. Vulnerable, slow, unable to use weight and power, a man in his right mind knows woods are not for heavy horse.

  Hal knew, as soon as he heard the great crashing, that sanity had run from this part of the world, with a frightened look over one shoulder at the madness of God which rode in to replace it.

  Hal, following the stained gold surcoat with the red lion snarling defiantly, turned to see a white camilis billowed, ripping apart on the snatching talons of tree and bush as Brian De Jay, Master of the Templars and righteous with the power of the Lord in him, closed with a triumphant roar on the running fox of Wallace, that offence to God.

  Hal did not think. He turned, stepped to one side as the warhorse plunged, De Jay reeling in the saddle, half pulled out by the snag of the treacherous white robes. The German Method, Hal heard himself say aloud, though the voice did not seem to be his at all – then he half crouched and spun, putting all the weight in a backhand cut, the sword grasped in both hands.

  It broke the warhorse’s hind leg with a crack like a snapping branch and the shriek of it falling was high and thin, piercing as any blade. Brian De Jay went out between the ears of it, smashing into the mulch and the briars, rolling over and over until he slammed into a tree with a sound like an acre of tin kettles falling off a cart.

  Pulled off balance by his blow and the weariness of a hard day, Hal tipped sideways and fell his length, then started to scramble up. De Jay, struggling weakly, also started to rise, bellowing rage and pain out in bloody froth; then a shadow fell on him and he looked up.

  ‘Ye were seeking a wee word with me?’ Wallace asked mildly and De Jay tried a cut, so weak that Wallace only had to put his sword out for the Templar blade to ring a soft chime, then fall limply to the ground.

  ‘Aye, weel,’ Wallace said softly, ‘here I am, my wee lord. May God forgive ye for what ye have done to Templar honour this day – argue your case when ye see Him.’

  The hand-and-a-half, clotted to the hilt already, came round in a vicious two-handed swipe that took De Jay badly.

  It was meant to be a neck kill, a single-stroke beheading that men would later marvel at, but rage and fear and the black howl of defeat made Wallace poor with it; the blade slammed into the Templar Master’s expensive, new-fangled plate gorget and skittered upwards, taking the man in the jaw and carving through into the tree beyond, where it stuck.

  With a pungent curse and a frown, Wallace put his foot up – he had taken off his boots, Hal noted dazedly – on De Jay’s chest and began to work the blade out, his toes flexing in the vomited mess flooding from the Master of Templars’ ruined face.

  The forest crashed and a new rider, like the ghost of De Jay himself, came bounding out like a stag on the run. Hal, halfway to his feet, saw that Wallace was trapped, saw the Guardian let go of the wedged sword and whirl, fumbling for a dagger.

  Brother John De Sawtrey, his white robes shredded and stained, his helmet and bascinet, maille coif and all flung away, whirled a little fluted mace in a circle and his purpled face under a thorn-crown of sweat-spiked tonsure was a vicious snarl.

  He saw the fallen De Jay and howled at the outrage of it until his throat corded. His head was a storm of vengeance and he dug in his spurs; the warhorse’s great rump bunched and it squealed – Hal levered himself to his feet, knowing he was between Wallace and this charging knight.

  He tried to brace, but his legs trembled and his arms felt as if they had two anvils on the end; De Sawtrey rocked as the great warhorse shot forward – four strides and it would plough Hal into the forest floor.

  One stride. Hal saw small twigs and acorns bounce up off the ground with the powered weight of each hoof.

  Two strides. Something flicked at the corner of Hal’s eye, but he could not turn his head from the sight of the warhorse’s snarl of yellow teeth, the angry pink flare of nostrils and the great, slow-motion rise of massive feet.

  Three strides – something went between Hal and the great loom of beast and rider, whirring like startled bird. John De Sawtrey flung up one hand as if arrogantly dismissing the world and then vanished over the back of his cantled saddle.

  The warhorse, veering, slammed a shoulder into Hal and there was a moment of flying, a great tempest of leaves and earth that left him breathless and sprawled. Gasping and desperate, he struggled to rise, to find his sword -MacDuff’s sword, he remembered wildly. He staggered and weaved, then a shape lurched into trembling view, the crossbow across one shoulder. Beyond, John De Sawtrey lay with the black leather fletches of a bolt perched like a crow in his eye.

  ‘Aye til the fore,’ said a familiar voice. Hal’s head wobbled on his neck as he looked up into Sim’s badger-beard grin and, beyond, other faces he knew, twisting and sliding like heat haze in the dappled, dying light of the forest – Ill Made Jock, Dirleton Wi
ll, Sore Davey, Mouse…

  ‘Aye til the fore,’ echoed Bangtail Hob from the filth of his face and stuck out a hand to haul Hal back to his feet. ‘Time we were not here.’

  The fires were piled high, as if to ward off all the bewildered ghosts who wandered that field and, in the dark, the moans and cries of those still alive crawled on everyone’s skin.

  Edward sat in his curule chair, sullen and droop-lidded, looking at the stained, bloody rag they had brought to lay at his feet. Red jupon with a white lion, someone had pointed out; you could see it if you squinted, Edward thought, but even this man’s own mother would not know him now.

  ‘The Wallace arms, I am told, your Grace,’ De Warenne declared proudly, his Saracen beard a quivering silver curve as he smiled.

  ‘The Ogre,’ Edward declared sarcastically, ‘seems to have shed the arms of Scotland which I was reliably informed he wore at the start of this affair – yellow-gold, my lord of Surrey, with a red lion rampant.’ De Warenne’s eye flickered a little.

  ‘Also,’ Edward went on savagely, ‘even allowing for the exaggerations of the fearful, this giant ogre Wallace seems to have diminished. I have a court caperer whose little bauble is taller than this.’

  With a sudden, sullen twist, De Warenne signalled for the body to be removed and followed it, stiff with indignation. De Lacy leaned forward, his face bloody with torchlight.

  ‘Possibly a cousin, your grace,’ he said softly. ‘I heard there were three such in the field here. The search goes on…’

  ‘He is gone,’ Edward muttered and gnawed a nail. Gone. Wallace was gone, into the damned forests where had had come from, where he fought best.

  There was a slew of bloody grass studded with Scots dead like winnowed stooks – and only two English deaths of note, Sir Brian De Jay and John de Sawtrey. The Master of England’s Templars and the Master of the Scottish Templars – there is a harsh justice in that, Edward thought, chilled by the presence of the Hand of God.

  He did not bother with the tally of lesser lights, dead Welsh, Gascons and foot, for they were mainly men of little or no account – but the victory he’d had here was no more than possession of a blood-slimed field near Callendar.

  Wallace was gone. Nothing had been resolved.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Herdmanston

  Feast of St Merinus, September 1297

  She stood between the merlons and looked out and down to where the riders sat, patient as stones, while a crow circled like a slow crucifix in the grey-blue. The rider in the centre looked up as it racked out its hoarseness and, even from this height, she saw the red-gold of his beard and hair. She knew who he was and glanced sideways at Bangtail Hob.

  ‘Ye were right, Hob,’ she said.

  ‘No’ me, Lady. Sir Hal sent me to warn ye this might occur – him and the rest of the men are running and hidin’ with The Wallace.’

  He was matter-of-fact about it, but Isabel knew that the running and hiding he spoke off hid a wealth of hurt, fear, blood and rough living. The fact that Bangtail Hob had managed to slither his way unseen to Herdmanston with the message was not the only miracle in it.

  Below, the man with the red-gold head waved.

  ‘I can shoot the een oot of his head from here,’ muttered Wull The Yett, nocking an arrow to the hunting bow and getting a scathe of glance back from Bangtail Hob.

  ‘Away. Ye could not hit a bull’s arse at five paces when ye could see clear, Wull The Yett. Ye have not seen clearly the length of your own arm in years.’

  ‘Go down and tell Sir John Comyn he can come up to the yett,’ Isabel said. ‘Then escort him into the hall.’

  Wull shot them both a black scowl and slid the arrow from the string.

  ‘Oh aye, no bother,’ he declared bitterly, hirpling his way to the stairwind. ‘Open the yett to our enemies – let the place scorch betimes, for it seems there is no respect left for a hauflin’ like myself, the least of a clekkin’ of bairns to a poor widow wummin.. .’

  They ignored him, as folk always did, while his long, bitter murmur trailed behind him like damp grey smoke.

  The Red Comyn heard the invite and dismounted, then handed his sword to the nearest of his men, smiling back into their warnings and anxiety. He went up the steep, cobbled incline, across the laid plank bridge and into the short arch with its opened, iron-grilled yett. There was the scent of woodsmoke and new-baked bread fighting with the headiness of broom in his nose.

  Briefly, in the dim of the small hall, he was blind and took a few breaths to accustom himself before following the shuffling old servitor to where the lady sat in the high seat, as neatly arranged in Lenten grey and snowy barbette as any nun, while the glowing brazier of coals and freshly lit sconces bounced the light back off the too-brilliant gentian of her eyes.

  But her hair and skin were damp from fresh grooming and her rings were loose enough on the fingers he kissed for him to know she had thinned, while the marks of sleeplessness told him much.

  ‘Countess,’ he said, with a formal bow.

  ‘My lord.’

  The voice was steady, even musical, but the strain was evident in it and the Red Comyn was suddenly irritated by the whole business – he had more to do these days than play advocate in the life of his kinsman Earl of Buchan and his wayward wife.

  ‘I am told your father is unwell.’

  The solicitous inquiry stumbled him off the track of matters, but he recovered, swift as a russet fox.

  ‘His humour is turned overly choleric,’ he declared, which was a bland description of the paralysis which had twisted one side of the Lord of Badenoch’s body and exchanged his power of speech for a constant drool from one side of his mouth. His own temper, folk said, that had given him the name Black John, had finally choked him – but his son knew better and his voice was thick and bitter when he said.

  ‘Imprisonment in the Tower did that.’

  ‘He is fortunate, then,’ Isabel replied steadily, ‘since most of those sent to the Tower never come out alive at all.’

  She was baiting him, he knew, but he held himself in check and nodded to the man at her side.

  ‘I do not know your man, there,’ he said in sibilant French, ‘but I know what he is, so I am certain you have been told of the events that bring me here.’

  ‘His name is Hob,’ she replied and felt Bangtail’s head come up at the name, the only part he understood. She switched to English, deliberately to include him.

  ‘MacDuff is dead, Hob tells me,’ she said, the harsh crow-song of it raking her, for all that she had disliked the man.

  ‘Bravely,’ Red Comyn replied, also in English, ‘together with others. Wallace is fled and resigned his Guardianship. New Guardians have been appointed by the community of the realm.’

  What was left of a nobility not scrabbling to kneel at Edward’s footstool, she shought. Yet the way he said it made her breath stop a moment.

  ‘Yourself?’

  He acknowledged it with a haughty little nod and, at last, she realised the duty that had brought him here. Not just for the Earl of Buchan’s pride, then.

  ‘The Earl of Carrick is the other,’ he declared and she almost laughed aloud but he saw her widening eyes and her lip-biting and smeared a wry twist on to his face.

  ‘Aye,’ he admitted. ‘The Bruce and myself. Unlikely beasts in the same shafts, I will allow – but the Kingdom demands it.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Isabel replied softly. ‘To what does Herdmanston owe for the honour of your presence here?’

  He grew more irritated still, at her presumptious sitting there as if she was lady of this pawky manor, as if she spoke for the absent lord of Herdmanston as a wife.

  ‘Ye know well enough,’ he replied shortly. ‘I am to return you to the good graces of your husband, the earl.’

  ‘Others attempted that,’ she retorted bitterly. ‘One in particular decided force was best. Is that in your instruction from my husband?’

  ‘If necessary,’ he
replied bluntly and leaned his short, barrelled body towards her a little, so that Isabel felt Bangtail start to bristle like a hound.

  ‘The lordship of Fife is invested in your wee brother, currently held by the English – so Fife has reverted to the Crown, lady,’ he said coldly. ‘In the absence of a king, it reverts to the Guardians – namely myself and the Earl of Carrick. Your presence with the Earl of Buchan is now desirable less for reasons of his passion than reasons of Comyn honour, dignity and estate. I am here, as a Guardian of Scotland, to impress upon you the need for it. You should know also that my lord earl wants the bladder that is Hal of Herdmanston dipped in dark water.’

  She looked at him, this stocky, fiery wee man; his boots had high heels and that little vanity robbed him of some of his menace. God’s Wounds, he had enough of it just by looking like a smaller version of Buchan.

  It was undignified, she thought, sitting here within sight of this small, blurred image of her husband, so like him in colour and temper and discussing her intimacies. She had known her husband’s rage was enough for him to injure her but lately had hoped that it was enough for him just to detach from her.

  Now, eyes blank and fogged, she saw the stupidity of that. He had been cuckolded, made a fool over the business of ransom – when he need not have ransomed her at all – and now needed to stamp the imprint of the Buchan lordship firmly on the lands of Fife. With a wife who was the last noble MacDuff in Fife and the backing of his kinsman, an appointed Guardian, he would be able to gain control.

  Shame and anger flushed her, sank into her belly and twisted all the weary organs. Like beads on a rosary, all the slights she had given her husband, small and large, winked in her memory. Worse, with a chill that flushed goosing on her skin, she thought of the grim little Comyn of Badenoch’s words regarding force. If necessary.