Those who remembered the murder of Tod’s Wattie nodded and the others had heard enough of it to want to be part of a vengeance.
‘Well said,’ Jamie declared cheerfully. ‘Count me with this
mesnie
, for I am a knight with no less honour than any here.’
‘No knight me,’ Sim Craw rumbled, ‘but my honour is as fine.’
Dirleton Will stirred at that and shook his head.
‘Away, Sim – ye are ower auld for chargin’ into folk as if in a tourney fight. Better ye leave that to
nobiles
and folk who dinna need to roll out o’ their beds in the middle of the night to take a pish.’
‘Ye slaverin’ wee lume. I will show ye auld – ye will reflect on it when I take ye by the clap of the hass and rip the harigails from ye …’
‘Easy,’ Hal said warningly and Sim subsided while Dirleton Will, unfazed by a threat to grab him by the throat and tear out his entrails, held up placatory palms to the scowling Sim and ruined it with a wicked sickle of smile.
Hal listened to the dry laughter, hoarse as a wind through stubble and knew it for the whistle in the dark that it was. Even this fearful, the Herdmanston men would still ride to war and Hal was sure much of it had to do with what the Welsh had done to the Templar knight in the pyre; he now had a name and that added to the horror for those who had seen and smelled him.
‘If you will give me a brace of good men,’ de Bissot declared, ‘I will strike at their rear while you strike at their head. If, in the middle of this, someone can pluck Kirkpatrick free, we will have done God’s work this day. Speed and surprise.’
‘Och aye,’ Jamie Douglas declared, his grin wild, the Dog Boy a feral mirror on his right. ‘God’s work. We are the braw lads for that, mark me.’
The Abbey of Scone
The same day …
He made a face and twisted the scar into a snake writhe.
‘Christ’s Bones, that’s foul.’
Isabel’s glance at the King was fouler still as she collected the bowl.
‘Yon Cathar never fed me anything so sour,’ Bruce persisted, smacking his mouth in a grimace of disgust.
‘He never fed you anything worthwhile,’ Isabel answered tartly, ‘and has run off besides. A wee proscribed French Cathar Perfect, heart-afraid for his life now that he has shackled himself to a usurping king declared red murderer and about to be cast loose from Holy Mother Church. Now you have only me.’
‘Aye, speak plain why don’t you? Never bother sweetening it, woman.’
‘You are a king and supposed to be stronger than others. Besides, I sweetened the brew I gave you with honey and spices and it seems to have made little difference to the taste.’
‘What was in it?’ he asked suddenly, his voice quiet; she heard the fear threnody in it.
‘Rue, valerian, fox’s clote, lady’s bedstraw and laurel among others. This is an ointment of radish – do not swallow it, rub it on.’
‘Will it work?’
She looked at him and smiled.
‘It is not a cure for lepry,’ she said, ‘if that is indeed what you have. For that, any blessed water will be as good.’
‘Then why am I poisoning myself with it?’ he demanded, truculent as a babe.
‘Because it will help with the skin complaint you do have, which is common enough and nothing to do with the lepry,’ she answered. ‘At worst the lady’s bedstraw might dye your beard yellow, while the radish ointment, if you spread it on Lady Day, will keep you in funds all year if Hildegard of Bingen is to be believed.’
He heard her tone and lost his irritation in an instant. She had always dabbled in herbs and potions, he knew, but he thought it was merely a mild woman’s interest, like they had in wool thread or good needles. He said as much, while managing to marvel at her expertise enough to rob the patronising sting of it.
‘Better still,’ she answered, ‘is that you can trust me with the secret. That scar is a worry, certes, but there is nothing here that makes me believe in lepry, Robert.’
‘The signs are slow,’ Bruce replied and it was clear he had found out all he could. ‘They take years to manifest.’
That was true, but Isabel refrained from pointing out that the usual first signs were when the appendages started to rot – the end of the nose and fingers. And the prick.
‘I would stop hiding it,’ she said. ‘Once the skin clears, you can let the air and sun to that scar, which will do more than your hodden hoods. Besides – the mark of a great tourney knight is to have at least one scar on the face, to make women swoon and men cower.’
‘Christ, Izz,’ Bruce said, shaking his head and smiling. ‘I should have married you.’
‘Instead, you cast me back to my husband and married an earl’s daughter. That will learn you.’
‘I am a king now,’ he growled, eyeing her sideways. ‘You are not supposed to speak so.’
‘You are a great bairn,’ she answered lightly, ‘who cannot sup a wee grue without making a face. Besides – we have both made our respected beds and now must lie in them.’
Bruce relaxed, tried not to pick skin from his cheeks.
‘Aye – how is the master of Herdmanston?’
‘More bitter these days than the brew you swallowed,’ she replied brutally. ‘His lands are scorched, his castle slighted, his folk scattered – and that done by those he has sworn fealty to. God help him when his enemies get to work.’
‘I hope he knows the necessity of it,’ Bruce answered suspiciously, then sighed wearily. ‘I do not need to lose more good men. There are few enough as it is.’
Faintly through the thick walls, they both heard the sound of the few good men, drilling frantically in pike squares while their women stitched and sewed thick gambeson coats, the quilted flutes stuffed with straw.
‘He will stick,’ she said firmly, then gathered up her jars and packets. ‘Now I must attend your wife in the role you gave me – lady to a queen.’
‘An honour well earned,’ he answered and she smiled wryly.
The last time she had seen the Queen she had been riding a palfrey using a
sambue
, a sidesaddle so elegant and so useless that the horse had to be led because the rider had no control of it. She and her new coterie were discussing the chansons of Guilhem and pointedly fell silent when Isabel approached; it annoyed Isabel, but only because all the other women were local wives and daughters who should know better – but the court, she knew, had a way of corrupting.
‘An honour that does not sit well with Her Grace,’ she answered, ‘which you might have known. Bad enough I placed the crown on her head without constantly attending her as a reminder of how I was once her husband’s hoor.’
‘God in Heaven, Izzie – moderate yer tongue.’
He rose and paced for a moment, then rounded on her.
‘Is she aggrieved?’
Her look was enough and he shook his head.
‘I do not know what …’ he began, then stopped and let his hands drop to his side.
‘Start mending that fence,’ she answered. ‘Dine with her. Spend time with her. Else you will find the chasm too broad to leap.’
He straightened, breathed deeply, then nodded and turned to her with a smile.
‘Good advice and good treatment. God keep you, Isabel – and your Herdmanston lord.’
‘I trust he is safe,’ she said and felt the deep, welling panic that he was not.
When she was gone, he went to a scrip on the table and pulled out the small, stoppered bottle, opened it and put a finger in. It came out bloody and he sniffed it suspiciously. Was that rot?
He sighed. Probably. He should have known better, even if the bottle was gilded and the cap jewelled, to have bought it from his confessed heretic Cathar physicker, even if it came wrapped in vellum and sealed with the Order’s double-mounted knights as provenance. Yon wee pardoner, Lamprecht, would probably have sold me the same, he thought wryly.
He glanced at the crumpled parchment, knowing the Latin on it by heart –
Hoc quicumque stolam sanguine proluit, absergit maculas; et roseum decus, quo fiat similis protinus Angelis.
Whomsoever bathes in the divine blood cleanses his sins and acquires the beauty of angels.
He looked at the beautiful little bottle which had done nothing at all for him. What had he expected? That the blood which flowed from His Hands and Feet had been collected in this, then translated across the centuries, miraculously, to arrive at Bruce’s moment of need?
Perhaps it was. Perhaps it really was His Divine Blood and not the escape fund of a cunning, desperate physician. He felt a chill at the idea – better it was chicken or pig, for if even the Blood of Christ Himself had failed, where did that leave King Robert Bruce?
Yet, he thought, can Christ still save the world? All the signs are against it, Lord, and there are so few righteous left in a kingdom ravaged by endless strife, where Your flock is reduced to individuals and petty tribes suffering and killing one another.
But there was a Plan. If I am not here then barbarism and madness become law, the weak have their throats cut or become slaves and the future is a terrible nightmare of cruelty and bloodletting.
I am the leash, he thought. The leash and the lash and even tormented by the Curse of Malachy I will never give in. He thought of Wallace, saw the twist of his bloody face on the day they gralloched him like a caught stag. He thought of his part in it.
I think, he said aloud, that the wee Cathar was right – this world is, in fact, Hell.
And there is no other.
Near Cupar, Fife
That same moment …
Hell vomited over the ridge. Malise saw it, falling like some huge wave of horses that seemed to snarl, ridden by open-mouthed men desperate with fear and an anger that was as good as courage.
He had been watching Kirkpatrick, stumbling along behind Malenfaunt’s horse, falling now and then to be dragged when Malenfaunt, vicious and laughing, spurred it a little to make it too fast for Kirkpatrick to keep up.
‘Walk faster,’ he would yell, ‘else you will be dragged to Carlisle.’
No-one but Malise understood the gabble of him, but all understood what he was doing. A few of the other
serjeants
laughed, harsh as old crows, but most did not and the leader of them frowned disapprovingly, for it was his charge to get this prisoner alive to Carlisle and then to the King himself.
What happened then, Sir Godard Heron thought, is none of my concern – but one of the red murderers of the Comyn leader would not be treated lightly. Still, he did not care for this Malenfaunt, a foresworn knight who should have lost his right hand, at the very least, for losing a joust before God.
Malise was thinking that he would have to begin to persuade Malenfaunt to find a horse for Kirkpatrick, not least because they were ambling along as if on a ride through a deer park, too slow for anyone’s liking. Mostly because Kirkpatrick looked the worse for being dragged by a thin rope fastened round Malenfaunt’s waist and he knew the Earl of Buchan wanted this one alive to face the King’s questioners; it was essential Kirkpatrick admit his witness to the usurper Robert Bruce’s murder of Badenoch.
He was on the point of saying so when the riders sprang up over the ridge and poured down on them, shrieking like the
bean-shìdh
.
Hal saw that the
mesnie
were well-armed and armoured,
serjeants
mounted on decent horses, though he thanked the good God that there were no warhorses among them, not even under the knight with the herons on jupon and shield.
He saw all this in the eyeblink it took to cover the twenty or so strides down the gentle slope, the garrons half-stumbling through the gripping-beast bracken, to plough into the centre of the milling mass of riders, a stone in the confused pool of it.
Hal rode close, almost belly to belly with the taller palfrey, which was wild-eyed and pawing the air. Hal backhanded the rider with a sweep of his shivering-crossed shield, cut across himself and missed, then was plunged on by the squealing, half-panicked garron he rode.
He reined it in viciously, trying to turn, saw Chirnside Rowan hook a
serjeant
out of the saddle while Nebless Sandie half-trampled, half-stabbed the luckless man with a furious flurry of blows. The knight with silver herons on his blue shield cut hard and savage and Nebless arched, howled and went off the garron like a half-filled sack of grain. Hal lost them in the sudden whirl of bodies, saw Jamie Douglas charge down on the head of the column, his face wild with mad delight – and then his world reeled.
The man who did it wore a new blue cloak and a feral snarl under a bristle of moustache, battering Hal’s bascinet with the wheel pommel of his sword while fighting to keep his horse facing front. Hal got his sword in the way of another cut, the bell clang of it loud even in the shriek and scream of the fight; the snarling-dog whirl of it broke them apart, then Blue Cloak surged back.
What did I ever do to him, Hal thought wildly, as the blows thundered on his shield, that he seeks me out?
Because he sees you as leader, he answered himself in the calm centre of the maelstrom within him. If you are downed, they win.
He flailed with the sword, stabbed, felt it hit, saw the grimace of pain that twisted the black moustache and felt a surge of triumph at that. He took a blow on his shield, another that whipped the ailettes off one shoulder, a third that cut a deep groove in the cantle of the saddle. The sweat rolled in his eyes, he slashed hard, saw the edge dent the arming cap and rattle Blue Cloak’s head sideways, saw the sudden limpness of the man as he fell away into the storm of hooves and mud.
‘
Deus lo vult
.’
The cry brought Hal’s head up briefly, as he fought for control of the garron, which just wanted to be away from this horror and was fighting the bit so hard he had to use both hands, awkward with sword and shield, to hold it steady. With the clear part of his blood-flushed head, he saw that Rossal de Bissot had timed it perfectly, waiting until the rear of the column had started to spur forward into the fight before launching his attack, bellowing the Templar warcry.