The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (121 page)

Inside the sweltering room, he knelt dutifully and waited. It had been the abbot's room, but the simple austerity of that monk had been washed away in the comforts of a royal household which took a score of wagons to transport.

Flames danced in the mantled hearth, which had seldom seen such a luxury of sparks – and did not need it on such a muggy night, Walwayn thought – while the blaze of expensive tallow gilded the oak panelling and a long table festooned with parchments and dangling seals. A dish of diced spiced meat covered with breadcrumbs was half-buried under the scrolls, the debris of it trailing here and there where careless fingers had spilled it.

The King was sitting at one side of the table, dressed in a simple wool robe of green, his hair curled and gilded, a habit he had begun years before in order to emulate the golden cap of the now-dead Gaveston. Surreptitious as any mouse, Walwayn glanced up from under lowered lashes and bowed head, thinking the King looked liverish, though that might have been the green robe.

The chamber jigged with mad shadows from the disturbed candles; another mark of muster, Walwayn thought to himself, is the way no one seems to sleep if the King does not – and he, for certes, is too feverish to sleep. Feverish, bordering on panic, to get his army gathered and on the move.

‘My lord John of Argyll is with the fleet?' the King demanded and Walwayn heard the deferential, almost soothing affirmative from one of the cluster around the table; Mauley, he recognized, seneschal and commander of the King's Royal Household troops.

‘The Red Earl is muttering about visiting his daughter,' a voice interrupted – Beaumont, the one who wanted to be Earl of Buchan. Walwayn knew that his own master, the Earl of Hereford, had a grudging respect for Henry de Beaumont, if only because he was a fighting man with a long pedigree and a reputation for adventurous daring.

‘The Red Earl may ride where he pleases,' the King answered waspishly. ‘It is not him I need, but the Irishers he brought with him. And his daughter remains safe in Rochester – tell him so.'

Walwayn knew the Red Earl of Ulster would be dealt with politely, since his support was vital and his situation awkward – the daughter safely shut in Rochester was Bruce's wife and effectively the Queen of Scotland. Not that anyone there acknowledged there being a king in Scotland; their adversary was always, simply, ‘the Bruce', or now and then ‘the Ogre'.

‘I need foot, my lords,' Edward declared, his voice rising, almost in a whine of panic. ‘As fast as it accumulates, it melts. I need foot.'

‘We have two thousand horse, my liege,' a voice answered, liquid with balm. ‘More than enough to crush the rebellious Scots.'

The King turned his drooping eye on this new face: the Earl of Gloucester, the young de Clare who vied with Despenser for the royal favour and who, despite being the King's nephew, was losing out to the charms of ‘the new Gaveston'.

‘I have fought the Scotch before, my lord of Gloucester. Foot will be needed, trust me,' Edward said flatly. He said it kindly, all the same, and Despenser scowled, but then saw his chance, leaping like a spring lamb into the silence.

‘Besides – we have Sir Giles back with us.'

The name buzzed briefly round the room and made the king smile. Sir Giles d'Argentan was the third-best knight in Christendom, it was said – with the other two being the Holy Roman Emperor himself and, annoyingly, the Bruce. Imprisoned by the Byzantines, Sir Giles had been freed because the King had paid his extortionate ransom and summoned him to fly like a gracing banner above the army sent to crush the Scots.

Walwayn saw the others – Sir Payn Tiptoft, Gloucester, de Verdon – nod and smile at the thought. As young men barely into their twenties they and others – Gaveston and his own lord, Humphrey de Bohun among them – had been in the retinue of the King when he was still a prince. Idolizing the older, brilliant dazzle of d'Argentan, they had all trooped off with him to a tourney in France, leaving the Prince's army hunting out Wallace in the wilds. Twenty-two of them had been put under arrest warrants by a furious Edward I and they all wore that now like some badge of youthful honour binding them together.

That had been eight years ago and the gilded youth of then were tarnished and no wiser, it seemed. Particularly the King himself, who now turned to the patient, kneeling Walwayn.

‘You are?' he began, but nodded and answered it himself. ‘Hereford's clerk and lawyer – well, take this to your master.'

He paused, rummaged and helpful hands found and gave him the seal-dangling scroll he needed. Walwayn looked up then and, over the King's shoulder, saw two faces. One was the triumphant leer twisting the handsome face of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester; the other the long mourn of bad road that belonged to Sir Marmaduke Thweng, his walrus moustache ends silver-winking in the light.

Like angel and Devil on the royal shoulders, Walwayn thought, wildly trying to gather himself as he took the scroll from the King's hand.

‘Your master and the Earl of Gloucester are appointed commanders of the Van,' the King declared, more for the benefit of any who did not already know than for Walwayn.

The clerk blanched, hesitated.

‘Your Grace?' he quavered and the King's eye drooped. Even as a parody of the fierceness of his father, it was frightening enough to the little Hereford lawyer.

‘Are you witless? Deaf?'

Walwayn caught the angel Thweng's warning eye and simply bowed and backed out, sick to his stomach at what he had to carry back to his master.

Sir Marmaduke saw the clerk scuttle off, knew what he felt and why.

Joint commanders. The de Clares and de Bohuns were bitter rivals and appointing them to jointly command anything was a surety for disaster – yet Thweng knew the King had done it to promote his nephew, young de Clare. The Earl of Hereford, Constable of England, would be furious, but de Clare was the new Favourite. There is always a favourite with Edward, Thweng thought. For all the tragedy of Gaveston, the King has learned nothing – and, behind him, he could feel the flat hating gazes from the Despensers.

‘Pembroke,' the King said suddenly. ‘Where is the Earl of Pembroke?'

‘Sir Aymer is in Berwick,' Thweng replied flatly, and then remembered himself. ‘Your Grace sent de Valence to oversee matters in Berwick.'

The King had forgotten and did not like the fact of it, so Thweng moved back into the shadows and out of his eyeline.

He is losing control, he thought. He has even brought that stupid lion in a cage, the one he touted round in '04, when he and the rest of this menagerie were young. He brought it in the last attempt to bring Bruce to battle, four years ago, he recalled, though the lion was toothless and mangy then. Now it was blind and bad-tempered and dying. A fitting banner for this campaign, in fact.

But the beast harks back to the gilded youth the King and all his company had, Thweng thought moodily, and are reluctant to let go. Christ's Wounds, the King even calls it Perrot, the ‘loving name' he gave to Gaveston. Stupid name for a favourite, be it dog, horse, bird or lion – and too Malmsey-sweet for a man.

Was he a sodomite? Thweng looked at the King and wondered. Tall and imposing – the picture of a warrior, but that meant little. Priests, Thweng knew, indulged in it and, by God, the Templars were given it as the second-worst accusation that could be levelled at them after spitting on the God they were supposed to protect and uphold. But magnates of the realm? A king?

Thweng remembered himself as a youth, draped round the neck of a loving brother in arms with nothing more in it than the bonds of battle-forged friendship. He shook the thoughts of royal sin away from him.

The King was no boy-lover, but neither was he a good king, or half the warrior he looked, Thweng thought, and then surreptitiously crossed himself for the sin in thinking it.

Mark you, he added to himself, if this army gets anywhere it will be because someone marches off and all the others will follow after, like sheep – but whether it reaches Scotland, Wales or bloody Cathay will be by accident and all are equally likely.

He straightened, as quietly as he could, to ease the stiffness in his back; he was too old for these late-night maunderings and, if proof were needed that matters were spiralling out of control, it was this need for frantic conferences well into the dark.

It was hot in the room, stank of sweated wool and desperation and Sir Marmaduke longed to be outside, questing for a bit of wind in the summer night.

Craignish, Argyll

At the same moment

He breached from the dark, like the ship out of the maelstrom, crashing back to a nightmare of creak and slow rending, a mad, pale light and the flicker of shadows.

‘Ah, blissin' o' heaven, yer honour – ye're alive.'

Hal was not so sure of it; he struggled to rise and against the thundering pain of his head. A hand fumbled at the trap he seemed caught in, a voice cursed from the dark and Hal was suddenly free to sit up, listening to groans and pig-squeals; a face thrust itself into the light of the torch, grinning with mad relief, dripping sweat and sea-water.

‘Niall Silkie …' Hal said and the torch bobbed.

‘Good, good – ye have yer wits. Now … careful. We are lying on our side here and everythin' is arse to elbow.'

Hal saw he had been trapped by the strap of his baldric, which seemed fastened to the floor by an iron hook – until he realized that it had once been hung up alongside a truckle bed, but now the world was canted and crazy.

The ship …

The ship was beached and broken, the timbers snapped and splintered as gnawed bones. Like a rotted whale, it was a cave of dangerous dangle and sudden pits that he and Niall had to struggle through, while all the time the gentle sough and hiss of the merciful, calmly breathing tide set the last of the timbers to creak and moan.

‘Nothin' so mournful as a stricken boatie,' Niall said, when they paused the once, to get bearings. His face was sheened and gleaming.

‘Others,' Hal managed from the great half-numbed strangeness that was one side of his face; there was a ragged, rasping catch inside his cheek that spoke of one or more teeth knocked out or splintered.

‘Kirkpatrick is on the beach. Pegy is gone and gone – Donald, too, unless God is merciful to his brother's wails. Almost all the crew …'

Niall stopped, trembling.

‘It is after being the Feast of St Erasmus,' he said wonderingly. ‘May the wee holy man keep them safe as he should.'

He shook it from him like a wet black dog and fumbled on through the dark, Hal at his heels and still clutching his sword and scabbard, all that he could find of his in this dragon's cave of dark terror. St Erasmus, Hal thought, patron of sailors and known to them as St Elmo. Asleep, with all God's other holiest, he added bitterly to himself.

Niall warned him; he dropped with a splash and Hal followed, the jar sending a great wash of pain up through his head, so that it seemed like a bursting blood orange. Then they sloshed on, out through the ribs of the stricken beast, where great blocks like stone lay scattered in the luminous tide. The cargo, thought Hal desperately. The cargo …

‘See if we can find any other poor souls,' Niall hissed and Hal started guiltily from his thoughts of the wrapped weapons. Slowly, carefully, the torch flattening and flaring in the still-stiff breeze, they moved along, searching the dark and wet.

It was a desolate harvesting in the dim, by touch alone, of objects that might be waterlogged flesh and wool, or sheets of bladderwrack silting the waves like streaming hair. They might be heads fronded with cropped beards, or weeded rocks, all of them veined by the sea, surging and dragging, hissing over pebbles.

The only two men Hal discovered were dead and he gave up on dragging them out of the loll of surf. Somewhere further up he heard shouting, saw torches dance in the darkness and Niall Silkie plunged his own brand into the surf with a hiss, falling into a half-crouch of terror.

‘Wreckers,' he said. ‘Come to loot the ship and slit the throats o' any survivors.'

But Hal knew at once that the shouter was Kirkpatrick and rose, sloshing up through the surf to the stumbling pebbles, dragging his sword out. Niall, who did not want to be left alone in the dark, cursed.

Moving towards the sound, Hal felt the tug and treachery of tussocks, saw the torches coalesce and the shadows etched against them. He stumbled out of the dark and saw a man whirl towards him, the gleam of naked steel in his hands.

‘Friend,' he yelped. Somhairl, both fists full of knife, gave a delighted grin and called out his name, so that all the shadows turned; there were not many of them, Hal noted.

One of them was Kirkpatrick, who turned once to acknowledge him, then faced front again and yelled out a long stream of Gaelic, patiently learned at the elbow of Bruce.

‘Bastard Campbells,' he growled aside to Hal, the sodden dags of his wet hair knifed to his face. ‘Caterans and worse, who would try and steal the smell off your shit because it belongs to someone else.'

Hal saw the figures, uncertain under their torches, all wild hair and bare legs and wet, sharp steel.

‘I hope you are being polite,' he said and knew the mush of his voice was a shock to them both when Kirkpatrick turned to him and raised his own sizzling torch for a better look; Hal did not want to hear his views on the batter of his face, but had them anyway.

‘Christ, ye look as if ye had the worst o' an argument with a skillet,' he declared. ‘Ye are more bruise and swell than face.'

‘A rope's end will do that,' Somhairl added sombrely, ‘whipped by a gale like we had.'

So that was what had hit him. Not the whole world
then …

Kirkpatrick's warning shout buzzed pain through him and, finally, a voice called out in thick English from a throat not used to it.