The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (125 page)

They were worse than any wattled beldame, Edward thought moodily as he chewed on the fish and enjoyed the sweet of the sauce. Christ betimes, he had banners aplenty – a whole cartload of them – and holy help from a slew of abbots and bishops. He was even eating fish, as any Christian knight would do in order to show his purity of body and soul. What was one flapping cloth more or less?

Besides, this was
his
army, gathered at vast expense and despite the refusal of the likes of Lancaster and Warwick. When this was concluded, Edward thought with savage glee, I will be able to deal with them as I wish – as a true king would wish – but, for now, there is the rare freedom of being out from under the Ordinances, with my own army at my back. Better still, it had men in it he could trust enough to have at his back.

Like Ebles de Mountz – Edward raised his cup to the Savoyard and saw the man flush with pride at being so singled out by his king. A valuable asset was de Mountz, whom Edward had set to watching his wife for a time and then appointed constable of Edinburgh. Too late, as it turned out, because the place fell to the Scotch before de Mountz could take command – but the man had fourteen years of experience in the Scottish wars and had served as constable of three castles in his time. Including Stirling.

De Mountz was bench-paired with Sir Marmaduke Thweng, that ancient warhorse who had also commanded at Stirling – I am not short of local knowledge, Edward thought, of the ground we will have to fight across.

But the men he felt a glow for, a warmth borne of old comradeship and safety, were roistering and roaring all round him: Sir Payn Tiptoft, d'Argentan, the de Clares and the de Bohuns and the lesser lights of chivalry, such as Lovel and Manse and the Ercedenes, all the gilded youth of yesterday who were now the golden warriors of the royal household.

Edward stood suddenly and saluted them loudly, feeling the exultant moment racing in him; they roared their appreciation back to King Edward, second of that name by the Grace of God, ringing the rafters of the rugged, solid storehouse built by his father as a supply base for the armies.

Endless armies, Edward thought, traipsing ever northwards. This would be the last of them. This would end it once and for all …

If Bruce stood to fight.

Thweng watched the King, flushed face singing with wine and the moment. The cheers of his salute to the ‘golden warriors' were still echoing when the most golden of them all, the paragon of chivalry and the third-best knight in Christendom slammed his cup on the table, levered away from his bench and unlaced himself. Hitching up his tunic, he pissed into the floor-straw not far from the table and his neighbours scrabbled away from the vinegar-reek splashes of it.

‘Christ betimes, d'Argentan,' protested Henry de Bohun, ‘can you not use the privy like a
gentilhomme
?'

‘Like you, little maid?' d'Argentan replied and grabbed his cock so that the last of the stream arced higher and splashed more. ‘I give you a look at what a man is like. Compare with your own and be downhearted.'

Those nearest hooted and banged the table. Henry de Bohun's face went stiff. He was young, not yet twenty, and crested with a curling mass of dark copper hair, which he kept like an arming cap on the top of his head, while shaving it all off round the ears.

It was a deliberate statement to all those who had grown their hair long in their gilded youth and still kept it that way, even if much of it was faded and thinner. It hinted at how Henry de Bohun was a warrior in the old Norman way while they were ageing fops, and it did not help that you could see how his hair, if left to grow, would ringlet magnificently round his ears with no need of the curling tongs.

Everything about Henry de Bohun was a slap to the others, from his youth to his cool efficient mastery of the lists and the avoidance of anything to do with the ‘golden warriors'. The biggest smack of all to them was his being the nephew of Humphrey, Earl of Hereford, Constable of England and bitter rival to the de Clare Earl of Gloucester, whose men were doing most of the hooting.

‘I think you have had too much wine,' Henry answered flatly, his voice a scourge of distaste.

‘Not nearly enough,' d'Argentan answered, and drank more to prove it, wiping the dribble off the five-inch scar on his chin – mêlée wound, tourney proper for the Honour of the Round Table, Brackley, five years ago. He licked the remains of the brew from the fingers of his left hand, all but the missing little one – a bohort, in some French town he could not even remember, eight years ago.

‘But already too much for you to match,' he added and grinned raggedly at Henry from a mouth extended on the left by a three-inch scar – tourney proper, in Rhodes, all of a decade ago.

The memory soured him, as did the sight of Henry de Bohun, who was already an acknowledged master of the joust, that one-on-one test of arms altogether too popular for d'Argentan's liking and replacing the mayhem of the mêlée these days.

He saw the splendour of youth in the de Bohun brat and wanted his own back again, so that he did not have to think about the three decades and more of his own life, least son of four and owning nothing but a name and the distinction of being the third-best knight in Christendom. Not even the second, which title belonged to the very Bruce they were going to fight.

The years were falling on him like a charging mass of knights and he did not like the fear it lanced him with.

‘You stick to almond milk, child,' he growled, more harshly than he had intended and heard the mocking oohs and aahs from his coterie at this clear challenge. He also saw de Bohun half rise, before a voice cut through the din.

‘You provoke my nephew's honour, Sir Giles, so you provoke mine own.'

Sir Giles acknowledged the Constable of England with an apologetic bow.

‘If your nephew wishes redress,' he said, ‘I am sure we can find time to run a friendly passage at dawn.'

‘As you wish and when you wish,' Henry retorted sharply.

A pantler went over suddenly, by accident or tripped by the howl of knights at another table, and the clattering clang of his dropping tray was echoed by the baying laughter. He picked himself up, collected as many of the pastries as he could and served them anyway, straw and all; servants and scullions fought the dogs to snatch those he missed.

It snapped the tension and Hereford went back to his close-head mutterings with his clerk, Walwayn; Thweng saw that little man, aware that he was being watched, turn and stare insolently back at him.

Walwayn sweated with secrets, so that any stare made him twitch, but the one from that droop-moustached cliff of a face made his bowels turn; Sir Marmaduke Thweng, he recalled briefly, a lord from Yorkshire reputed to be a hunter of trailbaston and brigands for the head-reward. The thought made him shiver and Hereford scowled, thinking he was not being paid enough attention.

‘Stir yourself. You say Lord Percy sent a man, a Templar heretic, to spy out some plot with that discredited Order and the Scotch?'

‘Just so, my lord,' Walwayn answered in a softer hiss, appalled at the lack of discretion in Hereford's voice. The Earl saw it and frowned, but tempered his volume.

‘What plot? Is the excommunicate King about to visit us with heretic Templars?'

Walwayn shook his head furiously.

‘I do not know, my lord. The Lord Percy understands it is more to do with acquiring weapons. Or treasure.'

Hereford stroked his beard while the noise swirled, thick and hot. The famed Templar treasure was a gleaming lure that would not be banished, but Templar weapons, even the expertise of the Order's former knights, would be formidable – and God forbid that Bruce had enlisted fled Templars to his cause.

And Percy, already firmly in the camp of the King's opponents, had said nothing. A thought hit Hereford.

‘Who is Percy's spy?'

Walwayn, who wanted away to drink and women, blinked sweat from his eyes.

‘A Knight formerly of the Order is all I understand, lord.'

Hereford nodded, thought for a time longer, and then patted Walwayn on the shoulder.

‘Keep track of it and keep me informed.'

Walwayn, released at last, merely nodded and slid away. He did not ask if Hereford would inform the King; he thought it unlikely – all was rumour, though Walwayn could taste the truth of it. Hereford would wait until matters were firmer and there was advantage in it for himself, but Walwayn would have to be the one setting such an advantage. Until then, there was drink and women …

There were no women of any worth, Thweng noted, which accounted for the knights' behaviour. There were serving trulls, who would be caught and tupped before the night was over, and a wet nurse sitting by the fire with someone's babe, but no woman of quality to put a curb chain on the revels, for this was war and even if the entire court travelled with the King, the Queen and her women did not.

He dropped the fish and wiped his fingers on his tunic front; he thought the sweet taste was less to do with spices and cooking than incipient rot, which echoed the entire court as far as he was concerned.

He watched the great Sir Giles, scarred paladin of the first rank, his red jupon with its silver grail-cups stained with meat juice and his own piss, glowering at the fiery de Bohun nephew.

Young Henry's uncle, finished with his clerk and his rank established like the big-ruffed wolf in a pack, returned to stabbing a finger at the younger Earl of Gloucester. No doubt pointing out that, as Constable of England and a veteran of the Scots wars, it should have been his right to command the Van alone and not in tandem with an inexperienced sprig of the de Clares. Politely and with due deference to rank, of course.

‘What say you, my liege lord?' d'Argentan bellowed at the King. ‘A chivalric passage of arms on the morrow, to set the start of a glorious day?'

He spoiled the moment of it by belching and Thweng saw the droop of the royal eyelid. Bad idea to mention time to the King, he thought, since he was running out of it. They would be hard put to make it to within three leagues of Stirling by the Feast of St John the Baptist as it was and even then would have to leave all the foot and baggage behind. Delaying for a ‘passage of arms' was not an option.

Sir Giles was too canny a court rat to argue the point, bowing graciously and then leering at Henry de Bohun. A hurrying wench, goosed by one of the Nevilles, clumsily dropped a torch and there was a furious moment of stamping, sparks and soot; a dog took the opportunity to filch Miles de Stapledon's meat from his plate and he chased it round, bellowing and threatening until it gave up and dropped it.

Thweng, sweating in the leprous heat, looked at the mortrews and gristle on his plate, the nightlife fliers which seemed to congregate on it and wished he were somewhere else. Anywhere else.

The whole court was here, squeezed into the great ugly fortification of the Pele at Linlithgow, Longshanks's unsubtle stake in the heart of Scotland. He had built it round a former royal residence and swallowed the church of St Michael as he did so, turning that holy place into a storehouse.

It had never been spacious or comfortable at the best of times, was less so now that the fleeing Scots had wrecked it as they had wrecked every other possible refuge and store, and so Hall struggled with Chamber.

The pantlers, cellarers, scullery and scalding house of Badlesmere's stewardship fought for space with Chamberlain Despenser's staff, who in turn elbowed with Charlton's Office of the Privy Seal and ignored the growls of Brotherton's Marshalsea, responsible for all the horses, carts and carriages that moved everyone. A hundred horses of them alone belonged to the King, forty of which were prime destriers.

I have two, Thweng thought moodily. Both of them cost a small manor apiece and the chances are that one or both will be ruined by the time this affair is over. He wished, again, that he was somewhere else.

For all the excitement and freedom this campaigning threw up, Edward also wanted to be somewhere else and would have been surprised to find that he and Sir Marmaduke Thweng were more alike than either of them imagined – they were both, at heart, country knights who preferred building a wall than coping with the backstabbing, fervid hothouse of intrigues that was the court.

It did not help that the clerics were carping on and on about the missing banners of Beverley and St Cuthbert and the grate of it was thrumming on Edward's nerves; he could hear those two old farts, the Bishops Ely and Winchester, discussing it.

‘I am sure the Lord will overlook it,' Bishop Sandale of Winchester said, but the fish-eyed stare he had back from John Hothum, Bishop of Ely, gave lie to it.

‘The Lord sees all,' Hothum grunted, worrying at the remains of a bone. The weight of his ornate robes made sweat bead his brow – he did not need to wear them, but liked the trappings of his Treasury office; more than that, he liked people to see his power and none more so than the Chancellor Bishop of Ely.

‘It might still be possible to fetch the Beverley,' Sandale offered hesitantly. ‘A fast rider …'

‘The Lord is not fooled.'

The voice was a thin rasp, like a nail on slate, the speaker swathed in black and white. Like a magpie, Edward thought sourly, looking at the Pope's envoy, the Dominican Father Arnaud.

‘So the damage is done?' he snapped and saw the Dominican's tonsured head raise up, the fat little currant nose twitch like a coney. It was a plump, friendly, avuncular face and a lie; this was the Pope's best Inquisitor and you had to tread carefully for he had flames in those blackcurrant eyes.

He had come with a party of Clement V's Inquisitors – Dieudonné, Abbot of Lagny, and Sicard de Vaur, Canon of Narbonne – complete with finger-wag abjuration on how, despite there being no torture permitted under England's Common Law, King Edward had better not interfere with the Church's treatment of heretics. God willed it.